~Franz Rosenzweig
So the old quarrel seems settled, heaven and earth reconciled. But that was only appearance, both for the solution given to
the question of faith and for the self-completion of knowledge.
A highly apparent appearance at any rate; for if the presupposition
that was mentioned first is valid, and if all knowledge concerns
the All, if it is enclosed in it while being all-powerful in it,
then that appearance was certainly more than appearance, then it
was truth. Whoever still wanted to raise an objection had to feel
under his feet an Archimedean point outside of that knowable
All. It is from such an Archimedean point that a Kierkegaard,
and not only he, contested the Hegelian integration of Revelation
into the All.
The point in question is Søren Kierkegaard’s
own consciousness, or the consciousness designated by some
other first and last name, of personal sin and of personal Redemption,
which neither aspired to nor gave access to a dissolution
into the cosmos; it did not give access to it: for even if
everything in it could be translated into the universal—there remained
the fact of having a first and last name, the most personal
thing in the strictest and narrowest sense of the word, and
everything depended precisely on that personal reality, as the
bearers of these experiences asserted.
At any rate, one assertion here countered another assertion.
Philosophy was accused of a deficiency, or more accurately,
of an insufficiency which it could not itself admit because
it could not recognize it: for, if there really was here an object
situated beyond it, then, in the completed form it assumed under
Hegel, it had precisely closed off any view of this beyond,
as well as that of any other; the objection contested its right on
a domain whose existence it had to deny; this objection
did not attack its own domain. That had to happen in another
way. And this happened in the philosophical epoch inaugurated
by Schopenhauer and carried on by Nietzsche, and its end
has not yet come.
Schopenhauer was the first among the great thinkers to be
concerned, not with the essence, but with the value of the world.
A highly unscientific concern, if he really was enquiring into the
objective value, the value of “something,” the “meaning” or the
“purpose” of the world—which, after all, would only be another
expression for enquiring into the essence—but if the enquiry
was about its value for man, and perhaps even for the man Arthur
Schopenhauer. And this is the way it was meant. Of course, it
was consciously that one only asked about the value for man,
and even this question’s poisonous fangs were extracted so that
it found its solution, after all, in a system of the world.
For system
quite simply signifies that things already have value independently
and universally. And so the question of man prior to the
system found its answer in the saint, produced by the system in
its terminal phase. At any rate, this was already an unheard-of
thing in philosophy, that a human type and not a concept closed
the arch of the system, really closed it as its keystone, and did
not complete it as an ethical ornament or trifling appendage.
And more than all the rest, its prodigious influence has only one
explanation that corresponds as well to the reality of things: one
felt that here there was a man at the beginning of the system, a
man who no longer philosophized in the context of the history
of philosophy and so to speak as its proxy, as the heir to the
present status of its problems, but a man who “had resolved to
reflect upon life,” because it—life—“is a toilsome thing.”
These
proud words of the adolescent in a conversation with Goethe—
just the fact that he says “life” and not “world” is remarkable—
find their complement in the letter where he proposed the completed
work to the publisher. He specifies there, for the content
of philosophy, the idea by which an individual mind would react
to the impression the world has made on it. “An individual mind”:
this was precisely the Arthur Schopenhauer who here occupied
the place which, according to the prevailing conception in philosophy,
the problem would have had to occupy.
Man, “life,” had
become the problem, and because he had “proposed” to resolve
it in the form of a philosophy, the value of the world for man
had to be questioned—an extremely unscientific question as already
admitted above, but all the more a human one. Till now, all
philosophical interest had revolved around the knowable All; even
man had been entitled to be an object of philosophy only in this
relationship to the All. Now, facing this knowable world, there
rose another independent reality: the living human being; before
the All there rose the One who mocked all totality and all universality,
there rose the “Unique One and his property.”2 It was not
in the book of that title—which was after all only a book—
but through the tragedy of Nietzsche’s life that this innovation
was then encrusted into the riverbed of the evolution
of the conscious mind.