Theological predestination is the first form of historical totality thinking

Evidence

The predestination debate is, of course, more dramatically contradictory than the later and more secular bourgeois and proletarian forms we have been considering in Kant and Marx; the awkwardness of its “solutions” are more embarrassing for the modern mind. Nonetheless, some conception of divine pansynchronism, of the providential anticipation or the thoroughgoing predestination of all the acts of history, is surely the first mystified form whereby people (in the “West”) attempted to conceptualize the logic of history as a whole, and to formulate its dialectical interrelationship and its telos. To wonder, then, how the necessity of my future acts is to be squared with any active obligation on my part to struggle to make them come out right is to tap the same anxiety that will confront political activists later on when a doctrine of historical necessity and inevitability seems on the point of sapping their militant resolve. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 707

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘divine pansynchronism’ as the first mystified attempt to conceptualize the logic of history as a whole.
• XREF: connects to: Historical materialism needs hidden theology to win its game — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 601; The Calvinist doctrine of predestination paradoxically unleashed expansive individual initiative. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1212; The doctrine of progress is better called a theology because of its Christian origins — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 754 (+6 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Historical materialism needs hidden theology to win its game — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 601; The Calvinist doctrine of predestination paradoxically unleashed expansive individual initiative. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1212; The doctrine of progress is better called a theology because of its Christian origins — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 754 (+6 more)