In his preface to his Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel writes: “Philosophy, however, must beware of wishing to be edifying.” As is generally the case with him, he is here only repeating what Spinoza had said when he considered his philosophy not the best but the only true philosophy. It seems at first glance that this declaration came, so to speak, from the depths of the heart. But Hegel, who repeated Spinoza, was no more veridical than the latter. Before as after Socrates, all the great philosophers have always sought to preach to, and edify, their listeners and readers. And it was precisely those among them who preached and edified with the most insistence who proclaimed that their purpose consisted in discovering the truth, and nothing but the truth. I do not think that Socrates himself was an exception in this respect, although he did not, as is known, in any way hide the fact that he wished to better his fellow-men. But he succeeded in so closely fusing knowledge and edification that when he was preaching he appeared only to be seeking the truth, while when he was seeking the truth he was in reality preaching.
To Socrates belongs the merit of having created what was later called “autonomous ethics.” But it was also Socrates who laid the foundations of scientific knowledge. He was the first to distinguish the “morally good” from the “pleasant,” the “morally evil” from the “bad.” At the same time he taught that virtue is knowledge, that the man who knows cannot but be virtuous. But since Socrates there was introduced into philosophy the enigmatic “passing over into another realm” that the opposition of “good” and “evil” (in the moral sense) to “pleasant” and “bad” makes possible. When one begins to speak of the bad, one generally glides—without effort, without wishing it, without even realizing it—into the morally evil, just as one airily substitutes, as if the thing happened of itself, the morally good for the pleasant or vice versa . . .
Hegel’s words that I have just quoted, as well as Spinoza’s declaration, contain a problem that is worth studying closely. Whatever philosophic question is presented to us, we discover in it obvious traces of the confusion that Socrates openly admitted when one identifies knowledge with virtue; and even those philosophers who in no way shared the fundamental postulate of Socratic thought could not, or perhaps did not wish to, avoid this identification. It might be said that this confusion constitutes the “point on which philosophy stands or falls,” that philosophy would lose its raison d’être if it renounced this mistaken substitution or (what is perhaps still more terrible) if it admitted that it lives only thanks to this substitution. Yet no one today would identify knowledge with virtue. The most limited mind realizes that one can know and at the same time be full of vice just as one can be ignorant and at the same time a saint. How is it, then, that Socrates did not see what common sense today clearly perceives? No one dreams of raising this question. Still less does one dream of asking himself: can philosophy exist if common sense is right, if the wisest among men was grossly deceived when he proclaimed that virtue and knowledge are one and the same thing?
It is generally assumed that German idealism—in the person of Kant and of his successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—finally and definitively overcame Spinozism. This judgment of history is correct only in the sense that toward the end of their careers the German idealists, those even who like Fichte and Schelling could call Spinoza their first philosophic love, tried by every means to draw a sharp line of demarcation between themselves and Spinoza. People esteemed Spinoza but they feared him and moved far away from him. Leibniz argued with Locke in a respectful and friendly tone, while in his polemic against Spinoza an icy hostility breaks through: he did not wish to be confused with the author of the Ethics. This hostility is also to be discerned in Kant when he speaks of Spinoza. As for Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, one might believe from their attitude toward Spinoza that they had left him far behind and had completely rid themselves of him. But the development of German philosophy testifies to the contrary. Kant was indeed further removed from Spinoza than his successors. What separated Kant from Spinoza was submitted in the post-Kantian philosophy to the sharpest criticism.
As German idealism developed it drew ever nearer to Spinozism, and we are justified in considering Hegel’s “Philosophy of the Spirit,” in its content if not in its form, as the restitutio in integrum of Spinozism. Hegel affirmed that philosophy must not be edifying. Spinoza said that he was seeking not the best but the true philosophy. As for Socrates, he identified virtue with knowledge, or to use his formula: nothing bad can happen to a virtuous man, nothing good can happen to a wicked man. It seems then that Spinoza and Hegel took their departure from a principle sharply opposed to that of Socrates. Spinoza wrote in the Ethics that daily experience shows us that successes (good) and failures (bad) are distributed equally among the just and the impious. Hegel, of course, was completely in accord with Spinoza in this matter. In his Philosophy of Religion he affirms that a miracle, as a breaking of the natural relationships of things, would be violence against the spirit. Hegel shows himself in this case even more Spinozist than Spinoza himself. Spinoza appeals to daily experience which convinces him that successes and failures are distributed indifferently among the good and the wicked. This knowledge, like all empirical knowledge, is still not the highest, true knowledge (the tertium genus cognitionis, cognitio intuitiva) that philosophy seeks. Hegel does not in any way appeal to experience; what he knows, he knows before all experiences. He does not need “experience.” He, like Spinoza, needs tertium genus cognitionis, and he is not content with the simple fact but finds for it a foundation in the very structure of being. If misfortune struck only the impious and if the just alone knew success, this would be a miracle; but a miracle is violence against the spirit. Consequently, since the spirit does not tolerate violence, virtue—to employ the language of Socrates—is one thing and knowledge is another.
This is the meaning of Spinoza’s words, this is also the meaning of Hegel’s words. And yet, Spinoza and Hegel followed the way opened up by Socrates: throughout their work they never ceased to develop the idea that virtue and knowledge are one and the same thing, that nothing bad can happen to a just man and nothing good to a wicked man. Not only could not and would not their philosophy renounce edification, but it was precisely in edification that it saw its principal, one could even say its unique, task. Spinoza concluded on an inspired note the reflections on God and the soul that he set forth in the first two parts of the Ethics: “How useful the knowledge of this doctrine is for the conduct of life. . . . First, inasmuch as it teaches us to act solely according to the decree of God, and to be participants in the divine nature, and so much the more, as we perform more perfect actions and more and more understand God. . . . This doctrine then . . . teaches us wherein our highest happiness or beatitude consists, namely, solely in the knowledge of God. . . . Secondly, inasmuch as it teaches us how we ought to conduct ourselves with regard to the gifts of fortune or things that are not in our power . . . namely, to await and endure both faces of fortune with equanimity.”1
Hegel is, in this respect, in no way outdone by Spinoza. Having taken up, against Kant, the defense of the ontological argument, he says in his Logic: “Man must, through thought, raise himself to a 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, etc., so that si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae2—as a Roman said, and the Christian must feel himself still more in this state of indifference.” Try to remove from Spinoza his docet (it teaches) and his quomodo nos gerere debeamus (how we ought to conduct ourselves)—what will remain of his philosophy? And what will remain of the ontological argument if man does not consent “to raise himself to a generality in which it is really indifferent to him whether he does or does not exist”—as Hegel translated into his own language Spinoza’s suggestion that “we ought to await and endure both faces of fortune with equanimity”?
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason especially irritated Hegel and his disciples, and precisely because they found in it, carried to the maximum, that edification of what we have spoken above. It is well-known that the Critique of Practical Reason is entirely based on the idea of pure duty: what Kant calls the categorical imperative. For Hegel the “critique of reason” (theoretical as well as practical) was generally intolerable. To criticize reason was, in his eyes, a mortal sin against philosophy. He mocked Kant’s “critiques” in every way and compared the philosopher of Konigsberg to the scholastic who, before going into the water, wanted to know how to swim.
Jesting remarks often pass for arguments, and Hegel’s irony produced a certain effect, even though his comparison was completely false. Did Kant begin by asking himself how he should philosophize, and did he attack philosophic problems only after having obtained an answer to this first question? Kant finished his Critique of Pure Reason at the age of fifty-seven; he had already been occupied with philosophy for many years without asking himself whether the methods of searching for truth that he, like everyone else, used in the realm of the exact sciences could be applied to the solution of metaphysical problems. It was only in the sixth decade of his life—whether under the influence of Hume’s “skepticism” or struck by the antinomies that he had encountered at the limits of thought—that Kant, as he himself relates, awoke from his dogmatic slumber; it was then that there arose in him the doubt that was to lead him to the “critique” of reason: are the methods of searching for truth that have been elaborated by the exact sciences, and that give such excellent results, inapplicable to metaphysical problems?
It is hardly to be admitted that Hegel himself did not understand how little Kant resembled the ridiculous scholastic. Apparently he simply was not able to answer Kant, and he realized at the same time that, were the “critique” of reason carried through, the very foundations of human thought would be ruined. That this disturbing thought was not entirely strange to Hegel is to be divined from certain reflections in his Phenomenology of the Spirit: “Meanwhile, if the fear of making a mistake sets up a distrust of knowledge which, without any such scruples, goes about its work and really knows, it is not to be conceived why, conversely, a distrust of this distrust should not be set up, so that this fear of making a mistake is already itself a mistake.”
Distrust and distrust of the distrust! Is there any place in philosophy for such a struggle between distrusts? Kant knew before Hegel—and he spoke of it sufficiently in his book—that the exact sciences have no need of the critique of reason, and they can calmly accomplish their task without at all concerning themselves with the doubts and anxieties of the philosophers; nothing is more foreign to them than distrust of their work. But this is not the meaning of Hegel’s remark. The important thing is that there came to Hegel’s mind the thought that one could trust knowledge, but one could likewise distrust it. He immediately brushes aside this thought, it is true, by saying “what is called fear of error is rather to be recognized as fear of truth.” But it is hardly probable that this consideration can make the reader forget that Hegel himself felt at times uneasily that one could trust knowledge but that one could also refuse to trust it, and to the distrust of knowledge there was nothing else to oppose than distrust of the distrust. For those who make scientific knowledge the ideal of philosophy, “the distrust of distrust” is a truly shattering thought. It turns out, then, that in the last resort knowledge is based on the trust that we accord to it and that it is up to man to decide, to choose freely, whether knowledge deserves his trust or not.
What is to be done with this freedom? And even if it should appear that fear of error in this case is fear of knowledge, this would in no way simplify the situation: if knowledge inspires fear, it is perhaps because it really hides in itself something terrible against which man must guard himself. The fear of knowledge poses a problem as difficult as that which underlies the distrust of knowledge. And, of course, the philosopher must, before everything else, in some way overcome his distrust and his fears. As long as he sought truth naively without suspecting that there could be in his methods of search a defect which prevents man from recognizing truth even when he encounters it on his way, as long as he was also naively convinced that knowledge must be beneficial for man, the philosopher could calmly give himself over to his task. It seemed to him that trust is founded only on knowledge and that knowledge alone is capable of driving away all terrors. But suddenly it turns out that knowledge cannot found itself on itself, that it demands that trust be placed in it, and that not only does it not drive away terrors but on the contrary provokes them.
If Hegel had decided to plumb this thought to its depths, perhaps he would have seen that Kant’s sin was not in having criticized reason but in never having been able to decide to fulfill the promise he had made of giving us a critique of reason. Spinoza said: “What altar will he who insults the majesty of reason build for himself?” Kant could have taken this phrase as the motto of his “critique.” And, indeed, to criticize reason—is this not to commit an offence against its sovereign rights and to render oneself guilty of laesio majestatis? Who has the right to criticize reason? What is the power that will dare put reason in its place and deprive it of its scepter? Kant, it is true, affirmed that he had limited the rights of reason in order to open the way to faith. But Kant’s faith is a faith within the limits of reason; it is reason itself but under another name. Hegel, who spoke of “distrust of distrust,” was—if you please—more radical, more daring than Kant; but, of course, in words only. In fact Hegel had neither the audacity nor the desire to stop for a moment and ask himself why he had such trust in reason and knowledge and whence this trust came to him. More than once he brushed up against this question but always passed it by.
A strange thing! Hegel hardly appreciated the Bible; he did not like the New Testament, and as for the Old, he despised it. And yet, when there arose before him the fundamental philosophic problem, forgetting all that he said about Scripture, he sought support in the biblical account of original sin. Hegel writes: “This is found in another form in the old story of the fall of man—the serpent did not, according to it, deceive the man; for God says, ‘See, Adam is become as one of us, to know good and evil.’” Again in his meditations on the fate of Socrates (in the same Lectures on the History of Philosophy), we read: “The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—of the knowledge that is of reason out of itself—[is] the universal principle of philosophy for all later times.”
It is not only Hegel who thinks thus. All of us are persuaded that the serpent who enticed our primal forefathers to taste of the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil did not deceive them, that the deceiver was God who had forbidden Adam to eat of these fruits in the fear that the man would become like God. Whether it was proper for Hegel to appeal to Scripture is another question. Hegel could permit himself everything and his disciples, whom the atheism (or pantheism) of Spinoza angered, listened piously to Hegel’s discourses and almost considered his philosophy the only possible apology for Christianity. Yet here again, Hegel was only repeating Spinoza’s thought, with the difference that Spinoza declared openly and forthrightly that there is no truth in the Bible and that the sole source of truth is reason, whereas Hegel spoke of revelation at the very moment when in the “dispute” between God and the serpent he took the side of the latter. There is no doubt that if the problem of truth had been posed in this form to Spinoza, he would have given his full approval to Hegel. If it is necessary to choose between God who warns us against the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the serpent who extols these fruits to us, the educated European cannot hesitate; he will follow the serpent. Daily experience convinces us that learned people enjoy great advantages over the ignorant. Consequently, he who seeks to discredit knowledge in our eyes lies, while the truth speaks through the mouth of him who glorifies knowledge. To be sure, as I have already said, according to Spinoza and to Hegel who followed him in everything, experience does not give us perfect knowledge (tertium genus cognitionis). Thus, when it is a question of choosing between the serpent and God, we are in the same situation as when we must choose between distrust of knowledge and distrust of distrust. In difficult moments reason refuses to guide us, and then we are obliged to decide at our own risk and peril without any guarantee that our decision will be justified by its results.
III
I know, certainly, that not only Spinoza and Hegel but even Kant would never have admitted that reason could refuse to guide man. “Reason avidly seeks universal and necessary judgments,” says Kant at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason (First Edition). And not once in the course of his work does he ask himself: Why must we exert ourselves to furnish reason what it so avidly seeks? And who or what is this reason that possesses so great a power over man? Moreover, the fact that reason is possessed by a passion like every limited being should already suffice to put us on the alert and render reason and the universal and necessary judgments to which it aspires suspect in our eyes. But, I repeat, reason remains above all suspicion, even for the author of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Such has always been the tradition of human thought: distrust of reason has always been considered a crime oflaesio majestatis. Plato said that the greatest misfortune that could come to a man was to become a “hater of reason.” For Aristotle, knowledge is universal and necessary knowledge (katholou gar hai epistêmai panton, ex anankês ara estin to epistêton). From Socrates on, we have once and for all renounced what constitutes the essential problem of knowledge and, at the same time, the metaphysical problem. The aim of the Socratic thought was precisely to protect knowledge from every attempt at criticism, as appears in that statement which at first glance appears precisely the condition and the beginning of all criticism—“I know that I know nothing” (a statement which, according to Socrates’ own testimony, made the oracle declare him the wisest of all men)—but which actually kills in the germ the very possibility of all criticism. Indeed only he who is convinced that knowledge is the sole source of truth will say he knows that he knows nothing. Not for nothing did Hegel, in connection with Socrates’ fate, recall the tree of knowledge and the words of the tempting serpent, “You shall be like God.” Only he who has tasted the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil is capable of handing himself over so unreservedly to the enchantments of knowledge. For Socrates, to despise knowledge was a mortal sin. He reproached the poets, mocking them for seeking to attain truth by ways other than those of knowledge. And he could not find words harsh enough for those who, knowing nothing, believed that they did know something. Whence comes this unshakable assurance that knowledge alone brings man the truth? And what does this assurance that we have all inherited from Socrates mean? Did the oracle seduce Socrates as the biblical serpent had once seduced Adam? Or did the seduction lie elsewhere, and did Pythia, like Eve, only offer Socrates the fruit that she had herself tasted at the suggestion of a power that escapes our sharpest notice?
However this may be, after Socrates the most noted representatives of human thought could not do other than identify truth with the fruits of the tree of knowledge. This is the meaning of Plato’s warning against the “hater of reason.” This is the meaning of Aristotle’s “in general” (katholou) and “of necessity” (exanankês), of Descartes’ “everything is to be doubted” and “I think, therefore I am,” of Spinoza’s “the true is the index of itself and of the false.” This is why Kant declares at the beginning of his “critique” that reason avidly seeks universal and necessary judgments.
All this constitutes the heritage of Socrates. Since Socrates the truth, for men, has been confounded with universal and necessary judgments. Everyone is convinced that thought has the right to stop only when it has come up against Necessity, which puts an end to all searchings and all curiosity. And at the same time no one doubts that thought, in penetrating to the necessary relationships of things, accomplishes the supreme task of philosophy. So that Hegel, in short, saw quite rightly when he sought to demonstrate that there are not “philosophies” but “philosophy,” that all the philosophers have always understood in the same way the mission that fate had imposed upon them. All of them sought to discover the rigorous and unchangeable order of being, for all of them—even those who, like Socrates, knew that they knew nothing—were completely hypnotized by the idea that this order which depends on no one must exist, that it is impossible that it should not exist, just as there must exist a science which reveals this order to man.
Socrates said, it is true, that perfect knowledge belongs only to the gods and that the knowledge of man is incomplete. But in saying this he exalted knowledge still higher, for his words meant, in short, that the freedom of the gods was no longer absolute: knowledge sets limits to them by fixing the bounds not only of the possible and the impossible but even of the permitted and the forbidden. In the Euthyphro, written by Plato while his master was still alive, Socrates demonstrates that it is not given even to the gods to choose: they are not free not to love the just, as mortals are not free not to love it. Mortals and immortals are equally subject to duty and to Necessity. This is why the task of philosophy consists of revealing the necessary relationships of things, that is to say, in obtaining knowledge, in order to convince men that one cannot argue with Necessity, that one must obey it. Of course, the exact sciences also establish the necessary relationships of things and teach men obedience, but philosophy is not content with this. It is not enough for philosophy that men accept Necessity and accommodate themselves to it; philosophy wishes to bring it about that men should love and venerate Necessity, as they once loved and venerated the gods.
It may be that the essential difference between Socrates and the Sophists, a difference which history has carefully hidden from us, consists precisely in the fact that, when the Greeks of the second half of the Fifth Century discovered that the Olympian gods were the work of the imagination and that “constraints” of every kind came not from living beings who took the fate of men to heart but from Necessity which is indifferent to everything, the Sophists (as St. Paul was later to do) reacted violently: if constraints come not from the gods but from Necessity, then nothing is true, everything is permitted. Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things” has the same meaning, it seems, as St. Paul’s phrase, “if the dead rise not, let us eat and drink”3; in short, let us do whatever occurs to us, let us live just as we wish. No more than the Sophists did Socrates admit the existence of the gods. And this is quite understandable: he who is afraid of becoming a “hater of reason,” who sees in knowledge the sole source of truth, cannot agree to recognize the gods. With a naivete perhaps very alluring but hardly appropriate to a philosopher who wished to prove everything and to question everything, Socrates turned away disdainfully from the poets and the artists only because, even if they happen at times to discover high truths, they do not obtain these from knowledge but from some other source and are incapable of explaining how they have found them. Socrates had no confidence in men “inspired by the gods”: how can one place confidence in them when it is known that the gods do not exist? Or—if Hegel’s later commentary is admitted—when one knows that God deceived man, as He Himself admitted when the serpent, having penetrated His secret intentions, revealed them to our primal forefathers? In any case, if one wishes to be prudent, it is better to hold on to Protagoras: “As for the gods, I do not know whether they exist or whether they do not exist.”
Before his judges, who had to pronounce judgment concerning the accusation of atheism brought against him by Anytus and Meletus, Socrates said in short the same thing as did Protagoras; but, since he spoke of the immortality of the soul and not of the existence of the gods, many people even today believe that Socrates thought otherwise than Protagoras. In reality, both of them set out from the same idea but reacted differently to it, though with the same passion. Protagoras said: if the gods do not exist, if the soul is not immortal, if human life is no more than this brief terrestrial existence which begins with birth and ends with death, if we are not bound by invisible threads to superior beings—in short, if everything that begins in the world also ends there—then what is it that can bind man’s caprice and in the name of what shall man renounce his caprice? Why, in this case, should not man give free rein to his desires and passions? He is at times obliged to submit to force, insofar as he cannot conquer or escape it by any ruse. But to submit to it still does not mean to recognize its supreme and final rights. Let us—to speak as did St. Paul—eat, drink and rejoice.
Socrates’ attitude in regard to the truth that he had discovered is completely different. Like Protagoras, he does not doubt for a moment that it is for reason to decide the question of the gods’ existence; and, with the intellectual honesty that characterized him and in which he saw (and we also after him) the highest virtue of the philosopher, he had to recognize that in the sight of reason one could as well admit the existence of the gods and the immortality of the soul as deny them. Furthermore—Socrates did not say this but it may be believed that he thought it—since science is incapable of providing a positive answer to these questions, since a scrupulous examination leads him as well as Protagoras (so different from him in all respects) to the same conclusion—it may be that the gods exist or it may be that they do not exist—then the cause of the gods is in a bad way: there is every reason to believe that they were invented by men. Yet, the solution proposed by Protagoras was unacceptable to Socrates, just as he would have indignantly rejected the words of St. Paul if he had been able to know them. Anything was better in Socrates’ eyes than Protagoras’ homomensura or the apostle’s “let us eat and drink.” What remains to be measured by man if everything that is measurable is transitory and subject to change? And how can one think of rejoicing when he knows that his days are numbered and that no one is certain of tomorrow?
Long before Socrates the great philosophers and poets of Greece considered with terror the agonizing uncertainty of our transient and sorrowful existence. Heraclitus taught that everything passes, that nothing remains. With a power that has never been surpassed the tragedians portrayed the horror of human life. And yet, as if across the centuries he were echoing the prophet Isaiah and St. Paul who repeated Isaiah, Heraclitus could still say that what the gods have prepared for us surpasses all the dreams and hopes of men. But it was no longer given to Socrates to speak thus. We do not know what awaits us after death: is it not then shameful to speak of what one does not know? Heraclitus, Isaiah and St. Paul were as unacceptable to Socrates, enthralled by knowledge, as was Protagoras who glorified the arbitrary. It is obvious that the men of the Bible and the philosophers of Heraclitus’ type drew their wisdom from sources extremely doubtful; they were like the poets who, in a burst of unjustified enthusiasm, proclaimed things that they themselves did not understand. Without knowledge there can be neither truth nor goodness. Consequently, knowledge is the only source of everything that is important to man; it gives man, and cannot do otherwise, the “one thing necessary.” To be sure, if knowledge revealed to us the gods and the immortality of the soul, this would not be at all bad; but since it is otherwise, we shall have to get along without these. So it was that Socrates understood the task that devolved on him. He saw quite as well as Aristotle that a man of knowledge could be wicked. But he had discovered that our existence ends in death. Since this is so, the biblical serpent and Pythia were right: virtue resides only in knowledge. In the eyes of all, publicly, Socrates had to repeat the act which, according to the ancient myth that no one can attest, Adam had committed.
IV
The serpent did not deceive man. The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., as Hegel has explained to us, reason, which draws everything from itself) has become the principle of philosophy for all time. The “critique of reason” that contained the prohibition against tasting the fruit of the tree from which must come all our evils was replaced by the “distrust of the distrust,” and God was expelled from the world that He had created while His power passed over entirely to reason. The latter, it is true, had not created the world, but it offered us in limitless number the very fruits against which the Creator had warned us. It is to be believed that it was precisely their “infinity” that seduced man: in the world where the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the principle not only of all philosophy but of being itself, thinking humanity dreamed of the possibility of the greatest victories and conquests. Whom should it distrust—the serpent who praised reason, or God who criticized reason? The answer could not be doubtful. It is necessary, according to Hegel, to oppose distrust to distrust. Hegel forgot only one thing, doubtless bona fide: if the serpent spoke the truth, if those who taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge really become “like God,” if Pythia was also right and Socrates was indeed the wisest of men, then philosophy cannot be other than edifying; its essence, its meaning, is to edify. And not only among us on earth but in the other world also, if man is destined to live again after death, nothing will change in this respect: “The greatest good of man is to discourse daily about virtue.”4 To put it differently, according to the wisdom of Socrates, the greatest good for man is to feed on the fruits of the tree of knowledge.
It is not for nothing that Hegel recalled, in speaking of Socrates, the myth of the fall of man. It appears that the sin is hereditary: Socrates repeats Adam. In Hegel’s interpretation one finds again all the circumstances of the fall of the first man (and it may be that Hegel deliberately emphasized the parallels). The serpent is the Delphic god, and the woman intervenes this time also. Xanthippe could not play the role of Eve, it is true, but Pythia fills it perfectly; she gathers the fruits of the tree of knowledge and persuades Socrates that they are “the greatest good for man” and that, consequently, it is they and not the fruits of the tree of life that supply man with “the one thing necessary.” Yet, though Hegel does not cease stubbornly repeating that knowledge is bound up with distrust of distrust, with the break with God and with faith in the serpent, his philosophy does not show us with the desired clarity and fullness what the fruits of the tree of knowledge have brought us.
If Hegel went with such enthusiasm to the serpent, it is doubtless because he did not suspect what could result from this commerce. The illuminations of Socrates were strange and incomprehensible to Hegel. As for Heraclitus, he pretended to have assimilated all his philosophic ideas, but he required them only in order to attain certain external purposes. Among the ancients it is Aristotle alone who was really close to him, and I believe that I am not exaggerating in saying that of all the philosophers of antiquity it was Aristotle who exercised a decisive influence over Hegel. Aristotle, who was “moderate to excess,” who knew with such inimitable art to stop in time and who was so deeply persuaded that he had to seek truth and authentic reality in the middle zones of being, seeing that the limits of life present no interest for us—Aristotle appeared to Hegel as the model of the philosophic mind. The caution of the Stagyrite was, in his eyes, the best guarantee of what he considered his ideal—scientific rigor. The “best” must be sought between the “too much” and the “not enough.” It is there also that the truth must be sought. Limitation, Aristotle taught, is the sign of perfection; and it was in this doctrine that Hegel found a sure refuge against the waves of the “bad infinity” that threaten to drown men.
When Socrates heard the serpent’s words (let me be allowed, following Hegel, to hold on to the biblical image) “you shall be like God,” and, turning away from God, tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge—he went to the end: these fruits alone give life to men. Aristotle, however, stopped in time. Throughout his Ethics one finds remarks of this kind: “those who say that a man on the rack . . . can be happy, provided only that he be a virtuous man, speak—whether they mean to or not—an absurdity.”5 Such remarks, thrown out in passing, constitute the very foundation of Aristotle’s ethics; they are obviously directed against Socrates whose ardent thought and life bear a quite different testimony. His conviction that nothing bad can happen to a good man and that knowledge is virtue, a conviction that appears to many people as the expression of a naive optimism, hid in itself the most terrible and cruel “truth” that the human soul has ever accepted.
When the schools deriving from Socrates declared solemnly that the virtuous man would be happy even in the bull of Phalaris, they contented themselves with expressing under a new form what constituted the meaning, the very essence, of the Socratic ethic. And, on the contrary, when Aristotle insisted that virtue alone did not suffice for happiness and that the latter demanded a certain minimum of temporal goods, he was defending himself against Socrates. Aristotle refused to admit that the fruits of the tree of knowledge could end by pushing man into the belly of the bull of Phalaris and make him taste that happiness of which not only the Stoics but also the Epicureans speak and which constitutes the foundation of the ethics of the last of the great philosophers of antiquity, Plotinus. The dishonoring of his daughters, the murder of his sons, the destruction of his fatherland—nothing troubles the happiness of the wise man, teaches Plotinus.6 The meaning and the importance of ethics lies precisely in the fact that its “good” is autonomous, that is to say, completely independent of “things that are not in our power.” The ethics that is afraid and therefore turns aside, as in Aristotle, from the bull of Phalaris renounces in the end its essential task.
Socrates saw this; he knew what the fruits of the tree of knowledge bring to men; he had tasted of them as Adam had once tasted of them. For Aristotle, however—as well as for Hegel in our day—these fruits were only “a mental perception” (theôria); he was content with contemplating them and did not even suspect the terrible poison with which they were permeated. So it is not to Socrates that one should go to seek naivete and unconcern but to those who have betrayed Socrates “willingly or unwillingly.” Aristotle had recourse to a minimum of temporal goods in order to escape the bull of Phalaris. But the bull is not a fiction, it is reality itself. And knowledge does not have the right to deny its existence; it must even cut short every attempt to drive the bull of Phalaris outside the limits of the real. Everything that is real must be recognized as rational. That is what Hegel said. That is also what Aristotle said two thousand years before Hegel: “There is something of the divine in the nature of everything.”7 Thus one can find traces of the divine even in the bull of Phalaris, and reason, consequently, has not the right to refuse its benediction to it. Finally, wisdom brings man not “happiness” (eudaimonia) but something quite different; or, to put it more accurately, the happiness promised by wisdom is worse than the worst misfortunes that strike mortal men.
But how could the wisdom that leads men to the bull of Phalaris seduce them? Being a practical man Aristotle felt the danger; he understood that Socrates’ wisdom could not find in the world the “selflessness,” the “spirit of sacrifice” on which his ethic relied. And the same practical sense whispered to Aristotle that the scorn which the philosophers ordinarily bear to the mob, hoi polloi, is simulated. Philosophy cannot get along without general agreement; in this respect it strives for the goodwill of hoi polloi or mob that it rejects in words. But if this is so, there is no place in ethics for the bull of Phalaris. Ethics must keep at its disposal a certain minimum of temporal goods. When such a minimum is guaranteed—or even when one succeeds at least in convincing men that what terrifies them and consequently appears to them eternally problematic is pushed to a sufficient distance, so that every direct threat is avoided—then only can one set about philosophizing in all tranquility. In that case one can accept from the hands of Socrates his truth that virtue and knowledge are one and the same thing; this truth then acquires, to be sure, another significance than that conferred upon it by the wisest of men, but this is precisely what is required. Philosophy becomes at the same time vera and optima (the true and the best), but it is not obliged to demand of men the impossible.
It was all the easier for Aristotle to escape the bull of Phalaris since Socrates himself had suggested to him (perhaps intentionally) how he should go about doing this. It would seem that the knowledge with which Socrates had promised to enrich humanity should have led it to entirely new sources that had been ignored up until then, and that the good discovered by this knowledge could have nothing in common with the good which men had previously obtained. But, as I have already indicated, Socrates, in setting out on the search for knowledge and the good, turned precisely to men of whom he himself said that they knew nothing, that they had no relationship with the good, and that they boasted of their knowledge only because they had lost all shame; Socrates turned to doctors, cooks, carpenters, politicians, etc.
The historians of philosophy have often asked how the wisest of men could confuse what is useful in daily life with what is morally good; they have seen here one of those inconsequences which the greatest minds do not succeed in avoiding. But it is to be believed that if there is inconsequence here it was intended. It would not have been difficult for Socrates himself to expose the metabasis eis alio genos (passing over into another realm) of which he was guilty. And, alone by himself, not surrounded by anxious disciples who wished to obtain answers to all questions and sharp-eyed opponents who threatened to call by its true name the source whence he drew his truths, Socrates doubtless saw clearly that the “useful” of the doctors and the cooks did not at all resemble the “good” with which he was called to endow men. It was in this probably that Socrates’ “secret,” which he concealed with so much care under the mask of irony and of dialectic, consisted: since the gods do not exist, it is necessary to accept the wisdom of the serpent. The serpent, however, has no power over the tree of life, over res quae in nostra potestate non sunt [things which are not in our power]; it has power only over the tree of knowledge. From the moment the gods left the world, the tree of knowledge forever hid the tree of life.
V
We know Socrates, who left no writings, only through the accounts of his disciples, Plato and Xenophon, and through second-hand pieces of information. But everything that seems unclear to us, debatable and incomplete in Socrates’ doctrine can be completed and clarified from Spinoza’s works. It would not be exaggerated, I think, to say that Socrates was resurrected in Spinoza or even that Spinoza was the second incarnation of Socrates. “Let us sacrifice with reverence to the shade of the holy, rejected Spinoza,” says Schleiermacher, who was, according to Dilthey, the greatest of the German theologians after Luther. It was in the same tone the ancients spoke of Socrates—the best of men, the righteous one, the holy one. If recourse could be had to the oracle in modern times, it would certainly have called Spinoza, as it once did Socrates, the wisest of men.
Kierkegaard reproaches philosophers for not living in accordance with the categories in which they think. This reproach perhaps contains some truth, but it is certainly not applicable either to Socrates or to Spinoza. What makes both of them so remarkable is precisely the fact that they did live in the categories in which they thought, thus miraculously transforming the “true philosophy” into the “best philosophy,” to use Spinoza’s terms, or incarnating knowledge in virtue, to speak as Socrates did. In Socrates, universal and necessary truth led to the “highest good”; in Spinoza, his tertium genus cognitionis, cognitio intuitiva (third kind of knowledge, intuitive knowledge), ended in the amor Dei intellectualis (intellectual love of God) and the supreme beatitudo (blessedness) that is connected with it. But it is an error to brush aside, as people too often do, the fundamental idea of Socrates and Spinoza by invoking their “intellectualism.” One can thus rid himself of them, but it is then impossible to understand the problem on which the thought of the wisest among men, both in his first and second incarnations, was entirely concentrated. To this the subsequent development of philosophy clearly bears witness. “All knowledge starts with experience”—so begins the Critique of Pure Reason; but Kant adds immediately that it does not follow from this that it comes entirely from experience. And, indeed, there is in our knowledge something that we never find in experience, a certain Zutat (seasoning) according to Hegel’s expression, or, to speak as Leibniz did, “there is nothing in the intellect that was not in the senses, except the intellect itself.” Our knowledge reduces itself entirely to this mysterious Zutat, and in the end experience plays hardly any role in the act of knowing.
It is true that those who sought knowledge were always interested in not detaching it from experience and also often substituted experience for knowledge. Scarcely had Aristotle said “all men desire by nature to know”8 than he hastened to add: “this is seen in the pleasure that sensible perception gives us.” But Aristotle knew perfectly well that knowledge is distinguished toto coelo from sensible perception. We recall with what insistence he emphasized that knowledge is knowledge of the universal and the necessary and that it is such knowledge alone that science seeks. We ought then to say: knowledge begins with experience and ends by completely brushing it aside. There is not, there must not be, any place in science for “pleasure in sensible perception.” The purpose of knowledge is to detach itself from the sensible given, to overcome it. The sensible given is something that arises and disappears continually and never abides, something that one cannot take hold of and must consequently rid himself of, or, as the philosophers say, that one must raise himself above.
This is what Socrates taught; and such was also the meaning of Spinoza’s philosophic “conversion.” The unstable and transitory character of everything terrestrial filled his soul with disquietude and anxiety, as he himself admits in his Tractatus de intellectus emendation (The Treatise Concerning the Amendment of the Intellect). The attachment to the sensible given which, as Aristotle rightly remarked, is proper to all men, and which Spinoza also experienced, constitutes at first blush a very natural human aptitude, but in reality it is laden with threats and prepares for us the worst catastrophes. How can one attach himself to that which has a beginning and must, consequently, have an end? How can one admit such a dependence? The more passionately we attach ourselves to the temporal, to the passing, the more grievous will be the pain of parting when the moment comes for the object of our attachment to return into that nothingness from whence it arose for a brief moment.
Even though pleasure in sensible perception be proper to all men, it does not constitute a common virtue, a principle of power, but rather a common defect, a principle of weakness. And if Aristotle approximated it to knowledge, this was only thanks to a misunderstanding, perhaps intentional. Aristotle took his departure from Socrates and Plato and, as we know, always emphasized that knowledge is of the universal and that if everything were reduced to sensible perceptions (ta aisthêta) there would be no knowledge. Knowledge thus presupposes a certain transformation of man: he denies what he loved, what he. was attached to, and devotes himself to something quite new that differs entirely from the object of his former attachment. Even though he despised the Bible and so never took the trouble to reflect on the philosophic import of the myth of the fall, Hegel saw correctly when he said that the fruit of the tree of knowledge is what in modern language is called reason, which draws everything out of itself and which since Socrates has become the principle of philosophy for all time. But Hegel could never decide to draw from this idea the conclusions that follow from it and to say, as did Spinoza: “We may therefore conclude absolutely that Scripture must neither be accommodated to reason nor reason to Scripture.”9 Just like Aristotle, Hegel possessed a safety valve in case the tension should become too dangerous. That is why, like Aristotle, he did not discern the bull of Phalaris hidden behind the wisdom of Socrates. That is also why he did not suspect that the words of the God of the Bible could be true, that is to say, that knowledge would poison the joy of existence and lead man, through terrible and loathsome trials, to the threshold of nothingness. Why did Aristotle and Hegel remain blind to what Socrates and Spinoza saw? I do not know. But everything leads me to believe that neither Aristotle nor Hegel learned anything from the Socratic-Spinozist vision.
From the pieces of information we possess it is difficult to determine how Socrates resolved the problem of free will. But Spinoza knew that men were as little free as inanimate objects. Had the stone been endowed with consciousness it would imagine that it falls freely (se liberrimum esse). In the same letter (LVIII) Spinoza further says: “Without, I hope, contradicting my consciousness, that is, my reason and experience, and without cherishing ignorance and misconception, I deny that I can by any absolute power of thought think that I wish or do not wish to write.” And immediately afterwards, to remove all doubt from the reader, he explains: “I appeal to the consciousness, which he has doubtless experienced, that in dreams he has not the power of thinking that he wishes or does not wish to write; and that, when he dreams that he wishes to write, he has not the power not to dream that he wishes to write.”
How are we to understand these puzzling words? It would seem less proper for the clear-headed Spinoza than for anyone else to seek in dreams the explanation of what happens in reality. No one denies that sleep fetters the human will. But sleep is followed by awakening, which consists precisely in the fact that man breaks the fetters which paralyze his will. It often happens to us, even before we awaken, to feel that everything that is occurring belongs not to true reality but to dream-reality, which, at the cost of a certain effort, we can brush aside and cast away from ourselves. To be sure, if the sleeper had preserved that capacity for clear and contradiction-free thought, of which Spinoza and his teacher Descartes speak so much to us, he would have to say that his judgment that he is sleeping and that his reality is a dream-reality conceals within itself a contradiction and must therefore be considered false: it is in the dreamstate, indeed, that it seems to him that he is sleeping and dreaming. Besides, the sleeper, like the awakened person, does not feel himself, generally speaking, bound or deprived in any sense of his liberty; in dreaming we no more feel ourselves in the power of a strange force than in the state of waking. A suspicion penetrates into us only when we begin to feel that the force which dominates us is hostile to us, when the dream becomes a nightmare. It is then only that there suddenly comes to our minds the absurd, inept idea—one recognizes the absurd, the inept, by the fact that it contains an inner contradiction—that this reality is not the true reality but a dream, a lie, an illusion.
At the same time we suddenly find ourselves before a dilemma: what shall we choose—the reality of the nightmare or the absurd assumption? The reality of the nightmare offends our entire being; to admit the absurd is an offence against reason. It is impossible not to choose, for if one does not himself decide, someone or something will decide for him. In dreaming, as is known, man chooses the absurd assumption: before the horror of the nightmare the fear of offending reason loses all power over us—we awaken. In the state of waking a different “order” prevails. We “accept” everything—no matter how shameful, how repugnant, how frightening that which we must accept appears—provided only that reason, as well as the principle of contradiction which protects it, be not outraged. For, Quam aram parabit sibi qui majestatem rationis laedit? (What altar will he build for himself who insults the majesty of reason?), as Spinoza, who denied the freedom of man, wrote.
Or was Nicolas of Cusa closer to the truth in affirming that God lives “inside the wall of the coincidence of opposites” and that this wall “is guarded by an angel stationed at the entrance to Paradise”? It is true that it is obviously not given man to drive this angel away; and besides, not only Spinoza, who did not believe, but still more the believer will shudder with horror at the idea that he should raise his hand against the guardian posted by God Himself at the gate of Paradise. For what altar will the man who violates the commandment of God build for himself? There cannot even be a question, it seems, of “free” decision here. To pass from the nightmarish dream to the beneficent reality of the waking state is not forbidden to man, but to pass from the nightmare of reality to the God who lives inside the wall of contradiction—this is not given to us; God Himself here sets a bound to our freedom.
Spinoza, of course, would not have admitted the formula of Nicolas of Cusa; for Spinoza, the God of Nicolas of Cusa, his paradise, his angel stationed at the entrance to Paradise—all these were only the images of a naive mind which still had not freed itself from traditions and prejudices. But the thought of Nicolas of Cusa expresses the pathos of the Spinozist philosophy more completely than Spinoza’s own words—quam aram parabit sibi [what altar will he build for himself] . . . And further, quam aram parabit sibi is also an image in which can be found traces of that very tradition which had inspired Nicolas of Cusa with the idea of the angel posted at the door of Paradise. But the chief thing is that both Nicolas of Cusa and Spinoza were firmly “convinced” that it is not given mortal men to overcome the bounds established by the “law” of contradiction and that, consequently, one cannot escape the nightmare of reality. The philosopher is obliged, like everyone else, to accept reality; before reality the philosopher finds himself as impotent as anyone. The only thing then that the philosopher can and must do is to teach men how they should live in the midst of this nightmarish reality from which one cannot awaken because it is the only reality. What this means is that the aim of philosophy is not truth but edification, or, to put it differently, not the fruits of the tree of life but the fruits of the tree of knowledge. It is thus that Socrates understood the task of philosophy in antiquity, and it is thus that Spinoza understood it in modern times.
We have already heard Socrates. Let us now listen to Spinoza who completed what Socrates had begun. Spinoza’s task consisted in uprooting from the human soul the ancient idea of God. As long as this persists in man, we live not in the light of truth but in the darkness of falsehood. All prejudices, writes Spinoza, “spring from the notion, commonly entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view. It is accepted as certain that God Himself directs all things to a definite end, for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he might worship Him.”10 All prejudices have for their source the conviction that God sets up purposes or goals. Now in reality, “God . . . has no principle or goal of action.”11
When one reads this, one asks himself before everything else: “Is Spinoza right or not? Do the people who believe that God sets Himself certain purposes know the truth, while those who affirm that every purpose is alien to God deceive themselves? Or is the contrary the case?” Such is the first question that arises quite naturally, or of itself, before us. But given what Spinoza has previously said to us, we must raise another question before this one: “Is man free to choose this or that answer when it is a question of knowing whether God does or does not set Himself purposes? Or is the answer to this question already prepared in advance, before man poses the question, before man who asks it has even risen from nothingness into being?” We recall that Spinoza has openly admitted to us that he was not free to write or not to write. Is he then free to choose between this or that solution to the question that presented itself to him? A hundred years later Kant fell into the same snare. Metaphysics, he says, must decide whether God exists, whether the soul is immortal, whether the will is free. But if the will is not free or if its freedom is doubtful, then it is not given man to choose when it is a question of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality. Someone or something has already decided, without him, the question of God’s existence and the soul’s immortality; whether he wishes it or not, he is obliged to accept the answer that will be presented to him.
VI
The problem of free will is usually connected with ethical questions. But as was already brought out in part in the preceding chapter, the problem is still more closely connected with that of knowledge. More precisely: freedom, on one side, and our ideas of good and evil, on the other, are intertwined to such a degree with our theories of knowledge that every attempt to treat the problems outside their mutual relationships leads inevitably to partial or even false conclusions. When Leibniz stated with assurance that a man with his hands tied can still be free, his assurance was based on the conviction that it is given to “knowledge” to answer the question of freedom and that we must accept the answer furnished by knowledge as final and without appeal. Such was also Spinoza’s conviction. But “knowledge” furnished Spinoza an answer completely different from what it furnished Leibniz. Leibniz “knew” that our will was free, Spinoza that it was not free.
The celebrated debate between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Luther turned around the same question. Erasmus wrote Diatribae de libero arbitrio [Discourses on Free Will]; Luther answered him with his De servo arbitrio [On the Bondage of the Will]. And if we ask ourselves how it was that Erasmus and Leibniz knew that the will is free while Luther and Spinoza discovered that it is not free, we shall find ourselves in a very difficult situation from which we shall not be able to escape in the ordinary way, that is to say, by checking the arguments of the two parties. It is certain that they were both equally honest and correctly reported their personal experience. But how is one to know which of these personal experiences testifies to the truth? The problem appears even more complex if one takes account of the fact that there is a conflict not only between different individuals, but also between the experiences of one and the same individual, who sometimes feels himself free and sometimes unfree. Spinoza is an example: when he was young he affirmed free will, but when he was older he denied it. “Freedom is a mystery,” said Malebranche, and like everything that bears the mark of mystery, freedom hides within itself an inner contradiction. Every attempt to rid oneself of it always leads to the same result: one rids oneself not of the contradiction but of the problem.
Is it necessary to show this in the case of Spinoza? An ass placed at an equal distance between two bales of hay will die of hunger, he says, but it will not turn towards the one or the other unless an external force intervenes. And man is in a similar situation: he goes to his ruin, he knows that death lies in wait for him, but even the consciousness of the greatest dangers will not draw him out of the lethargy to which he has been condemned by the “order and connection of things” that has always existed and remains forever unchangeable—just as the bird hypnotized by the serpent throws itself, on its own, into the monster’s jaws. If Spinoza’s thought is translated into simpler language, it appears that his reflections have finally the same meaning as Luther’s words: by nature man is free, but his freedom is paralyzed by someone or something. Hence this puzzling contradiction, so sad and so torturing: man, who above all others in the world prizes his freedom, feels that it has been taken away from him and sees no possibility of recovering it. Everything that he does, everything that he undertakes, not only does not deliver him but makes him still more a slave. He acts, he writes, he reflects, he perfects himself in all sorts of ways, but the more he strains his powers, the more he perfects himself and reflects, the more he becomes conscious of his complete incapacity to bring about, by his own power and on his own initiative, any change whatsoever in the conditions of his existence. And what most weakens and paralyses his will is thought, that precisely on which men ordinarily base all their hopes of deliverance. As long as man did not “think,” he believed that “God directs everything to a definite end.” But when he began to reason, he suddenly discovered that this was only a prejudice, an error, born of the free will to which he so eagerly aspires and which once perhaps had the power of transforming his desires into realities but which today, enfeebled and impotent, can only torment man by recalling to him a past forever lost. When it was still itself, it inculcated in man the conviction that high and important purposes are realized in the universe, that the good, the evil, the ugly, the beautiful, etc., exist. But “knowledge” has disarmed the will and deprived it of its decisive voice when it is a question of truth and of being. God does not set Himself any purpose. The will and the intellect of God as little resemble the will and the intellect of man as the constellation called the Dog resembles the dog, the barking animal. Let us turn our gaze toward the ideal science, toward mathematics, and we shall know where and how truth is to be found. We shall then become convinced that truth is one thing and that the “best” is another. There is no “best” for God, and those who “maintain that God does everything with a view to the good” are still more in error than those who suppose that “everything depends on His (God’s) discretion.” Necessity reigns over everything: “God does not act out of freedom of the will.”
Spinoza does not cease repeating to us that Necessity is the essence and foundation of being: “things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.”12 For him, sub specie aeternitatis (in the perspective of eternity) has the same meaning as sub specie necessitatis (in the perspective of necessity). In all the history of thought probably no other philosopher developed with such obstinacy, with such passion, the theme of the omnipotence of Necessity. And he assures us, along with this, that he has “demonstrated” his theses luce meridiana clarius (clear as day light). That he has expressed luce meridiana clarius the conviction that has seized hold of the human mind is indisputable, but can this pass for a demonstration? When he affirms, on the one hand, that “God acts solely by the laws of His own nature and is not constrained by anyone,”13 and, on the other hand, is indignant at those who admit that God can act sub ratione boni (with a view to the good), the question quite naturally arises: whence does he know that the sub ratione boni does not constitute one of the “laws of His (God’s) nature,” and perhaps even the supreme law? If Spinoza had affirmed that God is outside and beyond all laws, that He is Himself the source and creator of laws—very well! But this thought is far from Spinoza. Human reason can renounce everything, but it will not consent to free either the highest or the lowest being, either the Creator or the creatures, from obedience to laws. So, even though Spinoza affirms that “if men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil,” it is no more given him to realize the ideal of the man who stands beyond good and evil than the ideal of freedom.
The end of the fourth part and all of the fifth part of the Ethics testify clearly to this: the man whom Spinoza calls free is not at all free, and the happiness that the philosopher brings has for its primary condition the distinction between good and evil. If we wish to decipher the profound meaning of the Socratic doctrine that knowledge is identical with virtue and that nothing bad can happen to a good man, we must address ourselves, not to the historians who show how naive and superficial was the wisest of men, but to Spinoza who, two thousand years later, took upon himself the burden of the problems raised by Socrates. We even find in Spinoza Socrates’ irony, but it is hidden under the more geometrico (according to the geometric method). The mathematical method—is it not indeed an irony in the mouth of the man who affirmed that summum mentis bonum est Dei cognitio (the mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God) and that summa mentis virtus Deum cognoscere (the mind’s highest virtue is to know God)? Since when is mathematics interested in things like summum bonum [highest good] or summa virtus [highest virtue]? And how does it happen that God who has bound Himself “not to act with a view to the good” has yet brought the summum bonum?
It is clear that Spinoza’s summum bonum [the highest good] was of a very special kind. Like Socrates, Spinoza plucked the fruits of the tree of knowledge, which became for him the principle of philosophy for all time. His summum bonum and his beatitudines, like Socrates’ “happiness” and “highest good,” have absolutely nothing in common either with happiness or with the good. That is why he demands so insistently of men that they renounce the beautiful, the good, all “purposes,” desires and instincts. It is on this condition alone that men will obtain the “contentment with oneself” which “understanding” brings and become “like God, knowing good and evil.” All human attachments must be replaced by “love for the eternal and infinite” which is none other than the “intellectual love of God,” of which Spinoza says that it “necessarily springs from the third kind of knowledge.” The noblest part of man is his mens (mind), ratio (reason), intellectus (understanding). And Spinoza knows firmly that “the human mind is eternal, the human mind cannot be completely destroyed with the body,” and again, “we feel and experience that we are eternal.”
At first reading it may seem that Spinoza contradicts himself when he says, on the one hand, “properly speaking, God neither loves nor hates anyone” and proclaims, on the other hand, “hence it follows that God, insofar as He loves Himself, loves men, and, consequently, that the love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same.”14 But there is no contradiction here. The God of Spinoza “knows no passions”; joys and sorrows are alien to him, and “love” in the first instance has a meaning quite different from what it has in the second. It is here that the spiritual relationship between Socrates and Spinoza becomes especially clear. Both of them, like the first man, allowed themselves to be seduced by the promises of the tempter, “you shall be like God, knowing good and evil.” Both of them, like the first man, exchanged the fruits of the tree of life for those of the tree of knowledge, that is to say, “the things that are not in our power” for those that are in our power. Did they decide to do this freely or did they, as the Bible says, act under the influence of a mysterious enchanter? We shall return again to this question. What is certain is that, having stretched forth their hands toward the tree of knowledge, men have forever lost their freedom. To put it differently, they have preserved only the freedom to choose between “good” and “evil.”
It is not for nothing that Spinoza, who denied freedom, entitled the two last parts of his Ethics “of human freedom” and “of human bondage.” Not only is there no contradiction here, but rather a strict relationship, one of immense metaphysical significance. Men have completely forgotten that at some distant, perhaps mythical, time of their existence, they had the possibility not of choosing between good and evil but of deciding whether evil should exist or not exist. They have forgotten this to such a degree that we are all convinced that man never had such freedom, that such freedom is an impossibility not only for man but for a higher being as well.
In his remarkable study “On the Essence of Human Freedom,” a study certainly inspired by the fourth and fifth parts of Spinoza’s Ethics, Schelling brings us testimony of touching candor on this matter. “The real and living concept, however, consists in the fact that it (freedom) is a capacity for good and evil. This is the point of greatest difficulty in the whole doctrine of freedom, and it has always been felt as such.” And indeed, according to our conception, freedom is the freedom to choose between good and evil: if we wish, we choose the good; if this does not suit us, we choose the evil. But evil might not have existed in the universe at all. Whence did it come? Do not Necessity and the capacity for choosing between good and evil testify, not to our freedom—as Spinoza and Hegel thought and as all of us also think—but to our enslavement, to our loss of freedom? The free being possesses the sovereign right to give names to all things, and they will bear the names that he confers on them. The free man might not have authorized evil to enter the world, but now man must be content with “choosing” between the evil that is not subordinated to him and the good that is likewise no longer in his power. But for Socrates already it was evident that man had never possessed such power and such possibilities. Names were given to things neither by man nor even by the Being in whose image man was created, and evil entered the world without demanding authorization of anyone. In his first incarnation Socrates did not even try to struggle against this self-evidence; in any case, he says not a word of his attempts, perhaps because they always ended in shameful failure. But in his second incarnation, when he appeared to men in Spinoza’s form he showed himself a little more candid. He allowed us to have a glimpse of his fruitless struggles and even admitted to us, as we recall, that his situation, that is to say, the situation of a man “who is led by reason alone,” was no better than that of Buridan’s ass who dies of starvation between two bales of hay.
In his youth he could not admit this idea. In the Cogitata metaphysica he still maintained human freedom, and added that if we were not free, “man would have to be regarded not as a thinking being but as a most infamous ass.” But the years passed, and with a terror to which the first pages of his Tractatus de intellectus emmendatione [Treatise concerning the Amendment of the Intellect] bear witness, Spinoza declared that there is no difference between man and Buridan’s ass: they are both deprived of freedom, their will is similarly paralyzed. It was long ago that the choice was once and for all made for them: “God has no principle or end of action.” This is reality—the final and definitive reality. And the philosopher is as little capable of changing anything in it as the man in the street or “the ass, the most infamous of animals.” These are “things that are not in our power.” The philosopher has at his disposal only the docet (teaching) how “to bear with equanimity” what fate brings us. And man must be content with this: “happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.”
VII
The idea of finality, the idea of an omnipotent God who created man and blessed him—this idea runs through and animates the entire Bible. But the Middle Ages already could not without difficulty accept the Bible’s logic, which constantly offends the habits of rational thought. I shall not exaggerate, I think, in saying that the Scholastics, who called Aristotle to rule over all the domains of theology, themselves thought what Spinoza was later to proclaim openly: “God did not wish to teach the Israelites the absolute attributes of His essence, but to break down their hardness of heart and draw them to obedience; therefore He did not appeal to them with reasons but with the sound of trumpets, thunder and lightnings.”15 And indeed, the God of the Bible in no way resembles Aristotle: instead of arguments there are sounds of trumpets, rolls of thunder, lightnings. And so throughout Scripture, beginning with Genesis and ending with the Apocalypse: over against the logic of human reason are set the omnipotent fiat and the thunder.
With the conscientiousness and determination that are especially his, Spinoza concludes that “between faith and theology or philosophy there is no connection or affinity . . . Philosophy has no end in view but truth, faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.”16 To be sure, philosophy and theology cannot and do not wish to have anything in common. The philosopher and the theologian must recognize this if they have enough courage to express in words the profoundest human experience, or, to put it better, if it has been given them to know, through their own experience, the illuminations that are produced when the different orders of being and of human thought strike up against and contradict each other.
Luther is infinitely distant from Spinoza, and yet in his doctrine of faith and free will we encounter the very thoughts that we find in Spinoza and expressed in almost the same words. Spinoza refers to Exodus 20:20; Luther to Jeremiah 23:29, “is not my word like . . . a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”, and to I Kings 10:11–13. He says: “The law is a hammer that breaks rocks, a fire, a wind, and that great and mighty shaking that overthrows mountains.”17 There is, it is true, an essential difference between Luther and Spinoza, a difference that we must state as precisely as possible in order to clarify the problem of the relationship between knowledge and freedom. Both Luther and Spinoza drew from their extraordinary inner experience the profound conviction that the human will is not free. And both of them were equally convinced that “there is no connection between faith and philosophy.” But while Spinoza affirms that philosophy has no end other than truth and that the goal of theology is piety and obedience, Luther says, or rather cries out with all the force and ardor of which a man is capable when he struggles for his most precious good, that the source of truth is not knowledge, the knowledge that reason brings to man, but faith, faith alone. Strange as it may seem, Luther was convinced that the goal of philosophy is not truth but obedience and piety, while truth is obtained only through faith, sola fide. Inspired as he was by Scripture, Luther could not finally speak otherwise. Hegel himself, let us recall, saw in the fruits of the tree of knowledge the principle of philosophy for all time. Now it is thanks to these fruits that man acquired the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil and became bound to submit to the laws of the good. Thus, if Socrates in antiquity and Spinoza in modern times tasted of these fruits, by this very fact they denied truth and replaced it with something quite different. Instead of truth humanity received “obedience and piety.” The world found itself subordinated to a law that is impersonal and indifferent to everything, and it is in voluntary obedience to this law that both mortal men and the immortal gods must find their greatest contentment.
To be sure, as I have already indicated, despite their intellectual honesty which is unparalleled in the history of philosophy, Socrates and Spinoza were obliged in this case to put a good face on a bad situation. Socrates did not succeed (and basically he recognized it) in constructing a bridge between knowledge and virtue; Spinoza no more succeeded in keeping himself on the heights of the mathematical method. He could never forget that, having lost his freedom, man has been changed from res cogitans (a thinking being) to asinus turpissimus (a most infamous ass), and this thought tormented him to the end of his life. But both of them were enthralled to such a degree by the idea of Necessity and of the eternal order that every manifestation of human freedom appeared to them both foolish and sacrilegious. Seduced, as Adam had been, by the magic “you shall be like God,” they agreed to everything, even though their agreement was no longer a free act but a forced adaptation to the conditions determined in advance by being. The man qui sola ratione ducitur (who is led by reason alone) finds himself obliged sooner or later forever to renounce his freedom and to make others renounce theirs. Suppressing his revolt into the deepest part of himself and swallowing the outrage (asinus turpissimus), he must glorify the God who knows no purpose and man who, in harmony with his God, is prepared “to endure both faces of fortune with equanimity” and to find there acquiescentiam in se ipso (contentment with oneself) or beatitudinem (happiness).
Of course, if Socrates or Spinoza had wished to realize fully the ideal of the man qui sola ratione ducitur, they would not have had to make the least allusion to acquiescentia and beatitudo. Why choose acquiescentia? Why not prefer for oneself anxiety? There is not, there cannot be, place in philosophy for any preference whatever. Philosophy, like mathematics, seeks not the best but the true. Its basic principle is non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand). And, as it is a question only of “understanding,” acquiescentia in se ipso, the calm and balanced mind enjoys no right or special privilege over the disturbed and agitated mind. The tertium genus cognitionis (third kind of knowledge), which reveals the necessary relationships of things, will find for all states of the mind and body the place that is appropriate to them.
It is thus, I say, that the man who is led by reason alone should have thought. In his eyes the difference between res cogitans [a thinking thing] and asinus turpissimus [a most infamous ass] ought not to be clothed with any particular importance. Human beings imagine that they constitute in the universe a kind of state within a state and that it matters greatly to someone or to something that they be res cogitantes [thinking things] and not asini turpissimi [most infamous asses]. But we know that these are only prejudices of the ignorant and churlish mob, prejudices of which the philosopher wishes to rid himself and can do so. Yet neither Socrates nor Spinoza could resolve to do this: the sacrifice was too hard, even for them. Before his judges, who held his life in their hands, Socrates continued to repeat that he would not renounce his “good,” even if the gods did not exist, even if the soul were not immortal. And Spinoza—as if it had been decreed that he should follow Socrates in everything and reveal what Socrates had left unsaid—declared in the next to the last theorem of the Ethics (before saying: “Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself”): “even if we did not know that our mind is eternal, we should still consider of primary importance piety and religion, and generally all things that in Part IV we showed to be attributable to courage and high-mindedness.” The mob, says Spinoza in the explanation of this theorem, judges otherwise: if men knew that no reward awaits them after death no one would do his duty, for people believe that in following the way of the good they are renouncing their rights and imposing heavy burdens on themselves.
But we ask once again: why does Spinoza consider the mob’s judgment low and contemptible and his own noble and elevated? For him who has understood “through the third kind of knowledge” that everything happens in the world necessarily, the mob’s judgment and Spinoza’s are only links in an infinite series of events. Neither the one nor the other can lay claim to any special qualification. One person, after discovering that the soul passes and disappears along with the body, will renounce morality and religion and say, with St. Paul, “let us eat and drink.” The other, on the contrary, will say, like Socrates, “I shall not deny the good; I shall not eat nor drink, and I shall continue to seek happiness in the good.” And neither the one nor the other has a right to expect the approval of others and to consider their judgments and valuations universal and necessary. But neither Socrates nor Spinoza will renounce universality and necessity for anything in the world: all humanity must think and speak as they do.
It is in the “must” that the meaning of Spinoza’s geometrical method and Socrates’ dialectical method lies. Indeed, if, like a stone or an asinus turpissimus, man is subject to the law of necessity, if neither man nor God Himself acts in view of some purpose but “only according to the laws of their nature,” then philosophy has nothing more to do: everything has already been done before it and without it, everything will continue to be done without it. The life of the universe follows the course determined for it in advance, and there exists no power in the., world which can change or wishes to change in any way whatsoever the established “order and connection of things.” But if the structure of being can not be changed in any way, if what is must be accepted as much by the philosopher as by the mob (i.e., asinus turpissimus)—for we know that in the face of reality all are equally impotent—what difference is there between the wise man and the imbecile? Yet there is a difference, there must be, or else Socrates and Spinoza have nothing to do in the world, or else they have no reason for being. One understands now why the wisest among men allowed himself to be seduced by the craftiest of animals. The serpent offered him, in place of the fruits of the tree of life, that is to say, in place of the “things that are not in our power” the fruits of the tree of knowledge, that is to say, reason which draws everything out of itself. This substitution promised man complete independence: “you shall be like God.” But all that reason could draw out of itself was happiness in the bull of Phalaris. No matter what Spinoza may say, it is philosophy and not religion that demands obedientiam et pietatem [obedience and piety]. The wise man must “endure and await with equanimity both faces of fortune,” even when, like his humble companion, he dies of hunger between two bales of hay.
Thus, reason teaches piety and obedience. If, then, faith also taught piety and obedience, there would be no distinction between reason and faith. Why then does Spinoza affirm so insistently that “there is no connection between philosophy and faith” and that they “are totally different”? And why did Luther, for his part, attack reason so violently? I recall that Luther—who in all things followed Scripture and particularly St. Paul, who in turn relied on Isaiah—every time he pronounced judgments that were particularly audacious and offensive to reason was convinced, like Spinoza, that man’s will is not free. And I would add to this that the source of their conviction, in both cases, was their inward experience. Finally—and this is the most important thing—these “immediate deliverances of consciousness” caused them a mad terror. Both of them experienced something akin to what a man buried alive feels: he feels that he is living, but he knows that he can do nothing to save himself, and that all that remains to him is to envy the dead who do not have to be concerned with saving themselves. Not only De servo arbitrio [On the Bondage of the Will] and De votis Monasticis judicium [On Monastic Vows] but all of Luther’s works speak to us of the boundless despair that seized him when he discovered that his will was paralyzed and that it was impossible for him to escape his downfall. Spinoza does not speak freely of what takes place inside himself, and yet, calm and reserved as he appears, he at times allows confessions to escape that permit us to catch a glimpse of what his philosophical “happiness” cost him. Spinoza never succeeded in forgetting—how can one forget such things?—that a man deprived of freedom non pro re cogitante, sed pro asino turpissimo habendus est (would have to be regarded not as a thinking thing but as a most infamous ass).
But it is here that Spinoza and Luther part company. Since our direct consciousness tells us that freedom does not exist, it does not exist. It may be that this is terrifying, it may be that the man deprived of freedom is indeed no more than an asinus turpissimus, but this in no way changes the situation. Terrors and horrors, whatever they may be, are not arguments against truth, just as happiness and joy do not bear witness to truth. By virtue of its discretionary power, reason commands: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari (not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse). Why must one obey reason? Why may one not oppose to the immediate deliverances of consciousness lugere et detestari? “Experience” itself, the “immediate deliverances of consciousness” contain no such prohibition; “experience” is not at all interested that men should not weep and curse. “The true is the index of itself and of the false” can no longer justify reason’s pretensions to omnipotence. The immediate deliverances of consciousness, so long as they do not go beyond their proper limits, bear witness both that man’s will is not free and that man weeps and curses the fate that has taken away his freedom. And he who allows himself to be guided by experience and experience alone permits himself to weep and curse when he discovers that an invisible power has deprived him of his most precious good—freedom. But to him who takes reason for his guide, qui sola ratione ducitur [who is guided by reason alone], it is strictly forbidden to weep and curse. He must be content with understanding, intelligere. To put it differently, one takes away from him the last vestiges—not merely the vestiges, but the very memory (Plato’s anamnêsis) or, if you prefer, the very idea—of freedom. Ratio (reason) brings with it the tertium genus cognitionis—cognitio intuitiva (third kind of knowledge—intuitive knowledge), the knowledge that by virtue of its power—acquired no one knows where—transforms purely empirical judgments, statements of fact, into universal and necessary judgments, that is, confers on the “real” immutability and definitively fixes it in saecula saeculorum.
Whence comes this dreadful power of reason? By what magic does it bring it about that the real becomes necessary? I think you will not find any answer to this question in any philosopher. But I know definitely that men do everything in their power to turn this question aside. Spinoza, who wished to reason “according to the geometric method,” permits himself to defend rational knowledge with “theological” arguments. He calls reason “our better part” and even “the divine light,” and is not afraid, when necessary, to write that phrase that I have already quoted and that one would expect to find in a catechism rather than in a philosophic treatise: “what altar can he build for himself who offends the majesty of reason?” It is true that there was no other way out for Spinoza: there, where man learns that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, one can only learn that we have never had and never shall have free will, or that it is forbidden us to weep and curse when we discover that our will is not free, or that our curses and tears, our despair and rage, will never be able to overcome the “true philosophy” that knowledge furnishes us and regain our lost freedom. But if this is so, then Spinoza’s statement that I have already quoted and that appears indisputable—“the goal of philosophy is only truth, while the goal of faith is only obedience and piety”—appears to be a false and dangerous auto-suggestion. Philosophy, and precisely that philosophy which found its most complete expression in Spinoza’s work, with the intelligere and the tertium genus cognitionis that crown it, is not at all concerned with truth and seeks only “obedience and piety” which, in order to turn aside all suspicion from itself, it attributes to faith.
Spinoza states—and here again we approach Luther—that the God of the Bible did not in any way dream of making known to men His absolute attributes but wished simply to break their obstinacy and their wicked will; wherefore he had recourse not to arguments but to trumpets, thunder and lightning. But if the arguments in which Spinoza put his trust led him to the conviction that everything happens in the universe by virtue of Necessity, which condemns man to the fate of the stupid animal who dies of hunger between two bales of hay, does this not indicate that “arguments,” by paralyzing man, do not at all lead him to the truth? That they do not awaken but rather still more stupefy our slumbering thought? And that if God had recourse to thunder and to lightning, it is because it was impossible otherwise to return to the human soul, in its lethargy and semi-death, its ancient freedom, impossible to deliver it from obedience and make it escape the limits of the piety into which the power of reason had forced it, impossible to make it participate in the truth? Verbum Dei malleus est conterens petras (the word of God is a hammer, breaking the rocks), says Luther, following the prophet; this “word” alone is capable of breaking the walls with which reason has surrounded itself. And it is in this that the function and meaning of “God’s hammer” consist. This wall is nothing other than the acquiescentia in se ipso (contentment with oneself) and that virtus (virtue) which expects and demands no reward, for it is itself the supreme reward, the summum bonum, or the beatitudo (blessedness/happiness) proclaimed by Socrates in his first and second incarnation. The thunderbolts of the prophets, of the apostles, and of Luther himself were directed against the altars erected by human wisdom. “Because man is presumptuous and imagines himself to be wise, righteous and holy, it is necessary that he be humbled by the law, that thus that beast—his supposed righteousness—without whose killing man cannot live, be put to death.” In all his works Luther speaks again and again of the malleus Dei, the hammer of God, which breaks the trust that man puts in his own knowledge and in the virtue founded on the truths furnished by this knowledge.
A page further he says again, with still more power and passion: “Therefore God must have a strong hammer to break the rocks, and a fire blazing to the middle of the heavens to overthrow the mountains, that is, to subdue that stubborn and impenitent beast—presumption—in order that man, reduced to nothing through this contrition, should despair of his power, his righteousness and his works,” which means, translating Luther into the language of Spinoza, non intelligere, sed lugere et detestari [not to understand, but to lament and to curse]. To put it differently, having discovered by his own experience to what abyss the “divine light” of which the wise men have spoken so much led him, the man who has lost his freedom and has been transformed from a res cogitans into an asinus turpissimus begins to make absurd, mad attempts to struggle against the force that has bewitched him. Acquiescentia in se ipso [contentment with oneself] and the beatitudines [blessings] that are strictly bound to this acquiescentia, as well as virtus, the virtue that finds its supreme reward in itself, all the “consolations” given by the fruits of the tree of knowledge, to use the biblical image, or by reason which draws everything from itself, to speak as Hegel did—all these things suddenly allow their true nature to appear, and we discover that they bring us not eternal salvation but eternal death. And our first answer is the lugere et detestari which is forbidden by the philosophers but which testifies to the persistence in man of certain vestiges of life. Man himself then calls upon the terrible malleus Dei [God’s hammer] and joyously welcomes the sound of trumpets, thunder and lightning. For only the thunderbolt from heaven that breaks the rocks can break “that obstinate and impenitent beast, presumption” which has so seized hold of man that he is prepared to accept everything that fate sends him aequo animo (calmly/with equanimity) and has even learned to find in this total acceptance his summum bonum. . . .
Where Socrates, in his first and second incarnation, saw man’s salvation, Luther saw his destruction. Intelligere and tertium genus cognitionis deliver man over into the hands of his worst enemy. He “who is led by reason alone” cannot recover his lost freedom; it remains for him only to learn and teach others to find the “best” in the inevitable. One must consider himself happy even in the bull of Phalaris. One must allow himself to die quietly of hunger between two bales of hay in the conviction that the world is ruled by a law from which no one can escape. Reason avidly seeks universal and necessary judgments. Men must see in reason their “better part” and, in submitting to it, find their good in these very universal and necessary truths. Placed at equal distance between the idea of God and immortality on the one hand, and the idea of Fate, on the other—both of which attract him—man will not turn to God: he cannot decide freely; he knows that decision does not depend on him and he will go where Necessity propels him, being accustomed aequo animo ferre et expectare utramque faciem (to await and endure calmly both faces) of omnipotent fate. All the docet (teaching) of philosophy, all of philosophy itself in which the search for truth has been replaced by edification, lead us inevitably to this.
Luther knew this, quite like Socrates and Spinoza. He also spoke de servo arbitrio (of the unfree will). But his docet appears to be something quite different. More exactly, his de servo arbitrio led him to a hatred of docet of every kind and, consequently, of the reason that is the source of all docet. Leaving to philosophy the glorification “of obedience and piety,” he concentrated all his thoughts on the struggle against the idea of Necessity. The malleus Dei in Luther strikes not man but that bellua (monster) or bestia obstinax (obstinate beast) which makes man believe that, in perfecting himself morally, he can attain to the virtue which requires no reward, for it is already happiness itself or, as Luther said, “man presumptuously claims to be holy and righteous.” The virtue and happiness of the man who by his own powers can turn neither to God nor to immortality, for reason has enchained his will and obliged him to go where Necessity pushes him, appeared to Luther as the fall of man, as original sin. The idea of law and order, on which all our thought is based, is also for him the worst of errors. The source of truth is found where human reason least expects it; and it is there also that one can attain the good which we have exchanged for philosophical happiness.
Luther calls this source “faith.” Let us then for the present give it the same name, if only to indicate that there can be another source of truth than that of which Socrates spoke and that the truth in no way resembles the universal and necessary judgments of Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant, that the truth has nothing in common with Necessity. “Nothing is more inimical to faith than law and reason, and these two cannot be overcome without great effort and labor, yet they must be overcome if you wish to be saved. When, therefore, conscience frightens you with the law . . . conduct yourself as if you had never heard anything of the law but rather as if you are ascending into darkness, where neither law nor reason give light but only the riddle of faith . . . Thus the gospel leads us beyond and above the light of law and of reason into the darkness of faith, where light and reason have nothing to do. Moses on the mountain, where he speaks with God face to face, has, makes and employs no law; only when he comes down from the mountain is he a law-giver and does he rule the people through law. So let the conscience be free from the law, but let the body obey it.”
What Socrates and Spinoza glorified as “our better part” and “the divine light” appear to Luther to be bellua qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (the monster without whose killing man cannot live). When Moses on the mountain saw truth face to face, the chains that bound his consciousness immediately fell away and he obtained the most precious of gifts—freedom. But when he descended from the mountain and mingled with men, he found himself again under the domination of the law; as it did to Socrates and Spinoza, eternal, immutable law appeared to him as belonging to the very nature of being, as constituting the universal and necessary truths of which it is always the question here. Such a “metamorphosis” is incomprehensible to “reason.” Reason is convinced that law is always law, for him who keeps to the mountain-top as well as for him who has descended into the valley. Its power cannot undergo any diminution. As for Luther, he throws himself into the darkness and abyss of faith in order to find there the power to struggle against the monster that the wise adore. Or, to put it better: he attains that extreme tension of the soul wherein it ceases to calculate in advance, to measure, to weigh, to adapt itself. Malleus Dei, the trumpets, the thunder, the lightnings of which Spinoza spoke with so much scorn, awakened in Luther’s soul all the ridere, lugere et detestari [to laugh, lament and curse] that reason had lulled to sleep. Luther forgets the obedientiam et pietatem [obedience and piety] under the domination of which he had long lived—had he not been a monk, had he not sworn obedience to the good and pronounced vows as solemn as those with which Spinoza’s works are filled?—but now he thinks of only one thing; he must kill this abominable “monster without whose killing man cannot live.”
Which road leads to the truth? Is it the road of reason, of obedience and piety that brings us into the kingdom of Necessity, or is it the road of “faith” which declares an implacable war against Necessity? Behind Socrates’ autonomous ethics and reason we have discovered the bull of Phalaris; Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis has changed man under our eyes from res cogitans [a thinking thing] into asinus turpissimus [a most infamous ass]. May it be that Luther’s thunderbolts and audacity, born of tears and despair, will bring us something else, and that out of the “darkness of faith” the freedom that man lost in entrusting himself to knowledge may be won again?
IX
It is usually held that German idealist philosophy sprang entirely from Luther. How this opinion arose is difficult to say. Perhaps the historians of philosophy have allowed themselves to be led astray by a very simple train of reasoning: all the representatives of German idealism—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—were Lutherans, ergo German idealism sprang from Luther. But it suffices to recall what Hegel said about original sin, or Kant’s “I ought, therefore I can,” or Schelling’s famous essay “On the Essence of Human Freedom” (even if it be only the quotation from it cited above), or Fichte’s ethical idealism to realize that Luther remained entirely outside German philosophical thought. “I ought, therefore I can,” says Kant, while Luther’s entire doctrine rests on the opposite assertion: “I ought, I wish even, yet I can not.” The law is not given man to guide him but only to make him aware of his weakness and impotence; “the law accuses, terrifies and condemns.” After the fall, man lost both his freedom of will and his freedom of thought; he cannot go where he wishes to go and he takes appearances and illusions for truths. In Luther’s lifetime his doctrine seemed unacceptable and absurd both to the learned Erasmus and to the Catholic theologians nurtured on the Bible. According to Luther, God is beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsehood. How could philosophy or even theology accept this—especially philosophy? At bottom Kant, Fichte and Schelling thought as did Hegel: the serpent did not deceive Adam, Socrates repeated Adam’s act, and the fruits of the tree of knowledge have become the principle of philosophy for all time.
The only exception to this was Nietzsche. He alone saw in Socrates a fallen man. Socrates “appeared to be a healer, a deliverer. Is it still necessary to show the error in his belief in “reason” at all costs? It is self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to think that they are leaving décadence by making war against it. To escape it is beyond their power; what they choose as a remedy, as a means of deliverance, is only another expression of décadence. They merely change its expression; they do not destroy it . . . To be forced to fight against the instincts—this is the formula of décadence; as long as life is on the ascendant, happiness and instinct are identical.” And again: “The morality of the Greek philosophers since Plato is pathologically conditioned, just as is their lofty estimate of dialectic. Reason = virtue = happiness only means: We must imitate Socrates and establish forever against the dark instincts a daylight—the daylight of reason. We must be intelligent, clear, lucid at all costs; every surrender to the instincts or to the unconscious leads downward.”
In general Nietzsche treats Luther very cavalierly; many a time he calls him a coarse and brutal peasant. But in the papers found after his death we read: “Luther’s language and the Bible’s poetic form as the foundation of the new German poesy—this is my discovery.” And, indeed, Nietzsche is the first of the German philosophers who turned to Luther and the Bible. The subtitle of the work from which I have quoted his remarks on Socrates is already sufficiently revelatory in this respect: “How one philosophizes with the hammer.” We recall the role that the “hammer of God” plays in Luther and in the prophets. Furthermore, in his reflections on Socrates, Nietzsche basically only repeats what Luther had said about the fallen man. The fallen man is entirely in the power of an alien force and can do nothing more to save himself.
Such precisely is Nietzsche’s Socrates; the more he struggles, the more desperately he strains his forces, the more surely he marches to his ruin. He has lost his freedom and does not choose, though he is persuaded to the contrary; he is pushed and dragged and does not even feel that he is in chains. Socrates went to reason, to the good, as the first man stretched out his hand to the fruit of the tree of knowledge; but where they expected to attain resurrection and life they found only corruption and death. This is the meaning of Luther’s terrible words: “Man must distrust his own works and, like a cripple with slack arms and legs, implore grace as the effector of works.” This is also the meaning of his doctrine of “the law” and of his de servo arbitrio [on the bondage of the will].
Luther’s as well as Nietzsche’s “experience” correspond so little to what men ordinarily find in experience that they appear to them fantastic; they have been brought, it seems, from another world, completely foreign to our own. Luther and Nietzsche were not the only ones, however, to have such experiences. In Kierkegaard’s Thorn in the Flesh we find a similar testimony: “You wish to run faster than ever, but you feel that you cannot even lift your feet from the ground; you are prepared to sacrifice everything in the world to buy even only an instant and you learn that it is not for sale for ‘it does not lie in any one’s will or power but only in God’s mercy.’” All this is so much outside the field of our vision that it seems to us to have passed beyond the limits of all possible and actual human interests. If, after the fall, our will is so weakened that we can do nothing for our own salvation—Nietzsche does not hide the fact that he, like Socrates, is a fallen man—and we are forced to go, arms dangling, to our ruin without even trying to fight, what interests can still be in question? All interests have vanished; it remains for us only to look straight before us, with heart frozen. It remains for us only to renounce forever ridere, lugere et detestari to learn to find “the highest good” in intelligere.
Luther could still “implore grace as the effector of works.” But for Nietzsche, judging by what he says in his books, prayers as well as He to whom Luther addressed his prayers had ceased to exist. How pray when there is no one to hear us? How beseech God when “knowledge” brings us the “universal and necessary truth” that God does not exist or, as Nietzsche said, that men have killed God?
But, strangely enough, in Nietzsche as in Luther, the moment of the deepest fall was followed by an entirely new revelation. When Nietzsche felt that Socrates’ “wisdom” was only the expression of his “fall” and that man, like a bird bewitched by a serpent, does not go where he wishes but is dragged against his will by an incomprehensible force into the abyss of physical and spiritual annihilation, there suddenly rose before him the idea of the Eternal Return, an idea completely alien to his thought as well as our own. It was as if he had suddenly been transported, like Moses, to that peak where “he speaks with God face to face.” He discovered that there—face to face with the primordial mystery, “law and reason have nothing to do,” and he began to speak of the will to power, of the morality of masters, and of all that he had found “beyond good and evil.”
I repeat that Nietzsche felt himself, quite like Socrates, a fallen man. The laws of reason and morality were deeply embedded in him, they had somehow become part of his spiritual being; to tear them out without killing his soul seemed to him as impossible as to extract the skeleton of a man without first killing the man. In his view, just as in ours, these laws express our deepest nature; beyond good and evil, beyond the truth, there is only the void, nothingness, where everything disappears. Nevertheless, it is there that one can, one must, seek omnipotence, the power that will save man from death! Luther’s sola fide led him to Him of whom he said, “for God is the Almighty who creates everything out of nothing.” But does not then Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” express under another form Luther’s sola fide? Luther relied on the authority of the Bible, on the prophets and apostles, while Nietzsche’s leap to the heights of Sinai began at the moment when the Bible had lost all authority in his eyes. On the contrary, everything that still retained any authority for him warned him imperiously that the “Will to Power” was the worst of follies and that there was no salvation, no refuge for a thinking man other than the beatitudines brought by Socrates and Spinoza.
Nietzsche has told us of this sufficiently in the books that he wrote immediately after his crisis. And yet a mysterious force impelled him away from the tree of knowledge. What are we to call this force? Shall we find a name for it among the words that still retain a certain meaning for us? We would postpone the answer to this question. But let us hear what Nietzsche himself says about this force: “Send me madness, you inhabitants of the sky—madness, that I may finally believe in myself! Send me delirium and convulsions, sudden clarity and sudden darkness, throw me into icy cold and into heat more intense than any man has ever felt, terrify me with mysterious noises and phantoms, make me howl and groan and crawl like a beast—only that I may believe in myself! Doubt devours me. I have killed the law, the law terrifies me as a corpse terrifies a living person; if I am no more than the law, I am the most miserable of men. The new spirit that is born in me—whence does it come if not from you? Prove to me, however, that I am yours; madness alone can prove it to me.”
These lines are taken from Dawn of Day, a book which belongs—as is commonly held—to Nietzsche’s “positivist” period. And yet we find here, expressed with perhaps even greater force, what Luther had already said about the law. Luther could, despite everything, still rely on the authority of the Bible. He admits openly: “I would not have dared so to call the law but would have considered it to be the greatest blasphemy against God, if Paul had not done it before.” Nietzsche, however, could not appeal to anyone; he was abandoned to himself and his “madness.” When the modern man, educated by Hegel, who has inoculated him with the wisdom of the Biblical serpent, hears or reads Luther’s discourses, he calms himself with the thought that these are only the visions of a medieval monk who has rid himself of his cowl but not of his prejudices and his foolish fears. Nietzsche, however, was never a monk and was familiar with all the conquests of science. Furthermore, we must not forget that everything Luther said about “the law” was directed especially against the monks, who felt the hair rise on their heads when they read his writings. Their life was in fact founded on the conviction that “to him who does what is in his power God does not deny grace.” (Luther even says, “God unfailingly gives grace.”) Luther’s thought, however, was born out of his profound conviction that the more the fallen man struggles to save himself, the more surely (like Socrates in Nietzsche) does he go to his ruin, and that only he who remissis manibus et pedibus (with slack arms and legs) surrenders himself to the will of God, who is beyond all the laws dictated by morality and reason, can participate in the supreme truth. There can be no doubt about it: from the human point of view, Luther’s doctrine, in its harshness and cruelty, surpasses anything that the most pitiless human mind could ever imagine. The God of the Bible, if He is in fact such as Luther represents Him, deserves not our love but our eternal hatred (as, by the way, Luther himself several times says).
There is another objection that, from our modern point of view, is still more decisive. The monks declared that “to him who does what is in his power God does not deny grace”; Luther proclaimed that “man must distrust his own works and implore grace as the effector of works.” But both the monks and Luther spoke of what does not exist. There is in the universe neither God nor grace, and real being develops entirely on a level that Luther’s ideas do not even touch. Man’s task consists, then, in recognizing the conditions of his existence and in adapting himself to them in such a way that his wants and needs are satisfied to the highest possible degree. There are, of course, many terrible and frightening things in life, but wisdom teaches us not to demand the impossible. Socrates was right when he concealed the bull of Phalaris by affirming that no evil could befall a good man. Spinoza was also right when he erected over his asinus turpissimus the beautiful altar of ethics with the inscription, “Happiness is virtue itself.” But, to tell all, Aristotle and Hegel were more truthful and more perceptive than all the others: “the highest good” presupposes a certain minimum of temporal goods, and he alone can attain the happiness of contemplation who possesses the skill and the resolution necessary to keep himself far away from those realms of being where bulls of Phalaris and asini turpissimi haunt man’s imagination.
Now both Luther and Nietzsche knew all this. Yet it is precisely against this presumptuousness, against this “stubborn and obdurate beast who imagines himself to be wise, righteous and holy” that their thunderbolts were directed. It is in his faith in his own “knowledge” and his own “morality” that they saw the “fall” of man. “The freedom of thought of our scientists,” says Nietzsche, “is in my eyes only a jest—they lack in these things my suffering, my passion.” Now this is a variation on Luther’s theme—” the monster without whose killing man cannot live.” It is an objection, Nietzsche’s objection, against what we commonly call free and objective inquiry, against what Spinoza called true philosophy and what Socrates proclaimed as universal and necessary truth. But can suffering, even if it be measureless, or passion, even if it be the most ardent and powerful, be set in opposition to universal and necessary truth? And where shall we go to seek an answer to this question? In experience? But we have already seen that experience gives us neither true philosophy nor universal and necessary truths. Experience brings only “conviction” or “belief.” But conviction inspires in Nietzsche no confidence. “In every philosophy,” he writes, “there comes a moment when the conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene or, to use the language of an ancient mystery: adventavit asinus pulcher et fortissimus.” Again the asinus, and apparently the same one that we have met in Spinoza and the one from which Socrates’ “irony” once sprang. But its power is so great that the most daring minds submit to it. We remember Kant’s sentence, “Reason aspires avidly to universal and necessary truths”; we remember also Aristotle’s reflections on the same theme. Who, then, inspired men with this “conviction” thanks to which experience is transformed into “knowledge”? And how is it that this conviction has come to rule despotically over our world? Whatever the answer to these questions may be, one thing remains indubitable: it is impossible to fight against this conviction by means of arguments and objections. It is outside of, and precedes, all objections; it takes the place of arguments. To it can be opposed only “passion,” hatred, the raging desire to be freed from it at all costs. Hence Luther’s malleus Dei, hence Nietzsche’s Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert (How one philosophizes with the hammer). It is impossible otherwise to break the enchantment which has—God knows when and how taken possession of men. . . .
X
Just as did Nietzsche, Luther discovered with horror that where Socrates and Spinoza had found the supreme and only possible consolation there opened up the abyss of eternal death. Luther writes: Deus est . . . creator omnipotens ex nihilo faciens omnia . . . “God is . . . the almighty creator who makes everything out of nothing. . . . But that most noxious pest, the illusion of righteousness—which does not wish to be sinful, impure, miserable and damned but rather righteous and holy—does not allow him to come to this, his natural and proper work. Therefore God must use this hammer, namely, the law, in order that he may break, crush, grind down and completely destroy this monster with its self-confidence, its wisdom, its righteousness, its power, etc. . . .” As if he were replying to Luther across the centuries, Nietzsche cries with an almost demented passion: “In man creature and creator are united: in man there is matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day:—do you understand this contrast? And that your sympathy for the “creature in man” applies to that which has to be fashioned, broken, forged, stretched, roasted, annealed, refined—to that which must necessarily suffer and is meant to suffer?”18
These lines are basically only a repetition of Luther’s words; the expressions, the tone, even the thought are identical. But Luther had heard them from the prophets. All that the prophets say is animated by a single desire, permeated by a single thought: Deus est creator omnipotens [God is the allpowerful creator] (in Nietzsche—“Will to Power”). And it is to Him, the creator omnipotens, that both Luther and Nietzsche rush headlong, smashing without regret all obstacles in their way. Luther says: frangere, contundere, prorsus ad nihil redigere (to break, to crush, completely to destroy); Nietzsche in no way yields to him in this respect—he also tears, breaks, burns, completely destroys precisely that to which men hold fast above all, that which they esteem and love more than all, that which they worship. On the altars erected by Socrates and Spinoza, Luther and Nietzsche see that bellua nocentissima qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (most noxious monster without whose killing man cannot live).
But how did it happen that Luther and Nietzsche saw a monster where the wisest of men, a righteous and saintly man, saw and worshipped a divinity? How could Socrates’ summum bonum, his “knowledge,” which was for him the source of his saintliness, be changed in Luther’s eyes into the “illusion of righteousness,” into sin, corruption, death? We must not deceive ourselves: the thunderbolts of Luther and Nietzsche are directed against the god of Socrates and of Spinoza. Luther constantly curses both Socrates’ good and his truth, while Spinoza was convinced, let us remember, that he who has offended reason would no longer have the right to pray and that all altars would be forbidden to him.
It will be said that the Deus omnipotens ex nihilo faciens omnia [the all-powerful God makes all things out of nothing] still existed for Luther, while Nietzsche had denied God. That is so—and it is here that we touch upon the most difficult of problems.
I have said that Luther’s Creator omnipotens [allpowerful creator] was transformed by Nietzsche into the “Will to Power,” which he set in opposition to the Socratic “good.” Socrates’ ethics was the doctrine of a fallen man concerning the ways to salvation; but a fallen man—Scripture tells us and Nietzsche also suggests to us—is a man condemned to a punishment whose horror surpasses the cruelest imagination: from res cogitans (a thinking thing) he is transformed into asinus turpissimus (a most infamous ass) and dies of hunger between two bales of hay, since his will is paralyzed and he is incapable of moving on his own initiative any of his limbs or making the slightest motion. Perhaps he remembers at times that there exists or existed somewhere a Macht [power] capable of breaking the spell. But he cannot turn toward it; he “aspires eagerly” to knowledge, to universal and necessary truths. The “knowledge” on which he counts or, rather, on which he is forced to count, is, however, of no help to him; not only does it not dissipate the spell, it causes it.
Socrates was a fallen man, Spinoza was a fallen man—but Nietzsche also, like all of us, is descended from Adam. When, in Engadine, at an elevation of six thousand feet, he had that sudden illumination that he later called the idea of the “Eternal Return,” he submitted his “revelation,” as each of us would have done in his place, to the judgment of reason. He wished to prove it, establish its truth, transform it into knowledge. And it was to the same tribunal that he submitted his “transvaluation of all values,” his “Will to Power,” his “beyond good and evil” and even his “morality of masters.” And, of course, after reason had pronounced its judgment and the verification had been completed, Nietzsche returned with empty hands; only the Socratic-Spinozist “virtue” was left to him. For even Moses himself could speak face to face with God only as long as he held to the heights of Sinai; as soon as he descended into the valley the truth that had been revealed to him was transformed into law. “To see the creator and the master of the universe is difficult, but to show him to others is impossible,” says Plato. It is doubtless because of this that Nietzsche has told us almost nothing of the idea of the “Eternal Return” which, by his own confession, he felt himself called to reveal to the world; and what he does tell of it shows only that it was not given to him to bring such a thing to men. What he offered them is something completely far as can judge, in his Beyond Good and Evil, did he succeed in expressing this idea in an adequate way: “‘This I have done,’ says my memory. ‘This I cannot have done,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Finally it is my memory that yields.”19
It is in these words, almost devoid—by human reckoning—of all meaning, that we must seek the explanation of the inner struggles that nourished Nietzsche’s thought. The memory, that is to say, the exact representation of reality in thought, says to man: “You have done this, it was so.”—“No, I could not have done this, it was not so” replies that which Nietzsche calls, not with complete precision, his “pride.” (In Thus Spake Zarathustra, after the conversation with the dwarf about the Eternal Return, Nietzsche expresses himself better when, characterizing “this something” in himself that refuses to accept the real, he says: “Mein Grauen, mein Ekel, mein Erbarmen, all mein Gutes und Schlimmes schrie mit einem Schrei aus mir.” [My horror, my hatred, my loathing, my pity, all my good and my bad cried with one voice out of me.] And the memory yields: that which was becomes that which has never been.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the chapter entitled “Of the Redemption,” Nietzsche returns to this theme: “to redeem the past and to transform every ‘it was’ to ‘thus would I have it’” And he returns to it again in the third part of the chapter “Of Old and New Tablets.” All that has accumulated in the soul of man during the course of long years of suffering and trial and that, by the decree of our reason which has seized the right of final decision, cannot even raise its voice when it is a question of truth and error, is suddenly permitted to proclaim its rights. And it even realizes them: that which has been, says Nietzsche, becomes that which has not been. It is probably impossible to “explain” how these rights are realized, for they are realized precisely because and insofar as man learns or, rather, decides to do without all explanations, to disregard them, to despise them. For this there is also required that mysterious and sudden illumination through which there arose in Nietzsche the idea of the Eternal Return. Man refuses obedience to reason which, until now, has dictated its laws to nature itself. What Descartes called “eternal truths” and Leibniz vérités de raison and what, according to Socrates and Spinoza, is revealed to the “eyes of the mind” loses all power over man. “When, however, we admit that it is impossible that something should be made out of nothing, then the proposition ‘out of nothing is nothing made’ . . . is considered an eternal truth . . . Of the same kind are the following propositions: it is impossible that the same thing should simultaneously be and not be; that which has happened cannot become something which has not happened; he who thinks must, while he thinks, exist . . . and innumerable others.”20
So Descartes speaks. One cannot argue with these innumerable eternal truths. Disgust, horror, hatred, scorn—no matter how powerful they may be—cannot overthrow them. These truths are eternal; they are before being, before man, before God. But when Nietzsche was transported six thousand feet high and higher still above all human thoughts, he felt suddenly that the eternal truths had lost their power and no longer dictated their laws either to the world or to him. I repeat: he did not find the words he needed to designate what had appeared to him and began to speak of the Eternal Return. But here was something infinitely more important than the Eternal Return. He discovered that, despite the eternal law quod factum est, infectum nequit esse (what has happened cannot become something that has not happened), not memory, which exactly reproduces the past, but a certain will (“pride,” I say again, is not the proper word here) has by its own authority rendered the past non-existent; and he discovered that it was this will that brought him the truth. He who so violently attacked the Bible dares to speak of “redemption.” Redemption from the past, from the enslavement of the law and laws thanks to which alone the past remains unshakable. These laws, which reason draws out of itself, are precisely that bellua (monster), that bestia, qua non occisa homo non potest vivere (beast without whose killing man cannot live).
Behind Nietzsche’s Eternal Return is hidden, it seems, a force of infinite power that is also prepared to crush the horrible monster who rules over human life and over all being: Luther’s Creator omnipotens ex nihilo faciens Omnia [the allpowerful creator makes all things out of nothing]. The omnipotent Creator is not only beyond good and evil but also beyond truth and falsehood. Before His face (faces in faciem) both evil and falsehood cease to exist and are changed into nothingness, not only in the present but also in the past. They no longer are and never have been, despite all the testimonies of the human memory. In opposition to Hegel who, drawing up the balance of all that he had learned from his predecessors (“Socrates produced the principle of philosophy for all future times”), hoped to find God such as He was before the creation of the world and the finite spirit in logic, that is, in the system of eternal and unchangeable truths—Nietzsche longed only to escape from the domination of these truths. Explaining his idea of the Eternal Return, he writes: “A great struggle awaits us. For it is required a new weapon, the hammer: to bring on a terrible decision.”21 And again: “The philosophy presently on the throne does not cease remembering that all things are perishable in order not to consider them too important and to live peacefully in their midst. But for me, on the contrary, everything seems too important to be so transitory; I seek eternity for everything.”
It is not to be doubted that Nietzsche clung to the idea of the Eternal Return because—in opposition not to Marcus Aurelius but to Marcus Aurelius’ master, the master of all those who philosophize, Socrates—he was seeking to obtain eternity for the things which, according to our conception of truth, are condemned to annihilation. But does this mean that he wished eternity for “everything”? He himself has just told us that his “pride” condemned to death certain things to which eternity was guaranteed without any intervention on his part. Nietzsche even obtains in this way results that are quasi-miraculous: that which was, the past which enjoys the omnipotent protection of the truth of reason—quod factum est, infectum esse nequit [what is done cannot be undone]—is transformed by his will into that which has never been. Why, then, does he suddenly demand eternity for “everything”? Does he wish to satisfy reason, which aspires eagerly to universal and necessary truth? But this would mean that when memory says to a man, “you have done this,” no discussion, no protest, is any longer possible, for the memory reproduces exactly the past to which eternal existence in truth is guaranteed. To put it differently, he must renounce the “Will to Power” and adopt the attitude of the common man who accepts everything that fate brings him, or even the attitude of the sage who not only accepts everything but sees in this disposition aequo animo utramque faciem fortunae ferre (to bear both faces of fortune calmly) a virtue and considers this virtue his supreme good. It is impossible to escape the stone that calls itself “it was,” and “redemption” becomes a word devoid of meaning.
Nietzsche allowed himself to be ensnared by Socrates’ logic, the logic of the fallen man. The “stubborn and impenitent monster” was not killed, it only seemed to be dead. Nietzsche’s hammer did not break the pretensions of reason, which entrenched itself behind universal and necessary judgments. We must return to Luther whose hammer struck more powerfully and more accurately than Nietzsche’s. Let us forget that Luther was a theologian. Let us forget that he repeated the prophets and the apostles. We are not bound by any authority. Authority, indeed, is only a residue of the pretensions of reason, which aspires eagerly to universal and necessary judgments. But where truth is, there is not, there cannot be, any constraint. There is freedom. Let us listen to Luther. Let us listen to the prophets and the apostles such as they were in the sight of their contemporaries—simple, despised, even persecuted men. Now, when these men speak of redemption, it does not even occur to them that anyone or anything could place them before the dilemma: either accept everything that has been, or make everything that has been not to have been. Among the things that have been there are some that one can save and others that one can annihilate. God came down on earth, He became man, He suffered, but not in order to realize one of those universal and necessary truths that reason draws out of itself. He came to save men.
Luther writes: “God sent His only begotten son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and doer of violence; David, that adulterer; that sinner who ate the apple in paradise; that thief on the cross—in sum, be thou the person who committed the sins of all men.” The form is different, in keeping with Luther’s epoch and environment, but the profound thought of these lines is identical with that which appeared to Nietzsche under the aspect of the idea of the Eternal Return: it is necessary to deliver oneself from the past, to transform that which once was into that which has never been. Peter, Paul, King David, the thief on the cross, Adam who tasted the apple—these are all “fallen men,” like Socrates, Wagner and Nietzsche. They cannot save themselves by their own powers. The more they struggle, the more they sink. But Luther was not enchained by the eternal truths of reason. He sees in them, on the contrary, “the monster without whose killing man cannot live.” If these truths are destined to triumph, there is no salvation for men. To put it differently, in philosophic language, in absolutizing truth we relativize being.
Luther decides to hand truth over to the power “of the omnipotent Creator, who makes everything out of nothing.” If truth is in the hands of the Creator, the Creator can abrogate it, entirely or in part. He can bring it about that Peter’s denial, Paul’s persecutions and blasphemies, David’s adultery never existed but that certain other things among those that have been are preserved forever. God, indeed, is not rational truth, which, itself deprived of will, can yet paralyze the human will. And God does not fear anything, for everything is in His power. He is not even afraid of transferring to His son all the sins of the world, or, more exactly, to make of him the greatest of sinners. “All the prophets,” writes Luther, “saw this in the spirit: that Christ would be the greatest robber, thief, defiler of the temple, murderer, adulterer, etc., such that no greater will ever be in the world.”
The Christ, the consubstantial son of the Father, that is to say, God Himself, is, then, the greatest sinner who ever lived on earth! But this means that God is the source and creator of evil; one cannot suspect Luther of Docetism. The prophets “saw” and proclaimed this just as they saw and declared that God had hardened, that is, made wicked, Pharaoh’s heart. Such visions and proclamations, even though they come from the prophets, appear to human reason, bound by universal and necessary truths, blasphemous and sacrilegious; they outrage God, reason tells us, and they deserve the worst tortures in the hells both of this world and the other. God responsible for evil? God the Creator of evil? Absit—this be far from us—cried the Fathers of the Church as well as the simple monks. Evil exists on earth, yet it is not God who is its author but man; otherwise it is impossible to justify and save God’s goodness. And indeed, if the eternal truths are before God and above God, if quod factum est, infectum esse nequit [what is done cannot be undone], then we have no choice: we must set against God, the creator of good, man, the creator of evil. Man becomes creator omnipotens, ex nihilo omnia faciens [allpowerful creator who makes all things out of nothing]. And then redemption, deliverance from the past, from the nightmare of death and the horrors of death, is impossible. There remains only one way out: to recognize that the universal and necessary truths and that reason which brings us these truths constitute precisely that bellua, qua non occisa homo non potest vivere [the monster without whose killing man cannot live].
Luther felt that man would recover freedom only when reason and the knowledge that reason gives us will have lost their power. And Nietzsche, as we have seen, felt this also. He refused to accept the testimony of fact and tried to break the self-evidences with the hammer of his will. But when Zarathustra came down from his heights to men, he was obliged to come to terms with his terrible enemy. We read in Ecce homo, Nietzsche’s last work, “My formula for the greatness of man is amor fati [love of what is fated]—to change nothing, neither before nor after, throughout all eternity. Not only to bear Necessity, and still less to hide it—all idealism is a lie in the face of Necessity—but to love it.”22 But such was precisely the teaching of the decadent, the fallen man, Socrates! Such were the fruits of the tree of knowledge which, according to Hegel, were to be the principle of philosophy for all time. It was this also that Spinoza, who assimilated Socrates’ wisdom and saw happiness in virtue, proclaimed.
Instead of engaging in supreme combat with Necessity, Nietzsche, velut paralyticus, manibus et pedibus omissis (like a cripple, with slack arms and legs), abandons himself to his adversary and hands over his soul to it; he promises not only to obey and venerate but to love it. And he does not make this promise only in his own name; all must submit to Necessity, venerate and love it, or else they will be excommunicated. Excommunicated by whom? Amor fati, says Nietzsche, is the formula for greatness, and he who refuses to accept everything that fatum [fate] imposes upon him will be deprived of the praise, the encouragement, the approbation that the idea of “greatness” contains in itself. The old “you will be like God” arose anew, one knows not whence, and cast a spell upon Nietzsche who, before our very eyes, had made such heroic efforts to pass beyond good and evil, that is, beyond all praises, encouragements and approbations.
How could this happen? Must we believe in the intervention of the biblical serpent who had once seduced Adam? Indeed, translated into the language of Luther, amor fati means that Nietzsche sees “the monster without whose killing man cannot live” not in the chains which bind the human will but in the human will itself, in its drive to power. Accordingly, he strains all of his forces not to destroy or at least weaken his enemy but to kill in himself every desire for battle, to learn to see his essential task in uncomplaining, joyous even, and loving submission to all that comes to him from outside without his knowing whence or how. And this is the same Nietzsche who spoke so much of the morality of masters and railed so scornfully against the morality of slaves, who refused to stoop or bow down before any authority whatsoever! But when he looked Necessity in the face, his powers betrayed him and he built for it an altar of which the most exacting of the inhabitants of Olympus could have been jealous.
Thus was everything that Luther had said in De servo arbitrio [On the Bondage of the Will] and in De votis monachorum [On Monastic Vows], and what Nietzsche himself had glimpsed in Socrates’ fate but never succeeded in discovering in his own, confirmed: the fallen man cannot do anything for his own salvation, his choice is no longer free, everything that he undertakes brings him closer to death, and the more he “does” the weaker he becomes and the deeper his fall. And then there is still this point that is no less important: the fallen man—and we know that Nietzsche realized this when he thought about Socrates—puts all his trust in knowledge, while it is precisely knowledge that paralyses his will and leads him inexorably to his downfall.
This Necessity of which Nietzsche tells us—whence, indeed, does it come? Who or what is it that has brought it to us? If one had put this question to Nietzsche he would probably have replied “experience.” But we have already seen that one cannot discover Necessity in experience. Knowledge draws the idea of Necessity from a source quite other than experience. Moreover, without the idea of Necessity knowledge would immediately collapse. But where Necessity is, there is not, there cannot be, freedom; consequently where knowledge is, there is no freedom. It seems that Nietzsche was very near throwing down the gauntlet before knowledge and going to seek the truth elsewhere. And not only because Socrates’ example had put him on guard against the consequences of an exaggerated trust in knowledge. Nietzsche knew certain experiences which show that he aspired with all his being to rid himself of knowledge and to penetrate into those realms of being where the enchantment of knowledge would no longer weigh upon man, would no longer enchain him. He tells us of this in the same Ecce homo. I hope that the reader will excuse this rather long quotation, considering the importance of the question for us: “Can anyone at the end of this Nineteenth Century possibly have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period mean by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears—one does not seek; one takes—one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation—I have never had any choice about it . . . Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. . . .”
How little the necessity of which Nietzsche here tells us resembles the Necessity that had led the ancients to the conception of fate indifferent to everything! And the question rises for us: when was Nietzsche in the power of “prejudices”—when he glorified amor fati in the conviction that fate is invincible, or when he declared that everything “occurs quite without volition” but nevertheless “as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity?”
He ends thus: “This is my experience of inspiration. I have no doubt that I should have to go back millennia to find someone who would have the right to tell me: ‘such is also my experience.’” I think these words provide a reply to the question we have just raised: at moments the “prejudices” of men who lived thousands of years earlier were much closer to Nietzsche than the “truths” of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, in the end he brought his illuminations to the tribunal not of those “prejudices” on which the ancient freedom that had no fear of anything was nourished, but to that of knowledge, which has begotten the indifference, passivity and dreary submissiveness of modern thought. The idea of the Eternal Return wished to be “based” on something, and it was always to this very fate that it turned to obtain its right to existence. For it cannot maintain itself by its own will, it has no will; and it can no longer maintain itself by the will of any living being, the living being has no power. Everything depends on fate: will it or will it not agree to concede to this idea some place in the structure of being? For the decisions of fate are unchangeable and without appeal, whether it be the existence of the individual or all of humanity or even of the universe that is in question, and the virtue of the simple mortal as well as of the wise man consists not only in accepting the decisions of fate but in revering them, even loving them.
It is unnecessary to describe here in detail how Nietzsche tried to obtain from fate the right to existence for his idea of the Eternal Return. Nietzsche says that fate granted his prayers, but it is hardly probable that he himself seriously believed that one could “demonstrate” the idea of the Eternal Return and give it a solid foundation and that the considerations on which he established it were capable of convincing anyone whomsoever. And yet he did not fail to reason honestly and scrupulously on the subject, not like his distant ancestors with whom he carried on a dialogue in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but as a learned man, that is, one who sets out from the idea of submission to Necessity and not from the idea of power, must reason. From the point of view of “demonstration,” the idea of the Eternal Return, even under the modest form which Nietzsche gave it in order to bring it before the supreme judge, is greatly inferior to the majority of the modern ideas which Nietzsche had so mordantly mocked. The idea of the Eternal Return or, more exactly, what was revealed to Nietzsche under this form, can maintain itself only when the throne or seat of Necessity is destroyed. And it is precisely against this throne that Nietzsche had to raise his hammer. The sufferings, the horror, the despair, the hatred, the disgust, the joys and hopes that it was given Nietzsche to know—all these he would have to throw at the monster’s head to destroy it.
It seems that Nietzsche himself thought that such was precisely his life’s task and that he made truly super-human efforts to fulfill it. He weighed himself down with an enormous burden and was ready to take on even more. In one of his letters he says that he would gladly experience the worst sufferings that any human being had ever known, for it is only on this condition that he could believe he had really seen the truth. And his wish was fulfilled. Except for Kierkegaard, perhaps, not one of the thinkers of the nineteenth century knew the horrifying experiences through which Nietzsche passed. But he found that this was still not enough; he did not have the daring to rise up against Necessity and defy it. When he stood before Necessity and looked it straight in the eye, his powers betrayed him and he became paralyzed, like Socrates, like Spinoza. “The necessary does not offend me, amor fati is my innermost nature,” he says in Ecce Homo as if he had forgotten all that he had said so many times about the morality of masters and slaves, the “Will to Power,” the freedom that lies “beyond good and evil.” Instead of fighting against the monster he becomes its ally, its slave, and directs his hammer not, to be sure, against those who refuse obedience to Necessity (all submit to Necessity, the wise as well as the foolish) but against those who refuse to consider submission to Necessity as summum bonum and beatitudo. Nietzsche sets his pride in amor fati and bases all his hopes on “you shall be like God, knowing good and evil.” His philosophy, like Socrates’ and Spinoza’s, is changed into edification: man must “endure both faces of fortune with equanimity;” no evil can come to a good man, for he must find happiness even in the bull of Phalaris.
Nietzsche’s “cruelty,” which frightened so many people, did not originate with Nietzsche. It had already been introduced into the soul of the first man, who let himself be tempted by the fruits of the tree of knowledge. It had already been proclaimed by the wisest among men, who had discovered the universal and necessary truths. Original sin weighs heavily on fallen humanity, and all the efforts that it makes to deliver itself break, like waves on a rock, against the invisible wall of prejudices that we venerate as eternal truths. And Nietzsche could not escape the fate of all; the idea of Necessity succeeded in seducing him also. He bowed his own head, and called all men to prostrate themselves, before the altar or throne of the “monster without whose killing man cannot live.”
XI
Even more clearly than in Nietzsche does the strict bond that exists between knowledge and freedom or rather, the loss of freedom, appear in the shattering fate of Kierkegaard. Nietzsche called himself the anti-Christ and deliberately fought against Socrates. Kierkegaard regarded himself as a Christian, considered the Bible revelation, and said that he had nothing to learn from Socrates since Socrates was a pagan. In reality, however, he never succeeded in escaping from the power of the Socratic ideas. I should even say that the more he fought against Socrates, the more he became entangled in his nets. Strange as it may appear, something drove this Lutheran, this candidate in theology, away from Luther. By his own admission Kierkegaard had read almost nothing of Luther. “I have never read anything of Luther,” he notes in his Journal. And this is certainly no accident: the modern man cannot help but seek lux legis (the light of law) and he fears above all else tenebrae fidei (the darkness of faith).
It must be said frankly at the risk of arousing the indignation of many of Kierkegaard’s admirers: Kierkegaard’s Christianity brings us what Socrates, in his first and second incarnation, had already offered—the virtuous man will be happy even in the bull of Phalaris. In a discourse entitled “To Suffer Once, To Live Forever” Kierkegaard compares men to criminals from whom one cannot wrest an admission of their crimes by sweetness and good words and whom it is therefore necessary to submit to torture; and he declares, “Hope, in the eternal sense, is conditioned by a horribly painful interior tension, and the natural man will never resolve to take this on himself of his own free will.” Also, “the Christian consolation leads, by human reckoning, to a despair more terrible than the worst terrestrial sufferings, than the worst temporal misfortunes. And it is here alone that edification, Christian edification, begins.”
Anyone who has read Kierkegaard must recognize that all his writings, all his thoughts, reflect the same spirit as the lines I have just quoted. The very titles of his works—Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, The Sickness Unto Death, The Thorn in the Flesh—testify to the sufferings and anxieties with which his life was filled to the brim. In his Journal he writes: “When I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will suffice to make my name immortal. People will read the book, they will translate it into foreign languages. Men will shudder at the frightful pathos with which it is permeated” (II, 89). A year previously he had already noted, “It seems to me that I have written things that must move the very stones to tears” (I, 389). And again, “Can men imagine how much I have suffered, how much I constantly suffer, and with what atrocious suffering my existence is bound up” (II, 142). Near this we find the following testimony: “In eleven months I finished Either/Or. If anyone in the world knew what provoked the appearance of this book! My God, a work so immense! Everyone imagines that I was impelled to write this book by some deep sentiment, but in reality it relates entirely to my private life. And my purpose—if people knew what my purpose was, they would declare me stark mad” (I, 183).
Such confessions—and the Journal is filled with them—give us, in a way, a key not only to Kierkegaard himself but also to the extremely complex philosophic problems bound up with his work, which is unique in the orientation of its thought. It is beyond doubt that what Kierkegaard lived through, and of which he tells us in his books, was so horrible that the very stones would have had to pity him. But it is no less certain, on the other hand, that if men had known for what reason Kierkegaard raised such a storm, they would have laughed at him or shut him up in a madhouse. Moreover, despite the many passages of the Journal which permit us to divine what it was that made Kierkegaard suffer, he himself remains persuaded that no one will ever know the cause of his torments and where the “thorn in the flesh” of which he speaks so insistently was driven in.
Furthermore, he solemnly forbids anyone to try to discover the concrete circumstances that broke his life and informs us that, for his part, he has taken all necessary measures to bewilder and confound the curious who would gain possession of his secret. In this he partly succeeded. Some believe that the wishes of a dead man must be respected; others recoil before the complexity of the Gordian knot in which Kierkegaard deliberately interwove truth and falsehood. It seems, then, that we shall never succeed in determining exactly what it was that happened to Kierkegaard, even if we believe that the wish he expressed while still living in our world no longer binds anyone now that he has left this world almost a century ago. One may, indeed, assume that what torments Kierkegaard in the other world is the thought that he did not have the courage while alive to proclaim his secret openly in the face of all, and that if there were now someone to pierce his secret and reveal it, he would deliver the dead man’s soul from a great burden and at the same time render an immense service to all who seek and think.
Kierkegaard is neither the first nor the last among men who carried with him to the grave a secret that he would have done better to leave on earth and for the earth. I shall mention, for example, Nietzsche. Nietzsche talks to us incessantly of the “masks” under which human beings hide their innere Besudelung (inward soiling). And, quite like Kierkegaard, he is afraid to call that which torments him by its true name. Socrates likewise had his secret which remained inviolate, and Spinoza also, and even great saints like Bernard of Clairvaux whose perdita vita (wasted life) troubled Luther so much. One can, of course, speak of ideas without touching the life of the men in whose soul the ideas arose. Setting out from Spinoza’s maxim “the true is the index both of itself and of the false,” we can assume that for the verification of any philosophic conceptions proposed to us there are available principles that are immanent in them. But here is one of the worst petitio principii that reason, which aspires avidly to universal and necessary judgments, has ever forged. If it is given to men to realize the critique of reason not by means of reason and the principles immanent in reason, we must be prepared before everything else to renounce Spinoza’s principle. We must have the courage to tell ourselves that the secret of Kierkegaard, of Socrates, of Spinoza or of Nietzsche must not fear men and hide itself like a thief in the night, that the secret which was so mocked and slandered that it ended up by being ashamed of itself must occupy the first place among the truths.
Kierkegaard reproached the philosophers for not living in the categories in which they thought. Would it not be more correct to reproach them for not having the daring to think in the categories in which they lived? Kierkegaard himself wishes to believe that he lives in the categories in which he thinks, and it is in this that he sees his “merit.” “The explanation that I hide in my inmost being, the more concrete explanation that includes my dread still more precisely—this I do not write down.” But, despite his efforts to bewilder us, it is beyond doubt that the “concrete” is his breaking off with his fiancée, Regine Olsen. He could not, of course, hide the breaking off itself. But he did hide the fact that he had broken with the young girl not of his own volition but because he was obliged to do so, obliged not internally by some “higher” consideration but externally—because of a circumstance that was banal, offensive to him, shameful even, and utterly repugnant. This is what he wished to hide, and he did all in his power to make people believe that he had broken with Regine Olsen voluntarily, that it was on his part a freely offered sacrifice to God. Even more, not only did he succeed in making others believe this, he almost succeeded in persuading himself of it. But this was false. It was a “suggestion,” not even—it seems—an auto-suggestion. Kierkegaard had not sacrificed Regine; Regine had been taken away from him by force. And it was not God who had taken her away but the obscure powers that had once taken away Eurydice from Orpheus. Not only was Regine taken away from him, everything that God gives to man was taken away from him. What is, then, most terrible, most shaking in Kierkegaard’s fate (and also in Nietzsche’s), is that he had nothing more to sacrifice. To offer a sacrifice one must have something, but Kierkegaard (quite like Nietzsche) possessed nothing. He was a poet, a thinker. He even believed that he was extraordinarily endowed in this respect. But he had no use for these talents. If at least, he had been capable, like Orpheus, of moving the stones! But we know that when he spoke men laughed and the stones were silent, as they always remain silent. Besides, did Orpheus himself possess this power? Has there ever been a man on earth to whom it has been given to conquer the inertia and silence of this immense universe of which, according to the teaching of the wise, we are all only links? To put it differently, has there ever been a man audacious enough to think in the categories in which he lives and to descend, despite “eternal laws,” into the Hades forbidden to mortals?
Be that as it may, Kierkegaard appears to us now as, in a way, “Orpheus come back to life”; what he loved was taken away from him and since he no longer possessed the power of his prototype, who made himself understood by stones and animals, he had to turn to men. Now men are worse than stones; stones are content to keep silent, while men know how to laugh. Therefore one can tell stones the truth, but from men it is preferable to hide it. It is impossible to tell men that hell must violate the eternal laws of its hellish being for a Soren Kierkegaard and a Regine Olsen (in other words to take account of a particular and consequently insignificant circumstance). Furthermore, one cannot speak to men of hell, especially to the educated men of our time; the word “hell” does not exist for them. They know that there are immutable principles which determine the structure of being, that these principles admit of no exception and make no distinction between an Orpheus inspired by the gods and the least of beggars. It is useless to speak to men of Kierkegaard’s “sufferings” when he learned that hell would not restore Regine Olsen to him. In general, it is useless to speak of sufferings: no matter how terrifying they may be, can they shake the “order and connection of things” and the “order and connection of ideas,” that is, our thought, that is based on it? Spinoza’s non ridere, non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand) is as unpitying as the laws of hell. All argument is here vain; we must obey. Nietzsche himself, who “had killed the law,” ended with amor fati. What can Kierkegaard do? It is impossible for him to accept the idea that his torments will pass without leaving any traces and will change nothing in the general economy of the universe. But one cannot speak of this; it is “shameful,” and one must hide it and act as if it never were. Why is it “shameful”? Why must Kierkegaard not speak of what Orpheus once sang? It will be objected that Orpheus is an imaginary or, in any case, mythical person. Orpheus in the flesh and bone would not have dared fight against hell and would have been content with “justifying” his submission through lofty considerations, i.e., through thoughts about sacrifice, etc.
Whence shame came into the world no one knows. In Plato’s Symposium Alcibiades says that Socrates taught him shame. According to the Bible shame is the consequence of sin: when Adam had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge he was ashamed of his nakedness which heretofore had not seemed shameful to him. In both cases shame is bound up with knowledge and placed in dependence on it. Not knowledge as “pleasure in sensible perception” but the knowledge of universal and necessary truths. Knowledge obliges man to accept the real, that is, “things that are not in our power.” And it is knowledge, likewise, which suggests to him that there is at times something shameful in this acceptance. When Kierkegaard speaks of voluntary sacrifice and has nothing to sacrifice—for he has been stripped of everything—he does not even suspect that, following Adam’s example, he is hiding his nakedness under a fig leaf. He believes, on the contrary, that he is accomplishing a sublime work, that he is “saving” his soul and helping others save theirs. But it is then precisely that that happens against which both Luther and Nietzsche warned us, the first in saying “for man must distrust his works,” and the second “everything that the fallen man undertakes to save himself does nothing but hasten his fall.” Kierkegaard concludes that we must live in the categories in which we think—and stretches forth his hand to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil whose fruits, as Hegel has explained to us, became the principle of philosophy for all time. Kierkegaard detested and despised Hegel. A few months before his death he made the following entry in his Journal: “Hegel! Would that I were permitted to think like the Greeks: how the gods must have laughed! A poor professor who grasped the necessity of everything that exists and transformed the universe into a plaything. Ye gods!” (II, 351). But Kierkegaard could never bring himself to renounce the idea that our life must be determined by our thought, to break with Socrates. Even in his moments of highest spiritual tension, as we shall see, he could not resolve to exchange the “light of reason” for “the darkness of faith,” to use Luther’s language, and turned to Socrates.
In The Thorn in the Flesh he writes: “. . . and when mortal dread takes hold of a man, time stands still. To wish to run faster than ever before and not be able to move a limb, to be ready to sacrifice everything else just to purchase an instant and then to learn that it is not for sale, because ‘it depends on no man’s will or permission but only on God’s compassion.’” One would think that anyone who had passed through such an experience must forever lose all trust in his “works.” What works can a man for whom time has come to a stop accomplish—a man who, like Spinoza’s asinus turpissimus (most infamous ass) that is hypnotized by a hostile power, is incapable of making the least movement? But precisely in such moments Kierkegaard always remembers Socrates: nothing bad can happen to a good man, the good man will be happy even in the bull of Phalaris. Even if his will is paralyzed, even if he is condemned to die of hunger between two bales of hay, there still remains to him one “work”: he can still “endure both faces of fortune with equanimity,” he can still glorify fatum, he can still demand of himself and of all men that they find supreme happiness in the horrors of life. It is not only philosophy, indeed, but all of Christianity that is reduced to Erbauung, to edification.
XII
Two books are particularly revelatory in this respect—Fear and Trembling (along with Repetition) and The Concept of Dread. The first is devoted to Abraham and his sacrifice, that is, to the problem of faith; the second deals with original sin. I recall once more that Kierkegaard was born and grew up in a strict Lutheran environment. Even though he had not read Luther’s works, he could not but profess Luther’s sola fide. With age, however, he moved further and further away from Luther and his sola fide in order to regain “free will,” thus approaching that conception of faith as “faith formed by love” that Luther attacked so violently in Catholicism. In 1844, when he wrote The Concept of Dread, he already understood faith quite differently than in 1843 when he wrote Fear and Trembling; between these two works one of those events which are unimportant in other people’s eyes but which determined Kierkegaard’s fate happened: Regine Olsen, his former fiancée, became engaged to Schlegel. For everyone else this was only another engagement like all others and could furnish no material for profound meditation. For Kierkegaard, however, this meant: Socrates was the wisest of men, and Abraham, the father of faith, must and could be accepted only insofar as his faith confirmed and expressed Socrates’ wisdom.
As everyone knows, God turned Abraham’s hand away at the moment he raised the knife over his son and Isaac remained alive. Regarding this, Kierkegaard says in Fear and Trembling, “Let us go further. Let us assume that Isaac had really been slaughtered. Abraham believed. He had faith, not in some future happiness in another world but that he would be happy here in this world. God could return to him Isaac whom he had killed. Abraham had faith in the power of the Absurd;23 all human calculation had long ceased to exist for him.” A page further Kierkegaard adds, “. . . the movement of faith must always be made by virtue of the Absurd, but it must be noted that the finite is not lost thus but won in its totality.” And further on, to make his conception of faith clearer for us, Kierkegaard tells us the “invented” story of the poor young man who fell in love with a princess. It is obvious to everyone that the young man will never obtain the princess as his wife. But “the knight of faith,” who knows as well as “everyone” how mighty is the power of the “everyday” over men, makes the “movement of faith,” and a miracle happens: “I believe,” says he, “that she will be mine; I have faith by virtue of the Absurd, for to God everything is possible.” Yet at the same time Kierkegaard several times admits to us, “As for myself, I do not believe; I lack the courage for that.” Instead of saying, “I lack the courage,” perhaps Kierkegaard should have repeated what he had written in the Thorn in the Flesh, “to wish to run faster than ever before and not be able to move a limb” and recalled Luther’s De servo arbitrio. What is it that prevents him from believing? Faith is what he needs most in the world. Faith means that God can give Abraham a new son, recall the slaughtered Isaac to life, unite the poor young man with the princess, force hell to violate its laws and return Regine Olsen to Kierkegaard.
It is clear that it is not courage that is involved here—on the contrary, if courage is needed it is rather to renounce faith. And, in general, anyone who knows Kierkegaard’s life will not be able to deny him courage, just as he cannot deny it to Socrates or Spinoza. This is why the road to “faith” for Kierkegaard passes inevitably through “infinite resignation”: “This resignation is that shirt of which an old folk-tale speaks; its thread is woven in tears, the shirt is sewn in tears. . . . The mystery of life consists in the fact that every man must sew for himself such a shirt.” And in this “infinite resignation lies rest and peace.” It is not difficult to discover behind this infinite resignation Socrates’ bull of Phalaris, Spinoza’s beatitudines, or Nietzsche’s amor fati. Kierkegaard passed through all this; but while Socrates’ wisdom stopped here, considered this the final end and blessed this end as the supreme goal of man, Kierkegaard could not stop here when he wrote Fear and Trembling. Or, to put it better, he could still not stop here. He called upon himself all the horrors of existence—by the way these, as we know, did not wait for his summons to visit him—not in order to appear a model of virtue and astonish people by his resistance and heroism. He expected from these horrors something different: God could return to Abraham his slaughtered son. Kierkegaard hoped that his sufferings would finally break in him that trust in the given, in experience, which reason inspires in men and by virtue of which they “accept” the real as inevitable.
Kierkegaard in a way gathered and concentrated all his powers, all his capacities for despair—the beginning of philosophy, he said, is not wonder, as the Greeks taught, but despair—to obtain the right “to weep and curse” and to oppose his tears and curses to the limitless demands of the reason which has enchained the human will through universal and necessary truths. The “knight of resignation” must become the “knight of faith.” Kierkegaard writes: “Reason is right: in our vale of tears where reason reigns as master it is impossible (that for God everything be possible). Of this the knight of faith feels as certain as the knight of resignation. The only thing that can save him is the Absurd, and this he acquires through faith. He sees the impossibilities and at the same moment has faith in the Absurd.” Here is still another confession—the moment in question is so important that we must concentrate all our attention on it: “If I renounce everything, this is still not faith—it is only resignation. This movement I make by my own efforts,24 and draw from it as a prize myself in my eternal consciousness, in blessed agreement with my love for the eternal Being. Through faith I renounce nothing;25 on the contrary, through faith I acquire everything—even in the sense in which it is said that he who has faith as a grain of mustard can move mountains.” And not only move mountains; infinitely more is promised to one who has faith: “Nothing will be impossible for you.” In other words, reason with its universal and necessary truths, reason which rules autocratically over our world, will forever lose its power. “Beyond reason and knowledge”—these words of Plotinus express the same thought. Plotinus also began with an apotheosis of resignation: if your sons are killed, your daughters dishonored, your fatherland destroyed, it must all—he declared—be “accepted.” But he ends up with a demand for the impossible: Beyond reason and knowledge lies the impossible. When Kierkegaard opposes to the knight of resignation, i.e., Socrates, the knight of faith, i.e., Abraham, he expresses basically the same thought as Plotinus, whom he probably knew hardly at all. But he uses the term “faith,” which is foreign to Plotinus.
“My intention,” says Kierkegaard at the end of his introduction to Fear and Trembling, “is to draw out in the form of problematics the dialectical in the story of Abraham in order to show what a monstrous paradox faith is, a paradox that transforms murder into a holy action, pleasing to God; a paradox that returns Isaac to Abraham; a paradox that no thought can master for faith begins precisely where thought ends.” This is Kierkegaard’s basic idea which he never stops repeating throughout all his works. Six years after Fear and Trembling he writes in The Sickness Unto Death: “To believe means to lose reason in order to find God.” This formula, recalling Pascal’s s’abêtir (to humble oneself) which has given rise to so many commentaries, carries Kierkegaard, it seems, beyond the limits of philosophic problems: if thought is brought to a halt, if reason is lost, does this not mean that philosophy also ends and is lost? But it is precisely on this account that I have recalled Plotinus’ words “beyond reason and knowledge.” Indeed, though he never says anything of Abraham and Isaac and perhaps never even thought of them, having attained the limit beyond which Socrates’ bull of Phalaris is found and where man must accept passively everything that is real according to the testimony of reason, so that “he is no longer to be held a thinking thing but rather a most infamous ass,” Plotinus made what Kierkegaard recommended—a leap into the unknown, where the competence and power of reason come to an end. Did philosophy then end for Plotinus? Or did it, rather, only begin, for it was only then that the critique of pure reason was attempted, that critique without which there cannot be any philosophy? I say “attempted” for it has been realized only once since humanity has been in existence, when God said to Adam, “The day you eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil, you shall die.” And indeed, the critique of pure reason is the greatest paradox, which saps the very foundations of thought. “It requires no support, as though it could not carry itself.”26 This idea which appeared to Plotinus in connection with the bull of Phalaris appeared to Kierkegaard in connection with the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice. If man is really res cogitans and not asinus turpissimus he will never accept the reality where reason reigns and where human beatitudo consists in putting oneself joyfully under the protection of universal and necessary truths—Isaac slaughtered by his father, man thrown by a tyrant into the bull of Phalaris.
Abraham raised his knife against his son, Abraham was a child murderer, that is, the greatest of criminals. According to the Bible, however, Abraham was a righteous man, the father of faith. What then remains of the Socratic-Spinozist edification, and the beatitudines promised by it, for the man who has decided to kill his son? Is there any peace of soul possible for him? Such a man is condemned forever. As long as reason reigns over the universe it is as impossible to save him as to make that which has been not to have been. Kierkegaard sees as clearly as Descartes saw that “what has happened cannot be made not to have happened” Kierkegaard sees, then, that it is necessary to choose between Abraham and Socrates, between him whom Scripture declared a righteous man and him whom the pagan god proclaimed the wisest of men. And Kierkegaard, conscious of the heavy responsibility with which he was charged, took the part of Abraham and began to speak of the “suspension of the ethical” with a daring that reminds one of Luther and the prophets. He notes in his Journal: “He who succeeds in resolving this enigma (the suspension of the ethical) will explain my life.” Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil,” which differs from the suspension of the ethical in form only, was also for Nietzsche not the solution of a theoretical problem, as he himself in several places admits, but a way out of the impasse into which the universal and necessary truths had pushed him.
To make clearer what Kierkegaard meant when he spoke of “the suspension of the ethical,” I shall quote again one of his almost involuntary confessions; when it is a question of the relationships between lovers, Kierkegaard’s confessions are always against his will. He tells the love story of the young man and young woman and ends it thus: “The ethical could not come to their help, for they have a secret which they hide from it, a secret which they take upon themselves, for which they accept responsibility.” What is this secret? Kierkegaard proceeds to explain it to us. “The ethical as such is the universal. . . . As soon as the particular man opposes the universal he has sinned and can reconcile himself with the universal only in acknowledging his sin. . . . If this is the highest that can be said of man and his existence, then the ethical has the same meaning as eternal happiness which for all eternity and at every instant constitutes the end (telos) of man.” It is easy to recognize in these words the deepest and dearest thought of Socrates and Spinoza. The ethical was them not only the supreme but the essential value. You may possess all terrestrial goods, but if you lack the “ethical” you have nothing. And, on the contrary, if everything is taken away from you and you have saved the “ethical” only, you have the one thing necessary—you have “everything.” The “ethical” is a value sui generis [of a unique kind] which is distinguished toto coelo [by the whole extent of the heavens] from all other values. The goods which the “ethical” has at its disposal differ as much from the goods which the man who does not participate in wisdom seeks and finds as the constellation called the Dog differs from the dog, the barking animal. It is with deliberate intent, of course, that I use Spinoza’s image, and it is with intent also that I do not quote the end of the sentence, to the effect that they have in common only the name. For even their names are different: on the one hand a constellation, on the other a dog, an animal that not only barks but is despised. It would have been more logical on Spinoza’s part to say not animal latrans (a barking animal) but animal turpissimum (a most infamous animal). It is beyond doubt that the source of the Socratic-Spinozist ethic was a profound metaphysical shaking, if one may so express oneself. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the beatitudo [supreme happiness] brought by the Socratic ethic is worse—if one evaluates it by human standards—than the worst calamities.
Kierkegaard felt Socrates’ problem, which is the basic problem not only of ethics but of all philosophy, no less deeply than Nietzsche. And, like Nietzsche, he strained all his powers to overcome Socrates’ enchantment. It was for this reason alone that he turned to the Bible; it was only to deliver himself from the temptation of the beatitudines [blessings] promised by the wisest of men that he remembered Abraham. But, unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard never thought of considering Socrates a “fallen man” who, as Hegel tells us, transformed the fruits of the tree of knowledge into the principle of philosophy for all future time. Socrates is, for Kierkegaard, a pagan, but the most perfect man who lived on earth before the truth of the Bible was revealed to the world. At the very moment when, carried beyond good and evil, he finds himself face to face with Abraham, dares to proclaim his “suspension of the ethical,” and sees that man is forced to hide from the “ethical” his final secret, he continues to cling compulsively to Socrates. He compares Socrates to the Christian mystics and declares with assurance, “The system begins with nothingness, and it is with nothingness that mysticism always ends. The latter is the divine nothingness, as Socrates’ ignorance, with which he not only began but also always finished, or to which he returned, was piety.”
As I have indicated, Socrates’ ignorance was not ignorance; Socrates knew that he did not know, and aspired eagerly to the knowledge that appeared to him the only means possessed by man for avoiding the fatal consequences of the fall. Nietzsche felt that “man must distrust his works” and that death awaits the fallen man precisely where he believes himself to see the road to salvation. But Kierkegaard does not even dream that Socrates is the fallen man par excellence and that “knowledge” is not a remedy for the “fall” and that the need, the hunger for knowledge is already the expression and confirmation of the fall. That is why in the Concept of Dread Kierkegaard attributes to Adam before his fall the same “ignorance of nothingness” which he had found in Socrates and which, having reached the extreme degree of tension, is realized in the act of disobedience to the divine command. To put it differently, Socrates, for Kierkegaard, is man as he was before tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That is why in Fear and Trembling he dares turn to Abraham only after having obtained the favorable disposition of the universal and necessary truths. At the very beginning of this book, as if to excuse himself before the “ethical” for the offence that he is about to perpetrate against it, he declares: “In the world of the spirit an eternal divine order rules; here the rain does not fall equally on the good and the wicked, here the sun does not shine indifferently on the good and the wicked. Here there is only one law: he who does not work does not eat.”
What is this “world of the spirit?” How did Kierkegaard know it? It is not from the Bible surely that he learned it, for in the Bible it is said that the sun rises equally on the good and the wicked. But this Kierkegaard could not endure: in “the world of the spirit” there must be another “order,” another “law”; in the world of the spirit the sun rises only on the just and only he who works eats. Why must there be another law here? No answer to this question is found either in Fear and Trembling or in The Concept of Dread. But The Thorn in the Flesh contains a confession which sheds light on Kierkegaard’s “suspension of the ethical” as well as on his attitude toward Abraham’s sacrifice: “In the world of the spirit,” he says, “luck and accident do not make one a king and another a beggar, one more beautiful than the queen of the Orient and another more miserable than Lazarus; he only is excluded from the world of the spirit who has excluded himself. In the world of the spirit all are invited.”27
At the last moment, Kierkegaard returns to the “ethical.” It is only in it that he hopes to find protection. And, indeed, here in our world the sun rises indifferently on the just and on the wicked. Still worse, it sometimes happens that the just never see the smallest ray of the sun. The sun is among the “things that are not in our power.” No, neither in our power nor in the power of God. Can one attach himself to what caprice and chance bring and take away? Can one love it? By virtue of the Absurd, Kierkegaard has told us, he believed that God returned Isaac to Abraham, that the princess would belong to the poor young man. As long as he hid from the “ethical” his faith in the Absurd he could maintain his faith. But when he resolved to reveal his “secret” in order to obtain the blessing of the ethical, the secret lost its magic power, and from the world where the sun shines on both the just and the wicked Kierkegaard entered the world of Socrates, the world of necessary truths, where—to be sure—there are no sinners but only just men, but where the sun has never risen and will never rise.
XIII
Kierkegaard felt himself irresistibly drawn to Abraham, but he “understood” in Abraham only what recalled to him Socrates in his first and second incarnations. He tried in every way to make Abraham pass into a “new” category but did not succeed in this at all. The most extraordinary thing is that, quite like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard comes to the boundary beyond which Socrates’ enchantment no longer acts on man and where the freedom for which we passionately long awaits us, but it is impossible for him to pass beyond this boundary and follow Abraham.
Above all, Abraham is for Kierkegaard a man driven out of the “universal” and deprived, therefore, of the protection of universal and necessary truths. Kierkegaard dares to say, “Faith is the paradox that the individual as individual is above the universal.” He even repeats this a page further. But both times he makes a reservation: “He only, however, is as an individual man above the universal who has first submitted to the universal and has become a man, an individual, through the universal.”
This reservation is extremely characteristic of Kierkegaard’s thought. He, who so violently attacked and mocked Hegel, nevertheless does not cease seeking everywhere the dialectical movement, the natural development. Hardly does he glorify the Absurd and proclaim that he who wishes to possess faith must renounce reason and thought than it appears that one cannot renounce it, that it is necessary to observe a certain order and rigorous progression. And this at the very moment when reason, which has established all “orders” and all “rigors” no longer has any power over us. “God is the friend of order,” he writes, without suspecting that this is equivalent to saying God is the slave of order. In Plato, in those brief moments when he succeeds at the cost of an extreme tension of all the faculties of his soul in delivering himself from the reason which crushes him, there arises always the “sudden” (exaiphnês), as proclaimer of the wished for but far removed freedom. Kierkegaard fears the “sudden” and does not trust freedom, even when it comes from God. Comparing Abraham to the tragic hero, he is ready to envy the latter. “The tragic hero renounces himself in order to permit the universal to express itself; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to become a particular man. . . . He who imagines that it is quite comfortable to be a particular man can be sure that he is not a knight of faith. The knight of faith knows, on the contrary, that it is a glorious thing to belong to the universal. . . . He knows how pleasant it is to be a man who has his fatherland in the universal, who finds in the universal a sweet refuge where he is gathered with open arms when the desire to enter it takes hold of him. But he knows that above the universal rises a solitary, narrow and abrupt path; he knows how fearful it is to be born solitary, to follow an always empty road without ever encountering a living soul. He knows very well where he is and how men regard him. Humanly speaking, he is a madman and can make no one understand him. “A madman”—the expression is too weak. If people refuse to consider him mad, then he is a hypocrite and the higher he ascends on the path the more frightful a hypocrite he is. The knight of faith knows that it is good to hand oneself over to the universal. This demands courage but brings with it peace, precisely because it is done for the sake of the universal.”
“It is a glorious thing to belong to the universal!” We recognize this thought: Socrates and Spinoza not only proclaimed it, they actualized it in their lives. But we recall also something else: the universal and necessary truths demand of man that he accept aequo animo [calmly] everything, including the bull of Phalaris, that fate brings him; they demand that he be ready to transform himself from a res cogitans [thinking thing] into an asinus turpissimus [most infamous ass]. Aristotle did not suspect this, but Socrates and Spinoza knew it perfectly well. When Kierkegaard speaks of the tragic, he holds to the Aristotelian point of view: one can envy the tragic hero—the universal and necessary truths take his side. And Kierkegaard even refers to the Aristotelian conception of tragedy. He also quotes, with an indulgence that seems hardly compatible with his character, Aristotle’s corrective to Socrates’ ethic of which we have already spoken, i.e., that it is necessary for the virtuous man to have a certain minimum of temporal goods. Kierkegaard’s indulgence is, of course, explainable. He makes every possible effort to introduce Abraham into another “category” than that which he marked out for Socrates. Thus, when it is a question of the “ethical” or of the “tragic hero,” he tends to separate himself in the sharpest possible way from Socrates and, to accomplish this more easily, substitutes Aristotle for Socrates.
Abraham, as I have already said, is above all, for Kierkegaard, a man driven out of the universal and therefore deprived of the protection of universal and necessary truths. “The knight of faith is completely abandoned to himself, and it is in this that the horror of his situation consists.” He decides everything himself and always at his own risk and peril. He cannot take counsel of anyone. He cannot even find any support in the church. “The hero of the church expresses the universal by his acts. . . . There is no one in the church who does not understand him. The hero of faith is deprived of this. . . . Even if a man were timorous and cowardly enough to wish to become a hero of faith at others’ risk, he would not succeed. For only the individual man as such can become a knight of faith. It is in this that his greatness, which I understand even though I cannot myself attain it, consists; but it is in this likewise that the horror of the situation, which I understand even better, consists.”
These confessions contain an extremely important truth. We recall that Nietzsche said the same thing but in other terms: when he saw himself obliged to leave the universal, or, as he himself put it, “to kill the law,” he almost became mad with horror. But there is in Kierkegaard’s case a particularity that is at first sight negligible but produces the effect of a dissonance and is significant. Kierkegaard speaks not only of the horror but also of the greatness of the situation of the knight of faith. The very term “knight of faith” sounds rather strange: one could say that faith implores the benediction of the very universal that it has fled. Is not the “knightly,” indeed, one of the categories that belongs, so to speak, to the “ethical”? But the tribute paid to the “ethical” is still more manifest in the “greatness” imputed to the knight of faith and in Kierkegaard’s efforts to place the knight of faith at a level above the tragic hero in the hierarchy of human values. This also is a tribute to the “universal”: Kierkegaard could not resolve to break once and for all with the habits of thought that men had adopted after Socrates, who provided the principle of philosophy for all time. If Kierkegaard had wished and been able to speak all of the truth, he would have had to root out from his soul all the ideas of “greatness” and of “knightliness” that his memory suggested to him. To one who has dedicated himself to faith there remains only “horror,” and he must renounce forever all “consolations” that the “universal,” by raising some to the dignity of “knight” and according to others “greatness,” has distributed. Aristotle could speak of the greatness and beauty of the tragic: he saw it on the stage. But for the man who has lived tragedy in his own soul these terms have no meaning. Tragedy is the absence of any way out. There is nothing beautiful in this, nothing great; it is only ugliness and misery. The universal and necessary truths not only do not support the man fallen into a situation with no way out but do everything, on the contrary, to crush him once and for all. Man sees every way cut off precisely at the moment when the universal and necessary truths, which promised to sustain and console him in all circumstances, suddenly reveal their true face and demand imperiously of man that he transform himself from res cogitans into asinus turpissimus.
Should not Kierkegaard, who had been drawn by the Absurd because it was the Absurd precisely that promised to deliver him from universal and necessary truths, have known this? God can give Abraham another son, God can bring Isaac back to life, nothing is impossible for God. . . . But as I have indicated, neither in his books nor in his Journal did Kierkegaard ever dare say that his Isaac was none other than Regine Olsen and that it was because of Regine Olsen that he had had the audacity to proclaim his “suspension of the ethical.” This was his “secret” that he hid from the “ethical,” that he hid from the Absurd, that he was unwilling even to admit to himself. For scarcely would he have called it by its true name than the universal and necessary truths would have deprived him not only of the title “knight of faith” but also that of “tragic hero.” The worst thing for Kierkegaard is that he was aware that everything that had happened to him had happened “naturally,” without God or the devil or even pagan fate having intervened in any way. This Kierkegaard, who was prepared to bear everything, could not accept. But he could no longer destroy this nightmare. It is for this reason that it was necessary for him to persuade himself that his break with Regine was a voluntary sacrifice—the repetition, in a way, of Abraham’s sacrifice, who had agreed with God only because his was also a voluntary sacrifice. But whence does Kierkegaard know that God is more pleased with voluntary sacrifices than with others? We cannot put such a question to Socrates. His “ignorance” furnished him a definite answer; but had not Kierkegaard repeated many times that Socrates was a pagan and that he, Kierkegaard, had nothing to learn from Socrates? Now it appears that the Christian also cannot do without Socrates, just as he cannot do without universal and necessary truths.
At the same time that he wrote Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard wrote his Repetition, the subject of which is not Abraham but Job. Job, as is known, did not voluntarily kill his sons nor dissipate his wealth. All these misfortunes broke upon him suddenly without his expecting them. He has not even the right to claim the high dignity of the tragic hero. He is quite simply a miserable old man, like many—a burden on himself and on others. In our time of war and social upheaval one meets such Jobs at almost every corner of the street. Yesterday a king, today only a beggar lying on an ash-heap, scratching his boils with a shard. And yet, the biblical Job, who was neither a knight nor a tragic hero, succeeds in drawing Kierkegaard’s attention and “merits” that the philosopher should devote to him, as to Abraham, an entire book—Repetition. One can say of this book what Kierkegaard himself said of Fear and Trembling: “if men felt the somber pathos that animates it, they would be seized with horror.” Repetition is also written in “fear and trembling” by a man upon whom has fallen the terrible hammer and who asks himself in his terror whence the blow came to him: is it the malleus Dei, the hammer of God, or simply the “natural” power of the universal and necessary truths? According to the Bible, it was God who tested Job as He tested Abraham. But we cannot “know” this: “what is the knowledge that can be so constructed that a place is found for testing, which, in the infinite perspective of thought, does not exist, for it exists only for the individual? Such a knowledge does not exist, such a knowledge cannot exist.”
But to what purpose does Kierkegaard invoke Job’s memory and raise all these terrible questions? The hero of Repetition, just like Kierkegaard, was a man who was obliged to break with his fiancée. “Oh, my unforgettable benefactor,” he says, “O martyred Job! May I join you, may I be with you? Do not push me away I have not possessed your wealth, I have not had seven sons and three daughters. But he also can lose everything who has not had much, and he also can lose son and daughter who has lost that which he loved, and he also can find himself covered with boils who has lost his honor and pride and at the same time the power and meaning of his life.” What is it that Kierkegaard expects of Job? Why does he wish “to join him”? “Instead of seeking help from a professor publicus ordinarius [well-renowned professor] celebrated throughout the entire world, my friend [that is, Kierkegaard] runs to a private thinker, Job.” The celebrated professor is obviously Hegel. Long before Hegel, however, Spinoza had already seen the “necessity of everything,” and Hegel in this respect only repeated Spinoza. Why, then, did Kierkegaard not even once dare to think that the Olympic gods had burst out laughing on hearing Spinoza? Socrates had also taught the universal and necessary truth, but the god of Delphos did not mock him; on the contrary, he proclaimed him the wisest of men.
What would Job have answered Socrates and Spinoza if they had come to offer him their wisdom and their consolations? Kierkegaard never raised this question, neither at the time that he wrote Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Dread nor in the last years of his life when he so violently attacked the Protestant church and the married pastors. In his Either/Or Kierkegaard permits himself to set Job against Hegel, at whom the gods laughed so gaily. But the gods respected Socrates, and Spinoza was Socrates’ second incarnation. Kierkegaard could never overcome the anxiety that he felt before Greek wisdom. We shall see that, according to Kierkegaard, man left the hands of the Creator with his soul filled with anxiety, that anxiety is—in a certain sense—a fundamental trait or even the essential faculty of man. But when he wrote Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard still refused to think thus. He went to Abraham and Job because he saw in them beings who had had the power and audacity to overcome all their anxieties and to rise above the “edification” of Socrates and the Delphic god who had blessed Socrates. Abraham did not know fear; God was with him, God to whom nothing is impossible. And in Job “daily experience” had still not completely destroyed the memory of the time when reason did not rule as master over the earth. Or, more exactly, the misfortunes which fell upon Job reawakened in him this memory.
Kierkegaard writes: “The importance of Job does not consist in the fact that he said, ‘The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.’ This he said only at the beginning, he did not repeat it later. The importance of Job consists in the fact that he fights through the boundary disputes to faith, that here that terrible revolt of the wild and pugnacious powers of passion takes place.” To put it differently, daily experience or the immediate data of consciousness constitute for men the supreme tribunal in the question of truth: whatever “experience” brings us, whatever the “data” show us, we accept it all and consider it true. In a world where reason rules it is madness to fight against the given. Man can weep and curse the truths that experience reveals to him, but he knows that it is in no one’s power to overcome them, that they must be accepted. Philosophy goes even further: the data must not only be accepted, they must be blessed. Nietzsche even tells us that “Necessity does not offend him.” Also, Job, a righteous man, begins by completely repressing to the depths of his soul all lugere et detestari (weeping and cursing): “the Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” But as his misfortunes multiply and grow, the tension of the repressed lugere et detestari increases, and this tension finally bursts the hard shell of the self-evidences that paralyze his freedom. “The meaning of Job consists precisely in the fact that he does not diminish the passion of freedom with false consolations.”
Good will and wisdom speak through the mouth of Job’s friends; and yet not only do they not succeed in calming him, they only irritate him more. If Socrates or Spinoza had come to console Job, they would not have been able to tell him anything other than what Eliphaz, Zophar and Bildad said. They are men and, like all men, they are in the power of the “given.” And not only are they in the power of the given, they are condemned to think that everything that exists in the universe, living and dead, powerful and miserable, low and high, shares their fate, that is, is a slave to these truths. Job’s friends look at him in silence for seven days. But one cannot look and remain silent forever. One must speak. And hardly do their lips open than they begin, as if obeying Spinoza’s precept, to say what they could not refuse to say. Perhaps they realized that a man who speaks thus no longer pro re cogitante sed asino turpissimo habendus (is to be regarded as a thinking thing but rather as a most infamous ass), but they continue to speak, themselves afraid of what they have said. What can be more shameful, what can be more outrageous than the necessity to think and say not what we desire to say but what we are forced to say “by the laws of our nature”? If, at the time of his prosperity and happiness, Job had found himself before a being “fallen from the lap of the universal” and had tried to console him, it is certain that he would have had to tell him only what his friends later had to tell him. Does he not also begin with “the Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord”? And it appears that it is piety that dictated these words to him. Yet it is not piety but wickedness—and even that deepest wickedness, that pietas et obedientia which had permeated the flesh and blood of man after he tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge—that speaks through his mouth. It seems that Kierkegaard felt this: herein lay the secret that he hid so carefully from the “ethical,” herein only lay the meaning of his “suspension of the ethical.” But he can only temporarily push aside the “ethical.” Not only does he never connect the “ethical” with the fall of man, but the “ethical” appears to him always a necessary dialectical moment in the development of man toward the religious, and—as if he were an orthodox Hegelian—a moment that can only be suspended (aufgehoben) but not once for all abrogated.
Shortly before his death in 1854, he wrote in his Journal: “. . . when Christ cried out ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ it was terrible for Christ, and so it is ordinarily presented. But it seems to me that it was still more terrible for God to hear this cry. To be so immutable is horrifying! But no, the most terrible thing is not this, it is to be immutable and at the same time to be Love: infinite, deep, inexpressible suffering! Oh, what have I, a miserable man, suffered in this respect: not to be able to change anything whatever and at the same time to love. I have experienced this, and it helps me to understand even though only a little, from afar, the sufferings of the divine love.”
I think that, after everything that has already been said, these lines need no commentary. The universal and necessary truth has conquered not only Kierkegaard but God Himself. Not everything is possible for God, many things are impossible for Him; and what is impossible is the principal, the most important, the most necessary. God’s situation is worse even than Kierkegaard’s or Nietzsche’s into whose soul has crept “the most fearful, the blackest, the most terrifying.” It is with such an “experience” that Kierkegaard approached the biblical story of the original sin. One can say in advance: for man as for God there is only one solution, only one possibility of salvation: the fruits of the tree of knowledge which, after Socrates, became the principle of philosophy for all time and transformed themselves almost under our eyes into Spinoza’s beatitudines. The outraged “ethical” will receive complete satisfaction: man will reveal to it all his secrets. Hegel, whom Kierkegaard had offended still more than the “ethical,” will perhaps forget all the cruel words that the rabid author of Either/Or had directed at him. And then the Olympic gods will no longer laugh at Hegel, but it will be Hegel’s turn to laugh at the Olympic gods.
XIV
God must learn from Socrates and seek help from him whose truth has become the principle of philosophy for all time. All the lugere et detestari of God Himself break against His “immutability,” just as Kierkegaard’s lugere et detestari break against the immutable laws of being, of that order into which he was plunged by his birth. And it remains to God only “to endure both faces of fortune with equanimity” and “through the third kind of knowledge” to arrive at the conviction that “happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.” According to Socrates, a virtuous man will be happy even in the bull of Phalaris; according to Kierkegaard, “Christianity” does not reveal to us a new truth but brings us an edification which, like the edification brought by Socrates, is worse, by human reckoning, than any calamity. Luther said of God that he was “the omnipotent God who creates everything out of nothing.” For Kierkegaard, God’s will is paralyzed by His immutability, as man’s will is by Necessity—and, indeed, in even greater measure. Before His beloved son who agonized on the cross, God feels the horror of His impotence, as does Kierkegaard before Regine Olsen whom he tortures; he feels that he must run, do something, but at the same time he is aware that he is wholly in the power of “the categories of his thought” and cannot move any of his limbs.
Luther, it is known, spoke also of de servo arbitrio—of the bound will, but his de servo arbitrio was concerned only with man. For Kierkegaard, as for Socrates and Spinoza, de servo arbitrio extends likewise to God. There was one moment, however, when Kierkegaard resolved to seek salvation in the Absurd. By virtue of the Absurd, he tells us, God could decide for the “suspension of the ethical,” could return Isaac to Abraham, could recall a dead man to life, etc.—that is, overcome His immutability. But even when he proclaimed the omnipotence of God, Kierkegaard did not succeed in ridding himself of the thought that “in the world of the spirit” there is, there must be, a certain order—different from what we observe here on earth, yet a strict, eternal order: there the sun does not rise equally on the good and the wicked, there only he who works eats, etc. Accordingly, Abraham’s faith, no matter what Kierkegaard says, was not at all a “suspension of the ethical.” On the contrary, in the final analysis it appears that Abraham’s faith obeyed the demands of the “ethical.” Despite what he has told us, Kierkegaard did not perceive in Abraham the free fearlessness of a man behind whom stands the omnipotent God; Abraham was in his eyes a “knight of resignation” (to use his own language), just as God, who abandoned His son, was only a “knight of resignation.” Abraham’s faith, for Kierkegaard, is not God’s gift, it is his own desert. Man must believe, Kierkegaard endlessly repeats, and he who accomplishes this duty “works” and acquires by his work the right to the goods laid up for the just in the kingdom of the spirit where the sun rises only on the “just.” Virtue, like faith, consists in living in the categories in which we think. God must be immutable—and He sacrifices His son: Abraham must obey God—and he raises his knife over Isaac. The life of the spirit begins beyond the boundary of the “you must” from which God is no more free than man.
From where did Kierkegaard take this truth? The Bible does not at all represent God as immutable, and in the Bible the father of faith, Abraham, does not always obey God. When God, inflamed with anger against men, decides to make them perish through the flood, the righteous Noah does not enter into dispute with Him but locks himself in his ark, happy to save his own life and that of his dear ones. But Abraham argued with God about Sodom and Gomorrah, and God forgot that He is immutable and gave in to his “servant.” It is obvious that biblical “faith” has nothing in common with obedience, and that every “you must” is located in regions where the rays of faith do not penetrate. Kierkegaard himself writes in the Sickness Unto Death about the mysterious words of St. Paul—“all that does not come of faith is sin” (Romans 14, 23): “that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith constitutes one of the most decisive definitions of Christianity.” And he repeats this several times in the course of the book. In The Concept of Dread he writes: “The opposite of freedom is guilt.” But if this is so, if to sin and guilt faith and freedom are opposed, then do not Kierkegaard’s reflections on the order and laws that rule in the world of the spirit show that man has neither faith nor freedom and that he knows only guilt and impotent virtue? Does it not appear that Kierkegaard has drawn his Christian edification not from the Absurd that he glorified, not from the Bible that he considered as the revelation of truth, but from the “knowledge” that the wisest among men brought us after eating from the fruits of the tree of knowledge?
Speaking of the first man, Kierkegaard declares with assurance in The Concept of Dread: “Innocence is ignorance. In the state of innocence man is determined not as mind but as soul, in unmediated union with his nature. The mind is still dormant in man. This idea is in harmony with the Bible which denies to man in the state of innocence knowledge of the difference between good and evil.” Indeed, the Bible says that in the state of innocence man did not know the difference between good and evil. But this was not a weakness, a defect; on the contrary, it was a power, a tremendous advantage. Man as he left the hands of the Creator did not know shame, and this also constituted a great advantage. The knowledge of good and evil, as well as of shame, came to him only after he had tasted the fruits of the forbidden tree. This is incomprehensible to us, just as we do not understand how these fruits could bring him death. And relying on the infallibility of our reason, we wish with all our powers that the mind should be dormant in the man who does not know the difference between good and evil. But the Bible does not say this. The Bible says, on the contrary, that all the misfortunes of man come from knowledge. This is also the meaning of the words of St. Paul quoted by Kierkegaard: “all that does not come of faith is sin.” In its very essence knowledge, according to the Bible, excludes faith and is the sin par excellence or the original sin.
Contrary to what Kierkegaard asserts, it must be said that it was precisely the fruits of the tree of knowledge which lulled the human mind to sleep. This is why God forbade Adam to eat of them. The words that God addressed to Adam, “As for the tree of knowledge of good and of evil, you shall not eat of it, for on the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die,” are in complete disagreement with our conception of knowledge as well as our conception of good and evil. But their meaning is perfectly clear and admits of no tortured interpretation. I repeat once more: they constitute the only true critique of pure reason that has ever been formulated here on earth. God clearly said to man that he must not put his trust in the fruits of the tree of knowledge, for they carry with them the most terrible dangers. But Adam, like Hegel later, “opposed distrust to distrust.” And when the serpent assured him that the fruits were good to eat, that having eaten of them men would become like God, Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptation. This is what the Bible tell us. This is how St. Paul understood the biblical account, it is also how Luther understood it. St. Paul says that when Abraham went to the Promised Land he departed without knowing where he was going. This signifies that only he attains the Promised Land who takes no account of knowledge, who is free of knowledge and of its truths: where he arrives will be the Promised Land.
The serpent said to the first man: “You shall be like God, knowing good and evil.” But God does not know good and evil. God does not know anything, God creates everything. And Adam, before his fall, participated in the divine omnipotence. It was only after the fall that he fell under the power of knowledge and at that same moment lost the most precious of God’s gifts—freedom. For freedom does not consist in the possibility of choosing between good and evil, as we today are condemned to think. Freedom consists in the force and power not to admit evil into the world. God, the freest being, does not choose between good and evil. And the man whom He had created did not choose either, for there was nothing there to choose: evil did not exist in paradise. Only when man, obeying the suggestion of a force hostile and incomprehensible to us, held forth his hand towards the tree did his mind fall asleep and did he become that feeble being, subject to alien principles, that we now see. This is the meaning of the “fall” according to the Bible. This appears to us so highly fantastic that even men who considered the Bible an inspired book attempted by every means to attach to it commentaries that would modify its meaning. Kierkegaard in this respect was, as we have seen, no exception. According to him, following the sin man, having learned to distinguish good and evil, awoke from his sleeping state. But then what kind of sin would this be? Would we not in that case have to admit—as Hegel thought—that it was not the serpent but God who had deceived man?
Kierkegaard could not resolve to acknowledge this openly, but it is to this conclusion precisely that his commentaries in fact lead. He declares: “I shall say frankly that I cannot form any precise idea of the serpent. Above all, the serpent places us before the difficulty that the temptation comes from outside.” No doubt, according to the Bible, the temptation came from without. And it is likewise beyond doubt that there is here something monstrous for our reason and still more so for our morality. But did not Kierkegaard himself invoke the Absurd, did he not speak to us in an inspired tone of the “suspension of the ethical?” Why then, in the face of the most troubling enigma that the Bible poses to us, does he turn again to reason and morality? Whence did this “temptation” come to him? From without or from within? And is there not here something more terrible, infinitely more terrible, that temptation? Kierkegaard could not form any precise idea of the serpent, and yet he himself has told us of the fearful anxiety experienced by the man who feels that he must run as quickly as possible but that a mysterious force paralyses him and prevents him from making the slightest movement! And not only Kierkegaard but God also is in the power of this force that has paralyzed His will. What then is this force? Is the biblical serpent, perhaps, merely a symbol, merely an image of that which determined Kierkegaard’s fate, which determines all men’s fate? Is not to forget the serpent under the pretext that it is impossible to bring it into our thought equivalent to renouncing that truth that the biblical account of the fall reveals to us by substituting for it theories drawn from our own “experience?”
Kierkegaard does not raise such a question. He wishes unconditionally to “understand,” to “explain” the fall, and yet he never stops repeating that it is inexplicable, that it does not admit of explanation. Accordingly he tries in every way to discover some lack, some defect in the state of innocence. This state, he says, “includes peace and calmness, and yet there is in it something else still; this is not disturbance nor struggle—there is nothing for which one could struggle! What then is it?—Nothingness! What result does this nothingness produce? It produces anxiety. The profoundest mystery of innocence is that it is at the same time anxiety. . . . Psychology has never concerned itself with the concept of anxiety, wherefore I must draw attention to the fact that it is necessary to sharply distinguish anxiety from fear and other similar states; the latter always relate to something definite, while anxiety is the reality of freedom as possibility before all other possibility.” Again we ask ourselves: “whence did Kierkegaard take this? Who revealed to him the secret of innocence?” The Bible says not a word of it. According to the Bible, shame and anxiety came only after the fall and proceed not from innocence but from knowledge. Thus anxiety is not the reality of freedom but the manifestation of the loss of freedom. Even more: in the Bible the anxiety that was born after the fall is strictly bound up with the threat of numerous calamities—you shall eat your bread in the sweat of your brow, you shall bear children in pain, sicknesses, privations, death, all the sufferings that came to the afflicted Job, the no less afflicted Kierkegaard and Abraham himself, at least potentially, for Abraham stood to lose what was dearest to him in the world.
But Kierkegaard felt that if he admitted that anxiety was born after the fall and that it is the expression not of the reality of freedom but of the loss of freedom, he would have had to agree to something the very idea of which appeared to him unbearable: he would have had to speak aloud his “secret” and, ignoring the judgment of the “ethical,” call it by its true name or at least admit in general terms that he had broken with Regine Olsen not by virtue of the “immutability” of his nature but by virtue of the “necessity” that had enchained him. This he could not resolve to do. If Kierkegaard had had a son who was as dear to him as Isaac was to Abraham, he would have had the courage to offer him up as a sacrifice. But to cover himself with shame in the eyes of the “ethical”—no, this he would not have consented to do, even if God Himself had demanded it. I think that one can say the same of Nietzsche. He accepted all the sufferings to which he was condemned but, put to the torture, he continued to repeat that necessity did not offend him, that he even loved it. Just as in Kierkegaard, the ontological category of necessity “changes itself” in him into the ethical category of “immutability” from which God can escape no more than man.
It is in this that the result of the fruits of the tree of knowledge consists, here is the meaning of the “fall of man.” In what is only an empty phantom, in nothingness, man suddenly perceives omnipotent necessity. That is why everything that the fallen man undertakes to save himself only brings him closer to the abyss. He wishes to flee “necessity,” and he changes it into an immutability from which it is impossible to escape. Certainly he cannot fight against necessity, but he can hate it, curse it. But immutability must be adored, for it leads him to the kingdom of the “spirit,” it gives him the “eyes of the mind” and thanks to the “third kind of knowledge” it brings to birth in him “love for what is eternal and infinite, the intellectual love of God.” Kierkegaard began by perceiving in innocence and ignorance anxiety before nothingness. In order to understand and explain this anxiety, he recalled the fear that is aroused in children by frightening fairy tales. From anxiety before nothingness and from childish terror he passed abruptly to the horrors of real life with which his own existence was filled.
We recall what Kierkegaard has told us of the horrors he underwent. One would think that he would have concentrated all his powers on rooting out of his life the principle that had introduced these horrors into it. But, on the contrary, he wishes to justify, to legitimize, to confer eternity on this principle. The anxiety before nothingness, from which have sprung all the evils of existence, he discovers in man in the state of innocence. No great perspicacity is required to perceive in this nothingness not that ordinary and impotent nothingness which is incapable of putting an obstacle to the slightest human interests, but the omnipotent Necessity before which human thought has throughout all time bowed. But if this is so, if nothingness possesses this tremendous, even though negative and destructive, power—what makes Kierkegaard say that he does not understand the role of the serpent in the account of the fall? For the serpent was just that terrible nothingness, that “monster without whose killing man cannot live,” to speak as Luther did.
Should Kierkegaard not have known this? Was it not the anxiety before nothingness that had risen between him and Regine Olsen, between God and His beloved son? It is here only that the profound meaning of the apostle’s words, “everything that does not come of faith is sin,” appears. Knowledge did not liberate Kierkegaard but bound him, just as it binds all of us. Nothingness is not a nothing, it is a something, and it is not given anyone to kill it, to deprive it of its annihilating power. But if this is so, the ignorance of the first man could not last forever: at a certain moment his eyes had to be “opened,” he had to “learn.” And this moment, despite what the Bible says, was not a fall but the birth of mind in man, the birth of mind in God Himself. The biblical revelation leads to the same result as the pagan wisdom: there is no force that can deliver men from the power of necessity, of nothingness, of the sufferings and evils they bring. We must accept all this, we must live with all this. Religion and philosophy, as well as ordinary good sense, are completely in accord here. The only thing religion and philosophy can offer us is an edification which, by human reckoning, is worse than the most frightful calamities. But we have no choice. The choice has already been made for man as well as for God. Both man and God act “solely out of the laws of their own nature and are not coerced by any one.” The law of human nature is necessity. The law of God’s nature is immutability or, to put it differently, necessity transformed into an ethical category. Had Kierkegaard not perceived in his relationships with Regine Olsen that very necessity which condemned God to remain a powerless spectator of the sufferings of His beloved son on the cross?
XV
Kierkegaard declared that before Abraham raising his knife over Isaac we feel a horror religiosus. But that is not so. We feel horror, and that extreme form of horror which is worthy of the epithet religiosus, when we see that the monster named necessity, that is, nothingness, approaches man while he, as if under the influence of a supernatural spell, not only cannot make the least movement, not only does not permit himself to express his despair and his protest through an anguished cry—as happens in nightmares—but, on the contrary, strains all the faculties of his soul to justify and to “understand,” that is, to transform into an eternal truth what is given to him in experience merely as a fact. Kierkegaard does not stop repeating: “the possibility of freedom does not consist in the power to choose between good and evil. Such an interpretation conforms as little to the Bible as to thought. Possibility consists in the fact that man ‘can.’” He says, “original sin takes place in impotence,” and “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” But to overcome his impotence, to leave his dizziness, to conquer anxiety, to realize the power that promises him freedom is infinitely more difficult for man than to choose between good and evil.
Kierkegaard began by declaring that God can return Isaac to Abraham, restore his children and wealth to Job, and unite the poor young man with the princess, but ended by taking away from God His beloved son, that is, reduced God’s freedom to the possibility of choosing between good and evil: the immediately given must be accepted by all—by God as well as men. This “truth,” that did not exist for the first man, became on the day Adam tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge the principle of thought for all times. And it is only by accepting this truth that man can enter into the “kingdom of the spirit.” Kierkegaard’s “kingdom of the spirit” means: the immediate deliverances of consciousness are invincible, it is impossible to escape them, the salvation of man lies in “you shall be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Towards the end of his life Kierkegaard became enraged when he heard a pastor console a mother who had lost her child by recalling to her how God had tried Abraham and Job. Christianity brings not consolation but an edification which, like Socrates,’ is worse than all evils. As can be seen from certain “indirect” confessions, Kierkegaard tried to arouse anxiety and horror of life in the soul of the young Regine Olsen. He did not succeed, it is true, in “raising” her to himself. Despite all his cleverness, he did not even suspect, it seems, what he was doing in the soul of the young woman; this trial he was spared. When he related that his beloved was seventeen years old and he seven hundred, he imagined that, at the cost of an apparently innocent exaggeration, he had justified himself before the “ethical.” But this was not an exaggeration, it was a lie and a by no means innocent lie. He was not seven hundred years old, he was seventy; an old man of seventy was engaged to a girl of seventeen and, seeing that he could not recover his youth, that God Himself could not return it to him, he threw himself desperately toward the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and wished to force Regine Olsen to follow him. Necessity is transformed under our eyes into immutability. Bewitched by anxiety before the primordial nothingness that rises between Himself and His son, as it arose between Kierkegaard and Regine, God Himself loses His omnipotence and becomes as weak as man whom He created. This means: when knowledge destroyed our freedom, sin took possession of our soul. Not only do we not dare to return to the state of ignorance, but ignorance seems to us a slumber of the spirit.
Kierkegaard appeals to the Absurd, but in vain: he appeals to it but is incapable of realizing it. He speaks to us constantly of the existential philosophy; he rails at speculation and the speculators with their “objective” truths but, like Socrates and Spinoza, he himself aspires to live and oblige others to live in the categories in which they think. He refers incessantly to Scripture, but in the depths of his soul he is convinced, he “knows” that “God did not wish to teach the Israelites the absolute attributes of His essence. . . . Therefore He did not appeal to them with reasons but with the sound of trumpets, thunders and lightnings.” All of us, furthermore, are persuaded that only “grounds or reasons” lead us to the truth; as for celestial thunder, it is only an empty sound. The “you shall be like God” has seduced us and that “enchantment and supernatural slumber” of which Pascal spoke has taken possession of us. And the more we try to subordinate our life to our thought, the heavier our slumber becomes. Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing,” Spinoza’s “third kind of knowledge,” Kant’s reason that “aspires eagerly to universal and necessary judgments”—all these cannot deliver man from his somnolence, cannot restore to him the freedom that he has lost, the freedom of ignorance, the freedom not to know. We “accept” the dishonoring of our daughters, the killing of our sons, the destruction of our fatherland, that “God has neither purpose nor end,” that it belongs to metaphysics (which this does not at all concern) to decide whether God exists, whether our soul is immortal, whether our will is free, while we, to whom this is more important than anything else in the world, are forced to crush in ourselves all the lugere et detestari, to submit in advance “with equanimity” to the decisions of metaphysics, whatever these may be, and even to consider this submission a virtue and to see in virtue the supreme happiness.
The philosophy which begins with necessary truths can only end in a sublime edification. And the religion which, to obtain the approval of philosophy, sees in the ignorance of the first man a slumbering of the spirit can only conclude with a no less sublime edification. Socrates and Spinoza spoke of the bull of Phalaris, Kierkegaard, of the happiness that is more terrible than the worst human torments. And, indeed, there is no other way out. As long as we submit to the domination of the Socratic knowledge, as long as we do not find the freedom of ignorance, we shall remain prisoners of that enchantment which transforms man from res cogitans (a thinking thing) into asinus turpissimus (a most infamous ass).
But can man by his own efforts escape from the magic circle into which Necessity has pushed him? The horror of the fall, the horror of the original sin of which Nietzsche and Luther have told us, consists precisely in the fact that man seeks his salvation just where his ruin awaits him. Necessity does not offend the fallen man. He loves it, he venerates it, and this veneration is in his eyes the testimony of his own grandeur and virtue, as Nietzsche who reproved Socrates’ decadence has himself confessed. And Spinoza, following the thought of the wisest of men, sings the glory of Necessity. The capacity “to endure with equanimity” everything that fate decrees no longer offends him, it even rejoices him. It brings to men, as the most precious docet (teaching), the commandment non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to weep nor curse, but understand), and the indifference to “things that are not in our power”—the raping of daughters, the murdering of sons, etc. Kierkegaard hands God Himself over to the power of Necessity, upon which he confers the nobler name immutability, in order to redeem the offences that he had committed against the “ethical.” The “ethical,” that is, the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, of which Aristotle tried to rid himself by means of his minimum of temporal goods, has destroyed everything and has led man to the abyss of nothingness.
It is thus alone that one can understand the “cruelty” that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche openly taught and that was already present in Socrates’ and Spinoza’s doctrine, hidden behind their beatitudines. This “cruelty” reveals the true meaning, the hidden meaning of the words “you will be like God.” Behind Socrates’ and Spinoza’s apparent calmness one senses the same horror of the rejected lugere et detestari that one hears in the flaming words of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: it is not given the fallen man to reconquer his lost freedom by his own “works.” Knowledge and virtue have paralyzed our will and have plunged our spirit into a somnolence such that we see our perfection in impotence and submission. But if it is not given us to break the circle “by our own works” and attain true being, perhaps what “happens” to us independently of our will, contrary almost to our will, will transport us beyond the limits of the enchanted kingdom where we are condemned to draw out our existence. Besides virtue and knowledge there are still in man’s life the horrors of which Kierkegaard and Nietzsche spoke so much and with which Socrates’ and Spinoza’s docet and edification are permeated. Whatever they may do, the knowledge that suggests to us that Necessity is invincible and the wisdom that assures us that the virtuous man will enjoy happiness even in the bull of Phalaris never succeed in extinguishing in us the lugere et detestari [weeping and cursing]. And it is out of these lugere et detestari, these horrors of life, that the terrible hammer of God, the malleus Dei of the prophets and Luther, is forged. But the hammer is not directed against the living man, as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who followed the way traced by Socrates and Spinoza, believed. “Because man is presumptuous and imagines himself to be wise, righteous and holy, it is necessary that he be humbled by the law, that thus that beast—the illusion of righteousness—without whose killing man cannot live, be put to death.”
Put into modern language, we find that man must awake from his millennial sleep and decide to think in the categories in which he lives. Knowledge has transformed the real into the necessary and taught us to accept everything that fate decrees. And here precisely is the dizziness, the impotence, the paralysis, the death even—it sometimes seems—of freedom; to speak as Spinoza did, man is changed from a res cogitans into an asinus turpissimus. Can a living man, a free man, accept the dishonoring of his daughters, the murder of his sons, the destruction of his fatherland? Not only men but the very stones would have wept, Kierkegaard tells us, if they had known the sufferings with which his life was filled, but men laughed when they listened to him. If the word “sin,” which today is forgotten, still has any meaning whatsoever, then the most terrible, the mortal, unpardonable sin consists in this acceptance and still more in the edification, in the equanimity, which “true philosophy” offers us and on which it rests. It is here that we must seek that “monster without whose killing man cannot live.” Hypnotized by the false “you shall be like God, knowing good and evil,” which since Socrates has become the principle of thought for all times, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche themselves directed all their powers to convincing man that he must renounce “the things that are not in our power” and that “happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.” “Arguments,” whatever they may be, are incapable of shaking man’s conviction regarding the omnipotence of Necessity. But under the blows of the malleus Dei, the so greatly scorned lugere et detestari are transformed into a new power that awakes us from our slumber and gives us the audacity to enter into a struggle against the monster. The horrors on which Necessity established itself are then turned against it. And in this supreme, mortal combat man perhaps succeeds in delivering himself from knowledge and reconquering true freedom, the freedom from knowledge which the first man had lost.