We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life. Of all the things that we here on earth are the witnesses, this is obviously the most absurd and meaningless, the most terrible, almost unnatural, thing—which forces us irresistibly to conclude either that there is something that is not right in the universe, or that the way in which we seek the truth and the demands that we place upon it are vitiated in their very roots.
Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes’ clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness). Now, reality here shows us only an eternal, impenetrable mystery—as if, even before the creation of the world, someone had once and for all forbidden man to attain that which is most necessary and most important to him. What we call the truth, what we obtain through thought, is found to be, in a certain sense, incommensurable not only with the external world into which we have been plunged since our birth but also with our own inner experience. We have sciences and even, if you please, Science, which grows and develops before our very eyes. We know many things and our knowledge is a “clear and distinct” knowledge. Science contemplates with legitimate pride its immense victories and has every right to expect that nothing will be able to stop its triumphant march. No one doubts, and no one can doubt, the enormous importance of the sciences. If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world. The clare et distincte has justified all the hopes which were founded upon it.
But the haze of the primordial mystery has not been dissipated. It has rather grown denser. Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his “premonitions.” The world would remain for him, “in the light” of our “positive” sciences, what it was—a dark and sorrowful subterranean region—and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, “as in a battle,” to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which “dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.”1 In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. And, conversely, our era would receive Aristotle with open arms but resolutely turn away from Plato.
But it will be asked: What is the force and power of the blessings and curses of men, even if these men be such giants as Plato and Aristotle? Does truth become more true because Aristotle blesses it, or does it become error because Plato curses it? Is it given men to judge the truths, to decide the fate of the truths? On the contrary, it is the truths which judge men and decide their fate and not men who rule over the truths. Men, the great as well as the small, are born and die, appear and disappear—but the truth remains. When no one had as yet begun to “think” or to “search,” the truths which later revealed themselves to men already existed. And when men will have finally disappeared from the face of the earth, or will have lost the faculty of thinking, the truths will not suffer therefrom. It is from this that Aristotle set out in his philosophical researches. He declared that Parmenides was “constrained to follow the phenomena.” In another place,2 speaking of the same Parmenides and of other great Greek philosophers, he wrote, they were “constrained by the truth itself.” This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides’ unknown slave and the least of Alexander’s stable-men.
Why does the truth have this power over Parmenides and Alexander, and not Parmenides and Alexander who have power over the truth? This is a question that Aristotle does not ask. If someone had asked it of him, he would not have understood it and would have explained that the question is meaningless and obviously absurd, that one can say such things but one cannot think them. And this is not because he was an insensible being who was indifferent to all and to whom everything was the same, or that he would have been able to say of himself, like Hamlet, “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter.” For Aristotle oppression is bitter. In another passage of the same Metaphysics he says that it is hard to bow down before Necessity: “everything which constrains is called necessary and that is why the necessary is bitter, as Evenus says: ‘every necessary thing is always painful and bitter.’ And constraint is a form of necessity—as Sophocles also says: ‘But an invincible force necessitates me to act thus.’”3 Aristotle, we see, feels pain and bitterness at ineluctable Necessity, but, as he himself adds immediately, he distinctly knows that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And since it does not listen to persuasion and is not to be overcome, one must submit to it—be this bitter or not, painful or not—submit and henceforth renounce useless struggle: anankê stênai, “cry halt before Necessity.”
Whence comes this “cry halt before Necessity”? Here is a question of capital importance which contains, if you wish, the alpha and omega of philosophy. Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, it does not even listen. The injustice cries to heaven, if there is no longer anyone here to whom one can cry. It is true that in certain cases and even very often, almost always, the injustice will cry and protest only to end up by becoming silent; men forget both their sorrows and their cruel losses. But there are injustices that one cannot forget. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . . let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”4 For two thousand years we have all repeated the Psalmist’s oath. But did the Psalmist not “know” that Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, that it does not listen to oaths or prayers, that it hears nothing and fears nothing? Did he not know that his voice was and could be only the voice of one crying in the wilderness? Of course he knew it, he knew it quite as well as Aristotle. But, doubtless he had something more than this knowledge. Doubtless when a man feels the injustice as deeply as did the Psalmist, his thought undergoes, in a way that is completely unexpected, incomprehensible and mysterious transformations in its very essence. He cannot forget Jerusalem, but he forgets the power of Necessity, the omnipotence of this enemy so terribly armed—one does not know by whom or when or why; and, without thinking of the future, he begins a terrible and final, battle against this enemy. This is surely the meaning of Plotinus’ words: “A great and final battle awaits human souls.” And these words of Plato have the same meaning: “If it is necessary to dare everything, should we not dare to defy all shame?”5 Man decides to take up the struggle against all-powerful Necessity only when there awakens in him the readiness to dare everything, to stop before nothing. Nothing can justify this boundless audacity; it is the extreme expression of shamelessness. One has only to look at Aristotle’s Ethics to be convinced of this. All the virtues are placed by him in the middle zone of being, and everything which passes beyond the limits of “the mean” is an indication of depravity and vice. “Cry halt before Necessity” rules his Ethics as well as his Metaphysics. His final word is the blessing of Necessity and the glorification of the spirit which has submitted to Necessity.
Not only the good but the truth as well wishes man to bow down before it. All who have read the famous Twelfth Book, especially the last chapter, of the Metaphysics and the Ninth and Tenth Books of the Ethics know with what fervor Aristotle supplicated Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded and which he had not the power to overcome. What irritated him or, perhaps, disturbed him most in Plato was the latter’s courage or rather, to use his own expressions, Plato’s audacity and shamelessness, which suggested to him that those who adore Necessity only dream of reality but are powerless to see it in the waking state. Plato’s words seemed to Aristotle unnatural, fantastic, deliberately provoking. But how to silence Plato, how to constrain him not only to submit to Necessity in the visible and empirical world but also to render to it in thought the honors to which, Aristotle was convinced, it is entitled? Necessity is Necessity, not for those who sleep but for those who are awake. And the waking who see Necessity see real being, while Plato, with his audacity and shamelessness, turns us away from real being and leads us into the domain of the fantastic, the unreal, the illusory, and—by that very fact—the false. One must stop at nothing in order finally to extinguish in man that thirst for freedom which found expression in Plato’s work. “Necessity” is invincible. The truth is, in its essence and by its very nature, a truth that constrains; and it is in submission to the constraining truth that the source of all human virtues lies. “Constrained by the truth itself,” Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras accomplished their work. It has always been so, it will always be so, it must be so. It is not the great Parmenides who rules over the truth but the truth that is the master of Parmenides. And to refuse obedience to the truth that constrains is impossible. Still more: to do other than bless it, whatever be the thing to which it constrains, is impossible. Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.
II
Let us stop and ask ourselves: why does the truth that constrains need men’s blessing? Why does Aristotle put himself to so much trouble to obtain for his Necessity men’s blessing? Can it not get along without this blessing? If Necessity does not listen to reason, is it more receptive to praises? There is no doubt that constraining Necessity listens no more to praises than to prayers or curses. The stones of the desert have never replied “Amen” to the inspired sermons of the saints. But this is not necessary. What is necessary is that to the silence of the stones—is not Necessity, like the stones, indifferent to everything?—the saints should sing hosannas.
I would recall in this connection the chapters already mentioned of the Metaphysics and Ethics of Aristotle, the high priest of the visible and the invisible church of “thinking” men. We are asked not only to submit to Necessity but to adore it: such always has been, and such is still, the fundamental task of philosophy. It is not enough that philosophy should recognize the force and power, in fact, of such or such an order of things. It knows and it fears (the beginning of all knowledge is fear) that empirical force, that is, the force that manifests itself in constraining man only once, may be replaced by another force that will act in a different way. Even the scientist, who refuses to philosophize, has, finally, no need of facts; the facts by themselves give us nothing and tell us nothing. There has never been a genuine empiricism among men of science, as there has never been a genuine materialism. What scientist would study facts merely for the sake of facts? Who would wish to observe this drop of water suspended from a telegraphic wire, or this other drop that glides over the window-pane after a rain? There are millions of such drops and these, in and of themselves, have never concerned the scientists and could not concern them. The scientist wishes to know what a water-drop in general is or what water in general is. If, in his laboratory, he decomposes into its constituent elements some water drawn from a brook, it is not in order to study and know what he has at this moment in his hands and under his eyes but in order to acquire the right to make judgments about all the water that he will ever have occasion to see or never will see, about that which no one has ever seen and no one ever will see, about even that which existed when there was not a single conscious being or even any living being on earth. The man of science, whether he knows it or not (most often, obviously, he does know it), whether he wishes it or not (ordinarily he does not wish it), cannot help but be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. He is distinguished from the philosopher only by the fact that the philosopher must, in addition, explain and justify the realism practiced by science. In a general way, since empiricism is only an unsuccessful attempt at philosophical justification of the scientific, i.e., realistic, methods of seeking the truth, its work has, in fact, always led to the destruction of the principles on which it was based. It is necessary to choose: if you wish to be an empiricist, you must abandon the hope of founding scientific knowledge on a solid and certain basis; if you wish to have a solidly established science, you must place it under the protection of the idea of Necessity and, in addition, recognize this idea as primordial, original, having no beginning and consequently no end—that is to say, you must endow it with the superiorities and qualities that men generally accord to the Supreme Being. As we have seen, that is what was done by Aristotle, who thus deserves to be the consecrated pope or high priest of all men who think scientifically.
Doubtless Kant did not exaggerate Hume’s merits when he wrote in his Prolegomena that since the beginning of philosophy no one had ever discovered a truth equal in importance to that which Hume discovered. As if scales had suddenly dropped from his eyes, Hume saw that the “necessary” bonds established by men between phenomena are only relationships of fact, that there is no “necessity” in the world, and that those who speak of necessity only “dream of being” but cannot see it in waking reality. Hume was too balanced a man—and one, moreover, who valued his equilibrium more than anything else in the world—to be able to appreciate and utilize the great discovery that he had made. One may, if one wishes, say as much of all those men whose eyes have been opened and who have been permitted to see extraordinary things; the sun of truth blinds the inhabitants of the kingdom of darkness with its brilliance. Hume ended up by restoring to Necessity almost all its sovereign rights; but Kant, not being able to bear the “almost” that no one had noticed, accomplished his Copernican task and directed our thought anew into that “sure and royal way” which mathematics had followed for centuries.
Hume’s sudden discovery had awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. But is it given to men to be awake on earth? And is “nature that does not sleep,”6 to use Plotinus’ term, man’s natural state? On the other hand, does not “to dream in sleep or while awake mean to take that which resembles (reality) not for something that resembles (reality) but for the reality that it resembles?”7 Necessity resembles what really exists like two drops of water resemble each other, but it is not what really exists; it only seems really to exist for him who dreams. Hume’s barely perceptible “almost” would have been able to render immense services to thinking and searching humanity if it had been preserved under the form in which it first appeared to the Scottish philosopher. But Hume himself was afraid of what he had seen and hastened to throw away everything that had fallen to his hand so as to have it no longer under his eyes. As for Kant, he found that this was still not enough and he transferred Hume’s “almost” outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori into the transcendental and noumenal—i.e., completely inaccessible, without relationship to us and without usefulness for us—world of things in themselves (Ding an sich). The shock that he had received from Hume awakened the great philosopher of Königsberg from his sleep. But Kant understood his mission and destiny to mean that he must at all costs defend himself and others against the eventuality of sudden and brutal shocks that interrupt the peace of our somnolent waking, and he proceeded to create his “critical philosophy.” At the same time as Hume’s “almost,” all metaphysics was transferred outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori which, since Kant, have inherited all the rights of the old Necessity and have, for a century and a half, guaranteed to European humanity undisturbed sleep and faith in itself.
It is obvious that for Aristotle the most intolerable and distressing of thoughts was that our earthly life is not the last, definitive, truly real life and that an awakening, be it only in a certain measure, is possible—an awakening similar to that which we know in coming out of sleep. When he attacked Plato’s “ideas” he was trying above all to rid himself of this eventuality which was, to him, worse than a nightmare. And his distress was, in a certain sense, completely justified, as was Kant’s distress when Hume, with his “almost,” so brutally awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Plato’s “they dream,” quite like Hume’s denial of any necessary bonds between phenomena, undermines the very foundations of human thought. Nothing is impossible. Anything that one wishes can flow from anything that one wishes and the principle of contradiction, which Aristotle wished to consider as “the most unshakable of principles,” begins to totter, discovering to the frightened human mind the kingdom of the absolutely arbitrary which threatens to destroy the world and the thought which seeks to know the world; einai kai noein (being and thought) become phantoms. How could Plato have permitted himself to speak of his cave? How could he have imagined it? How could Hume have dared to deny the rights of Necessity? And does not humanity owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Aristotle and to Kant, to the first for having put an end, by his severe criticism and indignant cries, to the fantastic tendencies of his teacher, and to the second for having led our thought back into its natural groove by his doctrine of synthetic judgments a priori?
There cannot be two answers to these questions. Aristotle is the founder not only of the positive sciences but also of the positive philosophy. It is not for nothing that the Middle Ages saw in him the only guide through the labyrinth of life and did not dare to open the books, written without him (and perhaps also not for him), of the Old and New Testaments. The new philosophy has always followed, and still continues to follow, the paths that he marked out. One can say the same thing of Kant: he subdued the disquieting spirit of doubt and “forced it to bow its rebellious head before the angelic visage of the universal and the necessary.
Necessity has obtained its justification—a justification of which it had no need at all. The celebrities of science, like all the ordinary scientists, glorify Necessity, even though it be as indifferent to blame as to praise. Only the wicked or the foolish can doubt its sovereign rights. But has this human defense rendered it stronger and more vigorous? Or should we not, perhaps, put the question differently: does not its force come from the fact that men have taken it under their protection and have surrounded it with an insurmountable wall made of formulas of incantation forged through the centuries?
III
Although Seneca may not have been an original philosopher, he succeeded quite well at times, as is known, in expressing the thought of others. Everything discussed in our preceding chapters was formulated by him in a few words that have become famous: Ipse omnium conditor et rector . . . semper paret, semel jussit (The founder and guide of all things . . . always obeys, but has commanded only once). So thought Seneca, so thought the ancients, so all of us think. God commanded only once and, thereafter, He and all men after Him no longer command but obey. He commanded a long time ago, an infinitely long time ago, so that He Himself has forgotten when and under what circumstances there occurred this absurd, unique of its kind, and consequently unnatural, event. Perhaps, having taken on this habit of passive and submissive existence, God has even forgotten how to command; perhaps, like us ordinary mortals, He can only obey. In other words, the will to act that He once manifested forever exhausted His creative energy, and now He is condemned, like the world that He created, to fulfill His own prescriptions, prescriptions that He Himself can no longer violate. To put it still differently, the Creator of the world has Himself become subordinate to Necessity which He created and which, without at all seeking or desiring it, has become the sovereign of the universe.
I repeat: Seneca’s formula belongs unquestionably to him, but the thought that he expresses is not his own. So thought and so continue to think all the learned men of all countries. Why do they think so? Were they witnesses of the world’s creation, or did the Creator reveal his secret to any of them? No one was present at the creation of the world, no one can any longer boast of any special intimacy with the Creator. The thought expressed by Seneca allured men because the mysterious and inconceivable moment of command (jubere) as pushed back into the eternity of the past and declared unique (semel jussit), while for ordinary usage men chose obedience, the parere, which seems to be the comprehensible, natural, and normal fate not only of the creature but also of the Creator Himself. And, indeed, Seneca was right: in the parere everything is comprehensible, clear to all, and—consequently—natural, while in the jubere everything is mysterious, arbitrary and—consequently—fantastic, eternally inconceivable and puzzling.
Had it been possible, Seneca and those from whom Seneca learned to “think” would have preferred not to remember the mysterious jubere at all. No one has ever commanded anything, all have always done nothing but obey; for there has never been anything supernatural or mysterious, either in the remotest times or in our own day. Everything has always been dear and natural. And the task of philosophy is then to strengthen and sustain Necessity by all the means at its disposal. But what are these means? It is not given mortals to change anything whatsoever of the nature of Necessity, to enhance or strengthen it in its own being. There remains, then, only one thing to do: to convince men by reasoning or by incantations that, on the one hand, Necessity is omnipotent and to fight it serves no purpose; on the other hand, that Necessity is of divine origin (that is why the semel jussit is preserved) and that it is impious and immoral to refuse it obedience. This same Seneca is inexhaustible in his praise of God who has forgotten how to command and of men who manifest a boundless submission. “I do not obey God, I agree with Him; I follow Him with all my soul, but not because it is necessary.” Or again, in the famous translation of the words of the Stoic Cleanthes which Cicero so admired: “the fates lead the willing, but the unwilling they drag.” One could cite hundreds of pages from Seneca or Cicero filled with reflections of this kind.
It will be said that Seneca, as well as Cleanthes on whom Seneca relied, expresses the ideas of the Stoic school, and that we have no right, in speaking of Aristotle, to refer to the Stoics whose narrowness of mind was already well known to the ancients. But I believe that Dilthey was right when he frankly admitted that the modern age received the philosophy of antiquity through Cicero and Seneca, and that it is with their eyes that we see the ancients. It is even more exact to say that the narrow philosophy of the Stoics and the overly simple logic of the Cynics at times reveal to us the essence of ancient thought (and of our own) better than the works of Plato and Aristotle. The Stoics are regarded with scornful condescension, but it cannot even be imagined what would have become of European thought if the ideas sown in the world by the Stoics had not produced so abundant a harvest. The Stoics at times were only too frank. Now, many ideas are admitted only if they agree not to show their true face and, when necessary, to deny it. Ham, who turned around to look at his father’s nakedness, has been nailed to the pillory by history. But how many have turned around without anyone thinking of blaming them? To turn around, to reflect, besinnen, is considered one of the most honorable of things; Hegel’s entire philosophy reduces itself finally to a looking around. It will be said that the “nakedness of the father” did not interest Hegel. I would answer that he looked at nakednesses that are even more criminal to contemplate than one’s father’s. But Hegel knew what one can say and what must be passed over in silence. This knowledge was foreign to the Stoics, and even more so to the Cynics. The Cynics’ whole error derives from the fact that they had an absolute confidence in reflective human reason. Other men, almost all, especially the philosophers, have committed the same mistake. Who does not trust reason? But others knew how to keep to themselves the greatest part of what they had received in payment for their absolute confidence in reason, and they are praised as sages while the Cynics are called “dogs.” Noah’s third son, the Cynics and, to some extent, the Stoics are not reproached for turning around and looking at the completely “naked” truth; this is permitted and even encouraged. What is not forgiven them is only their calling things by their right names, their saying that they are looking around when they are looking around and that nakedness is nakedness. Blessed are those who look around and are silent, blessed are those who see but hide what they see. Why is this so? No one can answer. It seems that every man, like Socrates, has at his side a demon who, in decisive moments, demands of him judgments and acts whose meaning remains incomprehensible to him and forever hidden. But if such a demon exists in nature and if even the most courageous of men dare not disobey him, how can one not ask whence, from what worlds, this mysterious being has come to us? But no one greatly desires to ask this. People know that there is someone (or perhaps even something: it is not known in advance how the demon should be spoken of, whether as a thing or as a being) that has received or has arrogated the right to present to men completely unmotivated demands, and they are satisfied with that. The demon prescribes, men obey. And all are happy that a power should finally be found which binds and decides, which delivers us from freedom of the will, and that one can, one should, one must stop—“cry halt before Necessity.”
Again it will be said that I have exceeded the limits, that I began by speaking in the name of “all” and ended with the words of a famous philosopher. For the phrase, “cry halt before Necessity,” that I have just quoted belongs to Aristotle. But the average person is not so far removed from the philosopher. Somewhere, at the beginning or at the end, in the depths or at the surface, the average man and the philosopher meet. Seneca, who proclaimed his paret semper, jussit semel as the last word of the philosophers’ wisdom, was only paraphrasing Aristotle. Quite like the average man, Aristotle wishes to know nothing of commanding (jubere); he needs only to obey (parere) in order to accomplish, in obeying, what he believes, what all men believe, to be the destiny of man. It does not matter to him at all whence the commandment comes—all the more so since, as Seneca has frankly admitted to us, the sources of jubere are now forever dried up. No one in the world will ever again command, all will forever obey—the great and the small, the righteous and the sinners, men and gods. “Truth” does not make any distinctions; it constrains all alike, the great Parmenides as well as the humblest day laborer.
“Parmenides is constrained” and the day laborer is constrained. The gods themselves are in the power of Necessity: “Not even the gods fight against Necessity.”8 It is impossible to investigate whence Necessity derives this power of constraining all living beings. One cannot even ask what the nature of this Necessity is and why it must constrain living beings. Not only will it not reply, but it will not even hear the questions that are addressed to it. And still less is it capable of allowing itself to be persuaded or convinced. Aristotle himself, like no one else, knew how to look around and investigate what was before him and behind him; he tells us that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”
Whatever field of philosophical thought we approach, we always run up against this blind, deaf and dumb Necessity. And we are convinced that philosophy begins only where the kingdom of strict Necessity discloses itself. Our thought, in the final analysis, is only the search for this strict Necessity. And still more, it is not for nothing that Parmenides affirmed “being and thought are one and the same.” To think is necessarily to take cognizance of the necessity of everything that forms the content of being. Whence comes Necessity? Does it come from being and end in thought? Or does it come from thought and end in being? We do not know. We do not even raise this question, knowing—doubtless instinctively—that such questions not only would not reconcile the theory of Knowledge which is concerned with “thought” (noein) with the ontology which is concerned with “being” (einai) but would forever separate them and set them at enmity with each other. No one wishes to take upon himself the responsibility for the results to which so ancient and universally recognized an idea as that of Necessity may lead. Thought would have preferred to consider Necessity a creation of being, that being, which by its very nature is more turbulent, might easily repudiate Necessity and declare it to be the child of pure thought. Being, despite what Parmenides says, is not the same as thought. But, on the other hand, being, at least within the bounds of philosophical systems, has not been able to find any adequate expression outside of thought. Even though it is not always submissive to Necessity, its attempts at struggle do not reach the domain of philosophy. We have said that philosophy has always meant and wished to mean reflection, Besinnung, looking backward. Now it is necessary to add that “looking backward,” by its very nature, excludes the possibility and even the thought of struggle. “Looking backward” paralyses man. He who turns around, who looks backward, must see what already exists, that is to say, the head of Medusa; and he who sees Medusa’s head is inevitably petrified, as the ancients already knew. And his thought, a petrified thought, will naturally correspond to his petrified being. Spinoza was in error when he said that if the stone were endowed with consciousness it would imagine that it falls to the ground freely. If someone had endowed the stone with consciousness, at the same time preserving for it its nature as a stone (this is obviously possible—the authority of the sober-headed Spinoza is sufficient guarantee for it), it would not for a single moment have doubted that Necessity is the primordial principle upon which all being in its totality—not only the real, but also the possible—is based. Is not the idea of Necessity the most adequate expression of petrification? And would not the thought and being of a stone endowed with consciousness be completely exhausted by the content that we find in the idea of Necessity?
But let us go further. Philosophy—we have seen—was, is, and wishes to be, a looking backward. To look backward does not at all mean, and we know this well, merely to turn the head. When Noah’s third son turned around he drew upon himself universal scorn. When the Cynics turned around they became dogs. But even worse things happen: one who turns around sees the head of Medusa and is changed into a stone. I know that the philosophers do not believe much in the possibility of such miraculous transformations and do not like to have them spoken of. But this is why I have reminded myself of Socrates’ demon. If Socrates had prejudices, if Socrates was superstitious, if Socrates sought protection against the light of his reason in the fantastic, if Socrates fled the clear and distinct world of ideas that he had himself created in order to take refuge with his demon—have we not the right, are we not obliged, even if it be only once in our life and only for a moment, to doubt, not our existence (there is no need for us to doubt this, any more than there was for Descartes), but that our thought, which we have become accustomed to consider as the only possible thought, leads us precisely to the sources of the final truths? Should we not tell ourselves that to think means not to look backward, as we habitually believe, but to look forward? And that we may even not look at all but proceed venturously forward with eyes closed, without foreseeing anything, without asking anything, without being disturbed by anything, without being concerned with adapting ourselves to the laws, great and small, the observance of which has always appeared to men as the condition of the possibility of seeing truths and the realities which these truths uncover? In general, must we forget fear, apprehension, anxiety?
It will be said that this is not given to man. But, then, let us recall once more the divine Plato, the great pupil of a great teacher, and his lesson: “everything must be dared.” We must try to stand up against Necessity itself, try to free the living and feeling Parmenides from dead and altogether indifferent power. To Necessity all things are indifferent, but to Parmenides all things are not indifferent. On the contrary, it is infinitely important to him that certain things should be and that certain other things should not be—for example, that the hemlock should be dependent on Socrates and not Socrates on the hemlock. Or rather, to make the matter still clearer, let us say this: in the year 399 B.C. the aged Socrates, condemned to death by his fellow citizens, took from the jailer’s hands the cup of hemlock and in that very moment, by Socrates’ will, the hemlock became a healthful drink. And this is not imagination or fantasy but reality, that which actually was. Imagination and fantasy, rather, are all that is related of Socrates’ death in the history manuals. And similarly, what Aristotle teaches us, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded,” is also only an invention. Necessity does listen and does allow itself to be persuaded, and it cannot oppose itself to Socrates; it cannot in general oppose itself to any man who has discovered the secret of its power and has enough audacity to command it without turning backward, to speak to it as “one who has power.”
Aristotle would certainly have paid no attention to thoughts of this kind. And Seneca and Cleanthes would have completely ignored them as being of no concern to themselves. But Epictetus, perhaps because he was more sensitive or perhaps because he was less well-bred, would have been enraged by them. Is this not an attempt to escape the principle of contradiction? In his eyes, as in Aristotle’s, this was clearly a mortal sin, and he considered that he had the right in this instance to give free reign to his anger. “I should have wished,” he said, “to be the slave of a man who does not admit the principle of contradiction. He would have told me to serve him wine; I would have given him vinegar or something still worse. He would have become angry and complained that I did not give him what he asked. But I would have answered, ‘You do not recognize the principle of contradiction; hence, wine, vinegar or any loathsome thing are all the same. And you do not recognize Necessity; therefore, no one has the power to compel you to regard the vinegar as something bad and the wine as something good. Drink the vinegar as if it were wine and be content!’ Or again, the master orders me to shave him, and I cut off his nose or his ear with the razor. He would again cry out, but I would repeat to him my argument. And I would do everything in the same way until I forced my master to recognize the truth that Necessity is invincible and the principle of contradiction omnipotent.”
We see that Epictetus repeats what Aristotle said or, more precisely, gives a commentary of Aristotle’s words. And, as almost always happens with the Stoics, Epictetus, in commenting, discovers what in Aristotle had been intentionally left in the dark, and so betrays the secret of the philosophical foundation of the Aristotelian truths. The principle of contradiction, as well as Necessity and the truth itself, with a capital letter or a small letter, are supported only by threats: one cuts off your ears or your nose, one pierces your eyes, etc. . . . Before such constraint all living beings—men and devils and angels, and even the gods—find themselves equal. Epictetus speaks of an imaginary master, but he would say the same thing of Heraclitus, of Parmenides, of Socrates and of God Himself.
IV
“Parmenides constrained, Socrates constrained”: it seems to Aristotle—no, it does not seem to him, it is obvious to him (and he is convinced that the whole world considers it obvious along with him)—that the truth has the power to constrain the great Parmenides, the great Socrates, anyone whomsoever. And (this is the most important thing) it is also obvious to him that it is completely absurd to ask who endowed the truth with this extraordinary power, and still more absurd to fight against this power. Whence came this conviction to him? From experience? But experience—Aristotle knew from Plato—is never the source of eternal truths. Experiential truths are just as limited and contingent as experience itself. “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded”—the source of this truth is not experience but something else.
Even the most ordinary experiential truth, even what is called the establishment of a fact, does not wish to be a relative and limited truth; the truths of fact claim, and indeed successfully, the title and dignity of eternal truths. I have given examples of this. In the year 399 B.C. Socrates was poisoned at Athens. This is a truth of experience, the establishment of a fact. But it does not wish to remain in this state. “That Socrates drank a cup of poison is, it is true, something that in reality happened once; but the historical truth that this was so will remain for all time, independently of the fact whether it is forgotten or not”—this is what we read in a book by a very prominent modern philosopher. No one will ever again have the right to say, “No, it was not so. It did not happen. Socrates was not poisoned.” Whether it be a question of the poisoning of Socrates or the poisoning of a mad dog is of no importance. The eternal truth, just like the necessity of which it was born, does not listen and does not allow itself to be persuaded. And, just as it does not hear or listen to anything, it does not make any distinctions: that Socrates should have been poisoned or that a mad dog should have been poisoned is absolutely indifferent to it. It automatically affixes the seal of eternity on both events and thus forever paralyses the seeker’s will. Once Necessity has intervened, man no longer dares to doubt, to be indignant, to contradict, to struggle and say, for example, “Yet it is not a dog but Socrates, the best and the wisest of men, a saint, who has been poisoned!”
Even if one agrees to recognize the proposition “a dog has been poisoned” as a truth which, though it establishes something that happened only once, is nevertheless an eternal truth, one cannot willingly resolve to fix the seal of eternity on the proposition “Socrates has been poisoned.” It is already quite enough that this truth should have subsisted for a long period of history. It has lived in the world all too long—almost twenty-five hundred years. But to promise it immortality, an existence outside of time that no forgetfulness will ever be able to destroy—who has taken upon himself the right to give such promises? And why does philosophy, which knows that everything that has a beginning must also have an end, forget this “eternal truth” and grant everlasting existence to a truth which did not exist before the year 399 B.C., which was born in 399 B.C.? Aristotle did not ask himself such questions. For him the truth was more precious than Plato, more precious than Socrates, more precious than everything in the world. Plato and Socrates, having had a beginning, must therefore have an end, while the truth which had a beginning, quite like the truth which had no beginning, will never have an end. And, if you should try to argue with Aristotle or to persuade him, it would be in vain; he would not hear, as Necessity does not hear. Even Aristotle is ti “something” (not tis, “someone,” but ti, “something”) that “does not hear”; he can but will not, or perhaps he cannot and will not, listen to any argument. He has lived so long in the company of “the truths” that he has assimilated their nature; he has himself become like a truth and sees the essence of his being, of all being, in “constraining and being constrained.” And if anyone should refuse obedience to him he would—as the honest Epictetus has told us—cut off his ears or his nose. He would force him to drink vinegar, and if all this were not enough, he would present him the cup of hemlock which, as we know, finally and once and for all (an eternal truth!) finished Socrates himself. Whatever one might say to him, Aristotle would not renounce his statement, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And he does not rely, I repeat once more, on experience; experience does not give us eternal truths, it gives us only empirical, provisional, temporary truths. The source of his truths is something quite other.
In 399 B.C. the Athenians poisoned Socrates, and Plato his disciple, “constrained by the truth itself,” could not do other than think that Socrates had been poisoned. He speaks of Socrates’ death in the Crito, in the Phaedo and in his other dialogues. But in everything that he writes, there is always apparent this question: is there really in the world a power to which it is given to constrain us finally and forever to admit that Socrates was poisoned in 399? For Aristotle such a question, which in his eyes was obviously absurd, did not exist. He was convinced that the truth “Socrates was poisoned,” quite like the truth “a dog was poisoned,” is beyond all divine or human objections. The hemlock makes no distinction between Socrates and a dog. And we, “constrained to follow the phenomena, constrained by the truth itself,” are obliged in our judgments, whether mediate or immediate, to make no distinction between Socrates and a dog, even between Socrates and a mad dog.
Plato knew this no less than Aristotle. He also, let us recall, wrote: “Not even the gods fight against Necessity.” Nevertheless he himself did struggle against Necessity all his life. From this derives the dualism for which he has always been reproached; from this come his contradictions and paradoxes which so infuriated Aristotle. Plato was not content with the sources of truth that satisfied the curiosity of his great pupil. He knew that it is difficult to find “the Father and Creator of all the universe” and that “if one finds Him, one cannot show Him to everyone.” Nevertheless, he strained all his powers in an attempt to overcome these difficulties as well as this impossibility.
It seems at times that it is only difficulties that attract Plato, that his philosophical genius deploys its full activity only before the impossible. “It is necessary to dare everything,” and it is all the more necessary to dare when there are fewer chances, in the eyes of the average man, of obtaining anything. There is no hope of wresting Socrates from the power of the eternal truth, which is as indifferent to Socrates as to a mad dog and which has swallowed him up forever. Therefore, philosophy and the philosophers must think of nothing other than to deliver Socrates. If one cannot do this otherwise, he must go down to the netherworld, as Orpheus did. He must implore the gods, as Pygmalion once did, whom the inert Necessity which directs the natural course of things would not hear. Pygmalion’s desire to animate the statue that he had made—was this not and is it not still, for logical thought, the height of madness and immorality? But before the tribunal of the gods, who, unlike Necessity, know how and are willing to allow themselves to be persuaded, the impossible and the senseless become possible and sensible. God thinks and speaks quite otherwise than Necessity. “Everything that is bound,” says God in the works of Plato, “may be dissolved; but only the wicked can wish to dissolve that which is well bound and holds together as it should. This is why, in general, you who were created are not protected against dissolution and are not immortal; but you will not be dissolved and you will not experience the fate of mortality because, by my will, you will receive a more lasting strength than that which you had at your birth.”9
Not only Aristotle but no one, not even the most ardent admirers of the Platonic truth, can read these words without irritation or resentment. What is this “my will” which arrogates to itself the right and power to change the natural course of things? We “understand” Necessity, and we “understand” also that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded” (why we understand it and who the “we” are who understand—these questions we do not even wish to raise). But when “by my will” intervenes, the whole spiritual nature of thinking man, his soul (in general the soul does not exist, but for this occasion it will be rehabilitated), is indignant at the daring and impudence of these pretensions. “By my will” is nothing else than the deus ex machina; but we think, with Kant (can we think otherwise?), that “in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge, the deus ex machina is the greatest absurdity that one could choose.” Or as the same Kant says elsewhere with still greater force, “to say that a supreme being has wisely introduced into us such ideas and principles a priori is completely to destroy all philosophy.”
Why does Necessity which does not listen and does not allow itself to be persuaded seem to us a reasonable supposition, while the deus ex machina seems to us to open the way to, and protect, all kinds of caprices (jeder Grille . . . Vorschub gibt) and appears to us so absurd? The deus ex machina threatens to destroy the very possibility of knowledge. But Kant’s task was not to defend and glorify knowledge at all costs. He had undertaken the “critique” of pure reason. He should therefore have put, before everything else, this question: are our knowledge and that which people ordinarily call philosophy so precious that we must take up their defense at the cost of any sacrifice, no matter how great? On the contrary, perhaps, since knowledge is so intimately bound to Necessity that it becomes impossible when one admits the deus ex machina (höheres Wesen), would it not be better to renounce knowledge and seek the protection of the “caprice” that so frightened Kant? To show oneself ready to renounce knowledge—is this not the only means (or at least the first step) to free oneself from that so greatly detested Necessity (which as we know, sometimes made Aristotle himself groan), from that Necessity which is not even afraid to offend the gods?
What Kant and all of us after Kant judge to be the most absurd of suppositions allows us to entertain the possibility of freeing mortals and immortals from that implacable power which, by some unknown miracle, has conquered the world and subjugated all living beings. Can it be that the deus ex machina might put an end to the hateful parere (obedience) and return to men the creative jubere (commanding) which the gods themselves had to renounce at some mysterious and terrible moment of the distant past? Can it be that the fall of Necessity would bring about the fall of the other usurpers to whom we feeble slaves, accustomed to the parere, have handed over our destiny? The principle of contradiction and the principle of identity have also been introduced into the world without authorization to act as masters therein. When we affirm that sound is heavy, these principles intervene and immediately oppose their veto: “we do not permit this, therefore it is not so.” But when it is said “Socrates has been poisoned,” these two principles remain passive and even give their blessing to this judgment and confer upon it, as we recall, eternity. But does there not exist somewhere in the depths of being a “reality” wherein the nature of the principles of contradiction and identity undergoes a radical transformation, wherein it is not they but man who commands, wherein they obey man’s commandments, i.e., wherein they do not intervene when sounds become heavy but protest when righteous men are put to death? Then the proposition “sound is heavy” would not seem absurd, while the proposition “Socrates has been poisoned” would become contradictory and, by that very fact, non-existent.
If such things be possible, if it be possible that Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded bows down before the caprice (Grille) of man, if the principles of contradiction and identity cease to be principles and become merely executive instruments, if the impossible becomes possible—what is then the value of the “eternal truths” accumulated by thinking humanity? It will be asked: how is one to know if such a reality is possible? That is just it: how is one to know? Once we begin to ask, we shall be told, as we have already been told, that such a reality is impossible; that Necessity, the principle of identity, the principle of contradiction and the other principles have ruled, do rule and will forever rule in our world as well as in all the worlds which have existed and will ever exist; that there never have been and never will be heavy sounds; that people have put to death and will continue to put to death wise men; and that the power of the gods themselves has limits that cannot be transcended.
But what if we do not ask anything of anyone? Are we capable of such daring and of so realizing the free will with which the philosophers entice us? Or better still, do we desire such freedom—a freedom such that the principles of contradiction and of identity and Necessity itself should be under our command? It seems that we have no great desire for it and that we should be afraid to grant such freedom to God Himself.
V
Aristotle and Epictetus submitted to Necessity and reconciled themselves to it. Plato did not reconcile himself to Necessity, even though he understood, quite as well as Aristotle and Epictetus, what dangers threaten the man who refuses to submit to this power. Plato saw quite well, just as all of us see, that in the year 399 Socrates was poisoned. And nevertheless, or rather precisely because he had seen it, because he had been “constrained” to see it with his own eyes, he suddenly had for the first time that deep, indestructible suspicion which is so incomprehensible to men: are our own eyes, then, really the source of the final metaphysical truths? In the Symposium he writes: “The spiritual eye becomes keen when the corporeal eyes begin to lose their sharpness” (219A).
It may be assumed that when this idea came to his mind for the first time Plato himself was frightened by it and, before deciding to express it aloud, had more than once to give himself courage by remembering “it is necessary to dare everything.” And indeed, if there are two kinds of eyes, who will say with which eyes we see truth and with which error? With all the good will in the world we should never be able to answer this question. Is it the corporeal eye that discovers the truth or is it the spiritual eye? The one supposition is as admissible as the other. The physical eyes can distinguish truth from error. Epictetus could force a man to distinguish vinegar from wine, shaving from cutting, etc., but Epictetus, quite like Aristotle, had no power over the spiritual eyes. For both of them relied on Necessity, both of them were “constrained by the truth itself,” and they wished and were able also “to constrain” others. But this was possible only so long as those to whom they addressed themselves were beings equipped with corporeal eyes. These one can constrain by threats. Necessity has power over them. But he who has lost his corporeal eyes, who, instead of corporeal vision, possesses “spiritual vision”—does Necessity have any power over him? Is it not in this that that miracle of transfiguration which was mentioned above consists? Parmenides is no longer constrained but rather constrains; the principle of contradiction does not command but obeys; the vinegar becomes wine, the razor does not cut, etc. And the whole arsenal of Aristotle’s and Epictetus’ threats loses, like salt which ceases to be salty, all sense and meaning.
I think that there cannot be two opinions on this matter: Plato’s “spiritual vision” is nothing other than a desperate attempt to tear himself away from the power of Necessity which has been throughout all time the foundation of human thought. The best commentary on the passage of the Symposium that we have quoted is found in the words of Plotinus: “Thought was granted to the divine, but not to the best beings, as an eye intended to correct their natural blindness. But what would it serve for the eye to see what is, if it were itself the light? And so if someone has need of eyes, it is that, being himself blind, he seeks the light.”10 “Spiritual vision” is no longer vision in the proper sense; that is, the passive consideration and acceptance of truth prepared in advance, imposed by an external constraint—as truth, according to Aristotle or Epictetus, is imposed. What appears to the latter as the essential moment of truth, the power of constraining all men, is found to be a mere accident. Circumstances change and this constraint becomes at first useless, inconvenient, intolerable, then finally a distortion of the very nature of truth—at least of the metaphysical truth concerning which we are here speaking. The truth of the corporeal eye maintains itself by force, by threats. Sometimes it also employs allurements. It forces the disobedient to drink vinegar; it cuts off their noses, their ears, etc. . . . It does not know any other means of bringing it about that men should agree to recognize it. If you deprive such a truth of the means of coercion that it has at its disposal, who would then be willing to follow it? Who would recognize of his own free will that Socrates has been poisoned? Who would delight in seeing the phenomena lead the great Parmenides, as if he were not Parmenides but a horse or a mule? All that is human in the living being imperiously demands that no one should be permitted to touch Socrates, and that the phenomena should not lead the great Parmenides as they wish but rather docilely and trustingly follow Parmenides.
Spinoza’s stone endowed with consciousness would have approved, one may believe, the order of existing things or, rather, the ordo et connexio rerum visible to the corporeal eye. But the living person will never accept this order. And if, nevertheless, many have sincerely sought to secure such a state of affairs in saecula saeculorum, it is not at all necessary to deduce therefrom what people ordinarily deduce: namely, that one can see the final truths with the corporeal eye and that Necessity has at its disposal a miraculous power, a supernatural force, to transform the temporal into the eternal. It is necessary to draw therefrom a conclusion which will perhaps seem at first sight paradoxical and consequently completely inadmissible for our ignava ratio (lazy reason) but which, it is to be believed, is the only truth: “Not all are created under the same conditions but to some eternal life is preordained, to others eternal damnation.” Or, if you do not care for theology and Calvin, the same thought may be formulated using Spinoza’s words: most men only resemble men, in reality they are not men but stones endowed with consciousness. And what we customarily call “the laws of thought” are only the laws of the thought of stones endowed with consciousness. Or again: it seems that, in the course of man’s brief existence, each of us often has occasion to see himself transformed into a stone endowed with consciousness—and this precisely when he turns backward, inquires, and begins to reflect. Plato sadly felt this and sought with all the powers of his soul to escape the petrification that threatened him. For Aristotle, on the other hand, to try to fight what he considered the natural order of things and, consequently, the final and definitive reality, was the height of folly.
Can it be hoped that the enfeebled physical eye may be replaced by a spiritual eye that will permit us to see another world and no longer that which we have always seen and shall always and everywhere see? It is here that there begins, for Aristotle, the domain of the fantastic, against which he defends himself and others by means of his logic as well as his metaphysics and his ethics, by his categorical statement “Cry halt before Necessity.” Plato, on the contrary, drew his inspiration from the fantastic. For Plato, the corporeal vision was so intimately bound to the idea of “constraining and being constrained,” to the idea that the death of Socrates is an eternal truth in the world where it is the corporeal eyes that discover the truth, that it did not seem to him sufficient to weaken our physical vision and our physical being in general. As long as we exist physically we are under the domination of Necessity. One can put us to the torture and force us to recognize anything whatever.
I shall recall again—for one repeats these things in vain, people always forget them—how the noble Epictetus treated all those who were unwilling to follow him, how he pierced their eyes and cut off their noses and ears, and how Aristotle forced the great Parmenides to accept his truths. Can one live in a world where the truth—i.e., that which, according to us, is the most powerful, the best, and the most desirable thing on earth—tortures men and transforms them into stones endowed with consciousness? We must flee this world, flee it as quickly as possible, flee it without turning backward, without asking where we are going and without considering what the future will bring us. We must burn, tear out, and destroy in ourselves everything that stupefies, petrifies, crushes, and draws us towards the visible world, if we wish to save ourselves from the terrible danger (damnatio aeterna) that lies in wait for us. Not only the corporeal eye but all of the “corporeality” through which we arrive at the constraining truths must be torn out of man, so that the vinegar may become wine and that a new eye may arise in place of the pierced eye. But how can we do this? Who can do it? Plato replies: this is the task of philosophy, of a philosophy that is no longer science and no longer even knowledge but, as he says in the Phaedo, meletê thanatou, “the practice of death”—of a philosophy capable of replacing the natural eye of man by a supernatural eye, i.e., an eye which sees not what is but thanks to which what one sees “by one’s will” becomes what is.
Aristotle does not understand Plato’s “practice of death,” even though this “thought,” if one may call it a thought, is developed in the Phaedo and emphasized with all the force of which Plato was capable. Plato says that all those who sincerely devoted themselves to philosophy were doing nothing but preparing themselves by degrees for death and to die. It is true that he adds immediately afterwards that the philosophers generally hide this from the whole world. But there was no need even, it seems, to hide it. Plato did not hide it: he proclaimed his “practice of death” aloud and yet no one understood it. Before as after Plato, the whole world is convinced that truths and revelations are not to be sought in death but that death is rather the end of revelations and truths.
People do not argue with Plato or contradict him, but almost no one speaks of the “practice of death.” The only exception is Spinoza, who, like Plato, was not afraid “to dare everything” or to approach the limits of being. As if in answer to Plato, he declares: “a free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”11 This is basically what Aristotle would already have had to say. Here is the only way of freeing oneself from Plato with his spiritual eye and his “preparation for death.” There are no eyes other than the corporeal eyes, and even Spinoza’s oculi mentis (eyes of the mind) are in a certain sense only the corporeal eyes arrived at a higher degree of evolution or, if you wish, the corporeal eyes par excellence. The oculi mentis bring us to the tertium genus cognitionis (third kind of knowledge), to cognitio intuitiva (intuitive knowledge), that is, precisely to the kind of knowledge where Necessity shows itself to us in all its omnipotence and terrible magnificence. Sub specie necessitatis is transformed, through Spinoza’s will, into sub specie aeternitatis, that is, Necessity becomes an ideal at the same time that it is a reality. It comes from reason, which Spinoza, forgetting his promise to speak of everything as the mathematicians speak of lines and surfaces, calls “the greatest gift and the divine light,” and to which he erects an altar as the only god worthy of veneration: “what altar will he build for himself who insults reason’s majesty?” Reason alone can give us that “one thing necessary” which, as all the wise men have taught, makes man, whom we see and who exists, and the gods, whom no one has ever seen either with corporeal eyes or with spiritual eyes, to live. “Contentment with one’s self can spring from reason, and that contentment which springs from reason is the highest possible.”12
Spinoza did not like Aristotle, perhaps because he did not know him well enough but more perhaps because even in Aristotle he discovered too obvious traces of that “mythological” thought of which he wished to believe himself completely freed. Spinoza endeavored to create not the “best philosophy” but the “true philosophy.” He assured everyone else as well as himself that man has no need of the “best,” that it is enough for him to have the “true.” But Spinoza was doubly wrong. Aristotle, as we have seen, believed in the sovereign rights of truth and never attempted in his philosophical and scientific researches to protest against the subordinate and dependent situation to which the very conditions of our existence condemn us. He spoke, it is true, of the purposes of creation, he said that nature does nothing in vain, etc. But this was only a methodological procedure, a procedure for seeking truth, just as his primum movens immobile (first unmoved mover) was no longer a living god inhabiting Olympus or any other place in the real universe, however distant from us, but only an active force determining the formation and succession of all the observable phenomena of the external world. For him, the summum bonum (highest good) of men is limited by the possible, and the possible is determined by reason.
And if Aristotle found this summum bonum in our world, Spinoza in this respect is hardly far from Aristotle. His “contentment with oneself which springs from reason” is not essentially distinguishable from the Aristotelian ideal of wisdom, from his noêsis noêseôs (thinking of thought). So that it is rather Spinoza (did he not affirm that his task was the search for the “true philosophy” and that he was not concerned with the needs and aspirations of men, for men are to him only perpendiculars or triangles and do not deserve to be considered in any way other than perpendiculars or triangles?) whom one could accuse of being untrue to his principles by erecting an altar to reason, by glorifying ratio as the “greatest gift and the divine light,” by singing the praises of “contentment with oneself,” etc. But it is precisely because Spinoza, quite like Aristotle, permitted himself this inconsequence, whether unconsciously or deliberately, that he succeeded in reaching the goal that he had set himself: to convince men that the ideal of human existence is the stone endowed with consciousness. Why? Even if it is correct that the stone endowed with consciousness is best fitted to perceive the truths, why address oneself to living men and demand of them that they accomplish such a transformation of themselves? And why did neither Aristotle nor Spinoza attempt (what at first appears easier), by means of their incantations and their sorceries, to endow with consciousness the inanimate objects which have not and cannot have any motive for opposing such attempts? But no one has ever attempted anything of the kind. No one is interested in seeing that the stones are transformed into thinking beings, but many are interested in seeing that living men are transformed into stones. Why? What is finally in question here?
VI
Here I have only touched lightly on the philosophy of Spinoza; elsewhere I speak of it in greater detail. I wished only to emphasize the basic opposition between the tasks Plato and Spinoza set for themselves. The one sees in philosophy the “practice of death” and declares that the true philosophers have always done nothing other than apothnêskein kai tethnanai (prepare themselves for death and to die). For Plato, philosophy is not knowledge or science—one cannot call the “practice of death” a science—but something of a completely different order. He wishes to render the human vision not more penetrating but, on the contrary, less so—that vision to which, according to general opinion, it is given to discover the ways that lead to the sources of all truths. “Have you not noticed,” he writes, “in observing those of whom it is said that they are wicked but intelligent men the keen vision that a soul such as theirs has, how well it sees what it looks at, and how the capacity for sight that it possesses is considerable; but it is obliged to serve the evil, and the keener its vision the more evil it does.”13
The faculty of seeing (Einsicht, intuitio), even if it be very great, does not bring man to the truth; on the contrary, it leads him away from it. Cognitio intuitiva, bestowed by reason and bringing us “contentment with oneself which is the highest possible”—Plato knew quite well that here was the supreme wisdom for men, but he also felt in the depths of his being that under this “contentment with oneself” was hidden the most terrible thing that there is in life. He tells us that Socrates, his teacher, said of himself that he was a gadfly and considered that his task was not to calm men but ceaselessly to irritate them and bring into their souls an intolerable restlessness. Spinoza’s ratio brings men “contentment with oneself” and a peace “which is the highest possible.” This means that ratio threatens us with the greatest of dangers, that we must fight against it night and day without shrinking before any difficulties or sacrifices. Plato, the father of dialectic, possessed a remarkable vision. But the sources of philosophical knowledge were not, for him, either in dialectic or in the faculty of discerning what others do not discern. Vision and dialectic can be in the service of the “evil,” and then of what use are they? The better we see, the more deeply do we sink into evil. Perfect vision would thus end in the definitive triumph of evil in the world.
It is of this, and of this alone, that Plato’s myth of the cave speaks to us. The inhabitants of the cave see clearly and distinctly everything that takes place before them, but the more firmly and solidly they believe in what they see, the more desperate does their situation become. They should seek neither what is clear and distinct nor what is fixed and lasting. On the contrary, they should experience the greatest suspicions, the deepest unrest. It is necessary that their spiritual tension reach the ultimate limits so that they can break the chains which bind them to their prison. The clarity and distinctness which seduce all minds and not only Descartes’ (Descartes merely formulated what led men astray long before him) and which, in the eyes of all, are a guarantee of the truth, seem to Plato forever to hide the truth from us. The clear and distinct draw us not toward the real but toward the illusory, not toward what exists but toward the shadow of what exists.
If you ask where Plato learned this and how he, being himself an inhabitant of the cave wherein all of us live, could divine that what he saw was not reality but only the shadow of reality and that real life begins elsewhere, beyond the limits of the cave—you will not get any answer. Plato has no proofs for this and yet, it must be recognized, he exhausts himself in searching for proofs. It was for this purpose that he invented his dialectic; and in his dialogues he tried by all dialectical means to obtain from his imaginary interlocutors that they recognize the truth of his revelations. But it is precisely because and inasmuch as Plato wished to make his revelation a truth that constrains, a truth obligatory for all, that he laid himself open to Aristotle’s criticisms.
As long as it was a question of the anankazein kai anankazesthai (to constrain and be constrained), it seemed that Aristotle, and not only Aristotle but Epictetus as well, were invincible. We have no means of constraining a man to recognize that his reality is not real. On the contrary, as we recall, all the means of constraint are on the side of those who see in reality the final and only possible reality. This reality is sufficiently protected against the attempts that might be made to disqualify it not only by the threats of Epictetus but also by the all-powerful principle of contradiction. He who doubts reality also doubts his doubt, for the doubter, together with all his doubts, belongs to this reality. Plato well knew this irrefutable argument, which later tempted two men as dissimilar as Saint Augustine and Descartes. Plato himself used it more than once to refute the Sophists, and he realized very well that his myth of the cave, as well as his theory of ideas, were shot through and through with contradictions. He understood this and yet he did not renounce his ideas and sought all his life to escape from the cave. What does this mean? Is it that “the practice of death” bestows upon man the mysterious gift of no longer fearing the principle of contradiction? Does he learn, in general, to fear nothing and “to dare everything”? Dialectic was not at all necessary for Plato and his revelations, and he used them not so much because his revelations could not do without them but because the men before whom he set forth his truths could not do without them. Men are accustomed to think that, by the very nature of things, where there is no force there is no truth; that force, whenever it wishes (by its own caprice), authorizes or does not authorize the truth to “be,” but that it itself exists without asking authorization of anything whatsoever (and especially of truth). In Spinoza’s terminology: it is necessary to seek the “true philosophy” and not the “best philosophy.”
This problem runs through all of Plato’s work, but nowhere is it posed with as much clearness and sharpness as in the Phaedo, where Plato tells us that philosophy is “the practice of death.” And this is not merely an accident. In the presence of Socrates, who awaits death, one cannot speak of anything else. If philosophy is really “the practice of death,” then a man who awaits death can still meditate and philosophize. But if the truth is with Spinoza and if “a free man thinks of death least of all things,” then the sentence of the judges forever closed Socrates’ mouth, even before he had drunk the hemlock. The human thought which wishes and is able to look death in the face has other dimensions than the thought of those who turn away from death and forget death. To put it in another way: the truths that Plato sought have no place on the plane of reason. They presuppose another dimension, a dimension which is generally not taken into consideration.
When Plato found himself before the dilemma, the “true philosophy” or the “best philosophy,” he did not hesitate: he has no need of the “true philosophy.” Thus, he seeks and finds the “best philosophy.” If he had been asked who gave him the right to choose, if there had been demanded of him what the lawyers call Justus titulis and which the philosophers also ordinarily desire to obtain, he certainly would not have known how and perhaps would not even have wished to answer this question. Or else he would have answered this question by another question: Does anyone have the right to grant what the lawyers (i.e., men who by their vocation and their mentality are called to defend the pseudo-reality they have discovered in the cave) call “Justus titulis”? And, indeed, who or what determines the fate of men? As long as we obtain no answer to this question, all our truths will have only a conditional significance. We say “who” or “what.” This means that the justi tituli are at the disposal perhaps of a living being who feels and chooses or, perhaps, of something that is interested in nothing and in no one. This something that is without will and indifferent to everything automatically pronounces—without hearing anything, without taking account of anything—judgments that are definitive and without appeal. And if this indifferent and inanimate “something” is the source of life and of truth, then what meaning, what importance, can human choice have? In that case, choice is only a delusion, an auto-suggestion, a shameless insolence that will inevitably be uncovered and severely punished at the first conflict of man with reality.
We could lengthen the list of these questions, but it is obvious that on the plane where they were born and developed we shall obtain no answer. Or worse still: on this plane all these questions are decided in advance. There is no “who” at the sources of being; therefore there is no “who” at the sources of truth. And even if there once was a “who,” long ago, in time immemorial, he renounced both himself and his sovereign rights by handing over their eternal use to the inanimate “what” from whose stony hand the power cannot be wrested, no matter how great our efforts and our daring may be. This is the meaning of the semper paret, semel jussit (He always obeys but has commanded only once), this is the meaning of all the “constraining and being constrained” which were discussed above. Reasoning and dialectic, quite like prayers and persuasion, can do nothing here. If true reality is found on the two-dimensional plane of the “what” and if the thought expressive of this reality knows only two dimensions [einai (being) = noein (thought)], then there is no escape: we must give up free choice, submit to Necessity, and no longer receive any truths without its consent and authorization. Necessity does not authorize choice. If you wish to acquire the right and freedom to choose, you must abandon the plane where Necessity realizes its power, without allowing yourself to be stopped by any impossibilities and, above all, despising all the justi tituli which fetter not only our thought but also our being. Without asking anything of anyone, on our own initiative, we must oppose to the Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded the authority of the “by my will.” So that the “Parmenides constrained” of Aristotle becomes the Parmenides who speaks “as one who has power.” For it is written: the kingdom of God is conquered only by violence.
It will be said that this amounts to fighting the self-evident. But Plato, all his life, did nothing but fight the self-evident. To subdue it he went to the most distant boundaries of being, where no one ventures, where—according to general opinion—life even no longer is or can be, where death, which puts an end to everything, reigns. To be sure, this is great daring, the greatest of daring, the final impudence of which man is capable. But what other means is there of obtaining the “by my will”? That “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded” was, I repeat once more, quite as incontestable for Plato as for Aristotle. But what death is, no one knows. It is true that it is uncanny to behold. But “the beautiful is difficult.” Spinoza himself did not deny this: “all sublime things are as difficult as they are rare.” That is how he concluded his Ethics. It may be that, behind the difficulties and the horrors of death, there is hidden something that we need much more than the facilities and pleasantries of daily life. We have nothing more to lose. We have appealed to Necessity, questioned it and begged it; it has not budged and will not budge. As long as it preserves its power, the judgment “Socrates has been poisoned” will remain an eternal truth, quite like the judgment “a mad dog has been poisoned.” But if one becomes intimate with death, if one passes through the needle’s eye of final and terrible solitude, of forsakenness and despair, then one may perhaps succeed in recovering the sacred “by my will,” the primordial and powerful jubere that we have exchanged for the weak, automatic and soothing parere. We must overcome fear, summon up all our courage, go toward death and try our luck with her. Ordinary thought, the thought of the man who obeys and recoils before threats, gives us nothing.
The first step is to accustom oneself to take no account of “sufficient reason.” If Epictetus or anyone else threatens to cut off our ears, pierce our eyes, make us drink vinegar or hemlock, we will not listen to his threats—just as Necessity does not listen to our supplications. “The human soul,” says Plato, “when it feels pleasure or pain in connection with something is constrained to consider this thing as the most evident and the most true, even though it is not really so . . . Each pleasure and pain is like a nail and rivets the soul to the body, fixes it to the body and makes it similar to the body, so that it begins to consider as true what the body considers as true.”14 As if he were defending himself in advance against Aristotle and Epictetus, for whom the anankazein (constraint) and the endless lupethênai (eyes pierced, ears cut off, vinegar, hemlock, etc.) were the final court of appeal in the conflict between truth and error, Plato tries not to refute them but rather to flee from the places where arguments of this kind have, and can have, any force. The body and all that is related to the body is subordinated to Necessity and fears its threats. As long as man is afraid, he can be terrorized; and once he is terrorized, he can be constrained to obedience. But the philosopher who has arrived at the boundaries of life and passed through the school of death, the philosopher for whom apothnêskein (dying) has become the present reality and tethnanai (death) the reality of the future, has no fear of threats. He has accepted death and become intimate with it, for dying and death, by weakening the corporeal eye, undermine the very foundation of the power of Necessity, which hears nothing, as well as of all the evident truths which depend on this Necessity. The soul begins to feel that it is given to it not to submit and obey but “to lead and govern.”15 In fighting for this right it does not fear to pass beyond the fateful limit where what is clear and distinct ends and the Eternal Mystery begins. Its sapientia (wisdom) is no longer a meditatio vitae (meditation on life) but a meditatio mortis (meditation on death).
VII
Such was the way that Plato followed. In the Phaedo Socrates relates that when he was a young man he was present at a reading of fragments of the work of Anaxagoras. Having heard that reason was the orderer and cause of all, he felt a tremendous joy and told himself that here was precisely what he needed and that he would not be willing to exchange this doctrine for all the treasures of the world. To ascribe such a power to reason meant, according to him, that it is given to reason to find for everyone what best agrees with him. Consequently man has the right to expect that there will come to him nothing but happiness and good. But how disillusioned Socrates was when, having probed Anaxagoras’ words to the depths, he saw that Anaxagoras’ reason seeks and discovers in the world only the natural relationships of things! Socrates found this deeply offensive and, turning away from Anaxagoras, began to seek at his own risk and peril the principles and sources of all that exists.
By what right did Socrates so decide? Was reason obliged to furnish Socrates an explanation of the universe in which “the best” would also be the strongest? Does reason possess the faculty of discovering everywhere only the “good” and not what is—the evil as well as the good? We have no right, i.e., we have no ground, to be certain that reason will find in the world more good than evil. It may be that it finds more good, or it may be that it finds more, even enormously more, evil. Aristotle also knew Anaxagoras, but Anaxagoras was quite agreeable to him; he considered him “a sober man among the drunken.” Are the notion of reason and the notion of “the best” juxtaposable? Should it not be admitted, on the contrary, that the notion of “the best” must be deduced from the notion of reason? The best may not be reasonable, and the reasonable may exclude the best. It is completely reasonable, not to take any other example, that the judgment “Socrates was poisoned” should be an eternal truth, quite like the judgment “a mad dog was poisoned.” It is similarly reasonable that the stone endowed with consciousness and the divine Plato, who would have given everything in the world to wrest his master from the clutches of this eternal truth, should be equally constrained to recognize the reality of this judgment. One could cite an endless number of examples of this kind. Did not Plato and Socrates know this quite as well as we? Had they so wished, they would have been able to say, as people now say: “The inferior categories of being are the strongest, the superior the weakest.” And even if there were only a little good here, even if there were no good at all, this would have been completely reasonable. It would have been well if the superior categories were the strongest. But to demand of reason that it recognize that the superior categories are the strongest, would this not be to “constrain” reason? And does reason submit to force, wherever it may come from? People can say to us, as they have said to us, “Parmenides constrained” or even “God constrained.” But to say “reason constrained,” even if it be by the good itself—no matter how highly one glorifies the good and even if one affirms, following Plato, “the good is not essence but that which is beyond essence and surpasses essence both in value and in power”16—who would dare say such a thing? Who would have the courage to declare that the truth “Socrates was poisoned” will cease to exist in some near or distant future and that (this is what is now most important for us) reason itself will have to recognize this, and not on its own initiative but “constrained” by something stronger than itself? Is there a power capable of ruling over the truths?
There cannot be two opinions on this matter: there is no such power. And yet Plato sought this power and followed it even into death where, according to the general opinion, one cannot find anything. But it must be recognized: Plato did not find what he was seeking. Or, to be more exact: Plato did not succeed in bringing back to men what he had found beyond the limits of all possible knowledge. When he tried to show men what he had seen, the thing changed itself mysteriously under his eyes into its contrary. It is true that this “contrary” beguiles and charms us through the reflection of the ineffable, which awakens in mortals the remembrance of the primordial, infinite and supernatural fullness and beauty of being. But the ineffable remains ineffable. “To see the Creator of the world is difficult, to show Him—impossible.” The ineffable is ineffable because and inasmuch as it is opposed by its very nature not to realization in general, as people are inclined to believe, but to definitive and final realization. It does realize itself but it cannot and does not wish to be transformed into knowledge. For knowledge is constraint, and constraint is submission, loss, and privation, which finally hides in its depths the terrible threat of “contentment with oneself.” Man ceases to be man and becomes a stone endowed with consciousness. The Parmenides “who is constrained by the truth itself,” the Parmenides who turns around to look at the truth, is no longer the Parmenides who, as Plato later did, dares to penetrate into the land which is known by no one but only promised to men, to seek there the golden fleece or some other treasure that in no way resembles those that men know. He is no longer the living, restless, insubmissive, tortured and—by that very fact—great Parmenides. The Medusa’s head, which he saw in turning backward, brought him a deep and final repose.
Plato himself writes: “But the pleasure which is to be found in the knowledge of true being is known only to the philosopher.”17 But he has explained to us what pleasure is: pleasure is the nail by means of which man is riveted to his illusory, shadow-like, and mortal being. Now if contemplation brings pleasure, whatever the contemplation may be, we shall not escape the fateful payment. And Plato, as if he were doing it purposely, as if he wished to emphasize that it is not given to man to go beyond “pleasure” and that pleasure is the recompense and goal of all our efforts, repeats again on the following page: “All pleasure, except that which a reasonable man feels, is impure and shadow-like.” And later he expatiates with still more warmth on the pleasure which this same contemplation brings to us.18 Everything that Aristotle later said with so much eloquence about “contemplation being what is most pleasant and best”19 is taken from Plato. And in Plotinus also we find not a few eloquent pages of the same kind. By means of pleasure man is effectively nailed, as with enormous nails, to that place of being where he was obliged by chance to begin his existence. And accordingly, fear, armed with threats of every kind, does not permit him to tear himself away, be it only in imagination, from the earth and to rise above the plane which our thought has become accustomed to consider as containing everything real and everything possible.
We have preserved this mysterious thought of Heraclitus: “For God everything is good and just, while men consider certain things just and certain other things unjust.” This thought is also found in Plotinus. He repeats it in the last, chronologically, of his Enneads (I, VII, 3): “for the gods there is only good, there is no evil.” And again (I, VIII, end): “there, there is no evil,” as if he were echoing to us the no less mysterious “it was very good” of the Bible. But this “absurd” thought, whose very absurdity makes it so seductive, does not find any root in the world where pleasures and pains have power over us, where pleasures and pains are a “sufficient reason” for the acts and thoughts of man, where it is they that determine what is significant and important for us. For it is also a “fundamental law” that pleasures and pains here on earth come not when and for as long as a man calls them but when they themselves wish. Then they make themselves masters of a man’s soul and, as Plato taught us, nail him to the subterranean place which was prepared for him in advance, by suggesting to him the invincible conviction that this was and always will be so, that even among the gods everything happens as it does on earth, that pleasures and pains govern and command while no one governs or commands them. In Spinoza’s terminology: good and ill fortune is distributed indifferently among the just and the wicked. Socrates’ statement that no good can come to the wicked and no evil to the good is only an “empty babbling,” a “poetic image” that he picked up on the street or some place still worse (Socrates went everywhere and disdained no one); it was certainly not drawn from the sources whence the eternal truths flow for man.
It is not difficult to guess where Socrates found his pseudotruth and to what source he went to seek it. It obviously flows from the “by my will,” from the primordial jubere, which men and gods have forgotten and of which they do not dare to remind themselves. Socrates’ conviction was born of his desire, but what good can there be in an idea derived from such low parentage? Socrates turned away from Anaxagoras because the latter glorified the reason (nous) which does not take any account of human desires and is indifferent to “the best.” The universe is maintained only by obedience: “Law is the king of all, of mortals and immortals.”20 There is no way of escape from this. Wherever one looks there are laws, demands, commandments that rest on the “sufficient reasons” of which we have heard so much said by Aristotle and Epictetus. Plato and Socrates dared to defy the laws and Necessity, and opposed to them “by my will.” But—and here is the most terrible and mysterious of all the “buts” that have ever limited man—they were not able to renounce pleasure, not even the pleasure that forms the essence and content of “contentment with oneself.” How could it be otherwise? If “by my will” remains itself, for as long as it remains itself, one cannot show it, as one cannot show men the Demiurge who is the source of all “by my will.” No eye, either corporeal or spiritual, can see either the Demiurge or the commandments that emanate from him. Here vision ends, here begins the mysterious region of the no less mysterious participation. Here constraint ends, for the commandments of the Demiurge, contrary to the commandments of Necessity which is indifferent to all, do not constrain anyone. They call to life, make gifts, enrich suddenly.
The more the Demiurge commands, the less it is necessary to obey. The Demiurge calls the man enchained by Necessity to ultimate freedom. He is not even afraid, no matter how strange this may appear to the human thought based upon fear—but the Demiurge fears nothing—to give all his endless power and all his creative forces which are also endless to another being whom he has created in his image. “For God everything is very good.” For men it is otherwise; for them the “very good” is the greatest of absurdities. “Daily experience” teaches us that it is necessary to be afraid, that everything surrounding us hides endless dangers in itself. And to avoid these dangers we take refuge behind the ramparts, created by ourselves, of “eternal, self-evident truths.” Plato himself, despite his desperate struggle against Necessity maintained in the depths of his soul the clear and irreducible conviction that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded,” that one may at times outwit its vigilance and trap it but that it is finally given no one to escape its power. Without pleasures one cannot live; but pleasures come and go, not when we desire but when they themselves please. And if one wishes to enjoy them, he must go and seek them at all-powerful Necessity; he must reluctantly renounce the sovereign jubere (command) and return to the parere (obedience) that has been admitted throughout all time.
As soon as Plato turned away from the Demiurge—even if it were only to show him to others, to show him to all—the “by my will” grew dim and became a shadow, a phantom. But when Plato, in communing with him, discovered the Demiurge, he lost the possibility and faculty of giving men truths “capable of being proved.” Communion presupposes “the flight of the one to the One,” as Plotinus was later to say. It begins with the “true awakening” and carries man “beyond reason and knowledge,” beyond the limits of the world “given” once for all that is “the condition of the possibility” of knowledge and where the conditions of the possibility of knowledge were created by Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded and which exists especially for this. And indeed, if Necessity were not deaf and blind, the idea of knowledge would lose all meaning. Truth could not be in the adaequatio rei et intellectus (agreement between thing and intellect), for how could one take as the standard a thing that is not at the disposal of deaf and, by that very fact, unchangeable Necessity but depends on the will of a relenting, susceptible to persuasion and, consequently, “capricious” being (Kant’s deus ex machina or höheres Wesen)?
If one drove Necessity from the world, knowledge would become a dream as unrealizable as it is useless. At present, as we recall, even empirical, a posteriori judgments have obtained the exalted rank of eternal truths; but if Necessity disappeared, a priori judgments themselves would return to the subaltern state of perishable beings. The very gods would no longer be omniscient. Can one accept such a state of things? “Contemplation is what is most pleasant and best,” we have heard Aristotle say above. And Plato spoke the same way. In return, however, we should once again possess the “by my will,” the primordial freedom. And to ariston (the best), as well as to hêdiston (the most pleasant) would come not when they wish but when we called them! And pleasures would no longer enchain us but rather follow us into that world where laws do not rule over mortals and immortals but where the immortals and the mortals whom they have created would, by their divine will, themselves make and unmake laws, where the proposition “a mad dog has been poisoned” would really be an eternal truth while the proposition “Socrates has been poisoned” would be a temporary and provisional truth, where for men also “everything is very good.”
I repeat once more: Plato sought only this—to flee from the cave where the shadows pretend to reality and where one cannot look at the illusory reality because it petrifies. Indeed, it is necessary that our corporeal eyes forget how to see when it is given us to penetrate into the region where the gods live with their tes ernês boulêseôs (limitless freedom) and without our knowledge, without even the perfect knowledge that we call omniscience. Plato, I say, sought only this. But Necessity does not merely refuse to let itself be persuaded. In the course of its millennial relationships with the men over whom it had power it acquired consciousness from them. If many men are changed into stones endowed with consciousness, Necessity—although preserving its stony and altogether indifferent nature—also finds itself provided with consciousness. And it succeeded in deceiving Plato himself, in persuading him that in the “other” world also only he who is on good terms with Necessity can exist, that the gods do not fight against Necessity, that the world was born of the union between reason and Necessity.
It is true that, according to Plato, reason convinced Necessity of many things and seems to have succeeded even in gaining ascendancy over Necessity; but this domination was illusory and conditioned by the tacit recognition of the primordial rights, and even the birthright, of Necessity. Still more: in order to “achieve dominion” over Necessity, reason had to give way on the most important and most essential point; it had to agree that all conflicts between truths should be resolved by “force” (bia) and to admit that truth is truth only when and for as long as it is given to it to constrain men. Through their corporeal eyes men are bound to their prison; “the spiritual vision” must then also bind, “constrain.”
The disciples of Socrates gathered around their condemned master to receive from his mouth not simply the truth but the truth that constrains—not through the corporeal eyes, it is true, but through the spiritual eyes. Its power of constraint, however, is not weakened thereby but further augmented. In the presence of death and preparing to die, Socrates gives proofs, proofs, and again proofs. He cannot do otherwise: “unbelief is proper to the masses.” If one does not furnish them with proofs, the masses will not believe. But who are hoi polloi, “the masses”? The disciples of Socrates are not hoi polloi; they are the elect. But the elect are no exception; they do not wish, and are not able, to “believe.” Hoi polloi—these are “all of us,” not only the mob but also the disciples of Socrates, not only the disciples of Socrates but Socrates himself. Socrates also wishes first to see, be it only by “the spiritual vision” or by the “eyes of the mind,” and only thereafter to accept and believe. This is why he listens so attentively to the objections of his interlocutors. This is why the divine Plato, who took over his intellectual heritage, could not, to the very end of his days, renounce dialectic. Dialectic is as much a “force” as physical force; it is a death-dealing weapon, like the sword or the arrow. It is a question only of knowing how to use it, and the whole world will be at our feet. “The whole world” means all men. All men will be obliged to repeat what you proclaim as the truth.
I insist upon this: in the presence of “all,” Socrates and Plato did not dare to go back to the sources of their truths. In the presence of “all,” they also became like everyone else, like hoi polloi, of whom it is said that unbelief is proper to them, who accept only the proven truth which constrains—the apparent, visible, evident truth. Beyond the limit of what is visible either to the spiritual or the physical eye, there is no longer anything to seek, there is no longer anything to expect. Under the pressure of Necessity, Socrates had to give way on this point. He offered his disciples “the vision of what is” and “the pleasure” that depends on the vision of what is. He offered these to his disciples in place of the various pleasures which are bound, for the inhabitants of the cave, to the perception of that subterranean reality where Plato suddenly felt the presence of corrupting, destructive elements (damnatio aeterna). And he regarded this “vision” as “a great gift to men of the gods, who will not give them and have never given them any greater.”21
The “masses” have obtained what they desired. They desired to receive their reward immediately, even before Socrates had closed his eyes, and they did receive it. “Philosophy” makes this categorical declaration to us in the Phaedo: “to believe no one except oneself.” But he who believes only in himself, only in his own eyes, even if they be the spiritual eyes, will inevitably become the vassal of Necessity and be condemned to content himself with the leavings that it hands over to mortals and immortals. Without realizing it Plato let himself slide (or was carried away) from the heights that he had attained when—” the one before the One”—he forgot, thanks to the practice of and meditation on death, all fear and all the threats that close for men the gateway to the final truth, and fell back again to the place where the great Parmenides himself, “constrained to follow the phenomena,” does not dare to seek anything other than the pleasure obtained by the contemplation of that which is, of that which was created and formed without him and before him. And not only Parmenides but the gods themselves, “constrained by the truth,” have refused to create or to change anything whatever in the universe. Plato did not succeed in “persuading” Necessity; Necessity outwitted Plato. For the “pleasure” of being with all and of thinking like all, he had to surrender everything to it. Necessity remained the sovereign of the world; the whole world belongs to it while the “by my will” became transformed into a shadow. And at the same time the cave, as well as everything that happens in the cave, became again the kingdom of the sole and final reality, outside of which there is neither being nor thought.
VIII
Aristotle won a complete victory over Plato, and what he established and constructed has remained standing to our day. Nicholas of Cusa wrote: “The difference between the divine mind and our own is similar to that between making and seeing. The divine mind creates through thinking, our own imitates through thinking or through intellectual vision. The divine mind is creative power, our own is imitative power.”
It seems that there is repeated here that thought of Philo’s which was based on the Bible: “For God creates in speaking, His word being already an act.” But we know that Philo, in his desire to reconcile Holy Scripture with Greek wisdom, had already weakened the meaning and scope of the biblical “and God spoke.” With Nicholas of Cusa, who appears at the threshold of modern history, the relationship between creation and thought is completely broken. He already thinks like a Greek, and if one separated the quotation that we have just cited from its superficial stratum of Christian theology, that is to say, from that which derives from the Bible, one could easily find there the semper paret, semel jussit that we know so well. Nicholas of Cusa felt that God is far away, so far away that it is better not to try to reach Him but rather to accept, once for all, our mortal destiny not to create (facere) but only to see (videre) and to imitate through thought (concipiendo assimilare). And he believed that for man the principle of agreement between thing and intellect (adaequatio rei et intellectus) is the universal principle for seeking truth, whether it be a question of ordinary positive truths or the final problems of metaphysics. And if Nicholas of Cusa—who still held close to the Biblical conceptions of the Middle Ages, though he is justly considered the forerunner of the new philosophy—thought thus, what shall we say of modern times and how they have come to limit the rights and possibilities of human thought?
It is true, and this is something that must never be forgotten, that the fear of freedom is undoubtedly the basic characteristic of our perhaps distorted but nonetheless real human nature. At the depths of our souls we aspire to limit God Himself, to curtail His creative activity, His right to the jubere, to the “by my will.” It seems to us that even for God it would be better not to command but to obey, that the will of God—if it be not subordinated to some “eternal” principle—will fall into arbitrariness and caprice. I am not yet speaking of St. Thomas Aquinas, who could not and would not consider the Scriptures otherwise than in the framework of Aristotelian philosophy and who taught the generations that followed to value this framework as much as what it contained. But a thinker as thoroughly free and Christian as Duns Scotus felt at peace only when he succeeded in convincing himself that above God there exists something which binds Him, that for God Himself the impossible exists: lapidem non potest (Deus) beatificare nee potentia absoluta nee ordinata (He—God—cannot make a stone blessed either through absolute or through ordered power). Why did he need to say this? He could, had he wished, easily have recalled what is related in Genesis: God created man out of the dust and He blessed man whom He created out of the dust. Whether He did it potentia ordinata or potentia absoluta matters little; whatever Duns Scotus says, He did it. But Duns Scotus is afraid to grant God a limitless sovereignty; he imagines perhaps that God Himself is afraid of such sovereignty. I think that if we would question Duns Scotus we would discover that God not only cannot beatificare lapidem (make a stone blessed) but that He is incapable of doing many other things besides. Duns Scotus would certainly have repeated after St. Augustine: “God’s justification can be without your will, but it cannot be in you against your will. . . . He, therefore, Who created you without yourself does not justify you without yourself. So He creates you without your knowing it and justifies you with your will.” And, after Aristotle, he would have repeated Agathon’s words:
For one thing only is impossible to God: to make undone that which has been done.22
One could discover many other things that are “impossible” to God, and the philosophy which takes for its point of departure the principle that the knowledge of the possible precedes the knowledge of the real at last obtains what it needs when it comes up against obstacles that are as insurmountable for God as they are for men. These are what we call vérités de raison [truths of reason] or veritates aeternae: for what is insurmountable for God is so definitively and forever. And, most important, not only is it given to man to know that there are insurmountable obstacles before which God Himself must bow, but it is also given to man to discern (obviously by means of his spiritual eyes) these insurmountable things in being and in reality. We have heard that God cannot beatificare lapidem, that He cannot save man against his will, and that He cannot make what has been not to have been. There are many such “impossibles” which stand over God as well as over men: ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), the principle of contradiction, etc. . . . The totality of these “impossibles” and of the “possibles” that correspond to them forms a whole science. This science, which precedes every other knowledge, which precedes reality itself, is the basic philosophical science. And both men and gods must again learn it from the very Necessity which itself learns nothing, knows nothing, and wishes to know nothing, which is not concerned with any thing or any person and which despite this—without wishing or seeking it—has been reared so high above everything existing that gods and men all become equal before it, equal in rights or, more correctly, equal in the lack of all rights.
This is what Hegel has admirably expressed in his Logic with the prudent and clever courage that characterizes him: “Consequently one must regard logic as the system of pure reason, the kingdom of pure thought. This kingdom is the truth without veils, as it is in itself and for itself. Therefore one can say that its content is the image of God, such as it is in its eternal essence before the creation of the world and of a finite spirit.” Some dozen pages further, Hegel, as if he had forgotten that he wrote God with a capital letter, tells us: “The system of logic is the kingdom of shadows, the world of simple essences, free of all concrete and sensible being.” Obviously Hegel could have himself brought together the two passages that we have just cited, instead of separating them by a dozen pages. Then the reader would have more clearly understood what the unveiled truth is and what kind of God He is who existed before the creation of the world and of the concrete spirit. But Hegel, the most daring of philosophical smugglers, was the child of his time and knew how, when necessary, to pass over certain things in silence, as he also knew how to avoid useless bringings together. Logic is “the image of God such as He was before the creation of the world”; “logic is the kingdom of shadows” (of shadows and not of spirits, it is expressly said). Then God, such as He is, is the kingdom of shadows? Not at all, many admirers of Hegel will tell you: Hegel was a believer, a convinced Christian. He adored God in spirit and in truth, as Holy Scripture demands.
This is undeniable: in no other philosopher does one so frequently encounter the words “spirit” and “truth.” And besides, Hegel called Christianity the absolute religion, declared that the Word had become flesh, recognized the Trinity and the sacraments and “almost” everything that Christianity teaches, and sought to give it a philosophical foundation. This is all correct. And it is still more correct that Hegelian Christianity, like the entire Hegelian philosophy that is based upon Aristotle, corresponds, in a way that cannot be improved upon, to the disposition of the modern mind. It is possible, it is even very probable, that if Hegel had been a Catholic, he would have been recognized as a doctor ecclesiae and would have replaced St. Thomas Aquinas, who, in large measure, is dated and needs to be corrected or, as is said in order to avoid conflicts, “interpreted.” But read a page of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and you will know what the essence of this Christianity is, or, more precisely, how Christianity must “transform” itself in order to satisfy at the same time “the reason and conscience” of European man educated by the Aristotelian Necessity; or, still more precisely, how the Christianity which has fallen under the power of Necessity has been transformed. “It is possible that in a religion faith should begin with miracles, but Christ himself spoke against miracles. He denounced the Jews who demanded miracles of him and said to his disciples, “The spirit will lead you to all truth.” The faith that is based on things so external is only a formal faith, and it must give place to the true faith. If this is not so, then it would be necessary to demand of men that they believe things which, after having attained a certain degree of education, they can no longer believe . . .23 Such a faith is a faith that has for its content the finite and the contingent; it is not, therefore, the true faith, for the content of the true faith is not contingent . . . That the guests at the marriage at Cana drank more or less wine is, for example, of no importance. The healing of a paralyzed hand is also only a pure accident; millions of men have paralyzed and crippled limbs and no one heals them. Again, it is said in the Old Testament that at the time of the Exodus the Jews marked their houses with bloody signs in order that the angel of the Lord should be able to recognize them, as if without these signs the angel would not have been able to distinguish the Jewish houses. Such a faith has no interest for the spirit. It is against this faith that the bitterest sarcasms of Voltaire are directed. He says, among other things, that God would have done better to teach the Jews the immortality of the soul than to instruct them how aller à la selle [go to the toilet] (Deut. 23:13–15). The places for relieving oneself thus become the content of faith.”
Hegel rarely speaks in so free a way. He was undoubtedly at the end of his patience and laid bare almost everything that he had accumulated in his soul in the course of his long apostolate. How can one ask of educated men that they seriously believe in the story of the marriage at Cana, in the healing of paralytics, in the resurrection of the dead, or that they consider as God Him in whose name verses 13 to 15 of the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy were written? And Hegel is right: one cannot ask such things, and this not only of cultivated people but also of simple men. But do the Holy Scriptures demand faith? By himself man can no more obtain faith than he could obtain his own being. It is this that Hegel does not even suspect. Such an idea does not enter into the thought of a learned man. Hegel writes: “Knowledge or faith, for faith is only a particular form of knowledge.” This is what all of us think. And, indeed, if faith is only knowledge, then the stories of the marriage at Cana or of the resurrection of Lazarus are only absurd inventions against which it is necessary to protect learned as well as unlearned people. And then the Scriptures, the Old as well as the New Testament, are only Inventions and lies; for these books do not demand but presuppose faith in what is incompatible, completely incompatible, with knowledge. Hegel obviously did not go to this length and express his thought completely. But it is not difficult to say it for him, and it is necessary to say it. It is not a question restricted only to Hegel, but refers to all of us, to the thought that is common to all of us. Hegel’s argument is not even original; it is not for nothing that he refers to Voltaire. He could have referred to Celsus who, fifteen hundred years before Voltaire, had said everything that can be said against the Holy Scriptures and who, as Was proper for a cultivated man (fifteen hundred years ago there Were already men as cultivated as Hegel and as all of us who have been to Hegel’s school), became enraged at the thought that there are men for whom and a Bible in which faith is not identified with, but opposed to, knowledge.
We read in the Bible: “If ye have faith as a grain of a mustard seed, ye shall say to this mountain ‘Remove hence to yonder place’ and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”24 Hegel does not mention these words. He feels that they are more difficult to handle than the story of the marriage at Cana and the resurrection of Lazarus, that it is more difficult to rid oneself of them. I say this is wrong: the one thing is as easy or difficult as the other. That the mountain should or should not remove itself at the command of man—this is in the domain of the finite and contingent and consequently is of no great interest to us. And then Hegel nowhere says but surely thinks: mountains are removed precisely by those who lack the faith of which Scripture speaks. This is the secret meaning of his words: “A miracle is nothing but a violation of natural relationships and, by the same token, nothing but a violation of the spirit.” Hegel expected nothing from faith: he placed all his hopes on science and knowledge. And if “the spirit” is the incarnation of science and knowledge, then one must agree with Hegel that a miracle is a violation of the spirit.
But we have seen something else. We have seen that science and knowledge were born of Necessity, that the birth of knowledge was a violation of man. Of this Hegel does not speak. He is a daring and truly ingenious smuggler, and he knows how to pass forbidden wares under the eyes of the most vigilant guards. The Evangelist’s miracles are a violation of the spirit while the killing of Socrates was perpetrated with the consent and approval of the spirit, because the miracles violate the natural relationships of things while the killing of Socrates does not. One would have thought that it is just the other way around: that it is the natural relationships of things that constitute the greatest violation of the spirit. Here, however, Hegel is powerless. But he does not dare admit his weakness and hides it under the solemn word “freedom.”25 Hegel’s mortal enemy, Schelling, thought as did Hegel himself on this matter. And this is quite in the nature of things; be who has turned around to look backwards sees Necessity, and he who sees Necessity is changed into a stone—a stone endowed with consciousness. For such a person the marriage at Cana, the resurrection of Lazarus, the poisoning of Socrates and the poisoning of a dog all become contingent and finite; for such a person the only source of truth is reason, and the only goal is the “contentment with oneself” of which it is said that “it springs from reason and is the highest possible.”
IX
Kant is considered the destroyer of metaphysics, while Hegel is regarded as the philosopher who gave back to metaphysics the rights that Kant had torn away from it. In reality Hegel only completed Kant’s work.26 The conviction that faith is knowledge, the hostility to Holy Scripture carefully hidden under the appearance of respect, the denial of the very possibility of any other participation in truth than that which science offers—all these sufficiently testify to the goal that Hegel had set for himself. For him there is only one source of truth; he is “convinced” that all those who wished to find the truth have always and everywhere gone to the sources from which his own philosophy sprang. In his Logic he writes: “The quality of the concept consists in negating itself, in holding itself back and making itself passive in regard to what is, in order that the latter be not determined by the subject but be able to show itself as it is in itself.” And in the Philosophy of Religion he declares: “In faithful prayer the individual forgets himself and becomes filled with his object.”
If this is so, it is obvious that “in philosophy religion receives its justification from the thinking consciousness. . . . Thought is the absolute ruler before which the content must prove itself true.” And of the very Christianity that he calls the absolute religion, he says in a tone that brooks no contradiction, “the true content of Christian faith is to be justified through philosophy.” This means: being is situated entirely and without residue on the level of reasonable thought and everything that suggests—no matter how remotely—the possibility of another dimension must be energetically repressed as fantastic and non-existent. “Just as man must learn to recognize the sensible on the basis that it is there and that it is, just as man must accept the sun because it is there, so man must accept science, man must accept truth.”
Whatever Hegel may do, whatever his efforts to convince himself and others that freedom is for him more precious than anything else in the world may be, finally he comes back to the old way, recognized by and comprehensible (that is to say, reasonable) to all: to constraint. In the metaphysical realm where philosophy dwells, as in the empirical realm where the positive sciences live, that Necessity of which Aristotle and Epictetus have told us so much alone rules and governs. Whether one wishes it or not, one must recognize what is given by the senses, just as one cannot escape from the “truths” of the religion that Hegel calls Christianity. Yet Hegel himself has no need of Christianity because the science of logic grasps, without the help of Christianity, the unveiled truth as it is in itself and for itself as well as God’s eternal essence before the creation of the world.
I do not know if Hegel inadvertently betrayed himself by uniting in such a tangible way the “truth” of concrete, sensible reality with the religious truths in the general notion of constraining truth, or if he deliberately emphasized the indestructible bonds that exist between metaphysical and positive knowledge. I am inclined to believe that he did it deliberately just as, in speaking of the marriage at Cana and of the healing of the paralytics, he deliberately concluded with the Voltairean aller à la selle. But whether it was deliberate or not, it is clear in any case that for him neither metaphysics nor religion can draw their truths from sources other than those which teach us, using the formula of Spinoza, that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles—and this even though already in the Phenomenology of the Spirit he speaks with extreme arrogance and scorn of the methods of mathematics. This is why I have said that Hegel only completed Kant’s work. It is known that for Kant metaphysics reduced itself to three fundamental problems—God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. When he posed the question “Is metaphysics possible?” he set out from the assumption that metaphysics is possible only if the answer to these three problems will be furnished us by the same authority that enlightens us when we ask if one can inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or if one can make what has been not to have been. Now, according to Kant, to the questions “Can one inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or make what has been not to have been?” we obtain answers that are completely precise and obligatory for all or, as he puts it, universal and necessary: one cannot inscribe a rhombus in a circumference or make what has been not to have been. But to the three metaphysical problems such answers cannot be obtained: it may be that God exists, as it may be that God does not exist; it may be that the soul is immortal, as it may be that it is mortal; it may be that free will exists, or it may be that it does not exist. All the “critique of pure reason” comes down basically to this. Indeed, if Kant had fully expressed his thought or, rather, if he had formulated his conclusions less cautiously, he would have said: God does not exist, the soul (which also does not exist) is mortal, free will is a myth.
But, beside the theoretical reason, Kant also assumes a practical reason. And when we address the same questions to the practical reason the situation immediately changes: God exists, the soul is immortal, the will is free. Why and how Kant transferred to the practical reason the powers that he had so pitilessly wrested from the theoretical reason is unnecessary to recount; everyone knows it. What is important is that Hegel’s metaphysics is basically not at all distinguished from Kant’s practical reason. To put it differently, Kant’s practical reason already contained, under an incompletely developed form, all of Hegel’s metaphysics. This seems almost paradoxical, but it is so and it could not be otherwise, because both of them set out from the traditional conviction that there is only one source of truth and that the truth is that to which every man can be led by constraint.
Almost every page of Hegel’s writings reveals to us that his metaphysics was born of Kant’s practical reason. Such is the meaning of his ontological proof of the existence of God: with Hegel as with Kant, it is not the theoretical but the practical reason which here “proves.” Even more clearly does this come out from the following thought of Hegel: “When a man does evil, this evil is at the same time given as something which in itself is nothing, as something over which the spirit has power, so that the spirit can bring it about that the evil should not have occurred. The meaning of repentance and atonement consists in that the crime, by the fact that its perpetrator has been raised to the truth, is apprehended as something which in itself and for itself has been overcome, which of itself has no power. That what happened should so be made not to have happened cannot come about in a sensible way but rather in a spiritual way, inwardly.”
Hegel’s entire metaphysics is thus constructed: where the theoretical reason stops, feeling its impotence and incapacity to do anything whatsoever, the practical reason comes to its aid and declares that it has a remedy for everything. Only the terms differ: instead of “practical reason” Hegel says “Geist.” Obviously no force in the world can bring it about that what has once been should not have been, and the crimes that have been committed—even the most terrible, Cain’s fratricide and Judas’ betrayal—will remain committed for all eternity. They belong to the domain of pure theoretical reason, and by that very fact are subordinated to the power of the implacable Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded. But it is not at all necessary that what has once been should not have been in the sensible and finite world, just as there is no need for the marriage at Cana or the resurrection of Lazarus. All this breaks the natural relationships and is consequently a “violation of the spirit.” The practical reason has found something much better: “inwardly,” “spiritually,” through repentance, it will make what has been not to have been.
Here, as frequently happens in reading Hegel’s works, one asks himself if it is really he who is saying what he thinks, or if it is the Necessity that is speaking through its intermediary, after having hypnotized him and changed him into a stone endowed with consciousness. It may even be assumed that Cain and Judas, if they had not known repentance, would have forgotten what they had done and their crimes would have been drowned in Lethe. But repentance is repentance precisely because it cannot come to terms with what has happened. This is the origin of the legend of the Wandering Jew. And if you do not like legends, I recall to you the testimony of Pushkin:
The long scroll of my memories unrolls before me;
And in reading my life with disgust,
I tremble and curse.
I moan bitterly and bitterly weep,
But I cannot blot out these overwhelming lines.
Pushkin did not kill a brother or betray a divine master, but he knows that no practical reason, no truth—not even that which, according to Hegel, existed before the creation of the world—can give him that for which his soul longs. It is to be assumed that Pushkin judged otherwise than did Hegel of the marriage at Cana and of the resurrection of Lazarus; it did not seem to him that the stories of Holy Scripture must be submitted to the verification of “our thought, which is the sole judge” and that the breaking of the natural relationships between phenomena was a violation of the spirit.
For Hegel as for Kant, faith, or what he calls “faith,” is under the eternal tutelage of reason. “Faith, however, rests upon the testimony of the spirit—not upon miracles but upon the absolute truth, upon the eternal idea, and thus upon a true content. And from this point of view miracles present only a paltry interest.” I think it is again necessary to correct the last words of the sentence quoted and to say not that “miracles present only a paltry interest” but that “miracles present no interest at all,” as the Stoics said: all that is not in our power is “indifferent.” Or again—and here Hegel’s true “interest” or, rather, the basic postulate of his thought would appear—it is necessary to say that all miracles, those of which the Bible testifies and those that are recounted in the Thousand and One Nights, are only worthless trash, rejected by the theoretical reason and completely unacceptable to the practical reason. Or, as Kant said: the deus ex machina is the most absurd of all suppositions, the idea of a supreme being involved in the affairs of men means the end of all philosophy. Kant’s thought as well as Hegel’s rests entirely on this principle. Even Leibniz’s innocent “pre-established harmony” was for them an object of horror and disgust, as idols were for the biblical prophets. The “pre-established harmony” is again nothing but the deus ex machina whose acceptance must sooner or later make man leave the rut of normal thought. Kant and Hegel, to be sure, were unfair to Leibniz. Leibniz never tried to make anyone come out of the norm or the rut. If he admitted a pre-established harmony, it was only for a single time, as did Seneca, for example, with his semper paret, semel jussit (He always obeys but has commanded only once). For Leibniz also, the thought based on the jubere seemed monstrous and barbarous. Consensu sapientium [by the agreement of the wise] the deus ex machina and the supreme being have always been driven by the philosophers outside the limits of real being into the region of the eternally fantastic.
But we would ask once again: by what right is the deus ex machina considered an absurd supposition and the supreme being declared the enemy of philosophical researches? When the chemist, the physicist or the geologist turn away from the deus ex machina or from the supreme being, they have their reasons for this. But a philosopher, and especially a philosopher who has undertaken the critique of pure reason—why does he not see that the deus ex machina has quite as much right to existence as any synthetic judgment whatsoever? And that in any case one cannot a priori qualify him as an absurd supposition? And yet, it is enough to grant him certain rights, be they even the most minimal, for the entire “critique” to fall to pieces. Then it would appear that the point on which stands or falls the philosophy of Kant and of all those who followed him depended on a shadow, on an idea having no relationship with reality. Or to put it better: the idea that the deus ex machina (höheres Wesen) is the most absurd of all possible suppositions was suggested to Kant and to those who followed him by that very Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded and has the capacity to change into stones all those who look at it. And its power of suggestion was such that Kant could never—either in reality or in dream, either alone or in the presence of others—tear himself away from the power of this idea. All reality found itself passed somehow into a flattening mill and forcibly introduced into that two-dimensional thought, which in fact does not “admit” (that is to say, refuses to give any place to) either the deus ex machina or the höheres Wesen and therefore considers as an absurdity everything that bears the stamp of the unforeseen, of freedom, of originality, everything that seeks and desires not passive being but the creative action that is not bound or determined by anything.
It was on this level, too, that there was installed Hegel’s “spirit” which, notwithstanding its overly celebrated freedom, was also—probably even before the creation of the world—condemned to turn in the circle “wherein the first is also the last and the last also the first.” For Hegel, as for Kant and for Fichte and Schelling (especially the Schelling of the first period), the idea of knowledge and the idea of truth were indissolubly bound to the idea of mechanism. In Fichte and Schelling we even find such expressions as “the mechanism of the human spirit.” In The Critique of Judgment Kant insists on the proposition that it is absolutely impossible to prove that organisms could not be produced by purely mechanical and natural means. And in The Critique of Pure Reason we read: “If we could explore to the bottom all the phenomena of human choice, there would not be any human action that we could not certainly predict and know as necessary from its anterior conditions.”
I ask again (and one cannot stop asking this question, even though its constant repetition will irritate and fatigue both the author and his readers): Whence did the great German philosophers derive this attachment to “mechanism,” as if they had already in infancy taken a Hannibal-like vow not to stop before overthrowing the detestable deus ex machina? Whence, more generally, springs the conviction in all the philosophy of all the centuries that it is in mechanism, in Selbstbewegung [self-generated movement], in movement in a circle, that we must seek the final mystery of creation? The German idealists always loved to speak of freedom and endlessly glorified freedom. But what freedom can there be where everything is “natural,” where mechanism rules? And was not Plato when he spoke to us of his prisoners in the cave, or Luther with his de servo arbitrio [bondage of the will], or Spinoza who openly admitted that everything that he wrote was written not because he freely wished it but under the influence of an external constraint, closer to the truth? Such disclosures (as well as the terror that flows from them—“the fear of God”), are signs of at least the presentiment of awakening and deliverance (here on earth men probably do not know Plotinus’ “true awakening”) or of a longing for freedom, and show us that we are dealing not with stones endowed with consciousness but with living men.
X
Hegel’s metaphysics and Kant’s practical reason are nourished from the same source and lie on the same plane. The modern attempts to overcome Kant’s formalism and to construct a material ethic were condemned in advance to failure. To remove formalism from ethics is to destroy ethics. Formalism is the soul of ethics, just as “theory” is the soul of “knowledge.” It is formalism alone that makes possible what is called autonomous ethics, the only kind that deserves the name of ethics. Obviously, “law is the king of all, of mortals and immortals”: this we have already heard from Plato. But there is something else that is no less essential: ethics has its own laws that are not the same as those which govern the other realms of being. It is this that we must never forget; otherwise, the constructions of Kant and Hegel lose their meaning and their importance. Already in The Critique of Pure Reason the role of ethics in Kant’s conception of the world is fixed in a precise enough way, just as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit one can easily discern the contours of his philosophy of history and of his philosophy of religion. But it is only in The Critique of Practical Reason that the idea of autonomous ethics appears openly under its true aspect. There is room to believe that Hegel, who criticized Kant’s ethics so self-assuredly and so pitilessly, owed much to it. It permitted him to keep the precepts of Spinoza that he could never renounce (sub specie aeternitatis seu necessitates—in the perspective of eternity or necessity—which Hegel translated as “adoration in spirit and in truth”) and to preserve at the same time the attitude, the solemn tone, which the elevation of his thought justifies and which, in the eyes of people in a hurry, brings contemplative philosophy, the vassal of Necessity, close to religion.
Surely if any ethics can pretend to the title “elevated,” it is Kant’s ethics, based on the idea of pure duty. People often quote the famous phrase of The Critique of Practical Reason: “The starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” But in my judgment the lyrical digression of the third chapter of the first part of the same Critique is still more important: “Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating but requirest submission and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or terror, but only holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience)—a law before which all inclinations are dumb even though they secretly work against it: what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations and from which to be descended is the indispensable condition of the only worth which men can give themselves?”
This attempt (rather gauche from a literary point of view) to compose a prayer out of the notions derived from “pure reason,” does not leave any doubt about what Kant really meant by “ethical formalism.” Formalism in Kant is the “adoration in spirit and in truth” of which Hegel, as well as the modern philosophers who go back to Hegel, speak so much. Kant knew quite as well as do our contemporaries how to develop the idea of personality, which was, for him, the condition and foundation of an autonomous morality. In the same chapter, “On the Motives of the Pure Practical Reason,” we read: “The idea of personality which awakens respect, which places the sublimity of our nature (according to its definition) before our eyes . . . is natural and easily perceptible even to the most ordinary human reason . . . It is the effect of a respect for something which is completely other than life, in comparison and in opposition to which life with all its charms has no value. He lives, henceforth, only out of duty, not because he finds the least pleasure in living.” I do not really know wherein the “duty” before which Kant prostrates himself is distinguished from Hegel’s “spirit” and why modern philosophical criticism holds Kant’s doctrine of personality to be inadequate. The idea of duty, the idea of the sanctity of the moral law, as well as the idea of the autonomy of the reasonable being, and all the sublimity and solemnity that these ideas bring to man—all these are guaranteed by the Critique of Practical Reason no less than universal and necessary judgments are guaranteed to science by the Critique of Pure Reason.
Hegel could “think his system to the end” only by introducing into the domain of theoretical reason, with everyone’s knowledge and with his customary boldness (Hegel could permit himself all kinds of boldness with impunity, and even an eye as vigilant as that of Schelling who closely surveyed the “dialectic” of his enemy perceived nothing), the lofty ideas procured by Kant’s practical reason. “Man,” he says in his Logic, “must raise himself to the abstract generality in which it is really indifferent to him whether he does or does not exist, that is, whether he does or does not exist in finite life (for it is a question here of a state, a determinate existence, etc.)—so that si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae, ‘if the heavens should crack over him, the ruins would strike him unafraid,’ as a Roman said; and the Christian must feel himself still more in this state of indifference.” Everyone knows these words of Hegel; he did not hide them, they are placed clearly in evidence. But Hegel’s self-assurance is such that it occurs to no one that Hegel’s “spirit” is nothing other than Kant’s “duty” of which we have just spoken. All are convinced that Hegel overcame Kant’s formalism and do not notice that his ontological proof of the existence of God (from which we have extracted the sentence quoted above) is distinguished in absolutely no way from Kant’s “postulate of God,” just as the Hegelian “spirit” is not at all distinguished from the Kantian “duty.”
Kant and Hegel went to seek the final truth in one and the same place. They made great efforts to raise themselves (“erheben” [sublime], “Erhabenheit” [sublimity] are favorite terms of both Kant and Hegel) to the regions from which the sources of being and of life flow. But they were convinced beforehand that man cannot take a step without turning backward and without looking forward—in short, without assuring himself first that the way which he wishes to follow is open. The Critique of Pure Reason was par excellence a looking backward. Kant asked (of whom?): is metaphysics possible? And the response naturally was: No, it is not possible. But, I repeat, Whom did he ask? Upon whom did he confer the right to decide what is possible and what is impossible? Experience as the source of metaphysical knowledge had been rejected by Kant. Already at the beginning of the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (First Edition), Kant definitely says of experience: “It tells us indeed what is but it does not tell us that it must necessarily be so and not otherwise. Therefore it does not give us any true universality, and reason which aspires so avidly to this kind of knowledge is more irritated than satisfied by it.” Remarkable words! Kant, as we see, immediately addressed his questions to reason and was sincerely convinced that he was writing a Critique of Pure Reason. He did not even ask himself: why must we endeavor to satisfy reason? Reason avidly seeks the universal and the necessary; we must be prepared for everything, prepared to sacrifice everything, in order that it may obtain the necessity which is so dear to its heart, in order that it be not irritated. The question arose before Kant: Is metaphysics possible and from what source can suffering humanity draw the elixir of life (do not forget that, according to Kant, metaphysics deals with God, the immortality of the soul and free will)? But Kant thinks only of pleasing reason, to which God, the soul and free will matter little—provided only that one does not offend Necessity! The positive sciences have justified themselves in the eyes of Necessity; if metaphysics wishes to have the right to exist, it must also assure itself of the goodwill of Necessity. “Necessity and strict universality are sure signs of a priori knowledge,” which is the only knowledge that man can trust. This is for Kant an evident truth, as it is evident that the deus ex machina is the most absurd of suppositions and that if ein höheres Wesen (a supreme being) intervenes in human affairs philosophy has nothing more to do in the world.
Who suggested to Kant that he should believe in these “truths?” How are such suggestions possible? You will not find answers to these questions in Kant’s “Critiques.” Neither will you find them in the philosophical systems which have continued Kant’s work. For to whom is one to address these questions? And is it possible to resist Necessity, to persuade it? “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” But in return it has the power, which is quite superfluous to it, of bewitching and conquering men. We have just heard the prayer that Kant addresses to duty: the practical reason only repeats docilely what it has learned from the theoretical reason. For the theoretical reason the source of truth is Necessity; for the practical reason virtue consists in obedience. The supremacy of the practical reason presents no danger. It will not be indignant, it will not betray, and its “commandments” will not at all threaten the order that has been established in the universe without it and in no way for it. It is impossible, for example, to admit the idea of purpose (finality) in nature: such autonomy would recall the deus ex machina or the supreme being and would be an incursion into the domain reserved for all eternity to Necessity. But the practical reason is modest and undemanding; it will never make any attempts against the sovereign rights of Necessity and mechanism.
If one at times observes in “experience” phenomena—organisms, for example—that lead men to believe that someone (who is not as indifferent to everything as Necessity) has borne a certain concern for the arrangement of the world, practical reason immediately arises and tells us that it is necessary to mistrust this supposition and that it would be better to admit that things happen in the world as if (als ob) someone occupied himself with the destiny of the world. Such an “as if” does not offend the majesty of Necessity and does not make any attempts on its sovereignty. In return, it is permitted to men to speak as much as they wish “of the wise adaptation of man’s cognitive faculties to his practical vocation” (such is the title of one of the chapters of the Critique of Practical Reason). It will be said: if one speaks of “wise adaptation,” is there not then purpose or finality? Will not the deus ex machina then reappear despite all interdictions? Not in the least; Kant knows what he is doing. This is not the miracle of Cana and it is not the resurrection of Lazarus. It is only one of those natural “miracles” that Necessity light-heartedly puts at the disposal of the philosophers. Such miracles will not bring you into the metaphysical realm. On the contrary, the more miracles of this kind in the world, the better will men be protected against metaphysics. This is why, as I have just said, the theoretical reason has so readily granted to the practical reason “primacy” and even the uncontrolled right to dispose of “metaphysical consolations.” For the role of metaphysical consolations is precisely to permit man to do without metaphysics, that is to say, to obtain without God, without the immortality of the soul, and without free will, the “contentment with oneself that reason produces.”
In Hegel the practical reason does not live in the neighborhood of the theoretical reason; it is found at the very heart of the latter. “Man must raise himself to abstract generality”: in Hegel this “categorical imperative” flows from “logic.” It is necessary to recognize this: Hegel thought Kant through to the end. He knows as well as Kant that metaphysics is impossible—the metaphysics that seeks God, the immortality of the soul and free will. But it is impossible not because reason is limited and because the categories of our thought are applicable only to what is given by the senses. The very act of raising the question of the limits of human reason irritated Hegel, and he apparently had sufficient grounds to believe that for Kant himself such was no longer the task of the “critique of reason.” A metaphysics which wishes to discover God, the immortality of the soul and free will is impossible because as God, the immortality of the soul and free will do not exist; all these are only bad dreams that are seen by men who do not know how to rise above the particular and the contingent and who refuse to adore in spirit and in truth. It is necessary at all costs to deliver humanity from these dreams and from the “unhappy consciousness” which created them. They are only representations (Vorstellungen). As long as man will not tear himself away from them and will not penetrate into the realm of pure concepts (Begriffe) given by reason, the truth will remain hidden from him. Super hanc petram (on this rock) Hegel’s entire philosophy is founded.
XI
So Hegel taught, but he had found all this in Kant. When Kant summoned metaphysics before the tribunal of reason he knew that it would be condemned. And when, later, Fichte, the young Schelling and Hegel wished to obtain from the same tribunal a revision of the case, they also knew that the cause of metaphysics was forever lost and hopeless. Kant strained all the tremendous powers of his dialectic in order to rid the human soul of the strange elements that he called “sensuousness.” But dialectic did not suffice. All that is customarily called “proof” loses, beyond a certain limit, the power of constraining and subduing. One can easily “prove” that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, but how is one to “prove” to a man that if the very sky falls in upon his head he must remain calm under the ruins, for what happened had to happen? To prove such a thing is impossible. One can only suggest it to himself and to others, as one can only suggest to himself and to others but not prove that the deus ex machina is the most absurd of suppositions and that Necessity has received the sovereign right of driving the great Parmenides on.
Submitting to his destiny or, to use Hegel’s terms, to the spirit of the time, Kant did not disdain suggestion as a means of searching for the truth. The principal thing is to obtain “universality and necessity,” the rest is secondary. Suggestion obtains universality and necessity quite as well as do proofs. One would think that there would be no place for prayer where it is a question of the critique of the pure theoretical reason or the critique of the pure practical reason. But Kant asked permission of no one and addressed prayers to duty, and this passes for “proof.” One would think that the ancient “anathema” had already long since been banished from the domain of philosophical thought, but when it is a question of ridding the human soul of all that is “pathological” (for Kant the term “pathological” does not mean diseased or abnormal; he uses it as a synonym for “sensuous”), Kant does not disdain anathema and even anathema passes for proof. “Suppose,” he writes, “that someone says his lust is irresistible when the desired object and opportunity are present. Ask him whether he would not control his passion if, in front of the house where he has this opportunity, a gallows were erected on which he would be hanged immediately after gratifying his lust. We do not have to guess very long what his answer would be. But ask him whether he thinks it would be possible for him to overcome his love of life, however great it may be, if his sovereign threatened him with the same sudden death unless he made a false deposition against an honorable man whom the ruler wished to destroy under a plausible pretext. Whether he would or not he perhaps will not venture to say; but that it would be possible for him he would certainly admit without hesitation. He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he knows that he ought, and he recognizes that he is free—a fact which, without the moral law, would have remained unknown to him.”
What is the meaning of this “argumentation?” And does there not remain here only a shadow of that freedom of which Kant speaks with such eloquence here and elsewhere in his works and which the best representatives of philosophy in their time have proclaimed? To justify his categorical imperatives Kant found no means other than suggestion and incantation. He prayed long and ardently before the altar of duty and when he felt in himself the necessary power—or rather, when he felt that he had no more power, that he himself no longer existed, that another power was working through him (when “he raised himself to abstract generality,” to speak as Hegel did), and when he became the blind and will-less instrument of this power—then he wrote the Critique of Practical Reason.
The theoretical reason cannot be satisfied as long as it has not convinced everyone, as long as it has not dictated its laws to nature. The practical reason leaves nature in peace, but its “will to power” demands that men should submit to it. The fate of men, then, is always the parere (obedience) while the jubere (commanding) remains at the disposal of the “idea,” the “principle.” The goal of philosophy thus comes down to this: to suggest to men, in one way or another, the conviction that the living being must not command but obey and that the refusal to obey is a mortal sin punished by eternal damnation. And this is what is called freedom! Man is free to choose the jubere instead of the parere, but he cannot bring it about that he who has chosen the parere should be damned. Here freedom ends, here everything is pre-determined. “Even the author and founder of the universe” cannot change anything of this. His freedom also has been reduced to obedience. Kant goes even further than Seneca: he will not admit that God commanded even once. No one has ever commanded; all have always obeyed. Every command is a deus ex machina which signifies the end of philosophy. This he knows a priori. But he also proves a posteriori, as we have just seen, that the moral law is realized—otherwise, it is true, that the commandments of the theoretical reason, but nevertheless realized: the “voluptuary” will be afraid of the gallows, while the man who obeys the moral law will feel no fear even in the face of the gallows. Why did Kant need to concern himself with such a “realization”? Why threaten the voluptuary with the gallows? Why not give him the “freedom” to follow his inclinations, since freedom is recognized as man’s fundamental prerogative? But such freedom is for the philosopher even more hateful than the deus ex machina and, in order to kill it, Kant did not disdain even the empirical gallows which, it seems, do not hesitate to become involved in the affairs of pure a priori judgments. But there is a limit to philosophical patience. The noble Epictetus cut off the noses and ears of his intellectual opponents; Kant is prepared to hang them. And they are obviously right; they have no other means at their disposal. Without the help of empirical constraint (Aristotle’s bia) the “pure” ideas would never obtain the victory and the triumph that they so highly esteem.
And yet Kant “made the reckoning without the innkeeper.” The gallows will not help him or, in any case, will not always help him. He speaks of a “voluptuary,” that is to say, he clothes the man with his shroud even before his fate is decided. It is permissible to cut off the voluptuary’s nose and ears, it is permissible to hang him, but one may not under any circumstances grant him freedom. But try for a moment to come down from the “heights” of pure reason and ask yourself who is this voluptuary whom Kant so implacably executes. Kant will not answer; he prefers to remain in the domain of general concepts. But it is not for nothing that people have always sought to make general concepts pure and transparent. The concept of the voluptuary is the Pushkin who wrote The Egyptian Nights; it is the Don Juan of Spanish legend; it is the Orpheus and Pygmalion of ancient mythology; it is also the immortal author of The Song of Songs.
If Kant had thought about it—or rather if, before playing the role of hypnotist, he had not himself been hypnotized by omnipotent Necessity—he would have felt that the thing was not so simple and self-evident and that neither his shroud nor his gallows pre-judge or decide anything here. Orpheus was not afraid to go down to Hades to seek out Eurydice; Pygmalion demanded of the gods a miracle; Don Juan pressed the hand of the statue that had come alive; in Pushkin a timid young man gives his life for a night with Cleopatra. And in The Song of Songs we read that love is strong as death. What remains of Kant’s suggestions? And what eternal truths can his practical reason, and the moral law that this reason contains, furnish? And is it not clear that true freedom is found infinitely far from the regions that the practical reason has chosen and where it resides? Is it not clear that where the law exists, where the parere exists, there is not and cannot be any freedom, that freedom is inextricably bound to that jubere which we have become accustomed to consider as the source of all errors, all absurdities, and all that is forbidden? Pygmalion did not ask anyone if he could demand a miracle for himself. Orpheus broke the eternal law and went down to Hades, though he should not and could not have gone there, though no mortal had ever gone down there before him. And the gods approved their daring, and even we others, we cultivated men, when we hear the story of their deeds, sometimes forget all that we have been taught and also rejoice with the gods.
Pygmalion wished the impossible, and because he wished it the impossible became possible, the statue became a living woman. If our “thought” incorporated in itself the ardent passion of Pygmalion, thus acquiring a new dimension, many things considered “impossible” would become possible and what seems false would become true. Then such impossible things would happen as that Kant would cease to characterize Pygmalion as a voluptuary and that Hegel would recognize that a miracle is not a violation of the spirit but, on the contrary, the impossibility of miracles is the Worst violation of the spirit. Or am I deceived and would they continue to repeat what they have always said? Would they continue to suggest to us that the passions and the desires (Neigungen) must bow down before duty and that the true life is the life of the man who knows how to rise above the “contingent” and the “temporary?” Was Calvin right: “Not all are created under the same condition, but to some eternal life is preordained, to others eternal damnation”? Who will answer this question?
XII
In one way or another we now understand why Hegel was so afraid to break the “natural relationships of things” and why Kant, without any preliminary “critique,” that is to say, not only without discussing the question but without even indicating the possibility of any questions or doubts whatsoever in this matter, submitted metaphysics to the judgment of the positive sciences that had justified themselves and to the synthetic a priori judgments on which these are based.
“All the interest of my reason (the speculative as well as the practical) is combined in the following three questions: What can (kann) I know? What must (soll) I do? What may (darf) I hope?,” writes Kant in one of the last chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason. To whom are these questions addressed? With this Kant is as little concerned as is Hegel. It seems absurd, no doubt, for him to admit that the very readiness to raise these questions binds men in advance and forever. When he studied the positive sciences he asked: What are the highest mountains on earth? What are the dimensions of the sun’s diameter? What is the speed of sound or of light? etc. And he became accustomed to think that it is always proper to question, that someone exists who can be questioned, and that it is to him that he must put all questions—him whom he asked concerning the mountains, the sun, the light and the sound—for at his disposal are all the kann, soll and darf. If metaphysics does not go to seek answers at the same place and does not receive them from the same hands that up till now have distributed all the kann, soll and darf, it will never obtain truth. The old, pre-critical metaphysics went to seek its truths where it ought not to have gone, and its truths were not truths but Hirngespinst (whim) and Grille (caprice). But when, after the Critique, it went where Kant directed it, it returned with empty hands; all the kann, soll and darf had already been distributed and there was nothing left for it. Since before the Critique metaphysics supplied certain things and since after the Critique it no longer supplies anything, it would seem natural to ask if it is not the Critique itself which has dried up the metaphysical sources. To put it differently, is it perhaps not metaphysics that is impossible, as Kant concluded, but the critical metaphysics, the metaphysics that turns around backwards and looks to the future, that is afraid of everything and asks everyone, that dares nothing (metaphysics as science, in Kant’s terminology) that is impossible?
Who suggested to us that metaphysics wishes to be or must be a science? How did it happen that, in asking whether there is a God, whether the soul is immortal, whether free will exists, we declare ourselves prepared in advance to accept the answer that will be given us without even inquiring concerning the nature and essence of that which supplies us with the answer? We are told that God exists, therefore He exists; we are told that God does not exist, therefore He does not exist; and it remains for us only to submit. Metaphysics must be a parere (obedience), just like the positive sciences. Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, “constrained by the truth itself,” do not choose and do not decide. Someone has chosen, someone has decided, someone has commanded, without them. And this is what is called the truth. People then consider, as Cleanthes and Seneca taught, that here it is necessary not only to obey but to accept with veneration and joy or, as Kant and Hegel taught, that it is necessary to prostrate oneself and pray and to call others to prayer. All the “reasons”—theoretical and practical, human and superhuman—have always told us, each in particular and all in general, the same thing throughout the millennial development of philosophical thought: one must obey, one must submit.
The metaphysics which goes back to the source, covered by the sand of centuries, from which flows the jubere (commanding) terrifies and repels everyone. God Himself, let us recall, dared only once to manifest His arbitrary will; doubtless He could not do otherwise, as the atoms of Epicurus could not turn aside but once from their natural orbit. But since then both God and the atoms humbly obey. For our thought the jubere, the “by my will,” is completely unbearable. Kant was horrified by the mere idea of deus ex machina or an höheres Wesen interfering in human affairs. In Hegel’s God, such as He was before the creation of the world, in Spinoza’s causa sui [one’s own cause] there is no trace of the free jubere. The jubere seems to us to be the arbitrary, the fantastic; what can be more horrible and more repugnant than this? Better Necessity that does not allow itself to be persuaded, that is concerned with nothing, that makes no distinction between Socrates and a mad dog. And if the theoretical reason cannot, when it is a question of metaphysical queries, guarantee for us the inviolability of Necessity—that is to say, give us universal, necessary, obligatory and constraining truths—we shall not, for all that, follow metaphysics to the sources from which the jubere flows. We wish at all costs to obey and we shall create for ourselves, in the image of the theoretical reason, the practical reason, which will watch to see that the fire is never extinguished on the altar of the eternal parere.
This is the meaning of the philosophical tasks that our “thought” has set for itself from antiquity to Kant and our own contemporaries. The sight of a man who is ready and capable of directing his own destiny at his own risk and peril and following his own will poisons the existence of our reason. God Himself seems to us a monster if He refuses to obey. Philosophy can accomplish its work only if all will forever forget the jubere, the “by my will,” and erect altars to the parere. An Alexander the Great or a Pygmalion could overthrow all the constructions of Aristotle or Kant if they were not constrained to abdicate their will. And the miracle of the marriage at Cana is more dangerous still. Even if one succeeded in establishing historically that Jesus really transformed the water into wine, it would be necessary at all cost to find a way of suppressing this historical fact. Obviously one cannot charge the theoretical reason with such a task. It would never be willing to admit that what has been has not been. But we have the practical reason (Aristotle already knew it long before Kant) which realizes “in the spirit” what the theoretical reason does not dare to accomplish. The marriage of Cana would have been, as Hegel explains to us, a “violation of the spirit,” of the spirit of men who—not “freely,” even though they think so, but constrained by Necessity—have deified the parere. Hence one can and must overcome the miracle of Cana by the spirit. Everything “miraculous” must at all costs be driven out of life, just as the men who seek to save themselves from Necessity by breaking the natural relationships of things must be driven out of it. “Parmenides enchained and constrained,” Parmenides transformed by Necessity into a stone endowed with consciousness: this is the ideal of the man who philosophizes as our “thought” represents him.
But it is not given the petrified Parmenides to help man escape from the limited world. And the thought which turns backward will not lead us to the sources of being. Aristotle turned back-ward, Kant turned backward, all those who followed Kant and Aristotle turned backward, and they became eternal prisoners of Necessity. To tear oneself away from its power, it is necessary “to dare everything,” to accept the great and final struggle, to go forward without asking and without foreseeing what awaits us. And only the readiness, born out of supreme anguish, to bind oneself in friendship with death (meletê thanatou) can fortify man in his mad and unequal struggle against Necessity. In the presence of death human “proofs,” human self-evidences, melt away, vanish, and are transformed into illusions and phantoms. Epictetus with his threats, Aristotle with his truths that constrain, Kant and Hegel with their imperatives and their hypnotizing practical reason, are terrible only to those who cling desperately to pleasure, even if it be the pleasure that “contemplation” gives and that bears the noble name “contentment with oneself.” The sting of death spares nothing; one must master it in order to direct it against Necessity itself. And when Necessity will be felled, the truths that rested on it and served it will also collapse. Beyond reason and knowledge, where constraint ends, the enchained Parmenides, having participated in the mystery of the being who is eternal and who always commands (tês emês boulêsêos), will regain his primordial freedom and speak not as a man “constrained by the truth” but as one “possessed of power.” And this primordial tês emês boulêsêos (boundless free will), which no “knowledge” can contain, is the only source of metaphysical truth. Let the promise be realized: “Nothing will be impossible for you!”