The Life of the Mind (57 page)

Nietzsche and Heidegger are wrong, I think, in their dating of that modern conviction; actually it had accompanied the rise of modern science and then was attenuated by the Cartesian "certainty" as a substitute for truth; this in its turn was destroyed by Kant along with the remnants of Scholasticism, which in the form of logical exercises and the dogmatism of the "schools" had led a rather brittle existence of sheer erudition. But only at the end of the nineteenth century (here Heidegger is right) did the conviction of not possessing the truth become the common opinion of the educated classes and establish itself as something like the Spirit of the Age, of which Nietzsche was probably the most fearless representative.

However, the mighty factor that delayed this reaction for centuries itself sprang up with the rise of die sciences as the natural response of every thinking man to the enormous and enormously rapid advance in human knowledge, an advance that was bound to make the previous centuries since antiquity appear as sheer stagnation by comparison. The concept of
Progress
as a vast co-operative drive in the interest of knowledge for its own sake, "in which all scientists of the past, the present and the future have a part ... appeared for the first time fully developed in the works of Francis Bacon."
⁶
With it there came about, at first almost automatically, an important shift in the understanding of Time, the emergence of the Future to the rank formerly occupied by the Present or the Past. The notion that each subsequent generation would necessarily know more than its predecessor and that this progressing would never be completed—a conviction that only in our time has found challengers—was important enough; but for our context, even more important is the simple, matter-of-fact perception that "scientific knowledge" has been and can be attained only "step by step through contributions of
generations
of explorers building upon and gradually amending the findings of their predecessors."

The rise of science had begun with the new discoveries of the astronomers, scientists who not only had "used most systematically" the findings of their predecessors, but who, without the records of past generations, and reliable records at that, would have been unable to make any "progress" at all, since the life-span of one man, or one generation of men, is evidently too short to verify findings and validate scientific hypotheses. But "the astronomers composed star catalogues to be used by future scientists," i.e., they had laid a basis for scientific advances. (Astronomy, of course, was not wholly alone in initiating progress. Thomas Aquinas was conscious of an "increase in scientific knowledge"—'"
augmentum factum est
" —which he explained by "the defects of knowledge of those who first invented the sciences." Craftsmen, too, used to the method of trial and error, were keenly aware of certain improvements in their crafts. Yet the guilds themselves "stressed the continuity rather than the progress of craftsmanship," and "the only passage in the extant literature which clearly expresses the idea of the gradual progress of knowledge, or better, technological skill, occurs in a treatise on artillery."
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) Still, the decisive breakthrough that gave modern science its impetus occurred in astronomy, and the idea of Progress, which from then on dominated every other science till it finally became the dominant notion of the equally modem concept of History, was originally based on the pooling of data, the exchange of knowledge, and the slow accumulation of records that were the requisites of astronomical advance. It was only after the world-shaking discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that what had been going on in that field came to the attention of those who were concerned with the general human condition.

Thus, while the "new philosophy" proving the inadequacy of our senses had "called all in doubt" and given rise to suspicion and despair, the equally manifest forward movement of knowledge gave rise to an immense optimism as to what man can know and learn. Except that this optimism did not apply to men in the singular, not even to the relatively small community of scientists; it applied only to the succession of generations, that is, to Mankind as a whole. In the words of Pascal, who was the first to detect that the idea of Progress was a necessary complement to the idea of Mankind, it was the "particularly [human] prerogative [distinguishing man from animal] that not only each human being can daily advance in knowledge, but that all men together progress continually while the universe grows older ... so that the whole succession of men throughout the centuries should be
considered as one and the same man who lives forever
and continually learns" (italics added).
⁸

What is decisive in this formulation is that the notion of "all men together," which is of course a thought, not a reality, was immediately construed on the model of "man," of a "subject" that could serve as a noun for all kinds of activities expressed in verbs. This concept was not a metaphor, properly speaking; it was a full-fledged
personification
such as we find in the allegories of Renaissance narratives. In other words,
Progress became the project of Mankind,
acting behind the backs of real men—a personified force that we find somewhat later in Adam Smith's "invisible hand," in Kant's "ruse of nature," Hegel's "cunning of Reason," and Marx's "dialectical materialism." To be sure, the historian of ideas will see in these notions nothing more than the secularization of divine Providence, an interpretation that is all the more questionable since we find the personification of Mankind in Pascal, who would certainly have been the last to desire a secular replacement for God as the true ruler of the world.

However that may be, the interconnected ideas of Mankind and Progress came to the foreground of philosophical speculations only after the French Revolution had demonstrated to die minds of its most thoughtful spectators the possible actualization of such invisibles as
liberté, fraternité, égalité,
and thus seemed to constitute a tangible refutation of the oldest conviction of thinking men, to wit, that the ups and downs of history and the ever-changing affairs of men are not worth serious consideration. (To contemporary ears Plato's famous dictum in the
Laws
that a serious man keeps his seriousness for serious things and "does not waste it on trifles"
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such as human affairs may sound extreme; in fact, it was never challenged before Vico, and Vico had no influence or echo till the nineteenth century.) The event of the French Revolution, the climax in many respects of the modern age, changed "the pale cast of thought" for almost a century; philosophers, a notoriously melancholy tribe of men, became cheerful and optimistic. They now believed in the Future and left the age-old lamentations over the course of the world to the historians. What centuries of scientific advances, fully grasped only by the participants in the great enterprise yet by no means beyond the general comprehension of the philosopher, had been unable to achieve was now brought about in a matter of a few decades: philosophers were converted to a faith in the progress not only of knowledge but also of human affairs generally.

And while they began to reflect, with a commitment never before witnessed, on the course of
History,
they could not help becoming aware almost immediately of the greatest riddle presented to them by their new subject matter. That was the simple fact that no action ever attains its intended goal and that Progress—or any other fixed meaningfulness in the historical process—arises out of a senseless "mixture of error and violence" (Goethe), out of a "melancholy haphazardness" in the "meaningless course of human affairs" (Kant). What sense there is can be detected only by the wisdom of hindsight, when men no longer act but begin to tell the story of what has happened; then it seems as though men, while pursuing their aims at cross-purposes, without rhyme and reason, had been led by an "intention of nature," by the "guiding thread of reason."
¹⁰
I have quoted Kant and Goethe, both of whom, as it were, stopped at the threshold of the new generation, that of the German Idealists for whom the events of the French Revolution were the decisive experiences of their lives. But that "the facts of known history" taken by themselves "possess neither a common basis nor continuity nor coherence" was already known to Vico, and Hegel, long after, was still insisting that "passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are ... the most effective springs of action." Hence, not the record of past events but only the story makes sense, and what is so striking in Kant's remarks at the end of his life is that he immediately understood that the subject of History's action would have to be Mankind, rather than man or any verifiable human community. Striking, too, is the fact that he was able to realize the great flaw in History's project: 'It will always remain bewildering that the earlier generations seem to carry on their burdensome business only for the sake of the later ... and that only the last should have the good fortune to dwell in the [completed] building."
¹¹

Probably it was sheer coincidence that the generation that grew to maturity under the impact of the eighteenth-century revolutions was also mentally formed by Kant's liberation of thought, by his resolution of the old dilemma between dogmatism and skepticism through the introduction of a self-critique of Reason. And as the revolution encouraged them to transfer the notion of Progress from scientific advancement to the realm of human affairs and understand it as the progress of History, it was only natural that their attention should be directed toward the Will as the spring of action and the organ of the Future. The result was that "the thought of making freedom the sum and substance of philosophy emancipated the human spirit in all its relationships," emancipated the thinking ego for free speculation in thought-trains whose ultimate goal was to "prove ... that not only is the Ego all, but contrariwise too, all is Ego."
¹²

What had appeared in a restrictive, tentative way in Pascal's personified concept of Mankind now began to proliferate to an incredible degree. The activities of men, whether thinking or acting, were all transformed into activities of personified concepts—which made philosophy both infinitely more difficult (the chief difficulty in Hegel's philosophy is its abstractness, its only occasional hints at the actual data and phenomena he has in mind) and incredibly more alive. It was a veritable orgy of sheer speculation, which, in sharp contrast with Kant's critical reason, was brimful of historical data in a disguised state of radical abstraction. Since the personified concept itself is supposed to act, it looks as though (in Schelling's words) philosophy has "raised itself to a higher standpoint," to a "higher realism" in which mere thought-things, Kant's
noumena,
dematerialized products of the thinking ego's reflection on actual data—historical data in Hegel, mythological or religious in Schelling—begin their curious disembodied ghostly dance whose steps and rhythms are neither regulated nor limited by any idea of reason.

It was in this region of pure speculation that the Will appeared during the short period of German Idealism. "In the final and highest instance," declared Schelling, "there is no other Being than Will. Will is primordial Being, and all predicates apply to it alone—groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation! All philosophy strives only to find this highest expression."
¹³
And quoting this passage in his
What Is Called Thinking?,
Heidegger at once adds: "The predicates, then, which metaphysical thought has since antiquity attributed to Being, Schelling finds in their final, highest ... most perfected form in willing.
The Will in this willing does not mean here a capacity of the human soul,
however; the word 'willing' here designates the Being of beings as a whole" (italics added).
¹⁴
No doubt Heidegger is right; Schelling's Will is a metaphysical entity but, unlike the more common and older metaphysical fallacies, it is personified. In a different context and more precisely, Heidegger himself sums up the meaning of this personified Concept: the
false
"opinion [easily] arises that the human will is the origin of the will-to-will, while on the contrary, man is being willed by the Will-to-will without even experiencing the essence of such willing."
¹⁵

With these words Heidegger resolutely turns against the subjectivism of the modern age as well as against phenomenological analyses, whose chief aim has always been to "save the phenomena" as given in consciousness. And what he turns to while entering on the "rainbow bridge of concepts" is German Idealism and its ingenuous exclusion of man and man's faculties in favor of personified concepts.

Nietzsche diagnosed the inspiration behind this post-Kantian German philosophy with unsurpassed clarity; he knew that philosophy only too well and finally went a similar, perhaps even more extreme way himself.

 

[German philosophy, said Nietzsche] is the most fundamental form of ... homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that has ever existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that place in which alone one can be at home: the
Greek
world! But it is in precisely that direction that all bridges are broken—except the rainbow-bridges of concepts....To be sure, one must be very light, very subtle, very thin to step across these bridges! But what happiness there is already in this will to spirituality, to ghostliness
[Geisterhaftigkeit]
almost!...One wants to go
back,
through the Church Fathers to the Greeks.... German philosophy is a piece of ... will to Renaissance, will to go on with the discovery of antiquity, the digging up of ancient philosophy, above all of the pre-Socratics—the most deeply buried of all Greek temples! A few centuries hence, perhaps, one will judge that all German philosophy derives its real dignity from being a gradual reclamation of the soil of antiquity ... we are growing more Greek by the day; at first, as is only fair, in concepts and evaluations, as Hellenizing ghosts, as it were....
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