“Man Before History,” the closing contribution to a symposium about the European political crisis, published in the spring of 1939, stands as Fondane’s most sustained effort to bring his existential philosophy to bear on politics.[1] In September 1938, Britain and France had acceded to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia; by March 1939, Germany had occupied the western part of Czechoslovakia and installed a puppet regime in Slovakia. Germany had previously reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938, and in 1939, it was assisting with Francisco Franco’s attempt to bring down the Spanish Republic. All the contributors to the symposium— ranging across the intellectual spectrum from conservative Catholics to surrealists and Marxists—address the mounting threat of war posed by Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. They were broadly divided, however, between those like Jacques Bénet, the author of the first essay,[2] who argue that the proper response to the danger of Fascism is a return to Christian self-sacrifice and charity, and those (notably Marxists) who see Nazism as an irrationalism that must be combated with reason. Fondane rejects both positions. Hitler is the arrogance of reason personified, but freed of hypocrisy; like liberal humanists, Hitler wants to realize the Idea on earth—at any price. Christian self-sacrifice likewise asks individuals to sacrifice themselves for an ideal. Instead of self-sacrifice, Fondane argues for an approach based on the model of the defeated and crucified Christ: a model of human powerlessness and the need for faith in a God for whom “all things are possible.”
Fondane invested himself very heavily in the composition of this article. It was his first important article since the death of his mentor, Lev Shestov, in 1938; Fondane was now flying on his own. In his correspondence with Jean Ballard, Fondane writes: “I have never had so much difficulty producing something. . . .There is enough material here for a big book. Everything I attempted suffered from delirious overexpansion; I had to tear it up and start over. This has been going on for weeks; I thought that I was going to have to fold my hand.” In a subsequent letter, he urges Ballard to publish the collection of articles as soon as possible in view of their relevance to the worsening political situation: “No, events have not weakened it; on the contrary, it is all too relevant. I am convinced that it will have quite an impact.”[3] This article expresses the urgency Fondane felt with respect both to the political situation and to his own philosophical development.
•
CAHIERS du Sud has asked me to “conclude” the survey they have initiated; for my part, I would rather be the one asking the questions. No doubt I could, like everyone, propose projects and reforms, by which I mean the same projects and reforms as everyone else, but I have some doubts about how effective these reforms might be. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the conclusion of this debate can be found in the epigraph that adorns the very first article, at least if I might be allowed to add to Gide’s[4] words as follows: “It’s no laughing matter to play in a world where everyone cheats—including me” (I have italicized what I have added). Completed in this way, Gide’s pensée seems to me above suspicion. For every man cheats when he states a proposition of a general and universal character and finds a way to exempt himself from it. Well-ordered truth must start with oneself. If I should feel like affirming, as Rimbaud does, that everyone is a swine, well then, I who affirm this am also a swine, as it’s impossible to see why I alone should be let off the hook. My method is honest and yet advantageous: It dispels confusion. For example, in noticing that most of my fellow intellectuals have adopted Gide’s proposition without, however, agreeing on the principles or the proposed solutions (each accusing the other of cheating), would I not have to conclude that everyone cheats—except them? Although paradoxical, this state of affairs is certainly not new. We only have to recall the history of philosophies, religions, and moralities to persuade ourselves that things have always been this way: The very possibility of a truth acting on the world rests on the postulate that only I who am speaking deserved that truth by dint of disinterestedness and hard work, whereas others have necessarily missed it because they wanted to bend it to their interests, their ignorance, or their whim. We understand nothing of history if we do not start from the fact that error has always been regarded as a sickness of virtue.
Let’s leave for another time the question of knowing whether a thought that wants to be instructive—which is the very definition of thought—retains the right and the freedom not to cheat, whether, in short, whoever would refuse to cheat would not be regarded as a public menace: a sophist, a cynic, a skeptic, a madman. . . . For now, let us just take note that, by way of pure coincidence, the most daring and honest thoughts do not come to light in serious works but in frivolous ones having the distinctive characteristic of excusing authors from having to assume responsibility for what they are saying. The poet or novelist seems to insinuate at sometime or other, “Why would I refuse you the truth, since I risk nothing?” In this way, under the cover of a fictional character—a character who, to diminish the risk still further, he presents to us as half mad—Dostoyevsky can allow himself to state (something Aristotle could never have done, even though he might have wanted to): “Can a conscious man respect himself, be it ever so little?,” or also: “We can say anything we want about universal History—anything which could pass through the craziest mind—except that it is reasonable; at the first word, your tongue would be paralysed” (Notes from the Underground).[5] And Shakespeare could dare to confess to us, in buskins and from behind a mask, things that Plotinus, Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, when entertaining the same thought, could never admit barefaced— for example (as William Faulkner recently reminded us), that “life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.”[6] But if this is so, then it is Gide who is right: “It’s no laughing matter. . . .” It is indeed no laughing matter to play a game where everyone cheats: for we cannot decide who among millions of people—each of whom provides the one and only solution—is right except by violence and force. It is no laughing matter to know that the modest project of reform we offer the world will either remain in an obscure notebook or triumph one day and cost the human race thousands of dead and defeated individuals. But what is even less a laughing matter is the thought that the only way to avoid cheating at the game is to pass oneself off as irresponsible.
I was saying that we are in a world in which each one of us comes along with his fixed idea, irreducible to that of his neighbor. But I hope that the reader will have understood from the foregoing that this fundamental law also admits to an important exception. Not even a world given over to the sound and the fury can be conceived without a minimum of structures, of common principles, where unanimity is created among the most diverse men—not necessarily a unanimity of agreement but a defensive unanimity, which Plato defined as follows: “And yet, if there is someone whom we must fight with all the forces of argument, it is he who abolishes science, clear thought, or the intellect—whatever thesis he claims to affirm for such a price” (The Sophist, 249).[7] Certainly, in writing this, Plato was thinking of his adversaries the Sophists, educated and clever men, and not of the ignorant barbarians of Asia who threatened to bring the sword to the noble Greek cities; and I beg the reader obsessed with current affairs to do the same and to push away the tempting idea that the enemy of reason and clear thought is Mr. Hitler or Mr. Rosenberg.[8] No, the formidable enemies of Plato and of the noûs [“mind” or “intellect”] are Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare—those who dare to think outside the constraints of society, who dare to assert that everyone cheats, themselves included. For all intents and purposes, the philosopher, the politician, the leader, and the priest can only impose their truth by postulating that they are the only honest people in a world where everyone cheats. Because if there is no one who does not cheat, including the philosopher, or if—on the contrary— everyone is honest, including the philosopher, the pitfall is the same: Everyone is right or everyone is wrong, and then the “noûs” would see itself forced to admit publicly that life is a tale told by an idiot.
It is obvious that not all philosophers were able to experience the truths glimpsed by Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare. But the very ones who did have a genuine intuition of those truths recoiled in fear before this logical impasse and its formidable consequences. Thus, in order to persuade us, they attempted clever arguments such as: It is necessary to consider what happens not only in relation to oneself but in relation to the whole; the world has more rights to Providence’s attention than do individuals; through thought, man must achieve such a degree of generality that he becomes indifferent as to whether he exists or not; evil is necessary to the Good, if only as its opposite; evil does not exist, it is a privative act, an absence, etc. I am briefly summarizing here the best arguments of Plato, Plotinus, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Leibniz, and Hegel. . . . On the one hand, though these arguments have had some effect, it must be admitted that it has been rather weak. On the other hand, the threats that have been used have been more effective: “Homo liber de nula res minus quam de morte cogitat” [A free man thinks of death least of all things],[9] wrote Spinoza, and Plotinus concentrates the substance of ancient thought in these few words: “To admit evil into the universe [and there is nothing more terrible than to think that the universe is unreasonable][10] is to bring evil right into the intelligible realm itself” (Enneads, II.9.XIII).[11] In other words, to admit evil is to posit it within reason, and if reason is God, to posit it in God.
To see that it required nothing less than this supreme threat to force the philosophers to deny the obvious facts (sometimes profoundly experienced) of our inner life—namely, that a conscious man cannot respect himself and that there is no trace of reason in history—simply requires reading this admission by Plotinus, which, despite its “elevated” tone, is deeply melancholy: “On earth, there are beings who perish because they cannot conform to the universal order. For example, if a tortoise found itself caught in the middle of a chorus dancing in perfect order, it would be trampled underfoot because it would not know how to escape from the effects of the order that regulates the steps of the dancers. However, if it conformed to that order, it would not suffer any harm” (Enneads II.9.VII). It is clear that here the intelligible world’s responsibility for suffering is masterfully let off the hook: The Laws cannot but dance perfectly and need not worry about the rest—the rest, that is to say history, the anonymous multitude of tortoises trampled under the dancers’ feet. To be sure, there is a soothing idea here: The assurance that, after all, some elite tortoises exist who know how to conform to the universal order. But though there may be a few learned tortoises who have attained such a generality that they become indifferent as to whether they exist or not; and though there may also be a few mystic tortoises who, out of love for the intelligible, deliberately throw themselves under the feet of the dancers in order to taste the delights of being trampled by perfect feet; yet how many stupid, ugly, clumsy, ignorant tortoises are there—millions!—born without the least rhythmic instinct, who will be mercilessly crushed without ever knowing why. And it is not so certain that even the learned tortoise will prove so musical that it won’t make some false step, commit some imprudent act from time to time! It believed that it was indifferent as to whether or not it existed and then suddenly, there he is, that Stoic mentioned by Seneca, who, surprised by a storm in the middle of the sea, began to tremble from head to toe.[12] Does he still believe that it is enough to dance to the rhythm of the universal order? Or rather, in that moment, perhaps he grasps that there is no privileged fate for even the “educated” tortoise, and that Dostoyevsky was right, and Shakespeare, or indeed their common Teacher, the Bible, which when it reminds us that the same sun shines on the just and the unjust[13] insists in its own way that life is a tale told by an idiot. The philosopher might see such an idea as an attack on God, and yet it is Jeremiah who echoes Job, “Cursed be the day on which I was born!” (Jeremiah 20:14).
Sound and fury![14] An immense howl of terror rises up from our wretched earth, and we ourselves are half crushed. Is not the time for fine words past? Isn’t it time to listen to the reader who cries out, “We must act, something must be done, anything”? In truth, in my reader’s place, I would cry out the same thing: “But act, act then, do something, in the name of God!” But do you think that we have exhausted the realm of the possible? Do you think that unhappiness belongs uniquely to our time, that Plotinus, that Saint Augustine, that Spinoza, that Leibniz were sheltered from the steps of the divine dancers? Do you think that they hardly heard anything, that they showed no pity to the millions of crushed tortoises, that they didn’t pity themselves who were also crushed despite their strict obedience to the universal order? They too would have wanted to act, to do something, anything! But what could they do? They knew well that History had already attempted everything, tried out every sort of politics, every resource, every kind of charity; and yet never had war nor famine, nor plague, nor terror been idle on earth. . . . What was there left to do? Howl in terror like Job, like Jeremiah? Admit their powerlessness and appeal to God? “Educated” people cannot howl in terror; they also “know” that it is useless to appeal to God: God has never intervened in the finite, and besides, if he had wanted to, he would be forbidden by our principle of noncontradiction. We must get ourselves out of this mess through our own efforts, and if we meet with defeat, fall back on self-governance, that is to say, accept the inevitable (Amor fati!),[15] though to do so we must block up our ears so as not to hear the human howls, and shout like a deaf person that the Idea alone exists, that only the universal order and the triangle exist, that which cannot be bombed nor killed, and that after all it does not matter much if a few more tortoises are crushed. . . . And are they not, in any case, subject to generation and corruption? “As for the intellect, it seems to be in the soul like a sort of substance and cannot be destroyed” (Aristotle, De anima, I.IV).[16] “For sensibility cannot exist without the body, whereas the intellect is separate from it” (De anima, III.IV).[17]
The conflict today is not between on the one hand sensibility— which cannot exist without the body, which cries for help, which cries out “do something,” which howls in terror—and on the other, the intellectus separatus of the Stagirite [Aristotle]. Efforts of reconciliation have certainly often been attempted—witness Plato’s Republic, The Social Contract, Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Capital. But for the intellect, that way lies certain failure. There was only one way for the intellect to obtain victory: to remember that it was separate. All we can do is to break with the sensibility that cannot function without the body, to become indifferent to history, and to limit ourselves to perfecting the self through renunciation, that is, the suppression of the contradiction [between sensibility and intellect]. And isn’t it insofar as the intellect is “separate from the body” that it is, in Aristotle’s words, something divine? From that secular and, in sum, considered idea, others besides Aristotle have drawn the necessary conclusions: It is not our helplessness to change History that is evil or that is the terrible and incomprehensible irrationality; quite the contrary, evil consists in the strange and passionate taste we have for the created world, in the absurd appetites we have for the tangible, in the pitiable habit we have of being wounded and humiliated by the derelictions of empirical reality. In the end, God gave us just one true gift: the intellect separate from the body, indifferent to pain and joy. Only the deliberate and continuous perfecting of the intellect can lead us to the deification of man hic et nunc. With a proper understanding of the intellect, the beast howling in suffering and terror can be transformed—by the wave of a magic wand—not just into homo sapiens but into an analogue of God. It would be pointless to recall here all the Greek, Christian, and Indian mystics who, in various degrees and with sometimes very different procedures and intentions, all ended up at this double movement: 1) Breaking with a necessarily unreasonable world, the object and source of pain; 2) Deification of the separate intellect, obtaining peace and joy in intellectual form.
There is no greater sleight of hand in human History than this transmutation of all our values. We have ended up believing that, on the one hand, that which is desirable but not in our power is Evil, and, on the other hand, that a completely negative thing without substance—renunciation—is the sovereign Good.
It must be said: The modern world has understood nothing of this desperate attempt to make man and history cohabitable. It has also been mistaken about Christianity, accusing it of advising against action and of delivering the key to history into God’s hands. It is not Christianity, it is the philosophia perennis [perennial philosophy] that must be held responsible for that attitude. The transcendent for the sake of which man renounced the world was never God but only the intellect, the noûs. Besides, if any such speculative decisions were taken, they never weighed very heavily on society; in practice, the Greek world, like the Christian world, never ceased acting in order to introduce a bit of reason into history by force. But it is true to say that the modern era believed that it could at last reconcile the demands of the separate intellect and the interests of that sensibility which cannot function without the body. From then on, it was believed, the intellect was going to give up just busying itself with perfecting only a select few; its new task is to transform the world.[18] We will have both bread and the idea; war, suffering, and inequality will be no more, the real will be rational;[19] and we will have, what is more, a “Philosophy of History!” Such an exaggeratedly optimistic view (see Hegel’s God-State)[20] is the origin of the greatest evils afflicting the modern world. A Reason that goes over the head of the philosophers and addresses the masses must necessarily keep its demagogic promises. In order to achieve the goal of that ideal balance of forces where contradiction will at last be eliminated, in order to get man to take up his role in a universal history that is only “the externalisation of Spirit in time,”[21] it was indeed necessary to compel man to renounce (at least provisionally) everything in him that was linked to the sensibility which cannot function without the body and which is—we realized—the origin of all forms of irrationalism. In order that some day soon the rational could become real, it was indeed necessary that the real pay the costs—first of all, by becoming rational! While waiting for peace, bread, happiness—immediately and here on earth!—real men had first to be sacrificed, and right away, to the Idea. What matter the cost of the bill presented to us by the wars and revolutions of the Idea; what matter even its failures! Is it not certain that die Vernunft in der Geschichte [reason in history] will end up triumphing one day? Reason is, as everyone knows, the one substance that cannot be destroyed. . . . But if this was a consolation at a time when, in the name of the idea, we had renounced the world, it is now no more than a suppurating ulcer at the heart of a world to which the Idea had promised the world. If the Intellect separated from the world was not touched by the misfortunes that undermined the ancient world, it now very much risks being compromised by the misfortunes of the modern world for which it has assumed responsibility.
I am one of those who have been profoundly marked by the events of these past years; those who find no consolation in having lost everything that we have lost; those who would not have forgotten, even in the middle of victory, the dead, the wounded, and the kids dying of hunger; it would be even less possible for me to forget them in the midst of defeat, and to content myself with braggadocio about the “value of example” and future “revenges.” Because I am under threat, I am certainly ready to defend my life, our shared life and freedom, against the wave of cruelty and violence that seems to place us right in the middle of John’s Apocalypse. But when it comes to protesting against the “immorality” of the people on the other side, and arguing that their immorality is due to their disobedience to the principles of reason—the Reason that henceforth we alone are going to incarnate—then you’ve lost me. Because it seems to me it is precisely the advent in the modern world of autonomous Ethics, of Kantian man conceived along the lines of an angel and promoted to the rank of “universal legislator,”[22] which finally provoked this wave of unashamed immorality. . .
This point should be explained at length, but a few examples will not be out of place. . . . It is when we decide that it is unworthy of man to have little vices and we suppress the legal right to drink alcohol that drunkenness and gangsterism grip the nation; it is when we decide that society must be able to do without that wretched institution we call prostitution that we provoke on a vast scale the quasi-official traffic in human flesh; it is when we establish a League of Nations that has to end all war forever that we witness the most unheard-of violation of pacts, of words, and of plain and simple rights in preparation for total war. Freud did his best to show us that constraining our moral peccadilloes through repression is enough to unleash psychic cataclysms afterward. Human nature has not withstood the inhuman Tower of Babel which we have erected and which we have called civilization. This is noticeable not so much in the increase in outbreaks of violence or in the taste for blood as in the fact that these now enter into history set up as principles, whitewashed as science. . . .Would you suggest increasing the dose of reason in order to put things right? Perhaps it would be better to consider a cure of detoxification. . . . If the patient is cynical, perhaps it is because his education was too hypocritical; if right now he is breaking windows, let us lock him up if possible, but let’s not disguise the true causes. . . . If the final result of four centuries of humanism and the apotheosis of science has been only a return of the worst horrors, which we thought were past and gone forever, it is certainly not the fault, as Maritain asserts,[23] of the “noble counterhumanism” that had foreseen the disaster, and from which emerged the prophetic figures of Luther, Kierkegaard, Shestov, and indeed Nietzsche. The fault lies perhaps with humanism itself, which was too lacking in pessimism, which staked too much on the separate and divine intellect, and neglected more than it ought to have real man, whom we had treated as an angel only to finally reduce him to a level lower than the beasts. . . . I will not say that a far-sighted humanism based on human wretchedness would have saved us from wars, revolutions, and cataclysms—these have never been found wanting in any period of history. But it would certainly have saved us from wars on a national scale, revolutions on a world scale, from mechanized barbarism, from gas and germ warfare—and from racism. A humanism that had not overestimated reason would certainly not have put all of science’s trump cards in the hands of those to whom today we deny the gift of reason itself! And should we complain about the “immorality” of the National Socialist Caliban or rather should we complain about the presumption of the humanist Prospero who used to believe—and, what is worse, continues to believe—that it is still up to him to introduce die Vernunft in der Geschichte, reason into history? Without a doubt, before we reappraise our values, we must defeat this Caliban at our gates; but not in order to fall into the same errors and the same nightmare all over again, or to boast that we ourselves have injected some reason into History! And are we really so certain that what confronts us is just an enormous Irrationality and not, more simply, the same reason as ours—but more conscious of itself, more consistent?
By refusing to accept the responsibilities incurred by our reason, by persisting in wanting to see National Socialist “barbarism” as an original essence and not a distorting mirror that reflects back to us a magnified image of our culture’s defining features, we give in to a form of vanity that will come back to cost us dearly later. We laugh with scorn when the boomerang thrown by us comes back to its starting point only slightly disguised. Do you want an example? All right! Let’s take the most well-known. Everyone, including even those priest-hating detractors of Christianity, was scandalized by that little phrase that Herr Goebbels’s propaganda has made universal: “How did Planetta die?[24] Shouting: Heil Hitler and long live Germany! How did Christ die? On the cross, sniveling.”[25] Everyone was scandalized by that phrase, a reaction that was not even hypocritical but just thoughtless—which is worse! If you will allow me, I will translate as follows: “Planetta died without cheating at a game where everyone cheats; he was a tortoise who fell into step with the universal laws; he died for the Idea; but Christ died saying: The kingdom of this world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury!” I know that you won’t accept my translation; too bad! Let’s come back to the pure, literal sense. But even in that case, tell me, is it likely that Christ is the prototype of our reason, the hero of the Idea? Is it the death of Christ or rather that of Socrates which forms the basis of our civilization? How, then, did they die: the philosophers, the Stoics, or even the Christian martyrs? Didn’t they shout: Heil . . . something or other, some sort of ideal, Justice, Law, Virtue, Holiness? Did they die “sniveling” or rather, on the contrary, “singing during their torments”? According to reason, which Christ died best? The one of Matthew and Mark who groaned “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?,”[26] or rather Luke’s, who said “Lord, into your hands I return my spirit,” or John’s, who said “Everything is accomplished”?[27] You see then, that “barbaric” as he may be, Mr. Hitler is not only reasonable but is Reason itself, sincere at last—the same reason that, long before the German dictator, was embarrassed that Christ died “sniveling,” and then was so happy when John thought it best to have him die nobly, making him shout like Planetta: “Heil Jehovah! Everything is accomplished!”
As stupid and petty as Goebbels’s comparison of the death of Planetta and that of Christ may be, as revolting as it appears to us and in fact is, its sharpest point touches us and our own civilization—we who made it possible—more than it touches the ones who came up with it. . . . On that point, all our humanism shoulders the responsibility for having never wanted, frankly, to recognize that everywhere there is History, History is self-sufficient: This is the polar opposite of the religious standpoint. The very people who propose a return to the Christian Middle Ages[28] are asking us to return to Planetta and not to Christ. Otherwise, they would have understood that the Middle Ages were no less powerless before human evils, suffering, and misfortune, no less defenseless than the present century is before the “immorality” of history. The Middle Ages were a time when executioners and victims nobly accepted their task, the former condemning the latter with the purest of intentions, and the latter dying with the most sublime resignation. Yet even though the medieval era used violence to guarantee victory at any price to its reason (a violence that concedes nothing to that of our own time), its exercitia spiritualia [spiritual exercises] placed the Christian Middle Ages before a suffering, wretched, powerless God, dying ignominiously on a wooden cross. If it had not confused God and the world, the Middle Ages would have truly realized something to which it gave only lip service: Namely that this powerlessness was not cowardice, a lack of bravery, or even a lack of resourcefulness but heroism, and thus powerlessness triumphant, stronger than all the powers of the world and of reason. . . .
Yes, even today, even empirically, the greatest heroism that we can ask of man is to not sacrifice himself to an Idea. . . .With a few speeches and a well-run press, millions of men will agree to sacrifice themselves; that’s how much the need for self-sacrifice is built into in the human frame. But what is not built into the human frame is true humility; not the kind that consists of training the will and self-mastery but the kind that consists in recognizing that one has no power, that one does not amount to much, that one amounts to so little that one can, without shame, be afraid, and tremble, and cry out, and call for help. There is more true humility in praying to God for one’s own flesh, in asking him, for example, for deliverance from a terrible toothache (as Saint Augustine did, Confessions, IX.4)[29] than to ask him to reveal his intelligible essence or confuse his will with ours in the delights of [mystical] union.
It may be that the supreme heroism—I mean the most difficult thing for man—is not sacrificing one’s life but admitting spiritual defeat. It is harder for our spirit to confess “I can do nothing, nothing, there is nothing more to be done,” than it is to give up one’s life. Courage in the face of the naked truth is more terrible than self-sacrifice; the terrors of the humiliated spirit are much more tragic than the trembling of the flesh. The person who, when there is no longer anything he can do, protests that history is reasonable and the enemy is “immoral”—he is far from the terrible and naked humility of Shakespeare admitting he has been defeated by the sound and the fury, or of Dostoyevsky crying out that he cannot respect himself! Are we at the threshold of a religious [stage of existence] which begins only, it seems to us, when history no longer has an intelligible meaning for us? As long there is still something to do, as long as we can hope to be victorious by our own strength and the strength of the Idea, as long as we have not yet lost everything, and lost it irremediably, the relationship between man and God has still not been opened—apart from the illusory relationship of the amor Dei intellectualis [intellectual love of God].[30] It is only when man has been broken, defeated to the point of daring to cry out that life is a tale told by an idiot, a nightmare, that the soul resorts to extraordinary measures. Such is not the heroism of Planetta; it is rather that offered to us by Christ: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?”[31] The measure of History is no longer our reason but God.
Is that the conclusion that I wanted to come to? No, it is the conclusion to which my own thought has led me in spite of myself—a painful, bitter thought that has experienced failure but that does not yet want to despair or to find facile appeasement by telling itself “That’s the way it is!” and in letting the dead bury their dead.[32] Without a doubt, just like you, dear reader, I cling desperately to the intelligibility of History; just like you, I hope, even though I have my doubts; just like you, I dream of useful reforms, of great measures to be put into effect. But the atrocious clamor of the world and my own anxiety demand not only a better future but also a past that has been put right; not just sufferings justified but also wiped clean, erased; not just healed but as if they had not been. It is impossible for History or for Reason to make what has been not to have been. If we are to believe the Theologians, it would be impossible even for God to do this. With my human reason, I understand this very well; over my dead body would I be deprived of the prestige of Physics. To be sure, if Physics had succeeded, if it had arranged things so that life was no longer a tale told by an idiot and the human tortoises were not crushed under the footsteps of the Laws, there would be no need for a metaphysics of the religious [form of existence]. But if this metaphysics has come into being, it is because Physics, having completed its task, could no longer answer our anxious questions. Whoever needs these answers, no matter what the cost (and not bowing before the inevitable), will continue to demand them, even if they will have to be given to him in a form that repels his human reason. But when man has failed everywhere, it is no longer up to him to set the conditions.
(translated with Andrew Rubens)