The Life of the Mind (67 page)

 

I have dwelt on Virgil's poems at some length for several reasons. To sum up: men, when they emerged from the tutelage of the Church, turned to antiquity, and their first steps in a secularized world were guided by a revival of ancient learning. Confronted with the riddle of foundation—how to re-start time within an inexorable time continuum—they naturally turned to the story of the foundation of Rome and learned from Virgil that this starting-point of Occidental history had already been a re-vival, the resurgence of Troy. That could tell them no more than that the hope of founding a "new Rome" was an illusion: the most they could hope for was to repeat the primeval foundation and found "Rome anew." Whatever lay prior to this first foundation, itself the resurgence of some definite past, was situated outside history; it was nature, whose cyclical sempiternity might provide a refuge from the onward march of time, the vertical, rectilinear direction of history—a place of leisure,
otium—
when men tired of the busy-ness of citizenship (
nec-otium
by definition), but whose own origin was of no interest because it was beyond the scope of action.

To be sure, there is something puzzling in the fact that men of action, whose sole intent and purpose was to change the whole structure of the future world and create a
novus ordo seclorum,
should have to go to that distant past of antiquity, for they did not "deliberately [reverse] the time-axis and [bid] the young 'walk back into the pure radiance of the past' (Petrarch) because the classic past
is
the true future."
¹³⁷
They looked for a paradigm for a new form of government in their own "enlightened" age and were hardly aware of the fact that they were looking backward. More puzzling, I think, than their actual ransacking of the archives of antiquity is that they did not rebel against antiquity when they discovered that the final and certainly profoundly Roman answer of "ancient prudence" was that salvation always comes from the past, that the ancestors were
maiores,
the "greater ones" by definition.

It is striking, besides, that the notion of the future—precisely a future pregnant with final salvation—bringing back a kind of initial Golden Age, should have become popular at a time when Progress had come to be the dominant concept to explain the movement of History. And the most striking example of the resilience of that very old dream is of course Marx's fantasy of a classless and warless "realm of freedom" as prefigured in "original communism," a realm that has a more than superficial resemblance to Saturn's aboriginal Italic rule, when no laws "fettered [men] to justice." In its original ancient form as the inception of history, the Golden Age is a melancholy thought; it is as though, thousands of years ago, our ancestors had a foreboding of the eventual discovery of the entropy principle in the midst of the progress-drunk nineteenth century—a discovery which, if it had gone unchallenged, would have deprived action of all meaning.
¹³⁸
What actually disposed of the entropy principle for the men who made the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was less Engels' "scientific" refutation than Marx's turning—and, of course, Nietzsche's too—to a cyclical time concept where the prehistoric innocence of the beginning would finally return, no less triumphant than the Second Coming.

But this does not concern us here. When we directed our attention to men of action, hoping to find in them a notion of freedom purged of the perplexities caused for men's minds by the reflexivity of mental activities—the inevitable recoil on itself of the willing ego—we hoped for more than we finally achieved. The abyss of pure spontaneity, which in the foundation legends is bridged by the hiatus between liberation and the constitution of freedom, was covered up by the device, typical of the Occidental tradition (the only tradition where freedom has always been the
raison d'être
of all politics) of understanding the
new
as an improved re-statement of the old. In its original integrity, freedom survived in political theory—i.e., theory conceived for the purpose of political action-only in Utopian and unfounded promises of a final "realm of freedom" that, in its Marxian version at any rate, would indeed spell "the end of all things," a sempiternal peace in which all specifically human activities would wither away.

No doubt to arrive at such a conclusion is frustrating, but I know of only one tentative alternative to it in our entire history of political thought. If, as Hegel believed, the philosopher's task is to catch the most elusive of all manifestations, the spirit of an age, in the net of reason's concepts, then Augustine, the Christian philosopher of the fifth century
A.D
., was the only philosopher the Romans ever had. He was a Roman by education rather than birth, and it was his learning that sent him back to the classical texts of Republican Rome of the first century
B.C
., which even then were alive only in the form of erudition. In his great work on the
City of God,
he mentions, but does not explicate, what could have become the ontological underpinning for a truly Roman or Virgilian philosophy of politics. According to him, as we know, God created man as a temporal creature,
homo temporalis;
time and man were created together, and this temporality was affirmed by the fact that each man owed his life not just to the multiplication of the species, but to birth, the entry of a novel creature who
as
something entirely new appears in the midst of the time continuum of the world. The purpose of the creation of man was to make possible a
beginning:
"That there be a beginning man was created, before whom nobody
was"—"Initium ... ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quern nullus fuit."
¹³⁹
The very capacity for beginning is rooted in
natality,
and by no means in creativity, not in a gift but in the fact that human beings, new men, again and again appear in the world by virtue of birth.

I am quite aware that the argument even in the Augustinian version is somehow opaque, that it seems to tell us no more than that we are
doomed
to be free by virtue of being born, no matter whether we like freedom or abhor its arbitrariness, are "pleased" with it or prefer to escape its awesome responsibility by electing some form of fatalism. This impasse, if such it is, cannot be opened or solved except by an appeal to another mental faculty, no less mysterious than the faculty of beginning, the faculty of Judgment, an analysis of which at least may tell us what is involved in our pleasures and dis-pleasures.

Chapter I

1. See
Sophist,
253–254 and
Republic,
517.

2. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz,
Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
Berlin, 1960, vol. I, frag. B4.

3.
Confessions,
bk. XI, chap. 13.

4.
La Pensée et le Mouvant
(1934), Paris, 1950, p. 170.

5.
Ibid.,
p. 26.

6. 1174b6 and 1177a20. See also Aristotle's objections to Plato's concept of pleasure, 1173al3–1173b7.

7.
Op. cit.,
p. 5.

8. For the following, see
Metaphysics,
bk. VII, chaps. 7–10.

9.
De Anima,
433a30.

10. Bruno Snell,
The Discovery of the Mind,
New York, Evanston, 1960, pp. 182–183.

11.
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy,
New York, 1940, p. 307.

12. "Whether whatsoever comes to pass proceed from
necessity,
or some things from
chance,
has been a question disputed amongst the old philosophers long before the incarnation of our Saviour.... But the third way of bringing things to pass ... namely
freewill,
is a thing that never was mentioned amongst them, nor by the Christians in the beginning of Christianity.... But for some ages past, the doctors of the Roman Church have exempted from this dominion of God's will the will of man; and brought in a doctrine, that...[man's] will is free, and determined ... by the power of the will itself." "The Question concerning
Liberty, Necessity and Chance,"English Works,
London, 1841, vol. V, p.l.

13. See
Nicomachean Ethics,
bk. V, chap. 8.

14.
Ibid.,
bk. 3,1110al7.

15. Gilbert Ryle,
The Concept of Mind,
New York, 1949, p. 65.

16. Henry Herbert Williams, article on the Will in
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
11th ed.

17.
De Generatione,
bk. I, chap. 3, 317bl6–18.

18.
Ibid.,
318a25–27 and 319a23–29;
The Basic Works of Aristotle,
ed. Richard McKeon, New York, 1941, p. 483.

19.
Meteorologica,
339b27.

20. Bk. 1, 1100a33–1100bl8.

21.
De Caelo,
283b26–31.

22.
The Will to Power,
ed. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1968, no. 617.

23.
De Civitate Dei,
bk. XII, chap. 20.

24.
Ibid.,
chap. 13.

25. Our present calendar, which takes the birth of Christ as the tuming-point from which to count time both backward and forward, was introduced at the end of the eighteenth century. The textbooks present the reform as prompted by scholarly needs to facilitate the dating of events in ancient history without having to refer to a maze of different time reckonings. Hegel, as far as I know the only philosopher to ponder the sudden remarkable change, saw in it a clear sign of a truly Christian chronology because the birth of Christ now became the turning-point of world history. It seems more significant that in the new scheme we can count backward and forward in such a way that the past reaches back into an infinite past and the future likewise stretches out into an infinite future. This twofold infinity eliminates all notions of beginning and end, establishing mankind, as it were, in a potentially sempiternal reality on earth. Needless to add that nothing could be more alien to Christian thought than the notion of an earthly immortality of mankind and its world.

26. See the article on the Will in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
mentioned above, in n. 16.

27. See Dieter Nestle,
Eleutheria. Teil I: Studien zum Wesen der Freiheit bei den Griechen und im Neuen Testament,
Tübingen, 1967, pp. 6 ff. It seems to be noteworthy that modem etymology inclines to derive the word "
eleutheria
" from an Indo-Germanic root signifying
Volk
or
Stamm,
with the result that only those who belong to the same ethnic unity can be recognized as "free" by their fellow-ethnics. Does not this piece of erudition sound rather uncomfortably close to the notions of German scholarship during the nineteen-thirties, when it first saw the light of day?

28.
Critique of Pure Reason,
B476. For this and other citations, see Norman Kemp Smith's translation,
Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason,
New York, 1963, which the author frequently relied on.

29.
Uber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen,
1795, 19th letter.

30.
The World as Will and Idea
(1818), trans. R. B. Haidane and J. Kemp, vol. I, pp. 39 and 129. Quoted here from Kon-stantin Kolenda's Introduction to Arthur Schopenhauer,
Essay on the Freedom of the Will,
Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis, New York, 1960, p. viii.

31.
Of Human Freedom
(1809), trans. James Cutmann, Chicago, 1936, p. 24.

32.
Beyond Good and Evil
(1885), trans. Marianne Cowan, Chicago, 1955, sect. 18.

33. "Also Sprach Zarathustra," in
Ecce Homo
(1889), no. 1.

34.
Ibid.,
no. 3.

35. See Karl Jaspers,
Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity
(1935), trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick J. Schmitz, Tucson, 1965; and Martin Heidegger,
Nietzsche,
2 vols., Pfullingen, 1961.

36.
Philosophy
(1932), trans. E. B. Ashton, Chicago, 1970, vol. 2, p. 167.

37. "
Das primäre Phänomen der ursprünglichen und eigentlichen Zeitlichkeit ist die Zukunft.
" In
Sein und Zeit
(1926), Tü- bingen, 1949, p. 329;
Gelassenheit,
Pfullingen, 1959, English translation:
Discourse on Thinking,
trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York, 1966.

38. Editor's note: we have been unable to find this reference.

39.
English Works,
vol. V, p. 55.

40. Letter to G. H. Schaller, dated October 1674. See Spinoza,
The Chief Works,
ed. R. H. M. Elwes, New York, 1951, vol. II, p. 390.

41.
Ethics,
pt. Ill, prop. II, note, in
ibid.,
vol. II, p. 134; Letter to Schaller, in
ibid.,
p. 392.

42.
Leviathan,
ed. Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, 1948, chap. 21.

43.
Essay on the Freedom of the Will,
p. 43.

44.
An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy
(1867), chap. XXVI, quoted from
Free Will,
eds. Sidney Morgenbesser and James Walsh, Englewood Cliffs, 1962, p. 59.

45. See Martin Kahler,
Das Gewissen
(1878), Darmstadt, 1967, pp. 46 ff.

46. See
Laws,
bk. IX, 865e.

47.
Op. cit.,
pp. 63–64.

48.
Notebooks 1914–1916,
bilingual ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York, 1961, entry under date of August 5, 1916, p. 80e; cf. also pp. 86e-88e.

49. Augustine,
On Free Choice of the Will (De Libero Arbitrio),
bk. III, sect. 3.

50. In the Reply to Objection XII against the First Meditation: "that the freedom of the will has been assumed without proof." See
The Philosophical Works of Descartes,
trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge, 1970, vol. II, pp. 74–75.