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II. Talk on the Common Course (1952) <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>> All things are conditioned by the situation in which they exist, they are part of various situations. Man is above situation, even though he is also partly part of a situation; within each situation he can take a position and thereby change the situation; Man, though partly located, is himself location and therefore can locate, make and organize space. He is only partly part of time, he is also duration (being identical or keeping his identity during a span of time) and therefore can make and organize time. Both, having time and being above it, and having space and being above it, are united in the fact that man is a being who is present. Presence is what distinguishes the being of man from all other things; it makes him a transcendent being. He can make himself present everywhere in the world and at any moment in the past; he can even, to a certain extent, provide for his own presence in the future. The experience of this human presence, which relates to man's fundamental attitudes to time and space, as distinguished from those of all other things, is the reason for the ever re- current ideas and concepts of eternity. Man neither knows nor can prove the existence of eternity; yet, in a sense, he always lives in it. That we are here and now means also that we are the Here and the Now, around whom space can be assembled and occurrences organized, around whom time can be gathered and events provoked. Through this activity and out of our own existence, which apparently rushes past us, finally dissolving us into spatial matter, we can make a bios, that is a life that has a consistency and continuity of its own. Consistency and continuity are not the sane as meaning, but the prerequisite to it. Our existence, merely as it is given to us, does not contain them . Only because we are more than our existence can we create them while we exist. They are given to us not as existing entities, but as possible propositions. Because we are the Here and Now we can reach over to the Now and There (television, which brings us the events going on now in some distant part of the world), or to the Here and Then (into our own history which took place here), or to the Then and the There (studying, for instance, the European past). We relate, assemble, organize and choose. We establish our own relations, choose our own "relatives" among the dead who are still present among us through their works. The reach of modern man is very long and wide after Western civilization has spread and established relations between the continuities, consistencies and traditions everywhere. We may lose this reach again. In order to insure it, we relate ourselves back to the great originators of human creativity; we thus free our- selves from the high servitude, into which our mind has been put during our metaphysical past, and from the low servitude into which we may sink through the pseudo-metaphysical concepts of our present time. 11. We are beings who are present in the world, and not merely there in sheer existence; we are not contained by, but are above Being. That is why we have time and space. Pascal in his reflections on human existence, thought that man as a being among beings was the most miserable creature of then all, and most easily destroyable; yet, at the same time, he found man greater than any- thing in the universe, perhaps even greater than the universe it- self, because only man knows that he will die. This knowledge of his own death is, as we shall see later, the condition sine qua non for human freedom. No proposition concerning the transformation of mere existence into a meaningful life could ever be made to man if he did not know that he has to die; he could not use even an infinite existence for the purpose of freedom. Here we need only consider the fact that the animal, which does not know that it will die, by the same token does not know that it will be here tomorrow, and is therefore unable to decide to be there and then; without knowing of death as the end of all future, man could not have a future at all; he could not have time and space and could not be present in Being. Although we are transcendent, we can never know what a transcendent being actually is, we never know its essence. The reason for the necessary "ignorance" is that while we have essence and existence, we are not essence and existence, but transcend both. The essence of man, the what he is, escapes all definitions because he is by definition more than any What. Of man we cannot ask: What are you; we must ask: Who are you? The essence of any human being cannot be determined because it is capable of constant self-determination. Everything that is, man can approach scientifically, except himself. Everything that is, has definite potentialities, possibilities, qualities; but man is a being of free creative capabilities which make these potentialities and qualities possible. Certain sciences, such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, deal with man and they can help us orient ourselves in the world. But if they try to rule man and determine his capabilities scientifically, they assume that he is not free; and this assumption does not follow from science, but is a metaphysical hypothesis which destroys human freedom and man himself. The uniqueness of the, human being among all other beings and things is the profoundest reason for the establishment of equality. Equality is not a fact which I can prove or disprove, observe or fail to observe; equality is a free proposition of man, founded on the uniqueness of man in Being. Here lies the reason why since its earliest memories, mankind (not counting individual exceptions of abnormal people) has always considered murder with such great horror. Totalitarian regimes have succeeded in overcoming this horror and made mass murder everyday occurrences. They probably could do this only because for the first time they have destroyed all awareness of human uniqueness and freedom. We can decide to be equals because of this transcendent quality of uniqueness. This brings with it the singularity of every free personality. In other words, equality based on human uniqueness is possible only as equality of diversity. It is one of the creative procedures of freedom to establish equality in diversity and to develop both, diversity and equality, at the same time. Equality becomes an instrument of tyranny if one tries to make everybody like everybody else, to level everybody down to a common denominator. The more we lose our distinguishing qualities and try to be like everybody else, the more we shall in the end try to distinguish ourselves from all others through exercising certain performing powers over them -- money, standing, administrative power, etc. In such a society those who are personally least distinguished will always eventually prevail. This was true for the two outstanding "mediocrities" of our time - Hitler and Stalin. Once true equality, the equality in diversity, has been abolished, the fake equality of everybody like everybody else soon dies out too. After thousands of years of "struggle of the sexes" we have finally come to an equality of the sexes, with the result that we already forget their natural difference, and we treat women like men. If this process goes on, the "struggle of the sexes" will become even more merciless than ever before precisely because it has become almost sexless. The struggle for equality among the sexes was long and difficult because here no substitute for equality in diversity seemed even possible. And it is here that man first became aware of his creative capability to establish equality at all. How this was done can still be seen in that much neglected story of man's creation in Genesis, in which we read: "God created man in his own image; male and female created He them." We do not know who wrote this. (Perhaps the author of this story is Abraham). But we do know that this unknown man, if we knew him, would belong among the founding fathers of freedom and creativeness. This is not true of the other Biblical author, whose story of the creation of man has always prevailed, and who tells us that God made woman out of man's rib because the bored male needed a companion and (later) a servant, who (according to Milton) must adore God in him, the male being the only one who was permitted to adore God Himself. Our unknown man, on the contrary, must have known that an Adam whose only companion was a being inferior to himself could never be free because he would at once get involved in the vicious circle of servant and master, in which the servant is always in a sense the master's master. He must therefore have understood that the attribution of such an act of creation to God meant accusing God of having created man as an unfree being. He, for the first time in history, was able to conceive of a God who could create a creative creature, i. e. conceive of truly divine creation which must transcend all creative capabilities of man himself. This unknown author must also have understood something of the wisdom of God, Who created a free creative being who is never able to knew himself as a free personality without the existence of his You. When God created man, he could only create "them," man and woman, who are absolutely equal by being unique as persons and who are at the same time absolutely different from each other and irreplaceable. The uniqueness of each human being, as conceived by the unknown author of the first chapter of Genesis, has prevailed only twice in the recorded history of mankind, once during the period of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and once again in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. We do not know if the man Abraham, whose actions are described in the Biblical stories, as a continuous biography of one consistent personality ever existed, although it is almost impossible to think of this figure as the product of mere imagination. Unity between thought and action, it is true, is the hallmark of each of our great originators. Yet nowhere else is this unity expressed chiefly in terms of action so that a whole pattern of thought is clearly revealed through action. Because of this unity, in which action has the priority, the author of the Abraham stories could only have been a man who was able to describe the deepest thought by in- venting action. This man then would have been like Abraham himself; he would have been one of the original thinkers who distinguished themselves from all later metaphysicians by saying: "What I do, you can do, if you want to," and not: "Do as I tell you." It is highly improbable that an author who expressed thought exclusively in terms of action would have lacked in his own actions the quality of his own thoughts. The question therefore whether the man Abraham ever lived or whether a poet once created this figure is of no relevance to us. The specific unity of thought and action in the Abraham stories could as well be achieved by an author, who, starting with thoughts, invented for them the story of an acting man as a historical figure who revealed his thoughts in his actions. It is always the same Abraham we deal with, the man who lived the most exemplary life ever recorded in history. <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next>> |
