The Culture of the End: Tarrying with the Apocalypse

Today, we apparently live in an epoch of the end. The idea of living in the end times became today so hegemonic that it began to generate a new universal “existential mood.” We live in a “culture of the end”, and this can be observed in all social fields, from art to politics, from science to popular humour. Yet, in the history of Western thought, the concept of the end is not new at all. To some extent, we might even say that we have always lived in the end times. In fact, the idea of the end has shaped a large part of continental philosophical tradition, stretching from Biblical motifs of apocalypse and the end time to Hegel’s idea of the end of history, where it is meant as an apex of the progress of freedom. According to Hegel, the End of History is not a violent finale of the world, as well as our lives in it, but a telos: a desired goal of the historical development. The last representative of the Hegelian optimism was Francis Fukuyama who, spurned by the 1989 fall of communism, urged us to greet “the end of history” – the global victory of liberal democracy – as the most welcome event that would stabilize the world politics and let it flourish, by preventing alternative revolutionary ideas to come to the fore. Yet, this type of metaphysical-historical optimism, so characteristic for the last decade of the second millennium, quite suddenly waned: the narrative of the desired goal gave way to the narrative of the imminent end as a threat to the world’s existence. The evocation of the apocalypse due to climate change and natural catastrophe to convictions about fatal inevitability of war and destruction of both mankind and the whole planet marks a stark contrast between the past-optimistic and contemporary-pessimistic narrations of the end. The essay attempts to elucidate the reasons why this sudden change occurred.