The Life of the Mind (65 page)

Human plurality, the faceless "They" from which the individual Self splits to be itself alone, is divided into a great many units, and it is only as a member of such a unit, that is, of a community, that men are ready for action. The manifoldness of these communities is evinced in a great many different forms and shapes, each obeying different laws, having different habits and customs, and cherishing different memories of its past, i.e., a manifoldness of traditions. Montesquieu was probably right in assuming that each such entity moved and acted according to a different inspiring principle, recognized as the ultimate standard for judging the community's deeds and misdeeds—virtue in republics, honor and glory in monarchies, moderation in aristocracies, fear and suspicion in tyrannies-except that this enumeration, guided by the oldest distinction between forms of government (as the rule of one, of a few, of the best, or of all) is of course pitifully inadequate to the rich diversity of human beings living together on the earth.

The only trait that all these various forms and shapes of human plurality have in common is the simple fact of their genesis, that is, that at some moment in time and for some reason a group of people must have come to think of themselves as a "We." No matter how this "We" is first experienced and articulated, it seems that it always needs a beginning, and nothing seems so shrouded in darkness and mystery as that "In the beginning," not only of the human species as distinguished from other living organisms, but also of the enormous variety of indubitably human societies.

The haunting obscurity of the question has hardly been illuminated by recent biological, anthropological, and archaeological discoveries, whatever success they have had in extending the time span which separates us from an ever more distant past. And it is unlikely that any factual information will ever throw light on the bewildering maze of more or less plausible hypotheses, all of which suffer from the incurable suspicion that their very plausibility and probability may well turn out to be their undoing since our whole real existence—the genesis of the earth, the development of organic life on it, the evolution of man out of the countless animal species—occurred against statistically overwhelming probabilities. All that is real in the universe and in nature once was an "infinite" improbability. In the everyday world where we spend our own exiguous quotient of reality we can only be sure of a shrinkage of time behind us that is no less decisive than the shrinkage of spatial distances on the earth. What only a few decades ago, remembering Goethe's "three thousand years"
("Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren / Sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben, / Bleib im Dunkel, unerfahren / Mag von Tag zu Tage leben"),
we still called antiquity is much closer to us today than it was to our ancestors.

This predicament of not-knowing is all too likely never to be resolved, corresponding, as it does, to other manifest limitations inherent in the human condition, which sets definite insurmountable boundaries to our thirst for knowledge—for example, we know
of
the immensity of the universe and nevertheless we shall never be able to know it—and the best we can do in the quandary is turn to the legendary tales that in our tradition have aided former generations to come to grips with the mysterious "In the beginning." I mean the foundation legends, which clearly had to do with a time antecedent to any form of government and to any particular principles that set governments in motion. Yet the time they dealt with was human time, and the beginning they recounted was not a divine creation but a man-made set of occurrences that memory could reach through an imaginative interpretation of old tales.

The two foundation legends of Western civilization, the one Roman and the other Hebrew (nothing comparable, Plato's
Timaeus
notwithstanding, ever existed in Greek antiquity), are utterly different from each other, except that both arose among a people that thought of its past as a story whose beginning was known and could be dated. The Jews knew the year of the creation of the world (and reckon time to this very day from it), and the Romans, as contrasted with the Greeks, who reckoned time from Olympiad to Olympiad, knew (or believed they knew) the year of the foundation of Rome and reckoned time accordingly. Much more striking, and fraught with much more serious consequences for our tradition of political thought, is the astounding fact that both legends (in sharp contradiction with the well-known principles allegedly inspiring political action in constituted communities) hold that in the case of foundation—the supreme act in which the "We" is constituted as an identifiable entity—the inspiring principle of action is love of freedom, and this both in the negative sense of liberation from oppression and in the positive sense of the establishment of Freedom as a stable, tangible reality.

Both the difference and the connection between the two—the freedom that comes from being liberated and the freedom that arises out of the spontaneity of beginning something new—are paradigmatically represented in the two foundation legends that have acted as guides for Western political thought. We have the Biblical story of the exodus of Israeli tribes from Egypt, which preceded the Mosaic legislation constituting the Hebrew people, and Virgil's story of the wanderings of Aeneas, which led to the foundation of Rome—'"
dum conderet urbem,
" as Virgil defines the content of his great poem even in its first lines. Both legends begin with an act of liberation, the flight from oppression and slavery in Egypt and the flight from burning Troy (that is, from annihilation); and in both instances this act is told about from the perspective of a new freedom, the conquest of a new "promised land" that offers more than Egypt's fleshpots and the foundation of a new City that is prepared for by a war destined to undo the Trojan war, so that the order of events as laid down by Homer could be reversed. Virgil's reversal of Homer is deliberate and complete.
¹²⁶
This time it is Achilles in the guise of Turnus ("Here too shalt thou tell that a Priam found his Achilles") who flees and is killed by Hector in the guise of Aeneas; in the center, "the source of all that woe" is again a woman, but this time she is a bride (Lavinia) and not an adulteress; and the end of the war is not triumph for the victor and utter destruction for the vanquished but a new body politic—"both nations unconquered join treaty under equal laws forever."

No doubt if we read these legends as tales, there is a world of difference between the aimless desperate wanderings of the Israeli tribes in the desert after the Exodus and the marvelously colorful tales of the adventures of Aeneas and his fellow Trojans; but to the men of action of later generations who ransacked the archives of antiquity for paradigms to guide their own intentions, this was not decisive. What was decisive was that there was a
hiatus
between disaster and salvation, between liberation from the old order and the new freedom, embodied in a
novus ordo saeclorum,
a "new order of the ages" with whose rise the world had structurally changed.

The legendary hiatus between a no-more and a not-yet clearly indicated that freedom would not be the automatic result of liberation, that the end of the old is not necessarily the beginning of the new, that the notion of an all-powerful time continuum is an illusion. Tales of a transitory period— from bondage to freedom, from disaster to salvation—were all the more appealing because the legends chiefly concerned the deeds of great leaders, persons of world-historic significance who appeared on the stage of history precisely during such gaps of historical time. All those who, pressed by exterior circumstances or motivated by radical Utopian thought-trains, were not satisfied to change the world by the gradual reform of an old order (and this rejection of the gradual was precisely what transformed the men of action of the eighteenth century, the first century of a fully secularized intellectual elite, into the men of the revolutions) were almost logically forced to accept the possibility of a hiatus in the continuous flow of temporal sequence.

We remember Kant's embarrassment in "dealing ... with a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states," i.e., with an "
absolute
beginning," which, because of the unbreakable sequence of the time continuum, will nevertheless always remain "the continuation of a preceding series."
¹²⁷
The word "revolution" was supposed to dissolve this embarrassment when, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, it changed its old astronomical meaning and came to signify an unprecedented event. In France this even led to a short-lived "revolution" of the calendar: in October 1793, it was decided that the proclamation of the Republic was a new beginning of human history; as this had happened in September 1792, the new calendar declared September 1793 to be the inauguration of the Year Two. This attempt to localize an absolute beginning in time was a failure, and probably not only because of the strong anti-Christian cast of the new calendar (all Christian holidays, including Sunday, were abolished, and a fictitious division of a thirty-day month into units of ten days was instituted; the tenth day of each decade was to replace the weekly Sunday as a day of rest). Its usage fizzled out around 1805, a date hardly remembered even by professional historians.

In the case of the American Revolution, the old legendary notion of a temporal hiatus between the old order and a new era seemed much better suited than a calendar "revolution" to bridge the gap between a time continuum of ordered succession and the spontaneous start of something new. Indeed, it would be tempting to use die rise of the United States of America as a historical example of the truth of old legends, like a verification of Locke's "in the beginning all the world was America." The colonial period would be interpreted as the transition period from bondage to freedom—the hiatus between leaving England and the Old World and the establishment of freedom in the New.

The parallel with the tales is astoundingly close: in both instances the act of foundation had come about through the deeds and the sufferings of exiles. This is true even of the Biblical tale as told in Exodus; Canaan, the promised land, is by no means the original Jewish home, but the land of the Jews' former "sojourn" (Exodus 6:4). Virgil insists still more strongly on the theme of exile: Aeneas and his companions were "driven ... to distant places of exile in waste lands," weeping at leaving "the shores and the havens ... where once was Troy," exiles "uncertain whither the fates carry us or where a resting-place is given."
¹²⁸

The founders of the American Republic were well acquainted with Roman as well as Biblical antiquity and they may have taken from the old legends the decisive distinction between mere liberation and actual freedom, but nowhere do they use the hiatus as a possible basis for explaining what they were doing. There was a simple factual reason for that: though the land eventually was to become a "resting-place" for many and an asylum for exiles, they themselves had not setded there as exiles but as colonists. Up to the last, when conflict with England proved to be inevitable, they had no trouble recognizing the political authority of the mother-country. They prided themselves on being British subjects, until the momentum of their rebellion against an unjust government—"taxation without representation"—had carried them into a full-fledged "revolution," a change in the form of government itself, and the constitution of a Republic as the only government, they now felt, fit to rule in die land of the free.

This was the moment when those who had started as men of action and had been transformed into men of revolution changed Virgil's great line "
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo
" ("the great order of the ages is [re] born as it was in the beginning")
¹²⁹
to the
Novus Ordo Seclorum
(the "
new
order"), which we still find on our dollar bills. For the Founding Fathers, the variation implied an admission that the great effort to reform and restore the body politic to its initial integrity (to found "Rome anew") had led to the entirely unexpected and very different task of constituting something entirely new—founding a "new Rome."

When men of action, men who wanted to change the world, became aware that such a change might actually postulate a new order of the ages, the start of something unprecedented, they began to look to history for help. They set about rethinking such thought-things as the Pentateuch and the
Aeneid,
foundation legends that might tell them how to solve the problem of beginning—a problem because beginning's very nature is to carry in itself an element of complete arbitrariness. It was only now that they confronted the abyss of freedom, knowing that whatever would be done now could just as well have been left undone and believing, too, with clarity and precision, that once something is done it cannot be undone, that human memory telling the story will survive repentance as well as destruction.

This applies only to the realm of action, the "many-in-one of human beings,"
¹³⁰
that is, to communities where the "We" is properly established for its journey through historical time. The foundation legends, with their hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, indicate the problem without solving it. They point to the
abyss
of nothingness that opens up before any deed that cannot be accounted for by a reliable chain of cause and effect and is inexplicable in Aristotelian categories of potentiality and actuality. In the normal time continuum every effect immediately turns into a cause of future developments, but when the causal chain is broken—which occurs after liberation has been achieved, because liberation, though it may be freedom's
conditio sine qua non,
is never the
conditio per quarn
that causes freedom—there is nothing left for the "beginner" to hold on to. The thought of an absolute beginning—
creatio ex nihilo—
abolishes the sequence of temporality no less than does the thought of an absolute end, now rightly referred to as "thinking the unthinkable."