The World and Its Meaning
or
Metalogic
Negative Cosmology
Now what do we know of the world? It appears to surround us. We are in it, but it exists within us too. It penetrates us, but with every breath and every stirring of our hands it also emanates from us. It is for us the self-evident quantity, as self-evident as our own self, more self-evident than God. It is the evident pure and simple, the one thing specially suited and specially commissioned to be understood, to be evident from within itself, to be “self-evident.” But philosophy long ago left this self-evidentness behind in favor of an agenda which would make now of the I, now of God the point of departure in one running start after another. Thus it has reduced the self-evidentness of the world to a virtual nil. What, then, remains of the self-evidentness of the world as knowledge of the Ding an sich—or whatever one chooses to call this infinitesimal residuum—would rather properly be the subject of a negative cosmology. It is due more to general cultural sympathies and antipathies than to objective reasons that this term has not been taken up with the same readiness as that of a negative theology. For the devotees of God are not always lovers of knowledge, and vice versa. No such contrast exists between the lovers of the world and those of knowledge; on the contrary, they are more or less dependent on each other, as indeed are also the concepts of world and knowledge themselves. Thus the “scientific conclusion” that one can know nothing of God was more palatable than the same conclusion with respect to the world. But we resist the one “conclusion” as well as the other. We will not let it remain conclusion. If science could lead to such a conclusion, then it has led itself ad absurdum. Though the conclusion need not then be wrong, the way in which it had to become a conclusion must be. Accordingly we consider this “conclusion,” here as before with God, as a beginning.
METHODOLOGY
Of the world we know nothing. And here, too, the Nought is a Nought of our knowledge, a specific, individual Nought of our knowledge at that. Here, too, it is the springboard from which we are to take the leap into the Something of knowledge, into the “positive.” For we “believe” in the world, as firmly at least as we believe in God or our self. Accordingly, the Nought of these three entities can be only a hypothetical Nought for us, only a Nought of knowledge from which we attain that Aught of knowledge which circumscribes the content of this belief. That we hold this belief is a fact from which we can free ourselves only hypothetically, by constructing it from the ground up, until we finally reach the point where we realize how the hypothetical must convert into the ahypothetical, the absolute, the unconditional character of that belief. This alone is what science can and must achieve for us. We cannot in the least expect that science free us from that threefold belief; science will teach us precisely that we cannot expect this and why. What appeared, according to earlier concepts, to be unscientific in this “belief” will thus be justified. The de omnibus dubitandum of Descartes was valid on the presupposition of the one-and-all universe. A one-and-all reasoning confronted this universe and, as tool of this reasoning, the one-and-all doubt de omnibus. But it was our initial endeavor to prove this presupposition untenable, to prove it, indeed, already invalidated for the conscious spirit. If, then, this presupposition falls, then the place of the one-and-all doubt, the absolute doubt, is taken by the hypothetical doubt which, just because no longer de omnibus, cannot regard itself any longer as end but only as means of reasoning. Thus we submerge once again into the depths of the positive.
World Order
Here, too, the original affirmation, the Yea of non-Nought, again wells forth out of the Nought, just because it cannot remain Nought. But this affirmation must affirm something infinite; hence the affirmed Non-nought cannot in this case, as in God’s, imply being. For the being of the world is not an infinitely static essence. We address the being of God as an ever-static essence, infinite in itself and in every moment. But the inexhaustible fullness of the vision, ever newly generated and newly perceived, the “being-full-of-form” of the world, is precisely the opposite of this. Thus the primeval Yea must here affirm something else; the primeval statement about the world must sound different. Only something “everywhere” present and “ever” lasting can be affirmed as something infinite—and only as such can the Non-nought be affirmed. The terms “everywhere” and “ever” would have only the meaning of an analogy as against the divine physis; they would be but the stammering expression for something inexpressible. But here in the case of the world they apply exactly. The being of the world really must be its Everywhere and Ever. Only in reasoning, however, is the being of the world everywhere and ever. The essence of the world is the logos.
Let us recall here what we premised about the relation of the world to its logos in the Introduction. Reasoning pours into the world as a system of individual stipulations with many ramifications. It is that which is valid in the world at all times and in every place. It owes its significance for the world, its “applicability,” to that ramification, that diversity, on which it has decided. It has left behind the “simple word of truth,” to use the language of tragedy. The force of its inclination to being springs from this very disinclination. The system of rational stipulations is a system by virtue not of a uniform origin, but rather of the unity of its application, its area of validity: the world. A uniform origin can and indeed must be presupposed by this reasoning, directed to being and only to being, but it cannot be proved. For by turning itself entirely into the applied reasoning at home in the world, it has renounced the capacity to demonstrate the unity of its origin. Since this uniform origin did not lie inside the world, the path from the “pure” — which was to be presupposed — to the “applied” came to lie outside the sphere of the power of applied reasoning. A merely presupposed reasoning may need to be reasoned about, but does not reason itself; only a real reasoning reasons, one that is valid for the world, applied to the world, at home in the world. Thus the unity of reasoning remains without; reasoning has to console itself for this with the unity of its application within the locked walls of the world. The infinite unity of divine being expressly precedes any identity of reasoning and being and thereby precedes both the reasoning which is valid for being and the being which can be reasoned out. It cannot possibly be proved here whether this unity is by chance the source whence the ramified system of logical irrigation issues into the tillable world; though it cannot be entirely excluded either, it remains here a mere assumption. No gate is barred against reasoning in the world in which it is at home, but—“the prospect ‘cross the way is blocked to him.”
ARCHETYPAL WORD, SYMBOL
The logos of the world is only applicable, but it is everywhere and ever applicable, and as such alone universally valid. With this concept of the universal we have sighted a new side of the effectiveness of the original Yea. Yea, we recall, was the wording of the original statement, the statement by which the “then” was fixed and confirmed—once and for all. Universal validity, therefore, is already inherent in the original Yea. Taken by itself, a predicate such as the word “free” has a meaning of its own ever and everywhere, regardless of the connotation it acquires through its use in the individual case of a particular statement. The universal is not what took shape in application, but rather the purely applicable entity itself. The Yea established applicability, but it is not the law of application itself. In the affirmation in which the divine essence issued forth from the Nought of God, the infinity of the affirmed non-Nought showed itself as infinite being of the divine physis. The infinity of the affirmed non-Nought of the world, on the other hand, shows itself as infinite applicability of the worldly logos. This logos is utterly universal and yet everywhere attached to the world, tied up in it. If we want a formulaic designation for it, then we would have to let it appear as the result of an affirmation on the right side of the equation; because of its universality, which allows for no free space next to it, we could only designate it by A; the trait of applicability which we recognized as essential here implies an allusion to the need for application really to occur to it: this passively attracting force which emanates from it was expressed symbolically by putting the equal-sign in front. Thus we arrive at “=A.” This is the symbol of the world-spirit. For this would be the name which we would have to give the logos, poured as it is into the world, the so-called “natural” as well as the so-called “spiritual” world, and amalgamated as it is with the world at all points and all times. In using this name, of course, we would have to keep its Hegelian connotation, which lets the name lose itself in the deity, at a distance; it would be better to listen backward for the sound which the term, together with the related words “earth-spirit” and “world-soul,” conjures up in the beginnings of the romantic philosophy of nature, in the young Schelling or again, say, in Novalis.
World Plenitude
But the disconcerting fact about the world is, after all, that it is not spirit. There is still something else in it, something ever new, pressing, overwhelming. Its womb is insatiable in conceiving, inexhaustible in giving birth. Or better yet—for both the male and the female are in it—the world as “nature” is equally the endless creatress of configurations and the indefatigable procreative force of the “spirit” inherent in it. Stone and plant, state and art—incessantly all creation renews itself. This plenitude of visions is just as original as the dancing circle of ideas. There is no precondition for its sprouting forth anymore than for the arrangement of that dance. The sun is no less a wonder than the sunlike quality of the eye which espies it. Beyond both, beyond the plenitude as well as the arrangement, there is immediately the Nought, the Nought of the world.
But the emergence of plenitude from Nought is here again something different from the previous emergence of the world-logos. The world-mind left the night of Nought behind it, and trod with calm and infinite Yea toward the Non-nought, the bright reality of the world. The plenitude of visions, however, breaks the nocturnal prison of the Nought in the ever-renewed constriction of procreation and birth; everything new is a new negation of Nought, a never-before, a new start unto itself, something unheard of, something “new under the sun.” Here the force of the negation of Nought is infinite, but every individual effect of this force is finite; the fullness is infinite, the vision finite. The individual phenomena emerge from the night, baseless and aimless. Whence they are coming or whither going has not been inscribed on their foreheads: they simply exist. But in existing they are individual, each a one against all others, each distinguished from all others, “particular,” “not-otherwise.”
SYMBOL
Thus the intracosmic plenitude of distinctiveness confronts the intrasonic order of the universal. In the universal there reposed a need for fulfillment, an implication of application; nothing of the sort reposes in the distinctive. In fact no need whatever reposes in the distinctive, no direction, no force—not even against its own kind. Everything distinctive, it is true, distinctive with a view to everything other, but it does not experience this view; it is blind from birth, it is nothing but-existing. Its force is solely the blind dead weight of its existence. In our terminology its symbol is B, B pure and simple, the naked sign of individuality, without a sign indicative of equality.
Thus Nay here leads to a result just as characteristically at variance with previous results as did Yea. The warp of its “existence,” which God had found in his physis, the world found in its logos; the woof of the fabric which divine freedom wove for God is supplied for the world by the inexhaustible well of phenomena. The free act in God, the phenomenon in the world—both are equally sudden, equally unique, equally novel revelations from the night of the Nought of, in the one case, God; in the other, the world. Both spring from the relentless close-quarter wrestling of Nay and Nought. Every divine action, every earthly phenomenon is a new victory over Nought, as glorious as on the first day. But while in God a boundless clarity breaks forth from the night of Nought, it is the birth of the individual, something colorful but itself still blind, which bursts from the dark womb of the world’s Nought. This birth hurtles into the world, propelled by its own gravity, not by any urge. But the world is already there, just as God’s dormant physis was already in existence when the bright reveille of divine freedom burst in upon it. The world is there in the regal treasure of the vessels and implements of its logos, infinitely receptive, infinitely in need of “application.” And the contents ceaselessly hurtle into these vessels from the spouting source. Above Yea and Nay, the And closes itself.
The Reality of the World
The distinctive is without drive, without movement in itself. It hurtles forth, and there it is. It is not the “given”—a misleading designation which mirrors the error of all pre-metalogical philosophies about the world; it is not for nothing that their systems come to a dead stop again and again precisely with this problem. It is not the given; much rather the logical forms are, once and for all, “given” in the simple, infinite validity of their Yea. The particular, however, is surprise, not a given, but ever a new gift or, better still, a present, for in the present the thing presented disappears behind the gesture of presenting. And logical forms are not the spontaneous beasts—sponteque se movent—which break into the gardens of the given to find their nourishment there; rather they are the precious, age-old vessels that are ever ready to store the wine of new vintages in their interiors. They are the unmoved, “ever of yesterday,” “universally common” which for all that is still not the “wholly common,” as the infuriated rebel apparently would have it, though he correctly characterized it nonetheless as that “which ever was and ever more shall be, valid today and therefore on the morrow.” The phenomenon, on the other hand, is ever new: the miracle in the world of spirit.
The phenomenon had been the stumbling block of idealism, and thus of philosophy as a whole from Parmenides to Hegel. Idealism had been unable to comprehend phenomena as “spontaneous,” for that would have meant denying the omnipotence of the logos, and so it never did it justice. It had to falsify the bubbling plenitude into a dead chaos of givens. Basically, the unity of the intelligible All admitted of no other conception. The All as one-and-universal can be held together only by a reasoning which possesses active, spontaneous force. But if vitality is thereby ascribed to reasoning, it must willy-nilly be denied to life—life denied its liveliness! Nothing short of the metalogical view of the world can restore life to its rights. For here the All no longer figures as the one and universal All, but (only) as an All. Thus the logos can fulfill it as the truth inherent in it without first having to effect the unity. The intracosmic logos is itself a unity by virtue of its relationship, however fashioned, to an extracosmic unity, wherever at home. As such, it need no longer be burdened with an activity which is the very antithesis of its worldly essence, its diversity and its applicability. It effects the unity of the world only from within, as its internal form, so to speak, not its external form. This metalogical All already possesses an external form by its very nature, by virtue of being an All, not the All, intelligent, not intelligible, informed by spirit, not created by spirit. The logos is not creator of the world as it was from Parmenides to Hegel, but rather its spirit or, better yet perhaps, its soul. Thus the logos has again become a world-soul and can now give the miracle of the living world-body its due. The world-body need no longer repose as an undifferentiated, chaotically undulating mass of “given-ness,” ready to be seized and shaped by the logical forms; rather it becomes the living, ever renewed surge of the phenomenon, descending upon the quietly opened lap of the world-soul and uniting with it to form the world.
Let us pursue the path of this descent of the particular upon the universal more closely. The particular—let us recall the symbol “B”—is aimless; the universal—“A”—is itself passive, unmoved, but by craving application, a force of attraction emanates from it. Thus an attracting field of force forms about the universal, and the particular plunges into it under the compulsion of its own gravity. We may distinguish in particular two points of this movement, here much as before within God, by way of describing more or less the entire curve of the process. After a piece of pure plunging, aimlessly and unconsciously blind, the particular becomes in a sense conscious of its attracted movement toward the universal, and thereby its eyes are opened to its own nature. This is the first point; at this instant what was previously blindly particular becomes altogether conscious of its particularity, and that means conscious of its direction toward the universal, particular (without qualification). The particular which “knows” about the universal is no longer merely particular; rather, without ceasing to be essentially particular, it yet has already stepped forward to the very edge of the sphere of influence of the universal. This is the “individual,” the singular which bears the criteria of the universal on its body—not, however, of the universal in general, which after all has no distinguishing marks, but rather of its own universal nature, its species, its genus—and yet this individual is still essentially particular, though now precisely “individually” particular. Individuality is not somehow a higher degree of particularity, but rather a stop on the path from the purely particular to the universal. The other stop is situated at the point where the particular enters the decisive domination of the universal. Anything beyond this point would be purely universal and the particular would dissolve in it without a trace; but the point itself designates that instant in the movement where the particular can still be sensed through and despite the decisive victory of the universal. As the first point was occupied by the “individual” so this one is occupied by the “category” or whatever else one may wish to call this universal entity which is not universal pure and simple, but rather an individuated universal, a particular universality. For species and genus are concepts which are unconditional universalities only vis-à-vis their own particularity, and so are community, nation, and state if we may pass into the human sphere; for the rest, however, all these concepts are units which can very well unite among themselves into pluralities of categories, nations, states. Just so, for its part, the individuum too is an individuality pure and simple only vis-à-vis its category and for all that capable of representing a category—its category—only because it already represents a plurality vis-à-vis the naked, blind particular. This plurality consists of at least two stipulations: the criterion of the species and its own peculiarity.
Thus the structure of the world perfects itself in the individual and the species, more specifically in the movement which carries the individual into the open arms of the species. With God, too, essence and freedom were no more than conceptual extremes, and his vitality created itself in the inner confrontations of divine power and divine obligation, with the caprice of power confined by obligation, and the constraint of obligation loosened by power. Similarly the world takes shape, not immediately out of the distinctive’s plunge into the universal, but more nearly out of the individual’s penetration into the species. The real “and” of the world is not the “and” of the world-endowed-with-spirit and the spirit-inherent-in-the-world—these are extremes—but much more immediately of the thing and its concept, the individual and his genus, of man and his community.
There is one process which mirrors these two elements of the cosmic essence in the strongest, most graphic, most meaningful terms. The individual originates at birth; the genus, as the term itself already suggests, at progeniture. The act of engendering precedes birth, it occurs as an individual act without definite reference to birth as an individual birth, yet strictly related and directed to it in its universal essence. Birth, however, bursts forth in its individual result as a thoroughgoing miracle, with the overwhelming force of the unpredicted, the unpredictable. There has always been progeniture, yet every birth is something absolutely new. A consequence of truly “unspeakable,” unthinkable individuality plunges over the most individual of all human acts. The particularity of the newborn—his particularity, mark you, as part of the world, not his self—collects itself together entirely at the instant of birth. This is the profoundest meaning of astrological belief, which fails because and to the extent of its delusion of grasping man as self, when in fact it meets man only to the extent that he is individuality, that is, a distinctive portion of the world like every other extrahuman being or thing. Only for the demon of individuality is the astrological law really valid that “as on the day which gave you to the world the sun arose, a greeting to the planets.” Never, therefore, is man and every individual part of the world more of an individuality than at the instant when he precisely—individuates himself, when he makes his appearance as a part of the world himself refusing partition, when he “sees the light” of the world. Now this individuality of his is, however, attracted by the power of its species with somber might; it strives toward this focal point, always increasing its distance from the day of its birth, full as that was with all possibilities. Thus it constantly forfeits its possibilities, its—individuality. In the end it surrenders it as completely as it can at the instant of engendering. At its birth, the individual is completely individual; it is downright concrete, free of connection and relationship, untouched by the reality if not by the concept of its species, at progeniture it penetrates just as completely into its genus. As it runs its perpetual course, this circular process proves a graphic representation of the metalogical essence of the world compared to Idealism’s concept of generation.
SYMBOL
It is a circular process. We would have to symbolize it by B=A. The origins of the two terms of the equation have disappeared, but the equation itself is characteristically distinct from the one we have previously worked out. Whereas A=A, the formula for God, equated two equally original, equally infinite entities, the formula for the world asserts the equation of two unequals: the content of the world and its form. Initially, moreover, it asserts this identity explicitly as B=A, not by chance as A=B. That is to say, it asserts the passivity of form, the activity of content; to the concept it attributes a self-evident character, but the thing appears to it as a miracle. And thereby the world becomes self-contained for it, a whole exclusive of everything external, a vessel filled to saturation, a cosmos abounding in configurations. All basic relationships in the equation are such as lead from B to A, such, that is, as permit abundance, content, individuals to penetrate the order, the form, the categories. Any relationships running in the opposite direction are derivative, not original. Spirit can fashion a body for itself only because the body, amazingly enough, presses toward the spirit. The music of Apollo’s harp can construct only a wall out of stones because the stones themselves are individuals miraculously endowed with souls—“filled with gods.” This picture of the world is thus a decided counterpoise to the world of Idealism. For the latter, the world is not miraculous factuality, not, therefore, self-contained whole; it has to be all-encompassing universe. For it, the basic relationships must run from categories to individuals, from concepts to things, from form to content. The given matter must be present, chaotic, gray, self-evident, until the sun of spiritual form makes it sparkle colorfully with its rays, but the colors are only those of the light which radiates from this miraculous source of light. The chaotic gray matter itself produces no sparks. The formula of this world-view would not be B=A, but A=B, and so it really proves to be in the age of its completion. The A=B of Idealism contains within itself the possibility of its “derivation” from an A=A. Thereby the profound paradox of the equation of two unequals, which after all is asserted here too, is broken. The idea of emanation leads almost imperceptibly over the gap which here too, after all, still yawns similarly between the universal and the distinctive. And only B can “emanate” from A, not A from B. B can only be “existing,” not origin. Hence only the equation A=B can be the equation of Idealism; only it can really be derived from a formally nonparadoxical equation B=B, from which one would have to derive the equation B=A, would, it is true, be formally just as unquestionable, but materially it would be incapable of allowing anything to be derived from it, quite apart from the possibility of an equation B=B. But an immediate relationship, say, between A=A and B=A could not even be produced within the world. A paradoxical statement about B (to wit, B=A) does not become less paradoxical by virtue of a relationship to a nonparadoxical statement about A (to wit, A=A). On the other hand, a statement about A which is inherently paradoxical (to wit, A=B) diminishes perceptibly, if not precisely entirely, in its paradox by virtue of its relationship to a nonparadoxical statement about A (to wit, A=A). The fact is that here the unexplained residuum is nothing but the concept of the relationship, and this is a difficulty which applies equally to the possibility of a relationship between two equations as to that of a relationship within the individual equation. This difficulty, however, still lies entirely outside our purview, since we are still dealing solely with the individual equation; we have only had to allude to the path of Idealism by way of anticipation, only in order to elucidate the peculiarity of B=A vis-à-vis A=B, or the difference between the metalogical and the idealistic views of the world. The path of Idealism leads to A=B as an intracosmic path of emanation, of radiating forth, of idealistic generation. We will have much more to say about the significance of this intracosmic path later. Here we return to the simple equation B=A, or rather to its referent, the metalogical world.
The Plastic Cosmos
In contrast to the all-filling world of Idealism, the metalogical world is the wholly fulfilled, the structured world. It is the whole of its parts. These parts are not fulfilled by the whole, nor borne by it: the whole is simply not All, it is in fact only a whole. Accordingly many paths lead from the parts to the whole. Indeed, to be quite precise, every part—insofar as it is really a part, really individual—has its own path to the whole, its own trajectory. From the universe of the idealistic view, on the other hand, which fills all its members and bears every single one of them, only one single path leads to these members, to wit, precisely that path along which flows the current of the universe’s force. The reason for a phenomenon which we mentioned in the Introduction becomes clear here. The Idealistic systems of 1800 display throughout a trait which we would have to designate as one-dimensional, most clearly Hegel’s, but in outline also Fichte’s and Schelling’s. The individual is not derived immediately from the whole, but rather is developed through its position between the next highest and the next lowest in the system, as for example the “society” for Hegel in its position between the “family” and the “state.” The force of the system as a whole courses through all the individual configurations as a one and universal current. This corresponds exactly to the Idealistic view of the world; the almost professionally impersonal quality of philosophers from Parmenides to Hegel mentioned in the Introduction also finds its explanation here. The unity of the All is a concept which admits of no other possible point of view than that which just happens to “have its turn” in the history of philosophical problems. And accordingly Hegel had to make of the history of philosophy itself the systematic conclusion of philosophy because thereby the personal point of view of the individual philosopher, the last thing which still seemed able to contradict the unity of All, was rendered harmless.
Now the metalogical view also creates, likewise of necessity in connection with the new view of the world, a new concept and type of philosopher. Here too the way, and a way of his own at that, leads from the individual philosopher, as before, from each individual thing, as individual, to the whole. Indeed, the philosopher is bearer of the unity of the metalogical system of the world. After all, this system itself lacks the unity of the one-dimensional, it is multi-dimensional in principle; threads and relationships run from every individual point to every other, and to the whole. The unity of these countless relationships, its relative conclusion, is the unity of the philosopher’s point of view, personal, experienced, philosophized. It is only a relative conclusion, for though the idea of the cosmic whole must be strictly grasped in its metalogical peculiarity as a concept, nevertheless the individual system can never turn this idea into a reality except relatively. In the idealistic system, this relativity was conditioned by the status of the problem as it had been historically attained, as Hegel properly recognized. So too in the metalogical system it is conditioned by the subjective point of view of the philosopher. Even these remarks as yet do not exhaust the problem of the “philosopher,” but we must save its further clarification for later.
ANCIENT COSMOLOGY
Category, although the fundamental “given” everywhere, was therefore overwhelmed by the miracle of individuality. Thus overwhelmed, the world of the metalogical view, not all-filling but all-filled, could be designated as the structured world, structured but not created. Createdness would have implied more than we were entitled to assert at this point. The living God of metaphysical theology was by no means “the” living God but “a” living god; just so the structured world of metalogical cosmology is not yet created but only structured. As the living gods symbolized the highpoint of ancient theology, so this structured world symbolizes the height of ancient cosmology, not alone the cosmology of the macrocosm but also and above all the microcosm, that is, of the “natural” as well as of the “spiritual” world. The relation is not even quite so clear for the natural world, since the identity of Existence and Reasoning—the basic idea of Idealism—had already occured to antiquity. But this idea remained without cosmological implementation in antiquity; it remained meta-physical. Even the idea of emanations awaited the Neoplatonic school, which already developed in response precisely to new ideas, not to ancient ones. Within the world, however, Plato himself as well as Aristotle teach no emanatory relation, no active relation at all, between idea and phenomenon, between concept and thing, between category and individual or whatever terms may capture the contrast. Rather we have here the odd idea that things “imitate” the idea, that they “look out” for it, “yearn” for it, “develop” into or toward it, though it is “purpose” not cause. The idea reposes; the phenomenon moves toward it—exactly, it appears, the metalogical relation.
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
The difficulties of this conception, unsolved by the great thinkers of antiquity, are obvious. Some of them were articulated in Aristotle’s polemic against his master, but he too did not overcome them. For the Aristotelian polemic mobilized the idea of infinity against Plato’s doctrine of ideas: beyond concept and thing, it must in turn be possible to posit a concept of the relatability of the thing to the concept, and so on ad infinitum. But the metalogical view of the wholeness of the world of configuration is altogether defenseless against this concept of infinity: the Aristotelian cosmos is exactly as finite as the Platonic. The limit of the isolated metalogical idea simply comes into view at this point. Aristotle evades the problem with a breakneck leap into the metaphysical. For his divine “reasoning about reasoning” is reasoning only about reasoning. Expressly and on principle he rejects the possibility that it be thinking about the unthinkable as well. Divine reasoning can only think the “best,” only, therefore, itself. But this a-cosmic quality of his metaphysics unfits it precisely for what it was meant to achieve. It was meant to expound the “principle” of the world as a doctrine of the purposeful cause. But because of its purely metaphysical character, this metaphysics is the principle only of itself. And if one disregards this stipulation of Aristotelian metaphysics as self-consciousness and tries to see it only as that which it is meant to achieve, without asking whether it really achieves it, then it becomes, as purposeful cause, a purely intracosmic principle. One can then direct against its relation to that which is caused everything that Aristotle had built up against the relation of idea and thing. Regarded theologically, Aristotle’s metaphysics incurred the charge of a-cosmism; regarded cosmologically, that of atheism—a reproach in both cases, precisely because the claim is made of explaining the world. In the one case this is impossible because it disappears from the field of vision; in the other because it becomes a self-contained whole, a “here” whose prospect of the infinite, “the beyond” is barred. Thus even this great theologian of antiquity cannot free himself from the metalogical view of the macrocosm as a plastic configuration, outwardly limited, inwardly configured. The contradiction between reasoning’s infinite claim to universality and unity, on the one hand, and the finite, but infinitely abundant wholeness of the world, which he sought to resolve, survived him, because he was incapable of replacing the either-or of theology and cosmology with a both-and.
THE POLIS
Thus the metalogical view could not be maintained vis-à-vis the macrocosm without internal difficulties. For the microcosm, on the other hand, it seemed easy enough to realize it, albeit only seemingly. It would seem that ancient humanity solved the problem of the relation of the individual and category, both theoretically and practically, in a metalogical sense. People state, or whatever else the ancient communities may have been, are lions’ dens which the individual may see tracks leading into, but not out of. In a very real sense the community confronts man as a whole: he knows that he is but a part. He is but a part vis-à-vis these wholes, only a representative vis-à-vis these categories; they are absolute powers over his moral life, even though in themselves by no means absolute, themselves rather once more examples of the categories state and people in general. They are outwardly exclusive and inwardly unconditional and for just these reasons become those configured individual beings which, upon profound reflection, quite automatically evoked the comparison with a work of art. The secret of the ancient state is not organization. Organization is a thoroughly idealistic political formation. In the highly organized state, state and individual do not assume the relation of the whole to its part, but rather the state is the universe whence a uniform current of force flows through the members. Here everyone has his defined place and, by filling it, belongs to the universe of the state. Whatever the intermediate powers, classes or otherwise, that may occur in the modern organized state, they are at best and on principle no more than that; they mediate the relationship of the state and the individual, and define the place of the individual in the state; the state realizes itself in man, and generates him by means of his “class,” his “place.” The ancient caste is not an instrument of the state; rather it completely overshadows the state as a whole in the consciousness of the individual. For the individual, caste is the state itself wherever it exists. For the ancient state knows only the immediate relationship of citizen and state; the ancient state is simply the whole whose configuration absorbs its parts. The modern state, on the other hand, is the universe from which its members draw the force for their own configuration. It is for this reason that the medieval serf belonged to the state, and the ancient slave did not.
Thus the ancient individual loses himself in the community not in order to find himself but rather, quite simply, in order to construct the community; he himself disappears. The familiar distinctions between the ancient concepts of democracy and all more recent ones are fully justified. It also becomes clear now why antiquity never worked out the idea of representation. Organs can only belong to a body, while a building has nothing but parts. Indeed the idea of representation encounters very characteristic difficulties in ancient law. Every individual is only himself, only individual. Only in the cult is the idea of representation unavoidable, especially in sacrifice—both with regard to the sacrificer and the sacrificed person. Even here, however, this difficulty manifests itself, for we observe throughout the endeavor to provide the sacrificer with personal purity, and the sacrificed person with personal liability for death, whether for example as a criminal or at least as the object of a magically effective curse. Nothing could be further from ancient individualism than the idea that precisely someone personally impure is suitable for offering a sacrifice on behalf of all, or that one personally pure is suitable for suffering it, this idea of the absolutely communal surety for man-kind by all men—nothing, that is, except the idea of the common surety of mankind.
THE OECUMENE
For that is the final characteristic of the metalogical ethic of the ancient world: the whole made up of parts can itself never be more than part of a whole, can never be All. The community as his community is something ultimate for the individual, beyond which all is barred from his view. The thing too knows only its own concept. The categories themselves, as individuals in their turn, construct a higher category, but of this the individual at the lower level is not conscious; it can only be drummed into him each time by action, and even then it does not, as a matter of course, enter his consciousness. The ancient empires accomplish at most the political disintegration of their national components; a positive sense of world empire eludes them. The doctrine of the Stoa encompasses only the equality of the original human quality in all individual men, not any community of renewed humanity. On the other hand, wherever it seems to man that his own community is the power which generates him, wherever as an individual in it he knows himself to be a member of a universe, not just an individual of his category, there the community, too, is pressed to know itself a member of an All. For while the whole reposes in itself and has no drive to progress to higher wholes, totality will not rest until it has found rest in the All. As a result, there is more world-consciousness in the smallest cell of the idealistic organization, in a guild, for example, or in a village commune, than in that empire of the Emperor Augustus which was always precisely that: a self-contained whole, a world both pacified and appeased within itself, with no urge to carry its peace beyond its borders. What lay beyond, remained beyond; with clearest conscience the world of Augustus identified itself with the world as—oecumene.
Now antiquity itself rebelled against this metalogical view of communal life, whose limitations we have here demonstrated in juxtaposition to the idealistic view. It rebelled, not with an alternative doctrine of communal life, but simply from the point of view of the individual person, who is not ready to admit that he is only part of a whole. The Sophists’ revolution is so instructive precisely because it fails to go beyond this basic idea, profound and correct as it is in itself. It proclaims the free glory of man against all things and over all systems—and stops. It is incapable of explaining how this free nature of man is to prevail in all things and systems. It makes man the measure of things. But to the things it is a matter of complete indifference how they are measured or by whom or with what kind of scale; what impresses them is who moves them, not who measures them. And thus the Sophists’ revolution remains a tempest in a teapot. It is not true that it uprooted antiquity’s political consciousness. The polis remained what it was, indeed it became even more so, and the great centuries of Rome, the greatest polis, already transpire in the full light of the Sophists’ political critique, which could find little fault with it. The Sophists’ concept of man with its deficient activity is just as incapable of a new solution to the problems of the metalogical microcosm as the philosophical concept of God, with its inactivity, of a solution of the macrocosmic problem.
Asia: the Non-Plastic World
INDIA
The fact is that the metalogical view of the world retains something unsolved just as did the metaphysical view of God considered earlier. Yet for all that, “it is the Greeks,” in this case as in that, who drove the idea forward to the highest development possible for it in its isolation—once more they and not the legendary peoples of the Orient. Here too, the latter come to a halt in the forecourts of Yea and Nay, of dream and ecstasy, while the Greeks stepped forth to the And, to the plastic structure. And again India and China each developed one side of the elemental, prestructural existence in enforced self-discipline to the highest degree. Indian thought, mad with spirit, covered the fullness of the world with the veil of the Maya; in all things it allowed only the “self” to count and dissolved this self in turn in the solitude of the Brahmin. But long before this, in its first beginnings, Indian thought already deviates from the definiteness of the particular and seeks something universal supposedly standing behind it. In those old hymns which accompany sacrifice, it has been noted, the individual god easily assumed the traits of the supreme and unique god for the poet, forfeiting his own peculiar visage. Hymns which begin with entirely individual strains lose themselves in colorless generalities. Divine figures of purely allegoric origin insert themselves into the oldest, naturalistic clan of gods at an early date, as similarly later in Rome. But here in India this is only the symptom of an intellectual disintegration of the world as a whole. The problem of the origin of the world is solved by countless learned pseudo-myths, which exist side by side and each of which in reality develops a system of categories in the guise of a myth of origins. Water, wind, breath, fire, or whatever else they may be are not elements of any reality; rather they assume, at an early date, the countenance of basic, prescientific concepts for clarifying the world, a world, moreover, which is not accepted and experienced, but above all “clarified.” What the priest offers up is not real things but rather the essence of things; only because they are essence can they be equated with the essence of the world and thus extend an immediate effect into it. Thus everything is prepared for the world to become a system of concepts, a system of world, it is true, of reality, but without any of the independent right of the particular, which is ascribed only to “illusion.” And now the doctrine of Buddha reaches behind even this objective world of concepts, and designates the concepts of cognition as the essence of these essences; whatever was still concrete in this world, already sublimated into concepts, was dissolved in a succession of epistemological concepts. And as the cognitive and volitive I is suspended, the entire world generated by this cognition and volition, including its gods and its essence, is at last suspended into the Nought. The Nought? No, here too we prefer to avoid a term which yet contains a residuum of positivism, and to speak instead of a realm beyond cognition and noncognition. Again we have reached a point just short of the limit of the Nought and withal far to the rear of the infinite universality of cognition, which negates the Nought and thus infinitely affirms itself.
CHINA
Spiritual powers alone were recognized as the essence of the world in India, and even their suspension still had to occur spiritually. China, for its part, denied these same powers of concept with equal decisiveness. For China it is precisely the fullness of the world which alone counts as real. All spirit must be material, specific, in order to qualify for place and existence here. Spiritual powers retreat before earthly interests. The Confucian system, freest of metaphysics of all systems of national ethics, has shaped and colored the life of the people down to the present day. To the extent that it still plays a role, the spiritual has become a matter of spirits. The spirits become entirely individual individuals, endowed with their own names and distinctly tied to the name of the worshiper: the spirits of his ancestors. Sacrifice is intended for them; they are present, in the midst of the living, visible, indistinguishable from them. Unhesitatingly the fullness of the world is filled to overflowing with their fullness. The question of the whereabouts of the deceased and why the world is not filled to overflowing with them was at least one of the stumbling blocks which in India significantly enough led to the doctrine of the transformation of the person through alternating forms; this type of unity of concepts above the diversity of phenomena is totally strange to the original China. Here the throng of spirits multiplies without concern, each immortal for itself, new ones ever added to the old, each distinguished prosopographically from the other. In India the individual was deprived of his distinctiveness by a caste which enclosed him, if not as a community, yet as a superior universality. In China, on the other hand, the chain of ancestors constitutes the community into which the individual is immediately inserted. This insertion, so far from robbing him of his distinctiveness, on the contrary confirms him in his external distinctiveness as the final link in the chain which runs his way. And it is only a distinctiveness in the world of which he is part. In India, Buddhism reached even behind the universal concepts for comprehension itself, and attained redemption from the world in the suspension of comprehension.1 In China, however, Lao-tzu reached behind the all-too-visible, all-too-busy, all-too-industrious, all-too-regulated world of Confucius and, without denying its essential reality, seeks the root and source of all this headlong industry. All the fullness of action springs from this source of in-action. The immeasurable fullness of beings arises from this arch-base of the one. The secret of governing is enclosed in this: not to govern, not to prescribe and proscribe in busy calculation, but rather in being, like the root of things, oneself “without action and without inaction”; thus the world is supposed to take shape “by itself.” Buddha teaches his followers to suspend the world, already become concept, in comprehension and beyond that in the comprehension of comprehension and thus beyond comprehension; Lao-tzu, similarly, teaches his adherents to overcome the material fullness of occurrence by a deed-lessly tacit absorption in the nameless arch-base of noisy and denominated occurrence.
PRIMITIVE PHENOMENALISM
Here again: closest proximity to the Nought and yet not the Nought itself. Here again—and also in that outermost point gained by the Indian spirit. They are the two poles of the worldliness which cannot muster that courage for clarity of vision to which alone the configuration of things is revealed. For the world disappears when one turns one’s back on it as well as when one submerges in it; only with open eyes and head held high can one behold configuration. The cool void of escape from the world, the ardent depth of love for the world—one and the other alike make India and China heirs of primeval man who escapes into the illusory world because he lacks the courage for a real inspection of the world—India, the nation dreaming with closed eyes, and China, dreaming with eyes open. And again the Greeks, that nation of discoverers, guide our species to the path of clarity. For the configuration outlined with worldly clarity is after all destined to triumph over the “supramundanely grand, rich in configurations and devoid of them by turns.”
Esthetic First Principles: Inner Form
At one point, moreover, configuration already triumphed under the Greeks, and has prevailed since: in the work of art. The work of art, initially at least, does not, after all, experience those problems of transcendant interconnection which appeared to endanger the metalogical view of the world in the last analysis. Its interconnection is initially only within itself. The mythical had already demonstrated its force as the eternal law of the realm of the beautiful, independent within itself against everything external to it, as the law, therefore, of outer form. Just so the world as configuration provides the second fundamental law of all art: self-containedness, the thoroughgoing interconnection of every part with the whole, of every individual detail with every other. This interconnection cannot be reduced to a unity in any logical manner, and yet it is thoroughly uniform. In it each part is inserted into the whole without an intermediary, without the mediation of any other part. It is the law of inner form which has its basis, once and for all, here in the metalogical view of the world. True, the law of outer form, though it too is operative in a work of art, reaches further yet, by substantiating the realm of the beautiful, the “idea of the beautiful.” But the law of inner form is peculiarly the law of the work of art and of the individual thing of beauty altogether, of the beautiful configuration, of: Hellas.
The Slumber of the World
But it did not go beyond configuration, a world inwardly infinitely wealthy, a colorfully irradiated, overwhelming cascade which, ever renewed, ever renews its clarity and placidity in the still depths which gather it in, but a world outwardly weak and impoverished. Is there an Outward for it? Well, it must answer affirmatively. But it has to add that it knows nothing of this outside and, worse yet, wants no part of it. It cannot deny the outside, but it has no need of it. A God there may be, but as long as he remains outside and does not become a part of this world itself, just so long this existence of his is invisible to its macrocosm. Man there may be, but as long as he can only be a measure laid against this world from outside, and not a moving force within it, just so long its microcosm is deaf to his existence, this “being there.” And truly, it is entitled to remain blind and deaf as long as God does not strive and man does not speak. As yet the world may be satisfied to bear within itself its logos, its entire and adequate basis. As yet it may remain what it is, its own basis and base, inspired with its own spirit, resplendent with its own splendor; as yet it may be—metalogical.
1 In the original, there is a play on the words for reach behind, concept, and comprehension, all of which are derived from the root “to grasp.”