J36 Epilogue
vidually and collcctively. Baeumler's Heraclitean universe has no place
for counterfactual normativity. People come into contact with one
another, collide, disengage, and part ways in corporeal reality. Hostility
culminating in war is truly the father of all things. Life exists only with-
in its boundaries. It needs to be confined, and can expand only within
particular limits. The reality-based dialectics of mutually hostile antithe-
ses derives from a vital need for boundaries. We underestimate these
antitheses if we reduce them to dialectics. A battle of life and death is
being waged, and there is no possibility of synthesis. Anything resem-
bling synthesis is actually the victory of one side. In the course of the
conquests, the conqueror might well have adopted something from the
conquered.
If there is no synthesis to bridge the batde of the antitheses, world
history is a history of contradictions that cannot be resolved, but must
be fought out until there are winners and losers. A totality, while con-
ceivable, cannot be realized as such, but only by fighting through con-
tradictions and by acknowledging the history of hostilities. Everyone is
steeped in wrenching hostile antitheses. The contingency of existence
dictates that we be born into one particular side of the dispute. We can-
not choose our bodies, nor can we select the corporate body, known as
a "nation," to which we would like to belong. We cannot pick our local-
ity, but only accept what we get. The question of whether it is the
"good" side is moot. The opposite logic applies: the side I have is good
because 1 belong to it and my people are here. Us and Them—that is a
clear-cut distinction. It is only a matter of clarifying the boundaries of
the "us," which continually shift because there are always people who
forfeit their affiliation. Even if the collective memory of myths and the
project of conceptualization undertaken by philosophers is traced all the
way back to the beginnings to capture the moment of unity, it turns out
that the horizon keeps receding. There is no way out of the history of
hostilities.
Baeumler concurred with Nietzsche in criticizing peacemaking
approaches and considered them pure self-delusion. Any project to