Democratic Institutions Within Our Civilizational Time: History, Nature and Contingency

Our civilization, just as is the case of previous civilizations, is built by contingent animals that survive from the “now” until tomorrow however measured. Civilizations created and built by such animals are not permanent structures that house and capture eternal truths and things. They rise, they peak, and they collapse. Nature’s time and civilization’s time are two different matters. Nature cares not about time. Contingent animals, such as us, are very much concerned with time. Nature’s ‘simples’ care nothing about change and changing conditions because they are the foundations of nature and do not undergo change in time. In a sense they remain outside of time and the sameness of the simples sets the foundations that allow us to contingently built on them. That is, entities or species, or animals such as us, that are composite animals, always undergo change in time and the uniformity and sameness of nature differentiates us from the simples, there can never be two composite entities or animals exactly the same for all times. Our historical time allows animals such as us to build a record and history of events, by human agency, to help us survive the “now” to reach tomorrow and therein lies history. Our institutions are built to reflect our preferences, desires, understanding within the realm of time—that will hopefully house us until we reach tomorrow. Our contingent state as composite animals does not allow us to grab eternity and permanence on our side of the equation. The simples have eternity and infinity on their side, composite animals can only know difference, change and finitude. Unlike other animals our species is capable of knowing our finitude or our finality of being. This gives us the opportunity to build structures and institutions not only to house our own being but the being of our posterity. History is the narrative of the finality of contingent human creatures scratching at the universe. History, causation, and finality help assign obligations and responsibilities to these contingent agents. The causation of the action must be cut to the “proximate” cause rather than the final cause.