II. The Point of Departure

MY REFLECTIONS up to this point may strike some people perhaps as rather morbid in character. Morbid? But what after all is disease? What, for that matter, is health?

Perhaps disease itself is the essential condition of what we call progress, and progress itself a disease.

Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Our first parents lived there in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and Yahweh let them eat from the Tree of Life and created all things for them. But He ordered them not to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But tempted by the serpent—a model of prudence for Christ—they tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to the crown and consummation of them all, death, and to labor and progress. For progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus it was that the curiosity of woman, of Eve, of the being most subject to organic necessity and the conservation of life, brought about the Fall, and with the Fall, man’s redemption, which put us on the road to God, to attain to Him and to be in Him.

Would you prefer some other version of our origin? Very well. There is one which holds that man is no more, strictly speaking, than a variety of gorilla, or orangutan, or chimpanzee, or the like, a hydrocephalic or something similar. Once upon a time an anthropoid ape gave birth to a diseased offspring—as seen from the strictly animal or zoological point of view—really diseased, and if the disease represented a weakness, it also proved an advantage in the struggle for survival. At last, the only upright mammal—man—stood erect. His new posture freed him from having to use his hands to walk, so that he could counterpose his thumb to the other four fingers and thus grasp objects and manufacture utensils; and hands are great forgers of intelligence, as is well known. And the upright position allowed his lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth to develop the power of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. And the same position, allowing the head—site of the mind—to weigh vertically upon the trunk, facilitated its development and increase of weight. Inasmuch as stronger and more resistant pelvic bones were now needed than those of species whose head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, it then devolved upon woman, author of the Fall, according to Genesis, to give birth to larger-headed offspring through a harder frame of bones. For having sinned, woman was condemned by Yahweh to bring forth her children in pain.

The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, and their kind must look upon man as a poor sick animal who goes so far as to store up his dead: store them to what end?

And this primary sickness and all those that follow from it—are they not, perhaps, the main element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects the blood, introducing scoriae, a kind of residue from an imperfect organic combustion. But may not this very impurity serve to stimulate the blood? Chemically pure water is undrinkable. And may not physiologically pure blood be unfit for the brain of the upright mammal who must live by thought?

The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or more precisely the diseases themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and thus perhaps enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What else do all the serums and vaccines demonstrate, what else is immunization over a period of time?

If the idea of health were not an abstract category, something which strictly speaking does not exist, we might say that a perfectly healthy man would no longer be a man but an irrational animal: irrational for want of any disease to ignite his reason. A real disease, and a tragic one, is the one that arouses in us the appetite to know for the sole pleasure of knowing, the delight of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

All men strive by nature to know.” Thus does Aristotle begin his Metaphysics. And a thousand times since it has been repeated that curiosity or the desire to know—which, according to Genesis, led our original mother to sin—is the beginning of knowledge.

But we must differentiate between the desire or appetite to know—apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge itself, the zeal for tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—and the need to know in order to live. The latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical, unconscious knowledge, is common to both men and animals, while what distinguishes us from them is reflective knowing, the knowledge of knowing itself.

Men have long debated and long will continue to debate—the world having been given over to their debates—concerning the origin of knowledge. But, leaving aside for the moment the question of what may constitute quintessential knowledge, it is certainly clear that in the apparential order of things, in the life of beings endowed with a certain more or less cloudy faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain life. It is consequent to that very essence of being, which according to Spinoza consists in striving to persevere indefinitely in its own being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness borders on vulgarity, we might say that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned, is in dependence on the stomach. Among beings who rank lowest in the scale of living things, the actions which demonstrate willfulness, those which seem to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness, are actions directed toward procuring nourishment for the being performing them.

Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge, whatever may be its origin in other regards. Beings apparently endowed with perception perceive in order to live, and only to the degree that they need to perceive in order to live. But perhaps once this knowledge has been stored up, knowledge which at first was useful and is no longer so, it constitutes a fund far exceeding that required by life.

Thus we have, first of all, a need to know in order to live, and then, arising from the first need, what we may call a superfluous or de luxe knowledge, which in its turn may come to constitute a new need. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire to know, is only awakened and becomes operative after the need-to-know-in-order-to-live is satisfied. Even though sometimes it may not occur in this order, given the present level of our human lineage, and instead curiosity take precedence over need, and knowledge over hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from the need to know in order to live, and this is the dead weight and gross matter which all knowledge and science carries in its womb. Aspiring as they do to knowledge for the sake of knowledge and truth for the sake of truth, science and knowledge are forced by the needs of life to place themselves at the service of these needs. And men, believing they seek the truth for its own sake, in fact seek life in the truth. The variety of knowledge and science depends upon the variety of human needs, and men of science usually work, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, in the service of those in power, or in the service of a nation requiring from them confirmation of its drives.

But does all this really constitute a dead weight and gross matter as far as science is concerned, or is it not rather more likely the source of its redemption? In truth, it is just that, and it is folly to presume to rebel against the human condition.

Knowledge remains at the service of the need to go on living, primarily at the service of personal survival. And this need and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them the range they have. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells whatever he must see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in order to go on living. The weakening or loss of any one of these senses increases the risks which hedge in his life, and if in the present state of society the risks are not augmented, it is because some people nowadays see, hear, touch, and smell for other people. A blind man alone, without a guide, could not live very long. Society constitutes an added sense, the true “common sense.”

Man, then, in his condition of isolated individual, only sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells what he needs in order to live and survive. If he does not perceive colors below red or beyond violet, it is perhaps because those between red and violet suffice for his purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves constitute an apparatus for simplification which eliminates from objective reality everything we do not need to know in order to utilize objects for the preservation of life. The animal that does not perish in complete darkness ends by becoming blind. Parasites living in the intestines of other animals on juices they find already processed for them do not need to see or hear, and so they do not see or hear, but instead, having turned into a species of sack, adhere to the being from whom they live. For these parasites neither the visual nor the audible world need exist. It is enough for them that the animals in whose intestines they live can see and hear.

Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of self-preservation, which is indeed, as we agreed with Spinoza, its very essence. And thus it may be said that the instinct of self-preservation itself makes the world’s reality and truth perceptible to us. For it is this instinct which chooses—from the unfathomable and limitless world of the possible—everything that exists for us. What exists for us, in fact, is precisely what we need to know, in one or another way, in order to go on existing. Objective existence is, in our minds, dependent on our own personal existence. And nobody can deny that facets of reality unknown to us today and perhaps unknowable at any time—simply because they are not necessary to us for conserving our own present existence—could very well exist and perhaps do exist.

But man neither lives alone nor is he an isolated individual, but is rather a member of society; there is a good deal of truth in the proverb which says that an individual, like an atom, is an abstraction. Of course: divorced from the Universe the atom is as much an abstraction as the Universe divorced from atoms. And if the individual survives through his instinct for self-preservation, society owes its being and its continuance to the instinct for perpetuation in the individual. And, from this instinct, or rather from society, springs reason.

Reason, what we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.

It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately, that is, reflectively, thanks to articulate language, and this language arose from the need to communicate our thought to our neighbors. To think is to talk with oneself, and each of us talks to himself because we have had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking, we succeed in giving it form, that is, securing it, extracting it from the mist of dim perceptions for which it stands in representation, because of the efforts we have made to present the idea to others. Thought is interior language, and interior language originates in outward language. So that reason is properly both social and common, and this fact is fraught with consequences, as we shall see.

And if there exists a reality which, in so far as we know it, is the product of the instinct for self-preservation and of the senses at the service of this instinct, must there not also exist another reality, no less real than the first, the product, in so far as we know it, of the instinct for perpetuation, the instinct of the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The instinct for self-preservation—hunger—is fundamental to the individual human being; the instinct for perpetuation—love—in its most rudimentary, physiological form—is fundamental to human society. And just as man knows what he needs to know in order to continue living, so society, or man to the degree that he is a social being, knows what is needful to know in order to perpetuate man in society.

There is a world, the perceptible world, which is the offspring of hunger, and another, the ideal world, which is the offspring of love. And just as there are senses employed in the service of knowing the perceptible world, so there are also senses—dormant for the most part today, since social consciousness has scarcely yet stirred—employed in the service of knowing the ideal world. For why should we deny objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct for perpetuation, inasmuch as we' grant it to those of hunger or the instinct of self-preservation? For if it is said that the creations of love are no more than figments of our imagination, devoid of objective value, might it not equally be said of the creations of hunger that they are no more than the figments of our senses? Who can assert that there does not exist an invisible and intangible world, perceived only by the inner sense which lives at the service of the instinct of perpetuation?

Human society, qua such a society, boasts senses which the individual, but for the existence of that society, would lack, just as the individual man—who is in his turn a kind of society—boasts senses which are lacking in the cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their obscure consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the visible world, and if you were to speak to them of it, they would doubtless consider it an arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while the latter in their turn would consider the audible world created by the hearing cells a complete illusion.

We have previously remarked on how those parasites which live in the intestines of the higher animals, feeding on the nutritive juices supplied by these animals, do not need to see or hear, so that for them neither the visible nor audible world exists. And if they were possessed of a certain degree of consciousness and paid any heed to the fact that the host at whose expense they live believed in another world, one different from theirs, they would perhaps regard it as a derangement of the imagination. In the same way there are social parasites, as Mr. A. J. Balfour admirably observes. These parasites receive from the society in which they live the basis for a moral conduct and they go on to deny that a belief in God and a future life are a necessary foundation on which to base a permissible life and good conduct—but society has already prepared for them the spiritual nutriment upon which they feed. A single individual can endure life and live it well and even heroically without any belief at all in either God or the immortality of the soul; nevertheless, he will be living the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honor is, even in non-Christians, the fruit of Christianity. And I say more: if it happens that faith in God is joined in a man to a life of purity and high morality, it is not so much the belief in God that makes him good, but that his being good, thanks be to God, makes him believe in Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clairvoyance.

I am not unaware, of course, that all this talk about man creating the world of his senses and love creating the ideal world and about the blind cells of hearing and the deaf cells of sight and about spiritual parasites and so on may well be said to be pure metaphor. For so it is, and I am attempting no more than to reason by means of metaphor. The fact is that the social sense, offspring of love, creator of language and reason and of the ideal world which springs from this sense, is basically no more than what we call fantasy or imagination. And out of fantasy comes reason. And if we understand fantasy to be a faculty fashioning images capriciously, I will ask: what is caprice? In any case, reason and the senses are also fallible.

And we shall have to look into this quintessential social faculty: the imagination which makes everything personal and which, placed at the service of the instinct for self-perpetuation, reveals God and the immortality of the soul to us, so that God is a social product.

But we will leave this until later.

And now then, why does man philosophize? That is to say, why does he investigate the first causes and the ultimate ends of things? Why do we seek disinterested truth? To say that all men have a natural tendency to know* is true. But why?

Philosophers search for a theoretical or ideal point of departure for their human task, the task of philosophizing. But they tend to neglect the search for the practical and real point of departure, the purpose. What is the purpose of making philosophy, of thinking it out and then expounding it to one’s fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and through it? The truth for truth’s sake? The truth in order to subject our conduct to it and to determine in relation to it our spiritual attitude to life and the Universe?

Philosophy is the product of each philosopher’s humanity, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and blood who addresses himself to other flesh-and-blood men like himself. And let him do what he may, he philosophizes not with his reason alone but with his will, with his feeling, with his flesh and blood, with his entire body and soul. It is a man that makes philosophy.

I do not want to use the word “I” here and say that in philosophizing it is “I” and not the man who philosophizes. For I would not want this concrete, circumscribed I, the I of flesh and blood who suffers from toothache and does not find life bearable if death is really the annihilation of the personal consciousness, I would not want this I confused with that other “I,” the contraband I, the theoretical I which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor confused even with the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say we; meaning we who are circumscribed in our space.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth’s sake! That is inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy is directed toward practice, truth toward goodness, science toward ethics, I will ask: And wherefore goodness? Is it perhaps an end in itself? Only whatever contributes to the conservation, perpetuation, and enrichment of consciousness is good. Goodness is directed toward man, toward the maintenance and perfection of human society, which is composed of men. And wherefore is this so? “Act in such wise that your action may be a pattern for all men,” Kant tells us. Very well: but wherefore? It is necessary to seek a wherefore.

There is a wherefore at the point of departure of all philosophy, at the true point of departure, the practical and not the theoretical. The philosopher does not philosophize merely for the sake of philosophizing. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari, says the old Latin adage; and inasmuch as the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must live before he can philosophize, and in fact he philosophizes in order to live. Usually he philosophizes so as to be able to resign himself to life, or to seek some end-purpose, or to distract himself and forget his woes, or by way of sport and games. A good example of this last is that terrible Athenian ironist who was Socrates, of whom Xenophon in his Memorabilia relates that he was so skillful in describing to Theodata, the courtesan, the artifice she should employ in luring lovers to her house that she invited the philosopher to be her companion in the chase, in a word, her pimp. The truth is that philosophy oftentimes tends to become a pimping art, albeit spiritual. And sometimes it is used as an opiate to alleviate pain.

I pick at random a book of metaphysics, the closest to hand, Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open it, and in the fifth paragraph of the First Chapter in the First Part, I read: “Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy; that is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds which carry it on, not in any external purpose, such as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life.” Let us examine this. And we will see, first, that metaphysics is not, “properly speaking,” a science, “that is,” it is a science whose end, etc. And this science, which is properly speaking not a science, has its end in itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that carry it on. Which is it then? Is the end of metaphysics in itself? Or is its end the gratification and education of the minds which carry it on? It is either one or the other! Hodgson next adds that metaphysics does not have any kind of external purpose as end, as for instance the founding of an art conducive to well-being in life. Still, is not gratification of mind for the philosopher part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader consider this passage from the English metaphysician, and then tell me if it is not a tissue of contradictions.

All this contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made humanly to define the theory of a science, a knowledge, whose end-purpose is in itself, of knowing for the sake of knowing, of truth for truth’s sake. Science does not exist except in personal consciousness and thanks to it: astronomy, mathematics have no more reality than what they possess as knowledge in the minds of those who learn and cultivate them. And if one day all personal consciousness on earth must come to an end, if one day the human spirit must return to nothingness, that is, to the absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if there is not to be any longer a human spirit to avail itself of all our accumulated science—then wherefore this science? For we should not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality of the soul involves the future of the entire human race.

The series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls, as he sets about explaining the theory of a science whose end lies in itself, becomes easily understandable as something natural to an Englishman who is before all else a man. Doubtless a German specialist, a philosopher who made philosophy his specialty, first murdering his humanity and burying it in the specialty, would explain much better all this about a science whose end lies in itself and the theory of knowing for the sake of knowing.

Let us take the man Spinoza, the Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland. Read his Ethics for what it is, a desperate elegiac poem, and tell me if you do not hear, beneath the unadorned, but seemingly serene, propositions set forth more geometrico, a mournful echo of the prophetic psalms. This is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when he wrote that a free man thinks of everything but death and that his wisdom consists in meditating on life itself and not on death—homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non mortis, sed vitae meditatio est (Ethics, Part IV, Prop. LXVII)—when he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves; and in fact he was thinking of death, and he wrote as he did to free himself—though his attempt was in vain—of this thought. Not even when he wrote Proposition XLII of Part V, to the effect that “blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself,” did he believe, surely, what he wrote. For men make philosophy precisely to convince themselves of what they say, though they do not succeed. And this desire to convince oneself, that is, to do violence to one’s own human nature, is often the true point of departure for not a few philosophies.

“Whence do I come, and whence does the world in which and from which I live? Whither am I going and whither everything around me? What is the meaning of it all?” These are the questions man asks himself as soon as he frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of having to labor for his material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath these questions lies the desire to know not so much the Why as the Wherefore, the wish to know not so much the cause but the finality. Cicero’s definition of philosophy is well known, where he called it “the science of things divine and human and of the causes contained in them”: rerum divinarum et humanarum, causarumque quibus hae res continentur. But in reality these causes are, for us, ends. What is the Supreme Cause, God, but the Supreme End? We are interested in the Why thinking only of the Wherefore. We want to know whence we come only the better to ascertain whither we are going.

This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found in that formidable intellectualist who was Clement of Alexandria, canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the Fifth Chapter of the first of his Stromata. But this same Christian philosopher—was he Christian?—in Chapter 22 of his fourth stroma, tells us that for the gnostic (that is, the intellectual), knowledge, gnosis, should suffice; and he adds:

For I will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself, chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a living substance. Could we, then, suppose any one proposing to the Gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting salvation; and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable, he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God, deeming that property of faith, which from love ascends to knowledge, desirable, for its own sake.

May He, may God himself, whom we long to possess and enjoy eternally, deliver us from this gnosticism or Clementine intellectualism!

Why do I want to know whence I came and whither I am going, whence and whither everything around me, and the meaning of it all? Because I do not want to die utterly, and I want to know if I am to die definitively or not. And if I am not to die altogether, what then is to become of me? If I am to die altogether, then nothing makes any sense. There are three solutions: a) I know I am to die utterly, and then my despair is incurable, or b) I know I will not die utterly, and then I resign myself, or c) I can not know either one thing or the other, and then I am resigned to despair or despairing in resignation, a despairing resignation or a resigned despair, and therein the struggle.

“The best thing to do with what can not be known,” some reader will suggest, “is to let it be.” But is that possible? In his beautiful poem “The Ancient Sage” Tennyson wrote:

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,

Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,

Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,

Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,

Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:

Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,

Nor yet that thou art mortal-nay, my son,

Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,

Am not thyself in converse with thyself,

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,

Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,

Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,

Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!

Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says:

nothing worthy proving can be proven,

nor yet disproven

And yet, can we repress the instinct which drives man to want to know, to want to know, above all, whatever will lead him to live, to live forever? We say to live forever, not to know forever like the Alexandrian gnostic. For to live is one thing and to know is another, and, as we shall see, there may be such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is, not only irrational, but anti-rational, and everything rational is anti-vital. And herein lies the basis for the tragic sense of life.

The defect in Descartes’s Discourse on Method does not lie in the methodical prior doubt, in the fact that he begins by resolving to doubt everything, which is no more than a mere artifice; the defect lies in his resolving to begin by leaving himself out, omitting Descartes, the real man, the man of flesh and blood, the man who does not want to die, so that he can become a mere thinker, that is, an abstraction. But the real man reappears and works his way into the philosophy.

“Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée.” Thus begins the Discourse on Method, and this good sense saved him. He goes on to talk about himself, of the man Descartes, telling us, among other things that he thought highly of eloquence and loved poetry; that above all else he delighted in mathematics, because of the evidence and certainty of its reasons, and that he venerated our theology and strove, as much as any man, to attain Heaven—et prétendais autant qu'aucun autre à gagner le ciel. And this attempt—a very laudable one I believe, and very natural—prevented him from drawing all the conclusions from his methodical doubt. The man Descartes attempted, as much as any man, to attain to heaven, “but having realized, for sure, that the way thither is not any the less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are beyond our intelligence, I would not have dared submit them to my feeble reason, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to succeed therein I would require some extraordinary help from Heaven and need to be more than a man.” And here we have the man himself. Here is the man who did not feel obliged, thanks be to God, to make a profession—métier—of science by way of improving his fortunes, nor the need to take upon himself the office of cynically denigrating glory. He goes on to tell us of how he was compelled to stay in Germany, and there, shut up in a stove—poêle—began to philosophize his method. In Germany, and shut up in a stove! And thus it is that his discourse is a stovediscourse, in a German stove, even though the philosopher shut up inside the stove is a Frenchman who proposed to attain Heaven.

And he comes to the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated. But the ego implied in this enthymeme, ego cogito, ergo ego sum, is an unreal, that is, an ideal ego, an ideal I, and its sum, its existence, something unreal as well. “I think, therefore I am” can only mean, “I think, therefore I am a thinker”; the being in the I am, derived from I think, is no more than a knowing; that being is knowledge, not life. The primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those who do not think also live, even though that kind of living is not a true life. So many contradictions, dear Lord, when we try to wed life to reason!

The truth is sum, ergo cogito—I am, therefore I think, though not everything that is, thinks. Is not consciousness of thought first of all consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, thought without consciousness of self, without personality? Is pure knowledge possible, knowledge without feeling, without that kind of materiality which feeling lends to it? Is not thought somehow felt, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: “I feel, therefore I am” or “I will, therefore I am”? And when there is a feeling of self, does not one feel oneself eternal? And in willing oneself, does not one will oneself eternal, that is, will not to die? Is not what the sad Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of a being, its striving to persevere indefinitely in its own being, its self-love, its longing for immortality, perhaps the primary and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is this drive not therefore the true basis, the true point of departure for all philosophy, though philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, do not recognize it?

And, moreover, it was the cogito that introduced a distinction which, although fruitful of truths, has also sown confusions, and that is the distinction between the object—cogito—and the subject—sum. For there is scarcely any distinction which does not also serve to confuse. But we will return to this later.

For the present let us agree on this intense suspicion that the longing not to die, the hunger for personal immortality, the striving to persevere indefinitely in our own being, all of which is, according to the tragic Jew, our very essence, constitutes the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inner point of departure for any and all human philosophy wrought by man for his fellows. And then we shall see how the solution to this inner affective problem, a solution which may amount to a despairing renunciation of any attempt at solution, is something that colors all the rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is nothing more than this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the why, into the cause, there is simply the search for the wherefore, for the end purpose. All the rest is either a self-deception or a wish to deceive others by way of deceiving oneself.

And this personal and affective point of departure for all philosophy and all religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us look into it.