The Event in History
A key to modern community building & social reform
Why universal ideals are continually betrayed in modern historical events?
- December 2025 -
Short Abstract: This article explores why modern historical events repeatedly betray the universal ideals that inspire them. Drawing on Renaissance developments in individual consciousness, French post-structuralist philosophy, and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science—extended by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon—it shows that universal impulses become inverted when they enter the social realm. This reversal occurs when the private ego appropriates universal forces, causing revolutions and social movements to manifest as their opposite. Yet the article also identifies a path toward counter-reversal through conscious inner development and the ethical awakening provoked by the encounter with the Other, following Emmanuel Lévinas. A contemporary example—the "Incredible Edible" movement—illustrates how authentic, decentralized initiative can overcome bureaucratic stagnation and enable genuine social renewal. The article argues that lasting community building requires not only structures or ideals but a transformed subjectivity capable of carrying universal impulses without distorting them.
***
At the end of his life Victor Hugo wrote ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity[1]’:
“For centuries past this war-madness
Has laid hold of each combative race,
While our God takes but heed of the flower,
And that sun, moon, and stars keep their place. (…)
We love but the field with its carnage,
And the strife which turns earth into hell;
And eager for glory, the people
Wou
ld not change the fierce drum for church-bell. (…)
Our natures have changed to brute fierceness;
'Forward! -- Die!' bursts from each angry throat,
While our lips seem to mimic the music
Of the echoing war-trumpet's note.”
If we look at this question honestly, we will recognize it not only ‘out there’ on the world stage, including most particularly the fate of the Anthroposophical Society at Rudolf Steiner’s death, but also in the heart of our own life and Anthroposophical-life experience, in our attempts to build organisations, communities, groups or even partnerships based on heartfelt ideological and universal goals. If we face it honestly, we must admit the same difficult forces are acting upon and tearing apart all our attempts to build projects based on any kind of universal ideals.
Only when we look at this question face-to-face, see it clearly and recognize it, can we search for a remedy, the key to answering and solving it. This key is to be found within Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and can be uncovered and activated by modern spiritual scientists. Only when we investigate this question deeply and find the key concepts so far missing, can we understand how to act on and realize our ideals, how we can begin to realize the social change we so need and long for.
In order to approach this key and find the force to dis-cover it (since in truth it can only be found and activated when it is experienced by the reader), we will begin with a brief historical recap of the context of our question, and then turn our attention to modern French post-structuralist philosophers (second half of 20th century), who investigated the same question without having any anthroposophical background. By doing this we can strengthen our thinking muscles by experiencing with these extraordinary philosophers their struggles and feats, which will help us to experience the transparent key concept behind any Event in History, and allow us to gain (and this victory will have to be repeated over and over again) the Ariadne thread to walk safely out of the labyrinth of modern social events. We are aided in looking at humanity’s struggle, and that of the French post-structuralists, with a special understanding gained through the work of lifetime modern spiritual scientist Yeshayahu Ben Aharon[2].
It is generally accepted that only since the Renaissance period have we begun to recognize in ourselves human values which are ‘universal’, shared by all. At the time of the Renaissance, for the first time, we as humans began to become conscious of ourselves as part of one humanity. Jacob Burkhardt expressed this idea in 1860. This signifies that the universal as such, called variously God, Nature, and Idea, could be grasped by a human individual in a personal way for the first time in history. Human individuals began to feel emancipated from all religion or social authority imposed from without, sensing that what was previously transcendental had now become ‘immanent’, interior, the very inner essence of our inner humanity. Supporting this observation, historians noticed an increasing recognition of universal values and rights, regardless of race, nation, sex, religion and social position: ‘The Act of Abjuration’ in The Hague in 1581[3], ‘The Petition of Right’[4] voted by the British Parliament in 1628, ‘The Declaration of Independence’ in the USA in 1776 in which the idea of liberty is central, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ in 1789 in France, and the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ voted in on the 10th of December 1948 in Paris by the 58 states of the UN. With such a declaration, new political ideals were formulated, at the same time that freedom, equality and brotherhood were recognized as the conditions necessary for a healthy society. At this time also, natural sciences developed their current universal form, using the language of mathematics as an international language, in order to discover, formulate and use universal laws.
Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon writes «the more humans become individualised the more they desire to universalise»[5], and later «the most essential observation is, that what is individualised is precisely the universal. The human individuality feels and experiences herself as a universal human being, precisely by dint of experiencing herself as a private personality».
Once this historical context is accepted, let us investigate once more our initial question: ‘Why have the universal ideals behind modern historical events been continually betrayed, manifesting as their opposite?’.
Now let’s follow ‘lines of flight’, as demonstrated by Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou in the French post-structural philosophical movement of the second half of the 20th century. These lines of thought (or ‘lines of flight’[6] in the words of Gilles Deleuze) can be understood as truly pure thought freed from the shackles of rigid representations. Then we will be able, with Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s work, to join the lines of thinking of 20th and 21st century spiritual science.
On the 16th December 1980 in Vincennes, Gilles Deleuze explained with great intensity to his students that in the 17th century, in the time of Spinoza, this question was already at the heart of all philosophical reflections. He said: «We pretend today that we are just now discovering the problem of betrayed revolution. We must not kid ourselves! The 17th century is full of reflection about this subject! How can a revolution avoid being betrayed? No, we must not believe that it is a new problem in 1975, with human rights, or with the discovery that there is a Gulag in Russia. The revolution has always been thought of by revolutionaries on the basis of this question; how is it that that this thing [revolution] is continually betrayed? In Spinoza’s time the ultimate modern, recent example was the British revolution started by Cromwell, who was the most fantastic traitor of the revolution which he himself had initiated!»[7]
Gilles Deleuze invites us to look at the most typical case of a historical event which manifests as its opposite: «everyone knows there was an English revolution. A significant English revolution, the revolution of Cromwell. And that this revolution was the example where everything was at the outset very pure. It was the revolution which was betrayed as soon as it happened.»[8]
Having understood this tragic situation, Deleuze remarks that the enlightened thinkers of the 17th century, not least Spinoza, avoided speaking of revolution. We must wait for the second half of the 20th century for the philosophical concept of ‘event’ to appear on the philosophical stage (in parallel and independently of Anthroposophy), brought most notably by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida[9], Michel Foucault[10] and Alain Badiou. The concept of ‘event’ is much richer and wider than the concept of ‘revolution’.
Gilles Deleuze says: «in all of my books, I have always searched for the nature of the event»[11]. For Deleuze this meant «understanding the pure event in its eternal truth, independently from its spatial-temporal effectualisation, as becoming and always already past, following the line of the Aion»[12]. And in What is Philosophy? he writes, «Becoming worthy of the event, this is the only purpose of philosophy». Gilles Deleuze situates the event at the level of an ‘immanence plane’. This plane is not found in the ordinary present, but just below the present as virtual past-and-future which is active around the present, and which the present actualises. The event is pure Time, which actualises Itself in the present, always torn by the present, actualising around the fracture line of the ‘I’. The event is the wound, the death of Time by its actualisation in the present of the sensory space. For Deleuze, events are part of a continual field.
As a polarity, Alain Badiou sees them as exceptions, “transcendentally discontinuous”. Alain Badiou, building on the mathematical modern theory of numbers and sets, links the concept of ‘event’ with the concepts of truth and subject: the truth bursts out in the event, and expands like a flame fanned by the breath of an inexhaustible subjective effort. The truth is not a theoretical affair but a «practical question», something which happens. «Each truth is at once singular and universal»; not knowledge which corresponds to an object, but an event-full exception, and «a trial from which something new emerges». The event-full or eventual truth in action is the opposite of the mundane principle of ‘personal interest’. In the philosophy of the event of Alain Badiou, we can sense, albeit unexpressed and unexplored, the breath of the gospel of St John (14:6): «I am the Way, the Truth and the Life».
This (and here we must try to find new words to describe a new phenomenon concept) ‘event-ing’ or ‘eventual’ truth is fragmentary and discontinuous, as if history no longer consists of a framework of truth, but merely of its occasional revelation. The truth is no longer an underground historical stream which suddenly springs up in the event. It is post-eventual. It is about the declaration without precedent of pure advent. «Entirely subjective», it is about «pure conviction»[13]. Similar to a revelation, it is however, Badiou specifies, a process, ‘not an illumination’: a process entirely contained in the absolute beginning of the event, of which it is a faithful continuation.
This is why, in contrast to Kant (and also Hannah Arendt), for whom the truth of the French Revolution is to be found in the disinterested regard of spectators, the truth according to Badiou is true only for its actors. It is necessary to search for it (or hear it arise) in Robespierre or Saint Just, and certainly not in Furet and Thermidorian historians.
Daniel Ben Saïd in “Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event”[14], accuses Badiou of saying in effect that «history becomes truly miraculous and the politics of the event a kind of revelation». But isn’t it here that Alain Badiou’s true insight is to be found? Isn’t it where he is capable of identifying in the event a potential for, as he himself puts it, ‘lay grace’ (St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism)? Could we then go further than Daniel Ben Saïd and feel that Badiou is speaking about and describing, albeit in a one-sided way, the Event of the ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8:12), an ‘I AM’ at the heart of each one of us, a consciousness which begins to awaken…in each eventual moment of life?
For Alain Badiou the antithesis of the event is the petrification of the event, as it falls prey to bureaucratic materialisation which characterizes «the disaster». This is what Gilles Deleuze calls the betrayal of the event. But Alain Badiou, like Gilles Deleuze, can only notice and describe this degradation of the event. Neither of them can fully explain what the event is, nor can they uncover the mystery of its repeated petrification which brings with it the «universal horror»[15].
To take this further, we need to follow the lines of thinking of Rudolf Steiner about the principal relation between the spiritual worlds (where universal ideals are dwelling) and the physical world where human beings try to realise them. Throughout his work, Rudolf Steiner described the reversal as the archetypal, principal relation between these worlds (spiritual and physical), in all levels and domains. So in Knowledge of Higher Worlds he writes about the perceptions in the physical and astral worlds as being reversed «mirror images»[16]. He also describes the reversed nature of the communication with the dead and all spiritual beings, the reversal between man and plant[17], the reversal of the work of the angels in the individual astral body, and also in modern historical context, in which the leading world imaginations are reversed in the physical world[18].
Following these lines of thinking , the modern spiritual scientist, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon introduced a concept of ‘The Event’ (The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century) which continues Anthroposophy’s ‘lines of flight’ and goes much further than the concept of ‘event’ for the post-structuralist philosophers. Ben-Aharon has developed a method for working with The Event in a conscious way, only possible since the second third of the twentieth century. He calls this ‘Singularisation’ and writes about it in his book The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art. Using this method, he leads us to think outside of our Cartesian represented ‘self’, in order to attain «the non-organic fields of life in the open cosmic worlds of pure thinking». From here Ben-Aharon proposes a vision of the archetypal phenomenon (Ur phenomenon) in modern history.
First of all he invites us to realize that «history reflects the process of humanity’s becoming». Then, progressively, he leads us to think and feel profoundly and individually the difference between universal ideals and their realisation in history, this paradox of the betrayed event expressed by Gilles Deleuze, described by Alain Badiou and many modern philosophers, helping us to discover the archetypal concept, the key to the enigma, «the concept of reversal, as Ur-phenomenon in modern history»[19].
Let’s take a closer look at this new concept, accompanying the 'lines of flight’ of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s thinking: ‘the most essential observation is this, that what is individualised is precisely the universal. The human individuality feels and experiences herself as a universal human being, precisely by dint of experiencing herself as a private personality. We come to realize that it lies in the nature of the case of modernity itself that the universal is individualised in so many people on the one hand, and that the individual is perceived as individual only because she is rooted in universals, on the other. But privatisation of the universal and generalisation of the individual means a mutual reversal for both. Universal force and power is put in the service of a personal, private ego, and the same personal ego feels itself enlarged by this into universal dimensions. Transforming universal into individual means nothing less than individuation (or privatisation) of the universal, which transforms and reverses the universal and makes it into a personal private possession. At the same time, the universalisation of the individual allows the personal self, the ego, to expand its private egotism and make it universal egotism. Egotistical universality on the one hand, and universal egotism on the other, merge together in this double reversal. In other words, modernity means exactly this: placing the content and force of the universal (God, Nature or Idea) into the hands of the individual, private human personality, gives it increasingly powerful means to control, change and realize this force in its economic, political and cultural life, and to use it in its research, utilisation and manipulation of nature. A private ego that controls the forces of God, Nature or Idea makes them its own, and uses them for its personal priorities in social life and in nature’.[20]
The concept of reversal makes the darkness of modern history transparent. Emancipated from external constraints (dogma, traditions, religions, family...) the private individual appropriates and controls the universal forces. This is why we observe in human history the realisation of the exact opposite of the universal ideals and values of humanity. The English and French revolutions of the 18th century are archetypal examples. The three revolutions of communism-Bolshevism, Fascism-Nazism, and Hegemonic American Capitalism are disastrous 20th century examples.
This realisation of the opposite of universal ideals has of course been identified by historians, nevertheless, the cause of the process has been incompletely or badly interpreted, as the archetypal phenomena have not been understood. It is possible to experience directly what is described by the concept of ‘reversal’ by sufficiently strengthening our soul and thinking, and especially with the help of the other, in order to recognize how we appropriate and reverse events in our lives, and learn to re-cognize them. It is possible to ‘re-reverse’ the reversal, to overcome personal egoism, to transform it into a carrier of the impulse of the Universal Self. Yeshayahu Ben Aharon brings to light with great clarity how The Event is the source of the reversal and the counter-reversal of individual consciousness, and shows us how we can awaken the life of this reality as a tool of spiritual transformation. At this moment, grasping an objective Event means to be grasped reciprocally by IT.
Let’s now describe an example of an individual who initiated a movement for social change, letting the reader find for herself the elements within it, including moments of reversal and counter-reversal.
Pam Warhurst was on a train from London to her home town of Todmorden in West Yorkshire. She had been in a frustrating and fruitless meeting. She was undergoing a moment of utter frustration and despair. Pamela had always been someone with a strong moral sense and she had worked all her life for charities and NGOs and Government bodies involved in improving and changing things and solving problems. Now she found herself on the train with a bottle of wine in front of her experiencing despair and realization. All her years of experience working for social economic and ecological reform had taught her this: it didn’t matter how good your intentions were, how many gathered together with the same intentions, in reality it was never possible to actually get anything done. Never. Every impulse and good idea was destroyed, and every group and organization which tried to realize them ended up broken or rendered ineffective by a combination of heavy bureaucracy, funding issues, and groups being unable to work together. In the heart of this moment, Pamela remembers thinking: either I drink the whole bottle of wine and give up completely, or I’ve got to come up with something new, I’ve got to DO something, now! She asked herself: what can I do, right now, without funding applications or bureaucratic delay, that is open to and can potentially involve everyone, and will benefit us all and actually make a difference?
The idea came for an immediate achievable action. She discussed this idea around the kitchen table with a few friends when she got home. She had the idea of using food as a foundation, everyone needs to eat and everyone is included in this issue. She wanted to use food to bring people together, and to educate people about growing food, and ecology. She had the idea of building a raised bed of edible plants, in a public space previously wasted, and inviting everyone to help themselves to the produce. She called this a ‘propaganda bed’, because she wasn’t attempting a grand project to feed the entire town, but starting with one bed which she hoped would provoke interest, get people meeting and talking, and thinking about sharing and how food is produced, and their local community. The friends round the table immediately went for the idea and volunteered to plant a bed using a minimum of donated materials and plants.
They commandeered a piece of untended rubbish-strewn waste land on the outskirts of the economically deprived town. The land belonged to the local council, but Pamela knew from long and bitter experience that if she made an official approach she would become bogged down in bureaucracy and if she ever got an answer it would probably be ‘no’. So she and a few volunteers went ahead and cleaned it up, filled it with a raised bed, planted it out with edible plants and left a notice saying: ‘Help yourself’.
The bed provoked some local interest. The volunteers called a meeting to talk about it and were astonished when over 60 people came. The 60 people as one took to the idea, they too had been feeling frustrated that they were powerless to change things for the better, and they all felt they could contribute to this project and that it could actually make a difference.
From this initial idea and act, the entire town and locality began to change and improve: today the ethical ecological initiatives of the movement have transformed the town even to the point of transforming the previously failing local economy. The mutually supportive and active community of Incredible Edible actors has grown into a powerful agent for social and environmental education and change, allowing residents to continue to create the town and local life that they really want, now with the enthusiastic help and support of local council, service providers and business.
How could all this happen from Pamela’s initial idea and the small act of a small group of volunteers? What did Pamela and the others do to start this change, and to enable it to continue, avoiding the problems of people working together, bureaucracy and funding which would mean all their highest ideals would be ‘reversed’ into their opposite?
One thing which stands out in Pamela’s experience is the important role of the meeting with the other. The other seems to have played a revelatory role in recognizing the un-reversed intuition in its purity, and inspiring each individual to be committed to its continuing un-reversing.
This phenomenon has been noticed by a fifth French post-structuralist philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, who developed his philosophy and ethics in the form of a description and interpretation of the event of encountering another person. For Lévinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. The Other precisely reveals himself in his ‘alterity’ not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness. In Ethics and Infinity, one of his main work, Lévinas defines morality as an absolute that rules existence with a relentless rigour and points to the relation to the other, what he calls the responsibility-for-the-other. For him, the relation to the other is asymmetrical: reciprocity of actions cannot be expected from the subject, he must act without knowing what the other will do, even if it might cost the subject’s life. In this way, Lévinas reverses the morality of autonomy developed by Kant: it is the heteronomy of the subject that makes morality compelling.
Yes, I will become my brother’s keeper!»[22]
We invite the reader to use the concepts uncovered in this article to find her and his own answers! But one thing should become clear, the success of a social or communal initiative cannot depend alone on the coming-together of morally motivated people, the fixing of a task or goal or the employing of a particular technique or agreed overriding organizational structure. Something is required in the heart of each individual, at the heart of her process of individualisation and ‘singularisation’, and any initiating organizational structure should have this at its heart and allow for its growth, becoming and evolution.
Victor Hugo, at the end of his life wrote “L’ascension humaine”[23]
Man is nothing else
Than the cover name of God.
Whatever he does, he feels the cause
Unbreachable, in the middle.
(…)
Euclide finds the meter,
The rhythm comes from Amphion,
Jesus-Christ comes to submit all,
Even the sword to the ray;
(…)
Dante opens the shade and quickens it;
Colomb splits the blue ocean …
It is God under a pseudonym,
It is God masked, but it is God.”
***
[1] The songs of streets and woods Book II (Wisdom), Chapter III “Liberty, equality, fraternity” - Victor Hugo, 1865
[2] From Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon see the books The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century, The New Experience of the Supersensible.
[3] 'The Act of Abjuration’, signed on 26th July 1581 is the declaration of independence by many of the Provinces of the Netherlands from the allegiance to Philippe II of Spain, during the Dutch Revolt.
[4] The Petition of Right, passed on 16th June 1628 while the revolution was smoldering, is a major document in UK constitutional law that sets out specific liberties of the subject that the king is prohibited from infringing.
[5] The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art - Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, 2011, p.83
[6] Line of flight : « The line of flight is a deterritorialization. (...) To flee is not to renounce to act, nothing more active than a flight. It is the contrary of the imaginary. It is as well to make flee, not necessarily the others, but make flee something, make flee a system as one bursts a pipe …To flee is to trace a line, several lines, a whole cartography. » (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, with Claire Parnet, 1977)
[7] See transcript of the course (in French) : www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=117
[8] ibid.
[9] See Jacques Derrida’s essay of 1965 “The structure, the sign and the game in the discourse of human science” published in Writing and difference. He writes there: «Perhaps happened in the history of the concept of structure something we could call an ‘event’ (…). What would be this event? It would have the external form of a rupture and a re-doubling.” Further, he tries to situate this ‘event’: “If we wanted, indicatively, choose some “proper names” and evoke the authors who had a discourse in which this production was the closest to its radical formulation, we would surely name Nietzschean critics of metaphysics, of the concepts of being and truth to which are substituted the concepts of game, interpretation and sign (sign without a present truth); Freudian critics of self presencing, that is of consciousness, subject, identity to self, proximity or property to self; and, more radically, the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, onto-theology, determination of being as presence». Derrida situates the ‘event’ between the epochs of Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger. The 1930’s are in the middle!
[10] See Philippe Sabot’s essay “The status of the event in Michel Foucault’s thinking”
[11] Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers, Ed. Minuit, 1990, p. 194.
[12] Gille Deleuze, Logic of meaning, 1969
[13] Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 1997
[14] Daniel Bensaïd, Résistances . Essai de Taupologie générale, chapter II « Alain Badiou and the miracle of the event »
[15] Alain Badiou, Theory of the subject, 1982.
[16] For the physical and astral worlds as mirror images of each other, one can meditate How to Know Higher Worlds, GA 10, Ed. Anthroposophic Press, 1994, p. 142-144
[17] For the reversal between man and plant, one can meditate for example the conference of 12th August 1908.
[18] For the reversal of leading world imaginations in moderne history, one can meditate the conferences The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, GA 177
[19] The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, page 82
[20] ibid. page 84
[21] See their web site: http://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/
[22] The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon, page 165 … or on YBA’s blog at:
http://www.ibecoming.co.il/eng/Blog/803/Emmanuel-Levinas%3A-The-Entry-of-the-Other
[23] The songs of streets and woods Book II (Wisdom), Chapter III “Liberty, equality, fraternity” - Victor Hugo, 1865