Modernism and Time Part I: Wyndham Lewis versus the ‘Eternal Return’

The following is an excerpt from Luke Gilfedder’s “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” published in September 2025 by Logos Verlag Berlin.

A prominent aspect of modern experience since the late nineteenth century has been the imposition of mechanised “empty time” by science, technology, and the Enlightenment economy upon all aspects of life. In response, Modernist, anti-Enlightenment, and New Radical Right thinkers seek a new relation to time, linking this empty, uni-directional time with capitalist catastrophes (Walter Benjamin), anthropocentrism (John Gray), and the Heraclitean elevation of becoming over Being (Giorgio Locchi), respectively. The ‘emptiness’ of Enlightenment time implies that its stages evolve within a ‘hollow shell’ of natural chronological time, without diachronic connections; they move “in” rather than “through” time (Jansen, 2016, p. 73). Time becomes merely the medium for historical occurrences, with no organic link between the past and present—only an artificially theorised sequence of stages through which humanity progresses towards enlightenment. 1

Conversely, for anti-Enlightenment thinkers, time is “incarnated” in historical events or instants (Jansen, 2016). These time perceptions can be called “concrete” (Bergson, 2005), embodied, or “organic” (Hölscher, 2014). They posit the revolutionary instant as disruptive events ‘breaking into’ history—a non-teleological vision that stands in contrast to the Hegelian concept of a historical reason progressively realising itself through the linear stages of a preordained telos. This holds even when such thinkers look to the past for their conceptions of instantaneity, as the reappearance of past elements can act as a form of “sudden interruption” (Beck, 2019, p. 5). A notable example is Benjamin’s “now-time.” In the messianic now-time, the return and the vision converge in the present instant because, within the “temporality of interruption,” tradition is “rediscovered” as illumined by a transformative future (Bohrer, cited in Beck, 2019, p. 152). Benjamin’s version of instantaneity, while influenced by Marxism and mystical Judaism, 2 shares with his reactionary modernist contemporaries an appeal to cyclical rather than linear time. It rejects the progressive, mechanical view of time as “beads on a rosary”, reinterpreting the present as a “time of the now” pierced through with “chips of Messianic time” (Benjamin, 1969, p. 263).

Many New Radical Right thinkers similarly advocate for a cyclical (precisely spherical) view of history and time, rejecting ‘empty’ linear time and its ‘catastrophic’ associations with industrialisation, liberalism, and modernity’s ‘nihilism’. In spherical time, history is not a continuous trajectory of infinite progress but works in cycles of “eternal return”. At any given moment, history can be “rolled in a direction” which places eternal, hierarchical, supra-individual, and organic values back at the centre of society (Griffin, 1999, p. 9). Indeed, Alain de Benoist—in Benjaminian terms—asserts that the historical “past” is a dimension or perspective implicit in every given moment: “Each present contains it… the past, thus, is latent in existence and can always be revived” (quoted in O’Meara, 2013, p. 97). 3

The idea of an alternative temporality is equally relevant to the political understanding of Aleksander Dugin’s (2017) neo-Eurasianist project, which rejects unidirectional time for a “synchronic model”.4 The neo-Eurasianist conservative does not fight for the past but for the “constant” and “perennial”, that which always remains “identical to itself”. In other words, the conservative, having rejected “empty time”, is concerned with “that which has been, that which is, and that which will be”—namely, Being as constant but under different modalities (Dugin, cited in Millerman, 2022, p. 117). While for ‘progressives’, Being is a “function of becoming,” for conservatives, time is a function of Being. Being is primary; time is secondary. However, in progressive ‘Western’ temporality, Being becomes not an idea but a “value, development, life, and the will-to-power… an arbitrary decision on the part of the subject.” (Dugin, 2014, p. 124). Because Being becomes the “function of values”—as Heidegger’s narrative of decline indicates—we arrive in “the space of total nihilism”. Indeed, Dugin views Heidegger as the exemplary “conservative revolutionary” who recognised that man is called upon to be the “guardian of Being,” while simultaneously taking a daring leap into “another Beginning”– the “Revolutionary” moment, the orientation toward the future.

The New Radical Right’s various metapoliticisations of ‘spherical time’ centre most coherently around Heidegger’s notion of “retrieval.” For Heidegger, crucially, the past can be “retrieved” within the “horizons of the present and the future,” revealing that it exists not merely as the past but as a “futural possibility” (cited in Bambach, 1995, p. 211). 5 Consequently, conservative revolutionaries like Armin Mohler favour the Sphere over the circle as the clearer model for ‘eternal return,’ as the sphere symbolises that everything is contained in each moment; the present, past, and future coincide (Locchi, 1973).

A notable parallel in Modernism is Yeats’s cyclical vision of history. Yeats believed that history, biology, and metaphysics were governed by two-thousand-year cycles, which he called “gyres.” Like the spherical model embraced by Nietzsche and the New Radical Right, Yeats’s alternative concept of time, while anti-teleological, does not strictly conform to a circle. Each ‘gyre’ should instead be visualised as a cone that starts as a tiny circle and then spirals outward and forward, expanding with each revolution. When it reaches its widest point, it begins to break apart under its own weight. Simultaneously, however, another gyre starts spiralling out in a direction antithetical to the first. According to Yeats, we are approaching a historical moment in which the current “gyre” of monotheism, father worship, universalism, and linear time—initiated with the birth of Christ and the end of particularist paganism—begins to break down. Some rough beast, slouching towards Bethlehem, “its hour come round at last,” will sow the seeds of the next gyre, which is its antithesis (Yeats, 1982, p. 211).

Yeats’s vision aligns with the New Radical Right’s metapolitical argument that the time is ripe for a “retrieval” of pre-Christian, Indo-European paganism. Just as centuries of particularist polytheism gave way to centuries of universalist Abrahamic monotheism (and its secular variant, progress), so the ideological defeat of modern liberalism will expedite the destined reversal to a pagan, ‘organic’ and roots-based social order. In the “interregnum,” society faces the collapse of entire frameworks of understanding as the centre no longer holds, anarchy spreads, and grand narratives lose power. Nevertheless, the cyclical conception of time in Yeats’s and the New Radical Right’s model renders inevitable this demise of the linear, egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition.

This notion that time is both cyclical and fated is arguably the most challenging and undesirable feature of the Yeatsian or Spherical vision. History follows cycles, and we cannot control it; it “controls us” (Kingsnorth, 2018). Lewis had a particular penchant in his polemics for rejecting these alternative visions of history. He admonished Spengler’s cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilisations, saying Spengler probably reasoned it was “about time the West ‘declined’” to fulfil his “periodic principle” and satisfy “chronology.” 6 In Artists of the Right (2012), Kerry Bolton observes that Lewis, unlike many modernists of the ‘Right,’ viewed organic and spherical interpretations of history as fatalistic and “demoralising for the survival of the European race.” Indeed, Lewis wanted the European mind to liberate itself from the fatalism inherent in these modes of thinking, which had resulted in “the Great War” and would precipitate the wars that “threatened” to come. For Lewis, all manifestations of the “historic” time-mind were deleterious to human agency and were “peculiarly useful to the promoters of wars,” for such doctrines imply “it’s time for another war.” In other words, adherence to the concept of eternal recurrence would render the vision in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” more probable. 7 A similar apprehension may have dissuaded Lewis from finishing his own fictional portrayal of armageddon in the thirties—in his original (abandoned) sequel to 1928’s The Childermass, the “whole affair” was to “end in chaos”.

A closer analysis of the book, however, suggests Lewis’s critique of Spengler does not signify a complete rejection of eternal recurrence. 8 Lewis even seems to share with Yeats a vision of the present moment as existing within a longer historical cycle. Significantly, Tomlin (1969, pp. 26-27) highlights the cyclical structure of The Childermass and notes the occult significance of the Maha-Yuga symbol on the Bailiff’s Punch-and-Judy booth. In Hindu cosmology, the Maha-Yuga (great age) represents one complete historical cycle. It consists of four world ages (‘Yugas’) and implies the “successive decline in human righteousness”, culminating in the Kali-Yuga, where righteousness “reaches its nadir”. Other occult symbols, like the ‘goat-hoof’ beneath the Maha-Yuga sign and the recurring imagery of the serpent, 9 indicate that modernity has entered its final cyclical phase of degeneracy: man is in hell, as Ezra Pound said, “without dignity, without tragedy.” 10

The theme of eternal recurrence is further suggested by the arrival of the dead at the transit camp outside Heaven, where “with the gait of Cartophilus”, some “homing solitary shadow” is “continually arriving” in the “restless dust” of the turnpike”. These separate ‘solitary’ souls become one stream arriving perpetually— ‘turnpike’ evoking not only the idea of a toll-paying road but also of rotation. This sense of the eternally revolving slaughter mill of history is amplified when considering that the protagonists, Satters and Pullman, likely died in the Great War and are just two more lost souls roaming this plain of death, awaiting admission to the Magnetic City.

Despite its pessimistic evocation of eternal recurrence, The Childermass demonstrates that Lewis, in his creative work, was willing to explore ideas he would not countenance in his polemics. 1927’s Time and Western Man launched an unequivocal—almost doctrinal—attack on the ‘Time-mind’, a term Lewis used to group seemingly disparate concepts (including eternal recurrence) that he believed exhibited mechanistic thinking. For Lewis, anything that is “becoming, not become” is a “function” or “process” and hence “mechanistic”. Describing his critique of ‘time-philosophies’, Lewis writes:

I have attempted, variously, since 1927, to translate this analysis into more popular forms. But you have to go back into the philosophies that went hand-in-hand with Nineteenth-Century Science (as, for instance, Nietzsche came out of Darwin…) and into the philosophical glosses of the time-physics, really to master the structure of the contemporary mechanical Juggernaut. (Lewis, 1963, pp. 261-262)

Lewis saw much of modernism as the next chapter in this process, arguing that its literary and philosophical works, which embraced history as a ‘process’, exalted continual change, and portrayed reality as perpetually in flux, ultimately stripped the self of stability, free will, and agency.

This “time-for-Time’s-sake” philosophy, obsessed with becoming and perpetual flux, was directly opposed by Lewis to his ‘spatial’ philosophy, which championed form, presence, and the principles of classicism—principles that Spengler (Lewis argued) denigrated in favour of a “formless” Romantic yearning for tragic “Faustian” man and a return to a mythical “superhuman temporality” where past, present, and future merge. Contrary to the Nietzschean idea that this suprahistorical outlook is the temporality of eternal return, Lewis contends that the “world of Space,” rather than the “mental world” of time, embodies the true world of the ‘pure Present’. Only ‘faustians’ are historic, whereas the “pure Present” of the ahistoric Classical Ages is “obviously” the world that is “born and dies every moment.”

This idea is central to understanding Lewis’s “vortex view” of art and civilisation, which, as Marshall McLuhan explains, contrasts with the reactionary-romantic view. For Lewis, the “moment of art is not a moment of time’s covenant”. Rather, it is “specifically that experience of arrest in which we pause before a particular thing or experience” (McLuhan, 2011, p. 10). McLuhan conceptualises the vortex not as a flux but as a “dynamic, moving image” which is related to time yet also contains a “stable point,” the “spatial element from which its energy spirals originate.” (Lamberti, 2018, pp. 219-220). While the vortex, like the sphere, gyre, or lightning flash, can thus be viewed as one of many radical modernist counters to ‘Enlightenment time’, it does not aim to redeem or ‘re-enchant’ temporality. Instead, Lewis seeks to “arrest the flux of existence” so that the mind may be “united with that which is permanent” (McLuhan, 2011, p. 6). In Vorticism, art “plunges to the heart of the Present”—an “aesthetic solidification of time” (Sutherland, 2018, p. 13) that momentarily disrupts the “insistent, hypnotic” flux of modernity, particularly the “romantic chaos” and crises of industrial society. 11

Link to the Endnotes

Full citations and references are available in “Wyndham Lewis: Modernism and the New Radical Right,” pp. 295–369.