Introduction: Can Values and Meanings be Outsourced and, if so, to Whom?

Finding a hidden ‘plot’ in history has tempted artists, scientists, scholars, philosophers, politicians, ideologues and religious leaders. Hegel tried to glimpse the cunning of Spirit manifesting itself through the material events of the history of human societies. Poets and religious leaders wanted to become — acknowledged or unacknowledged — legislators of mankind. Many of them tried to fathom secret ways, trace underground passages or envision ‘invisible hands’. Many of them borrowed metaphors from one another. T.S. Eliot might have been making an erudite reference to G.W.F. Hegel’s famous observation on the cunning of reason in history, when speaking of ‘cunning passages’. Hegel, the philosopher, referred to the irony of historical fate, which has mounted ‘reason’ on a horse. Historical events gave a gifted general of the French revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, imperial power to spread revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood at the point of the bayonets of his victorious armies. His Blitzkriegs were cruel to monarchies and kind to republics. Ironic twists of fate suggesting unseen deals between personal ambitions and public causes have been noted in metaphors used by numerous scientists and philosophers.