To some, perhaps, the foregoing reflections may seem to possess a
certain morbid character. Morbid? But what is disease precisely? And
what is health?
May not disease itself possibly be the essential condition of that which
we call progress and progress itself a disease?
Who does not know the mythical tragedy of Paradise? Therein dwelt our
first parents in a state of perfect health and perfect innocence, and
Jahwé gave them to eat of the tree of life and created all things for
them; but he commanded them not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil. But they, tempted by the serpent--Christ's
type of prudence--tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, and became subject to all diseases, and to death, which
is their crown and consummation, and to labour and to progress. For
progress, according to this legend, springs from original sin. And thus
it was the curiosity of Eve, of woman, of her who is most thrall to the
organic necessities of life and of the conservation of life, that
occasioned the Fall and with the Fall the Redemption, and it was the
Redemption that set our feet on the way to God and made it possible for
us to attain to Him and to be in Him.
Do you want another version of our origin? Very well then. According to
this account, man is, strictly speaking, merely a species of gorilla,
orang-outang, chimpanzee, or the like, more or less hydrocephalous. Once
on a time an anthropoid monkey had a diseased offspring--diseased from
the strictly animal or zoological point of view, really diseased; and
this disease, although a source of weakness, resulted in a positive gain
in the struggle for survival. The only vertical mammal at last succeeded
in standing erect--man. The upright position freed him from the
necessity of using his hands as means of support in walking; he was
able, therefore, to oppose the thumb to the other four fingers, to seize
hold of objects and to fashion tools; and it is well known that the
hands are great promoters of the intelligence. This same position gave
to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production
of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this
position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the
seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and
resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose
head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon
woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwé
condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow.
The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look
upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to
store up his dead. Wherefore?
And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not
perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects
the blood and introduces into it scoriæ, a kind of refuse, of an
imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a
more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is
chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is
physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that
has to live by thought?
The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists
not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases
themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps
enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood. What but this is the
meaning of vaccination and all the serums, and immunity from infection
through lapse of time?
If this notion of absolute health were not an abstract category,
something which does not strictly exist, we might say that a perfectly
healthy man would be no longer a man, but an irrational animal.
Irrational, because of the lack of some disease to set a spark to his
reason. And this disease which gives us the appetite of knowing for the
sole pleasure of knowing, for the delight of tasting of the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is a real disease and a tragic
one.
_Pantes anthrôpoi ton eidenai oregontai phusei_, "all men
naturally desire to know." Thus Aristotle begins his Metaphysic, and it
has been repeated a thousand times since then that curiosity or the
desire to know, which according to Genesis led our first mother to sin,
is the origin of knowledge.
But it is necessary to distinguish here between the desire or appetite
for knowing, apparently and at first sight for the love of knowledge
itself, between the eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of
knowledge, and the necessity of knowing for the sake of living. The
latter, which gives us direct and immediate knowledge, and which in a
certain sense might be called, if it does not seem too paradoxical,
unconscious knowledge, is common both to men and animals, while that
which distinguishes us from them is reflective knowledge, the knowing
that we know.
Man has debated at length and will continue to debate at length--the
world having been assigned as a theatre for his debates--concerning the
origin of knowledge; but, apart from the question as to what the real
truth about this origin may be, which we will leave until later, it is
a certainly ascertained fact that in the apparential order of things, in
the life of beings who are endowed with a certain more or less cloudy
faculty of knowing and perceiving, or who at any rate appear to act as
if they were so endowed, knowledge is exhibited to us as bound up with
the necessity of living and of procuring the wherewithal to maintain
life. It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according
to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own
being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it
may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned,
depends upon the stomach. In beings which rank in the lowest scale of
life, those actions which present the characteristics of will, those
which appear to be connected with a more or less clear consciousness,
are actions designed to procure nourishment for the being performing
them.
Such then is what we may call the historical origin of knowledge,
whatever may be its origin from another point of view. Beings which
appear to be endowed with perception, perceive in order to be able to
live, and only perceive in so far as they require to do so in order to
live. But perhaps this stored-up knowledge, the utility in which it had
its origin being exhausted, has come to constitute a fund of knowledge
far exceeding that required for the bare necessities of living.
Thus we have, first, the necessity of knowing in order to live, and
next, arising out of this, that other knowledge which we might call
superfluous knowledge or knowledge _de luxe_, which may in its turn come
to constitute a new necessity. Curiosity, the so-called innate desire of
knowing, only awakes and becomes operative after the necessity of
knowing for the sake of living is satisfied; and although sometimes in
the conditions under which the human race is actually living it may not
so befall, but curiosity may prevail over necessity and knowledge over
hunger, nevertheless the primordial fact is that curiosity sprang from
the necessity of knowing in order to live, and this is the dead weight
and gross matter carried in the matrix of science. Aspiring to be
knowledge for the sake of knowledge, to know the truth for the sake of
the truth itself, science is forced by the necessities of life to turn
aside and put it itself at their service. While men believe themselves
to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in
truth. The variations of science depend upon the variations of human
needs, and men of science are wont to work, willingly or unwillingly,
wittingly or unwittingly, in the service of the powerful or in that of a
people that demands from them the confirmation of its own desires.
But is this really a dead weight that impedes the progress of science,
or is it not rather its innermost redeeming essence? It is in fact the
latter, and it is a gross stupidity to presume to rebel against the very
condition of life.
Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. This
necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge
and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches,
tastes, and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear,
touch, taste, and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or the
loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is
environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in
which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch,
and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could
not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common
sense.
Man, then, in his quality of an isolated individual, only sees, hears,
touches, tastes, and smells in so far as is necessary for living and
self-preservation. If he does not perceive colours below red or above
violet, the reason perhaps is that the colours which he does perceive
suffice for the purposes of self-preservation. And the senses themselves
are simplifying apparati which eliminate from objective reality
everything that it is not necessary to know in order to utilize objects
for the purpose of preserving life. In complete darkness an animal, if
it does not perish, ends by becoming blind. Parasites which live in the
intestines of other animals upon the nutritive juices which they find
ready prepared for them by these animals, as they do not need either to
see or hear, do in fact neither see nor hear; they simply adhere, a kind
of receptive bag, to the being upon whom they live. For these parasites
the visible and audible world does not exist. It is enough for them that
the animals, in whose intestines they live, see and hear.
Knowledge, then, is primarily at the service of the instinct of
self-preservation, which is indeed, as we have said with Spinoza, its
very essence. And thus it may be said that it is the instinct of
self-preservation that makes perceptible for us the reality and truth of
the world; for it is this instinct that cuts out and separates that
which exists for us from the unfathomable and illimitable region of the
possible. In effect, that which has existence for us is precisely that
which, in one way or another, we need to know in order to exist
ourselves; objective existence, as we know it, is a dependence of our
own personal existence. And nobody can deny that there may not exist,
and perhaps do exist, aspects of reality unknown to us, to-day at any
rate, and perhaps unknowable, because they are in no way necessary to us
for the preservation of our own actual existence.
But man does not live alone; he is not an isolated individual, but a
member of society. There is not a little truth in the saying that the
individual, like the atom, is an abstraction. Yes, the atom apart from
the universe is as much an abstraction as the universe apart from the
atom. And if the individual maintains his existence by the instinct of
self-preservation, society owes its being and maintenance to the
individual's instinct of perpetuation. And from this instinct, or rather
from society, springs reason.
Reason, that which we call reason, reflex and reflective knowledge, the
distinguishing mark of man, is a social product.
It owes its origin, perhaps, to language. We think articulately--_i.e._,
reflectively--thanks to articulate language, and this language arose out
of the need of communicating our thought to our neighbours. To think is
to talk with oneself, and each one of us talks with himself, thanks to
our having had to talk with one another. In everyday life it frequently
happens that we hit upon an idea that we were seeking and succeed in
giving it form--that is to say, we obtain the idea, drawing it forth
from the mist of dim perceptions which it represents, thanks to the
efforts which we make to present it to others. Thought is inward
language, and the inward language originates in the outward. Hence it
results that reason is social and common. A fact pregnant with
consequences, as we shall have occasion to see.
Now if there is a reality which, in so far as we have knowledge of it,
is the creation of the instinct of personal preservation and of the
senses at the service of this instinct, must there not be another
reality, not less real than the former, the creation, in so far as we
have knowledge of it, of the instinct of perpetuation, the instinct of
the species, and of the senses at the service of this instinct? The
instinct of preservation, hunger, is the foundation of the human
individual; the instinct of perpetuation, love, in its most rudimentary
and physiological form, is the foundation of human society. And just as
man knows that which he needs to know in order that he may preserve his
existence, so society, or man in so far as he is a social being, knows
that which he needs to know in order that he may perpetuate himself in
society.
There is a world, the sensible world, that is the child of hunger, and
there is another world, the ideal world, that is the child of love. And
just as there are senses employed in the service of the knowledge of the
sensible world, so there are also senses, at present for the most part
dormant, for social consciousness has scarcely awakened, employed in the
service of the knowledge of the ideal world. And why must we deny
objective reality to the creations of love, of the instinct of
perpetuation, since we allow it to the creations of hunger or the
instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations
are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may
it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of
our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible
world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service of the
instinct of perpetuation?
Human society, as a society, possesses senses which the individual, but
for his existence in society, would lack, just as the individual, man,
who is in his turn a kind of society, possesses senses lacking in the
cells of which he is composed. The blind cells of hearing, in their dim
consciousness, must of necessity be unaware of the existence of the
visible world, and if they should hear it spoken of they would perhaps
deem it to be the arbitrary creation of the deaf cells of sight, while
the latter in their turn would consider as illusion the audible world
which the hearing cells create.
We have remarked before that the parasites which live in the intestines
of higher animals, feeding upon the nutritive juices which these animals
supply, do not need either to see or hear, and therefore for them the
visible and audible world does not exist. And if they possessed a
certain degree of consciousness and took account of the fact that the
animal at whose expense they live believed in a world of sight and
hearing, they would perhaps deem such belief to be due merely to the
extravagance of its imagination. And similarly there are social
parasites, as Mr. A.J. Balfour admirably observes,[10] who, receiving
from the society in which they live the motives of their moral conduct,
deny that belief in God and the other life is a necessary foundation for
good conduct and for a tolerable life, society having prepared for them
the spiritual nutriment by which they live. An isolated individual can
endure life and live it well and even heroically without in any sort
believing either in the immortality of the soul or in God, but he lives
the life of a spiritual parasite. What we call the sense of honour is,
even in non-Christians, a Christian product. And I will say further,
that if there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purity
and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes
him good, as the being good, thanks to God, that makes him believe in
Him. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.
I am well aware that it may be objected that all this talk of man
creating the sensible world and love the ideal world, of the blind cells
of hearing and the deaf cells of sight, of spiritual parasites, etc., is
merely metaphor. So it is, and I do not claim to discuss otherwise than
by metaphor. And it is true that this social sense, the creature of
love, the creator of language, of reason, and of the ideal world that
springs from it, is at bottom nothing other than what we call fancy or
imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is
understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask:
What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also
fallible.
We shall have to enquire what is this inner social faculty, the
imagination which personalizes everything, and which, employed in the
service of the instinct of perpetuation, reveals to us God and the
immortality of the soul--God being thus a social product.
But this we will reserve till later.
And now, why does man philosophize?--that is to say, why does he
investigate the first causes and ultimate ends of things? Why does he
seek the disinterested truth? For to say that all men have a natural
tendency to know is true; but wherefore?
Philosophers seek a theoretic or ideal starting-point for their human
work, the work of philosophizing; but they are not usually concerned to
seek the practical and real starting-point, the purpose. What is the
object in making philosophy, in thinking it and then expounding it to
one's fellows? What does the philosopher seek in it and with it? The
truth for the truth's own sake? The truth, in order that we may subject
our conduct to it and determine our spiritual attitude towards life and
the universe comformably with it?
Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each
philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who addresses himself to other
men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he will, he
philosophizes not with the reason only, but with the will, with the
feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and the
whole body. It is the man that philosophizes.
I do not wish here to use the word "I" in connection with
philosophizing, lest the impersonal "I" should be understood in place of
the man that philosophizes; for this concrete, circumscribed "I," this
"I" of flesh and bone, that suffers from tooth-ache and finds life
insupportable if death is the annihilation of the personal
consciousness, must not be confounded with that other counterfeit "I,"
the theoretical "I" which Fichte smuggled into philosophy, nor yet with
the Unique, also theoretical, of Max Stirner. It is better to say "we,"
understanding, however, the "we" who are circumscribed in space.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is
inhuman. And if we say that theoretical philosophy addresses itself to
practical philosophy, truth to goodness, science to ethics, I will ask:
And to what end is goodness? Is it, perhaps, an end in itself? Good is
simply that which contributes to the preservation, perpetuation, and
enrichment of consciousness. Goodness addresses itself to man, to the
maintenance and perfection of human society which is composed of men.
And to what end is this? "So act that your action may be a pattern to
all men," Kant tells us. That is well, but wherefore? We must needs seek
for a wherefore.
In the starting-point of all philosophy, in the real starting-point, the
practical not the theoretical, there is a wherefore. The philosopher
philosophizes for something more than for the sake of philosophizing.
_Primum vivere, deinde philosophari_, says the old Latin adage; and as
the philosopher is a man before he is a philosopher, he must needs live
before he can philosophize, and, in fact, he philosophizes in order to
live. And usually he philosophizes either in order to resign himself to
life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget
his griefs, or for pastime and amusement. A good illustration of this
last case is to be found in that terrible Athenian ironist, Socrates, of
whom Xenophon relates in his _Memorabilia_ that he discovered to
Theodata, the courtesan, the wiles that she ought to make use of in
order to lure lovers to her house so aptly, that she begged him to act
as her companion in the chase, _sunthêratês_, her pimp, in a
word. And philosophy is wont, in fact, not infrequently to convert
itself into a kind of art of spiritual pimping. And sometimes into an
opiate for lulling sorrows to sleep.
I take at random a book of metaphysics, the first that comes to my hand,
_Time and Space, a Metaphysical Essay_, by Shadworth H. Hodgson. I open
it, and in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter of the first part I
read:
"Metaphysics is, properly speaking, not a science but a philosophy--that
is, it is a science whose end is in itself, in the gratification and
education of the minds which carry it on, not in external purpose, such
as the founding of any art conducive to the welfare of life." Let us
examine this. We see that metaphysics is not, properly speaking, a
science--that is, it is a science whose end is in itself. And this
science, which, properly speaking, is not a science, has its end in
itself, in the gratification and education of the minds that cultivate
it. But what are we to understand? Is its end in itself or is it to
gratify and educate the minds that cultivate it? Either the one or the
other! Hodgson afterwards adds that the end of metaphysics is not any
external purpose, such as that of founding an art conducive to the
welfare of life. But is not the gratification of the mind of him who
cultivates philosophy part of the well-being of his life? Let the reader
consider this passage of the English metaphysician and tell me if it is
not a tissue of contradictions.
Such a contradiction is inevitable when an attempt is made to define
humanly this theory of science, of knowledge, whose end is in itself, of
knowing for the sake of knowing, of attaining truth for the sake of
truth. Science exists only in personal consciousness and thanks to it;
astronomy, mathematics, have no other reality than that which they
possess as knowledge in the minds of those who study and cultivate them.
And if some day all personal consciousness must come to an end on the
earth; if some day the human spirit must return to the nothingness--that
is to say, to the absolute unconsciousness--from whence it sprang; and
if there shall no more be any spirit that can avail itself of all our
accumulated knowledge--then to what end is this knowledge? For we must
not lose sight of the fact that the problem of the personal immortality
of the soul involves the future of the whole human species.
This series of contradictions into which the Englishman falls in his
desire to explain the theory of a science whose end is in itself, is
easily understood when it is remembered that it is an Englishman who
speaks, and that the Englishman is before everything else a man. Perhaps
a German specialist, a philosopher who had made philosophy his
speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in
his philosophy, would be better able to explain this theory of a science
whose end is in itself and of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non
mortis, sed vitæ meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when
he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did
in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V.,
that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he
feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why
men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail
in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say,
this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real
starting-point of not a few philosophies.
Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I
live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What
does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he
frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his
material sustenance. And if we look closely, we shall see that beneath
these questions lies the wish to know not so much the "why" as the
"wherefore," not the cause but the end. Cicero's definition of
philosophy is well known--"the knowledge of things divine and human and
of the causes in which these things are contained," _rerum divinarum et
humanarum, causarumque quibus hæ res continentur_; but in reality these
causes are, for us, ends. And what is the Supreme Cause, God, but the
Supreme End? The "why" interests us only in view of the "wherefore." We
wish to know whence we came only in order the better to be able to
ascertain whither we are going.
This Ciceronian definition, which is the Stoic definition, is also found
in that formidable intellectualist, Clement of Alexandria, who was
canonized by the Catholic Church, and he expounds it in the fifth
chapter of the first of his _Stromata_. But this same Christian
philosopher--Christian?--in the twenty-second chapter of his fourth
_Stroma_ tells us that for the gnostic--that is to say, the
intellectual--knowledge, _gnosis_, ought to suffice, and he adds: "I
will dare aver that it is not because he wishes to be saved that he, who
devotes himself to knowledge for the sake of the divine science itself,
chooses knowledge. For the exertion of the intellect by exercise is
prolonged to a perpetual exertion. And the perpetual exertion of the
intellect is the essence of an intelligent being, which results from an
uninterrupted process of admixture, and remains eternal contemplation, a
living substance. Could we, then, suppose anyone proposing to the
gnostic whether he would choose the knowledge of God or everlasting
salvation, and if these, which are entirely identical, were separable,
he would without the least hesitation choose the knowledge of God?" May
He, may God Himself, whom we long to enjoy and possess eternally,
deliver us from this Clementine gnosticism or intellectualism!
Why do I wish to know whence I come and whither I go, whence comes and
whither goes everything that environs me, and what is the meaning of it
all? For I do not wish to die utterly, and I wish to know whether I am
to die or not definitely. If I do not die, what is my destiny? and if I
die, then nothing has any meaning for me. And there are three solutions:
(_a_) I know that I shall die utterly, and then irremediable despair, or
(_b_) I know that I shall not die utterly, and then resignation, or
(_c_) I cannot know either one or the other, and then resignation in
despair or despair in resignation, a desperate resignation or a resigned
despair, and hence conflict.
"It is best," some reader will say, "not to concern yourself with what
cannot be known." But is it possible? In his very beautiful poem, _The
Ancient Sage_, Tennyson said:
Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Thou canst not prove that thou art spirit alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Nor canst thou prove thou art immortal, no,
Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself,
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
Cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!
Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven,
nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to
wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce
to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the
Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is
another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition
between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational,
not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And
this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.
The defect of Descartes' _Discourse of Method_ lies not in the
antecedent methodical doubt; not in his beginning by resolving to doubt
everything, a merely intellectual device; but in his resolution to begin
by emptying himself of himself, of Descartes, of the real man, the man
of flesh and bone, the man who does not want to die, in order that he
might be a mere thinker--that is, an abstraction. But the real man
returned and thrust himself into the philosophy.
"_Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée_." Thus begins the
_Discourse of Method_, and this good sense saved him. He continues
talking about himself, about the man Descartes, telling us among other
things that he greatly esteemed eloquence and loved poetry; that he
delighted above all in mathematics because of the evidence and certainty
of its reasons, and that he revered our theology and claimed as much as
any to attain to heaven--_et prétendais autant qu'aucun autre à gagner
le ciel_. And this pretension--a very laudable one, I think, and above
all very natural--was what prevented him from deducing all the
consequences of his methodical doubt. The man Descartes claimed, as much
as any other, to attain to heaven, "but having learned as a thing very
sure that the way to it is not less open to the most ignorant than to
the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead thither are
beyond our intelligence, I did not dare submit them to my feeble
reasonings, and I thought that to undertake to examine them and to
succeed therein, I should want some extraordinary help from heaven and
need to be more than man." And here we have the man. Here we have the
man who "did not feel obliged, thank God, to make a profession
(_métier_) of science in order to increase his means, and who did not
pretend to play the cynic and despise glory." And afterwards he tells us
how he was compelled to make a sojourn in Germany, and there, shut up in
a stove (_poêle_) he began to philosophize his method. But in Germany,
shut up in a stove! And such his discourse is, a stove-discourse, and
the stove a German one, although the philosopher shut up in it was a
Frenchman who proposed to himself to attain to heaven.
And he arrives at the _cogito ergo sum_, which St. Augustine had already
anticipated; but the _ego_ implicit in this enthymeme, _ego cogito, ergo
ego sum_, is an unreal--that is, an ideal--_ego_ or I, and its _sum_,
its existence, something unreal also. "I think, therefore I am," can
only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of the "I am,"
which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is
knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think,
but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this
living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek
to join in wedlock life and reason!
The truth is _sum, ergo cogito_--I am, therefore I think, although not
everything that is thinks. Is not consciousness of thinking above all
consciousness of being? Is pure thought possible, without consciousness
of self, without personality? Can there exist pure knowledge without
feeling, without that species of materiality which feeling lends to it?
Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act
of knowing and willing? Could not the man in the stove have said: "I
feel, therefore I am"? or "I will, therefore I am"? And to feel oneself,
is it not perhaps to feel oneself imperishable? To will oneself, is it
not to wish oneself eternal--that is to say, not to wish to die? What
the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of the thing, the
effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being,
self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and
fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it
not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy,
although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, may not
recognize it?
And, moreover, it was the _cogito_ that introduced a distinction which,
although fruitful of truths, has been fruitful also of confusions, and
this distinction is that between object, _cogito_, and subject, _sum_.
There is scarcely any distinction that does not also lead to confusion.
But we will return to this later.
For the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to
die, the hunger for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to
persist indefinitely in our own being, which is, according to the tragic
Jew, our very essence, that this is the affective basis of all knowledge
and the personal inward starting-point of all human philosophy, wrought
by a man and for men. And we shall see how the solution of this inward
affective problem, a solution which may be but the despairing
renunciation of the attempt at a solution, is that which colours all the
rest of philosophy. Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge
there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the enquiry into
the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore,"
the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive
others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
And this personal and affective starting-point of all philosophy and all
religion is the tragic sense of life. Let us now proceed to consider
this.