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The origin and goal of history
The Origin and Goal of History
A T
i'-\ h
THE ORIGIN AND GOAL
OF HISTORY
by
KARL JASPERS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright 1953, by Yale University Press.
Third printing, September 1965.
Printed in the United States of America
by the Murray Printing Company,
Forge Village, Massachusetts.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced,
in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers for
the public press), without written permission from the
publishers.
VOM URSPRTJNG UND ZIEL DER GESGHIGHTE
First German edition 1949
Translated from the German by Michael Bullock
Foreword
MAN'S history has largely disappeared from memory. Only
through investigation and research does it become access-
ible and then only to a small extent.
The long obscurity of prehistory, the foundation of all that
follows, is scarcely broken by such dim light as we can cast upon
it. The remains of the historical period proper the period of
which we possess written evidence are fortuitous and full of gaps;
history is richly documented only since the sixteenth century A.D.
The future is undecided, a boundless realm of possibilities.
Between a prehistory hundreds of times as long and an im-
measurable future lie the five thousand years of history visible to
us, a minute fraction of the unpredictable duration of man's life
on earth. This history is open towards prehistory as well as towards
the future. It cannot be limited in either direction, cannot be
conceived of as a rounded form, a self-contained and completed
structure.
We and the present in which we live are situated in the midst of
history. This present of ours becomes null and void if it loses
itself within the narrow horizon of the day and degenerates into a
mere present. The aim of this book is to assist in heightening our
awareness of the present.
The present reaches fulfilment through the historical ground
which we bring to effective activity within ourselves. The first
part of this book deals with world history up to the present.
On the other hand, the present reaches fulfilment through the
future latent within it, whose tendencies we make into our own,
either by rejecting or accepting them. The second part of this book
is devoted to the present and the future.
A present that has attained fulfilment allows us to cast anchor in
the eternal origin. Guided by history to pass beyond all history
into the Comprehensive that is the ultimate goal which,
though thought can never reach it, it can nevertheless approach.
In the third part of this book the meaning of history is discussed.
KARL JASPERS
Contents
FOREWORD page v
INTRODUCTION: The Structure of World History xiil
PART ONE. WORLD HISTORY
I. THE AXIAL PERIOD I
A. CHARACTERISATION OF THE AXIAL PERIOD 2
B. THE STRUCTURE OF WORLD HISTORY SINCE THE AXIAL PERIOD 6
C. EXAMINATION OF THE AXIAL PERIOD THESIS 8
i . Does it exist as a fact? 2. What is the nature of the parallelism
asserted? 3. What caused the facts of the Axial Period? 4. The
meaning of the Axial Period
n. SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 22
El. PREHISTORY 28
A. HISTORY AND PREHISTORY 28
B. OUR ATTITUDE TO PREHISTORY <JO
C. A TEMPORAL SCHEMA OF PREHISTORY 33
D. WHAT HAPPENED IN PREHISTORY? 34
i. Biological characteristics of man. 2. Historical acquisitions
E. THE OVERALL ASPECT OF PREHISTORY 4 1
F. DO ALL MEN FORM PART OF A SINGLE WHOLE? 4!
IV. THE ANCIENT HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS 44
A. SUMMARY 44
B. WHAT EVENTS USHERED IN HISTORY? 45
C. ANALOGIES AND DIVERSITIES BETWEEN THE ANCIENT CIVILISA-
TIONS 48
V. THE AXIAL PERIOD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 5!
A. THE STRUCTURING OF WORLD HISTORY BY THE AXIAL PERIOD 5 1
B. WORLD HISTORY AFTER THE BREAK-THROUGH 54
C. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDO-GERMANIC PEOPLES 55
D. HISTORY OF THE WEST 57
i. The overall aspect. 2. The significance of the Christian axis.
3. The cultural continuity of the West
vii
viii CONTENTS
VI. THE SPECIFIC QUALITY OF THE WEST page 6 1
Countries and peoples Political liberty Consistent rationalism
Inwardness of personal selfhood Impossibility of circumventing the
world Undogmatism and the exception Claim to exclusive truth
Decisiveness Personalities
VII. ORIENT AND OCCIDENT: THE EASTERN AND THE
WESTERN WORLD 6j
vm. ONCE MORE: A SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 71
PART TWO. PRESENT AND FUTURE
I. THE INTRINSICALLY NEW*. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 8 1
INTRODUCTION 8 1
I. MODERN SCIENCE 8 1
A. CHARACTERISATION OF MODERN SCIENCE 83
i. Universal. 2. In principle incomplete. 3. Devoted to the
smallest phenomenon. 4. JVb cosmos, but a cosmos of the sciences.
5. Radicality. 6. JVb dominant categories, but the mastery of all
categories. 7. The scientific attitude
B. THE ORIGIN OF MODERN SCIENCE 88
Sociological preconditions The will to power The Biblical
religion
C. ABERRATIONS AND TASKS OF MODERN SCIENCE 93
2. MODERN TECHNOLOGY 96
A. THE NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY IOO
i. Definition of technology. 2. The great historical dividing-line
within technology
B. THE NATURE OF WORK 1 06
i. Definition of work 2. Work after the dividing-line of modern
technology
C. APPRAISAL OF WORK AND TECHNOLOGY 112
Appraisal of work. Appraisal of modern technology, i . Remote-
ness from nature and new nearness to nature. 2. Misjudgment
of the limits of technology. 3. Perception of the demonism of
technology
II. THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 126
INTRODUCTION 1 36
A. CHARACTERISATION OF THE PRESENT SITUATION 127
i. The masses have become a decisive factor in the historical
process. 2. The dissolution of traditional values (lack of faith)
Thinking in ideologies Simplification Life out of negation
B. WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE PRESENT SITUATION? 135
CONTENTS ix
G. SUMMARY page 138
Universal process -The standard of judgment
III. THE FUTURE 141
Introduction concerning prognoses: Survey of the meaning of prog-
nostication Documents of pessimistic prognoses during the nineteenth
century The idea of progress Biological prognoses Concern for the
abyss of the new realities Anxiety as opportunity Concerning the
prognostic approach
i. THE GOAL: LIBERTY 152
A. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT OF FREEDOM 153
B. POWER AND POLITICAL FREEDOM
2. THE BASIC TENDENCIES 1 72
A. SOCIALISM 172
I. Sources and concept of socialism. 2. Power. 3. Planning
and total planning. 4. Conception of the economic structure:
Free competition or planned economy? 5. The medium of plan-
ning: Bureaucracy. 6. The limits of meaningful planning.
7. Socialism and total planning. 8. The motive of total plan-
ning and its mastery
B. WORLD UNITY 1 93
Introduction: The historical analogy with the end of the Axial
Period, i. World empire or world order. 2. The political powers:
National States and Great Powers Primal distribution of the
world Classical liberty Sense of the earth and of power.
3. The perils on the road to world order: Impatience Once
dictatorship has been achieved it cannot be got rid of from within
The danger of absolute destruction. 4. Ideas opposed to the
possibility of world order. 5. The idea of world order
c. FAITH 213
Introduction, i. Faith and nihilism. 2. The aspect of the
present situation. 3. The basic categories of eternal faith:
Faith in God Faith in man Faith in possibilities in the
world. The consequences -of faith: Strength from faith
Tolerance Animation of all activity. 4. The faith of the future
PART THREE. THE MEANING OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTION: The meaning of conceptions of history 231
I. BOUNDARIES OF HISTORY 235
A. NATURE AND HISTORY 235
B. HEREDITY AND TRADITION 236
C. HISTORY AND COSMOS 237
CONTENTS
II. BASIC STRUCTURES OF HISTORY page 241
A. THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 24!
B. THE TRANSITIONALITY OF HISTORY 243
III. THE UNITY OF HISTORY 247
INTRODUCTION 247
A. FACTS THAT POINT TO UNITY 248
i. Unity of the human make-up. 2. The universal. 3. Pro-
gress. 4. Unity in space and time. 5. Particular unities
B. UNITY THROUGH MEANING AND GOAL 256
C. UNITY FOR THE THINKING TOTAL CONCEPTION 258
Summary 263
IV. OUR MODERN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 266
A. UNIVERSALITY AND PRECISION OF THE METHODS OF INVESTI-
GATION 266
B. OVERCOMING TOTAL THINKING 267
C. OVERCOMING THE MERELY AESTHETIC VIEW OF HISTORY 269
D. ATTUNING TO THE UNITY OF MANKIND 269
E. HISTORY AND THE PRESENT BECOME INSEPARABLE TO US 27O
V. OVERCOMING HISTORY 272
NOTES 277
OTHER WORKS BY KARL JASPERS 284
INDEX 287
INTRODUCTION
The Structure of World History
BY virtue of the extent and depth to which it has transformed
human life, our age is of the most incisive significance. It
requires the whole history of mankind to furnish us with
standards by which to measure the meaning of what is happening
at the present time.
A glance at the history of mankind leads us, however, into the
mystery of our humanity. The fact that we possess a history at all,
that history has made us what we are and that the duration of this
history up to now has been comparatively short prompts us to
ask: Where does it come from? Where does it lead? What does it
mean?
Since the earliest times man has attempted to picture the whole
to himself: first in mythical images (in theogonies and cosmo-
gonies, in which man had his appointed place), then in the
image of divine activity operating through the decisive events of
world politics (the historical vision of the prophets), then as a
process of revelation running through the whole course of history,
from the creation of the world and the fall of man to the end of
the world and the last judgement (St. Augustine).
The historical consciousness is fundamentally altered when it
bases itself on empirical foundations and on these alone. The
accounts of a natural genesis of civilisation, such as were devised
everywhere, from China to the West, though still in fact legend-
ary, were already empirical in intent. Today the real horizon has
become immensely wider. Temporal limitations such, for
example, as the Biblical belief in a world 6,000 years old have
been broken through. Something endless opens up into the past
and into the future. Within it research adheres to historical
remains, documents and monuments of the past.
Confronted by limitless multiplicity, this empirical conception
of history must either restrict itself to the demonstration of single
regularities and never ending descriptions of the manifold: the
same happenings repeat themselves; the analogous recurs within
the diverse; there are orders of power-politics in typical series of
forms, and there are chaos and confusion; there are regular
xiv INTRODUCTION
sequences of styles in the realm of the spirit, and there is levelling-
down into that which endures without any regular pattern.
Or the endeavour is made to achieve a unified and integrating
overall view of the history of mankind: the factual cycles of
civilisation are seen in their development and decline first in
isolation and then in mutual interaction; the common element
underlying the problems of meaning and mutual comprehensi-
bility is apprehended and leads finally to the concept of a single
meaningful pattern, in which all diversities have their appointed
place (Hegel). 1
Whoever turns to history involuntarily adopts one of these
universal viewpoints, which reduce the whole of history to a
unity. These viewpoints may be accepted uncritically, may even
remain unconscious and therefore unquestioned. In the modes of
historical thought they are usually taken as self-evident pre-
suppositions.
Thus in the nineteenth century world history was regarded ^as
that which, after its preliminary stages in Egypt and Mesopotamia,
really began in Greece and Palestine and led up to ourselves.
Everything else came under the heading of ethnology and lay out-
side the province of history proper. World history was the history
oftheWest(Ranke).
As against this view nineteenth-century positivism aimed at
according equal rights to all men. Where there are men there is
history. World history embraces, in time and space, the entire
globe. It is arranged geographically on the basis of its distribution
in space (Helmolt). It took place everywhere on earth. Battles
between negroes in the Sudan were on the same historical plane as
Marathon and Salamis or were even, by virtue of the greater
numbers involved, of superior importance.
Hierarchy and structure seemed once more to be perceptible in
history as a result of the conception of integral cultures. 2 From the
undifferentiated mass of mere primitive existence, cultures so
it was thought develop like organisms, as independent life-
forms having a beginning and an end, being of no concern to one
another but capable of meeting and interfering with each other.
Spengler recognises eight such historical organisms, Toynbee
twenty-one. Spengler ascribes to them a life-span of one thousand
years, Toynbee an indefinite one. Spengler sees the necessity for a
mysterious total process to be accomplished by any given culture-
organism: a metamorphosis governed by natural laws which he
claims to perceive morphologically, from analogies between the
phases of the various organisms. In his physiognomic conception
everything assumes the character of a symbol. Toynbee under-
INTRODUCTION xv
takes a multiple causal analysis from sociological points of view.
Beyond that he finds room for the free decisions of individuals, but
in such a way that, in his view too, the whole appears in the guise
of a currently necessary process. Both, therefore, make predic-
tions for the future on the basis of their overall conceptions. 3
In our time, apart from Spengler and Toynbee, Alfred Weber
has evolved a great independent conception of history. In spite of
his disposition to make the totalities of cultures the object of
knowledge, his universal conception of history his sociology of
civilisation remains, in fact, remarkably open. Guided by his
clear-sighted historical intuition and gifted with an unerring
feeling for the status of spiritual creations, he adumbrates the
historical process in such a manner that neither dispersal into
unrelated culture-organisms nor the unity of human history as
such becomes a principle. In fact, however, he finds himself con-
fronted by the shape of a universal historical process, which
divides itself up into primary civilisations, secondary cultures at
the first and second stage, and so on down to the history of the
expanding West after 1500.
I shall not devote any further time to the discussion of these
conceptions, but shall attempt, in my turn, to outline the schema
of a total conception.
My outline is based on an article of faith: that mankind has one
single origin and one goal. Origin and goal are unknown to us,
utterly unknown by any kind of knowledge. They can only be felt
in the glimmer of ambiguous symbols. Our actual existence
moves between these two poles; in philosophical reflection we may
endeavour to draw closer to both origin and goal.
All men are related in Adam, originate from the hand of God
and are created after His image.
In the beginning was the manifestness of Being in a present
without consciousness. The fall set us on the path leading through
knowledge and finite practical activity with temporal objectives,
to the lucidity of the consciously manifest.
With the consummation of the end we shall attain concord of
souls, shall view one another in a loving present and in boundless
understanding, members of a single realm of everlasting spirits.
All these are symbols, not realities. The meaning of universal
history, so far as it is empirically accessible whether it possesses
such a meaning, or whether human beings only attribute one to
it we can only grasp when guided by the idea of the unity of the
whole of history. We shall examine empirical facts in order to see
to what extent they are in accordance with such an idea of unity,
or how far they absolutely contradict it.
xvi INTRODUCTION
In so doing we shall evolve a conception of history which
ascribes historical significance to that which, firstly, stands un-
mistakably in its place within one single overall process of human
history, as a unique event, and which, secondly, possesses the
qualities of reality and indispensability in the communication or
continuity of humanity.
We shall now proceed, by an analysis of the structure of world
history, to adumbrate our schema, whose aim is the greatest
inclusiveness and the most categoric unity of human history.
PART ONE
*
WORLD HISTORY
CHAPTER ONE
The Axial Period
IN the Western World the philosophy of history was founded
in the Christian faith. In a grandiose sequence of works
ranging from St. Augustine to Hegel this faith visualised the
movement of God through history. God's acts of revelation repre-
sent the decisive dividing lines. Thus Hegel could still say: All
history goes toward and comes from Christ. The appearance of the
Son of God is the axis of world history. Our chronology bears daily
witness to this Christian structure of history.
But the Christian faith is only one faith, not the faith of man-
kind. This view of universal history therefore suffers from the
defect that it can only be valid for believing Christians. But even in
the West, Christians have not tied their empirical conceptions of
history to their faith. An article of faith is not an article of em-
pirical insight into the real course of history. For Christians sacred
history was separated from profane history, as being different in its
meaning. Even the believing Christian was able to examine the
Christian tradition itself in the same way as other empirical objects
of research.
An axis of world history, if such a thing exists, would have to be
discovered empirically, as a fact capable of being accepted as such
by all men, Christians included. This axis would be situated at the
point in history which gave birth to everything which, since then,
man has been able to be, the point most overwhelmingly fruitful
in fashioning humanity; its character would have to be, if not
empirically cogent and evident, yet so convincing to empirical
insight as to give rise to a common frame of historical self-corn^
prehension for all peoples for the West, for Asia, and for all men
on earth, without regard to particular articles of faith. It would
seem that this axis of history is to be found in the period around
500 B.C., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and
200 B.C. It is there that we meet with the most deepcut dividing
line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For
short we may style this the 'Axial Period'.
2 WORLD HISTORY
A. CHARACTERISATION OF THE AXIAL PERIOD
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this
period, Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools
of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti,
Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the
Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of
philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism,
sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging
view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine
the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah^ by way of
Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the
appearance of Homer, of the philosophers Parmenides, Hera-
clitus and Plato of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes.
Everything implied by these names developed during these few
centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West,
without any one of these regions knowing of the others.
What is new about this age, in all three areas of the world, is
that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his
limitations. He experiences the terror of the world and his own
powerlessness. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the
void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously
recognising his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experi-
ences absoluteness in the depths of selfhood and in the lucidity of
transcendence.
All this took place in reflection. Consciousness became once
more conscious of itself, thinking became its own object. Spiritual
conflicts arose, accompanied by attempts to convince others
through the communication of thoughts, reasons and experiences.
The most contradictory possibilities were essayed. Discussion, the
formation of parties and the division of the spiritual realm into
opposites which nonetheless remained related to one another,
created unrest and movement to the very brink of spiritual chaos.
In this age were born the fundamental categories within which
we still think today, and the beginnings of the world religions, by
which human beings still live, were created. The step into univer-
sality was taken in every sense.
As a result of this process, hitherto unconsciously accepted ideas,
customs and conditions were subjected to examination, questioned
and liquidated. Everything was swept into the vortex. In so far
as the traditional substance still possessed vitality and reality, its
manifestations were clarified and thereby transmuted.
The Mythical Age, with its tranquillity and self-evidence, was at
THE AXIAL PERIOD 3
an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were un-
mythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets in their
ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience
launched a struggle against the myth (logos against mythos}\ a
further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God
against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took
place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered
ethical, and the majesty of the deity thereby increased. The myth,
on the other hand, became the material of a language which
expressed by it something very different from what it had origin-
ally signified: it was turned into parable. Myths were remoulded,
were understood at a new depth during this transition, which was
myth-creating after a new fashion, at the very moment when the
myth as a whole was destroyed. The old mythical world slowly
sank into oblivion, but remained as a background to the whole
through the continued belief of the mass of the people (and was
subsequently able to gain the upper hand over wide areas) .
This overall modification of humanity may be termed spiritual-
isation. The unquestioned grasp on life is loosened, the calm of
polarities becomes the disquiet of opposites and antinomies. Man
is no longer enclosed within himself. He becomes uncertain of
himself and thereby open to new and boundless possibilities. He
can hear and understand what no one had hitherto asked or
proclaimed. The unheard-of becomes manifest. Together with his
world and his own self, Being becomes sensible to man, but not
with finality: the question remains.
For the first time philosophers appeared. Human beings dared
to rely on themselves as individuals. Hermits and wandering
thinkers in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in Greece and
prophets in Israel all belong together, however much they may
differ from each other in their beliefs, the contents of their thought
and their inner dispositions. Man proved capable of contrasting
himself inwardly with the entire universe. He discovered within
himself the origin from which to raise himself above his own self
and the world.
In speculative thought he lifts himself up towards Being itelf, which
is apprehended without duality in the disappearance of subject
and object, in the coincidence of opposites. That which is experi-
enced in the loftiest flights of the spirit as a coming-to-oneself
within Being, or as unio mystica, as becoming one with the Godhead,
or as becoming a tool for the will of God is expressed in an
ambiguous and easily misunderstood form in objectifying specu-
lative thought.
It is the specifically human in man which, bound to and concealed
4 WORLD HISTORY
within the body, fettered by instincts and only dimly aware of him-
self, longs for liberation and redemption and is able to attain to them
already in this world in soaring toward the idea, in the resignation
of ataraxia, in the absorption of meditation, in the knowledge of his
self and the world as atman, in the experience of nirvana, in concord
with the tao, or in surrender to the will of God. These paths are
widely divergent in their conviction and dogma, but common to all
of them is man's reaching out beyond himself by growing aware of
himself within the whole of Being and the fact that he can tread
them only as an individual on his own. He may renounce all
worldly goods, may withdraw into the desert, into the forest or
the mountains, may discover as a hermit the creative power of
solitude, and may then return into the world as the possessor of
knowledge, as a sage or as a prophet. What was later called reason
and personality was revealed for the first time during the Axial
Period.
What the individual achieves is by no means passed on to all.
The gap between the peaks of human potentiality and the crowd
became exceptionally great at that time. Nonetheless, what the
individual becomes indirectly changes all. The whole of humanity
took a forward leap.
Corresponding to this new spiritual world, we find a sociological
situation showing analogies in all three regions. There were a
multitude of small States and cities, a struggle of all against all,
which to begin with nevertheless permitted an astonishing pros-
perity, an unfolding of vigour and wealth. In China the small
States and cities had achieved sovereign life under the powerless
imperial rulers of the Chou dynasty; the political process con-
sisted of the enlargement of small units through the subjection of
other small units. In Hellas and the Near East small territorial
units even, to some extent, those subjected by Persia enjoyed
an independent existence. In India there were many States and
free cities.
Reciprocal intercourse set a spiritual movement circulating within
each of these three regions. The Chinese philosophers Confucius,
Mo-ti and others wandered about the country and met in places
of renown favourable to the spiritual life, founding schools which
are termed academies by sinologists : the sophists and philosophers
of Hellas travelled about in similar fashion and Buddha passed his
entire life in wandering from place to place.
In the past, spiritual conditions had been comparatively
enduring; despite catastrophes everything had repeated itself, con-
fined within the horizons of a still, very slow spiritual movement
THE AXIAL PERIOD 5
that did not enter consciousness and was therefore not appre-
hended. Now, on the contrary, tension increases and causes a
movement of torrential swiftness.
This movement reaches consciousness. Human existence
becomes the object of meditation, as history. Men feel and know
that something extraordinary is beginning in their own present.
But this very realisation also makes men aware of the fact that this
present was preceded by an infinite past. At the very commence-
ment of this awakening of the specifically human spirit, man is
sustained by memory and is conscious of belonging to a late or
even a decadent age,
Men see themselves faced by catastrophe and feel the desire to help
through insight, education and reform. The endeavour is made to
dominate the course of events by planning, right conditions are to
be re-established or brought about for the first time. History as a
whole is seen as a sequence of shapes assumed by the world,
either as a process of continual decline, or as a circular motion,
or as an ascent. Thought is devoted to the manner in which
human beings may best live together, may best be governed and
administered. Practical activity is dominated by ideas of reform.
Philosophers travel from State to State, become _ advisers and
teachers, are scorned or sought after, enter into discussions and
compete with one another. A sociological parallel can be drawn
between Confucius' failure at the court of Wei and Plato's failure at
Syracuse, between the school of Confucius, which trained future
statesmen, and the academy of Plato, which served the same purpose.
The age that saw all these developments, which spanned
several centuries, cannot be regarded as a simple upward move-
ment. It was an age of simultaneous destruction and creation. No
final consummation was attained. The highest potentialities of
thought and practical expression realised in individuals did not
become common property, because the majority of men were
unable to follow in their footsteps. What began as freedom of
motion finally became anarchy. When the age lost its creativeness,
a process of dogmatic fixation and levelling-down took place in all
three cultural realms. Out of a disorder that was growing mtoler-
able arose a striving after new ties, through the re-establishment
of enduring conditions.
The conclusion is at first of a political character. Mighty empires,
made great by conquest, arose almost simultaneously in China
(Tsin Shi hwang-ti), in India (Maurya dynasty) and in the West
(the Hellenistic empires and the Imperium Romanum). Everywhere
the first outcome of the collapse was an order of technological
and organisational planning.
6 WORLD HISTORY
But the relation to the spirit of what had gone before remained every-
where. It became a model and an object of veneration. Its
achievements and great personalities stood clearly in view and
provided the content of schooling and education (Confucianism
was evolved under the Han dynasty, Buddhism by Asoka, and the
age of Augustus consciously established Graeco-Roman cultural
education) .
The universal empires which came into being at the end of the
Axial Period considered themselves founded for eternity. But their
stability was only apparent. Even though these empires lasted for
a long time by comparison with the State-formations of the Axial
Period, in the end they all decayed and fell to pieces. Subsequent
millennia produced an extraordinary amount of change. From one
point of view the disintegration and re-establishment of great
empires has constituted history ever since the end of the Axial
Period, as it had constituted it through the millennia during which
the ancient civilisations were flourishing. During these millennia,
however, it had possessed a different significance: it had lacked
that spiritual tension which was first felt during the Axial Period
and has been at work ever since, questioning all human activity
and conferring upon it a new meaning.
B. THE STRUCTURE OF WORLD HISTORY SINGE THE
AXIAL PERIOD
Reference to a few facts, such as I have made, does not suffice
in itself to bring about complete conviction as to the truth of a
particular view of history. Portrayal of the full wealth of historical
material can alone cause the thesis either to appear in ever greater
clarity or to be rejected. Such a portrayal is beyond the scope of a
short book. The facts to which I have referred should be looked
upon as a question and a challenge to put the thesis to the test.
Assuming this view of the Axial Period to be correct, it would
seern to throw a light upon the entire history of the world, in such
a way as to reveal something like a structure of world history. Let
me endeavour to adumbrate this structure:
(i) The thousands of years old ancient civilisations are everywhere
brought to an end by the Axial Period, which melts them down,
assimilates them or causes them to sink from view, irrespective of
whether it was the same peoples or others that became the bearers
of the new cultural forms. Pre- Axial cultures, like those of Baby-
lon, Egypt, the Indus valley and the aboriginal culture of China,
may have been magnificent in their own way, but they appear in
some manner unawakened. The ancient cultures only persist in
THE AXIAL PERIOD 7
those elements which enter into the Axial Period and become part
of the new beginning. Measured against the lucid humanity of
the Axial Period, a strange veil seems to lie over the most ancient
cultures preceding it, as though man had not yet really come to
himself. This fact is not obscured by isolated beginnings, moving
in themselves, but without effect on the whole or on what followed
(such as the Egyptian discourse of a man tired of life with his soul,
the Babylonian psalms of repentance and the Gilgamesh). The
monumental element in religion and religious art, and the exten-
sive State-formations and juridical creations corresponding to it,
are objects of awe and admiration to the consciousness of the
Axial Period; they are even taken as models (by Confucius and
Plato 5 for instance), but they are seen in a new light that trans-
mutes their meaning.
Thus the imperial idea, which gains new force toward the end
of the Axial Period and terminates this era in the political domain,
was a heritage from the ancient civilisations. But whereas it
originally constituted a culture-creating principle, it now becomes
the means by which a declining culture is stabilised by being laid
in its coffin. It is as though the principle that once bore mankind
upward, despite its factually despotic nature, had broken through
afresh in the form of conscious despotism, but this time merely to
preserve a culture in icy rigidity.
(2) Until today mankind has lived by what happened during the
Axial Period, by what was thought and created during that
period. In each new upward flight it returns in recollection to this
period and is fired anew by it. Ever since then it has been the case
that recollections and reawakenings of the potentialities of the
Axial Period renaissances afford a spiritual impetus. Return
to this beginning is the ever-recurrent event in China, India and
the West.
(3) The Axial Period commenced within spatial limitations, but
it became historically all-embracing. Any people that attained no part
in the Axial Period remained 'primitive', continued to live that
unhistorical life which had been going on for tens or even hundreds
of thousands of years. Men living outside the three regions of the
Axial Period either remained apart or came into contact with one
of these three centres of .spiritual radiation. In the latter event they
were drawn into history. In the West this happened, for example,
to the Germanic and Slav peoples, in the East to the Japanese,
Malays and Siamese. For many primitive peoples^ this contact
resulted in their extinction. All human beings living after the
Axial Period either remained in a primitive state or took parkin
the new course of events, now the only one of fundamental sig-
8 WORLD HISTORY
nificance. Once history had come into being, the primitive peoples
represented the residue of prehistory, which occupied a con-
tinually shrinking space and has only now reached its final end.
(4) Between these three realms a profound mutual comprehension was
possible from the moment they met. At the first encounter they
recognised that they were concerned with the same problems.
Despite the distance that separated them they at once became
involved in one another. To be sure, they were not bound by the
common possession of a single, objective truth (such a truth is only
to be found in science which, methodologically conscious and
compelling general assent to its propositions, is capable of spread-
ing over the entire globe without undergoing any metamorphosis
as a result and has a claim on the collaboration of all) ; but the
authentically and absolutely true, which is lived by mankind
historically from diverse origins, was seen and heard reciprocally
in this encounter.
To sum up: The conception of the Axial Period furnishes the
questions and standards with which to approach all preceding and
subsequent developments. The outlines of the preceding civilisa-
tions dissolve. The peoples that bore them vanish from sight as
they join in the movement of the Axial Period. The prehistoric
peoples remain prehistoric until they merge into the historical
movement that proceeds from the Axial Period, or die out. The
Axial Period assimilates everything that remains. From it world
history receives the only structure and unity that has endured
at least until our own time.
G. EXAMINATION OF THE AXIAL PERIOD THESIS
i. Does it exist as a fact?
The earliest discussion of the facts of the Axial Period known to
me is to be found in the works of Lasaulx and Viktor von Strauss.
Lasaulx (Neuer Versuch einer Philosophie der Geschichte y Munich,
1856, p. 115) writes: 'It cannot possibly be an accident that, six
hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra in Persia, Gautama
Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel,
King Numa in Rome and the first philosophers lonians, Dorians
and Eleatics in Hellas, all made their appearance pretty well
simultaneously as reformers of the national religion.'
Viktor von Strauss, in his wonderful Lao-tse commentary, p.
Ixiv (1870), says: 'During the centuries when Lao-tse and Con-
fucius were living in China, a strange movement of the spirit
passed through all civilised peoples. In Israel Jeremiah, Habakkuk,
Daniel and Ezekiel were prophesying and in a renewed generation
THE AXIAL PERIOD 9
(521-516) the second temple was erected in Jerusalem. Among the
Greeks Thales was still living, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Hera-
clitus and Xenophanes appeared and Parmenides was born. In
Persia an important reformation of Zarathustra's ancient teaching
seems to have been carried through, and India produced Saky-
amuni, the founder of Buddhism.'
Since then these facts have now and then been noted, but only
marginally. As far as I am aware, they have never been grasped
as a whole, with the aim of demonstrating the universal parallels
obtaining for the entire spiritual being of the humanity of that
time. Let us consider possible objections to this view.
(1) One objection might be that the common element is only
apparent. The differences differences of language and race,
differences as to the types of empire and in the mode of historical
recollection are so great that, by comparison, the common
element strikes us as no more than a series of coincidences. Every
clear-cut formulation of the common element as a whole is refuted
by the facts. Or, it is argued, it amounts to no more than the
trivial maxim that fundamentally everything can be found every-
where amongst men, either as a beginning or as a potentiality. In
the realisation of common human possibilities it is the differences
which are essential, distinctive and historical; the whole can never
be apprehended as a unity, except in the unhistorical, universal
characteristics of human existence.
The answer to this is: What is involved in the Axial Period is
precisely the common element in an overall historical picture, the
break-through to the principles which, right up to our own time,
have been operative for humanity in borderline situations. The
essential thing here is this common element, which does not stem
from all over the earth, wherever man as such exists, but his-
torically speaking solely from these three origins and the narrow
area they occupy. The question is whether increasing knowledge
will prove this common element to go even deeper than appeared
at first, despite the differences that still remain. In that event, the
temporal coincidence would become a fact, all the more astonish-
ing the more clearly it is visualised. To demonstrate it thus con-
vincingly would, however, demand a broader canvas.
(2) A further possible objection would be: The Axial Period is
not a fact at all, but the product of a judgement of value. It is on the
basis of a preconceived opinion that the achievements of this
period are appraised so inordinately highly.
The answer to this is: In matters of the spirit, a fact can only
be apprehended through the understanding of meaning. Under-
standing, however, is by its nature valuation. Though it rests
I0 WORLD HISTORY
empirically upon an accumulation of separate data, an historical
construction never comes into being through these alone. Only
through understanding do we arrive at our view of the Axial
Period, as of the spirit of any historical period. And this view
involves understanding and valuation at the same time; it
includes the fact that we are emotionally moved, because we feel
ourselves touched by it, because it concerns us as our own history
and not merely as a past of which we can trace the effects, but as
the past whose wider, more original effect, which is continually
beginning afresh, is incalculable.
For this reason the whole man is the organon of historical
research. 'Every man sees that which he bears within his own
heart. 5 The source of understanding is our own present, the here
and now, our sole reality. Thus the higher we ourselves ascend,
the more clearly do we see the Axial Period.
If the hierarchy of the contents of history can only be grasped
in the subjectivity of human existence, this subjectivity is not
extinguished in the objectivity of something purely factual, but
in the objectivity of communal perception perception on the
part of a community which man seeks after if he does not find
himself already within it; for truth is that which links us to one
another.
It is my thesis that in common understanding, which is in-
separably bound up with valuation, we shall realise the sig-
nificance of the Axial Period. This thesis is not, by the nature of
the matter, susceptible of final proof; it can, however, be sub-
stantiated through a widening and deepening of the conception.
(3) A further objection may be: This parallel is not historical in
character. For that which has no contact in spiritual intercourse
does not share a common history.
This objection was already put forward against Hegel, who
brought together China, India and the West as stages in the
dialectical sequence of the development of the spirit. It was argued
that here no real contact led from one stage to the next, as it did
between the various stages in the development of the history of the
West.
Our thesis, however, involves something altogether different.
It is precisely this series of stages from China to Greece whose
reality we deny; there is no such series, either in time or in mean-
ing. The true situation was rather one of contemporaneous, side
by side existence without contact. To begin with, several roads
seem to lead from disparate origins toward the same goal. There
is a multiplicity of the same in three shapes. There are three inde-
pendent roots of one history, which later after isolated and inter-
THE AXIAL PERIOD 11
rupted contacts, finally only a few centuries ago and properly
speaking not until our own day become a single unity.
The question at issue is, therefore, the nature of the parallelism
involved.
2. What is the nature of the parallelism asserted?
The facts of the Axial Period might represent nothing more than
a number of synchronistic curiosities devoid of historical sig-
nificance. Numerous strange synchronisms can be pointed to
in world history. For example:
In the sixteenth century the Jesuits discovered in Japan a
Buddhist sect which had flourished there since the thirteenth cen-
tury. It seemed to bear (and actually did bear) an astonishing
resemblance to Protestantism. According to the description given
by the Japanologist Florenz (in the textbook by Chantepie de la
Saussaye) their teaching was somewhat as follows: Man's own
efforts contribute nothing toward his salvation. Everything
depends upon faith, faith in Amida's loving kindness and aid.
There are no meritorious good works. Prayer is not an achieve-
ment, but only an expression of gratitude for the redemption
granted by Amida. 'If even the good shall enter into eternal life,
how much more so shall sinners', said Shinran, the founder of the
sect. As against traditional Buddhism it demanded: no works, no
magical formulae or conjurations, no amulets, pilgrimages,
atonements, fasts or other forms of asceticism. The layman has the
same prospects of salvation as the priest and the monk. The priests
are only a body of teachers to the laity. There is no more need for
them to differ from the laity in their way of life and they wear the
same clothes. Celibacy is abolished. The family is regarded as the
best sphere of action for the religious life. Members of the sect are
counselled to 'preserve order, obey the laws of the State and, as
good citizens, to care for the wellbeing of their country'.
This example of synchronicity, which extends to identity with
the basic doctrines of Lutheranism, is astonishing. Numerous
other parallels occur throughout the centuries, from China to
Europe. They have been tabulated on synchronistic charts.
The answer to this is:
Firstly: It can be said of many parallels in history, whether they
are synchronistic or not, that they manifest a rule which holds
good for single phenomena. Only in the Axial Period do we
encounter a parallelism that follows no general law, but con-
stitutes rather a specifically historical, unique fact of an all-
embracing character which includes within itself all spiritual
phenomena. The Axial Period is the only one that represents a
12 WORLD HISTORY
total universal parallelism on the plane of world history, and not
merely the chance concurrence of particular phenomena. Single
phenomena or series of phenomena do not suffice to establish the
kind of parallelism with which we are dealing in the Axial Period.
Secondly, the three parallel movements are close to each other
only during those centuries. The attempt to prolong the parallels
beyond the Axial Period in synchronistic tables spanning
millennia becomes increasingly artificial. The lines of subsequent
development do not run parallel, but rather diverge. Though
originally they appeared like three roads directed toward the
same goal, they finally became deeply estranged from one another.
But the farther back we go toward the Axial Period, the closer our
relationship becomes, the closer we feel to one another.
It seems to me continually more unlikely that this overall
aspect of the Axial Period should be no more than an illusion
created by historical coincidence. It seems rather to be the mani-
festation of some profound common element, the one primal
source of humanity. What followed later in the course of increas-
ing divergence produces occasional analogies, marks of a common
origin, but never again in toto that real, original community of
meaning.
The only comparable world historical parallelism occurs at the
commencement of the ancient civilisations in Egypt, Meso-
potamia, the Indus valley and China.
Within this temporal coincidence, however, there are differ-
ences of millennia. The beginnings stretch from 5000 to 3000 B.C.
(Mesopotamia and Egypt; the earliest discoveries on Crete and at
Troy date from the same period). The beginnings of the Chinese
and Indus civilisations fall within the third millennium B.C.
Comparable to these ancient civilisations are those of Mexico
and Peru, which are conjectured to have arisen during the first
millennium A.D.
Their common properties are highly developed organisation
and a high level of technical achievement. In Egypt, Meso-
potamia, the Indus valley and in China along the banks of the
Hwang-ho, analogous civilisations sprung up in the river valleys
characterised by the central administration of a highly evolved
mechanism for satisfying the needs of the community.
They also have in common a magical religion destitute of
philosophical enlightenment, devoid of any quest for salvation and
lacking any break-through into liberty in the face of extreme
situations, as well as a singular apathy accompanying extra-
ordinary stylistic achievements in art; especially, in the case of
some of these civilisations, in architecture and sculpture.
THE AXIAL PERIOD 13
However, this parallelism does not exhibit the same syn-
chronism as does that of the Axial Period. Moreover it consists only
of the similarity of an established type, not of a spiritual move-
ment. It involves strangely stable conditions which, after destruc-
tive catastrophe, tend to reconstitute themselves in their old form.
It is a world between prehistory, which is almost a closed book to
us, and history proper which no longer permits things to remain
constant in the realm of the spirit. It is a world which furnished the
basis for the Axial Period, but was submerged in and by the latter.
5. What caused the facts of the Axial Period?
If the facts of the Axial Period are beyond dispute, we must now
ask ourselves what caused them. Why did the same thing happen
at three mutually independent points? The fact that these three
regions were originally unknown to each other seems, at first, to
be entirely extraneous but it is an historical mystery which
progressive research into the facts of the situation renders increas-
ingly great. The Axial Period, with its overwhelming plenitude of
spiritual creations, which has determined all human history down
to the present day, is accompanied by the enigma of the occur-
rence, in these three mutually independent regions, of an analo-
gous and inseparably connected process.
Apart from the Axial Period, the mystery of simultaneity
applies, as we have shown, to perhaps only one other situation in
the whole of world history: the genesis of the ancient civilisations.
The question is, why did the development from the general con-
dition of prehistoric peoples to the ancient civilisations take place
more or less simultaneously despite intervals of up to two
millennia in the river valleys of the Nile, of Mesopotamia, the
Indus, and the Hwang-ho?
The usual answer is that analogous tasks (provision of irriga-
tion and the fight against floods) had similar consequences. But in
that case, why simultaneously? Why only in respect of these par-
ticular rivers? Why much later and under different conditions in
America?
Commercial and cultural exchanges might have had a releasing
effect. At all times civilising achievements of a craft character
have slowly made their way across the earth, or at least the entire
Eurasian continent. The invention of writing may possibly have
taken place at a single spot and spread from there; without it the
tasks of administration, and especially of river-control, would
have been insuperable. But these are only possibilities. Such
exchanges can be proved to have occurred in the third millennium
between the Sumerian culture of Mesopotamia and the culture of
i 4 WORLD HISTORY
the Indus valley; they existed between Egypt and Babylonia in
early times, being very active during the second millennium.
But the multiple developments leading up to the ancient
civilisations of the early millennia cannot be explained in terms of
diffusion from a single'source. E. Meyer (Geschichte des Altertums, I,
2, p. 935) therefore remarks: c We must assume that around
5000 B.C. the genus homo had reached a stage in his evolution that
opened up to all human groups or peoples, whose inherent
aptitudes (i.e. the spiritual forces latent with them) rendered them
capable of rising above this level at all, the way toward the genesis
of a culture which would thereafter continue to advance. 5 The
parallel phenomena would, in that event, have to be regarded as
simultaneous developments in the biological evolution of human
beings who are members of a similarly endowed humanity. That
which, by virtue of a common origin, is dormant in all of them,
manifests itself simultaneously and independently as happens
during the life-span of identical twins who have been separated
from one another.
But this idea is a mere figure of speech which explains nothing.
It is empty because it provides no basis for further research. The
'evolution of the genus homo" is not a reality that can be appre-
hended as such or serve as an explanation of anything. And,
above all, this 'biological evolution' would only have been
accomplished by a small, scattered section of mankind, not by
mankind as a whole.
The mystery of the simultaneous inception of the Axial Period
appears to me to be situated at a much deeper level than the
problem of the birth of the ancient civilisations. In the first place,
the simultaneity is much more exact and, in the second, it relates
to spiritual-historical developments in the whole conscious, think-
ing-aspect of humanity. The three regions which, from the begin-
nings of the ancient civilisations onward, were possessed of a
unique character, brought forth creations during the millennium
before Christ upon which the entire history of the human spirit
has rested ever since.
These developments were originally independent of one
another. Real communications and stimuli must be ruled out.
Only after the penetration of Buddhism into China, which took
place at the end of the Axial Period, did a profound spiritual
communication between India and China come into being.
Though there had always been relations between India and the
Alest, these only became extensive during Roman times, via
Alexandria. But the origin of these developments is not affected
THE AXIAL PERIOD 15
at ail by the relations between India and the West, their lurther
course not visibly so.
Let us see how this mystery has been explained:
Lasaulx writes: This strange concurrence can only be founded
on the inner unity of substance in the life of mankind and the life
of peoples, on a vibration of the total life of humanity which passed
through all peoples, and not on the particular efflorescence of the
spirit of any one people.' But that is not an explanation, it is
merely a paraphrase of the mystery.
V. von Strauss talks of a hidden law: This phenomenon, for
which there is no lack of parallels in history, and from which very
mysterious laws may be inferred, probably has its roots, on the one
hand, in the total organism of mankind, by virtue of its homo-
geneous origin, while on the other it presupposes the influence of a
higher spiritual power, in the same way that the urge to florescence
in nature only arrives at the unfolding of its magnificence through
the vivifying rays of the returning sun. 5 But, as with Lasaulx, such
figures of speech only paraphrase the mystery. In addition they
make the mistake of levelling down the uniqueness of the his-
torical fact of the parallels of the Axial Period in the name of
supposedly similar instances of shared development throughout
history.
Keyserling says (Buck vom Ursprung, p. 151): 'From generation
to generation men seem to change in the same fashion and in the
same direction, and at turning-points of history a similar change
embraces enormous areas and peoples who are complete strangers
to one another. 5 But this again is simply a paraphrase of the
mystery, and a bad one at that, because it sinks down completely
into the realm of biology without there being the slightest basis for
approaching the problem from a biological standpoint.
All these explanations overlook the clear fact that it was not
mankind, not all men, who by that time had occupied the entire
planet, but only a few, relatively very few, who took this step
forward at three points. As in the case of the ancient civilisations
not mankind as such, but only a small section was involved.
Instead, therefore, of taking as a basis a biology of mankind,
something falsely supposed to be held in common and valid for
the whole of humanity, the attempt has been made to trace back
the few peoples amongst whom this revolution occurred to a
common historical origin within mankind. This origin is admittedly
unknown to us. It would have to be assumed to lie in prehistoric
Central Asia. With their source in such a common origin the
parallel developments could perhaps be considered related. But
this hypothesis has so far eluded all possibility of verification. It is
i6 WORLD HISTORY
improbable because it would have to prove a common origin for
such disparate racial groups as the Chinese, the Indo-Europeans
and the Semites; furthermore, this common origin would have to
be taken as only a few millennia prior to the period at which the
inception of these peoples 5 history becomes visible to us bio-
logically speaking a very short space of time and hardly sufficient
to allow profound racial differentiations to take place.
In response to the question, why this simultaneity? only one
methodologically arguable hypothesis has so far been advanced,
that put forward by Alfred Weber. The penetration of the nations
of charioteers and horsemen from Central Asia which did, in
fact, reach China, India and the West and introduced the horse to
the ancient civilisations had, so he argues, analogous conse-
quences in all three regions. The men of these equestrian peoples
came to experience, thanks to the horse, the limitless vastness of
the world. They took over the ancient civilisations by conquest.
In hazards and disasters they experienced the problematic
character of existence, as master-peoples they developed an
heroico-tragic consciousness that found expression in the epic.
This turning-point of history was brought about by the Indo-
European nations of horsemen. By the end of the third millen-
nium they had reached Europe and the Mediterranean. A great
new thrust carried them as far as Iran and India round about
1200. In the same way, other nations of horsemen reached China
by the end of the second millennium.
Before, from Europe to China, there had been the ancient
civilisations reaching back into the depths of the past and charac-
terised variously as matriarchal, as civilisations of settled cattle-
breeders, or simply as the population masses flourishing in closed
self-sufficiency in the fertile regions of the belt of civilisation
extending from China to Europe.
History became a conflict between these two forces: the old,
stable, unawakened matriarchal powers against the new, mobile,
liberating tendencies of the equestrian peoples which were rising
into consciousness.
Alfred Weber's thesis demonstrates the existence of a real
uniformity within the Eurasian bloc; how far the appearance of
the equestrian peoples was decisive is difficult to determine, how-
ever. Geographical situations and historical constellations may
have given rise to the preconditions; but what set the work of
creation in motion remains the great enigma.
Weber's thesis possesses a singular power of illumination
arising out of its simple, causal explanation based on the human
character of the life of the horseman. But it still applies at most to
THE AXIAL PERIOD 17
a precondition. The contents of the Axial Period are so remarkable
and all-embracing that one hesitates to derive them from such a
cause, even if it be regarded as only a necessary precondition.
Counter-evidence is afforded, for example, by China, which
produced the rich contents of the Axial Period, but neither the
tragic consciousness nor the epic (in China nothing comparable
to the epic appears until the centuries after Christ, during the
period of long-drawn-out struggles against new peoples, corre-
sponding to our migration of the peoples). A further contradictory
instance is Palestine, whose population experienced no mingling
with equestrian peoples and yet, through the prophets, produced
an essential factor in the spiritual creation of the Axial Period.
The credibility of the hypothesis is further impaired by the fact
that movements, migrations and conquests had been precipitating
themselves upon the ancient civilisations for millennia; to this is
added the further fact that the period of incubation between the
Indo-European invasions themselves distributed over a period
of more than a thousand years and the inception of the spiritual
development of the Axial Period was very long, while this incep-
tion, when it took place, did so with such astonishingly exact
simultaneity.
That it is necessary to enquire after the historical reason for the
events of the Axial Period is due to the fact that it is a question of a
new departure within mankind involving small areas only and
not of a development shared by the whole of humanity. The Axial
Period does not represent a universal stage in human evolution,
but a singular ramified historical process.
Whereas Alfred Weber has given an ingenious and clearcut
reply to this question, that can be put to the test and rendered
fruitful by further discussion, the mystery of the lack of contact
between the three independent origins has usually been veiled by
the vague assertion of a general Eurasian interrelationship.
Perhaps, so it is meaning] essly said, influences no longer apparent
to us were at work. The unity of the history of the whole Eurasian
bloc, determined by constantly renewed advances, migrations and
conquests from Central Asia, is pointed to, as well as the demon-
strable parallels that can be observed in archaeological finds of a
technological and ornamental character. These finds go back to
early prehistory and permit a perpetual cultural exchange over
the entire major continent to be inferred. Against this, however, it
must be said that the spiritual movement of the Axial Period, in its
simultaneity and the sublimity of its content, cannot be accounted
for in terms of such migrations and exchanges.
In the end, the simplest explanation of the phenomena of the
18 WORLD HISTORY
Axial Period seems to lie in common sociological preconditions
favourable to spiritual creativeness: many small States and small
towns: a politically divided age engaged in incessant conflicts;
the misery caused by wars and revolutions accompanied by
simultaneous prosperity elsewhere, since destruction was neither
universal nor radical; questioning of previously existing con-
ditions. These are sociological considerations which are meaning-
ful and lead to methodical investigation, but ultimately they
merely illuminate the facts and do not provide a causal explana-
tion of them. For these conditions form part* of the total spiritual
phenomenon of the Axial Period. They are preconditions of which
the creative result is not a necessary sequel; as part of the overall
pattern their own origin remains in question.
No one can adequately comprehend what occurred here and
became the axis of world history! The facts of this break-through
must be seen from all sides, their many aspects must be fixed in
the mind and their meaning interpreted, in order to gain a pro-
visional conception of the Axial Period, which grows more
mysterious the more closely we examine it.
It might seem as though I were out to prove direct inter-
vention on the part of the deity, without saying so openly. By no
means. For that would not only be a salto mortale of cognition into
pseudo-knowledge, but also an importunity against the deity. I
want rather to prevent the comfortable and empty conception of
history as a comprehensible and necessary movement of human-
ity; I should like to maintain awareness of the dependence of our
cognition upon current standpoints, methods and facts and,
thereby, of the particularity of all cognition; I should like to hold
the question open and leave room for possible new starting-points
in the search for knowledge, which we cannot imagine in advance
at all.
Wonder at the mystery is itself a fruitful act of understanding,
in that it affords a point of departure for further research. It may
even be the very goal of all understanding, since it means pene-
trating through the greatest possible amount of knowledge to
authentic nescience, instead of allowing Being to disappear by
absolutising it away into a self-enclosed object of cognition.
4. The meaning of the Axial Period
The problem of the meaning of the Axial Period is something
quite different from that of its cause.
The fact of the threefold manifestation of the Axial Period is in
the nature of a miracle, in so far as no really adequate explanation
is possible within the limits of our present knowledge. The hidden
THE AXIAL PERIOD 19
meaning of this fact, however, cannot be discovered empirically
at all, as a meaning somewhere intended by someone. In enquir-
ing after it we are really only putting our own interpretation on
the facts and causing something to grow out of them for us. If, in
the process, we make use of terms which seem to indicate that we
have in mind some plan of providence, these are only metaphors.
(a) Really to visualise the facts of the Axial Period and to make
them the basis of our universal conception of history is to gain
possession of something common to all mankind, beyond all differ-
ences of creed. It is one thing to see the unity of history from one's
own ground and in the light of one's own faith, another to think
of it in communication with every other human ground, linking
one's own consciousness to the alien consciousness. In this sense, it
can be said of the centuries between 80 and 200 B.C. that they are
the empirically evident axis of world history for all men.
The transcendental history of the revealed Christian faith is
made up out of the creation, the fall, stages of revelation, prophe-
cies, the appearance of the Son of God, redemption and the last
judgement. As the contents of the faith of an historical human
group it remains untouched. That which binds all men together,
however, cannot be revelation but must be experience. Revela-
tion is the form taken by particular historical creeds, experience
is accessible to man as man. We all men can share the know-
ledge of the reality of this universal transformation of mankind
during the Axial Period. Although confined to China, India and
the West, and though there was to begin with no contact between
these three worlds, the Axial Period nonetheless founded universal
history and, spiritually, drew all men into itself.
(b) The fact of the threefold historical modification effected by
the step we call the Axial Period acts as a challenge to boundless
communication. To see and understand others helps in the achieve-
ment of clarity about oneself, in overcoming the potential narrow-
ness of all self-enclosed historicity, and in taking the leap into
expanding reality. This venture into boundless communication
is once again the secret of becoming-human, not as it occurred in
the inaccessible prehistoric past, but as it takes place within our-
selves.
This demand for communication made by the historical fact
of the threefold origin -is the best remedy against the erroneous
claim to exclusive possession of truth by any one creed. For a
creed can only be absolute in its historical existence, not univer-
sally valid for all in its predications, like scientific truth. The
claim to exclusive possession of truth, that tool of fanaticism, of
human arrogance and self-deception through the will to power,
20 WORLD HISTORY
that disaster for the West most Intensely so in its secularised
forms, such as the dogmatic philosophies and the so-called
scientific ideologies can be vanquished by the very fact that God
has manifested himself historically in several fashions and has
opened up many ways toward Himself. It is as though the deity
were issuing a warning, through the language of universal history,
against the claim to exclusiveness in the possession of truth.
(c) If the Axial Period gains in importance with the degree to
which we immerse ourselves in it, the question arises: Is this period,
are its creations, the yardstick for all that follows? If we do not con-
sider the quantitative aspect of its effect, nor the extent of the
areas involved in its political processes, nor the pre-eminence
accorded to spiritual phenomena throughout the centuries, is it
still true that the austere grandeur, the creative lucidity, the depth
of meaning and the extent of the leap toward new spiritual worlds
contained in the phenomena of the Axial Period are to be regarded
as the spiritual peak of all history up to the present? Do later
manifestations, in spite of the heights to which they attained and
in spite of having become irreplaceable in their turn, pale before
the earlier Virgil before Homer, Augustus before Solon, Jesus
before Jeremiah?
It would certainly be wrong to answer this question with a
mechanical affirmative. The later manifestation invariably
possesses a value of its own, which was not present in the earlier
one: a maturity of its own, a sublime costliness, a depth of soul,
especially in the case of the 'exception'. It is quite impossible to
arrange history in a hierarchy of values following automatically
from one universally applicable conception. But the manner in
which this question is formulated and also, perhaps, a prejudice
against the later does result from an understanding of the Axial
Period. This in turn illumines what is specifically new and great
after a different fashion and does not belong to the Axial Period.
For example: Anyone studying philosophy is likely to find that
after months with the Greek philosophers, St. Augustine affects
him like a liberation from coldness and impersonality into ques-
tions of conscience, which have remained with us ever since the
time of St. Augustine but were alien to the Greeks. Conversely,
however, after spending some time on St. Augustine, he will
experience an increasing desire to return to the Greeks and cleanse
himself of the feeling of impurity that seems to grow with the pur-
suit of this type of thinking, to regain his health by immersion in
the pellucid waters of Greek thought. Nowhere on earth can we
find final truth, authentic salvation.
The Axial Period too ended in failure. History went on.
THE AXIAL PERIOD 21
Only this much seems certain to me: Our present-day historical
consciousness, as well as our consciousness of our present situation,
is determined, down to consequences I have only been able to
hint at, by the conception of the Axial Period, irrespective of
whether this thesis is accepted or rejected. It is a question of the
manner in which the unity of mankind becomes a concrete reality
for us.
CHAPTER TWO
Schema of World History
To ascertain the basis of our existence we look at the globe.
We cannot consider too frequently, by examining the
revolving globe, the information made available to us by
geographers and historians concerning the major features of the
division between land and sea, the shapes of continents and
countries and the geographical positions of the earliest cultures:
(1) A single great sweep of mainland extends from the western
coasts of Europe and Africa to the farthest east of America, that is,
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the Pacific,
the Atlantic, until the time of Columbus, was the great natural
cleavage point of mankind, whereas everywhere else throughout
prehistory migrations took place toward east and west (the land-
ing of Northmen in North America was an exception devoid of
consequences).
(2) The races'. White, Negroes, Mongols and Red Indians, until
more recent times, were distributed over the face of the earth in
fairly closed regions of settlement, though with racial transitions at
the edges.
(3) Wherever it is possible to live at all, man has settled. We see
the vast territories of Northern Asia, Africa and America, which
were inhabited by men but saw the birth of nothing of importance
to the history of the spirit. We see the outermost regions in the
north and south, where displaced populations demonstrate in their
ways of life what man is capable of under pressure.
The principal types of landscape and their importance for civilisa-
tion appear to the eye: river valleys, Mediterranean coastlines,
oceanic coastlines, archipelagos, plains, steppes and deserts.
(4) The American continent was populated from north to south
by the same race, the Red Indians. It has not been the scene of
any discoveries of bones of a pre-human or early human charac-
ter. The continent must have been populated from north to south
at a relatively late date by migrants from Asia.
(5) The area within which civilisation came into being extends, when
compared with the total surface of the earth, like a narrow strip of
land from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Europe via North
22
SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 23
Africa and Asia Minor to India and China. This strip in length
about a quarter, in width less than a twelfth of the circumference
of the earth contains fertile land scattered amongst deserts,
steppes and mountain ranges. The places of origin of the higher
forms of civilisation are all situated within this strip. To begin
with, they were independent of one another, their creations
spread, touched and lost contact again. Continuous intercourse,
even within this belt, was only established relatively late and was
constantly interrupted; in its full extent, it was only established a
few centuries ago, by Europeans.
Within the vast expanses of human settlement, the area in
which civilisation first arose is very small. It is the same in regard
to time.
History in the restricted sense can be pictured in the following
schema:
From the dark world of a prehistory lasting for hundreds of
thousands of years and from the life of human beings similar to
ourselves, which had gone on for tens of thousands of years, the
ancient civilisations emerged, thousands of years before Christ, in
Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus valley and along the banks of the
Hwang-ho.
In comparison with the globe as a whole, these were islands
of light amidst the broad mass of the rest of humanity, in the
midst of the world of primitive peoples, which was all-embracing
until close to our own time.
From the midst of the ancient civilisations, or from within their
orbit, during the Axial Period from 800 to 200 B.C., the spiritual
foundation of mankind arose in three mutually independent
places, in the West polarised in Orient and Occident in India,
and in China.
Since the end of the Middle Ages the West has produced in
Europe modern science and with it, after the end of the eighteenth
century, the age of technology the first entirely new develop-
ment in the spiritual or material sphere since the Axial Period.
From Europe, America was populated and provided with
spiritual foundations; from Europe, Russia which has its roots in
Eastern Christianity was decisively shaped in the spheres of
rationality and technology, while in her turn Russia colonised the
whole of Northern Asia down to the Pacific Ocean.
The contemporary world, with its great American and Russian
blocs, with Europe, India and China, Asia Minor, South America
and all the other regions of the earth, has in the course of a slow
process dating from the sixteenth century become a de facto single
24 WORLD HISTORY
unit of communications, in consequence of the development of
technology. Despite all conflict and division, the fact that the
world is now a single unit of communications gives rise to a grow-
ing drive toward political unification, either by force in a des-
potic world-empire or through mutual agreement in a world order
based on the rule of law.
It is possible to claim that there has been no world history
until now, but only an aggregate of local histories.
What we call history, and what in the old sense is now at an
end, was an interim period of five thousand years' duration
between the settlement of the globe, which went on throughout
the hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory, and the begin-
ning of world history properly so called, in our own time. Before
history, all that happened in the isolation of human groups
unaware of their interrelatedness was an entirely repetitive con-
tinuance of living, still closely allied to the processes of nature.
Our subsequent brief history, however, was like a meeting and
gathering of men for the action of world history; it was the spiritual
and technical acquisition of the equipment necessary for the
journey. We are just setting out.
It is always a gross simplification to give history a structure by
dividing it up into a few periods, but the purpose of such sim-
plifications is to indicate the essentials. Let us formulate the schema
of world history once again, so that it shall not petrify into a false
singleness of meaning:
Four times man seems, as it were, to have started out from a new
basis:
First from prehistory, from the Promethean Age that is scarcely
accessible to us (genesis of speech, of tools and of the use of fire),
through which he first became man.
Secondly, from the establishment of the ancient civilisations.
Thirdly, from the Axial Period through which, spiritually, he
unfolded his full human potentialities.
Fourthly, from the scientific-technological age, whose re-
moulding effects we are experiencing in ourselves.
In accordance with this division, our historical insight is con-
fronted by four separate groups of questions, which today appear
the fundamental questions of world history:
(1) Which steps taken in prehistory were decisive in their effect
on humanity?
(2) How did the first civilisations come into being after 5000
B.C.?
SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 25
(3) What is the essential nature of the Axial Period and how
did it come about?
(4) How are we to understand the rise of science and tech-
nology? How did the 'Age of Technology' come about?
This schema suffers from the disability that it describes four
stages in world history which, though all of exceptional impor-
tance, are heterogeneous in their significance: the Promethean
Age, the age of the ancient civilisations, the age in which were laid
the spiritual foundations of our humanity as it stands today, and
the age of technology.
More significantly, but anticipating the future, the schema
might be formulated like this: The history of mankind visible to
us took, so to speak, two breaths.
The first led from the Promethean Age via the ancient civilisa-
tions to the Axial Period and its consequences.
The second started with the scientific-technological, the new
Promethean Age and may lead, through constructions that will be
analogous to the organisation and planning of the ancient civilisa-
tions, into a new, second Axial Period, to the final process of
becoming-human, which is still remote and invisible to us.
There are, however, essential differences between these two
breaths. From the second breath, which we are just beginning to
take, we can know the first, that is we possess the experience of
history. The second essential difference is this: whereas the first
breath was, as it were, split up into several parallel ones, the
second breath is being taken by mankind as a whole.
During the first breath every event, even in the shape of the
mightiest of empires, was local and nowhere decisive for the whole.
This made possible the special character of the West and the
departure that took its rise there, when the other movements that
had issued from the Axial Period seemed to be declining further
and further, without producing, as far as can be seen at the
moment, any great new possibilities.
What happens in the future, however, will be universal and all-
embracing; there can be no more limitation to China, Europe or
America. Decisive events will be of a total, and therefore also quite
unprecedentedly fateful, character.
The developments issuing from the first breath in their mani-
fold conformation look to us as though, as a whole, they would
have come to naught if something new had not arisen in the West.
The question now is whether the coming course of historical
evolution will remain open and lead, through terrible sufferings,
distortions and horrifying abysses, to the specifically human. As to
how this might happen we can form no idea.
26 WORLD HISTORY
The one origin of mankind at the beginning of prehistory is as
obscure as the future world of humanity dominating the globe,
when it has entered into the unity of its legally ordered existence,
whose spiritual and material horizons are infinite.
Between the origin (which we simply cannot imagine or con-
ceive) and the goal (of which we cannot formulate any adequate
concrete image) our actual history is taking place.
But origin and goal are interrelated: as I think of the one, so I
think of the other. Symbols make manifest that which cannot
attain any convincing perceptual shape as a reality: in the
'Creation of Man' the origin and in the 'Everlasting Realm of
Spirits' the goal.
The following chapters deal with the basic problems and topics
of history of this happening between origin and goal in so far as
it is past. The course of world history is summarised in the follow-
ing simple schema (to be read from the bottom upwards) :
THE ONE WORLD OF MANKIND ON THE EARTH
A
America Europe Russia Islam India China Negroes etc.
I I /
Age of Science
and Technology
The West Byzantium Islam
Axial Period
Extinction
Peru
Mexico
End with
integration into
the world of the
Axial Period
Orient-Occident India China
Y
"Later prehistory"
Ancient
Civilisations
Scriptless peoples
in the orbit of the
civilisations
Mesopotamia Egypt Indus Hwang-Ho
Prehistory
Primitive
peoples
THE ONE ORIGIN OF MANKIND
CHAPTER THREE
Prehistory
A. HISTORY AND PREHISTORY
HISTORY extends as far back as linguistic evidence. It is as
though we feel solid ground under our feet wherever a
word reaches us. All non-verbal artifacts from prehistoric
excavations seem to us lifeless in their dumb silence. It takes the
element of language to communicate to man the intimate mean-
ing of a work, its atmosphere and the impulses that gave it birth,
with any vividness. Nowhere does linguistic evidence extend
further back than 3000 B.C. History has therefore lasted about
5,000 years.
No doubt prehistory, objectively speaking, was a flux of per-
petual change; but spiritually it does not attain to the status of
history, in so far as history only exists where there is also know-
ledge of history, where there are historical remains and docu-
mentation, consciousness of origins and of contemporary events. It
is a preconceived notion that where there are no remains there
nevertheless may, and indeed must, have been the thing itself
history.
History is that section of the past which, at any given time, is
clearly visible to man; it is the sector of things past which he can
make his own, it is consciousness of origins. Prehistory is that
section of the past which, although it is in fact the foundation of
all that comes after, is itself unknown.
The evolution of man in prehistory is the development of the
basic elements constituting humanity. His evolution in history is
an unfolding of inherited contents of a spiritual and technical
nature. The basic constitution took an immeasurable period of
time in which to develop; by contrast, historical evolution has the
appearance of something taking temporary shape in works,
notions, thoughts and spiritual configurations on the broad and
deep foundation of humanity, which was evolved in prehistory
and is still real today.
Prehistory and history, therefore, one after the other, created
the two fundaments of our humanity. Prehistoric becoming, that
process of the growth of man's basic structure, with its elemental
impulses and characteristics, with all the unconscious part of our
28
PREHISTORY 29
make-up, formed the basic stock of our being. The historical
process, in which man consciously took over the past and built up
on it, which shows us what man was capable of and what is the
fountainhead of our education, our belief, knowledge and ability
and their contents this second fundament is like a thin skin
stretched over the heart of the volcano that is man. It may seem
possible for this skin to be cast off, whereas the basic stock of man's
being as formed during prehistoric ages can never be cast off.
We may feel the threat of becoming Stone Age men once more,
because beneath the surface we are so all the time. Our weapons
would be aeroplanes instead of stone axes, but everything else
would be the same as it was then, as though all the millennia of
history had been blotted out of memory. With the dissolution of
history man would fall into the condition in which he was when
still and already human thousands of years ago; without know-
ledge or awareness of his cultural heritage.
We know nothing of the soul of the man of 20,000 years ago.
But we do know that during the course of the short period of
known history at least, man as a whole has not changed biologi-
cally or psycho-physically, that there has been no demonstrable
modification in his elemental, unconscious impulses (after all, only
some hundred generations are involved).
The outcome of the prehistoric process of becoming is some-
thing biologically inheritable, and to this extent something whose
continuance through all historical catastrophes is assured. The
acquisitions of history, on the other hand, have to be consciously
passed on and may get lost. Everything which was planted in the
human kingdom in the sudden burst of creation, and has stamped
and altered the appearance of man through entering into the
cultural heritage, is so closely bound up with this heritage that
without it, because it is not biologically inheritable, it might die
out entirely: we should be back with the bare fundamental
constitution.
Historical consciousness is now confronted by the major
question of man's basic stock as inherited from the ages before
history, of this universal fundament of humanity. Man is alive
with subterranean forces from the ages during which he received
his characteristic stamp. Prehistory was the time during which this
human nature came into being. If we could know prehistory we
should gain an insight into one of the fundamental substances of
humanity, by watching it come into existence, by seeing the con-
ditions and situations that made it what it is.
The questions to which prehistory, if it could be reached
empirically, might provide an answer are:
3 o WORLD HISTORY
What are man's primary motives, what are his vital impulses?
Which remain constant throughout the ages, which undergo
modification? Are they still capable of transformation? Are they
invariably veiled? Have these impulses only been held in check
since the beginning of history, or were they already curbed by
the social orders of prehistory? Do they break out from time to
time or in certain situations and tear through the veil? When and
how has this happened? Will they break out with greater violence
than ever before if all our beliefs and our cultural heritage break
down? What becomes of them when they are moulded? How can
they be moulded? What becomes of them when they are deprived
of speech and every means of direct expression, when they are so
thickly veiled as to be paralysed by conceptional schemata,
interpretations of the world, established values and outright
violation?
What little we know of prehistory, together with the picture
that we are able to form with the aid of ethnography, eth-
nology and history, and of which we make use in visualising
psychologically the primal human impulses, combine to give us a
mirror of our inner being. This mirror shows us what we often
prefer to conceal, under certain circumstances forget, and what
may then take us by surprise as a reality signifying disaster.
But none of the pictures we form of man, of his basic con-
stitution and his elemental impulses, are absolute representations
of something that really exists as we see it. These pictures are
rather instances of our own motivating, illuminating and im-
pelling self-awareness. This self-awareness contains that which is
empirically inevitable, whose factuality demands recognition,
indissolubly linked with the freedom that bestows the quality of
attraction or repulsion on the pictures seen.
B. OUR ATTITUDE TO PREHISTORY
By comparison with the history of the earth (in the region of
two thousand million years) by comparison with the much
shorter history of life on the earth (in the region of five hundred
million years) by comparison with the hundreds of thousands of
years during which, as is proved by skeletal remains, there were
Humans living on earth the history of mankind that is known to
us and in which man was conscious of himself as history was let.
us repeat of ephemeral duration. Temporally this history is like
the first minute of a new happening. It has just started. This
fundamental fact cannot be too emphatically brought to mind.
Seen within this horizon the whole of history becomes a small, still
PREHISTORY 31
germinal world in the life of mankind, dwindling almost to noth-
ing in immeasurable space and unending time. We ask:
What does this beginning mean?
Why has man, ever since this cultural heritage began to be
handed on, which means since the beginning of history, always
felt himself to have reached an end whether this end was one of
culmination or decline?
Is it a mere passing moment, condemned to utter disappear-
ance and oblivion? If so, what does it mean?
How did man become what he is before history began? What
trials did he pass through, what potentialities did he unfold, what
did he achieve and discover before the dawn of transmitted
history?
The demand made on our cognition by prehistory is contained
in the almost unanswerable questions: Where do we come from?
What were we when we started history? What can possibly have
gone before history? Through what incisive processes that took
place in those times did man become man and capable of having a
history? What forgotten depths were there, what 'primal revela-
tion', what lucidity that is concealed from us? How did languages
arise and myths, that exist complete at the very dawn of history?
In the face of these questions, the phantasy of a romanticism
in whose eyes the whole course of history is merely a downward
path is as erroneous as the sobriety that sees in prehistory nothing
but dull facts, which it interprets by analogies with natural his-
tory. Yet almost all answers are hypotheses.
Prehistory, sinking into the unfathomable depths of time, has
for us, because of our lack of knowledge, the appearance of calm,
of distance, of inapprehensibly profound significance. The
moment we catch a glimpse of it, it exerts over us a power of
attraction that seems to give promise of something extraordinary.
Prehistory casts a spell from which we can never escape, no matter
how often we are disappointed.
(i) We can see the attitude which, from the very first moment
of history, men have adopted toward prehistory; how they
claimed a knowledge of it which they expressed in myths and
images that entered into the fabric of their lives; how they found
in it a lost paradise, immense crises like that of the Tower of
Babel a golden age and disasters; how they mingled the natural
with the supernatural, made gods walk the earth and told tales of
inspiration and instruction from above. Such myths contain no
core of tenable knowledge of the remote past, no basis of factual
tradition. But the whole mass of them presents a grandiose
32 WORLD HISTORY
image of the necessity which man felt, as he still feels, to relate
himself to his foundations in the depths of the prehistoric age.
(2) Today we seek to investigate that which can be known.
Within modest limits we are able to ascertain what man already
possessed at the dawn of history, and hence what must have
developed and been acquired during prehistory; language, tools,
myths, social orders. We can gain only external knowledge of
prehistory itself, to the extent to which we are able to unearth
relics of prehistoric man (in the shape of bone remains) and his
artifacts. Up to now such finds have been considerable in number,
but very meagre as to the information they can give us regarding
the soul, inner attitude, beliefs and spiritual motion of pre-
historic man, of which they afford at best a very hazy picture.
Even burial places, buildings, ornaments and the celebrated cave-
paintings only bring us a lively grasp of an occasional detail; we
are unable to understand it in the context of its world, of which we
can form no total image. Nothing can be known with certainty
but the purposes of the implements. For this reason, we hear a
great deal that is hypothetical from prehistorians. They interpret.
But their interpretations rarely contain any element of cogency;
they never cause vanished imports to become vividly manifest as
do the linguistic documents of history. It is therefore a wise prin-
ciple for historians who want to hold fast to that which has
perceptible, comprehensible form, not to have too much to do
with the beginnings. What we know about prehistory is far from
being nothing, but in the empty ages and spaces there are a mul-
titude of objective facts with very little meaning.
Visualisation of prehistory brings us no satisfactory positive
information. The clarity of the facts shows us the existence of pre-
history. But to questions concerning the humanity that we our-
selves are, knowledge of prehistory gives no adequate reply.
(3) Quite a different path of penetration into prehistory is laid
down by the permanent element in man's spiritual make-up from
the dawn of history down to later ages and the present day. This
permanent element is understood as an unconsciously preserved
heritage from prehistory. Here primal insights into the main
features of humanity are essayed through creative visions. These
visions are then employed in the same manner as hypotheses, to
see how far they render the factual heritage and the factual pro-
cesses of history comprehensible. But it is the essence of these
insights that they reveal imports which can never be lost, of which,
even if they are empirically undemonstrable, something remains.
The visions of Bachofen are the prime example. Through them we
learn to see. There is no meagreness of material. But at the same
PREHISTORY 33
time there is no proven insight into a prehistory now factually laid
bare. There is only a wide area of vivid and meaningful possibility
in respect of forms of life and their inner implications, which is
opened up, not by archaeological finds, nor through positivistic
construction, but by the seeing comprehension of historically
existent behaviour, of the customs and practices, of the symbols
and thought-patterns of men.
To try out all these different attitudes to prehistory increases
awareness of the immense potentialities that prehistory contains :
here something happened which, by giving humanity its charac-
teristic stamp, has, so to speak, decided the whole ensuing course
of history in advance.
G. A TEMPORAL SCHEMA OF PREHISTORY
With regard to the remains of human skeletons, two facts
appear to be of essential significance:
(1) The skeletal finds in Java, China, Africa and Europe not,
so far, in America cannot be fitted into any real sequence of the
genesis of the human form: all attempts to make them fit any such
sequence are arbitrary, ideal constructions in which unconnected
findings are linked on the principle that such a manifoldness of
phenomena is inconceivable and incomprehensible except as
arising through derivation and evolution.
(2) All these finds, even those which, judged by the geological
strata in which they lay, must be the earliest, show a skull with a
brain-weight approaching the present-day average and greater
by more than double that of the most highly evolved anthropoid
apes. Biologically, therefore, they are all of them already human.
Individual features, such as the absence of chin, supra-orbital
ridges and shallowness of the skull, are not of universal occurrence.
It is nowhere possible to tell which finds represent a major race,
which a lateral branch and which the ancestral stock: their real
genealogical relationship to contemporary man is completely
unknown.
These findings defy the establishment of an evolutionary
sequence. Only the geological strata in which the finds were made
permit the formulation of a temporal sequence which does coin-
cide, in some measure, with the order of age conjectured from the
nature of the finds themselves. Worked out in a rough schema:
Diluvium is the term used to designate the final phase of the
earth's history with its series of ice ages and inter-ice ages. Allu-
vium designates the years subsequent to the last ice age; its
duration has not yet reached that of an inter-ice age and amounts
34 WORLD HISTORY
to perhaps 15,000 years. The diluvium must span a million years.
Finds have proved the existence of man during the diluvium
in the later ice ages and inter-ice ages. Not until the last ice age
in other words about 20,000 years ago did the man of the Cro-
magnon race appear, who is anthropologically no different from
ourselves. It was the Cromagnon race which, toward the end of
the last ice age, produced the amazing paintings in the caves of
Spain and France. This is called the Palaeolithic Period after the
method used in the primitive manufacture of stone implements.
The Neolithic Period (the age of polished stones) is dated from
eight or five thousand years B.C. The earliest phases of the cultures
in Egypt and Mesopotamia, on the banks of the Indus and in
China also fall within the Neolithic Period.
It is in no sense a matter of a straight line of advancing develop-
ment, however, but of manifold spheres of culture simultaneous
with and succeeding one another. At the same time, certain tech-
nical advances, such as the working of stone, ran through them
as they were diffused by a slow process of transmission from one
culture to another.
Temporally, two groups of prehistory are to be distinguished :
Absolute prehistory, prior to the inception of the great early
cultures after 4000 B.C. And relative prehistory, which went on
simultaneously with the course of these cultures that left docu-
mentary evidence of themselves, in part in the neighbourhood and
under the influence of the latter and in part remote from and
almost without contact with them. This relative prehistory was
partly the prehistory of later civilised peoples, such as the Ger-
mano-Romance and Slav worlds, and partly led on to the peoples
which have remained primitive down to the present day and
constitute a permanent prehistory.
D. WHAT HAPPENED IN PREHISTORY?
At bottom, the vast stretches of time during which humans
already existed are an enigma to us. They represent an age of
historical silence in which, nonetheless, something of vital impor-
tance must have taken place.
The moment of becoming completely human is the deepest enigma
of all, up to now utterly impenetrable and beyond all comprehen-
sion. Such figures of speech as { a gradual process of transition'
merely serve to obscure it. We can evolve phantasies of the genesis
of man. But even these phantasies break down; whenever we try
to picture man coming into being, our imagination sees him
already there.
PREHISTORY 35
On top of this, we cannot even give a definitive and satisfactory
answer to the question: What is man? We can give no complete
answer to the question of what man is. The very fact that we do
not know what man really is, is an essential part of our humanity.
Visualisation of the problem of man's becoming in prehistory and
history means, at the same time, visualising the question of the
essential nature of humanity.
Prehistory contains two elements, the biological evolution of
man, and his historical evolution, which took place in prehistory,
and, even without writing, created a cultural heritage. It would
seem necessary to begin by separating these two elements, both in
their reality and as to the method of investigating them:
Biological evolution brings inheritable characteristics, his-
torical evolution only a cultural heritage. That which is bio-
logically inheritable is permanent; the cultural heritage can be
destroyed and forgotten in a very short space of time. Biological
reality can be apprehended in the structure, function and psycho-
physical characteristics of the body; the reality of the cultural
heritage can be apprehended in language, behaviour-patterns and
works.
In the process of becoming human, going on through long
millennia, the fundamental features of humanity must have been
fixed as inheritable biological qualities that are still present. In
historical times, on the other hand, man has not undergone any
demonstrable biological metamorphosis. We 'have not the slight-
est indication that during the historical period susceptible of
scientific control the inherited predisposition of the newborn child
has undergone any modification 5 (Portmann).
The two modes of approach and the realities corresponding to
them the biological and the historical do not coincide. It looks
on the surface as though the one, the evolution of human history,
is a sequel to the other, the biological evolution culminating in the
genesis of man as such. What we call history has, it seems, nothing
to do with biological evolution.
Humanity, however, consists of that in which the biological
and the historical are, in fact, indissolubly combined. Immediately
we have made the conceptual division we are confronted by the
question: What biological consequences did the phenomenon of
history have? What biological realities may have been the causes
of historical potentialities?
Even the biology of man, if we once succeed in grasping it, may
perhaps prove different in some way from all other biology.
But the manner in which biological evolution and historical
metamorphosis interact upon one another is, once again, a closed
3 6 WORLD HISTORY
book to us as a totality. We know of remarkable facts in history, in
our own present, in prehistory and amongst primitive peoples, on
the basis of which we can endeavour to formulate hypotheses con-
cerning the paths that led up to them. Such endeavours raise
questions that are well-founded, but the answers that have been
given to them up to now are, in all probability, entirely erroneous.
Let us see which of the characteristics of man strike us in the
light of this conception of a dual prehistory.
/. Biological characteristics of man
What is the difference between man and animal? The answer
is: The upright carriage, the great brain-weight, the skull struc-
ture corresponding to it and the lofty brow the development of
the hand his nakedness man alone can laugh ^ and weep, etc.
Although as a structure man falls, morphologically, into the
category of zoological life-forms, he is perhaps^ unique even from
a physical point of view. His body is the expression of his soul. The
human body has its own specific beauty. But the uniqueness of
the human body has not hitherto been recognised as a cogent
and conceptually clearly demonstrable fact, at least not as an
overall principle, but only in respect of individual phenomena
which, as such, have no bearing on the total judgement
The most valid general criterion is this: Every animal, with-
out exception, develops organs adapted to particular tasks in
connexion with the special circumstances obtaining in the par-
ticular environment by which its life is confined. This specialisa-
tion of organs results in every animal being superior to man at
some point, in terms of particular abilities. But this very superior-
ity means, at the same time, a narrowing down of its potentialities.
Man has avoided all such specialisations of his organs. Hence the
fact that though he is inferior in each individual organ, he remains
superior in the potentialities he has kept alive by non-specialisa-
tion. He is compelled by his inferiority and enabled by his
superiority, through the medium of his consciousness, to follow
paths quite different from those taken by animals in bringing his
existence to realisation. It is this, and not his body, that renders
him capable of adapting himself to all climates and all zones, to
all situations and all environments.
If man must have been, from the very first, a creature that
avoided all definitive fixation, then even in his weakness he
enjoyed a superiority over the animals deriving from his spirit
and his power of thought. Thanks to the absence of organ special-
isation, he remained open to possibilities for the fashioning of his
environment , in which his organs were replaced by implements.
PREHISTORY 37
Man's very weaknesses (In comparison with the animals) give him
the freedom to enter upon a course of spiritual self- transformation,
the culmination of whose upward path is beyond our ken. Instead
of endlessly repeating the natural and constant cycle of life, as do
the animals, he became capable of creating history. Nature
possesses history only in the form of an unconscious, by human
standards infinitely slow, irreversible process of becoming
different. Man achieves history, on the foundation of the purely
repetitive function of natural life, which he shares with everything
living (and which has remained constant throughout the period
visible to the historical eye), as a conscious, rapid transformation
through the free acts and creations of his spirit.
Biologically we can observe facts which, though they seem to
differentiate man from the animals, nevertheless remain on the
plane of that which is not specifically human, e.g.:
There are morbid biological predispositions, such as the
psychoses, that only occur in man, but in all races of men.
There are qualities of character, such as a peculiar malignancy,
which is by no means common to all animals, but is possessed by
many apes. Amongst chimpanzees such, so to speak, biological
characteristics as good-nature, the urge to inflict pain, intelli-
gence and stupidity and, above all, humanness can be observed.
Perhaps there is a humanness which, in this sense, is also bio-
logical. Our subterranean store of instincts and propensities
reaches deep down into the realm of biology; on occasion it may
confront us within ourselves as an alien force that terrifies us.
All this is not specifically human. Portmann was the first to
attempt to penetrate, along biological paths, to a radical con-
ception of the element specific to humanity? 4
For example, he draws attention to the following: The newborn
human is different from all other mammals : His sense organs are
developed, his brain- and body-weight are much higher than is
the case with the apes and yet, by comparison, he is a pre-
mature birth in the sense of being completely helpless. The first
year of life in the human requires the maturing of functions which,
in other mammals, mature before birth. Man lives his first year in
the world, although measured against the newborn animal he
ought to be continuing his intra-uterine growth. For instance, his
spine acquires its S-shape through sitting up and standing. How
does this come about? As the result of an instinctive urge and the
imitation of adults, fostered by the latter's interest and encourage-
ment; in every case, the historically determined environment is a
co-factor in inducing the first step toward physical maturity. The
spirit is already operative, even in the biological realm itself. In
3 8 WORLD HISTORY
all probability, the experiences undergone during the first year of
life, the year in which those primary biological functions mature
that are acquired by animals whilst still in the embryonic stage,
is of such great importance as to lend a decisive stamp to the
individual's whole ensuing life.
In short: 'In contradistinction to all the higher animals, man
acquires his specific life-form "in the open", in a free and rich
relationship to colours and shapes, to living creatures and, above
all, to other human beings, 5 whereas the animal is born with his
life-form complete.
Hence, for Portmann, the peculiar nature of man does not
lie in palpable morphological and physiological characteristics
of the body. To define man it is not enough to trace the line of
evolution that leads from the receding jaw of the ape, by way of
the facial angle of early and Neanderthal man, to the projecting
chin of modern man.
The essential factor is rather man's mode of life in its entirety.
' We find in man a form of life which is peculiar in every respect.
Notwithstanding the extent of his resemblance to the animal in
body structure and behaviour, man's whole make-up is as
dissimilar to the animal's as it is akin. Every limb of our bodies,
every one of our motions, is an expression of this peculiar charac-
ter, to which we give no name, but which we are at pains to
advertise in all the phenomena of human existence.'
If we seek to grasp the biological element in man, we find that
it ceases to be merely biological. It is certainly impossible to
apprehend man in toto through the medium of biology yet he is,
at the same time, a biological reality down to the smallest detail
and capable of being apprehended biologically, i.e. by means of
the categories in which all life, in animals and plants, is investi-
gated. In the case of man, however, 'biologically' has a wider
signification, since it includes that which distinguishes man from
all other living creatures, that element of difference in man which
contrasts with the innumerable biological identities and analogies.
Since it thus proves impossible to separate biological from
spiritual reality in man, we are bound to say: Man cannot be
conceived of as a zoological species, capable of evolution, to which
spirit was one day added as a new acquisition. Within the bio-
logical sphere man must have been, from the very start, some-
thing different, even in a biological sense, from all other forms of
life.
Attempts have been made to interpret man's biological pecu-
liarity as the product of domestication, on the analogy of animals,
which change their essential nature as the result of the domestica-
PREHISTORY 39
lion inflicted on them by man. It is not man who has created
culture, but culture that has created man. Quite apart from the
question of where culture comes from in this case, from a purely
biological standpoint the universal consequences of domestication
are not found. Portmann has drawn attention to the decisive
points :
(1) In man the brain- weight is increased in contradistinction
to the normal rule of domestication, which is that a reduced
brain-weight is always found in domesticated animals.
(2) In man the process leading to sexual maturity is greatly
delayed in domesticated animals early sexual maturity is the
rule.
(3) The disappearance of the annual rutting-season normal to
animals is taken to be a sign of domestication in the human. But
this phenomenon also occurs in primates in a wild state. 'Here we
may well be confronted with a characteristic of the primates,
which is more likely to be a precondition for the development of
culture than its consequence.'
(4) Man's nakedness. This, however, is not merely a negative
absence of the hair coat, but a positive increase in the sensory
performance of the skin.
In particular, though men do exhibit certain effects of domes-
tication (e.g. dental caries), these do not determine the specific
quality of humanity.
Far back in prehistory stands the compelling question of the
differentiation of the basic constitution of man into the major
races whites, negroes and the yellow race.
All the races are in themselves mixtures, forms of humanity that
are mobile in selection and mutation. But from the very beginning
there have been interminglings between the major races as well.
Intermingling between the white and the yellow races went so far
in India that pure descendants of the once immigrant whites are
now hardly to be found. In antiquity, interbreeding between
whites and negroes was rare; during the last three centuries it has
become more frequent. Interbreeding between whites and Red
Indians led to a numerous population.
Pure races are never more than ideal types. The existence of
firmly closed, immutable, unmixed races at any period of time
has not been demonstrated as a reality. It is an extreme notion pre-
supposing isolated pure races. Moreover, prehistory seems to bear
witness to races that no longer exist. It does not show one primal
race, from which all others evolved, nor does it show several
primary races which, in their diversity, would provide a tangible
starting-point for the whole evolution of man. We look into a
40 WORLD HISTORY
seething ocean of forms, in which clear-cut divisions only exist in
the foreground, in seeming, for a moment not absolutely and
for ever. But the real descent and movement of man in immeasure-
able prehistory is known to none. In all probability it never will
be known.
2. Historical acquisitions
We have no information concerning the historical moments of
creation, none concerning the spiritual steps that made up the
course of becoming; what we know relates only to their results.
The rest must be inferred from these results. We enquire after the
essential factors which, in prehistory, caused man to become man
in his world; we look to see what sort of inventions his fear and
courage led him to achieve in situations of danger and conflict,
how the relation of the sexes and the attitude to birth and death,
to mother and father, took shape. Amongst the essential factors we
may perhaps number the following:
(1) The use of fire and implements. A creature destitute of these
two would hardly seem human to us.
(2) Theformation of language. The radical difference from animal
communication through unpurposed expression lies in the con-
jectured meaning of the world of objects, which becomes con-
scious and communicable to man alone and to which his thinking
and speaking refers.
(3) The characteristic ways in which man does violence to himself,
e.g. through tabus. It is the nature of man to be incapable of being
solely nature and to bring himself to realisation through art. The
nature of man is his artificiality.
(4) The formation of groups and communities. Human community
is something different to its very roots from the instinctively
automatic insect States. In contrast to the group formations and
the circumstances of superior and subordinate status in the higher
animals, human community is founded on conscious meaning.
In the human, social life, right up to the formation of States,
seems to be based on an additional phenomenon which is peculiar
to him alone: the conquest of sexual jealousy through masculine
solidarity. Amongst animals, there occur either herd-formations
that are purely temporary and split apart at every rutting-season,
or else permanent formations made possible by the asexuality of
the majority. The human alone was able, without giving up his
sexuality, to bring forth an organisation of masculine comrade-
ship whose wealth of tensions has made historical life possible.
(5) Life through myths. How the images contained in myths first
lent their stamp to life and came to exercise a predominant
PREHISTORY 41
influence over the whole business of living, over the family,
society, work and warfare is beyond our ken. These images are
susceptible of infinite interpretation and infinitely heightened
meaning, yet they simply bear the awareness of Being and the self
and give security and certitude. At the dawn of history and thence-
forth man lived in their world. Bachofen's visions may be his-
torically dubious in respect of the evidence on which they are
based, they may prove untenable as documentary tradition,
nevertheless they capture vital truths, both in their general out-
line and also, probably, in much of their contents.
E. THE OVERALL ASPECT OF PREHISTORY
During incalculable ages and spaces of time man spread over
the globe; within this diffuse happening, endlessly fragmented in
limited regions, something of an embracing and integral charac-
ter took place: the great, slow, processes of the imperceptible
breeding of races, of the formation of languages and myths, the
silent spread of technical inventions and the migrations. All these
events were unconscious and, although already human, still
closely attached to nature.
Associations of human beings took place with their eyes on
other associations of human beings. Men knew of one another and
looked at one another. Diffusion gradually drew together in
conflict and made its way to the formation of more inclusive
units. This was the transition to history, which began definitively
with writing.
Prehistory is a gigantic reality for in it man made his appear-
ance yet it is a reality of which we are fundamentally ignorant.
But if we seek an answer to the question of what we humans really
are through the knowledge of whence we come, we cannot plunge
deep enough into the enigma of prehistory. This obscurity
possesses a power of attraction which rightly lures us on and
causes us perpetual disappointments through our ignorance.
F. DO ALL MEN FORM PART OF A SINGLE WHOLE?
Prehistory might help to provide an answer to the question of
whether men as men form part of a single whole, and in what way,
by providing us with a decision between the monophyletic or the
polyphyletic origin of man.
Man exists in the multiplicity of races. Are these races branches
of a single stem, or are they independent developments from pre-
human life, implying that man came into being on several differ-
42 WORLD HISTORY
ent occasions? All the facts speak for the monophyletic as against
the polyphyletic origin of man.
First there is the pointer given by the fact that no earlier human
relics have been found in America. America must have been
settled from the north across the Bering Straits by emigrants from
Asia in late prehistoric times. At all events, no human race appears
to have had its origin in this continent, although the Red Indian
races bear a strongly individual stamp.
Then there is the biological argument for a monophyletic
origin provided by the ability of all races to beget progeny through
interbreeding who are in their turn capable of reproduction. To
this is added the spiritual unison of the main features of their
being, when they are compared with animals. The distance that
separates man from the animal is immeasurably greater than the
distance that separates men of the most alien races from each
other. In comparison with the distance that separates them from
the animal, the closest affinity exists between all men. The
immense divergences between us, the differences of character, the
remoteness that goes as far as non-comprehension, our outbreaks
of mortal enmity, the horrifyingly silent disintegration that takes
place in mental illness or in the reality of national-socialist con-
centration camps all this is the torment of authentic affinity,
which has been forgotten or can no longer find a path to realisa-
tion.
An empirical verdict as to the monophyletic or polyphyletic
origin of man is impossible, since we know nothing whatsoever
about the biological origin of man. Hence the unity of human
origin is an idea and not a reality open to experience.
To all such arguments the reply is: Interrelationship between
men does not consist essentially in their zoological structure, but
in the fact that they can understand each other, that they are all
made up of consciousness, thought and spirit. Here there is an
intimate affinity between men, whereas an abyss divides them
from even the closest of the animals.
Hence we cannot deduce the unity of mankind and the exist-
ence of human solidarity from empirical investigations, even
though these give us some pointers; nor can we refute this unity
and solidarity by empirical investigations. Whether man's origin
was monophyletic or polyphyletic is, in the last analysis, not
decisive. What we are dealing with here is the belief in the unity
of mankind which has grown, in the course of history, into an
integral part of the human make-up; the abyss separating man
from the animal is its presupposition.
Concomitant with this belief in human solidarity is the will to
PREHISTORY 43
make it a reality. To the extent to which man becomes aware of
himself, he ceases to see his fellow-man as merely nature, merely a
means. He experiences his own inner being as a duty. This feeling
of duty penetrates so deep into his reality as to become a second
nature. But it lacks altogether the reliability of a natural law.
Cannibalism has come to an end, yet it is capable of breaking out
again at any moment. Genocide took place in history and now,
after coming to be looked upon as an impossibility, it has hap-
pened again on an unprecedented scale. One of the preconditions
of humanity is human solidarity, illumined by natural and human
law, continually betrayed and for ever presenting its demands
afresh.
This is the reason for the peculiarly human satisfaction to be
obtained from achieving understanding with those remote from
us and the demand to see man as man, as Rembrandt paints a
negro or, as Kant puts it: A human being must never be looked
upon or treated as merely a means, but always as an end in
himself.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Ancient Historical Civilisations
A. SUMMARY
/|T only approximately the same time the three earliest
ZJk civilisations arose in three regions of the earth: firstly the
A JL Sumero-Babylonian, Egyptian, Aegean world from 4000
B.C.; secondly the pre-Aryan Indus culture of the third millen-
nium, which initial excavations are just bringing to light and
which had some connexions with the Sumerians; thirdly the
ancient, archaic Chinese world of the second millennium B.C.
(probably even earlier), of which only a glimpse can be caught in
the recollections of its successors and in a few tangible relics.
At one stroke the whole atmosphere becomes different from
that of prehistory. Silence no longer reigns; men speak to one
another in written documents, and thereby to us once we have
learned to understand their script and their language; they speak
in buildings, which presuppose organisation and the existence of
a State, and in works of art which conceal a meaning that is
strange to us in forms that are nonetheless eloquent.
Yet these civilisations are destitute of the spiritual revolution
which we have outlined in our picture of the Axial Period and
which laid the foundations for a new humanity, our humanity.
The American cultures in Mexico are comparable to them,
though they blossomed thousands of years later. They too are
devoid of everything which the Axial Period brought with it
although it preceded them in time. They vanished before the
mere presence of Western culture deriving from the Axial Period.
In the desert belt that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean
through Africa by way of Arabia deep into Asia, apart from many
small oases, there are two great river valleys, the land of the Nile
and the land of the two rivers, Mesopotamia. In both these
regions the history of man can be traced back, in an unbroken
sequence of documents and monuments, further than anywhere
else on earth. Here we can see what existed some 3000 years B.C.
and can deduce from relics what existed even further back than
that. In China we cannot see much beyond the second millen-
nium, while clear and comprehensive records are only available
44
THE ANCIENT HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS 45
from the first millennium. Excavations in India reveal cities at a
high level of civilisation in the third millennium but they still
stand in isolation and, at the moment, show hardly any connexion
with the later India, which begins toward the end of the second
millennium. In America everything is much later, without
exception subsequent to the start of the Christian era. Europe gives
evidence, through excavations, of a prehistoric existence amount-
ing to an autonomous culture going back to the third millennium;
but it does not carry the weight of a physiognomy of its own
capable of affecting us strongly today. Only because this is the site
of our own prehistory ilo we feel our interest caught and held by it.
The later stages of the Egyptian and Babylonian culture were
known to the Greeks and the Jews who lived within their orbit
and the recollection of them became part of the Western tradi-
tion; but it is only today that excavations and the deciphering of
their languages have brought them really vividly before us in their
passage through thousands of years. Finally the Indus culture has
become known to us through excavations, but only in the course of
the last few decades; it had vanished completely from the memory
of the present population of India (its written characters have not
yet been deciphered). The Chinese cultural heritage idealises its
own foundations as laid in the second millennium and earlier.
Excavations have brought to light only a few relics.
B. WHAT EVENTS USHERED IN HISTORY?
We ask: With what tangible events did history begin? Perhaps
the following are the most essential:
(1) The task of organising river-control and irrigation on the
Nile, the Euphrates and Tigris and the Hwang-ho enforced
centralisation, a civil service and the formation of a State.
(2) The discovery of writing a necessary precondition for this
organisation was made (according to Hrozny) around 3300 by
the Sumerians, around 3000 in Egypt and around 2000 in China
(the alphabetic script was only discovered during the last millen-
nium B.C. by the Phoenicians). There remains the question of
whether the discovery can be traced back to one single source (the
Sumerians), or whether it was made independently at several
places. The indispensability of writing to administration led to the
acquisition of a dominant social position by the scribes, who
formed an intellectual aristocracy.
(3) The genesis of peoples who feel themselves a unity with a
common language, a common culture and a common body of myths.
(4) Later on the world-empires, beginning with Mesopotamia.
4 6 WORLD HISTORY
Their origin was the task of preventing the perpetual attacks of
nomads on the civilised country, by achieving dominion over all
surrounding countries and over the nomads themselves. The^first
world-empires to arise were those of the Assyrians and Egyptians,
followed in a new shape by that of the Persians; after this the
Indians founded their empire, perhaps with the Persian empire as
a model ; last of all the Chinese empire came into being.
(5) The introduction of the horse after these civilisations had
already developed and as a factor in their transformation
employed either for drawing war-chariots or for riding. The horse
set man free from the soil and gave him distance and liberty; it
furnished him with a new and superior battle-technique and
brought with it a spirit of mastery that is bound up with the
taming and curbing of the horse, the courage of the rider and
conqueror and the feeling for the beauty of the animal.
These events that open up history lead on to the deeper
question: What came over man that he stepped out of unhis-
toricity into history? What is the specific factor in his being that
leads to history? What are the basic characteristics of the his-
torical process as compared to prehistory? We should like to
derive an answer from the inner core of man's being. It is not the
outward occurrences, but the inward transformation of man that
we should like to know.
Prior to history a process of becoming and self-transformation
went on, a process which man very largely shares with nature.
The leap from this mere happening into history was perhaps
characterised:
(1) by consciousness and recollection, by the handing on of
spiritual acquisitions this set man free from the mere present;
(2) by rationalisation, in varying senses and to varying degrees,
by technology this set man free from dependence on his immediate
environment for the satisfaction and safeguarding of his vital
needs;
(3) the emergence of men to be emulated, in the shape of
rulers and sages, whose deeds, achievements and destinies were in
full view of the masses this was the first step toward setting men
free from the apathy of self-awareness and the fear of demons.
The outcome of history was an unceasing change in conditions,
knowledge and the manifestation of the inner implications of life;
but in such a manner that the relationship of everything to every-
thing, the inter-connexion of all aspects of the cultural heritage
and universal communication was felt to be possible and indeed
demanded.
For what reason did man take the leap? When he took it he
THE ANCIENT HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS 47
neither desired nor knew what came over him as he did so. All
other living creatures are at once confined and consummate in
their peculiar structure, but man is boundlessly open in his
potentialities, his being has not attained consummate shape and
never can do so. Everything dormant in man from his inception,
everything that must already have been at work in prehistory
as the seed of history, broke forcefully through when history
began.
This leap made by humanity which resulted in history, may be
conceived of as a disaster that overtook mankind; something
incomprehensible happened, the fall of man, the intrusion
of an alien power; history is a process of annihilation in the cycle
of a firework that may be magnificent, but is short-lived; that
which took place at the outset may be reversed again; in the end
man will return to the blissful state of his prehistoric existence.
Or else the leap was humanity's great gift and the fact that man
made it is his high destiny, his path to unprecedented experiences
and to an ascent that drives him forward out of his inconsummate
state. Through history man has become the being that strives to
rise above itself. Not until history commenced did he take up his
high task. No one knows whither it will lead him. Even disaster
and misery can serve to give it momentum. Only with the begin-
ning of history did man become truly human:
(a) From his beginnings* flows the stream of potentialities given him
as part of his substance. But these only become full, rich, manifest by
entering into the movement of history, where they are illumined,
verified, enhanced, where they get lost, are remembered and rise
up afresh. They have need of rationalisation, which is itself not
the primary factor, but the medium through which the origins and
final aims are made manifest.
(4) With the leap to history transitoriness becomes conscious.
Everything in the world has its appointed time and must pass
away. Man alone knows of his own death. In the recoil from this
terminal situation he experiences eternity in time, historicity as a
phenomenon of being, in time the effacement of time. His his-
torical consciousness becomes identical with his consciousness of
eternity.
(c) History is a continual thrusting forward on the part of single
individuals. They call to the rest to follow them. Whoever hears and
understands them joins them in the forward movement. But
history remains at the same time mere happening, a continual going-
with-the-tide in which these calls are vain and the lead is not
followed. An immense gravitational pull seems again and again to
paralyse every upward sweep. The tremendous forces of the
48 WORLD HISTORY
masses, with their attributes of mediocrity, suffocate whatever is
not in line with them. Anything in their midst which does not win
the right to exist through its significance as a realisation of that
which is inherent in the mass, and anything that does not arouse
their belief, must perish. History is the great question which is
still undecided and never can be decided by thought, but only by
reality itself as to whether history in its upward sweep is a mere
interlude between unhistorical conditions, or whether it is the
break-through into the depths. If it is the latter it will lead in its
entirety, even in the guise of boundless disaster and to the accom-
paniment of danger and ever-renewed failure, to Being becoming
manifest through man and to man himself, in an upward sweep
whose limits we cannot foresee, laying hold of potentialities of
which we can have no foreknowledge.
G. ANALOGIES AND DIVERSITIES BETWEEN THE ANCIENT
CIVILISATIONS
The analogous basic features large-scale organisations, writing,
the dominant social position of the scribe class gave rise to a type
of human who, despite his more refined civilisation, has some-
thing unawakened about him. A specific form of technological
rationalisation corresponds to this unawakenedness devoid of
authentic reflection.
In the great communities everything is bogged down by per-
ceptual images of existence, held fast in unquestioned orders.
Living expresses and is patterned upon unproblematic acceptance
of things as they are. The fundamental human problems are
embedded in sacred knowledge of a magical character, not
broken open in the restlessness of search apart from a few
profoundly moving first steps (these traces of awakening do not
come to fruition). A vigorous start was made in the ideas concern-
ing justice evolved in Egypt, and particularly in Babylonia. But
the problem of meaning was not expressly posed. It is as though
the answer were there before the question.
The resemblance between the conditions and developments sets
us looking for a common ground. At all periods implements and
ideas spread slowly over the face of the earth. Any new discovery
causes us to search for the centre from which its diffusion pro-
ceeds. This led to the hypothesis of the fundamental and universal
importance of the Sumerians on the banks of the Euphrates, from
whom decisive influences radiated out to Egypt and as far as
China. But far more significance is attributed to this influence
than can be proved. The dubious hypothesis of a centre of culture
THE ANCIENT HISTORICAL CIVILISATIONS 49
in Asia somewhere round Western Kurdistan and the Caspian
Sea is put forward. It is supposed that this was a flourishing
province of culture while the surface of the earth was moister, and
that when it dried up there was a general migration in all direc-
tions. This migration resulted in the founding of cultures all over
the Eurasian continent, from China to Egypt. But if we gaze into
the chasm of prehistory we come upon no ground for this suppo-
sition that is confirmed by compelling empirical evidence.
However, the divergences between the various ancient civilisa-
tions are also considerable. We feel within each the presence of its
own peculiar spirit. In China there are only the rudiments of
myths, a limited number of a priori notions of a cosmic order, and
a living view of nature combined with a natural humanity. In
Mesopotamia there is a hardness and vigour, a dramatic quality,
and, in the early Gilgamesh epos, a touch of tragedy. In Egypt
there is a serene joy in the intimate aspects of life, coupled with a
veiling of life by the levelling compulsion of labour, and a lofty
feeling for a style of solemn magnitude.
The diversity of language reaches down to the very roots of the
spirit. The Chinese language is so radically disparate from the
languages to the west of it, not only in its roots, but also in its
structure, that its derivation from a common primal language is
hardly conceivable. If there were such a primal language, the
process leading to such disparity must have gone on for so long
as to make it very unlikely that the common source could have
been a Central Asiatic culture existing on the verge of pre-
history.
The relationship of these civilisations to their successors is also
totally diverse. To the Greeks and the Jews they were something
different and alien, they knew them and retained them in memory,
they saw them at first with awe and wonder and then with con-
tempt as well. The later Indians knew nothing of the ancient
cultures, which had completely vanished from recollection. The
later Chinese of the Axial Period saw in the old civilisation their
own past in a continuous, unbroken line of succession; they had no
sense of living in a new age (unless it were one of decadence) ;
they saw the past, in an idealised shape that was taking on the
character of a myth, as a model that was unfolded in creative
phantasy.
Nevertheless, these ancient civilisations were destitute of any
specifically historical movement. After remarkable initial creations,
the millennia passed with comparatively little spiritual move-
ment; they were a period of constantly recurring migrations from
Central Asia, of conquests and revolutions, of the extermination
5 o WORLD HISTORY
and mingling of peoples and the continual re-establishment of
the old culture, which catastrophes merely interrupted.
Hence the account of the history of these millennia is eventful
in the extreme, and yet its events do not bear the character of
historical decisions vital to humanity.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Axial Period and its Consequences
WE began this book by anticipating the chaiacterisation of
the Axial Period, because an understanding of this period
seems to us of central importance for the whole con-
ception of universal history.
If we are concerned with the history of philosophy, the Axial
Period affords the most rewarding field of study and the one most
fruitful in respect of our own thought.
It may be called an interregnum between two ages of great
empires, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid
consciousness.
A. THE STRUCTURING OF WORLD HISTORY BY THE
AXIAL PERIOD
The Axial Period becomes a ferment that draws humanity into
the single context of world history. It becomes, for us, a yardstick
with whose aid we measure the historical significance of the
various peoples to mankind as a whole.
A deep division falls between the peoples according to the
manner in which they react to the break-through. We can dis-
tinguish:
(1) The Axial peoples. These are the peoples which accom-
plished the leap as a direct continuation of their own pasts. To
them it was a second birth, so to speak, and through it they laid
the foundations of man's spiritual being and his history properly so
called. The axial peoples are the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Jews
and Greeks.
(2) The peoples without the break-through. Although the break-
through was decisive for universal history, it was not a universal
occurrence. There were the great peoples of the ancient civilisa-
tions, who lived before and even concurrently with the break-
through, but had no part in it and, despite their temporal con-
currence, remained inwardly unaffected by it.
During the Axial Period the Egyptian and Babylonian cultures
were still flourishing, although in a palpably later shape. Both of
51
52 WORLD HISTORY
them were destitute of that quality of reflection which trans-
formed mankind; they underwent no metamorphoses under the
influence of the axial peoples; they no longer reacted to the break-
through that had taken place outside their orbit. To begin with
they remained what they had been earlier, as the predecessors of
the Axial Period: magnificent in the organisation of public and
social life, in architecture, in sculpture and painting, in the
fashioning of their magical religion. But now they came slowly to
an end. Outwardly subjected by the new powers, they also lost
inwardly their old culture, which flowed out into Persian, after-
wards Sasanian culture and Islam (in Mesopotamia) or into the
Roman world and Christendom (which in Egypt subsequently
became part of Islam).
Both of them are of significance to universal history, because the
Jews and Greeks, who created the basis of the Western World,
grew up in sight of them, learning from them, drawing away from
them and striving to outdo them. Then these ancient cultures were
almost forgotten, until they were rediscovered in our own time.
We are gripped by their magnificence but feel somehow remote
from them, in consequence of the gulf created by their lack of
everything that went with the break-through. We are infinitely
closer to the Chinese and the Indians than to the Egyptians and
the Babylonians. The grandeur of the Egyptian and Babylonian
world is unique. But that which is familiar to us only starts with
the new age of the break-through. In evanescent beginnings we
see an anticipation of what comes later that excites our wonder;
it is as though the break-through were about to commence and
then came to nothing, particularly in Egypt.
There is one fundamental question that is crucial for our con-
ception of human history: Are China and India to be set alongside
Egypt and Babylonia and really only distinguished from them by
the fact that they have survived until today or did India and
China, through their share in the creation of the Axial Period
itself, take that great step which carries them right past those
ancient civilisations? I will repeat what I have already said:
Egypt and Babylonia may be set alongside early China and along-
side the Indus Culture of the third millennium, but not alongside
China and India in their entirety. China and India occupy a
position beside the West, not only because they lived on, but also
because they accomplished the break-through. We will look
briefly at the pros and cons of this view:
It is an old thesis that, compared with the West, China and
India had no proper history. For history implies movement,
changes of inner nature, new beginnings. In the West there are
THE AXIAL PERIOD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 53
a succession of totally diverse cultures; first the ancient culture of
Hither Asia, then the Graeco-Roman, then the Teuto-Romance.
There is a constant change of geographical centres, areas and
peoples. In Asia, on the other hand, a constant situation persists;
it modifies its manifestations, it founders in catastrophes and re-
establishes itself on the one and only basis as that which is con-
stantly the same. This view gives rise to a conception that pictures
unhistorical stability east of the Indus and the Hindu-Kush, to
the west of them historical movement. Accordingly the deepest
division between the great provinces of culture lies between
Persia and India. The European might believe himself still in
Europe till he reaches the Indus, said Lord Elphinstone (who is
quoted by Hegel). 5
This view seems to me to have its origins in the historical
situation of China and India in the eighteenth century. Lord
Elphinstone saw the circumstances of his own time and failed
altogether to discern China and India in their overall import. At
that time they had both reached an advanced stage in their
downward path.
Is not the recession that has taken place in India and China
since the seventeenth century like a great symbol of what may
happen to the whole of mankind? Is not the problem of our
destiny to avoid sinking back into the Asiatic matrix from which
China and India had also raised themselves up?
(3) The peoples that came after. All the peoples were divided
into those which had their foundations in the world of the break-
through and those which remained apart. The former were the
historical peoples, the latter the primitives.
The peoples responsible for the political construction of the new
great empires were the Macedonians and the Romans. Their
spiritual poverty consisted in the fact that the experiences of the
break-through failed to touch the inner core of their souls. For
this reason they were able, in the historical world, to conquer, to
govern, to organise, to acquire and preserve the forms of civilisa-
tion, to safeguard the continuity of the cultural heritage, but not
to carry forward or deepen experience.
It was different with the Nordics. To be sure, the great spiritual
revolution no more took place in the North than it did in Baby-
lonia or Egypt. The Nordic peoples lay in the slumber of primi-
tivity, but when the Axial Period reached them they had attained,
with the essence of their psychic attitude which it is so difficult for
us to apprehend objectively (Hegel calls it the Northern soul), to
an autonomous substance.
54 WORLD HISTORY
B. WORLD HISTORY AFTER THE BREAK-THROUGH
Two thousand years have passed sirice the Axial Period. The
consolidation in world-empires was not definitive. The empires
collapsed; In all three regions there was a succession of ages of
warfare between States, ages of confusion, of the migration of
peoples, of ephemeral conquests and fresh moments of the highest
cultural productiveness which rapidly vanished in their turn.
New peoples entered the three great spheres of culture, in the
West the Teutons and Slavs, in Eastern Asia the Japanese, Malays
and Siamese; all of them for their part brought forth new cultural
configurations. But they did so in a process of coming to terms
with the civilisation transmitted to them, by appropriating and
refashioning it.
The Teutons only began their spiritual world-mission at the
moment when they achieved a share in that revolution of human-
ity which had started a thousand years earlier. The instant they
related themselves to this world, they began a new movement in
the midst of which, as the Teuto-Romance world of Europe, they
still stand today. One more historically unique phenomenon
commenced. That which Antiquity had no longer been capable
of achieving now took place. The most extreme tensions of human-
ity, the luminosity of extreme situations, everything which had
begun in the period of the break-through, but had almost found-
ered in late Antiquity, was accomplished afresh at the same depth
and in perhaps greater extension; on this occasion it was not
accomplished for the first time and not by the Nordic peoples out
of their own resources, but originally as a result of the meeting
with an alien tradition which they now felt to be their own. A
fresh trial was begun of what is possible to man.
In comparison with China and India, there seem to be far
more dramatic fresh starts in the West. Side by side with a spiritual
continuity, which became very attentuated at times, there
appeared a series of totally dissimilar spiritual worlds. The pyra-
mids, the Parthenon, Gothic cathedrals China and India can
show no such diverse phenomena as these appearing in historical
succession.
Yet there can be no question of stability in Asia. In China and
India there were silent centuries, like our period of the migration
of the peoples, during which everything seems to disappear in
chaos, only to reappear and give birth to a new culture. In Asia,
too in India and China there were shifts in the geographical
position of cultural pinnacles and political centres; the peoples
bearing the movement of history alternate. The dissimilarity to
THE AXIAL PERIOD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 55
Europe Is not a radical one. The great analogy remains: the
creative epoch of the Axial Period followed by revolutions and
renaissances; until A.D. 1500, when Europe takes its unpre-
cedented step, whereas China and India, at precisely the same
moment, enter into cultural decline.
Once the break-through of the Axial Period had taken place,
once the spirit that grew up in it had been communicated, through
ideas, works and constructs, to all who were capable of hearing
and understanding, once its infinite possibilities had become
perceptible, all the peoples that come after were historical by
virtue of the intensity with which they laid hold of that break-
through and the depth at which they felt themselves spoken to
by it.
The great break-through was like an initiation of humanity.
Every later contact with it is like a fresh initiation. Subsequent to
it, only initiated individuals and peoples are within the course
of history proper. But this initiation is no hidden, anxiously
guarded arcanum. Rather has it stepped out into the brightness
of day, filled with a boundless desire for communication, laying
itself open to every test and verification, showing itself to all, and
yet an 'open secret' in so far as he alone can discern it who is
ready for it, he who, transformed by it, comes to himself.
The fresh initiation takes place in interpretation and assimila-
tion. Conscious transmission, authoritative writings and study
become an indispensable element of life.
C. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDO-GERMANIC PEOPLES
From time immemorial peoples have streamed out of Asia
toward the south. The Sumerians themselves came from the north.
From about 2000 B.C. peoples with Indo-Germanic languages
moved into India and Iran and then into Greece and Italy; the
Celts and Teutons who, during the last millennium B.C., again
disturbed the cultural worlds of the south and were for a time
held at bay by the Roman Empire as the nomadic Mongols
were for a time by China were also Indo-Germanic peoples.
After that it was the Teutonic and Slavonic peoples of the period
of the migration of the peoples, then the Turkish peoples, then the
Mongols. This incessant movement of wandering peoples toward
the regions of culture only came to a stop a few centuries ago. Its
final conclusion was the cessation of the nomadic way of life.
From the eighteenth century until today Chinese peasants from
the south have peacefully settled Mongolia. From the north the
last of the nomads were compelled to settle by the Soviets.
56 WORLD HISTORY
Amongst these wandering peoples who, throughout the mil-
lennia, have determined the course of events, we are wont to give
historical precedence to the bearers of the Indo-Germanic
languages with justice, but with limited justice.
At no point were the ancient civilisations Indo-Germanic. The
linguistic type of the Hittites, which shows clear Indo-Germanic
influence, was not accompanied by any tangible spiritual dis-
tinctiveness.
It is true that the past of the Indo-Europeans, contemporary
with the ancient civilisations, exhibits no organised world com-
parable to the latter, with writing, State power and cultural
tradition. But there must have been a world of more than simply
linguistic community. Profound spiritual contents may be
inferred such, for example, as the idea of a Father-God and the
peculiar closeness to nature.
There runs through history a periodicity of times in which the
past is neglected, forgotten and allowed to sink out of sight,
alternating with times in which it is recognised afresh, recalled
to mind, re-established and repeated. Ever since then renaissances
have run through history at all points (the Augustan age, the
Carolingian, the Ottoman renaissance, the Renaissance so called
in a narrower sense, the German humanist movement from
1770 to 1830, the Sanskrit renaissance in the twelfth century the
Confucianism of the Han period, the neo-Confucianism of the
Sung period).
For the Axial Period and for the ensuing millennia of the West,
however, the cultures founded by the Indo-Germanic peoples
were of paramount importance. These peoples Indians, Greeks,
Teutons, as well as Celts, Slavs and the later Persians have one
thing in common: They gave birth to the heroic saga and the
epic, they discovered, shaped and evolved the tragic spirit. Com-
parable creations on the part of other peoples the Babylonians'
Gilgainesh, the account of the battle of Kadesh written by the
Egyptians, the Chinese San-kwo tshi are quite different in
feeling. The Indo-Germanic peoples played a part in deter-
mining the mode of the Axial Period in India, Persia and Greece.
But peoples such as the Jews and Chinese, who were so essential to
the Axial Period, are not Indo-Germanic at all. Moreover, every-
thing founded by the Indo-Germanic peoples was based on the
higher cultures that preceded them and developed through
mixture with the previous population and assimilation of the
alien heritage.
In Europe there awoke 'out of the Nordic peoples, after they
had come into contact with the Axial Period in the first millen-
THE AXIAL PERIOD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 57
nium A. D. 3 a hitherto unreflected substance, which vague as
such notions are bound to be is akin to the forces partially
manifested in the Axial Period itself. It needed this much later
contact to enable the content of impulses, which were perhaps
uncomprehended by themselves, to attain sublimation in the
Nordic peoples. In new creations of the spirit there developed
qualities that progressed from intractable obstinacy to a move-
ment of spiritual rebellion and then of questioning and seeking,
or from the unshakable ego to the free personality founded on
existence as an autonomous individual. With resolution every
tension is pushed to the extreme and in tension itself Northern man
learns the significance of mankind, of life on earth, of Being
itself; in tension he becomes cognizant of transcendence.
D. HISTORY OF THE WEST
(i) Overall aspect. The history of China and India does not
fall into such clear-cut divisions as that of the West, it does not
contain the same clarity of opposites, nor the lucidity of spiritual
conflict in which the various inner forces and religious trends
displace one another. The West possesses the polarity of Orient
and Occident not only in the distinction between itself and the
other world outside it, but also as a polarity within itself.
The history of the West may be divided into epochs as follows:
Three thousand years of Babylonia and Egypt up to about the
middle of the last millennium B.C.
One thousand years, based on the break-through of the Axis,
of the history of the Jews, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, in
the course of which the West was consciously constituted; this
lasted from the middle of the last millennium B.C. to the middle of
the first millennium A.D.
Following the division into East and West round about the
middle of the first century A.D., there grew up in the West, after
an interval of some five hundred years, the new history of the
Western world of the Romance-Teutonic peoples; this began in
about the tenth century A.D. and has now lasted approximately
one thousand years. In the East the empire and culture of Con-
stantinople persisted in unbroken continuity into the fifteenth
century. There the present-day Orient of Hither Asia was formed
by Islam, in constant touch with both Europe and India.
In this passage through the millennia the Western World made
its way with decisive steps, not shrinking from sharp breaks and
sudden bounds and introducing radicality into the world, in a
measure unknown to China or India. The differentiation into a
58 WORLD HISTORY
multiplicity of languages and peoples is perhaps no less in India
and China. But there this differentiation does not become, in the
course of struggle, the foundation for a three-dimensional con-
trast between the various forms taken by social and cultural
reality, it does not become the historical structure of a world in
which the particular configurations develop an energy and con-
sistency that threaten to burst asunder the whole mass.
(2) The significance of the Christian axis. For the consciousness of
the West, Christ is the axis of history. Christianity, in the shape of
the Christian Church, is perhaps the greatest -and highest organ-
isational form yet evolved by the human spirit. Its religious
impulses and premises stem from the Jews (from an historical
viewpoint Jesus was the last in the series of Jewish prophets and
stood in conscious continuity to them); its philosophic breadth
and the illuminative power of its ideas stem from the Greeks, its
organisational energy and its wisdom in the mastery of reality
from the Romans. These elements combine to make a whole
which no one planned as such and which, on the one hand, is a
remarkably complex end-product in the syncretistic world of the
Roman Empire, while on the other, it is set in motion by new
religious and philosophic conceptions (the most important repre-
sentative of which is St. Augustine). This Church proved capable
of compelling contradictory elements into union, of absorbing the
highest ideals formulated up to that time and of protecting its
acquisitions in a dependable tradition.
Historically, however, Christianity, in respect of its contents and
in its reality, is a late product. The fact that this was taken as the
matrix and origin of the time to come led to a shift in the per-
spective of the Western view of history in favour of a late- Antique
phenomenon analogous shifts took place in India and China.
Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages Caesar and Augustus
were esteemed more highly than Solon and Pericles, Virgil than
Homer, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Augustine than Hera-
clitus and Plato. The later return to the real and original axis
never took place as a whole, but only fragmentarily in various re-
discoveries, such as the appraisal of Aristotle and Plato already
during the Middle Ages, the renewal of the profundity of the
prophetic religion by Protestant movements and the re-experi-
encing of the Greek spirit by German Humanism at the end of
the eighteenth century.
The ways of Western Christianity became decisive for Europe
not only spiritually, but also politically. This is disclosed by a
comparative view. The great dogmatic religions, after the third
century A.D., became factors of political unity. The Iranian
THE AXIAL PERIOD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 59
religion became the bearer of the Sasanian Empire from 224
onward, the Christian religion the bearer of the Roman Empire
from the time of Constantine, Islam the bearer of the Arab
Empire from the seventh century. In contrast to the world of
relatively free cultural exchanges in Antiquity, that world of
humanity, the chasm now yawned. Wars became religious wars at
the same time between Byzantium and the Sasanids, between
Byzantium and the Arabs, later on the wars of the Western States
with the Arabs and after that the wars of the Crusades. In this
world, transformed Christianity in Byzantium was not very
different from all the other dogmatic religions. It was a more or
less theocratic State. Things were different in the West. Here the
demands of the Church were just the same. But because they were
not fulfilled the Church fought; here it not only unfolded the
spiritual life, but became a factor of liberty against worldly power.
Here Christianity fostered liberty even in the very foes of the
Church. The great statesmen were pious. The force of their wills
not only to the accomplishment of the passing designs of power
politics, but also as they operated to fill the forms of life and of the
State with ethos and with religion, was one of the major well-
springs of Western liberty after the Middle Ages.
(3) The cultural continuity of the West. The cultural continuity of
the West was never lost, notwithstanding extraordinary ruptures,
destructions and apparently total decay. There are at least certain
conceptional forms and schemata, words and formulae which
have persisted through millennia. And where conscious references
to the past ceased, some degree of factual continuity remained and
was consciously linked up with past tradition again later.
China and India always lived in continuity with their own
pasts; Greece, on the other hand, lived beyond its own past in
continuity with an alien, Oriental past; the Nordic peoples lived
in continuity with the culture of the Mediterranean world which,
to begin with, was foreign to them. The West is characterised by
the manner in which, at a given moment, it introduced its own
originality into a continuity taken over from a foreign source,
which it appropriated, worked over and transmuted.
The West founded itself on Christianity and Antiquity, both
of them to begin with in the form in which late-Antiquity trans-
mitted them to the Germanic peoples; it then thrust back step by
step into the origins both of the Biblical religion and of the
essential spirit of Greece.
Since the times of the Scipios, Humanism has been a form of the
cultural consciousness which, in varying inflections, has run
through Western history right up to the present.
6o WORLD HISTORY
The West created for itself the universal crystallisations from
which the continuity of culture drew its life: the Imperium Romanum
and the Catholic Church. Both of them went to make up the basis
of the European consciousness which, though it is continually
threatening to disintegrate, has always been constituted afresh
though not reliably in the great undertakings against the
menacing stranger (as at the time of the Crusades, and of the
Mongol and the Turkish threats).
The tendency to unitary forms of culture did not, however, lead
to static mummification of the spiritual life, as very largely took
place in the Confucianism of China. There were continual break-
throughs, in which the various European peoples in turn had their
creative epochs, from which the whole of Europe then drew its life.
The period following the Italian Renaissance conceived of
itself as a renewal of Antiquity, that following the German
Reformation as the re-establishment of Christianity. In the sequel
both of them, in fact, became the most penetrating recognition of
the axis of world history. Both of them, however, were also and
above all original creations of the new Western World, which had
already set in with growing vigour before that recognition. The
period of world history from 1500 to 1830, which in the West is
distinguished by its wealth of exceptional personalities, by its
imperishable works of poetry and art, by the most profound
impulses of religion and finally by its creations in the fields of
science and technology, is the immediate presupposition of our
own spiritual life.
CHAPTER SIX
The Specific Quality of the West
N earlier centuries the historical consciousness of Europe
disparaged everything pre-Greek and pre-Jewish as alien to
it and a mere introduction to history; it placed all men living
on the globe, outside its own spiritual world, in the broad pro-
vince of ethnology and collected their creations in ethnological
museums. This blindness, which has long ago been corrected, does
in fact contain a truth.
The differences are already present in the Axial Period the
time at which the greatest similarity existed between the various
cultural zones from China to the West, before divergent lines of
development carried them apart. Notwithstanding this sub-
sequent parting of the ways, a resemblance between the great
provinces of culture can be perceived until as late as A,D. 1500.
During the last few centuries, however, a single phenomenon
that is intrinsically new in all respects has made its appearance:
science with its consequences in technology. It has revolutionised
the world inwardly and outwardly as no other event since the
dawn of recorded history. It has brought with it unprecedented
opportunities and hazards. The technological age, in which we
have been living for a bare century and a half, has only achieved
full dominion during the last few decades; this dominion is now
being intensified to a degree whose limits cannot be foreseen.
We are, as yet, only partially aware of the prodigious conse-
quences. New foundations for the whole of existence have now
been inescapably laid.
The origin of science and technology lay with the Teuto-
Romance peoples. With it these peoples accomplished a break in
history. They began the really universal, the planetary history of
mankind. Only those peoples who make Western science and
technology their own, and thereby take upon themselves the
dangers to humanity which are bound up with this Western
knowledge and skill, are still capable of playing an active part in
determining the destiny of man.
If science and technology were created by the West, we are
faced with the question: Why did this happen in the West and not
61
62 WORLD HISTORY
in the two other great cultural zones? Can some peculiar element
have already been present in the West during the Axial Period,
which has only had these effects in the course of the last few
centuries? Did that which finally manifested itself in science
already exist in embryo during the Axial Period? Is there some
quality specific to the West? The sole entirely new and radically
transforming development that took place in the West must have
its roots in some more comprehensive principle. This principle
cannot be apprehended. But there may perhaps be certain
pointers to the nature of the quality specific to the West.
(1) Geographically alone there is a vast difference. Vis-a-vis the
closed continental territories of China and India, the West is
characterised by an extraordinary variety in its geographical
elements. The manifold richness of its division into peninsulas,
islands, areas of desert interspersed with oases, into regions with a
Mediterranean climate and the alpine regions of the north,
together with its comparatively much more extended coastlines,
is paralleled by the multiplicity of the peoples and languages that
have here made history by taking over, each in its turn, the car-
dinal role in action and creation. The countries and peoples of
the West present a unique picture.
Over and above this, it is possible to outline the spiritual
charactei of the West in a series of typical features:
(2) The West knows the idea of political liberty. There arose in
Greece, although only as a transient phenomenon, a liberty that
had come into being nowhere else in the world. A sworn brother-
hood of free men prevailed over the universal despotism of a
totalitarian organisation that claimed to be bringing happiness to
the nations. With this action the polis laid the foundations of all
Western libertarian consciousness, of the reality as well as the idea
of freedom. In this political sense China and India know nothing
of liberty.
From that point a radiance shines out through our Western
history and also a demand. The period from the sixth century
on, when the liberty of Greek thought, Greek man and the Greek
polis came into being and then, in the Persian war, proved itself
and reached its highest, though short, florescence, is the great
turning-point in the history of the West. It was not a universal
priestly culture, not the Orphic mysteries nor the doctrines of
Pythagoras, but the formation of the free States that constituted
the Greek ethos and presented mankind with a prodigious oppor-
tunity and danger. Since that time the possibility of freedom has
been abroad in the world.
(3) A rationality that pursues its course without stay, holds itself
THE SPECIFIC QUALITY OF THE WEST 63
open to the cogency of logically consistent thought and of empiri-
cal facts that must carry conviction to all men everywhere. In
contrast to the East, Greek rationality contains a strain of con-
sistency that laid the foundations of mathematics and perfected
formal logic. Modern rationality became decisively different from
anything brought forth by the East with the end of the Middle
Ages, At this point scientific research, operating with the critical
faculty, entered on an unending path that enables it to reach
definitive findings in the particular to the constant accompani-
ment of incompleteness in the whole. The attempt was made to
confer the maximum degree of calculability upon the daily life
of society through the legal decisions of the State based on the rule
of law. In economic undertakings exact computation determined
every step.
By the same token, however, the West experienced the limita-
tions of rationality with a clarity and force unknown to the rest of
the world.
(4) The conscious inwardness of personal selfhood achieved, in
Jewish prophets, Greek philosophers and Roman statesmen, a
perennially decisive absoluteness.
This however, since the days of the sophists, also made it
possible to break away from the matrix of nature and human com-
munity, to step into the void. Western man has experienced in the
highest freedom the limits of freedom in nothingness. In the most
decisive selfhood he experienced the bestowal upon himself of
precisely that which, in a false fixation as a mere ego, he imagined
he could leave to its own resources as though man were begin-
ning and creator.
(5) Western man is continually confronted by the world in its
reality as that which he cannot circumvent.
To be sure, the West, like the other great cultures, knows the
dichotomy of human nature; on the one hand unrestrained life,
on the other unworldly mysticism on the one hand the monsters,
on the other the saints. But the West endeavours to rid itself of this
dichotomy by finding the path that leads to the moulding of the
world itself; it seeks not only to gaze upon the true in the realm of
ideals, but to realise it, to attain through ideas the enhancement
of reality itself. The West knows, with unique forcefulness, the
postulate that man must shape his world. He feels the meaning of
the world's reality, which represents the unending task of accom-
plishing cognition, contemplation and realisation within and from
the world itself. The world cannot be passed over. It is within the
world and not outside it that Western man finds his assurance.
This has rendered Western man capable of experiencing the
64 WORLD HISTORY
reality of the world in such a way as to know disaster in the pro-
found sense that reaches beyond all interpretation. The tragic
spirit becomes simultaneously reality and consciousness. Tragedy
is known only to the West.
(6) Like all cultures, the West realises the forms of a universal.
But in the West this universal does not coagulate into a dogmatic fixity of
definitive institutions and notions, neither into life under a caste-
system nor into life under a cosmic order. In no sense does the
West become stabilised.
In the West it is the 'exceptions', which break through the
universal, that generate the motive forces of the limitless Western
dynamism: The West gives the exception room to move. From
time to time it admits an absolutely new mode of living and
creating which it is then capable of destroying just as radically.
Human nature reaches a height that is certainly not shared by all
and to which, it may be, hardly anyone ascends. But like lofty
beacons these heights afford the West a multi-dimensional
orientation. In this is rooted the perpetual disquiet of the West, its
continual dissatisfaction, its inability to be content with any sort of
fulfilment.
Thus there sprang to life as one extreme, in apparently for-
tuitous situations, the possibilities that look like impossibilities.
In this manner the prophetic religion of the Jews came into being
while they stood powerless between two warring empires and
were delivered over to powers against which all struggle was vain,
when politically their world was in ruins. In a similar fashion the
Nordic culture and ethos of the Icelanders blossomed in resistance
to State regimentation on the fringe of the world of political
powers.
In contradiction to its liberty and infinite fluidity, the West
now developed the opposite extreme in the shape of the claim to
exclusive truth by the various Biblical religions, including Islam.
It was only in the West that the totality of this claim appeared
a.s a principle that ran without interruption through the whole
further course of history.
In the sequel, however, it was of essential importance that
although the energy of this claim lent added vigour to men, the
:laim was at the same time held within bounds by the cleavages
^nto the numerous Biblical religions and also by the dissension
Detween State and Church, The claim to a single paramountcy,
3y impinging upon the same claim in other guises, brought not
mly fanaticism, but also the irresistible movement of unceasing
juestioning.
The very fact that there was no one single paramountcy, but
THE SPECIFIC QUALITY OF THE WEST 65
that State and Church competed with one another, both claiming
the right to total dominance and only relaxing this claim from
time to time under the necessity for compromise, may perhaps
through the constant spiritual and political tension that it
engendered have lent the West its high level of spiritual energy,
its liberty, its untiring questing and discovery, and the breadth
of its experience, in contrast to the uniformity and relative free-
dom from tension of all Oriental empires, from Byzantium to
China.
(8) In a world that is not closed up by any universal, but
always directing itself toward a universal, in a world in which
exceptions break through and win recognition as truth, and in
which the claim to exclusive truth on the part of the historical
creeds takes both these manifestations into itself in such a world,
tension of this kind is bound to carry man to the uttermost bournes
of the spirit.
Hence the West is typified by a resoluteness that takes things to
extremes, elucidates them down to the last detail, places them
before the either-or, and so brings awareness of the underlying
principles and sets up battle-fronts in the inmost recesses of the
mind.
This resoluteness is manifested in the concrete historical
tensions, into which almost everything at work in the West is
forced; such tensions are those, for example, between Christianity
and culture, between State and Church, between empire and
nations, between the Romance and Teutonic nations, between
Catholicism and Protestantism, between theology and philosophy.
At no one point does Western man feel absolute, firm ground
under his feet. Any claim he may make to doing so is immediately
questioned.
(9) This world of tensions is perhaps at one and the same time
the precondition and the outcome of the fact that nowhere but in
the West have there existed, in such amplitude of character,
autonomous personalities. These personalities range from the Jewish
prophets and the Greek philosophers by way of the great Christ-
ians to the outstanding figures of the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries.
And then there is the ultimate and pre-eminent factor in the
formation of the West: personal love and the power of boundless
self-irradiation in never completed movement. Here a measure of
openness, of infinite reflection, of inwardness came into being
which first caused the full meaning of communication between
men, and the horizon of reason proper, to light up.
The West became cognizant of its own reality. It has not given
66 WORLD HISTORY
birth to one dominant human type, but to many opposed types.
No man is everything, everyone has his place and is of necessity
not only bound up with others, but also separated from them.
Hence no one can desire the whole.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Orient and Occident
The Eastern and the Western World
IN placing the three historical movements in China, India and
the West side by side, we have disregarded the pre-eminence
which Europeans are accustomed to abrogate to themselves.
In the foregoing section we gave an interpretive outline of the
European self-consciousness, which no European can throw off.
The fact that the European line of development alone led on
to the Age of Technology, which today gives the whole world a
European countenance, and that, in addition, a rational mode of
thought has become omnipresent, seems to confirm this pre-
eminence. To be sure, Chinese and Indians have also felt them-
selves to be the truly human peoples and have asserted the
self-evidence of their pre-eminence with no less conviction than
the Europeans. But it does not seem to be quite the same thing if
every culture considers itself the centre of the world. For Europe
alone appears to have confirmed its pre-eminence by practical
achievement.
From the outset, that is since the time of the Greeks, the West
was built up out of an inner polarity of Orient and Occident.
Ever since Herodotus, men have been aware of the antithesis of
West and East as an eternal antithesis that is for ever reappearing
in fresh shapes. It was only with this awareness that the anti-
thesis became truly real at all, for not until a thing is known does
it become a reality in a spiritual sense. The Greeks founded the
West, but in such a manner that it only continues to exist as long
as it keeps its eyes steadily on the East, faces up to it, comprehends
it and withdraws from it, takes over cultural elements from it and
works over them till they become its own, and engages in a struggle
with it in which now the West and now the East gains the upper
hand.
It is not simply the antithesis between Greeks and Barbarians.
This situation is pictured in an essentially analogous fashion by the
Chinese, Egyptians and Indians vis-d-vis the other peoples. In the
divorce of the Occident from the Orient, the Orient remains both
politically and spiritually an equal and admired power, a force
67
68 WORLD HISTORY
from which the West can learn and which exercises a seductive
attraction over it.
We can interpret the antithesis as a form of the self-division to
which every spiritual phenomenon is subject. The spirit only
comes to life, is set in motion, becomes fruitful and surges upward,
when it becomes cognizant of itself in antithesis and finds itsdf in
conflict. But the antithesis that confronts us here is an historical
one; its inner implications cannot be reduced to a universal
form nor can its contents be exhaustively defined in finite terms.
It is like a profound historical enigma running through the ages.
In multifarious modifications the original polarity has kept alive
throughout the centuries.
The Greeks and the Persians, the division of the Imperium
Romanum into the Western and the Eastern Empires, Western and
Eastern Christendom, the Western World and Islam, Europe and
Asia, which was in turn split up into the Near, Middle and Far
East, are the successive shapes taken by the antithesis, in which
cultures and peoples simultaneously attract and repel one another.
This antithesis has at all times been an element in the make-up
of Europe, whereas the Orient merely took it over from Europe
and understood it in a European sense.
Now although objective historical analysis reveals that the West
has played a paramount role in shaping the world, it also dis-
closes an incompleteness and deficiency in the West which render it
perennially apposite and fruitful to ask of the Orient: What shall
we find there that is supplementary to ourselves? What became
real there and what became truth, that we have let slip? What is
the cost of our paramountcy?
It is true that the West possesses reliable historical records
stretching farthest back into the depths of time. No place on earth
has an earlier history than Mesopotamia and Egypt. During the
last few centuries the West has given its imprint to the whole
world. The West has the richest and most clearly marked articula-
tion in its history and in its creations, the most sublime struggles of
the spirit, the greatest plenitude of graphically visible great men.
Looking at things from this point of view, we ask the ubiquitous
question: What rudimentary beginnings can we find in the Orient
of the various achievements of the West, of science, rational
methodology, personal selfhood, the life of the State, or of an
economic order bearing the imprint of capitalism, etc.? We then
look for that which is identical with the West and ask why it
never unfolded fully in the Orient.
We fall under the suggestion that there is really nothing new to
ORIENT AND OCCIDENT 69
be found in Asia. Everything we meet is already known to us
with no other differences than those of emphasis. No doubt it is
the typical self-sufficiency of the European that leads us to regard
this alien world as a mere curiosity. We either take the view that
the same conceptions have arisen there as arose in a more lucid
form in the West, or we resign ourselves to the opinion that we are
only able to understand what the East took over from us and not
what had its origins there.
Asia only becomes essential to us, however, when we ask: What
is it that, despite all Europe's pre-eminence, has been lost to the
West? What we lack and what vitally concerns us is to be found
in Asia! Questions come to us from over there that lie deep in our
own minds. For what we have produced, accomplished and
become we have paid a price. We are by no means on the road
to the self-perfection of man. Asia is an indispensable need for
our completion. Even though we only understand things from our
own vantage point, by recognising what we ourselves are, we may
still be able to recognise that which is so deeply buried and con-
cealed within us that it would never have risen into consciousness
if we did not see it reflected in this world that is at first so strange
to us. We should understand by expanding ourselves within it,
while that which lies dormant within us blossoms out. And then
the history of Chinese and Indian philosophy is no mere super-
fluous repetition of our own, nor is it simply a reality in which we
can study interesting sociological effects. On the contrary, it is
something that directly concerns us because it appraises us of
human potentialities that we have not realised and brings us into
rapport with the authentic origin of another humanity a human-
ity that is not ours in actuality and yet is ours potentially, and that
represents an irreplaceable historical entity.
The self-evident equation of a closed circle of Western culture
with world history as such has been broken through. We can no
longer leave the great cultural worlds of Asia on one side as being
made up of unhistorical peoples in a state of perpetual spiritual
stagnation. The compass of world history is universal. The picture
we form of mankind becomes incomplete and distorted if we
narrow this compass. But if we turn our eyes upon the magnitude
and efficacy of Asia we may easily be deceived into an exaggerated
and indeterminate conception of it:
In comparison with infinitesimal Europe, Asia seems huge in
space. In time it appears the all-embracing matrix of the whole
human race. It is immeasurable, mighty in its extent and in the
human masses it contains, everlasting and slow of movement.
70 WORLD HISTORY
Greek culture seems like a peripheral phenomenon of Asia.
Europe broke prematurely away from its Asiatic mother. The
question arose: Where and when and through what step did this
break take place? Is it possible that Europe will once more lose
itself in Asia? In Asia's depths and in its levelling-down that is
destitute of consciousness?
If the West emerged from the matrix of Asia, its emergence has
the appearance of an act of daring in which human potentialities
are set free. This act brings with it two dangers: first, that Europe
might lose the foundations of its soul, and then, once it has
attained consciousness, the continual danger that it might sink
back again into Asia.
If this danger of sinking back into Asia were to be realised
today, however, it would be under new technological conditions
which are transforming and destroying Asia itself; Western liberty,
the idea of personality, the amplitude of Western categories and
its lucid consciousness would go by the board. In their place
would remain the eternal characteristics of Asia: The despotic
form of existence, the absence of history and of decision, the
stabilisation of the spirit in fatalism. Asia would be the universal,
enduring world that outlives Europe and includes it. Whatever
fashions itself out of Asia and must sink back into Asia is tran-
sitory.
Such contrasting images linked with visions of decline may
possess a momentary evidence. But in fact they are untrue and
unjust.
The realities of China and India for three thousand years have
been just as much attempts to emerge from the indeterminate
matrix of Asia. Emergence is a universal historical process, not
a peculiarity of Europe's attitude to Asia. It happens within Asia
itself. It is the path of mankind and of authentic history.
Asia is turned into a mythical principle, that falls apart when
it is analysed objectively as an historical reality. The antithesis
Europe- Asia must not be metaphysically hypos tasised. Then it
becomes a terrifying spectre. As a mythical language at moments
of decision it serves as a cryptogram that represents a truth only
so long as it operates as an abbreviation for something historically
concrete and intellectually lucid, and is not meant as an apper-
ception of the whole. But Europe-Asia is a cryptogram that
accompanies the whole of Western history.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Once More: A Schema of World History
BEFORE we turn to the present, let us once more cast our
eyes on the structure which the sum-total of history has
assumed for us. We have found the whole of history to be
divided into three successive phases: prehistory, history and world
history.
(1) The long prehistory embraces the course of man's becoming
that ran through the formation of languages and races to the
inception of the historical cultures. It leads us into the enigma of
humanity, to consciousness of the uniqueness of man amongst the
creatures of the earth, it sets us before the problem of our freedom,
which must be connected with the origin of all things, and which
confronts us nowhere else in the world.
(2) History embraces the events of about five thousand years in
China, India and the Near Orient together with Europe. It is
China and India, not the geographical totality of Asia, that are to
be placed alongside Europe.
Here the ancient civilisations first developed: The Sumerian
Culture, the Egyptian, Aegean Culture, pre-Aryan India, the
culture on the Hwang-ho.
Then further cultural developments were set in motion by con-
quests. They were determined by the mutual interaction of
victors and vanquished and the adoption of the existing aboriginal
cultures by the victors in China, in Aryan India, by the Baby-
lonians, by the Persians and by the Greeks and Romans.
In contrast to all these geographically small areas there stood
the isolated processes of the cultures in Mexico and Peru, and the
multifarious cultures of the primitive peoples that covered the
earth up to the time of the discovery of the world by Europe.
(3) The planetary unity of the world and of mankind, which is
becoming a reality today, opens up the factual universal history
of the earth, world history. Its preliminary stages lie in the Age of
Discovery and it really began in our own century.
The internal structure of each of these three phases is essentially
different. The first phase, in so far as it is not a field for hypotheses,
is only accessible to us as the contactless co-existence of an endless
?2 WORLD HISTORY
multiplicity of men that resembles a mass of isolated natural
phenomena. There must have been a common fund of spiritual
possessions and modes of thought arising out of the common, soil
of the natural predisposition of man, and not essentially out of
history. All the grandiose images of the origin of the human race,
of the dispersion of the peoples and their spread over the earth,
of the forgetting which produced in the self-deceiving conscio us-
ness the idea of a multiple origin, are either ingenious symbols or
hypotheses.
The structure of the second phase is centred on the break-
through represented by the Axial Period of history.
The third phase belongs, for the most part, to the future. In
order to perceive it we must go back to those features of the pas t
which are like an anticipation or preparation of it: to the greatt
unifications that took place in history (the empires), to the great
universal human figures of Antiquity and the Modern Age, those
men of rich content who do not represent points at which under-
standing arose out of an empty humanity as such, but who grew
from the roots of their own people as figures of absolute humanity
and are therefore able to speak to mankind through their existence
and their words.
The structures of the three phases have the following additional
characteristics:
(i) In the first phase everything that happened was akin to the
unconscious processes of nature. The prehistoric and unhistoric
peoples (the primitives till they died out or became material
for technological civilisation) were split up into de facto com-
munities of language and spheres of culture. These spread out in
silent movements that can only be observed in their outcome.
Direct and conscious contact between men was mostly confined to
very restricted areas within an overall pattern of scattered units.
Factual contact through the diffusion of the acquisitions of
civilisation covered very wide areas, in some degree the whole
earth, but without the knowledge of men.
Within prehistory the processes of culture already existed. At
some points they can be observed in typical forms that seem to
anticipate the historical cultures. There remains the difference
that they did not come to history, but collapsed at their first
contact with the historical peoples; within their own limited
range they achieved astonishing things, but they were as though
bound to the substratum of natural life, into which they con-
tinually threatened to slip back.
Primitive cultures were scattered over the whole earth. Every
people has its own peculiar ethos, even the most primitive, such
ONCE MORE: A SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 73
as the Pygmies or the Bushmen, or the peoples of the extreme
north, such as the Eskimoes; amongst the Polynesians it is in
splendid evidence.
The American peoples in Mexico and Peru justify comparison
with Babylon and Egypt.
(2) In the second phase, the small number of major cultural
developments that began to unfold proceeded side by side, despite
occasional contacts. They are separate histories.
The unity of these lines of historical development is no more
than an idea. The sum-total of achievement was certainly not
known and effective everywhere. On the contrary, the most sub-
lime and important developments were restricted to small areas
and short periods. They blossomed, died down and seemed to slip
for long ages perhaps for ever into oblivion. Transmission of
the cultural heritage is not dependable. The sum-total of a sphere of
culture seems to enter into a continuity of communication, it spreads
and endures; and then of a sudden it ebbs away and vanishes.
And yet, on relatively small areas of the earth's surface, there
did arise something amounting, in the sense of its spiritual sig-
nificance, to a single, universal history, in which everything
becomes manifest that was thought by man and that concerns
ourselves.
The various developments become articulated to one another.
The processes that went to make up a whole in the course of some
centuries can be seen in the sequence of styles running from the
first blossoming out to the conclusion in the later periods of
decline. We see the typical sequences of the generations, which
together comprise about a century (diffusion, perfection, dis-
integration) . From time to time we may even see one of Spengler's
millennial processes.
But all the time there was continued movement. There were no
lasting periods of decline, there was no endless 'fellaheen exist-
ence', no final rigidification. Again and again something new and
original broke through, even in India and China.
Attempts to comprehend the course of history as a whole have
proved vain. Seeing the road that leads from Babylon via Greece
and Rome to the North, historians said that the course of history
runs from east to west and made the prognostication that, pur-
suing the same direction, the road would lead on to America. In
India, however, the road ran from the Indus region (early Vedic
period) via the central area (period of the Upanishads) to the
Ganges (Buddha and his period), that is from west to east. All
such schemata are valid only from certain points of view for
limited worlds, and even there only with reservations.
74 WORLD HISTORY
The world of Hither. Asia and Europe constitutes a relative
whole vts-A-m the two others India and China, The West has
existed as an internally coherent world from Babylon and Egypt
till the present day. But since the times of the Greeks this Western
cultural continent has been inwardly articulated into Orient and
Occident. Thus the Old Testament, the Iranian-Persian ethos and
Christianity belong to the West as opposed to India and China
and yet they are the Orient. The territories between India and
Egypt have always been subject to an Indian influence as well
this is an intermediate region possessing unique historical fascina-
tion but it is of such a kind as to render simple, clearly discern-
ible analysis in terms of universal history impossible.
(3) In the third phase, the unity of the whole beyond which,
with the definitive closing up of space, it becomes impossible to
pass comes into its own. Its presupposition is the possibility of
universal communications which has now been attained. This
phase has not yet reached the level of an historical reality^ it is
still only a future possibility. Hence it is not an object of empirical
investigation, but a shape that can be adumbrated by calling into
consciousness the present and our own situation.
This present situation has been created by Europe. How did it
come about?
The great incisions and leaps that characterise Western history
lend it the appearance of being fragmented and of continually
giving birth to itself afresh in a series of radical metamorphoses.
By comparison, India and China, notwithstanding the movement
that took place there too, give an impression of uniformity.
There have been times when the West has sunk so deep into its
substratum as to look almost as though it were finally extin-
guished. A visitor from some other planet who had travelled around
the earth in about A.D. 700 would perhaps have found in Tshan-
gan, then the capital of China, the highest seat of the spiritual
life of the earth, and in Constantinople a remarkable residue; the
northern districts of Europe would have appeared to him mere
realms of barbarism. By 1400 the overall life of Europe, India and
China had reached a uniform level of civilisation. The events that
occurred after 1500, however, in which Europe discovered the
world and stamped it with its own characteristic imprint, give
rise to the question of what caused them, of what new and peculiar
quality Europe possessed that enabled it to carry out this develop-
ment and what were the steps in which it proceeded. This becomes
the fundamental question of universal history. For a break took
place that was unique in its importance to the West and, in its
ONCE MORE: A SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 75
consequences, to the whole world; a break whose results make up
our own situation and whose ultimate significance is still open.
The major steps leading up to it were: The prophetic religion
of the Jews set the minds of men free from magic and the trans-
cendence of objects with a radicality such as had not occurred
anywhere else on earth; although it did so only for an historically
limited moment and for a small number of men, it left its message
in the Book for all who came after and who were capable of hear-
ing it. The Greeks created a clarity of distinctions, a plasticity of
spiritual forms and a consistency in the operations of reason never
before attained anywhere in the world. Christianity realised aware-
ness of the most extreme transcendence as India and China also
succeeded in doing but with the difference that Christianity
fettered this realisation to the world of immanence, and thereby
brought about the perpetual unrest involved in the task of giving
a Christian conformation to the world.
But the great break really took place after the late Middle
Ages. These steps and the memory of them may have been pre-
conditions. The break itself is the fresh great enigma. It is by no
means a transparent, rectilinear evolution. Development of the
preliminary stages of modern science in late medieval nominalism
was accompanied and immediately followed by the orgies of
witchcraft. The changes that, in the sequel, occurred in the reality
of man's existence, while he was creating science and technology
and winning mastery over the whole surface of the globe, are in
horrifying contrast to these palpable achievements.
The steps that separate the whole historical past from the still
veiled future were only definitively taken during the nineteenth
century. Again and again the question arises: What goes to the
making of Europe's character as the moulder of the earth, what
is the quality that may perhaps be glimpsed from the beginning,
that again and again springs into prominence and seems at other
times to be gripped by paralysis? What is it that develops after
the nominalists as science, spreads across the planet after the
fifteenth century, begins to operate on a broad front after the
seventeenth century and becomes definitive during the nine-
teenth century?
Europe's exceptional spiritual achievements from 150010 1800,
that outshine science and technology Michelangelo, Raphael,
Leonardo, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Goethe, Spinoza, Kant,
Bach, Mozart challenge comparison with the Axial Period of
two and a half millennia earlier. Is a second Axial Period to be
discerned in these later centuries?
76 WORLD HISTORY
The difference is considerable. The purity and clarity, the
ingenuousness and freshness of the worlds of the first axis are not
repeated. Everything stands in the shadow of exacting traditions
and follows false roads; it is as if in spite of these false directions
that the great figures, the solitary ones, find their way to the most
miraculous successes. On the other hand, however, possibilities
are open to the second axis that were unknown to the first.
Because it was able to take over experiences and appropriate
ideas, it possessed from the outset both more variety of meaning
and greater inner wealth. Its very fragmentation caused pro-
fundities of human nature to become manifest that had not
previously been visible. For this reason pre-eminence might be
given to the second axis, because, while making an original con-
tribution to the continuity of Western culture and at the same
time enjoying a more sweeping view through its position on the
shoulders of its predecessor, it achieved the greater breadth and
the greater depth. But it must be relegated to second place
because it did not live entirely on its own resources and because
it suffered and connived at extraordinary distortions and aberra-
tions. It is our own immediate historical matrix. We are alter-
nately at war and on intimate terms with it; we are unable to look
at it in the same calm of distance as that in which we see the first
axis. Above all, however, it is a purely European phenomenon
and for that reason alone has no claim to the title of second axis.
To be sure, these centuries are the most fruitful period for us
Europeans; they constitute the indispensable fundament of our
culture and the richest source of our intuitions and insights. But
they do not represent a universally human, world-embracing axis,
and it is improbable that they might become such in the sequel.
A quite different axis was established by the activities of the
Europeans, with their consequences in science and technology,
which first made their appearance when the West, whose spirit and
soul were already in decline, impinged upon an India and China
whose spirit and soul had reached their nadir.
At the end of the nineteenth century Europe seemed to domin-
ate the world. The situation was thought to be final. Hegel's words
seemed to be confirmed: 'The Europeans have sailed round the
world and for them it is a sphere. Whatever has not yet fallen
under their sway is either not worth the trouble, or it is destined
to fall under it.'
What a transformation since then! The world has become
European through the adoption of European technology and the
European demands of nationalism, and it is successfully turning
ONCE MORE: A SCHEMA OF WORLD HISTORY 77
both against Europe. Europe, as the old Europe, is no longer the
dominant factor in the world. It has abdicated, overshadowed by
America and Russia, upon whose policies the fate of Europe
hangs if Europe does not gather itself together at the last
moment and become strong enough to stay neutral when a new
world war plunges the planet into storms of destruction.
It is true that America and Russia are also permeated by the
spirit of Europe; but they are not Europe. The Americans (despite
their European provenance) may not yet have found a new
autonomous consciousness and a new origin in their own soil, but
it is certainly their aim to do so. The Russians have an historical
matrix of their own in the East and in the mingled European and
Asiatic origin of their peoples; spiritually their matrix is Byzan-
tium.
China and India, however, who do not wield any decisive
power today, will increase in importance. Their vast populations,
possessed of a profound and irreplaceable cultural heritage, are
becoming an element of mankind in common with all other
peoples which are seeking their way in the present great meta-
morphosis of humanity, into which all are being pressed.
PART TWO
*
PRESENT AND FUTURE
CHAPTER ONE
The Intrinsically New: Science and Technology
INTRODUCTION
THE purpose of an overall philosophical view of history, such
as we are seeking to arrive at, is to illumine our own
situation within the totality of history. It serves to light
up the consciousness of the present epoch and shows us where we
stand.
It is only when judged by the standards of world history that
the depth of the dividing-line that has been made in our time, and
for which two centuries have prepared the way, becomes visible.
In the wealth of its consequences, this dividing-line is beyond
comparison with anything that we know from the past five
thousand years.
The sole specifically new and radically different element, that
bears no resemblance to anything that has come out of Asia, is
entirely autonomous, and foreign even to the Greeks, is modern
European science and technology. In retrospect, the overall
picture of history up to the present exhibits a continuity, indeed a
uniformity, whose last splendid delineation was contained in
Hegel's conception of history. This changed with the advent of
modern technology. Hence there was a considerable similarity
between Europe and Asia until about A.D. 1500, whereas a very
great diversity has arisen during the last few centuries.
It is not easy to see the radically new element in modern
science and technology clearly. Since clarity on this point is
crucial for the interpretation of our own present for its spiritual
as well as its material opportunities and perils we must endeav-
our to set forth the new in its full significance by a comparison
with what went before. This requires a somewhat detailed
analysis,
I. MODERN SCIENCE
Looking at world history, we see three steps in cognition:
First, rationalisation in general, which in some form or other is
common to all mankind, made its appearance as soon as man as
81
8a PRESENT AND FUTURE
such appeared, and, in the guise of 'pre-scientific science',
rationalised myths and magic; second, science that became
logically and methodologically conscious, Greek science, of which
there were rudimentary parallels in China and India; third,
modem science, which has developed since the end of the Middle
Ages, became decisive since the seventeenth century, and reached
full unfolding since the nineteenth century. At all events, this
science distinguishes Europe from all other cultures since the
seventeenth century. Let us visualise the uniqueness of modern
science within world history.
In range, amplitude and manifoldness of cognition alone the
facts of modern science are without their like in the whole pre-
ceding course of history. The history of this modern science
presents an inexhaustible picture. The most strikingly new
element is probably the natural scientific knowledge gained by the
application of mathematical theory since Kepler and Galileo; it
has had unprecedented effects through its consequences for tech-
nology. But it is only one link in a more comprehensive process
of cognition. The expeditions of discovery led to the first voyage
round the world and to establishment of the fact that sailing
towards the west resulted in the loss of a day. That was only four
hundred years ago. Never before had man been cognisant of the
earth as a sphere in this real sense (not as a mere surmise). The
first geographical globe was produced. Experience of things
nearby followed the same lines as of those at a distance. Human
anatomy (Vesal) was laid bare through the dissection of corpses
with a hitherto unknown passion for research. With the aid of the
microscope, the seething activity in a drop of water was disclosed
to Leeuwenhoek. In the telescope Galileo saw planets and moons
never seen before. From the eighteenth century onward excava-
tions brought to light bygone and forgotten historical realities
(Pompeii), enabled whole cultures to be reconstructed, and
fulfilled Schliemann's yearning for the reality of the Homeric
age. The deciphering of scripts and languages made audible the
men who lived thousands of years ago. Prehistory became an
indubitable reality through archaeological discoveries. Today we
know more about the history of early Greece, of the Near East and
of Egypt than the Greeks themselves did. The horizon of history
has been pushed thousands of years farther back into the past,
the history of the earth is spread out before our eyes, the immeasur-
able depths of the starry firmament are disclosed to us. The
modern world seems at all points to give birth to fresh sciences
that are independent of one another, but spring from a common
spirit. Natural science grew up in the workshops of painters and
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 83
architects, geography developed in attendance upon navigation,
and economics upon the interests of the State : all of them arose
out of the initial impulse to gain practical advantages and were
then pursued for their own sakes, independently of utilitarian
purposes. In theology historical criticism of the Bible made its
appearance. This picture, which can be endlessly extended, leads
us to ask: Does modern science, which has attained an un-
paralleled scope, contain any radically new and singular charac-
teristics?
A. CHARACTERISATION OF MODERN SCIENCE
Science possesses three indispensable traits: It is methodical
cognition, cogently certain and universally valid.
I know scientifically only if I am also cognisant of the method
by which I gained my knowledge, and can therefore explain it
and demonstrate its limits.
I know scientifically only if I know with cogent certainty. In this
way I also know uncertainty, probability or improbability.
I know scientifically only what is universally valid. Because the
insight can be cogently experienced by every intelligence,
scientific knowledge can be spread abroad and yet retain the same
meaning. Unanimity is a hallmark of universal validity. Where
the unanimity of all thinkers throughout the ages has not been
achieved, universal validity is doubtful.
By these criteria, however, science was already present in the
Greek sciences, even though the task of working it out to full
purity remains uncompleted today. These three factors apart,
what is modern science?
(1) In spirit, modern science is universal. In the long run
nothing can elude it. Whatever takes place in the world is subject
to observation, enquiry and investigation, no matter whether it
involves the facts of nature, the actions and statements of men, or
their creations and destinies. Religion, too, and every kind of
authority, is investigated. And not only every reality, but also
every intellectual possibility becomes an object of investigation.
There are no limits to enquiry and research.
(2) Modern science is in principle incomplete. The Greeks did
not know the science that advances without limits not even
where, as in mathematics, astronomy and medicine, they them-
selves did in fact advance for a time. Amongst the Greeks,
research itself had the character of an operation carried out
within a closed circle. This character of completeness knows
neither the desire for universal knowledge nor the explosive force
84 PRESENT AND FUTURE
of the will to truth. Since the times of sophistry, the Greeks got no
further than reflections of fundamental doubt on the one hand,
and on the other, a negligent trifling with the knowledge of par-
ticular things, no matter how magnificent the latter may have
been in the case of men like Thucydides, Euclid or Archimedes.
Modern science is motivated by the ardent desire to reach the
limits, to break through all definitive forms of knowledge, ever
and again to revise all knowledge from its very foundations.
Hence the sudden reversals that take place at every break-
through, accompanied by the preservation of factual acquisitions
as an element in the new interpretation. There is a constant
awareness of the underlying hypotheses, that is of the presup-
positions that constitute the point of departure for research at any
given time. Everything is there to be overcome (for the pre-
suppositions are explained in terms of more comprehensive pre-
suppositions and so relativised) ; when it is facts that are involved
they are used as a means to further advances in the continuity of
increasing and more penetrating knowledge.
This forever incomplete cognition is, by intent, directed toward
something that exists and that will be disclosed by cognition.
But while cognition presses inimitably forward, it is not capable
of apprehending the eternal certitude of Being as a whole. In
other words: Through the infinity of the existent it is directed
toward Being, which, however, it never reaches and it knows
this through self-criticism.
Because the content of knowledge is unclosed and unclosable
(contrary to the Greek cosmos), this science thinks in terms of
unlimited advance and in its self-consciousness lies the idea of
progress. This begins by lending wings to science, and then causes
it to be overcome by a feeling of senselessness : if the goal can never
be reached and every piece of work is merely a step for posterity
to rise upon, what is the point of it all?
(3) Nothing is indifferent to modern science: it considers every-
thing worth knowing and directs its attention to the smallest and
most individual phenomenon, to every fact as such. The manner
in which the modern European appears to immerse himself in all
sorts of things he would otherwise despise, simply because they
are empirically real, is a source of continual amazement. In
comparison, Greek science seems to have no love for reality, to
choose its point of attack fortuitously, guided by ideals, types,
forms, by a pre-existent knowledge that causes it to by-pass the
majority of realities. This applies equally to the minutiae of its
attitude to the empirical object and to many of the Hippocratic
writings.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 85
This self-surrender to every object, to chance, to the mis-
shapen equally with the well-shapen, has its roots in an all-
embracing self-consciousness that is both restless and sure of itself.
Everything that is must and shall be known. Nothing may be left
out of consideration.
The breadth of devotion to everything capable of being
experienced, the multi-dimensionality of emotional concern with
everything that occurs in the world, is essentially modern.
(4) Modern science, devoted to the most individual pheno-
menon, looks for its own universal interconnexions. It is not able to
apprehend the cosmos of Being, but it is able to apprehend the
cosmos of the sciences. The idea of the coherence of all the
sciences brings about dissatisfaction with every isolated cognition.
Modern science is not only universal but lives for the unity of the
sciences, though it never attains it.
Each science is determined by its method and its object. Each
science is a vista onto the world, no science comprehends the
world, each science lights upon one sector of reality, not reality
itself one facet of all reality perhaps, but not reality in its
entirety. There are distinct sciences, not the one science as the
science of the real. Thus every science is particular and special-
ised, but each one belongs to a world that is without confines and
yet is held together.
What connects the sciences and in what sense do they form a
cosmos?
This is more easily recognised negatively than positively. The
unity of the sciences does not consist in the unity of the reality of
which they give knowledge. The sum-total of the sciences does not
give us reality in its entirety. They do not constitute a hierarchy
through increasing approximation to reality. They do not con-
stitute a unitary system that becomes master of the whole province
of the real.
Repeated vain attempts have been made to formulate a world
system incorporating the sum-total of knowledge. To modern
science such attempts are nonsensical. They are the outcome of
the continued operation of the Greek idea of a cosmos and are
disruptive of genuine cognition and the false substitute for a
philosophy. In fact, pure philosophy becomes possible for the
first time today, on the basis of the sciences but with a different
origin and a different goal.
Positively it can be said:
The interconnexion of the sciences consists in the form of cog-
nition. They are all of them methodical, they all think in categories,
are cogent in their particular cognition, but at the same time
86 PRESENT AND FUTURE
restricted by current presuppositions and by the delimitation of
the object.
Then there are the interconnexions that arise from the relation
between the sciences, which render one another mutual assistance
through their findings and methods. They become auxiliary
sciences to one another. One science becomes the material of
another.
They have a common fundament in the subjective impulse to
universal knowledge.
Through the guiding idea of the particular fields of cognition
there speaks an idea of indefinable unity, as a demand for the open-
ness of everything real and thinkable. All science is a path. The
paths cross, separate, combine again, and do not show the
destination. But all of them want to be followed.
The sciences are articulated within themselves into categories
and methods and related to one another. Endless multiplicity
in research and the idea of unity set up a tension and drive
science from the one to the other.
In modern cognition, the systematic character of knowledge,
instead of leading to a world system, leads to the problem of the
system of the sciences. The system of the sciences is mobile,
manifold in its possible classifications, open. But it is characteristic
of it that it is also a permanent problem, and that no mode of
knowledge and no knowledge is to be left out of consideration.
Objectively, the striving after the interconnexion of all know-
ledge out of the idea of the unity of the sciences is visible:
Textbooks present the systematologies of individual sciences
as fruitful incentives to research (not systems of established facts;
when they do this they descend from the modern level to that of
the Greeks. )
The organisation of materials, of works of reference, of the
publication of texts, of museums and of laboratories is concerned
to place all knowledge at the disposal of the seeker.
The universities represent an all-embracing scientific activity
in operation.
(5) The radicality of enquiry carried to the extreme but with
the proviso that it be accomplished in concrete cognition, and does
not operate in ultimate universals which it reaches by overpassing
intermediate stages has assumed very great proportions in
modern science. Thought that contradicts visible appearances
(which began in Antiquity in astronomy), not in order to sub-
merge itself in the void, but precisely for the purpose of com-
prehending visible appearances in a better and unexpected
fashion, dares everything. The manner in which physics deals with
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 87
that which is beyond imagination, through non-perceptual
mathematics, is an example.
The capacity for repeatedly breaking away from the rounding-
off and totalisation of a form of knowledge makes it possible to
experiment with new hypotheses that at first seem highly para-
doxical, as in modern physics. An unparalleled freedom of
experiment has become possible at certain high-points. Every
question is asked afresh. There is always one more enquiry into
the possibility of presuppositions that have been overlooked. And
in the play of preparatory cognition, the most audacious pre-
suppositions are tried out.
(6) One might be tempted to regard certain categories and their
effects as being typical of modern science:
Such as the infinite as the basis of antinomies, as a problem
which, susceptible of the finest differentiation, ultimately always
presents the breakdown of thought.
Or the causal category, which does not lead, as with Aristotle,
to the subsumption of phenomena under the neatly defined modi
of causality and to a definitive explanation in toto, but to the real
investigation of questions that are always determinate and par-
ticular. In Greek thought the answer to a question always arises
from deliberation and plausibility, in modern thought from
experiment and progressive observation. In the thought of the
ancients an investigation meant simply meditating on the prob-
lem, only in modern thought does it come to imply action.
But what is typical of modern science is neither a category nor
an object, but universality in the working out of categories and methods.
Every form is tried out and every object dealt with that appears
mathematically, physically, biologically, hermeneutically or
speculatively possible. The results are a world of categories capable
of limitless expansion and a correspondingly unclosed theory of
categories.
The problem becomes that of the suitability of categories and
methods and not the superiority of any one of them. Where
reality is involved experience itself is reliably defined. Where
speculation is appropriate this is carried out as a sovereign act
with full knowledge of its meaning. The crucial problem is to
avoid confusing the one with the other.
(7) In the modern world a scientific attitude has become possible
that is able to question, investigate, test and reflect upon every-
thing it encounters from the viewpoint of all-inclusive reason.
This attitude is not one of scientific dogmatism, it does not swear
by findings and axioms, it stands aloof from all sects and all com-
munities of creed and conviction, in order to keep free in science
the realm of the knowable.
88 PRESENT AND FUTURE
The scientific attitude differentiates between that which is com-
pellingly known and that which is not compellingly known; it
desires its cognition to be accompanied by knowledge of method,
that is by knowledge of the meaning and confines of knowledge;
it seeks unrestricted criticism. It has an urge to the clarity of the
definite, as opposed to the approximations of everyday speech; it
demands concreteness in explanation.
Human veracity is determined by scientificity, once science has
become truly scientific. Hence it is an element in the dignity of
man, and possesses the enchantment that comes from illumination
of the world. Hence, too, however, it knows the anguish caused in
spiritual commerce by the unscientificness of blind assertion that
is unaware of itself and therefore impassioned and uncritical. It
renders the lies of life transparent. Sapere aude refers to its cour-
ageousness.
Any man who is scientific through his own research-work will
be capable of understanding authentic science everywhere. To be
sure, specialist routine and de facto achievements can exist without
a scientific attitude in toto. But no one's scientificity can be relied
upon who has not himself taken part in science at some point.
B. THE ORIGIN OF MODERN SCIENCE
Light can perhaps be cast upon the problem of the emergence
of the new science from various angles, but it cannot be com-
pletely understood. Like everything spiritually creative it is an
enigma of history.
The statement that it arose out of the aptitudes of the Nordic
peoples tells us nothing. These aptitudes are manifest in pre-
cisely this effect and by no other signs, so that this argument is a
tautology.
Many circumstances combined during the latter centuries to
produce the unique concatenation of conditions that made the
new science possible.
Sociological conditions can be pointed to : The freedom of States
and cities the leisure of the aristocracy and the middle class the
fragmentation of the numerous European States, freedom of
movement and opportunities for emigration, competition between
powers and individuals the wide contacts between Europe and
alien cultures after the crusades the spiritual conflict between
Church and State, the need felt by all powers to justify themselves
with regard to questions of faith and justice, in general the need
to substantiate political claims and interests on the plane of
spiritual struggle the technical tasks arising in the various work-
shops the dissemination of ideas made possible by printing and
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 89
the resulting increase in their exchange and discussion. In this
unfolding of the sciences it seemed as though every activity was
destined to foster the development of every other activity and to
furnish it with opportunities: The tearing open of the earth's
surface for technological purposes led fortuitously to archaeo-
logical and prehistoric finds. Greed for gain and lust for adventure
resulted in the discovery of all areas of the globe, till eventually
journeys of disinterested exploration were undertaken. The
missionary zeal of the Churches laid bare the souls of strange
peoples and cultures and made possible immersion in their
spirit, so that it sometimes came about that Christian missionaries
turned into missionaries for the Chinese or Indian spirit in Europe.
Technological advances often produced devices serving purposes
quite different from those originally aimed at, from the printing
press to the innumerable apparatuses which, in almost all the
sciences, have led to greater refinement of observation, the estab-
lishment of facts and the restoration of that which had been lost.
Private hobbies and the driving passions of the individual acted
as aids to knowledge, particularly through the medium of special
collections (e.g. of lichens, etc.), special skills, and sport-like
competitiveness. With or without intent, the labour of many men,
embracing everything that exists, seemed to work toward a goal of
cognition which is at bottom unknown. The manner in which
scientists made their appearance under totally diverse conditions
in Italy, Germany, England and France is amazing. Scientists
emerged from remote corners of the land, seizing upon their tasks
and electing their roads in their own right and of their own free
will, and laying the foundations of new spiritual possibilities.
The question is: Why have there always been in Europe such
isolated individuals, who were independent of one another but
met each other? Why were they absent from Spain, later on from
Italy, and for a long time from Germany?
Sociological investigation will be able to disclose some inter-
connexions. Let us enquire further into the motives that may have
led to modern science.
It has often been said that modern science springs from the will
to power. Mastery of nature, ability, utility, 'knowledge is power 5 ,
this has been the watchword since Bacon. He and Descartes
sketched the outlines of a technological future. To be sure, it is not
crude force that avails against nature, but knowledge of her laws.
Natura parendo vincitur. An authentic cognition is one that gives
birth to its object and so confirms the cognition: 'I know only that
which I can make.' The creative consciousness of ability lends
wings to this type of cognition.
9 o PRESENT AND FUTURE
Two things must be differentiated in such an interpretation of
modern knowledge. Firstly: The power consciousness that it
expressed in the technological will, in the coercion of things, and
whose goal is ability. Secondly: The will to knowledge that desires
to penetrate the processes of nature. The scientist is the man who
examines the witnesses (Kant). A pure will to knowledge exists,
even without the aims of technology.
The opinion has been put forward that both these impulses
contain aggression. For this kind of cognition, that has not yet
been focused on technological power, is not the contemplation,
self-surrender and fitting in with nature of authentic, loving cog-
nition, but is already a struggle with and coercion of the existent,
from which exploitation duly follows.
This must be entirely contradicted; we have only to look at the
psychic attitude of the great scientists to see how false it is. They
are characterised by a feeling for necessity. Readiness to fit in with
nature has always been part of the ethos of the natural scientist.
But he wants to know what nature does and what happens in
nature. For this will to knowledge, this freedom of the knower, who
suffers, endures and lives, not blindly but with his eyes open, is
something quite different from aggressivity and will to power.
It is a will to power not as dominion, but as inner independence.
This liberty of consciousness of the knower is able precisely to
grasp pure factuality as a genuine hieroglyph of Being. It is not
aggressivity that is contained in the ethos of cogent, universally
valid knowledge in contrast to the plausible, approximate, fluid,
and ultimately capricious but will to clarify and trustworthi-
ness.
In particular, research by experiment is taken to be aggressive.
In contrast to simple contemplation the purpose of the alterna-
tion of theoretical speculation with verification by experiment is
to afford an insight which is not only trustworthy, but penetrates
ever deeper into the laws governing unconscious processes. The
motive is not aggression, but the questioning of nature.
On the other hand, of course, what modern science does may
be misunderstood and misused. Hence the will to power and the
will to destruction, which are themselves unhistorical and for ever
on the point of disappearing from the scene, have also taken
possession of science for purposes of aggressivity in speech, action
and practical application; but always in such a fashion that science
gets lost in the process.
The most horrifying example of this was experiments on
humans. That no experiments may be carried out on a human
being without his insight and consent so that dangerous experi-
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 9*
ments should only be carried out by the experimenter on himself
does not, it is true, follow from the spirit of science, but from the
basic principles of humanity and the rights of man.
Two thousand years ago an Indian prince carried out experi-
ments on criminals, something like this: Tut the man alive in a
tub, close this with its lid, cover it with a thick coating of lime,
place it in a baker's oven and light the fire. This was done. When
we knew that the man must be dead, the tub was pulled out, the
lid removed and we looked cautiously inside to see whether we
could perceive the vital spirit escaping: but we observed no vital
spirit escaping.' This is analogous to the experiments on humans
perpetrated by the national socialists. They have nothing to do
with modern science as such, but come under the heading of
misuse, which can be practised on science as on everything else
brought forth by man.
The position with regard to historically determined motives
is different from that which obtains for the unhistorical will to
power. The birth of modern science is perhaps unthinkable with-
out the state of mind and the impulses that have their historical
roots in Biblical religion. Three motives that impel research
forward to the limit seem to have their origin here:
(1) The ethos of Biblical religion demands veracity at all costs.
Through it veracity was pursued at the highest pitch and in all
its problematic nature. The demand for truth put forward by
God does not permit cognition to be pursued as a game, not as a
noble pastime for the idle hour, but requires that cognition shall
be regarded with all the seriousness of a vocation in which every-
thing is at stake.
(2) The world is God's creation. The Greeks know the cosmos as
the perfect and orderly, as the rational and law-abiding, as the
eternally enduring. But if the world is God's creation, then every-
thing that is, as the creation of God, is worthy of being known;
there is nothing that it is not necessary to apprehend and know.
Cognition is like a re- thinking of the thoughts of God. And God
in the words of Luther is present as creator even in the intestine
of a louse. The Greek is bogged down in closed world systems, in
the beauty of his thought cosmos, in the logical transparency of
the thought whole; he either causes himself to group everything in
schemata of grades and classifications, or he causes that which has
been thought to be deduced in interconnexions by means of
syllogisms, or he comprehends an eternal process obeying set laws.
Not only Aristotle and Democritus, but also St. Thomas and also
Descartes 6 obey this Greek impulse to the closed form, which
paralyses science.
92 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Entirely dissimilar is the new impulse that desires to hold itself
open to all creation without limits. Out of this impulse cognition
strives toward precisely that piece of reality which does not
accord with the classifications and laws so far discovered. Within
the logos itself there develops the urge to bring about its own down-
fall not in order to deliver itself up, but in order to win itself
back in a new, more ample, more fully realised shape, and to
continue this process ad infinitum, since it can never reach any final
conclusion. This science springs from the logos that does not
enclose itself within itself, but, open to the alogon, penetrates the
latter by subordinating itself to it. The continual and incessant
interaction between the formulation of a theoretical construction
and experimental experience is a simple and great example and
symbol of this universal process that is kindled by the impact
between logos and alogon.
For the new urge to cognition, the world is also no longer
intrinsically beautiful. This cognition is directed upon the beauti-
ful and upon the ugly, upon the good and upon the evil. Granted
that in the last resort omne ens est bonum, namely as having been
created by God. But this goodness is no longer the visible, self-
sufficient beauty of the Greeks; it is present only in the love felt
toward every existent as having been created by God, and con-
sequently also in the confidence that is felt in the meaning of
research. The knowledge that every worldly thing is a creature of
God gives peace of mind before the chasms of reality in the dis-
quiet of boundless questioning and the attendant forward-
thrusting research.
But known and knowable worldly being, as createdness, is only
second-grade being. Hence the world in itself is without founda-
tions, for it has its matrix in another, in the Creator; in itself it is
not closed and therefore cannot be closed by cognition either.
Worldly Being can nowhere be apprehended as final, absolute
reality; it always points to something else.
The idea of creation makes the created thing worthy of love as
the work of God, and thereby makes possible a hitherto unknown
closeness to reality. At the same time, however, it engenders the
greatest remoteness from Being, which is after all only created
Being, not Being itself, not God.
(3) The reality of the world is full of horror and dread for man.
His will to truth has to note c it is thus 5 . If God is the creator of the
world, however, He is so to speak made answerable for His creation.
The question of the vindication of God becomes in Job a struggle
round the Godhead in the knowledge of worldly reality. It is a
struggle against God for God. The existence of God is not in
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 93
doubt. The very fact that it is not in doubt intensifies the struggle.
It would cease if belief were extinguished.
This God, with His demand for absolute truthfulness, does not
want to be grasped through illusions. He spurns the theologians,
who seek to console and exhort Job with intellectual sophistries.
This God demands knowledge, the content of which seems again
and again to impeach Him himself. Hence the audacity of cog-
nition, the demand for unconditional cognition and at the same
time the aversion to it. There is a polarity, as if man heard at one
and the same time: The will of God is unlimited research;
research is the service of God it is an impugnment of God; not
everything is to be disclosed.
This conflict goes hand in hand with the investigator's conflict
with his own, with that which is dearest and most desirable
to him, with his ideals and principles: they must all be put to
the test and substantiated or transformed. Just as God is not
truly believed if He does not submit to the questions that grow
out of the facts of reality, and just as the quest for God is a process
of making things difficult for oneself by depriving oneself of
illusions, so the genuine will to research is the struggle with one's
own desires and expectations.
This combat finds its ultimate confirmation in the combat of
the scientist with his own theses. It has become the decisive hall-
mark of the scientific man that in his researches he seeks his
antagonists, and that he seeks most ardently for those who call
everything in question with concrete and clearly defined ideas.
Here something apparently self-destructive becomes productive.
And it is the hallmark of loss of science when discussion is avoided,
even declined, when thought is confined to like-minded circles
and destructive aggressivity turned outward in vague generalities.
G. ABERRATIONS AND TASKS OF MODERN SCIENCE
Science, at first slowly and in a series of leaps, then rapidly and
continuously unfolded in the collaboration of scientists from all
parts of the world, has, in the course of the last three centuries
become an inexorable destiny and opportunity.
Science is today universally disseminated and recognised; every-
one believes himself to have a share in it. But at the same time,
pure science and the lucidity of the scientific attitude are exceed-
ingly rare. There is the mass of scientific findings, which are
simply accepted; there is the plenitude of specialist ability without
participation in universal scientificity; there is the broad stream
that is made up of an intermingling of science with unscientific
94 PRESENT AND FUTURE
elements. In our world, however, authentic scientificlty, the
attitude of universal knowledge, trustworthy methodological
criticism, enquiring cognition, is no more than a thin thread in
the maze of aberrations.
Science cannot be acquired without effort. The vast majority
of men still have little or no idea what science is. That is the
flaw in the consciousness of our epoch. Science comes naturally
to very few. It is one of the cardinal features of the age and yet,
with its true nature, it is still spiritually powerless, because the
mass of men do not enter into it when they take possession of
technological findings or appropriate dogmatically facts that can
be learnt by question and answer.
Science has enjoyed an immense prestige in our era. Every-
thing was expected of it; penetrating knowledge of all Being and
help in every kind of need. This fallacious expectation is super-
stitious belief in science, the ensuing disillusionment leads to
contempt for science. Mystical trust in something that one thinks
one knows all about is superstition, the experience of its failure
leads to contempt for knowledge. Neither has anything to do with
science itself. Thus science is indeed the hallmark of our era, but
in a shape in which it ceases to be science.
The path of this error is the following: In research we make a
presupposition of the knowability of the world. For without this
presupposition all research would be senseless. But this presup-
position is susceptible of two interpretations: Firstly, that of
the knowability of the objects in the world; secondly, that of the
knowability of the world as a whole. The first supposition alone is
correct, and it is impossible to know how much further cognition
in the world can be carried. The second presupposition, on the
contrary, is incorrect. That it is fallacious is demonstrated by the
radical difficulties which, while placing no restrictions on research
into contents, show the limit of knowledge; this limit is repre-
sented by the fact that not only does the world as a whole, as a
single closed entity, evade cognition, but also that the world in
the sense of something that can be thought and experienced
without contradiction does not exist for us at all. These limits
become clearly visible when we see the fallacious presupposition
of the knowability of the world-as-a-whole come to grief on the
facts of research. Insight into the error is by no means easy. The
error entered into modern science through the supposition that it
is a philosophy; it dates from Descartes. Hence the great and
pressing task of our epoch is the pure apprehension of the meaning
and limits of modern science.
One misleading consequence of the fallacious scientific con-
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 95
ception that the world is knowable in its entirety and in principle,
has been to regard it as fundamentally beautiful. The view
became current that from now on it was only a matter of good will,
on the basis of knowledge, to organise the world in such a manner
as to create for mankind a permanent state of well-being and
happiness. This introduced a new phenomenon into history during
the last few centuries: The will not merely to help oneself in a
meaningful manner through knowledge, in the world and within
the incalculable totality of human conditions, but through know-
ledge of this totality (which the deified scientist was supposed to
possess) to put the world as a whole in order by means of intelli-
gence alone.
This typically modern superstition expects something that
science is not capable of achieving. It takes supposed scientific
total-interpretations of things to represent definitive knowledge.
It uncritically accepts results without knowing the methodological
road along which they were obtained, and without knowing the
limits within which the scientific results are valid at any given
moment. It conceives of all truth and all reality as being employ-
able by our intelligence. It has absolute confidence in science and
obeys without question the authority wielded by official bodies of
experts.
When this superstitious belief in science was disappointed,
however, the reaction produced repudiation of science and the
invocation of feeling, instinct, impulse. Every calamity was then
ascribed to the evolution of modern science. Such disillusionment
is the inevitable consequence of superstitious expectation of the
impossible. Reorganisation of the world fails to materialise, the
finest plans come to naught, catastrophes take place in the con-
dition of man, and their extent is rendered all the more unbear-
able by the previous expectation of final progress. Symbolic of
what lies within the potential scope of science is the fact that the
physician, despite the unparalleled increase in his ability that has
taken place in our day, remains unable either to cure all diseases
or to prevent death. Again and again man comes up against his
limits.
In this situation the task is to gain for ourselves that genuine
science which is as clearly aware of what can be known as it is
decisively conscious of its limits. Only in this way can the dual
errors of superstitious belief in science and hatred of science be
eluded. The crucial factor in deciding the ultimate fate of man will
be whether, with the passage of time, science can be safeguarded,
deepened and brought to reality in an increasingly large number
of men.
96 PRESENT AND FUTURE
This is no easy matter. For authentic, all-embracing science is
bound to the historically determined structure of a profound soul.
It rests on very fragile foundations that cannot be confidently
guaranteed to persist through generations. This science springs
from a complexity of motives so involved that when one of them is
lacking science itself becomes paralysed or empty; the con-
sequence is that throughout the centuries of the modern world,
science as the reality of the total scientific attitude has always been
rare and has perhaps become rarer. The prevailing sound and
fury of findings relating to the conformation of the material
world and to the twists and turns of the 'enlightened' view of the
world, so much talked about all over the globe, cannot blind us
to the fact that science, which appears to be so widely current, is in
fact the most deeply concealed rarity. For the most part, modern
man as such does not know at all what science is; he has never
really experienced what drives a man toward it. Scientists them-
selves, who continue to make discoveries in their own special
fields unconsciously carrying on a little while longer a move-
ment that was set going by other forces often do not know what
science is; they betray this in their comportment outside that
narrow field in which they are still masters. Modern philosophers
discuss science as though they knew it, and then permit it to
degenerate into an historically passing ideological error. Even
philosophers of the stature of Hegel know little or nothing about
this science.
II. MODERN TECHNOLOGY
Today we are all conscious of standing at a turning-point of
history; a hundred years ago this turning-point was likened to the
decline of the ancient world. Since then, however, it has been
more and more deeply felt to be the great moment of destiny not
only for Europe or the West, but for the whole world. It is the Age
of Technology, which seems to leave nothing standing of what
man has acquired in the course of millennia in the way of methods
of work, forms of life, modes of thought and symbols.
The German idealism of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling inter-
preted its own period as the most profound turning-point of
history. It did so on the basis of the conception of the Christian
axis, which was supposed to have just reached its climax or con-
summation. This was the overweening boldness of spiritual self-
deception. By contrast, we are now in a position to say with
certainty: the present is no second Axial Period. In the most
pronounced contrast to the latter, it is a period of catastrophic
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 97
descent to poverty of spirit, of humanity, love and creative energy;
one thing alone is still great enough to stand comparison with all
that went before: the production of science and technology.
But what sort of greatness is this? We understand the joy of the
discoverer and inventor; at the same time we see them as func-
tional components in the chain of a fundamentally anonymous
creative process, in which every link fits into another and the
participants do not operate as human beings, in the greatness of
an all-embracing soul. Despite a high level of creative inspiration,
of patient and persevering labour, and audacity in tentative
hypotheses, the overall picture leaves us with the impression that
the spirit itself has been sucked into the technological process,
which even subordinates the sciences to itself and this with an
intensity that grows from generation to generation. This explains
the astonishing stupidity of so many scientists outside their own
special field; it explains the intellectual helplessness of so many
technicians outside the tasks which, though they are for them the
ultimate ones, are in themselves not so at all; it explains the secret
lack of happiness in this world that is becoming ever more in-
human.
If we seek an analogy for our epoch, we find it not in the Axial
Period, but rather in another technological age, of which we have
no transmitted knowledge: the age of the invention of tools and
the use of fire. When man, with a single jump involving the whole
world, found entirely new preconditions for his potentialities. The
long ages of mere repetition and expansion that followed, during
which everything remained fundamentally the same, have been
left behind. Hence the past century was enthusiastically aware, as
we still are today, of the fact that immense and unprecedented
possibilities are open to humanity in every phase of existence.
Hence, too, recorded history furnishes us with nothing comparable
to the events of our era. For this reason we today, misunderstand-
ing ourselves, see ourselves in our technological ability as creators
of salvation on earth without parallel or we see ourselves as
equally without parallel in our spiritual perplexity. There is
nothing in history by which we can measure ourselves.
If there is to be a new Axial Period it can only lie in the future,
just as the first Axial Period followed, after a long interval, the
period of foundation-laying discoveries which finally differen-
tiated human life from the animal kingdom: the Promethean Age.
This new Axial Period, which perhaps stands before us and which
would constitute a single, world-embracing reality, is beyond our
powers of imagination. To anticipate it in phantasy would mean
to create it. No one can know what it will bring.
9 8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Technology is the procedure by which scientific man masters
nature for the purpose of moulding his existence, delivering him-
self from want, and giving his environment the form that appeals
to him. The appearance given to nature by human technology and
how his technological procedure reacts upon man, that is, the
manner in which his mode of work, work organisation, and shap-
ing of the environment modify him himself, constitutes one of the
ground-lines of history.
But it took modern technology to make this palpable as the fate
of man. In contrast to the relative stability of technological con-
ditions for thousands of years, there has taken place since the end
of the eighteenth century a revolution in technology, and thereby
in human existence as a whole, whose velocity has continually
increased up to our own day. Karl Marx was the first to recognise
this in grand style.
Man's attachment to nature is made manifest in a new fashion by
modern technology. Nature threatens to overpower man himself,
in a manner previously unforeseen, through his tremendously
increased mastery of her. Through the nature of the man engaged
in technological work, nature really does become the tyrant of
humanity. The danger threatens that man will stifle in the second
nature, to which he gives birth technologically as his own product,
whereas he may appear relatively free vis-d-vis unsubdued nature
in his perpetual struggle for existence.
Technology has wrought a radical transformation in the day-by-
day existence of man in his environment; it has forced his mode
of work and his society into entirely new channels: the channels of
mass-production, the metamorphosis of his whole existence into a
technically perfect piece of machinery and of the planet into a
single great factory. In the process man has been and is being
deprived of all roots. He is becoming a dweller on the earth with
no home. He is losing the continuity of tradition. The spirit is
being reduced to the learning of facts and training for utilitarian
functions.
In its first effects this age of metamorphosis is disastrous. We
are living today in the impossibility of finding a legitimate form of
life. Little that is true and trustworthy and that could sustain the
individual in his self-consciousness comes to us out of the con-
temporary world.
Hence the individual is either overcome by a profound dis-
satisfaction with himself/ or he delivers himself up in self-oblivion
to become a functional component of the machine, to abandon
himself unthinking to his vital existence, which has become im-
personal, to lose the horizon of past and future and shrink into a
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 99
narrow present, untrue to himself, barterable and available for
any purpose asked of him, under the evil spell of unquestioned,
untested, static, undialectic and easily interchangeable pseudo-
certainties.
But whoever retains in himself the troubled mind that comes
from dissatisfaction becomes perpetually false to himself. He is
compelled to live in masks and to change the masks according to
the situation and the people with whom he is dealing. He speaks
entirely in terms of the 'as if 5 and does not gain himself, because
in the end, thanks to all the masks, he does not know who he
really is.
If no ground is firm enough to stand on if there is no echo for
authentic selfhood if there is no more respect because masks and
wrappings do not command respect, but only make possible
fetishistic deification if men do not bring me to an upsurge
through the hidden demand of their selfhood speaking out of their
existence then the troubled mind grows into the despair that was
prophetically lived through by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and
that attained its most lucid expression in their interpretations of
the epoch.
Along with all this there has taken place a breaking-off of
history, a destruction or submersion of the past to an extent from
which all the millennia of history afford no analogies or parallels.
The first inception of the kindling of fire and the development of
the first tools are alone comparable with the events of our time;
the discovery of atomic energy does indeed seem analogous to the
discovery of fire: a prodigious opportunity and a prodigious
danger. But we know nothing of those ages of beginning. As then,
mankind is starting from scratch or else it is about to lay itself
in the grave of unconsciousness to the accompaniment of stupen-
dous destruction.
On account of the magnitude of the question of what it may
make of man, technology is perhaps the cardinal theme for the
comprehension of our present situation. The importance of the
irruption of modern technology and its consequences for absolutely
all the problems of life cannot be overestimated. As a general rule,
historical thought blindly clings to the fallacious idea that modern
technology is a direct continuation of the past and draws wrong-
headed comparisons between our existence and that which pre-
ceded us. Whenever historical parallels to our epoch are adduced,
it behoves us to ask whether sufficient account has been taken of
the radical difference which results from our technology. If this is
done, comparison will focus attention all the more sharply on what
continually recurs in man and what are the permanent basic
ioo PRESENT AND FUTURE
human conditions. The question is, what remains unaffected by
the transformation wrought by technology or re-establishes itself
in its primary form in spite of it.
We must therefore proceed to a more detailed and precise
analysis of what has so far been characterised and asserted in
general terms only. We shall begin by discussing technology and
work as they form part of man's life at any time, in order, by
means of comparison, to present a graphic picture of the depth
of the dividing-line established by modern technology and work.
A. THE NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY
/. Definition of technology
Technology as means: Technology comes into being through the
interposition of means to the attainment of an end. Immediate
activities, such as breathing, movement, or ingestion, do not
involve technique. Only when their functioning is faulty and
measures are intentionally taken to perform them correctly, do
we speak of breathing-technique, etc. The following are the
essential characteristics of technology:
Understanding: Technology rests on the work of the understand-
ing, on calculation in conjunction with anticipatory feeling and
the estimation of possibilities. It thinks in terms of mechanisms
and transforms everything into quantities and relations. It is a
part of rationalisation in general.
Power: Technology is an ability whose procedure in relation to
the aim is external. This ability is one of fabrication and utilisation
not of creating and causing to grow.
By setting natural force against natural force, technology
masters nature indirectly through nature itself. This mastery
rests on knowledge. It is in this sense that we say: Knowledge
is power.
The meaning of technology: Power over nature has meaning only
in terms of human purposes: The easing of existence, the^lessening
of the daily struggle for the physical prerequisites of existence, a
gain in leisure and comfort. The meaning of technology is free-
dom in relation to nature.* Its purpose is to liberate man from his
animal imprisonment in nature, with its want, its menace, and its
bondage. Hence the principle of technology is purposive activity
carried out on substances and forces in the service of man's
determination of his own life. Technological man does not simply
take things as he finds them. He sees them in their utility for
human purposes and seeks the approximation of their forms as
utility forms to the particularity of these purposes (Dessauer).
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 101
There is more than this to the meaning of technology, however.
Its role as a means, expressed in the making of tools, is sub-
servient to the idea of a unity, namely the unity of man's moulding
of his environment a process which, within its own closed circle,
is continually expanding. The animal finds its environment ready-
made and is unconsciously bound to it. Despite being likewise
bound, man brings forth his environment in boundless overpassing
of his ties. Life in an environment that he has created himself,
simultaneously with life in the natural environment, is the hall-
mark of humanity. He finds himself in his own creation, not only
through release from want, but also in the appeal that the beauty,
appropriateness and form of his creation has for him. He aug-
ments his reality with the breadth of his environment.
Kinds of technology: A distinction is made between the tech-
nology that produces power and the technology that produces
goods. Man obtains operational power for himself by such means
as the training of animals, wind- and water-mills, etc.; the tech-
nology that produces goods is made possible by various special
techniques, such as spinning, weaving, pottery, building and
medical treatment.
Dessauer expounds the view that, furthermore, technology
not only produces means to the attainment of a goal that is set in
advance, but also produces constructs whose further utilisation
cannot be foreseen at the time of their invention as was the
case with musical instruments, the printing press, etc. Here
technological creations become, so to speak, keys with which to
open rooms for the activity of man, so that he can expand his
being and make fresh discoveries.
In general, technology is defined as operation with the sub-
stances and forces of nature for the purpose of producing useful
objects and effects. It is only in analogy to this that we speak of
technique in relation to all other planned procedures in so far as
they lead to regulation and mechanical repetition; thus we use the
term in reference to the organisation of humg.n relationships, to
the carrying on of institutions, to the self-treatment of body and
mind.
Invention and repetitive labour: Technological rules are those that
can be learnt, handed on and applied in identical form. Tech-
nology as theory states the methods appropriate to the attain-
ment of ends, i.e. methods which are, firstly, objectively correct,
and secondly, avoid superfluous activities and involve the econo-
mical application of only such activity as is essential. Technology
consists in procedures and constructs invented by men and capable
of subsequent realisation in ad libitum repetition and quantity.
iot2 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Hence there is an essential diversity between the creative
activity that leads to technological inventions, and the perform-
ance of work that merely applies the invention repetitively in
order to produce greater quantities.
Deviations: If the meaning of technology lies in the unity of the
moulding of the environment for the purposes of human existence,
then a deviation is involved wherever tools and activities make
themselves independent of their mediate function, wherever the
end-purpose is forgotten and the means themselves become the
end, become absolute.
Wherever in day-to-day work the meaning of the whole, as
motive and field of vision, is lost sight of, technology degenerates
into an endlessly multifarious mode of action and becomes, for
the worker, senseless and a plundering of life.
Where that element of technological activity which consists
of performances that can be learnt by practice becomes self-
enjoying routine, it ceases to be an enrichment of life (through
ensuring its rudiments and services) and becomes instead an
impoverishment of life. Work, without the spiritual effort which is
an indispensable means of enhancing consciousness, becomes
instead sufficient to itself. Man sinks down into unconsciousness or
loss of consciousness.
2. The great historical dividing-line within technology
Technology, in the sense of the utilisation of implements, has
existed as long as men have existed. It existed as far back as our
historical memory reaches, on the basis of the natural physics of
the primitives, in handicrafts and the use of weapons, in the
employment of the wheel, the spade, the plough, the boat, of the
work-power of animals, of the sail and fire. In the civilisation
of Antiquity, particularly in the West, a highly evolved science
of mechanics became the means of moving immense weights,
erecting buildings, building roads and ships, and constructing
machines of siege and defence.
Yet all this technology remained within a comparatively
measurable framework that was not too large for men to see as a
whole. Everything that was done was accomplished by human
power supplemented by animal power, tensile force, fire, wind
and water power, but here too within the province of the natural
human world. The position became completely different after the
end of the eighteenth century. It is erroneous to suppose that no
decisive leap ever took place in technological evolution. It
occurred at this date, and it occurred in the technological life-
form as a whole. After the passage of centuries, during which
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 103
rudimentary beginnings had been attempted while a technological,
technocratic ideology was adumbrated in imaginative construc-
tions and its initial scientific prerequisites slowly and fragmentarily
created, a realisation took place in the nineteenth century that
exceeded all imagination. We shall enquire what this new mani-
festation was. It cannot be reduced to a single principle.
The most tangible fact is: Machines were invented that pro-
duced consumer goods automatically. What had previously been
done by man as a handicraftsman was now done by machine. The
machine spun, wove, sawed, planed, pressed, cast; it fabricated
complete objects. Whereas a hundred workmen had to blow
laboriously to manufacture a few thousand bottles a day, one
bottle-machine made 20,000 bottles daily and required only a
few workmen to serve it.
Further machines had to be contrived to supply the power with
which to drive the production machines. The steam engine was
the turning-point (1776), then the electric motor (dynamo,
1867) became the universal power machine. Energy was trans-
formed out of coal or water-power and conveyed to wherever it
was needed. The mechanical science of the ancients, which had
reigned supreme for thousands of years, was now confronted by the
modern science of energy. The old mechanical science had at its
disposal only limited power in the shape of the muscular perform-
ance of man and beast, and of wind and water for mills. The new
factor was the thousandfold greater power, which at first seemed
capable of multiplication ad infinitum, that was now at man's
disposal.
This development was only possible on the basis of the modern
exact sciences. These afforded knowledge and possibilities which
were entirely unknown to the earlier science of mechanics. Above
all, the development of the theory of electricity and of chemistry
became an indispensable prerequisite for the new technological
realities. That which was initially invisible and only disclosed to
the eye of research, furnished man with those almost boundless
energies which are today employed all over the planet.
One further prerequisite was needed, however, to lift the
various inventions from the level of a spare-time hobby or a
refined luxury-activity and bring them to economic realisation,
which alone made them a factor in human existence. Modern
social liberty in which slaves were unknown and free com-
petition permitted at the individual's own risk afforded bold
entrepreneurs the opportunity of trying out the improbable and
that which seemed to the majority impossible. This was facilitated
firstly by the credit system, which placed funds at the disposal of
104 PRESENT AND FUTURE
the efficient in a sum which formerly not even the wealthiest man
would have possessed, and secondly by an organisation of labour
with free labour forces which could be engaged for any desired
work-operation and, since they were paid at a fixed daily rate,
represented a predictable element in the calculation of the entre-
preneur's costs. And attendant upon both of them was a calculable
legal system, which enforced observance of contracts.
Thus there arose in the West the technological-scientific battle
of the entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, in which the old
handicrafts went under with the exception of a few indispensable
remnants and everyone engaged in technologically useless
activity was ruthlessly destroyed. To be sure, even the best ideas
might come to naught. On the other hand, however, miraculous
successes were achieved. A process of natural selection by the
touchstone of success took place. Whoever failed to accomplish
what the undertaking demanded went bankrupt or was dismissed
from his post. For a time at least at the commencement of these
creative enterprises a selection of the most competent occurred.
The genesis of the modern technological world therefore con-
tains the following inseparable elements: Natural science, the
spirit of invention, the organisation of labour. Common to each^of
these three factors is rationality. Even those scientific discoveries
which are per se technologically utilisable, are by no means sus-
ceptible of immediate application. They require the flash of
technological inspiration before they can be put to use. It took
Morse to make telegraphy. There is no predictable relationship
between science and technology.
(2) The spirit of invention is able to perform amazing feats even
without specifically modern science. The achievements of primi-
tive peoples e.g. the boomerang are astonishing, and numerous
inventions were made in China (e.g. porcelain, lacquer, silk,
paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder). Equally astonish-
ing, however, is the contemporaneous ossification in laborious
traditional methods of work, where the simplest, and for us, most
obvious mechanical inventions could be of assistance. It is as if a
normal absence of ideas held man fast to inappropriate methods.
In contrast to this attachment to tradition ; during the last
century and a half a multitude of inventions have been made in
all fields, which fall within the framework of that which has long
been possible without any need of modern science: e.g. heating-
stoves, the slow-burning fire, central heating, kitchen utensils,
and many domestic appliances, and medical equipment such as
the ophthalmoscope. For other things modern knowledge was a
prerequisite of discovery, though the old means would have
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 105
sufficed for their execution: this is true of a great part of the con-
trol of epidemics and to the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics in
operations. The traditional apathy in living, together with the
patient endurance of discomfort and inappropriate ways of doing
things, seems to have been overcome in our epoch by the spirit of
invention.
To this we must add the specifically modern element repre-
sented by the systematisation of invention. No longer are for-
tuitous inventions made here and there by individuals; the
process of technological invention has become a movement in
which numberless men participate. From time to time inventions
that are new in principle lend fresh impetus to this movement.
For the most part it consists in the development of existing
inventions, in continual improvements and further exploitation.
Everything becomes anonymous. The achievement of the indi-
vidual disappears in the achievement of the totality. In this way
perfected forms, e.g. of the bicycle or the automobile, caine into
being in a relatively short space of time.
The technologically utilisable must also be economically
utilisable. The spirit of invention as such, however, holds itself
free from this compulsion. In its major impulses it proceeds, as it
were, toward the creation of a second world. Nevertheless, that
which it creates is only given technological realisation to the
extent of the space made available to it by economic utility in free
competition or by the will that disposes of despotic power.
(3) The organisation of labour becomes a social and political
problem. The machine leads to the production not only of luxury
goods, but also of the mass-goods of everyday need to all; this
results in the majority of men being drawn into the production
process, into this method of work by machine, as component parts
in the machinery. If almost everyone becomes a link in the tech-
nological work process, the organisation of labour becomes a
question addressed to humanity. Because the ultimate considera-
tion for man is man and not technology, and because technology
is meant to serve man and not man technology, a sociological-
political process has been set in motion on the basis of modern
technology which strives passionately for a reversal of the initial
circumstances that permitted an ad libitum subordination of man,
as a unit of labour, to technological and economic purposes.
To understand the meaning of such demands it is necessary to
form a clear picture of the nature of work, first of all in a general
sense, and then in the metamorphosis wrought in it by the incisive
effects of technology.
io6 PRESENT AND FUTURE
B. THE NATURE OF WORK
Everything realised by technology has at all times demanded
work. And wherever man works he applies some form of tech-
nology. The nature of the technology determines the mode of
work. Modifications in technology modify work. A radical trans-
formation of technology is inevitably accompanied by a radical
transformation of work.
Not until the metamorphosis that took place in the nineteenth
century did both technology and work become a problem. At no
time prior to this were either of them discussed from so many
angles or in such detail as since this date.
Let us next call to mind what work as such is, and what it has
been since the beginning. Only with the aid of this yardstick can
the specific characteristics of work in the new technological
world be recognised.
i. Definition of work
The definition of work is threefold:
Work is physical labour.
Work is planned activity.
Work is the basic feature of man's nature in contradistinction
to the animal: it is what gives rise to his world.
Firstly: Work is physical labour. It is effort, e.g. the work of the
muscles, and leads to fatigue and exhaustion. In this sense the
animal works just as much as the human.
Secondly: Work is planned activity. It is activity undertaken with
purpose and aim. The effort is willed in order to gain the means
of satisfying needs. This work already distinguishes man from the
animal.
The animal satisfies its needs directly through nature. It finds
what it requires for its needs ready-made. Man can only satisfy his
needs through the conscious and planned interposition of means.
This interposition is made through the medium of work. Although
he finds the material for his work in nature, this material is suited
to the satisfaction of his needs only when he has worked it up.
The animal's instinct consumes and causes to disappear work
constructs tools and creates that which endures in the shape of
goods and products. The tool serves to remove man from direct
connexion with nature. It prevents destruction of the object by
transforming it.
Natural skill is not sufficient for work. The individual only
acquires skill through learning the universal rules of work.
Work is both physical and mental. Mental work is the more
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 107
difficult. Forms of work that can be learnt by practice and then
carried out almost unconsciously are infinitely easier. We are
always ready to flee from creative work into that which is auto-
matic, from mental to physical. On days when the savant makes
no progress in his researches, he is still able to give an expert
opinion.
Thirdly: Work is a basic form of human behaviour. It transmutes
the existing world of nature into a human world. The shape of the
total environment of man at any given moment is the world
intentionally and unintentionally created by communal work.
The world of man, the overall condition in which he lives, grows
out of communal work. Hence it always calls for division and
organisation of labour.
Division of labour: It is not possible for everyone to do every-
thing. Special skills are required. The man who is skilled in a
specialty can produce more and better goods of this particular
kind than the man who is unskilled. Furthermore, not everyone
possesses the means and materials for every kind of work. Work
in the community therefore leads straight to the division of labour,
because work is necessarily of many kinds.
Workers are differentiated in classes according to the type of
work they do. They are differentiated according to the nature of
their human culture, their mores, their mental outlook, and their
standing: husbandmen, artisans, merchants, etc. A process that
binds a man to his work takes place.
Organisation of labour: Where there is division of labour, col-
laboration is necessary. The performance of my special work has
meaning only if I am a co-worker in a society where all per-
formances are mutually valuable. Work gains its meaning from
its position in an organisation of work.
The latter develops in part without a plan and of itself through
the market, and in part according to a plan through the dis-
tribution of work. A society derives its essential character from
whether it is organised, as a whole, on the basis of planning or of
the operation of the free market.
Where there is division of labour, products are changed from
direct consumer goods into merchandise, and must therefore be
exchanged, put on the market, or distributed. This renders the
standard provided by an abstract value imperative. This standard
of value is called money. The value of merchandise in terms of
money either develops freely through the processes of the market,
or to order through planned price-fixing.
Today it is perfectly obvious that the social structure and
human existence are determined, in all their ramifications, by the
io8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
nature of work and its distribution. Hegel already saw this; Marx
and Engels disseminated the knowledge in epoch-making inter-
pretations,
The question of the extent of this connexion and to what
extent other causes religious and political factors for instance
operate to curtail its importance, is a matter for special historico-
sociological investigation.
Over-emphasis of this connexion, resulting in a monocausal
conception of human history, is certainly fallacious. That this
conception has been essayed since Marx and Engels, rests upon
the fact that in our epoch the connexion between work and social
structure has acquired very great importance and has therefore
become more perceptible than ever before.
Division of labour and organisation of labour are certainly
responsible for essential structures of our existence in our society.
But the crucial factor for the consciousness of all who are working
is what work is being done, to what end, with what meaning, and
how this presents itself to the consciousness of the worker. Dis-
cussion of these questions is all too naturally based on the pre-
supposition that it is the system of human needs food, clothing,
housing, etc. that determines work. This is true, but it is by no
means the whole truth.
Pleasure in work, in so far as it is not simply functional pleasure
in the use of the muscles or the exercise, of skill, is the conscious-
ness of participating in the creation of our environment. The
worker becomes conscious of himself in the mirror of that which
he has produced. His serenity springs from sharing in the life of
the existential forms which he has helped to create, from the
construction of something that exists.
Much more than this may lie in work, however. Hegel speaks
of 'religious labour that brings forth works of devotion which are
not intended for any finite purpose. . . . Such labour is itself an
act of worship. . . . Work as pure creation and as perennial labour
is its own purpose and hence is for ever unfinished. . . .' This work
runs 'from the merely bodily movement of the dance to the
stupendous and gigantic works of architecture ... all these works
fall into the category of sacrifice . . . the very activity is an offer-
ing; no longer of a purely external thing, but of the inner sub-
jectivity ... in this producing the sacrifice is spiritual activity and
the effort which, as a negation of the particular self-consciousness,
holds fast to the purpose that lives within and in imagination, and
brings it forth to outward view'. (15, 248 ff.)
Thus Hegel points out potentialities of the meaning of work
which today have been almost forgotten. It is a superficial view
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 109
that divides the content of work into the satisfaction of vital
needs and of the demands of luxury. The meaning of work
reaches a great deal further. It is precisely what is called luxury
from this viewpoint all forms and goods that are not indis-
pensable to vital satisfaction which conceals the essential
factor: how and as what man creates his world, in which he
becomes aware of himself and of being itself, of transcendence,
and of his own specific nature.
This briefly summarises work in general. We shall now turn to
a consideration of the incision made by modern technology.
2. Work after the dividing-line of modern technology
(i) Technology saves labour, but at the same time increases labour.
Technology aims at saving labour. Work is to be carried out by
machines, instead of by human muscles, by the automatism of
apparatuses, instead of by repeated efforts of thought. The unique
achievement of an inventor spares the exertion of muscles and
intelligence. The limit to the realisation of this technology is the
fact that there remains one form of work which has to be carried
out by men again and again and for which there is no tech-
nological substitute, and that fresh tasks become necessary which
did not exist before. The machines themselves have to be built
again and again. Even if machines become almost independent
beings, human labour is still required to serve, mind and repair
them; furthermore, it is needed to obtain the raw materials for the
machines to work on. All that happens is that labour is shifted to
different points. It is altered, not abolished. Somewhere or other
there remains the immemorial toil that no technology can do
away with.
Thus technology does indeed make work easier. But it also
gives rise to new possibilities of production and engenders new
needs through its achievements. Through the increase of needs,
new, augmented work arises. And above all technology produces,
in the shape of weapons of war, new means of destruction which
intensify the demands on labour to the utmost, first through the
obligation to manufacture the maximum quantity of armaments,
and then through the obligation to start all over again amidst the
chaos and the ruins.
On the whole it is doubtful whether, in respect of our con-
temporary reality, technology does in fact ease and diminish
work; it looks much more as though technology places a strain on
man's forces such as they have never before been called upon to
bear. At all events, modern technology has brought about an
immense initial increase in the labour of those who are actively
i io PRESENT AND FUTURE
engaged in it. Nonetheless, technological potentialities do con-
tain the principle of a reduction of physically ruinous labour, and
modern technology has established the lasting idea of a growing
release of man from the burden of physical labour in the interests
of leisure for the unfolding of his free potentialities.
(2) Technology changes work. In contrast to the magnificence of
inventive creation there stands the dependence of uncreative
application. Invention springs from leisure, inspiration, and per-
severance; application demands repetitive labour, order, and
reliability.
In executive technological work the observation and service of
the machine is reckoned as positive; a disciplined, deliberate,
reflective attitude of mind is developed; joy in meaningful
activity and ability, indeed a love for the machines, becomes
possible. Against this the automatisation of labour, for the many
whose work consists of continuous repetitive motions at the con-
veyor belt, becomes negative; the aridity of this empty labour that
brings nothing but fatigue becomes an intolerable burden to all
but those of a fundamentally apathetic disposition.
Hegel already saw the consequences for work arising out of
the leap from the tool to the machine. Initially the prodigious
advance. The tool is no more than an inert thing with which I
am only formally active and make myself into a thing; for it is
man who supplies the power. The machine, on the other hand, is
an independent implement; by means of it nature is tricked by
man, in that he causes her to work for him.
The trickery comes home to rest on the trickster, however:
'By causing nature to work through the medium of the machine,
he does not do away with the necessity for his own work ... he
removes it from nature and does not direct it toward her as a
living object . . . the work that is left to him becomes itself more
mechanical; the more mechanical work becomes, the less value it
possesses and the more he has to work in this fashion.' 'Work
becomes more lifeless . . . the skill of the individual infinitely more
restricted, and the consciousness of the factory-hand reaches the
lowest possible level of apathy; the connexion of the individual
type of work to the whole infinite mass of needs is completely
lost sight of and replaced by a blind obedience, so that an opera-
tion carried out far away often puts a sudden brake on the work
of a whole class of men, who have been satisfying their needs by
it, and renders it superfluous and useless.'
(3) Technology compels the adoption of a certain magnitude of organ-
isation. The technological goal can be completely and economically
realised only in factories of considerable compass. How large this
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY in
organisation must be is a question that must be answered separ-
ately for each factory. There remains, however, the further
question of how far any number of large-scale organisations can
advantageously develop without monopoly in the free market, of
how far, outside the framework of legal rights, the planned
establishment of an all-embracing world-factory is to be held in
view, in which all forms of production are to be geared to each
other, so that neither too much nor too little is produced in the
various individual fields.
In either case the individual is dependent upon the large-scale
organisations and the place he occupies in them. Just as machine
manufacture leaves no room for joy in the individual product, so
it also puts an end to personal freedom in the possession of the
tools of a craft and in production to personal order. The vast
majority of men are no longer in a position to visualise the pur-
pose and meaning of their own work. Human standards have been
overpassed.
The dual dependence of work upon the machine and upon the
organisation of labour, which in turn is a kind of machine,
results in man himself coming to resemble a machine-component.
Creative inventors and organisers of new units of work become
rare exceptions: they continue to build onto the machine. By
contrast, more and more men are forced to become parts of the
machine*
Technicisation, however, spreads out from the working up of
nature to the whole fabric of human life, to the bureaucratic conduct
of everything, to politics, even to pastimes and pleasures, which
now constitute a continuation of the accustomed forms of life and
have ceased to spring from creative pleasure. Man no longer knows
what to do with his free time if it is not in turn filled with tech-
nologically organised activity in so far as he does not give him-
self over to a state of twilight trance in order to recover from his
exertions.
Man's life as a component of the machine may be characterised
by comparison with the life he used to live: Man is uprooted, he
loses his soil and his homeland and in return he is given a place at
the machine; the house and land that are apportioned to him are
themselves of the type of the machine, transient, interchangeable,
not landscape and not unique home. The surface of the earth
takes on the appearance of a machine-landscape. The horizons of
man's life become extraordinarily restricted in respect of the past
and the future; he loses his cultural heritage and his quest for the
final goal; he lives in the present alone. But this present becomes
increasingly empty, the less it is sustained by the substance of
H2 PRESENT AND FUTURE
memory and the less it bears the already germinating seeds of
future possibilities. Work becomes mere effort in exertion and
haste, expenditure of energy is followed by fatigue, both of them
devoid of reflection. In fatigue nothing is left but the instincts,
the need for pleasure and sensation. Man lives on the cinema and
the newspaper, in listening to the news and looking at pictures,
everywhere within the range of the mechanically conventional.
The multiplication of technologically-produced consumer goods
enables this mass of men to increase to an apparently limitless
extent; at any rate our epoch has, in a short space of time, brought
about a multiplication of the total population of the earth.
The transformation of man into parts of the vast machinery is
revealed by the conception of man arrived at through so-called
tests. Individually variant attributes are tested and people are
classified by numbers and quantities, on the basis of which they
are arranged in groups, types, and grades. Man as an individual
resists being transformed into a material which can be inter-
cfaanged, he resists being arranged by label. But the course of
events throughout the world compels the adoption of this tech-
nique of selection. At the same time the selectors themselves are
human. Who selects the selectors? The selector himself becomes a
part of the machinery. The apparatuses and measurements are
operated by him mechanically.
Consciousness of being thus dragged into a machinery that is
alien to man was expressed by a twenty-one-year-old Lieutenant
in the American Air Force at an interview after he had received
the highest decorations for outstanding performances in bombing
planes: 1 am a cog in the inferno of a vast machine. The more I
think about it, the more it seems to me as though I had been a
cog in one thing after another since the day I was born. Whenever
I started to do something I wanted to do, a thing much larger
than I came along and pushed me into a place that was waiting
for rne. It's not exactly pleasant, but that's how it is.'
C. APPRAISAL OF WORK AND TECHNOLOGY
Appraisal of work
Contradictory opinions concerning work have been expressed
since early times: The Greeks despised all physical labour as
appropriate only to a low mentality. The complete man, they
thought, is an aristocrat, does not work, is possessed of leisure,
practises politics, lives in competition, goes to war, gives birth to
works of the spirit. Jews and Christians saw in work a punishment
for sins. Man has been driven forth from Paradise, he bears the
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 113
consequences of the fall, he is destined to eat his bread in the
sweat of his brow. Pascal intensified this conception: Work is not
only a burden, but a distraction from the authentic task of man;
work reveals the emptiness of mundane pursuits, the sham of
industriousness; it entices to diversions and veils that which is
essential. Protestants, however, see in work the great blessing.
Milton portrayed the salvation of man in the expulsion from
Paradise; Adam and Eve soon dry their tears:
'The world was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir Guide. , . .'
The angel Michael says to Adam:
'. . . onely add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable . . .
. . . then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shall possess
A Paradise within thee, happier farr. 5
Calvinism deemed success in work a sign of having been chosen
by God. The concept of the worldly profession as a duty, which
was the outcome of religious conceptions, lived on independently
of religion. Pleasure in work and work as a blessing, the honour of
work, and achievement as a touchstone of human value grew on
this soil. It is the foundation both of the postulate: 'He who does
not work shall not eat 5 , and also of the inner benediction: 'Work
and despair not.'
In the modern world the affirmation of work is universal. As
soon, however, as work became the dignity of man, the dis-
tinguishing feature of his nature as a human being, a dual aspect
of work was disclosed: on the one hand in the ideal of the working
human being, and on the other in the picture of the real average
working conditions, in which man is estranged from himself
through the mode of work and work-organisation.
From this duality springs the impulse to change the world of
man, so that man shall find his way to the proper mode of work
in the creation of the totality of his world. The false, compulsive
mode of work, that estranges him from himself, must be done
away with. The criterion is contained in Hegel's words: 'This is
the infinite right of the subject, that he find his own satisfaction
in activity and work' ( 1 1 , 50) .
The problem of work in its connexion with the dignity, the
rights and the duties of humanity, is fallaciously simplified if we
see work as one single whole. In truth work is extremely diverse
in the multiplicity of types of work, by virtue of the esteem
accorded to the particular type of work, by virtue of the extent of
n 4 PRESENT AND FUTURE
participation in the enjoyment of the goods produced, by virtue of
the way the work is organised, the manner in which authority is
exercised, and the degree of esprit de corps and solidarity felt by the
workers.
The tasks of changing the structure of work to the advantage of
the dignity of man cannot, therefore, be resolved by the applica-
tion of a single principle, nor can they be reduced to a single
denominator. The following have been recognised as tasks of this
order: Changes in the concrete material conditions under which
work is performed, in order to render them more humane
changes in the organisation of work in order to render the position
of the individual worker, and the methods of establishing author-
ity and subordination, compatible with liberty changes in
society, in order to render the distribution of goods more equitable
and to safeguard the status of every man, whether in terms of his
achievement, or simply as a human being.
These problems have only taken shape through the meta-
morphosis of work and forms of life wrought by technology.
Appraisal of modern work is inseparable from the appraisal of
modern technology. Through modern technology the burden of
work acquires new weight, but perhaps to the accompaniment of
opportunities for new fulfilments.
Appraisal of modern technology
For a hundred years technology has been glorified, or con-
demned, or looked at with horror.
In the nineteenth century there was the creative urge of the
inventor, and there were the workers who revolted and smashed
the machines.
The initial enthusiasm contains a meaning that has been held
fast until today and has been most recently interpreted by
Dessauer. The idea of the moulding of man's environment accom-
plished by the inventiveness of man, who, as the image and likeness
of the deity, discovers eternal creative ideas and creates fresh
realities that are like a second nature. The 'spirit of technology'
then implies something more than merely a means: it implies an
all-embracing realisation of the allegedly true and legitimate
environment of man. An autonomous world comes into being.
Technology is not simply outward existence, it is an inwardly
fulfilled realm of spiritual life. From this enthusiastic standpoint it
appears improbable 'that a world-transforming force should be
nothing more than a system of means with borrowed goals'.
If Dessauer is right, an environment radically different from
that created by man is now in the process of coming into being
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 115
out of the spirit of technology itself. In the current crises arising
out of the melting down of the old, the new environment has not
yet found its shape. It appears in rudimentary beginnings, while
the overall picture seems, in this creative transition, to be one of
anarchy and ruin. The idea of a new environment for man may
be contained in technology of a modern character. Perhaps
technological evolution is not proceeding ad infinitum, but is
following a direction to a conclusion that would be a new kind
of perfection in the material substratum of human existence.
In opposition to this conception there stands the other: The
way of technology is not liberation from nature through the
mastery of nature, but rather the destruction of nature and of man
himself. An unhalting course of the murder of the living will lead
ultimately to total destruction. The horror which, from the
beginning, gripped great men at the sight of technology was a
vision of the truth.
Vis-a-vis these two radical positions there is a third. It asserts
the neutrality of technology. Technology is per se neither good nor
evil, but it can be used for either good or evil. In itself it contains
no idea, neither an idea of perfection nor a diabolical idea of
destruction. Both of them spring from other origins, in man, from
which alone technology is lent meaning.
It seems characteristic that in Europe today the Promethean
enthusiasm for technology has almost vanished, without the
inventive spirit being paralysed. The dangerous infantile joy in
technology is gone or has been passed on to more primitive
peoples, who are just becoming acquainted with technology,
which they are in the process of making their own.
Along the route of the Age of Technology, however, whose goal
and end are neither clear nor certain, there is certainly taking
place at the moment that process of melting down and equivocal
refashioning, which we shall discuss with reference to some
individual facets:
/. Remoteness from nature and new nearness to nature
Man is torn out of his given, merely 'natural' environment. The
first step in the process of becoming human was the domestica-
tion which man carried out on himself. But up till a hundred
years ago this remained easily surveyable, a real environment,
a whole.
At present a new environment is being created; somehow or
other a 'natural environment' now as dependent and relative
must re-establish itself within this new environment, with a
fundamentally different consciousness.
n6 PRESENT AND FUTURE
In technological activity fabrication is the essential operation.
The purpose, and with it the technological apparatus, occupies the
foreground of consciousness; the naturally given, on the contrary,
recedes into obscurity. The nature which technological activity
has in view is nature in its mechanical aspect and the invisible
forces known through research (such as electricity), with which
I can operate indirectly within the permanent framework of the
mechanical environment.
Anyone who does not acquire this knowledge, but confines
himself to its utilisation in pressing the switch, in travelling by
electric railway merely exercises a primitive sleight of hand
without having the least idea of what is really going on. Thus men
can make use of uncomprehended technology without any
relationship to nature at any rate in many fields whereas the
natural mechanical science of the past demanded practice and
the ability expressed in physical skill.
In many realms, however, the nature given to technology
demands that we come close to it in respect of the functions
peculiar to these realms. Many technological apparatuses call for
a specific physical skill, from the typewriter to the automobile,
and more intensely so with the aeroplane. But it is almost always
a one-sided, particular and extreme skill and a capacity for
physical endurance, not a thoroughgoing cultivation of the life
of the body as a whole (this can be seen in the difference between
the skill of the cyclist and that of the walker). Furthermore, the use
of technological apparatus requires knowledge. The practical
essential is then skill in the exploitation of technological know-
ledge, in order on every occasion to find the right starting-point
from which to attain the purpose, and, when confronted by a
breakdown of the apparatus, to proceed from tentative experi-
mentation to methodological penetration and effective repair.
Thus technology can affect us who live within it in either of two
ways: It can remove us from nature entirely and leave us in the
position of unthinking utilisation of mechanical appliances, or it
can bring us close to nature in the shape of the known but invisible
findings of research.
Technology does not only bring us close to the nature that is
investigated in the categories of physics, however. Through
technology a new world comes into being for us and man is pre-
sented with new possibilities of existence in the world, which
bring with them a new closeness to nature.
(a) First of all the beauty of technological constructs: Consummate
technological forms are attained in vehicles, in machines, in
technologically manufactured objects of daily use. In tech-
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 117
nological fabrication the growth and creation of a second nature
does, in fact, take place. The question is, in what does this beauty
of the technologically successful product consist. It is not mere fit-
ness for purpose, but rather functionally perfect integration into the
human world. Still less does it consist in superfluous ornamenta-
tion and embellishment, which, on the contrary, impress us as
ugly, but in something which causes a natural necessity to be felt
in the totally functional construct; this natural necessity is first
manifest in a pure form in the work of man, and is then recog-
nised afresh in the unconscious productions of life (in the struc-
tures of the bodies of animals and plants, for instance). There are
solutions inherent in the thing itself, which are found, as it were,
through the striving after eternal, predetermined forms.
(b) Further, technology makes possible an enormous extension of
real apprehension. Through it great and small things become visible
that are closed to natural perception. The microscope and the
telescope are unnatural, but they open up a new world of nature.
Technology, through the medium of the various means of trans-
port, enables man to be almost omnipresent; he can move about
everywhere when his passage is not barred by the State, war,
and politics so as to immerse himself on the spot in that which
can be experienced, seen, and heard in a particular locality.
Visual image and sound make present to him in his own home
what was previously offered to his senses only in a scanty or
fantastic form through inadequate and erroneous notions, or did
not enter the field of knowledge at all; gramophone and film keep
past events present to memory. Possibilities of observation have
been unprecedentedly refined and enriched in all directions.
(c) Finally, there develops a new consciousness of the world. Since
the inception of the modern system of communications and news-
distribution, the feeling that we have of the spaces of the earth
has come to take in the whole planet. We visualise the globe and it
is filled with the daily news that comes to us from all parts of it.
The real imbrication of forces and interests all over the globe
renders it a closed whole.
Thus the technological world contains humanity's new possi-
bilities, the specific pleasures of technology, the achievement of
technology in extending experience of the world, in rendering the
whole planet and all the elements of existence present to concrete
experience; the foundations are laid for a playful mastery of
matter that will lead to pure experiences of the sublime. At the
present time, however, all this is still a rare exception.
Apart from skill, this new nearness to nature and to all things
postulates the sovereignty of man, who, penetrating with is
ii8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
power of apprehension into the realm of that which is alien to
nature, creates presentness out of the whole, which is not imme-
diately existent. The spirit is decisive.
Much easier is silting up in thoughtlessness, empty and mechani-
cal functioning, alienation in automatism, losing oneself in
diversions, growing unconsciousness, the residue of nervous
excitation.
2. Misjudgement of the limits of technology
The appraisal of technology depends upon what is expected of
it. A clear appraisal presupposes clarity concerning the limits of
technology.
Fallacious limits have frequently been placed upon technology
on the basis of a dogmatic knowledge of nature; thus, for example,
about half a century ago flight, and even the airship, were from
time to time declared to be impossible. The fact is that the extent
of the mastery over nature which man may be able to achieve is
unpredictable. Phantasy is free to formulate the most extra-
ordinary pictures, unrestrained by any absolute impossibility.
Such pictures include the technological utilisation of atomic
energy, which might provide a substitute after the supplies of coal
and oil have been exhausted, the intentional explosion of the
globe, or the spaceship. Although perpetuum mobile has rightly
been recognised as impossible, the discovery of a practically
inexhaustible source of energy nonetheless remains possible. But
the wide range of technological potentialities must not deceive us
as to the limits of technology. The limits of technology lie in those
presuppositions of all technological realisations which can never
be overcome.
(i) Technology is a means and requires direction: There would be no
technology in Paradise. Technology serves the purpose of ridding
man of the burden of want; this first compels him to maintain his
physical existence by work and then enables him, without the
compulsion of want, to extend his existence into the incalculable
structure of an environment which he himself has shaped.
Technologically creative invention is in the service of a need, is
guided by it and hence is valued according to its utility. It is true
that another process is also present in invention: Pleasure in the
creation of previously non-existent constructs which perform
certain tasks. The inventor is capable of building his contrivances
without any regard for utility. In this manner the automata and
playthings of the Baroque Period came into being. Nonetheless,
the selection and therefore the ultimately decisive direction of
invention proceed from usefulness. The technological inventor
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 119
does not create any fundamentally new needs, even though, by
satisfying existing needs, he expands and multiplies them. The
goal must be given; as a rule it is self-evident: the easing of work,
the manufacture of consumer goods, mass-production. Such
utilitarian considerations constitute technology's raison d'etre.
The limitation of technology consists in the fact that it cannot
exist out of itself for itself, but is always a means. This renders it
equivocal. Because it does not set itself any goals, it is beyond or
before all good and evil. It can serve the purposes of salvation or
calamity. In itself it is neutral toward both of them. This is
precisely why it requires direction.
Is it possible for this direction to spring from the existential
appropriateness of the natural environment as a whole? from
discovery itself and from extended needs? Such questions are
aimed at the unknown, and yet perhaps meaningful, element in
the course of things, as if this course were the realisation of a plan
or as if a devil were taking possession of it. We have little reason
to pin our faith to any such unconscious course of things. The
direction of technology cannot be looked for in technology itself,
but must be sought in a conscious ethos. Man himself must find his
way back to the guiding reins. He must achieve clarity concerning
his needs, he must put them to the test and determine their
hierarchy.
(2) Technology is restricted to the mechanism, to the lifeless., to the
universal: Technology never has more than the mechanically
intelligible in its grasp. It transforms its objects into a mechan-
ism, and thereby into an apparatus and a machine. In the face of
the unexpectedly magnificent successes of these mechanical
potentialities, everything may appear technologically possible.
Then there develops a basic attitude of illusory expectation of
being able to do everything. However, such absolutisations of the
technological misjudge reality, which always demands more than
technology; notwithstanding the fact that all activity contains
technique as a presupposition, mechanism only furnishes the
skeleton, so to speak. The steps to be taken with regard to
nature in cultivation and breeding, with regard to man in educa-
tion and communication, the creation of the works of the spirit,
indeed invention itself, cannot be performed according to the
rules of technique. It is erroneously hoped to fabricate by tech-
nique that which can be created only out of the living spirit.
Painting, poetry, and science make use of technique as a means,
but they are empty things if they are the products of technique
alone.
One limitation of technology is its restriction to the lifeless. The
120 PRESENT AND FUTURE
understanding that dominates the fabrication of technology is
adapted only to the lifeless, to the mechanical in the widest sense.
Therefore technology can only deal with the living organism by
treating it as it would something without life, e.g. in agricultural
chemistry, in modern breeding methods and treatments with hor-
mones and vitamins for such purposes as maximum milk pro-
duction, etc. There is also a notable difference between tech-
nological cultivation (modern ways of growing flowers, for
instance), which aims at sensational, extreme effects from the
viewpoint of breaking records, and the historical methods of
cultivation as practised in China for thousands of years; it is the
same difference as that between the manufactured article and the
living work of art.
The product of technology has a universal, not an individual
character. To be sure, technology can be employed to produce a
unique construct in an historical process of creation. But tech-
nology as such aims at types and at mass-production. The limita-
tion of technology by its attachment to the universal renders it
accessible to all peoples in its unrestricted transferability. It is not
bound to cultural presuppositions. Hence, in itself, it is something
inexpressive, impersonal, inhuman. Its character as a construct of
the understanding confines it to the understanding that is the same
everywhere, although something more than mere technology
always makes itself felt in the 'spirit' of discoveries and in par-
ticular constructions.
(3) At any given moment technology is bound to substances and forces
which are limited: Technology needs substances and forces with
which it operates. In so far as these are available to man in
limited quantities only, e.g. coal, petroleum, ores it uses up
what it cannot replace. The day will come when they are at an
end, unless new sources of energy are discovered. We think of
atomic energy, but we do not know how far the ores will go from
which it is obtained.
In addition to the sources of energy available from the surface
of the earth, which are for the most part limited and not to be
recovered once they have been used up, the possibility of using
solar energy may be considered. It is already accessible to us
indirectly through water-power, which is itself limited but per-
petually renewed. Whether it will ever be possible to utilise solar
energy directly is an open question for future technology. Beyond
this, deeper and more extensive boring into the earth's surface is
conceivable.
In practice we have not yet reached the end, the cellar of man-
kind is still full. But where calculations can be made as for coal
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 121
and petroleum the end is imminent within an historically com-
paratively short time.
If, however, the energies necessary to technology had been
used up, this would indeed mean the end of the Age of Tech-
nology, but human existence would not, on that account, have
ceased. The human population of the earth would decrease
greatly in numbers and would live under the presuppositions with
which all previous historical epochs managed, without coal and
petroleum, without modern technology.
(4) Technology is bound to human beings, through whose labour it is
realised: Human beings must desire, and must be prepared for,
service. What man's humanity leads him to demand will decide,
when the limit has been reached, whether he no longer wishes to
live or whether he will revolt at the risk of his life. Then either the
running of the machinery of technology will be upset or brought
to a halt, or it will be reshaped under conditions laid down by
humanity as such.
(5) The course of technological invention is perhaps confined to a possible
goal and predetermined by an end: From time to time great new dis-
coveries have come to pass, which, after a relative consummation
of our cognition appeared to have been reached, have resulted in
further groups of discoveries, of which we had no presentiment
and for which they were the prerequisites. The diesel engine and
the radio were new beginnings of this sort; now it seems as though
atomic energy will be another. The limit to such new thrusts will
have been reached when everything accessible to man has been
made use of. Up to now, the technological process as a whole has
proceeded at increasing, break-neck speed over a period of rather
more than a century and a half. It may look as though the end has
been fundamentally reached. If the end were already herein
essentials, there would still remain the gigantic qualitative
intensification to be brought about by the transformation of the
whole of the earth's surface into a single field of utilisation.
No proof can be given of a potential consummation or end of
technological inventions. But there are indications and pro-
babilities: Comparison of the number of new inventions prior to
1939 in the U.S.A., England, Germany, France and Russia
reveals such immense disparities that the situation can only be
described as one of paralysis in certain regions, and eruption in
others. The conditions and opportunities and the common 'spirit'
within a population play such an important role, that the ease
with which this spirit can be destroyed places the whole activity of
invention on an insecure footing. Perhaps technology itself has an
unfavourable retroaction on men: The constrained life occasioned
iaa PRESENT AND FUTURE
by technology causes the extinction of the prerequisite for
scientific-technological evolution, a crucial factor in which is
freedom of spirit. A prodigious dissimilarity is already manifest
between the great inventors and entrepreneurs of the nineteenth
century and the organised and increasingly anonymous forward
drive of today. The new tendency to withhold publicity from
research work and invention of military importance might be a
symptom of the end, especially in view of the unpredictable com-
pass of the sphere of research involved.
3. Perception of the demonism of technology
The word 'demonism' is not intended to imply that demons are
at work. There are no demons. The word refers rather to some-
thing created by man and yet unwilled; something coercive, which
has consequences for the whole of existence; the resistant that
remains impenetrable; that which takes place at the backdoor, so
to speak; the unmanifest.
At an early stage, men of vision were seized with horror of the
technological world, without really understanding it. Goethe's
attacks upon Newton are only intelligible in terms of the upheaval
produced in him by the exact sciences through his unconscious
knowledge of the catastrophe which was even then beginning to
threaten the world of man. J. Burckhardt had an intense dislike
of railways and tunnels and yet made use of them. Men deprived
of their handicraft and their livelihood by machines, destroyed
machines.
In opposition to this view, there stood the creed of progress,
which foresaw nothing but good fortune from the new knowledge
of nature and from technology. This creed was blind. For it saw
only misuse within technology, which seemed to be penetrable
and capable of correction. It did not see the more profound perils
hidden in technology. The creed of progress failed to recognise
that progress was limited to knowledge and technology and that
this could not possibly lead to progress in the sum- total of human-
ity. Today what has been called the demonism of technology is
clearly revealed. Let us summarise these unexpected inversions,
which turn upon man out of technology, in a few propositions that
have already been stated:
A growing proportion of work leads to the mechanisation and
automatisation of the people doing it. It is not the easing of the
stubborn labour of working up nature that determines work, but
the transformation of man into a component of the machine.
Mechanisation of the instruments of work, with the accompany-
ing complication, enlargement and necessity for collaboration,
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 123
results in an organisation which not only surpasses all earlier forms
in its compass, but is radically different, because the whole of
human existence and not merely a sector for particular pur-
poses is slowly drawn into this organisation.
Technological thinking spreads to all spheres of human action.
The revolution goes as far as the sciences; it is manifest in ^ the
technicisation of medicine, in the industrialisation of research into
nature, in organisational arrangements, which lead, in a number
of sciences, to research being carried out in factory-like organisms.
Circumstances demand it, if the desired success is to be achieved.
In consequence of the fact that the fashioning of life has
become the work of machines, the whole of society is transformed
into one great machine, into a single organisation embracing the
whole of life. The bureaucracies of Egypt, or the Roman Empire,
were only precursors of the modern civil service State. From now
on, everything that wishes to be effective has to be fashioned after
the pattern of the machine, that is, it has to take on an exact, con-
strained character and be bound by outward rules. The greatest
power emanates from the greatest and most perfectly evolved
machine.
The consequences of this mechanisation are the outcome of the
absolute paramountcy of mechanical constraint, of calculability
and dependability. Everything belonging to the realm of the soul
or of faith, on the other hand, is admissible only on condition that
it is of utility to the purposes of the machine. Man himself becomes
one of the raw materials to be purposefully worked over. Hence
that which was previously the substance and meaning of the
w hole man becomes a means. A veil of humaneness is per-
mitted, indeed fostered and, in speech, put forward as the cardinal
concern; but humaneness is radically violated where the purpose
demands it. The greatest power is attendant upon the greatest
ruthlessness. Therefore the cultural heritage, in so far as it con-
tains absolute demands, is destroyed; men are turned into a heap
of sand, which is all the more easily made use of the more destitute
of origins it is. The feeling for life divorces life in the service of the
machine from private life. But this private life itself becomes
empty, free time is also mechanised, enjoyment becomes another
type of work.
The technological mechanism is able to coerce men in masses
as never before. For example, the original liberation of the spirit
through the omnipresence of news is turned into the dominance
of all through controlled news. The will of the State, through the
communications system, can make itself effective at any moment
over wide areas, right into every home.
124 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Technology renders everyone dependent in his vital existence
upon the functioning of the apparatus that has been built up.
When this apparatus breaks down the life of comfort is imme-
diately reduced to one of utter destitution, such was unknown in
the past. Man is then more at the mercy of circumstances than the
peasant in his natural existence. There are no further reserves. 7
One thing is certain: Technology is in the process of trans-
forming man himself, along with his whole working existence.
Man can no longer extricate himself from the technology to
which he himself gave birth. It is certain too that technology
brings not only incalculable opportunities, but also incalculable
perils. Technology has become an independent, impetuous force.
Man has fallen into its clutches without noticing the fact or how
it happened. And who today dare say that he can penetrate the
obscurity of these events! Yet the demonism of technology is only
to be vanquished by following the road that leads to our pene-
tration of it. Whatever mischief it gives rise to may perhaps be
within our power to master. Organisation of the market, for
example, can afford deliverance from temporary want and then
enable a free market to be re-established, instead of ending in
annihilation, in which there is nothing more to distribute. But
again every plan conceals the possibility of that 'demonism 5 , of
the unforeseen. Technological mastery of the mischief wrought by
technology may add to this mischief. Absolute technocracy is, for
its part, an impossibility.
To look upon the task of vanquishing technology by means of
technology itself as one that can be achieved in toto will open up a
fresh road to calamity. The fanaticism of narrow judgement
abandons the technologically possible in favour of an alleged
technology. But the question remains as to how man is to impose
himself upon technology, which has become his master. The fate
of man depends upon the fashion in which he masters the con-
sequences of technology for his life (from the arrangement of its
whole structure, as it presents itself at any particular time, to
personal conduct at every hour of the day).
All the elements of technology combine with connexions whose
origins lie elsewhere to confer upon man the consciousness, in the
lucidity of contemporary understanding, of being at the mercy of
an uncanny process that is the inexorable and compelling out-
come of man's own actions.
Taking it all in all, the event of technology, because its obscur-
ity has not been penetrated, is not only a fatality but also a task.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 125
The projects of phantasy are at the same time like invitations to
humanity to become their master. Are all the potentialities of
man as an individual to cease, is meditation to vanish from the
earth? Does not man possess an origin which renders everything
technological ultimately conditional upon him, instead of man
becoming the slave of technology?
The reality of technology gave rise to the monstrous break in the
history of mankind whose ultimate consequences no phantasy
can anticipate, although we ourselves are in the midst of it
that consists in the mechanisation and technicisation of human
life.
This much is in any case obvious: Technology is only a means,
in itself it is neither good nor evil. Everything depends upon what
man makes of it, for what purpose it serves him, under what
conditions he places it. The question is, what kind of man will
take possession of it, what sort of creature will man prove himself
to be through the use he makes of it. Technology is independent
of what can be done with it; as an autonomous entity it is an
empty power, in the last resort a paralysing triumph of the means
over the end. Is it possible for technology, released from human
meaning, to become a frenzy in the hands of monsters or for the
earth, together with its human population, to be reduced to the
level of material for a single, gigantic factory,, for the whole world
to become an ant-heap that has transformed everything into a
part of itself and lives on only as a cycle of production and con-
sumption in the idle running of a contentless process? The under-
standing may construe it as possible; the consciousness of our
humanity will always say: in its entirety this is impossible.
Thought alone will never master technology. The world his-
torical decision as to the shape in which man's possibilities are
afforded him under the radically new conditions of his life, will
be reached now and in the coming centuries. All previous attempts
at the realisation of man are faced with the question of what they
still mean to us, how they can be repeated, and what account they
give of themselves.
Philosophy must look this reality in the eye. It is true that it
engenders only ideas, an inner attitude, judgements of value, and
possibilities for the individual; but the individual may, incal-
culably, become a salient factor in the march of events.
CHAPTER TWO
The Present Situation of the World
INTRODUCTION
OF the past we have but an incomplete recollection, the
future is obscure. Of the present alone we might expect
to form a lucid picture. After all, we are in the midst of
it. But it is precisely the present as such that is opaque to us, for it
would grow clear only through complete knowledge of the past,
by which it is borne, and of the future, which it conceals within
it. We should like to achieve awareness of the situation of our
epoch. But this situation contains hidden possibilities, which will
only become visible once they have been realised.
What is historically new and, for the first time in history,
decisive about our situation is the real unity of mankind on the
earth. The planet has become for man a single whole dominated
by the technology of communications; it is 'smaller' than the
Roman Empire was formerly.
The course of development since the Age of Discovery, four
hundred years ago, led up to this moment. Until the end of the
nineteenth century, however, history remained for us essentially
European history. To the European consciousness of that time,
the rest of the world was colonial territory, of secondary impor-
tance, destined as a source of booty for Europe. It was only
unintentionally that the foundations of the world history which
is at present unfolding were already laid at that time by the
powers that were seeking to win the great spaces of the earth for
themselves. In the First World War these spaces were already
brought into play. It was still a European war, however. America
withdrew again. It was only in the Second World War that all of
them, the whole globe, were committed to the full. The war in
Eastern Asia was as grave a matter as the war in Europe. In fact
it was the first real World War. World history, as one single
history of the whole world, had begun. From our vantage point,
the interlude of previous history has the appearance of an area
scattered with mutually independent endeavours, as the multiple
origin of the potentialities of man. Now the whole world has
126
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 127
become the problem and task. With this a total metamorphosis of
history has taken place.
The essential fact is: There is no longer anything outside. The
world is closed. The unity of the earth has arrived. New perils and
new opportunities are revealed. All the crucial problems have
become world problems, the situation a situation of mankind.
A. CHARACTERISATION OF THE PRESENT SITUATION
/. The masses have become a decisive factor in the historical process
All previous history occurred under conditions that were
relatively stable in comparison with those of today. The peasantry-
represented the mass of the population and remained fairly con-
stant in its mode of life, despite catastrophic political events. It
constituted the unhistorical substance of the population. The
agrarian crises that occurred again and again in historical times
brought upheavals, but no radical changes. The mutations of
social conditions proceeded slowly and only affected individual
classes and groups, within an overall condition that was felt to
be permanent. As far as their consciousness was concerned, men
remained comparatively secure in immutable orders, even if they
had to starve. They endured and submitted, and lived in a
pervading religious faith.
Today things are different. Social conditions are in ceaseless
flux. This flux has become conscious. The whole population of the
earth has been torn out of its immemorial traditional orders and
forms of consciousness. Consciousness of security is constantly
diminishing. Human masses are becoming more integral. Every-
one is learning to read and write. If they did not they could not
come to knowledge, could not acquire a language in which to
express their will, nor make their influence felt.
The masses are becoming a decisive factor. To be sure, the
individual is more powerless than ever, but the individual as a
member of the mass, the 'we 3 , seems to be gaining possession of a
will.
This will cannot grow originally in an anonymous mass, how-
ever. It is aroused and guided by propaganda. The masses need
ideas and slogans. They have to be told what they want. But the
soil for that which is told them must be ready within them. The
statesman, the thinker, the artist, the poet must appeal to forces
in the masses, if he wishes to have any effect. What forces these
will be cannot be stated in advance. Leaders are characterised by
the impulses, value judgements, and passions to which they appeal.
But what they stimulate in the masses has a retroactive effect on
128 PRESENT AND FUTURE
the leaders. The masses determine what the leaders themselves
must be and what they must become in reaction. They are
exponents of the will of the masses, unless they become dictators
over masses of directed slaves.
Mass 8 is a concept capable of several interpretations, however.
The mass means either the bulk of the population (and as such is
present at all times), or the momentary expression and com-
portment of people under the influence of suggestion (and as
such appears as suddenly as it vanishes again), or it is the in-
feriority of the many, of the average, whose existence determines
everything by the mass pressure which it exercises (and as such
is the manifestation of an historical situation under certain con-
ditions and by no means definitively inferior) .
A distinction must be made between mass and people:
The people is subdivided into orders, is conscious of itself in
ways of life, modes of thought, and cultural heritage. A people is
something substantial and qualitative, it possesses a communal
atmosphere; the individual from the people has a personal
character that is partly derived from the strength of the people
by which he is borne.
The mass, on the other hand, is not subdivided, is unconscious
of itself, uniform and quantitative, devoid of specific character and
cultural heritage, without foundations and empty. It is the object
of propaganda, destitute of responsibility, and lives at the lowest
level of consciousness.
Masses arise where men come to be without an authentic world,
without provenance or roots, disposable and exchangeable. In
consequence of technology this state of affairs is growing more and
more widespread: the narrowed horizon, life that does not look
ahead and is devoid of effective recollection, the compulsion of
meaningless labour, amusement in the dissipation of leisure,
excitation of the nerves masquerading as life, deception in the
illusion of love, fidelity and trust, betrayal, especially in youth,
resulting in cynicism: no one who has been involved in this sort of
thing can still respect himself. Via despair in the garb of liveliness
and obstinacy the road leads into oblivion and indifference, into
the condition in which corporate human life is a sandheap that
can be made use of, set to work, or deported, and that is treated in
the light of qualities which can be given a number and counted
by means of tests.
The individual is both, people and mass at the same time. He
feels quite differently, however, where he is people and where he
is mass. The situation forces him into the mass, man holds fast to
the people. Illustrated by some comparative examples: As mass I
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 129
thrust into the universal, into the current fashion, into the cinema,
into the mere today; as people I want corporeal, irreplaceable
reality, the living theatre, the historically present as mass I
applaud the star on the conductor's dais; as people I experience in
my intimate self the music that soars above life as mass I think
in numbers, accumulate, level; as people I think in hierarchies of
value and in structure.
A distinction is to be made between mass and public.
Public is the first step along the path of the transformation of
people into mass. It is the echo of poetry, art, literature. When the
people no longer lives comprehensively out of its community,
there develops a multiplicity of separate publics, amorphous like
the mass, but a forum for spiritual things in free competition.
For whom does the writer write when he is free? Today he no
longer writes for the people, and not yet for the mass. He woos and
wins his public, if he is lucky. The people possesses enduring
books that accompany its life; the public changes, is without
character. But where there is public there is still a lively open
forum.
The transformation of the people into public and mass can no
longer be brought to a stop. The situation compels the progress of
events through the medium of the masses. But mass is not some-
thing definitive. It is the mode of existence during the dissolution
of humanity. Every individual in it remains a human being. The
question is, to what extent is the individual and his intimate
world under the epithet 'private world' today so often the object
of overweening contempt giving birth to the new beginnings
which may ultimately lead to the recovery of humanity out of the
mass.
We can see the past by its pinnacles. Then it is as if, on the
broad substratum of mass-existence, of which little historical
information has come down to us, lofty spiritual creation made
proper history. It is the life and activities of individuals., who,
in the continuity that runs through the ages, call to each other as
friends and foes. Every individual has his community, however,
the human beings who belong to him and from whom he hears, to
whom he is important, he has his circle of friends, his people in
the shape of language and spiritual heritage, his public.
Now today this community is inevitably the world that is
determined by the masses. That alone will remain which is
assimilated by the masses. The path of history today runs inexor-
ably via the masses, or seems to do so. Popular education may put
the multitude on the road to spiritual nobility a de facto process
of natural selection, which is going on all the time, may engender
130 PRESENT AND FUTURE
a new factual aristocracy without hereditary privileges the
abolition of social repression and political terror may cause the
disappearance of the rebellious and negativist way of thinking,
by which the masses have, for the moment, been seized.
The school, natural selection operating in free competition, and
continual improvement of the still unjust human conditions in the
direction of greater social justice, may, to the accompaniment of
constant tensions, blaze the trail to growing freedom.
Their failure may open the door to inconceivable horrors of
abysmal mass existence. Everyone who wants to be of some
account desires to go with the masses. Many thinkers presuppose
that the masses are making for some particular point, and that
the truth is to know this and act accordingly. Human masses as
such, however, are not a person, they do not know or want any-
thing; they are without content and a tool for anyone who flatters
their universal psychological impulses and passions. Human
masses are easily able to lose the power of deliberation, rush into
the intoxication of change for the sake of change, and follow the
Pied Piper, who leads them into the inferno. It is easy for the
conditions of interaction between unreasoning masses and direct-
ing tyrants to develop. But it is also possible that the rationally
striving labour of the real spirit may develop in the masses them-
selves, this labour that takes place in gradual changes of con-
ditions, which no one observes in their entirety, but in which so
much reason prevails that an ordered existence, free work and
free creation become possible in an incalculable degree.
The world would ascend to a pinnacle of history wherever that
which was formerly confined to the aristocracy became real in the
masses themselves: education, disciplined moulding of the life and
thought of the individual, capacity to learn and to win a part in
the spirit, to reflect and deliberate and to find the rational solution
historically in the most powerful tensions of men who confront
one another at once critically and in solidarity.
Today, however, the monstrous peril is this: Whereas the events
of all former history had little effect on the substance of humanity,
this substance itself seems now to be in flux, to be threatened at
its core. The instability in everything sets the problem of what
man, on the basis of knowledge and technology, and out of the
origin of his nature, will make of his existence. In this the situation
forces us to follow the unavoidable path of the masses.
2. The dissolution of traditional values
Formerly, religions were bound up with the totality of social
conditions. Religion was borne by these conditions, which, in turn,
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 131
it justified. The conduct of everyday life was embedded in
religion. The latter was taken for granted as the omnipresent
breath of life. Today religion is a matter of choice. It is retained
in a world which is no longer permeated by it. Not only do the
various religions and confessions stand side by side and, by the
mere fact of doing so, cast doubt upon one another; in addition,
religion itself has become a special domain, unconnected with the
rest of life. The traditional religions are becoming untenable to an
increasingly large number of people: almost all dogmas and
revelation in its exclusive claim to absolute truth are disbelieved.
The de facto unchristian lives of the majority of Christians is a
criticism to which it is impossible to close one's ears. A Christian
life in its manifestness and unquestionable truth may perhaps still
be real today as a compelling model for imitation, but it no longer
exists for the masses.
In all ages in which men have thought and written since the
Axial Period, there has been doubt. But now the dissolution is no
longer an affair of isolated individuals and small circles. It has
become a ferment in the whole population. Although men have
at all times been ready to lose their faith, this apostasy never
involved more than a narrow sector. Under the conditions of
work and life in ages past, the population remained secure in its
religious bonds. The conditions of the Age of Technology, how-
ever, have proved conducive to an outbreak of nihilistic possi-
bilities in the whole of the population, that has degenerated into a
mass.
The ever-present readiness to loss of faith is today fostered by
spiritual movement as such, by misunderstood science by mis-
understanding on the part of the masses. Bacon's words have been
proved right: Half knowledge leads to unbelief, whole knowledge
to belief.
Our era's growing lack of faith has brought nihilism. Nietzsche
is its prophet. He was the first to see it in its calamitous mag-
nitude, to disclose it in all its manifestations, to suffer it himself as
the victim of his time, to seek with a mighty effort to overcome
it in vain.
Nihilism, which was previously powerless in its sporadic
beginnings, has become a dominant mode of thought. Today it
seems possible that the whole of the cultural heritage since the
Axial Period will be lost, that history from Homer to Goethe will
sink into oblivion. This looks like a threat of the downfall of
humanity; in any case, it is impossible to foresee or imagine what
will happen to man under these conditions.
Today there is passing through the world the evil spell of a
i 3 a PRESENT AND FUTURE
philosophy that finds truth in nihilism, that summons man to a
strangely heroic existence without consolation and without hope,
in affirmation of all harshness and mercilessness, in what is alleged
to be a purely worldly humanism. This is mere repetition of the ideas
of Nietzsche without his poignant tension in the will to overcome it.
Man cannot endure the fundamental attitude of nihilism, how-
ever. In the situation of universal lack of faith man succumbs
rather to a blind faith. Such a faith is an immense substitute, is
fragile, and suddenly discarded again; it may embrace the most
singular contents; it may be, as it were, an empty faith of mere
motion. It interprets itself as a feeling of oneness with nature, with
world history. It takes concrete shape in programmes of salvation.
It encloses itself in pseudo-scientific total conceptions, in Marxism,
in psychoanalysis, in the theory of race (whose scientific elements,
which seldom emerge with clarity, are at the same time beyond
doubt). 9
The following are some typical manifestations of this dissolution
of faith:
Thinking in ideologies. An ideology is a complex of ideas or
notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth
for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it
leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the
purpose of justification, obfuscation, evasion, in some sense or
other to his own advantage. Hence the apprehension of a way of
thinking as ideology means the unveiling of error and the un-
masking of evil. Bestowal of the epithet ideology upon a way of
thinking is to reproach it with untruth and untruthfulness and
therefore constitutes the most violent attack.
Our era has both given birth to ideologies and seen through
them. But the profound insights that have been achieved in this
direction, from Hegel to Marx and Nietzsche, have become a
brutal weapon in the war of words leading to the breaking off of
communication. The method of this attack is directed against the
opponent as such, against all views other than one's own. How-
ever, those very people who spurn everything that is believed,
thought, and imagined as being ideology, are frequently them-
selves possessed by the most stubborn ideology consisting in this
mode of interpretation.
The high daring of self-reflection, that precondition of all truth-
fulness, has degenerated along the path of ideological theory.
Certainly an infinite number of perversions, repressions and
obfuscations have taken place; they have won sociological sig-
nificance as the type-view of a whole social class: for example,
untruthfulness with regard to matters of sex in the bourgeois era,
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 133
the self-justification of economic success, the legitimation of the
status quo on the part of the privileged. But it is absolutely neces-
sary to unveil the method of unveiling itself. From the heights
reached by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche our age has carried the
thought that unveils to the very limit of this intellectual process of
unmasking; but now it has ceased to be an unveiling and has
become a malicious attack; it is not critical investigation, but sug-
gestion, not empirical exposition, but mere assertion with some
degree of plausibility. Thus the method of penetrating cognition
of truth has ended up as the abasements of psychoanalysis and
vulgar Marxism. When the thinking that unveils becomes itself
dogmatic, it completely loses the truth. Everything is ideology and
this thesis itself is an ideology. Nothing is left.
But perhaps the formation of ideologies really is particularly
great in its compass today. For in hopelessness there arises the
need for illusion, in the aridity of personal existence the need for
sensation, in powerlessness the need to violate those who are even
more powerless.
The manner in which malice salves its conscience in this process
is exemplified in the following arguments:
If the State commits blatant crimes, the argument runs: The
State is sinful from its origin, I too am a sinner, I obey the com-
mandments of the State, even when they are sinful, because I am
no better and because national duty demands it. But this is all to
the advantage of the man who speaks in these terms; he joins in
the deed and enjoys its fruits, he exhibits his anguish in the con-
torted features that are not true anguish, but merely play-acting.
He avails himself of sinfulness as a relief.
One takes part in frightful deeds and says: Life is harsh. The
lofty goals of the nation, of the faith, of the finally free and just
world that is coming demand harshness. One is harsh toward one-
self with a safe, partial harshness which is enjoyed and which
furnishes sham proof of the genuineness of one's demand for harsh-
ness, while in reality it covers up one's own unconditional will to
existence and power.
One is conscious of one's own mendacity in the enjoyment of
chance situations of advantage while these terrible things are
happening. Now one wants to see that which one is not prepared
to do oneself, does not wish to experience or suffer, is not capable
of being oneself. One craves martyrs. One waxes enthusiastic about
the possibility of martyrdom, as though this almost made one a
martyr. One attacks others for not being martyrs. One intoxicates
oneself with the destiny of men who appear to conform to the
image of one's craving, but one has no desire ever to be like that
134 PRESENT AND FUTURE
oneself. This distortion of the facts goes so far that later on one
sets oneself up as a pattern and becomes a fervent advocate against
one's environment of that which, as a contemporary, one paid
almost no attention to and, above all, did not do oneself.
We will not continue. There is no end to such illuminating
instances. The dissolution of traditional contents is revealed in the
mere fact that this type of intellectual unmasking is making itself
universal. The age invents the theory to fit its actions. But the
theory itself straightway becomes a means of intensifying the evil
it is combating.
Simplification. Simplicity is the shape of that which is true.
Simplification is the violence that takes the place of lost simplicity.
Simplicity is infinite in its capacity for interpretation, a world in
parvO) replete and mobile. Simplification is finite in nature, the
string by which one is guided like a puppet, incapable of develop-
ment, empty and rigid.
Ours is the age of simplifications. Slogans, universal theories
that explain everything, gross antitheses, meet with success.
Whereas simplicity crystallised into mythical symbols, simpli-
fication adheres to pseudo-scientific absolutes.
Life out of negation. Where faith is no longer the basis of the
content of life, nothing is left but the vacuum of negation. When
one is dissatisfied with oneself, the fault must be someone else's.
If one is nothing, one is at least anti-. All ills are heaped onto a
phantom that takes its name either from historical formations as
they once presented themselves to theoretical cognition: every-
thing is the fault of capitalism, liberalism, Marxism, Christianity,
etc. or else those unable to defend themselves are picked on in
individual shapes and serve as scapegoats: everything is the fault
of the Jews, the Germans, etc.
All the indissolubly intricate ramifications of causality or
responsibility to which blame attaches are uncritically reduced to
the blame of one single alien entity that is not oneself. All that
matters is to possess the means of giving expression to its no and
of attacking it in general. In this process intellectual concepts
become banners and badges. Words are used like counterfeit
coins, with their meaning reversed but with the emotions for-
merly attached to them preserved (liberty, fatherland, State,
nation, empire, etc.). In the language that has been ruined by the
sophistries of propaganda it is finally impossible to tell what words
really do mean. Speech deteriorates into a welter of vague phrases,
destined only to give expression to a perpetual no, to an anti-, that
does not follow from any real pro.
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 135
B. WHAT GAVE RISE TO THE PRESENT SITUATION?
The origin of the crisis cannot be apprehended in a single cause.
In the infinite web of the material and spiritual interconnexions
of historical change we can only bring to mind individual threads.
Every total and monocausal interpretation proves fallacious.
We cannot even visualise the fact of an age as a whole, but only
more or less essential particular phenomena within this age. The
more we get to know, the greater for our consciousness becomes
the enigma of the whole.
Now the dividing-line that starts off the Age of Technology cuts
unusually deep. It leaves no aspect of human existence undis-
turbed. Everything of which it is not actually the cause is modi-
fied by it. But we must avoid tracing the intricate course of human
affairs back to this one solitary factor. Long before technology had
these effects, movements were afoot from which the present
spiritual situation springs. The fact that technology became
operative and was universally adopted was due to this spiritual
world, this way of thought and of life, which it found waiting for it.
The Age of Technology certainly brought about the tremendous
crisis. Marx and Engels were able to gain an intrinsically illumina-
ting piece of knowledge because they saw this new factor. This new
factor was by no means a spiritually new humanity, however.
That was the great mistake.
People talked about a new human consciousness, about new
man, about spiritual creation, about truth and salvation, they
looked into a luminous future yet this kind of talk was nothing
more than the accomplishment of the tabula rasa, a symptom of
growing loss of consciousness. That which was devoid of any
informing idea was noisily propagated as idea. Then, after great
men had taken the wrong path, the world became a theatre for
petty place-seekers and obedient intriguers, who knew no differ-
ence between true and false or good and evil, but were merely
tools submissive to the function of power.
Or else people talked about lack of faith as being the conse-
quence of technology. The latter was supposed to have deprived
men of their roots, to have torn them out of all security, placed
them, as it were, in an empty space, dispossessed them of air and
with it of breath and of their souls, and to have left nothing of
them over save that which can be made use of in the operation
of machines.
The events of the Age of Technology, however, though they
were furthered by the consequences of technology, had quite
different presuppositions. The spiritual movements that led up to
136 PRESENT AND FUTURE
ourselves began long before the world was altered by technology.
The great change that introduced the Enlightenment at the end
of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution, the equivocal
consciousness of crisis and consummation that informed German
philosophical idealism, these are steps in our direction, indepen-
dent of technology.
The Enlightenment. Lack of faith is deemed to be a consequence
of the Enlightenment. Because men know too much, are
acquainted with the dangerous books and are daily surrounded
by the aura of their language in the press, they no longer believe.
The discovery of the world of alien cultures and religious con-
victions has brought scepticism toward one's own faith through
comparison. But this road need not have led to loss of faith. Only
half and misconstrued enlightenment leads into nothingness,
whereas total and unrestricted enlightenment renders the enigma
of the origin really audible for the first time.
Carried further, this thesis propounded the view that a dialectic
of spiritual evolution, impelled by Christian motives, led from
Christianity to such a radical illumination of truth that this
religion brought about the reversal against itself, out of its own
forces. But again this road need not have led to loss of faith. To be
sure, dogmatic positions were lost in this transition process of
painful and perilous melting down and recasting, but the trans-
formation of Biblical religion remained a possibility.
The French Revolution. This event, which either gave expression
to the modern crisis or set it in motion, is today still an object of
contradictory interpretation:
Kant, deeply moved by the attempt of reason to stand on its
own feet, never reversed his high appraisal of the outset: 'That will
never be forgotten.' Burke, on the other hand, was from the very
first moment a critic as perspicacious as he was hostile. One saw
in this event the consummation of the wonderful developments
and aspirations of the eighteenth century, the other the ruin and
corruption of these same tendencies which, in the French Revolu-
tion, had run off the rails a fatality by which the eighteenth
century was being not consummated, but overwhelmed.
The French Revolution grew on the soil of feudalism and
absolute monarchy; as an essential phenomenon, therefore, it is
not a universally European process, but confined to regions of
this particular type. The soul of England or of Switzerland
remained unaffected by it.
Even on the soil of feudalism, however, it was an ambiguous
manifestation, because, although it desired liberty and reason, it
made room for despotism and violence. It determines our thinking
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 137
In both directions: In the justice of the struggle against the evil of
repression and exploitation, in the name of the rights of man and
the liberty of every individual and in the error of the opinion
that the world as a whole can be founded on reason, instead of
transforming by the use of reason historical bonds, authority and
the order of values, without recourse to violence.
Founded with fanaticism in boundless belief in reason, it is not
the fountainhead of modern freedom, whose roots lie rather in the
continuity of genuine freedom in England, America, Holland and
Switzerland. To this extent, notwithstanding the heroic upsurge
of its beginning, it is the expression and origin of modern unbelief.
Philosophical idealism. The philosophy of German idealism
especially of Fichte and Hegel brought about an enhancement
of philosophical self-confidence, an alleged total knowledge that
knows what God is and desires, and loses all capacity for astonish-
ment because it fancies itself in possession of absolute truth. This
kind of sham faith was bound to swing over to lack of faith. It is
true that this philosophy unfolded in the particular, conceptions
that can never be lost; it was one of the manifestations of human
thought that possessed genius, and its speculative grandeur cannot
be doubted. But the distrust of its world, which has erroneously
spread to all German philosophy, is justified. Here the hubris and
waywardness of genius became an unparalleled seduction. Who-
ever drunk of this potion became intoxicated, a promoter of ruin,
through the fact that a spiritual firework of a high order caused
loss of faith, which presupposes sobriety.
Even these facts, however the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution, and German philosophic idealism are not sufficient
to explain our spiritual situation. They themselves often seem less
like the cause than the initial manifestation of the crisis. There
remains the burning and inadequately answered question as to
how lack of faith came about. The question contains the hope of
mastering lack of faith through the right answer.
This urge would be deprived of all prospect of success if certain
metaphysical interpretations of the course of history, and thereby
of the provenance of our situation, were correct. An age of con-
summate perplexity is supposed to be the outcome of a loss of
substance. A ceaseless total process is conceived of, that was
finally put into words by Klages in the statement that during the
nineteenth century the earth-essence deserted the planet.
Such an imprecise notion of a loss of substance seems, however,
unacceptable. It is not an insight, but a metaphor for the radically
pessimistic outlook. This sort of notion is more of an obfuscation
than an illumination. Yet the idea of some unrecognised total
138 PRESENT AND FUTURE
process forces itself upon us again and again. Only it is neither a
natural happening analogous to biological processes, nor in any
other sense an objective, tangible happening; it is the Com-
prehensive, in which we are but which we do not recognise. It is
the enigma of world history, which we deepen but do not dissolve,
and in the excogitation of which we must not submit to any con-
struct of thought as being supposedly necessary in its entirety; if
we do we shall surrender both the openness of our possibilities of
knowledge and the freedom of our inner being, of our choice and
of our decision to a subordinate conception.
Preferable to any form of alleged total knowledge is the simple
notion (which does not provide us with the key either) : There is
immutable evil in man, which has always led to the recurrence of
senseless wars, but which has today brought about a quantitative
increase both of their diffusion over the earth and of the measure
of destruction they cause, the results of which give rise to the
phenomena of both civilisational and spiritual disintegration.
No adequate answer is possible to the question of the proven-
ance of crises and lack of faith, no matter whether it is sought
along the path of empirical causality, intellectual understanding,
or metaphysical interpretation.
c. SUMMARY
The importance of the fact that the whole of mankind, that all
the old cultures, have been drawn into this one common stream
of destruction or renewal has only become conscious during the
last few decades. The older ones amongst us were, as children, still
living entirely within the European consciousness. India and
China were alien, untouched worlds of their own that one did not
learn about in history. Anyone who felt dissatisfied, or for whom
things were going badly, emigrated. The world was open.
In 1918 the following sentences of de Groot's in his book on
China (Universism) still affected me deeply as something abso-
lutely new: The universist system represents the highest point to
which the spiritual culture of China has been able to evolve. The
only power capable of undermining it and bringing about its
downfall is sound science. If ever the time should come when
science is seriously cultivated in China, there can be no doubt
that a complete revolution will take place in the whole of its
spiritual life, which will either put China utterly out of joint or
cause it to undergo a rebirth after which China will no longer be
China and the Chinese no longer the Chinese. China herself
possesses no second system with which to replace the old; con-
THE PRESENT SITUATION OF THE WORLD 139
sequently breakdown of the old would inevitably result in dis-
solution and anarchy, in short in the most complete fulfilment of
their own sacred doctrine, according to which catastrophe and
downfall are certain if mankind loses Tao. ... If it should be
ordained in the order of the world that the horrible work of
demolition is to take its course, so that the days of China's ancient
universist culture are numbered then at least let her last day
not be also the day of the corruption of a people of millions, that
has been cast into misfortune by foreign influences.'
It is a remarkable world phenomenon that contemporaneously
with and already prior to the emergence of the Age of Tech-
nology, a spiritual and psychical retrogression took place all over
the world which has today become a European movement, as well.
It is true that Europe continued to blossom spiritually for a short
time when, after the seventeenth century, China and India were
already going downhill. At the moment when these peoples were
overpowered by the European technique of warfare, they were
already lying at the nadir of their spiritual culture. Europe came
up against a China and India that were not florescent, but very
nearly oblivious of themselves.
Today, for the first time, there is a real unity of mankind which
consists in the fact that nothing essential can happen anywhere
that does not concern all. In this situation the technological
revolution effected by the Europeans through science and dis-
coveries is merely the material basis and precipitating cause of
the spiritual catastrophe. To the success of the process of melting
down and recasting that is now beginning, de Groot's remarks
concerning China once it is complete China will no longer be
China, the Chinese no longer Chinese may apply for the whole
of mankind. Europe too will no longer be Europe, the Europeans
will no longer be Europeans in the sense in which they felt them-
selves to be in de Groot's day. There will be new Chinese, new
Europeans, however, whose image we cannot yet see.
Out of this experience of our historical situation as the turning-
point of the ages, our gaze returns again and again. To the ques-
tion: have such radical metamorphoses taken place before? our
answer was: we know nothing of the events of the Promethean
Age, when man first came into possession of his world through
tools, fire and speech. But within history the greatest turning-
point was the Axial Period, which we have discussed. If we have
now entered into a new radical metamorphosis of humanity, this
is no repetition of the Axial Period, but a happening that is
different to its very roots.
First of all outwardly. Our Age of Technology is not merely
140 PRESENT AND FUTURE
relatively universal, like the events in those three mutually inde-
pendent worlds of the Axial Period, but absolutely universal,
because it is planetary. It is not a process that is mutually related
in meaning, yet separate in fact; it is a single whole in continual
mutual intercourse. Today it is taking place with consciousness of
universality. It is bound to bring a different decision concerning
humanity from the one that was reached then. For whereas all
previous periods of crucial change were local and susceptible of
being supplemented by other happenings, in other places, in other
worlds, so that even if they failed the possibility of the salvation
of man by other movements was left open, what is happening now
is absolutely decisive. There is no longer anything outside it.
Inwardly., however, something manifestly quite different from
the Axial Period is involved. Then the plenitude, now the empti-
ness. If we become aware of the turning-point, we know that we
are only in the preparatory stage. The present age is one of real
technological and political remoulding, not yet of eternal spiritual
creations. We may more readily liken ourselves, with our gran-
diose scientific discoveries and technological inventions, to the
epoch of the invention of tools and weapons, of the first use of
domestic animals and horses, than with the age of Confucius,
Buddha and Socrates. The fact that we are tackling the high task
of reconstructing humanity from its origin, that we sense the fate-
ful question as to how we can, in faith, become specifically human
beings, is, however, evinced in the current tendency, which is
becoming increasingly strong, to look back toward our origin.
The deep matrix from which we sprang, the specific reality
which was concealed by the veil of secondary cultural con-
structions, turns of phrase, conventions and institutions, is to
become articulate once more. In this process of self-understanding
through the knowledge of whence we come the mirror of the
great Axial Period of humanity will perhaps, once more, prove
one of the essential assurances.
CHAPTER THREE
The Future
AiONCEPTiON of history intended to cover the totality of human
affairs must take in the future. This was the case with the
Christian view of world history as running from the
Creation to the Last Judgement.
This contains a truth that holds good even if the Christian view
of history is disbelieved. For to renounce the future is to render
the historical picture of the past final and complete and hence to
falsify it. No philosophical consciousness of history is possible
without consciousness of the future.
The future is not accessible to research however. Research can
be carried out only on that which has reality, in other words, on
that which has already happened. Yet the future lies concealed in
the past and the present; we see it and think it out in real possi-
bilities. In fact we are at all times sustained by a consciousness of
the future.
We ought not to allow this consciousness of the future to run
wild in arbitrary phantasies of our desires or terrors, but to give it
solid foundations, first by research into the past and then by the
pure apprehension of the present. What matters is to discern, in
and through the struggles of the day, the more profound struggles
that are being waged round humanity itself.
Under these circumstances, the objectivity of a history that
deals merely with that which is past, and remains withdrawn from
the struggle of the day, is no longer appropriate; instead the
present itself becomes the origin and goal of historical conscious-
ness as well.
But it is as crucially necessary to look at the present from the
viewpoint of the future as from that of the past. The ideas we have
of the future guide the manner in which we look into the past and
the present.
Prognostic historical thinking determines our actions. The soul
shaken by concern and hope renders us clairvoyant. Or else we
suppress the emergent images of possibilities and let things take
their course.
Let us call to mind a few examples of earlier prognoses, the truth
141
142 PRESENT AND FUTURE
content of which is today already open to examination and which,
in some cases, strike us as uncanny prophecies. Ever since the
eighteenth century the future has been the object of conscious
meditation and empirically founded vision. From then until our
own time prognostication concerning the future has been a major
literary theme.
During the eighteenth century, in the process of liberation from
authorities that had lost their souls and been misused, at the time
of the initial, unprecedented achievements of science and tech-
nology, of the increase of wealth, in the jubilation of this success,
many men lived as though progress were assured, as though every-
thing would continually improve. They lived free from concern
about the future.
This changed after the French Revolution. Increasing pessi-
mism regarding the future traversed the nineteenth century.
In 1825 Goethe already looked into the impending century of
the machine. It will be the century of efficient intelligences, of
practical people with a quick grasp of facts, who, equipped with
greater mental agility, will feel themselves superior to the multi-
tude, even though their gifts do not reach the highest level. Then,
however, he had a vision of something worse: I see the time com-
ing in which God will find no more joy in mankind and will have
to obliterate it, in order to begin Creation afresh.
Tocqueville wrote in 1835 (Democracy in America^ translated by
Henry Reeve 1835; Oxford University Press edition, pp. 285 ff.):
'The time will therefore come when one hundred and fifty millions
of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, the
progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and
preserving the same civilisation, the same language, the same
religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the
same opinions, propagated under the same forms. The rest is
uncertain, but this is certain; and it is a fact new to the world a
fact fraught with such portentous consequences as to baffle the
efforts even of the imagination.
'There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world
which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started
from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans.
Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention
of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly assumed
the most prominent place among the nations; and the world
learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same
time.
'All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural
limits, and only to be charged with the maintenance of their
THE FUTURE 143
power; but these are still in the act of growth; all the others are
stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these are
proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which the human
eye can assign no term. The American struggles against the natural
obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the Russian are
men; the former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter,
civilisation with all its weapons and its arts: the conquests of the
one are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the other
by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest
to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided
exertions and common sense of the citizens; the Russian centres all
the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument
of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude. Their starting-
point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of
them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the
destinies of half the globe.'
Burckhardt wrote of the future for his Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen in the year 1870 (first printed in Werner Kaegi's
edition, Bern 1941, p. 218): 'Resignation will prevail instead of
reasoning, the single whole instead of individuals and the many.
fi ln place of culture, mere existence will once more occupy the
stage. . . .
'The State will again exercise dominion over culture and even
give the latter a manifold new orientation on the lines of its own
taste. Perhaps culture will, of its own accord, turn to the State for
instructions.
'At the outset, the most severe and repeated reminders will be
given that the business of earning a living and social intercourse
are not the cardinal factors in human life.
'A considerable proportion of the luxury pursuits of scientific
research and communication, and also of the arts, is likely to die
out; that which survives will have to double its exertions.
'Harsh utilitarianism will be the dominant pattern of life.
'Future wars will do everything else needed firmly to establish
this state of affairs. The State itself will take on a physiognomy
such that, for a long time, the representatives of other political
viewpoints will be unable to gain possession of it.
'Some sort of reaction on the part of free idealism will take
place, but only at the cost of superhuman effort.'
In 1872 he wrote in a letter: 'The ways of the army must now
become the pattern for all existence ... in the machinery of the
State and of government ... in school and cultural life. The most
remarkable things will happen to the workers; I have a pre-
sentiment which sounds at the moment utterly crazy, but of
144 PRESENT AND FUTURE
which I cannot rid myself. The military State will have to become
a large-scale manufacturer. The masses accumulated in the big
workshops must not be left for ever to their want and their greed;
a definite and supervised measure of misery, accompanied by
promotion, and begun and concluded daily in uniform and to the
roll of drums that is what must logically come.'
Nietzsche adumbrated a picture of the age and of the future:
The machine in its effect upon life and as a model for the whole of
existence; the rise of the masses and their reduction of everything
to the same level; the theatrical nature of this existence, in which
everything is falsified and nothing is really valid any more;
intoxication in place of reflection as an element of life 'God is
dead'. Nihilism is raising its head: The whole of our European
culture has for a long time been moving, with a torment of tension
that is increasing from one decade to another, in the direction of
catastrophe; like a river that wants to reach its end, that no
longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.'
Nietzsche drew a grotesque picture of the man of the last stages
of the epoch to come: The earth hath then become small, and on
it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His
species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man
liveth longest.
* "We have discovered happiness", say the last men, and blink
thereby . . .
'A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams.
And much poison at last for a pleasant death.
'One still worketh, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest
the pastime should hurt one.
'No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same;
every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth volun-
tarily into the madhouse.
( "Formerly all the world was insane", say the subtlest of them
and blink thereby.
They are clever and know all that hath happened: so there is
no end to their raillery.
e "We have found happiness", say the last men, and blink
thereby.' (Thus Spake J^aratkustra^ English translation by Thomas
Common, T. N. Foulis, Edinburgh, 1914*)
Since then many writers have pictured the ant-life of the future,
a life in which men derive their happiness from hygienic measures,
hour by hour instructions, and the ladling out of all things in
doses, through the agency of total planning.
These pessimistic visions are still today opposed by popular
THE FUTURE - 145
images, originating in the eighteenth-century idea of progress, of
coming splendour, of a world in which man will live in peace,
liberty and justice, a world order of the living equipoise of con-
tinually ascending forces vague images of salvation to come, to
which anyone is referred who is discontented.
The idea of progress has its roots in science and technology,
and here alone lies its real meaning. But it too leads to questions of
concern: Are there, in principle, limits to the future revelations of
scientific research, as well as to technological ability? The ques-
tion is whether science, which is today in full flower and bearing
fruit, is approaching a conclusion that will, for the time being,
bring its advance to a stop. Whether it will later make a fresh
start, or whether, by and large, it will only preserve its results for a
time and then lose part of them, until it is reduced to automatic
operation with technological constructs and conventional thought-
patterns, in such a manner as merely to satisfy the basic demands
of existence. Here all prevision is vain. One can do no more than
devise interesting and internally consistent Utopias, as has been
repeatedly done for half a century.
Another question: Will man one day come to feel cramped on
the globe? Will the situation arise in which he will have no further
way out, in which no further distance will be open to him, in
which, as far as space and matter are concerned, he will only be
able to turn round in a circle?
The prognosis is in doubt even as regards the mere provision of
necessities to the human masses. If a world order came about there
would, it is true, be no threat from barbarian peoples without
the threat would come from nature. The limited potentialities of
nature will shortly bring history into new situations. At the present
rate of consumption, supplies of coal will be exhausted in a
thousand years, of petroleum in less time than that, and of iron
already in two hundred years; supplies of phosphorus, which is
indispensable to agricultural production, will come to an end
even more rapidly than that. It is not yet possible to calculate how
soon the uranium ores, which will continue to furnish us with
atomic energy for a long time, will be used up. No exact com-
putation is possible in any particular case. But the carefree pro-
digality with which our limited resources are being used, makes it
safe to predict as possible, or even probable, that they will be
exhausted within a foreseeable period.
It is impossible to predict whether the human population of the
earth will sink to the numbers of five hundred years ago, or
whether new expedients will be found. What historical pheno-
mena and upheavals in the human soul will accompany these
i 4 6 PRESENT AND FUTURE
catastrophic breakdowns cannot be foreseen. One thing alone Is
certain: as before, there will be no stable conditions.
In our own time, numerous prognoses have been made on
biological grounds. Observations of a particular kind, alleged
total processes of life, have been carried over onto man; on the
basis of these processes man's decline has been predicted unless
it is prevented by biological planning and breeding. The point
of departure was a total conception that was becoming the vogue
in current biological thought.
Thus miscegenation was supposed to be disastrous, and racial
purity a precondition to high value. History, if this sort of thing
were susceptible of proof at all (biological proof does not apply to
races, but is in fact confined to hereditary interrelationships of
individual characteristics, which are by no means easily grasped),
would tend to demonstrate the contrary.
Thus, on the basis of alleged observations of psychopathic
families, mankind was supposed to be subject to a general process
of decay. All attempts at a closer and more detailed definition of
this theory have long ago been refuted.
Thus, by analogy with the consequences of domestication in
animals, man was supposed to lose vigour and discipline in the
process of domestication, because organised society relieves him
of all those difficulties in the overcoming of which he previously
became truly human. Whereas amongst wild geese 'marriage'
is contracted on the presupposition of certain qualities in the
partners and after resistances have been overcome, but then for
life and to the accompaniment of the upbringing and pro-
tection of the offspring, domestic geese pair at will but are able
to leave care of the offspring to the breeder, and have no other
task than 'indiscriminate and immoderate feeding and pro-
creation 5 . Domesticated man is supposed to degenerate in a
similar manner. The comparison is fallacious however (vide
PP- 3 8 > 39)-
All such fears for the future determined by "race 9 , 'heredity',
'decadence 5 , or 'domestication' are groundless, if they are directed
toward the totality of the process of mankind. They have a very
restricted significance. These theories are immeasurably more
dangerous (on account of the outlook engendered by their
untruth) than that which they themselves envisage as a danger.
It is as though real concern for the future sought a way of escape
for itself by obscuring the situation with palpable fears of objective
natural processes, against whose dubious effects no practical
measures could be taken.
Concern for the future of man of quite a different kind has
THE FUTURE 147
made its appearance in the world, however, a concern that has
never been felt before. This is concern for humanity itself, which
found expression in the works of Burckhardt and Nietzsche: Man
might lose himself, mankind might slip, partly unnoticed and
partly as the result of stupendous disasters, into a levelling down
and mechanisation, into a life without liberty and without ful-
filment, into a sombre malignancy destitute of humanity.
What man may come to has today, almost in a flash, become
manifest through a monstrous reality that stands before our eyes
like a symbol of everything unspeakably horrible: The national
socialist concentration camps 10 with their tortures, at the end of
which stood the gas-chambers and incinerators for millions of
people realities that correspond to reports of similar processes in
other totalitarian regimes, although none but the national socialists
have perpetrated outright mass murder by the gas-chamber. A
chasm has opened up. We have seen what man can do not
according to a plan drawn up in to to at the outset, but in a circle
along which he moves at ever increasing speed once he has set
foot upon it. It is a circle into which the participants are dragged
without the majority of them knowing or desiring what they will
suffer or do as they advance unceasingly around it.
It appears possible to destroy man whilst he is physically still
alive. Comparison with the psychoses forces itself upon us. It is a
horrifying fact, and one that cannot without dishonesty be fitted
into a conception of the world as for ever harmonious, that man
can become insane. Our natural fundament is such that, while the
body is still alive, we can see communication between us sun-
dered and our fellow man slip down into madness. But we are not
to blame for this extreme phenomenon, and there is no danger of
mental illnesses becoming epidemics. The dehumanisation per-
petrated in the concentration camps, however, was not the work
of nature but of man himself, and it can become universal. What
does this mean?
Man is capable under the conditions of political terror of
becoming something of which no one had any inkling. What hap-
pened there we only see from outside, unless we are amongst those
who either perished in it or survived it. What was possible to the
individual, how he suffered, what he did, and how he met his
death, remains his secret. Seen from without the impression we
gain from the phenomena is that men ceased to be human: almost
without a doubt in the case of the active elements, more question-
ably as regards the tortured victims, who suffered different and
greater agonies than those which every man undergoes in the tor-
ments of disease and which reduce us to wretched creatures.
I4 8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
The fact that this can happen presupposes in the active elements
(who to a great extent were drawn from the internees themselves)
a readiness, which was already present prior to this realisation, not
only in the existence of the social outcast, but also in the apparent
harmlessness of the trusty bureaucrat or the tranquil life of the
bourgeois. It is this readiness that inspires our horror, when sub-
sequent events reveal it as having been there all the time. It is
the implementation of unconscious lack of faith, the disappearance
of faith without conscious nihilism, life without roots or the life of
apparently secure puppets on the strings of decorous convention,
which can be exchanged without more ado for the strings of life
in the concentration camp.
That man, in the passivity of torment in a life in which every
minute is under compulsion, turns into this mechanism of reflexes
is the outcome of a technico-operative procedure which our era
alone has been capable of evolving, in the intensification of tor-
tures that were known to earlier periods also.
This reality of the concentration camps, this interaction in the
circular process between torturer and tortured, the ^ manner of
this dehumanisation, is an intimation of future possibilities, before
which everything threatens to vanish.
After dealing with reports of the concentration camps, one
hardly dare continue to speak. This peril goes deeper than the
atom bomb, because here it menaces the soul of man. We may
easily fall prey to the consciousness of utter despair. This is not the
last word, if we believe in man. Then alone does the crushing
prognosis, to which these realities give rise, cease to appear
absolutely inescapable.
Those individuals who, in all the frightfulness^ of suffering,
although they could not save themselves from being miserable
creatures in bodily anguish, yet refused to participate in their souls
and who, although they could not avoid injury, yet remained
intact as human souls, encourage us to hold fast to the ancient
faith in man.
In the face of all the perspectives of the future, we dare to state
the proposition: Man cannot get lost entirely, because he is
created in the Image of the Deity 5 ; he is not God, but he is bound
to Him with oft-forgotten and always imperceptible, but funda-
mentally unsunderable, ties. Man cannot altogether cease to be
man. Sleep is possible, absence and forgetfulness of himself. But
man as a whole can neither become, in the course of history, an
ape or an ant, nor, in the present, a reflex machine, save in the
horrifying circumstances that brought him to this brink, from
which he returns to himself, if he does not die as an individual.
THE FUTURE 149
These are menacing spectres. That they menace and at times
weigh down upon us like an incubus is itself a demonstration of
our humanity, that wants to rid itself of evil dreams.
The future of humanity does not come of itself, however, like a
natural happening. What men do today and at every moment,
what they think and expect, at once becomes an origin of the
future, which is in their hands. The only hope is for horror to
become conscious. Nothing but the most lucid consciousness can
help us. Dread of such a future may perhaps prevent it. The
terrible forgetting must not be allowed to take place. The fact that
these things have happened causes anxiety: They may be repeated,
they may spread, they may conquer the globe. We must keep our
anxiety, which is transmuted into active concern.
Anxiety in the face of the horrible facts is repressed in conscious-
ness of powerlessness. Mankind seeks to veil these frightful things
from itself. People become indifferent, but in the background of
anxiety at the destination toward which mankind is heading. If
we think about it, it seems inevitable; we see everything, including
ourselves, going under. That which makes humanity human and
life worth living will cease to be. We have not yet reached that
point. As long as disaster is not upon us we will not think about
it.
Consciousness of powerlessness may regard the course of history
as being similar to a natural happening. We set ourselves free from
responsibility, by seeking to extinguish ourselves as free men. But
there is a radical diversity between the historical process and the
process of a mental illness. A mental illness is a natural process
which it may one day be possible to combat with natural means,
but against which we have till then no defence. This path of
humanity, however, rests with man himself. To be sure, the
individual is defenceless, the peril can only be vanquished in com-
munity. But every individual perceives that his free will is
involved. Hence the recoil from anxiety to more intense anxiety:
It depends upon man, each individual man, upon the decision.
It must not be, it shall not be it is not inevitable. That which has
happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually
remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains
possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge
can it be prevented.
Here lies the danger. Unwillingness to know, forgetfulness and
even disbelief (there are still people who deny the reality of what
took place in the concentration camps); then the evil of docile
readiness to accept mechanisation and finally indifference that
seeks peace of mind in the nearby and the present, and the
i 5 o PRESENT AND FUTURE
passivity of impotence leading to resignation in the face of the
supposedly necessary.
Man can only counter the menaces of the future, however, by
combating the evil potentialities in the world itself. Man^alone can
master the danger that is approaching from within himself in
the hope -that assistance will come to him if he is of goodwill. He
can do it only in a constitution of liberty, in which power can be
relied upon to proceed against everything which threatens man's
freedom, that is to say, along the road of a legal order that will
become a world order.
No prognosis is harmless. Whether it is true or untrue, it ceases
to be a contemplative vision and becomes a call to action. What
man deems possible moves his inner attitude and his deeds. To
see the dangers with just concern is a precondition for his self-
assertion, whereas illusionary notions and obfuscations drag him
into ruin. Hope and anxiety move him. In view of the lethargy of
the average man, it is right to disturb all false peace of mind. It is
not the mental distress that springs from the feeling of being
personally threatened, but the great distress concerning human-
ity perhaps nourished by the former that may be of assistance.
Let us visualise the significance of anxiety.
An anxiety without parallel seems today to be spreading
through mankind. It is equivocal and by no means of one single
type; it may be superficial and easily forgotten again, or deep
and burning, unadmitted or overt it may be at a vital or at
an existential level and it seems to be all of this at the same
time.
In the democratic countries anxiety is caused by the indefinite-
ness of the danger, by uncertainty, by excess of liberty in the
totalitarian countries anxiety springs from political terror, which
leaves the individual no chance save in obedience and collabora-
tion.
When anxiety ceases in nihilism, in so far as that is possible (for
as long as we continue to believe in man, a hidden seed of human-
ity remains undestroyed), man seems like an extinguished being,
unconsciously consuming himself in vital passions. As long as
there is still anxiety, there is a chance for man in the method by
which he overcomes it.
Where it is possible for man to act on his own initiative in
the perpetual mutation of conditions and situations, he can over-
come anxiety only in the transcendentally founded self-aware-
ness of freedom. Where he is forced to obey and acquires his rela-
tively safe function in blind obedience, anxiety can diminish to a
THE FUTURE 151
continuously operative motor for the enforcement of obedience.
But an anxiety that is perhaps common to all pervades man-
kind. Terrible experiences (such as those of the concentration
camps), even if they are quickly forgotten, leave behind them a
hidden horror.
Anxiety is to be approved. It is a reason for hope.
The arguments so far put forward show the meaning of prognoses
in human affairs, the course of which depends upon man himself.
For precisely this course of human affairs the comportment in
prognostic thinking is decisive.
When one's own intentions are expressed in the form of a prog-
nosis (Hitler: 'If there is a war, it will be the end of the Jewish
race in Europe 5 ), that is not a prognosis, but a mere declaration
of will.
There is no statement concerning the future, however, in so far
as the human will is involved in its realisation, that is not, or
could not become, a contributory factor. The statement has the
effect of impelling us toward something, or of frightening us away
from it. In particular, alleged knowledge of the prospective future
is a factor that contributes toward bringing it about.
Anyone who regards an impending war as certain is helping
on its occurrence, precisely through his certainty. Anyone who
regards peace as certain grows carefree and unintentionally
impels us into war. Only he who sees the peril and does not for
one instant forget it, is able to behave in a rational fashion and
to do what is possible to exorcise it.
It is of crucial significance for the course of events whether the
individual can endure to remain in suspense, or whether he flees
into certainties. The dignity of man in his thinking about the
future consists both in the projection of the possible and in a
nescience that is founded on knowledge; our principle must^be
that we do not know what may happen. The most compelling
element in our lives is the fact that we do not know the future, but
contribute toward its realisation and see it loom before us incal-
culable in its entirety. To know the future would be the death of
our souls.
When we are erroneously convinced that a particular course of
events is going to take place, this paralyses us if it is unwanted
or, if it is wanted, it aids our actions in situations of failure,
through the certainty of ultimate success; but here too at the price
of an untruth, of a narrowness of heart, of a treacherous arrogance,
which deprives any such success in so far as it does, for a while,
occur of all nobility.
All this by no means implies a repudiation of prognoses. Only
152 PRESENT AND FUTURE
prognoses must not lose their meaning. They open the area of the
possible, they provide points of attack for plan and action, they
bring us into the broadest horizons, they enhance our freedom
with the consciousness of the possible.
All our activity depends upon what we expect from the future,
upon the picture we form of chances and certainties. The goals
of our activity are set within the area of that which we deem pos-
sible.
But the present alone is real Absolute certainty of a future
may pillage the present. Prognostications of salvation to come
may distract us from the present, which is all we have.
Only by accepting responsibility for the present can we become
responsible for the future.
In the following discussions we do not wish to project images
of the future, but to call to mind tendencies of the present, which
only represent questions put to the future. We wish to find the
decisive phenomena in the indissoluble web of happening. What
appears to be essential, seen in the perspectives of universal history?
Three tendencies are today making their way ^ through the
world. They may be summed up by the words socialism, world
order, and faith.
Firstly: The human masses are striving toward order. Socialism
shows the demands of just mass organisation.
Secondly: The unity of the surface of the earth is pressing toward
the implementation of this unity in peaceful intercourse. The
alternative is shown to be world empire or world order.
Thirdly: Loss of the traditional footholds in the substance of a
common faith is pressing toward the authentic origin of faith in
man with the question of whence and whither we are living. The
alternative is shown to be nihilism or love.
These three great basic tendencies of contemporary human
happening and volition converge in the goal of accomplished
human liberty. We shall preface these three cardinal themes by a
discussion of liberty.
I. THE GOAL: LIBERTY
Amidst all the antitheses of our volition, only one thing seems
today to be agreed. With complete unanimity, all peoples, indi-
viduals and political regimes demand liberty. But as to what
liberty is and what is required to achieve it there is at once a wide
divergence of views. Perhaps the deepest human antitheses are
determined by the modes of men's consciousness of liberty. What
THE FUTURE 153
is to the one the road to freedom, seems to the other the reverse.
In the name of liberty almost everything is desired by men. In the
name of liberty the road into serfdom is trod. To renounce liberty
in a free decision counts for many as the highest freedom. Liberty
arouses enthusiasm, but liberty also arouses anxiety. It may look
as though men do not want liberty at all, indeed as though they
would like to avoid the possibility of liberty.
Since the consciousness of the great Western crisis since the
French Revolution of 1 789 concern for human freedom has been
abroad in Europe. Spirits of the highest calibre have seen the
possibility: freedom can be lost. Whereas Hegel still tranquilly
saw world history as the history of the consciousness and reality of
liberty, more deeply shaken spirits were invaded by dread of the
possibility that the liberty of all men might be lost. The question
was then put directly to politics and society: the great spirits,
Burke, Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville and Max Weber, were
concerned for liberty. Our contemporaries, individual thinkers in
all parts of the world, adjure mankind in their concern for free-
dom men like W. Lippmann, Ferrero, Hayek, Ropke. They are
economists, historians, writers, attached to no party, addressing
themselves to all, in order to save the one single common posses-
sion, without which man would cease to be man.
A, THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT OF FREEDOM
We speak of political freedom, social freedom, personal free-
dom, economic freedom religious freedom, freedom of conscience
freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly,
etc. Political freedom occupies the foreground of discussion. Even
here the question as to its nature has not received a unanimous
answer.
If we take it to be a condition in which every citizen plays a
part in the decisions of will of the whole, in which every citizen
shares in knowledge and participates in action, history shows us.
Political freedom has only been tried in the West. But most of the
realisations have come to naught. They teach us what caused the
collapse of freedom in Athens, in Rome. The question that is
today exciting Europe and mankind is whether the road leads on
to liberty, or whether it passes first into the annihilation of liberty
for an unpredictable period.
What will happen is, in any case, dependent upon men. Here
nothing must be thought of as following a fixed path. All our
human, and particularly our spiritual, activity consists in finding
our way in open possibilities. What will come to pass depends
154 PRESENT AND FUTURE
upon us upon each individual, although no individual decides
the course of history.
The political concept of liberty becomes external and inverted
if it does not retain its foundations in the meaning of liberty, which
must be considered the authentic being and doing of man. Let us
essay a philosophical exposition of the nature of freedom.
1 i ) Freedom is the overcoming of the external and which coerces
me. It comes into being where the other ceases to be alien to
me, where rather I recognise myself in the other, or where the
externally necessary becomes an element of my own existence,
and is known and fashioned as such.
But freedom is also the overcoming of one's own arbitrariness.
Freedom coincides with the inwardly present necessity of the true.
If I am free, I do not desire because I so desire, but because I
am convinced of what is right. The demand upon liberty is,
therefore, to act neither from caprice nor from blind obedience,
but from judgement. Hence the demand to base our desire upon
our own origin by casting anchor in the origin of all things.
I may easily deceive myself, however. Arbitrariness re-establishes
itself as the claim to the right to hold my own opinion, with the
pre-assumption that every opinion is justified by the fact that
someone advocates it. Mere opinion is not judgement, however.
Freedom demands the conquest of mere opinions.
This conquest takes place through the attachment which we,
as individuals, impose upon ourselves in interrelationship with
others. Liberty is realised in community. I can be free only to the
extent that others are free.
Mere opinion melts away in favour of well-founded judgement
in the loving struggle with one's neighbours.
It is transmuted into consciousness of objective truth in the
common socio-political condition, in acceptance of opinions
through publication of the conflict of opinions, but only in the
movement of "dialectical discussion.
Freedom demands both: the depth of human communication
between individuals in their selfhood, and conscious work on the
freedom of public conditions through the forms of judgement and
will-formation.
But absolute truth, and with it final freedom, is never attained.
Truth, together with freedom, is on the way. We are not living in
the eternity of the perfect concord of souls, but in the time of the
ever uncompleted imperative of change.
(2) Freedom demands that nothing be omitted. Everything that
has being and meaning must be given its due. Extreme latitude is
THE FUTURE 155
a condition of freedom. Hence the content of freedom is manifested
through life in polarities and antitheses.
To every position there develops a counter-position. Potentially
freedom is everything. It is not only prepared to take what^ comes
from without as an antithesis, but also to incorporate it into
itself. Freedom is reason in boundless openness and ability to
hear, and it is through freedom in this truly open area of the
widest consciousness that the decisions of history are reached.
Hence freedom seeks the fruitful polarities in which one side
would perish without the other.
Liberty is lost where polarities are surrendered to restriction
either in an order that forgets its own limits or in extremes that
deny order on party grounds or in the one pole that makes
itself the whole. On the other hand, liberty is present where we
preserve our possibilities with open minds and in the tension of
antitheses, decide historically out of the origin in the mutation
of situations and unpredictably discern being in fresh implica-
tions.
(3) But if liberty coincides with the necessity of the true, then
our liberty remains at all times fragile. For we are never certain
of the truth in toto and finally. Our liberty remains dependent
upon something else, it is not causa sui. If it were so, man would be
God. Authentic freedom is aware of its own limits.
In subjectivity, man as an individual is familiar with the experi-
ence of the origin: that I am not free through myself, but that
precisely where I know myself to be authentically free I, at the
same time, know myself to be bestowed upon myself out of a
transcendental matrix. I can be lacking to myself this is the
mysterious boundary to which the possible experience of being-
bestowed-upon-oneself corresponds. Existence, which we are able
to be, is therefore only together with transcendence, through
which we are. Where existence becomes sure of itself and free-
dom lucid they will, at the same instant, become certain of transcen-
dence. . .
In the objectivity of free human community, however, it is the
case that freedom depends upon the freedom of everyone else.
Hence political freedom can never succeed in being the final and
secure permanence of a condition. Here too freedom remains on
the way.
(4) Freedom seems impossible: In polarities there arise alter-
natives: within time I must decide in concrete terms for what and
to what end I am living, I cannot be everything, I must adopt a
bias, I must fight against that which, at the same time, I recog-
nise as inevitable.
156 PRESENT AND FUTURE
In fact, freedom is man's road in time, He makes toward free-
dom out of the demand for freedom. Hence freedom is in move-
ment and in dialectic.
This movement seems to be possible in thinking by reason. We
designate reason the all-perceiving openness, which, in every step
taken by the understanding, is more than understanding. Reason
becomes the representation of the true, which makes use of the
forms of thought given by the understanding. It seeks with their
unfolding the systematic unity of everything thinkable. But then
again, it seeks precisely that which is contradictory. Thus it is the
incentive to bring the understanding to those limits upon which
it founders. It surrenders itself to antitheses, but at the same time,
surpassing the understanding, it is the power to bind them to one
another once more. It does not want to allow anything to fall
apart finally. It wants to overcome the alternatives of the under-
standing. Thus it binds together that which, at the same time, it
drives into the ultimate antitheticalities : world and transcendence,
science and faith, moulding of the world and meditation on
eternal being. Hence reason is intensified dialectic; through
consciousness, it pursues the factual dialectic to its ultimate
consequences.
The overcoming of antitheses, however, gets stranded on the
concrete alternatives of the real situation. This happens wherever
thinking cannot stop at itself, but is called upon to achieve a
realisation in space and time. Here he alone is free who can decide.
Whoever decides, takes upon himself an unfreedom that he lays
hold of by his decision. With the surrender of possibilities he
realises in freedom, but restricts himself. Through realisation
freedom acquires a content, but on the path to unfreedom.
Liberty can never be a possession. There is no isolated liberty.
Hence the individual sacrifices the rigour of his empty liberty in
favour of a liberty that can be won only in being together.
This kind of freedom develops only with the transformation of
man. It cannot be fabricated by compulsory dispositions for men
who do not change, but is bound to the mode of communication
between men prepared for mutation. Hence freedom as such can-
not be planned, but men become free in the right planning of
concrete tasks together.
To bring men to liberty means to bring them to converse with
one another. This remains bound up with illusion, however, if
there are mental reservations which are not put into words
reserves upon which, inwardly breaking off communication, one
draws back if converse amounts, in fact, to a concealment, a
THE FUTURE 157
mere gesture of giving, and the exercise of cunning. Genuine con-
verse between men is without restraint and holds nothing back.
Only in the complete openness of both parties does truth develop
in community.
Contrary to truth in their effects, and thereby contrary to
liberty, are both the bourgeois lulling of the mind by conventions
and the conditions of dictatorship, in which everyone has to
accept one universal ideology, in whose phrases alone it is per-
missible to speak, and which then dominates communication,
even in private letters; equally contrary to truth and to liberty is
the fanatical truth-pathos that claims possession of truth in
aggressive and offensive terms, but employs it only for the purpose
of suppressing others; this fanatical accentuation of truth exhibits
its lack of truth precisely through its lack of willingness to enter
into converse,
In fact, however, no one is in possession of truth as final and
absolute. To seek for truth always means to be ready for com-
munication and to expect communication from others in return.
With the man who desires real truth, and therefore also com-
munication, one can, ipso facto , speak openly on every subject; he
can do the same himself, and in such a manner as neither to injure
nor spare him who really wants to hear. The struggle for truth in
liberty is a loving struggle.
Has this disquisition taught us what freedom is? No. But that is
in the nature of freedom. In reply to the reproach that from all
these propositions we have not learnt what freedom is, it is neces-
sary to call into consciousness the fact that freedom is not an
object. It has no existence which, through its occurrence in the
world, is susceptible of investigation. To scientific-objective cog-
nition of the world there is no such thing as freedom. Hence free-
dom cannot be visualised in a defined concept. However, that
which I cannot know objectively, I can nevertheless become
familiar with by thinking, can bring to conceptual actuality in the
movement of thought and then I can speak of freedom as though
it existed. But it is inevitable that it will contain a maze of mis-
conceptions.
B. POWER AND POLITICAL FREEDOM
In theoretical reflection on that which is desirable and reason-
able we too easily forget the fundamental reality of force, although
it is present to us daily, even though covertly. Force is inescapable.
But if there is no human existence without the reality of force.
i 5 8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
whether the individual is aware of the fact or not, and if force h
per se evil (Burckhardt) , the question is: How is force to be sct^in
its right place, how is force itself to become a factor in the attain-
ment of order, till the point is reached at which it need hardly
manifest itself at all? Or how is force to be divested of its evil
character?
The answer is furnished by the primordial struggle of history:
between the rule of law and the rule offeree. Justice is to become
real through law on the basis of a guiding ideal law, natural law.
This ideal law takes shape, however, only in the historical law of
the society that gives itself laws by which it abides. The liberty of
man begins with the validity of the written law of the State in
which he lives.
This liberty is called political liberty. The State in which freedom
through law prevails is called a constitutional State. A constitutional
State is one in which laws come into being and are altered
exclusively along a legal path. In democracies this path leads via
the people, via its collaboration and participation, whether direct
or indirect, through its representatives, who are periodically
renewed in unimpeachable free elections.
A State is called free when it possesses sovereignty in relation to
other States. When we speak of political freedom, however, we mean
the freedom of a people in the sense of the internal freedom of its
political condition.
The external freedom of a State may be associated internally
with despotism and unfreedom. The external unfreedom of a
State usually results in loss of sovereignty, but not always in
internal unfreedom. For if the subjugating State-power desires
political freedom, it can permit this to develop in the depen-
dent State to the point at which individuals from the subject
people become autonomous members of the all-embracing State
order.
The power of internal political liberty springs originally from
the political self-education of a people, which therein constitutes
itself a political nation. From this point it can arouse and liberate
other peoples. But those who have been liberated remain pupils
politically speaking. They must, in humility, forgo the pride of a
creation of their own.
All this sounds simple, as though, if men were only clear-sighted
and of good will, they could live in ideal liberty through natural
law and the legal system that emanates from it. In the first place,
however, law is always concrete for the particular historical circum-
stances hence laws change with changed circumstances and in
the second, it is necessary to subdue force, which is ready at any
THE FUTURE 159
moment to break the law hence legally guided force directed
against crime.
Where there is force, we are beset by fear where law prevails,
we live in tranquillity. Force is incalculable, arbitrary; the indi-
vidual is its defenceless victim. Law is calculable, a source of
order; it furnishes the individual with the protection of his
existence. The rule of law produces a climate of fearlessness,
unconstraint, liberty and peace of mind. Where force rules there
is fear, silence and concealment, coercion and unrest. In the
constitutional State trust prevails, in the State based on force
there is universal mistrust.
Trust requires a fixed pole, an inviolable fundament, something
that is respected by all, in such a manner that anyone who
violates it can, without difficulty, be cast out as a criminal. This
inviolable fundament is called legitimacy.
Max Weber distinguishes three types of legitimate sovereignty:
traditional (belief in the sanctity of traditions effective since the
remote past), rational (belief in the legality of orders laid down by
law, and in those called to sovereignty through these orders), and
charismatic (belief in the sanctity or the heroic power or the
exemplariness of a person). In these three cases the rulers are
respectively: superiors determined by law, the lord called by
tradition (such as that of hereditary right), and the leader qualified
by his charisma.
Ferrero has formulated the alternative, which is perhaps
schematic, but illuminating for our epoch, between ^ liberty
through legitimacy, or despotism and fear through illegitimacy
(in which the charismatic leader is a type of illegitimacy).
Ferrero sees legitimacy in, for example, hereditary monarchy or
in the expression of the will of the majority through popular
suffrage. A legitimate government is able to rule ^without fear,
confident of the consent of the people. An illegitimate govenx-
ment is afraid of the people, its own force arouses force in others;
out of fear it has to safeguard itself by means of continually
growing political terror, through which, in turn^ fear becomes
the fundamental state of mind of all. Legitimacy is like a magic
spell that creates indispensable order through trust; illegality is
violence that engenders violence everywhere, through distrust and
fear, .
The basis of legitimacy always appears dubious when submitted
to a critique, e.g. hereditary right is irrational, because it also
legitimises fools and men without character; election by the
majority is questionable, because it is partly determined by error
and chance, by the momentary effects of mass-suggestion. This is
i6o PRESENT AND FUTURE
why legitimacy is always in such danger. The understanding can
all too easily cast doubts upon it. Since, however, the sole choice
is between legitimacy and despotism, legitimacy is the only way
along which man can live without fear especially since the mis-
takes made along this way can be rectified. Doubts such as these
explain the intellectual aversion to the fountainhead of legiti-
macy. Our age sees it in elections and votes.
In legitimate conditions there is an infinite amount that is
inadequate, unjust and inappropriate. Those who are elected may
be foolish people, laws may be wrong and injurious, a source of
revolt through their effects. Legitimacy does not afford absolute
protection to those elected or to the laws however. Fresh elections
may remove the former and fresh, legitimate, decisions change the
latter. The fact that both operations are carried out through
legitimate channels renders rectification without force possible.
The consciousness of legitimacy accepts great evils as part of the
bargain in order to avoid the absolute evil of terrorism and fear
under despotism. Political liberty is not the outcome of pure
understanding, but is bound to legitimacy.
In order that force shall not irrupt into universal sovereignty,
legitimacy is needed. Only where there is legitimacy is there
liberty, because legitimacy puts force in fetters. Where legiti-
macy disappears liberty too is annihilated.
In the West, certain fundamental determinants of the idea of
political freedom have been evolved (originally, above all, in
England and America, from whence they were taken over by
France and other States after the French Revolution; they were
elaborated philosophically during the period of the Enlighten-
ment, for instance by Kant). I shall try briefly to set out the car-
dinal points. Political freedom, in the sense of internal political
freedom, possesses the following characteristics :
(1) The liberty of the individual, if every individual is to be
free, is only possible to the extent that it is compatible with the
simultaneous liberty of everyone else.
Legally, scope is left to the individual for the play of his arbit-
rary will (negative liberty), through which also he can shut himself
off from others. Ethically, however, liberty consists precisely in the
openness of life in being together that can unfold without com-
pulsion, out of love and reason (positive liberty).
Only when positive liberty has been realised on the basis of
the legal safeguarding of negative liberty, does the proposition
apply: Man is free in the measure in which he sees freedom
around him, that is, in the measure in which all men are free.
(2) The individual has a dual claim: That he shall be protected
THE FUTURE 161
against force, and that his judgement and his will shall have the
opportunity to make themselves felt. Protection is guaranteed by
the constitutional State, expression of his judgement and his will is
made possible by democracy.
(3) Only when force has been overcome by law can freedom be
realised. Freedom fights for the power that serves the law. It
attains its goal in the constitutional State.
The laws operate in the same fashion for everyone. An altera-
tion in the laws can be made only through legal channels.
The operation of the law guides the use of force where this is
necessary. Hence the police do not exercise force outside the frame-
work of those measures against lawbreakers which are safeguarded
against arbitrary action by legal forms. Hence there are no special
political police.
The freedom of the individual is ensured as freedom of the
person, of property, and of domicile. Its curtailment takes place
only under conditions laid down by law and applying to all. Even
the intervention of authority must respect certain fundamental
rights; for example, no one can be arrested without the reason
being stated, and without trial after the elapse of a certain short
period of time, or without being afforded the legal means of
protest and defence in public court.
(4) To the inviolability of the rights of the individual person-
ality is added its right to participate in the life of the whole. Free
conditions are therefore possible only through democracy, that is,
where it is possible for everyone to play a part in forming the
collective will. Each individual has the chance of making his
influence felt to the degree of his political self-education and the
extent to which his views carry conviction.
Everyone enjoys the same right to make his influence felt
through his vote at elections. The secret ballot is guaranteed.
There is no limit to the number of popular groups that can put
up candidates. Government comes into being through elections
held at fixed intervals.
Hence, in democracy, government can be, and in fact is,
changed, brought down, or reconstructed by constitutional means,
without recourse to violence. Under free democratic conditions,
it is impossible for the same men to remain permanently and
uninterruptedly in the exercise of government.
To the protection of the individual against force, corresponds
the safeguarding of all against the power of one individual. Even
the greatest service to the State does not confer inviolability upon
the power of any individual. Man remains man, and even the best
is a danger if he is not subject to restraint. Hence there prevails a
!6a PRESENT AND FUTURE
deep-seated distrust of perpetual power, and hence even the most
powerful man has, at least for a while, to stand down in the
alternation of electoral popularity. There is no deification of man,
but there is gratitude and respect for him who, when the time is
ripe, gives up his power without opposition.
(5) Formation of the collective will takes place through decision
reached on the basis of converse.
Hence freedom demands public, unrestricted discussion. So that
this may take place within the widest horizons on the basis of the
most complete knowledge possible, freedom demands that what is
knowable shall be known, including news and the vindication of
opinions and that it shall be known to the whole people. For
this reason there must be freedom of the press, freedom of assembly
and freedom of speech. To persuade and carry on propaganda are
permissible, but only in free competition. Curtailment of this
liberty is possible solely in time of war, but even then it can apply
only to the public communication of news, not to the communica-
tion of opinions. A further curtailment arises out of penal law
(protection against libel, slander, etc.).
Everyone reaches his decisions on the basis of converse. The
political opponent is not an enemy. Liberty stands firm only when
it lives in readiness to work together even with the opponent. In
principle, there are no limits to negotiation except in relation to
the criminal; people seek to co-operate in agreement and com-
promise.
(6) Political freedom is democracy, but through forms and in
degrees that have come about historically. They exclude the
sovereignty of the masses (ochlocracy), which is always in alliance
with tyranny. This is the reason for the paramountcy of an aristo-
cratic stratum, which is continually supplemented from the ranks
of the whole people according to achievement, merit and success,
and in which the people recognises itself. It is not a class, nor an
estate, but a political elite. The creation of this elite through educa-
tion, through preservation and selection, is the precondition of a
free democracy. Democracy postulates that no elite shall be fixed
and thereby become a dictatorial minority. It must be kept under
perpetual control through free elections, in which it has to justify
itself, so that the persons exercising the functions of government
come and go, reappear or finally withdraw from the scene.
(7) The conduct of elections and the training of an elite are in
the hands of parties. In a free condition there are necessarily
several parties two at the least. In its concept and in its literal
sense party means a part. In conditions of freedom it is out of
the question for a party to claim the right to be the only one. A
THE FUTURE 163
single party with a claim to totality is a contradiction of liberty.
Its victory spells the end of liberty. Hence free parties desire the
existence of other parties. They do not desire to exterminate
them. Those parties which are, for the moment, in a minority
form the opposition, but they are at all times sustained by their
share in responsibility for the whole. They think in terms of the
instant when, following changed electoral results, it will be their
turn to take over government. The existence of an effective
opposition is the indispensable sign of free conditions.
(8) Democratic technique is bound up with the democratic way of
life. One without the other would immediately come to grief. A
free political condition can only be maintained if the conscious-
ness of freedom in the mass of the population is concerned for the
preservation of freedom and is in a state of constant alert against
all realities that threaten it. We know at what cost liberty was won,
both in the historical process and in the self-education of the whole
people.
Democracy is not possible without liberality. It must be
consciously bound to liberty. Otherwise it falls prey to ochlocracy
and tyranny.
(9) Political freedom is intended to make all other human free-
doms possible. Politics are directed toward the ordering of existence
as the basis, not as the final aim, of human life. Hence political freedom
embraces both the passion for liberty and cool-headedness con-
cerning immediate objectives. So that it shall afford man the
maximum degree of liberty, the legal order must be confined to
necessities of existence. The politics of freedom become impure
when they are mingled with other motives. And the impurity of
politics becomes a source of unfreedom.
(10) One mark of the condition of political freedom is the
severance of politics from the world view. To the extent that liberty
increases, religious (confessional) conflicts and conflicts relating
to the world view are divorced from politics.
Politics are concerned with that which is common to all men,
with the interests of existence that are independent of the content
of any faith, in which all men can understand one another so as to
make room for each other mutually through order, justice and
contract.
The question is, at what point does that begin which is not com-
mon to all men: world view, historically determined faith, all the
particular tendencies that must have room to move. The only
thing they have in common is their need for room to move.
Man has an urge to consider his own life-form the only true one,
to feel every existence that does not resemble his own to be a
1 64 PRESENT AND FUTURE
reproach, and to hate it. From this arises the disposition to enforce
one's own way of life upon everyone else, as far as possible to
model the whole world upon it.
Politics that draw their sustenance from such impulses tend to
violence, multiply violence. They do not hear, do not negotiate
save in appearance but subjugate.
Politics that spring from man's will to liberty, however, effect
a self-conquest that leads to moderation. Their aim is confined to
the interests of existence, in which they seek to give scope to
all human potentialities that are not inimical to that which is
indispensably common to all. They are tolerant toward all who do
not strive after force through intolerance. They follow the path of
a continual diminution of force.
This kind of politics is founded in a faith that desires liberty.
Faith is capable of an infinite variety of contents, but common to
all men of faith is the earnestness of their unconditional demand
for justice and legality in the conditions and processes of human
society. Pious men alone are capable of the grandeur of restraint
and of trustworthiness in ethico-political activity.
Politics relate, so to speak, to a lower plane of humanity, to
existence; therefore, although everything else depends upon them
hence the responsibility and the fervour of their intervention
they have no direct contact with the high goods of inner liberty,
of faith and of the spirit. For these they only create the pre-
conditions.
An example: Christianity is a matter of faith. The Christian as
such can vote for any party and belong to any party, inasmuch
as terrestrial affairs alone are involved; he may vote communist
or capitalist, republican or monarchist. For the manner in which
terrestrial matters are to be ordered does not follow from the
Biblical faith itself, but from ecclesiastically determined par-
ticularities of its manifestations. Evil alone the Christian cannot
desire. Christianity that has become political as such, has become
questionable as a faith.
On the other hand, however, since fervour is possible to
politics that soberly restrict themselves to their true meaning only
as the outcome of faith, it is the pious Christians who have brought
the modern world of liberty into being. Faith does not form the
content, but the general outlook of politics.
Another example: Marxism, in the shape of scientific Marxism,
was an exceptionally fruitful method of cognition; as an absolu-
tised historico-philosophical and sociological total conception it
has become a scientifically demonstrable fallacy and a fanaticis-
ing ideology. The socialisation of the means of production in
THE FUTURE 165
large-scale undertakings, to abolish the private appropriation of
surplus value, is a goal that one can deem just and strive after
without being a believing Marxist.
Articles of faith as a guide-rope for politics are disastrous to
liberty. For the exclusivity of the claim to truth presses toward
totality and thereby toward dictatorship, and thereby toward the
abolition of freedom. In conditions of political liberty, parties
based on a world view are therefore instinctively rejected and
factually ineffective. Movements based on a creed and a view
of the world are inimical to freedom in politics. For there can
be no discussion with men who are fighting for a creed. But in
politics the prime necessity is that discussion shall be universal
and that everyone shall learn to compound with his fellows for the
solution of the problems of existence in which all men can com-
bine all diversities of belief, world views, and interests.
( 1 1 ) The preservation of liberty presupposes an ethos of com-
munal life that has come to be regarded as axiomatic: The feeling
for forms and laws, natural modes of human intercourse, con-
sideration and readiness to help, constant respect for the rights of
others, unfailing readiness to compromise in questions of mere
existence, no oppression of minorities. In this ethos all parties
effective in free conditions remain at one. Between conservatives
and radicals there still prevails a solidarity in the maintenance of
the common element that unites them.
(12) Liberty is safeguarded by a written or unwritten constitution.
There is no absolutely reliable machinery for the preservation of
liberty however. Hence, in free conditions, people are concerned
to protect as inviolable something essential, liberty itself, the
rights of man, the constitutional State, even against temporary
majorities. This inviolable factor must remain beyond the reach
of decisions through election or voting. There must be regulations
(repetition of a decision after the passage of a sufficient period of
time to allow for its reconsideration, plebiscites, a court of justice
competent to give a ruling as to whether a decision does or does
not accord with the constitution) that can come into operation
when a majority momentarily forgets the common fundament of
political freedom. Any such regulations, however, can only
remain dependably effective as long as they are in harmony with
the political ethos of the people. The two together function to
prevent the destruction of democracy by democratic means, the
abolition of liberty through liberty. The trustworthy road to the
expression of the enduring, authentic will of the people is not, in
every case, the absolute validity of democratic techniques, nor,
therefore, is it mechanical majority per se. Even if these democratic
1 66 PRESENT AND FUTURE
techniques arc generally valid, restriction is nonetheless required
where, but only where, the rights of man and liberty itself are
menaced. In extreme cases of this kind, the principles must be
suspended in order to save the principles.
Tolerance must not be exercised toward intolerance, except
where the latter can be treated with indifference as a private
eccentricity that offers no danger to the community. There must
be no freedom for the destruction of freedom.
(13) There is no such thing as & final state of democratic political
liberty satisfactory to all. Tensions will always make their appearance
if the individual is restricted beyond the extent necessary for the
guarantee of equality of opportunity, if free competition is cur-
tailed apart from the prevention of clear injustice, if the natural
inequality of man and merit through achievement are not
rewarded by certain rights, if any number of citizens fail to see in
the laws of the State that justice on the basis of which, in their
own spheres, they themselves live.
Democracy means that everyone shall win the recognition due
to his ability and merit. The constitutional State means the safe-
guarding of this opportunity and thereby the necessity of trans-
forming this legal safeguard according to circumstances and
experience, but without violence and within the framework of
juridical forms.
The will to justice is never entirely satisfied. It puts up with a
great deal on account of the perils that threaten political freedom.
Political freedom always costs something, and sometimes a great
deal, in terms of personal renunciation, personal restraint and
patience. Liberty of the self is not curtailed by losses of politically
determined justice, as long as a struggle for justice is legally
possible, even if it should be protracted and frequently unsuccess-
ful.
Elections on the part of the populace at decisive points in the
course of events are indispensable. Formal democracy free, equal,
secret suffrage is not, ipso facto, a guarantee of liberty, but
rather a threat to it. Only under the presuppositions set out
above an ethos of communal life, self-education in converse for
the mastery of concrete tasks, unconditional defence of the
fundamental rights of man, the earnestness of faith as its founda-
tion is it dependable. Not only may it have ochlocratic conse-
quences with tyranny as an end-result, especially if it is suddenly
imposed from above without self-educational preparation, but
even before this happens it brings opportunist cliques into power,
since the populace does not really know what it is voting for.
Parties then prove a failure. Instead of being organs of the people,
THE FUTURE 167
they become self-sufficient organisations. Instead of an elite they
bring to the forefront experts in Parliamentary routine and men of
spiritually subaltern nature.
The manner in which democracy is defended against ochlocracy
and tyranny, against party cliques and the subaltern mentality,
is a question of vital importance to freedom. Inhibitive regulations
are required to combat the suicidal tendencies of a formal
democracy. The absolute sovereignty of every transitory majority
requires to be curtailed by something stable, which however,
since those who exercise such functions are only human, remains
in turn ultimately dependent upon the humanity that grows out
of the populace and its genuine will to freedom. The populace
must also, in the last resort, choose the inhibitive regulations, but
in such a fashion as to short-circuit the parties, so that the risk of
their achieving sole dominion is avoided.
(14) Everything depends upon the elections. We know the scorn
for democracy, the contempt for decisions by vote. It is easy to
see the obvious mistakes and aberrations and to declare an elec-
tion result or a majority decision absurd in individual instances.
In reply to this it must be pointed out again and again: There
is no other road to liberty than the one that runs via the populace.
Only a radical contempt for man, that makes an exception of the
contemner and his friends, can prefer the road of tyranny. This
latter road leads via the self-appointment of individual groups to
dominion over slaves, who are kept in tutelage while being led
to suppose themselves free, who are moulded by propaganda and
surrounded by stage scenery. In the most favourable instance, this
may result in the establishment of a benevolent dictatorship.
Both of them, democrat and tyrant, address themselves to the
people. The world has entered upon an era in which everyone
who wishes to rule is obliged to make use of this form of speech.
Both the criminal and fraudulent demogague, and the noble
demagogue in the service of liberty address themselves to the
people. Which of them will meet with success can be decided in
each instance only by the people themselves; the decision they
reach is a decision over themselves.
If the ultimate decision is in the hands of the people, however,
then everything possible must be done to assist them to decide
aright. Tyranny invents methods by which putting questions to the
people becomes a mere sham accompanied by public sound and
fury, through which people learn a great deal (so that they may be
turned into serviceable instruments) without becoming capable of
passing judgement. Democracy, on the other hand, since decision
by vote is the only remaining form of legitimacy, seeks to foster the
1 68 PRESENT AND FUTURE
right vote, so that the authentic, enduring will of the people may
find expression.
In the long run, the only means of achieving this is to instruct
the whole population, to awaken their authentic will by rendering
them reflectively conscious of this will.
Men ought not merely to be schooled in technological arts and
skills (through which, if it remains their only knowledge, they
simply become tools that can be used in servitude in response to
the fascist demand: Believe, obey, fight). We humans need educa-
tion in critical thought and comprehension, we need the world of
history and philosophy if we are to become competent to form a
judgement and independent. The whole population must be
raised to a higher level in a continually intensified educational
process; it must be brought from half knowledge to whole know-
ledge, from the contingent thinking of the moment to methodical
thinking, in which everyone can lift himself out of dogmatism
into freedom. This is the hope for the evolution of the majority,
that in decisions and resolutions by vote it will consciously and
deliberately choose that which is better.
A second road is the practical self-education of the people
through the participation of the greater part of them in concrete
tasks. Hence free and responsible local government is indis-
pensable to the genesis of a democratic ethos. Only that which is
practised on a small scale in their immediate surroundings at
every moment of their lives is capable of rendering men suffi-
ciently mature for the tasks which they must realise democratically
on an increasingly large, and finally vast, scale.
A third road is the organisation of the electoral process itself.
The electoral form is of the greatest importance: e.g. the method
of voting (votes for personalities or for a list of candidates), the
computation of the electoral results (majority or proportional
representation), direct or indirect election, etc. There is far
from being one single correct electoral pattern. But the electoral
pattern may determine the course of events.
The decisive factor in preserving liberty and legitimacy and
preventing despotism and political terror remains the holding of
genuine elections. The hallmark of despotism is the abolition of
genuine elections and their replacement by sham elections, with
which it pays its lying respects to our epoch's will to freedom.
Abolition of genuine elections corresponds to the execution of
kings in former times; it is an execution of the sovereignty of the
people. Annihilation of the source of legitimacy brings the most
unrestrained rule of force and the annihilation of liberty.
Tocqueville grasped the profound significance of bowing to the
THE FUTURE 169
will of the majority in relation to the phenomena of the French
Revolution. If prayers were offered to human reason, boundless
trust placed in its omnipotence, and laws, institutions and mores
refashioned ad libitum, it was fundamentally far less human reason
in general that the leaders of the Revolution were thinking of than
their own reason in particular. 'Never has anyone shown less
trust in the wisdom of the community than did these men.' They
despised the crowd almost as much as they despised God. 'True
and respectful subjection to the will of the majority was as foreign
to them as subjection to the will of God. Since that time almost
all revolutionaries have exhibited this dual character trait. This is
very remote from the respect which the English and Americans
evince for the opinion of the majority of their fellow-citizens.
With them reason is proud and full of self-confidence, but never
presumptuous; hence it has led to liberty, whereas our own has
merely invented fresh forms of serfdom.'
There is one very old objection to elections: One vote counts
for almost nothing. It is not worth the trouble of voting. The pro-
cedure detracts from the pleasure of exercising public will. It
diminishes the consciousness of performing a meaningful act.
Here there really is a crucial point for the attitude of mind of
modern democratic man. If one vote counts for almost nothing, the
decision is nevertheless reached through the sum of all the votes,
each of which is only a single vote. Hence the contemporary out-
look is: I cast my vote with complete earnestness and complete
responsibility, and at the same time I know how little the indi-
vidual means. Humility is necessary to us and in humility the
demand to do all that lies in our power. The almost total powerless-
ness of the vote of the individual is combined with the desire that
the decisions of these individuals in their totality shall determine
everything.
(15) But suppose the people do not, in fact, want freedom, justice
and democracy? This does not seem possible in the lucidity of
volition, but only where men are befogged by wants and passions.
It is this, however, that places freedom in constant question.
The concern of all for freedom is necessary. For it is the costliest
possession, that never falls to our lot of its own accord, and is not
maintained automatically. It can only be preserved where it has
risen into consciousness and been accepted into responsibility.
For freedom is always on the defensive, and therefore in danger.
Where the populace no longer feels freedom to be in peril, free-
dom is already lost. Ascendancy slips all too easily into unfreedom
and its organisation of force.
(16) Against the political ideal of liberty, as against every ideal,
i7o PRESENT AND FUTURE
grave contra-indications can be drawn from reality: Liberty is
supposed to have proved an impossibility. But the liberty of man
is itself the origin which may engender as a reality to experience
the very thing declared to be impossible on the basis of previously
asserted experiences.
The difference lies in whether, out of belief in God and in the
consciousness of the task of realising the dignity of man, we
choose the path of freedom and hold firm in boundless patience
through all disillusionments, or whether, in the inverted triumph
of nihilistic passion, we abandon ourselves to the fate of seeing our
nature as humans destroyed by humans.
The crucial hallmark of free conditions is faith in freedom. It is
enough that approximations to the ideal of political freedom have
been attempted and, even though with signal deficiencies, have
been successful. This gives us encouragement for the future.
If we look at the course of world history, we see that the political
liberty of men is rare, indeed an exception. The majority of men
and the greater part of history are destitute of political liberty.
Athens, republican Rome, and Iceland were exceptions of this
kind. And the greatest, most effectual and most powerful excep-
tion of all is England together with America. This was the birth-
place of the influence that set free the States of the continent, but
only in part and without the vigour of the daily, deliberate
assertion of liberty.
Political liberty is a Western phenomenon. If it is compared
with Indian and Chinese manifestations, liberty proves in both
these realms of culture to be devoid of any basic principle and
lacking the continuity of a people, fortuitous and personal. Hence
one may ask whether political liberty is a precondition to human-
ity's attainment of great heights. In view of history this question
must be answered in the negative. High spiritual vitality, creati-
vity and a profound psychic life were also possible in political
unfreedom. We who regard freedom as desirable, for whom
political freedom can never again be divorced from the idea of
humanity, see the historical question of whether something like
political freedom, having its source in the West, will or will not
become a reality for the education of the whole of mankind. And
we know how, in the West, political unfreedom has again and
again been arraigned as the reason for spiritual decline as well,
since Tacitus and Longinus in first-century Rome, at the time of
the loss of liberty and the despotism of the Caesarean monarchy,
wrote that spiritual life is possible only in political liberty. Never-
theless, the meaning of history for the comparative total concep-
THE FUTURE 17*
tion remains to render evident what man can be, under the most
manifold conditions of the ordering of power.
The will to power, and force, are constantly poised to intervene.
They begin in situations of helplessness with the demand, first to
ease the existence that has been encroached upon from without,
then for equality of rights and liberty, then for supremacy, secur-
ity and sovereignty (always in the name of alleged common
interests), and finally for the arbitrary exercise of their own
majesty.
In everyday life, force is engaged in a perpetual struggle with
free reason. Every imperious word that breaks off discussion
arbitrary disregard of reason, which invites rebellion unilateral
decision the command that does not keep within the terms of a
contract and the particular fields of action pertaining to it all
this begins in the private atmosphere of the home, in the corporate
work of an office, the violence which must ultimately break out as
war, because in these preliminaries man has factually prepared
himself for it and adapted himself to it.
In the face of might and force there must be no self-deception.
Theoretical projects of the proper organisation of the world, with-
out a glance at reality, are nugatory. But if we do look at this
reality we tend to formulate an erroneous alternative.
Either to live without force, according to the maxim 'do not
resist evil' prepared to accept all the consequences, to endure
and perish without a struggle.
Or to recognise force as a de facto condition of existence, to have
recourse to it as a factor in politics, and thereby to accept the evil
of force and affirm the inevitabilities of politics.
Both positions are logically unambiguous and seemingly con-
sistent, and yet, by the touchstone of the task confronting man, an
evasion. For the will to use force in the service of the right, to
place might under the control of justice, to appeal in politics to
the upsurging impulses and not merely to practical interests,
to seek the way with the noblest forces of man this will is not
logically unequivocal at all, it cannot be set forth as a perfected
project. It can only find its way historically.
Fixed and one-sided viewpoints are always a sign of failure.
Truth, however, is not a correct organisation of the world no
such correct, final organisation of the world is vouchsafed to man
but freedom of volition in the open space of endlessly possible
world realisation. We may well say there is a deficiency in the
spirit that does not become power, and a deficiency in the power
that does not combine with the profundity of humanity. The
172 PRESENT AND FUTURE
spirit becomes impotent, the power evil. In this tension the his-
torically interminable road is to let might become an element of
right, to prove existence to be the foundation of man's freedom.
What we shall discuss in the following section as socialism and
world unity, fate has interwoven with the pragmatics of power.
Faith has a different meaning. A faith which, as such, allows itself
to be caught up in the pragmatics of power, is already lost as faith.
It grows as truth only within the area of liberty without force.
Then, however, it is the crucial reason for the earnestness with
which the practice, and in it the idea, of socialism and world
unity are espoused.
II. THE BASIC TENDENCIES
A. SOCIALISM
/. Sources and concept of socialism
Several sources nourish the socialist idea and have led, for
more than a hundred years, to demands that can be successfully
fulfilled only in conjunction with one another.
Technology demands the organisation of labour. Machine
technology as such calls for the conduct of large-scale enterprises,
the community of joint labour.
All men must be supplied with the necessary consumer goods.
Every man has the right to expect his existence to be made
possible.
All men demand justice and are today able, with awakened
consciousness, to comprehend, express and advocate their claim.
This claim to justice applies equally to the distribution of the
burden of labour and to a share in its disposable products.
No one can evade these demands today. The difficulty does not
lie in their justification, but in their implementation.
Today the name socialism is conferred upon every outlook,
every tendency and every plan that aims at the ordering of the
life and work of the community according to the criteria of justice
accompanied by the repudiation of privileges. CjSocialisjn" is the
universal tendency of contemporary mankind toward an organ-
isation of labour and of participation in the products of labour that
will make it possible for all men to be free. To this extent almost
everyone is a socialist today. Socialist demands figure in the pro-
grammes of all parties. Socialism is the basic trait of our epoch.
These statements are, however, quite inadequate to define real
modern socialism. Although the latter thinks in terms of the
THE FUTURE 173
principle of justice, it also, in the shape of Marxism (communism),
thinks in terms of a total knowledge of the course of human affairs.
The realisation of communism is conceived, by the allegedly
scientific method of historical dialectics, as necessary. The com-
munists' own actions take place in the certainty of this necessity,
which they only hasten. According to the judgement and intention
of its believers, however, the consequence of the realisation of
communism will not merely be justice in the ordering of existence
for men as they are, but a transformation of humanity itself. Man
will emerge from the self-estrangement that he has suffered
through class division, and attain his authentic nature in the
classless society, with an unprecedented freedom and spiritual
fruitfulness, with a happiness springing from the harmonious
solidarity of all.
Scientific communism is a typically modern phenomenon, inas-
much as it bases the salvation of man on science as it understands
it. It needs nothing else.
On the road to the goal, according to the dialectical view of
history, a period of the greatest distress is an inevitable transition.
A peaceful realisation through renunciation on the part of the
capitalists and through free agreement, achieved in negotiation,
as to the structure of the new society is deemed impossible on
account of the spiritual make-up of the capitalist holders of power,
which is determined by class rule. Dictatorship of the proletariat
is the turning-point on the way to the establishment of justice and
liberty.
The attainment of this end requires, firstly, the power which, in
the crisis of capitalism, falls into the hands of dictatorship, and
secondly, planning on the basis of science.
2. Power
Ideas may deceive us into thinking that what is true and just
must also come to pass. The belief that an idea is true may fal-
laciously cause us to suppose that its correctness will, ipso facto,
compel its realisation. It is true that ideas arouse motives, but
they make their influence felt in the real course of events only on
condition that they are backed by the solid realities of power.
Socialism can only be realised through power that is capable of
using force when it comes up against resistance.
The manner in which the energy of the socialist idea combines
with power, utilises it, succumbs to it, or masters it, will be decisive
for the future liberty of man. To win liberty in justice, socialism
must unite with the forces that save man from violence both
from the arbitrary will of the despot and from the arbitrary will
174 PRESENT AND FUTURE
of masses in temporary majorities. From the beginning of things
this has happened only through legality.
The principles of political freedom evolved in the West are in
danger. Only a socialism that makes them its own can remain a
socialism of liberty. It alone will be concrete and human; it alone
will avoid the abstractions of doctrines, which, as a basis for
action, represent the path to unfreedom: in that justice demands
the sovereignty of all, it unwittingly places mass sovereignty in
the hands of demagogues, who at once become despots, make
slaves of everyone and establish a life of fear. It is the path on
which growing fear forces the despots to intensify political terror,
for they live all the time in distrust, and by their actions they
deliver everyone into a life of fear and distrust, since every man is
under a continual threat.
The power that becomes master of socialism, instead of socialism
making use of it, grows through socialism's basic trait of planning,
if it leads to total planning.
Planning is possible only through power, total planning only
through total power. As long as the law permits ad libitum accu-
mulation of capital, monopoly is possible; monopoly leads to
power over consumers, as well as over the workers and employers
of the monopoly organisations, because they control the whole of
the labour field in question, so that no possibility of employment
exists outside them; dismissal means annihilation. Total planning
is possible only through the agency of the State that possesses
absolute power to start with, or acquires it through its total
planning; it is infinitely superior to the power of any monopoly
organisation in a capitalist economy, a power of a compass and
exclusivity in its hold on private life such as history has never
before seen.
5. Planning and total planning
All over the world, people's minds are exercised by the problem
of planning. Plans on an immense scale and their implementations
are there to be seen.
Planning is any arrangement with a purpose. To this extent,
planning has formed an element in human existence from the
beginning. Animals live without plan, according to their instincts.
In order to find our way about within the multiplicity of planning,
we can make certain distinctions:
By whom is planning carried out? Planning is either done by
private initiative in undertakings competing with other private
institutions the limit is the amalgamation of those whose
interests lie in a particular field in trade unions and monopolies,
THE FUTURE 175
in order to eliminate competition or else by the State. In its
planning the State either confines itself to the ordering of free
initiative by means of laws, or it embarks itself upon undertakings
that bear a monopoly character a priori] in the latter case, the
limit is reached when the State, in principle, assumes control of
everything in total planning.
What is planned? An individual undertaking or the economy
as a whole or the overall ordering of human existence in general.
Modern planning began in the economic field, and this is still
its proper sphere. Planned economy had its origin in want. To
begin with, human collaboration in the economic field arose
without any overall plan. Planning was the outcome of a situation
of disaster, in which the work process and the whole enterprise
were in danger. It was an answer to the question: how can the
situation be improved, how can we save ourselves?
World economy came into existence only toward the end of the
nineteenth century. In contrast to previous local economies,
sufficient to satisfy local needs and therefore autarchic (they
included the purveyance through trade of extreme luxury goods
of an inessential nature to those few who possessed wealth), all
peoples in their growing prosperity were now dependent upon
each other through the exchange of mass products and raw
materials.
This new interdependence was accompanied by disturbances
which were at first incomprehensible to the bulk of the people (as
for instance when the price of corn, and with it great fluctuations
in the prosperity of agriculture, depended upon the size of the
harvest in Canada or Russia) . With want came the call for State
aid. All interested parties in many respects at variance with each
other wanted protection by the State. The outcome was the
erection of barriers and cordons, beginning with customs and
excise regulations, and ending with the desired new autarchy of
the totalitarian regime.
All this remained within bounds as long as there was peace, but
became total during the two World Wars. Schematically inter-
preted, the antithesis of possibilities now visible looks like this:
World economy, which is as a whole unplanned and within
limits rational, which operates through the free market and
enriches everyone, presupposes peace and has peace as its goal.
The coercion that is planned as a whole, apparently rational but
in fact accompanied by growing poverty, that interrupts inter-
course or places it under the surveillance of the State, that takes
the temporary interests of the individual State as its yardstick, is
176 PRESENT AND FUTURE
the consequence of world wars and, in its turn, has a tendency to
fresh wars.
Briefly: Some sort of distress is always the source of planning.
The most profound distress of all, that caused by war, is the source
of total planning.
The meaning and justification of such planning in times of
distress are then transformed by the fact that the State's will to
power, the will to defence and conquest, reaches the maximum
degree of momentary energy through total planning. Concomi-
tant with this is the imposition of the most intense shortages in the
interests of armament production. Existence is staked on military
conquest, which is alone capable of reversing one's own bank-
ruptcy by the plunder of others. That which is of practical value
to military ventures is established as a permanent condition, with
a view to a planned or feared war.
Thereupon a fresh motive comes into being. The condition of
absolute power, necessitated by war, is to be carried over into the
peace as a permanent condition of absolute sovereignty. Whereas
the first motive looked upon war as the normal condition, for
which peace merely serves to create the preparations, peace may
indeed be deemed by this second motive the normal condition.
But in peace the greatest happiness of all, justice and the satis-
faction of natural needs, is to be realised through the total plan as
a permanent condition, and thereby through a concurrent
absolute sovereignty. Certain erroneous ideas are involved here.
(1) In the want attendant upon war or some natural catas-
trophe, total planning is clearly the only means of providing and
distributing the necessities of life so that the shortage falls equit-
ably upon all and everyone receives a small but equal share. What
is in this case done meaningfully and for limited purposes under
abnormal conditions, is transferred onto the totality of the
economy, work, production, supply, and above and beyond this
onto the whole existence of man. The form of assistance during
shortage is made into the form of life in general.
(2) Machine technology is thought, by its nature, to call for
direction by an omnipotent State. There are, however, limits to
the necessary large-scale organisation of technology, and beyond
them its efficiency diminishes. Mammoth organisations become
rigid; they desire merely to keep themselves going, and not to
transform themselves, and where monopolisation has taken place
they become hostile to new inventions. Only in the struggle of
competition, unbounded by legal injunctions, can developments
and progress, the trying out of the new and the seizing of oppor-
tunities be expected with any confidence; here success comes from
THE FUTURE 177
the full exertion of all the forces of the spirit, because bankruptcy
threatens if they fail.
(3) The demand for justice is directed against the misery and
crying injustice that arose out of the free trade economy of the
liberal era. Here the basic idea of liberalism is reproached with the
disastrous confusions which did in fact invade liberalist thinking
in the service of egoistic interests. Liberalist theory, as W. Lipp-
mann shows, confused the privileges of corporations (which may
indeed be abolished) with the rights of man, which are inviolable
it confused the only limited immunity of juridical persons with
the sanctity of natural persons it confused the possessions of
monopolies with private property. The justified struggle against
the errors of liberalist thought must not become a struggle against
liberality itself.
4. Conception of the economic structure: Free competition or planned
economy?
A planned economy exists wherever competition and the free
market are restricted or abolished. It began with large-scale
enterprises, which, as trusts, established monopolies, and passed
from there to State economy.
The question for the economy is whether it should be a market
economy or a planned economy. Which is more successful: the
reason of all, realised in the play of free initiative in competition,
or the reason of a few technical brains, that realise the happiness
of all in total planning? Is risk on the market and decision in com-
petition preferable, or direction through commission and the
allocation of labour and profits on the part of a bureaucracy? Who
is to be the arbiter? The market, on which success or failure takes
place in competition, or the unilateral disposition of key men
operating through bureaucracy?
Where there is free competition, everyone can win recognition
for his products, achievements, ideas or creations, if he can find
a public for them. The taste, needs and will of all win recognition
for themselves in their multiformity. The whole population
decides, and within it also a small minority. In place of monotony
there is endless plenty. The particular spirit can fashion its par-
ticular environment. Competition provides a spur. Agon leads at
all times to the highest possible achievements.
Discussion of the question is confined, initially, to the economic
field. Here total planning represents elimination of the market in
favour of statistical computation and determination of labour,
production and distribution according to the knowledge of people
employed for this purpose, according to their aims and tastes. The
178 PRESENT AND FUTURE
result is extolled as a rational economy for the satisfaction of needs,
in contrast to what is characterised as the profit economy of the
free market.
The effects of total planning obviously extend beyond the
economic sphere, however, to the indirect guidance of the whole
of human life, as far as the world of spiritual creation, which, more
than any other activity, is dependent upon the freest initiative of
individuals and is stifled by any planned direction. In the liberal
world it was possible for the taste of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself to
remain a fundamentally private reality despite its^ inflation
through the wealth behind it, and the support of compliant State
organs within a much more comprehensive spiritual life, upon
which it made no impression and by which those vacuities were
despised or scoffed at. In the totalitarian world, however, Hitler's
taste determined who was allowed to paint at all and who was not.
The freedom of individuals to choose what they prefer for the
satisfaction of their needs conies to an end; the manifoldness of
supply and opportunities of trying things out to see if there are
a few people to whom they appeal are at an end. For example,
Kant's works are only for a minority, they have no further place
in a planned economy in which, in the long run, the sole criterion
is the needs of the masses together with the moods of those who
hold power or the doctrines of the leaders of the State, who could
also, if they wished, order the publication of mass editions of
Kant's Critiques. The vast multiplicity of free needs makes it
possible for the best and still unknown creative workers also to
flourish, alongside the trash beloved of the masses, because there
are certain groups that respond to their work, desire it and buy it.
By contrast, in planned economy a goods-index must be pre-
supposed that is oriented upon the needs of the masses. Instead of
man, it is bureaucratic minds that decide what spiritual organism
shall be permitted to grow.
Events have proved that economic total planning cannot be
confined to the economic sphere. It becomes universal for the life
of man. Direction of the economy leads to direction of the whole of
life, in consequence of the form of life to which it gives rise.
Whoever desires economic liberty in reliance on the course of
affairs when all human energies are aroused by competition,
demands the progressive striking of fetters, opening of national
frontiers and establishment of universal free world intercourse. He
imagines a future in which bureaucracy will grow less and less.
Whoever, confronted by disorder, unpredictable economic
crises, the squandering of labour power and over-production, the
evils of unemployment and hunger, when technology offers the
THE FUTURE 179
possibility of wealth, places his hope of salvation in total planning,
demands the progressive concentration of power, until everything
is directed by a central authority.
It has been said that both these alternatives are erroneous, and
that truth lies in the middle with the extremes excluded. But the
issue is a fundamental decision as to which of the two possibilities
is to have pre-eminence. After the fundamental decision has been
taken, the other standpoint will certainly be assimilated as a
subordinate, but in such a manner as to lose its totality.
In a free market economy no steps can be taken without far-
reaching planning but in this case it is restricted and the plan
will include the element of laissez-faire and the re-establishment
of the conditions under which competition remains as a method
of selection and confirmation. The planning of non-planning
creates a framework and opportunities by means of laws.
In addition, there are certain domains in which planning will
be carried out, for restricted spheres, in relative totality, i.e. so as
to eliminate competition: thus for example, in public utility
undertakings, railways and postal services, in the exploitation of
raw materials susceptible of purely quantitative measurement,
such as coal-mining, etc. Here freedom is retained through the
fact that the acquisition of these raw materials is open to all on
terms of equality, and there is no selective allocation to favoured
consumers.
The question is on the pre-assumption that the country is well
supplied with the means of production, as distinct from the con-
ditions of shortage prevailing in a war-devastated land where
and to what extent planning through economic guidance exer-
cised by vast organisations becomes reasonable. Maximum prac-
tical advantage is by no means the only criterion. In the interests
of liberty even the risks of crises and shortages may be accepted as
part of the bargain, when distress through the threat to existence
becomes absolutely compelling. When there is planning, however,
the alternative is between privately organised and State planning.
To be sure, monopolies will not be able to dispense with legally
restricted State control, if the interests of the nation as a whole are
to be protected. In view of experiences of the unprofitability of
State enterprises, of the reduced productivity of labour in them,
of the risk of red tape that comes with bureaucratisation, there
always remains the question of how far planning by private
monopolies, controlling themselves through managements drawn
from their own factories and offices, is better able to achieve the
aim than State planning. The criterion of judgement would be the
best way of avoiding the danger of the spur provided by natural
i8o PRESENT AND FUTURE
competition being lost and replaced by a State terror involving
compulsory labour accompanied by liquidation of the right to
strike, of freedom of movement, and of all militant initiative on
the part of the workers for the advancement of that justice which
is never finally attained.
The planning and organisation of the technological apparatus,
which is indispensable to its efficient functioning, does not seem
incompatible in principle with free competition, the constitutional
State and human liberty in general.
Total planning: It dispenses with the incentive of competition,
and therefore seeks to establish substitutes, such as output con-
tests. But the principle of free agon is suppressed. The arbiter is
appointed, the decision does not spring from the nature of the
matter through the agency of unimpeachable experts. Certain
qualities that have little to do with the matter play a part in the
picking of the winner. Initiative is supposed to be stimulated, but
it remains hemmed in by conditions. The whole concern heads
toward the sullenness that comes from exhausting work without
any hope of carving out a path of one's own by one's own achieve-
ments.
We can see before us two major trends, between which we have
always had to choose as the origins of our decisions, if we were
acting clearly:
Either we stand before comprehensive destiny in free choice.
We have confidence in the chances of the free interplay of forces,
notwithstanding the frequency with which they give rise to
absurdities for there are always opportunities of correcting
them.
Or we stand before the world planned in its totality by man,
with its spiritual and human ruin. 11
5. The medium of planning: Bureaucracy
Where undertakings involving large masses of men proceed in
an orderly manner, bureaucracy is needed. Hence the latter
arises wherever there are such undertakings. It operated in
Ancient Egypt, in the ancient world empires, in the Norse State
of Frederick II, but not in the Greek City States. Modern tech-
nology, however, furnishes the organisation and effects of bureau-
cracy with unprecedented scope. It can now become really
totalitarian.
Bureaucracy is sovereignty based on regulations and orders
issued by officials of the civil service. It functions like a machine,
but the implementation of these regulations is determined by the
nature and outlook of the officials.
THE FUTURE 181
We can draw up a schema characterising the hierarchy of civil
services types :
The ideal civil servant, like the artist, thinks almost continually
of his vocation a high government official, a hundred and twenty
years ago, asked on his deathbed what he was thinking about,
replied, 'About the State'. He obeys the regulations in free under-
standing, remains bound to the meaning of his occupation, lives in
the concrete situations on which he has to decide; he must confine
the ethos and activity of bureaucracy to the indispensable mini-
mum, continually ask himself where it can be avoided, and act in
such a manner that bureaucracy works rapidly and clearly and
remains human and helpful in its operation.
A grade lower we find the officious civil servant, who already
takes a delight in bureaucracy as such, zealously strives to expand
and complicate its ramifications, enjoys his function, but is
trustworthy and upright in his obedience to the regulations.
The third grade has lost the ethos fidelity to the State and to
the service, and trustworthy integrity. Corruptibility and mood
become decisive. The civil servant is overcome by an atmosphere
of emptiness and senselessness. He gets slack, work is reduced to
sitting away the office hours. Anyone who works more zealously is
regarded as a disturber of the peace. Instead of immersing himself
in the concrete matter in hand, he is left with nothing but a
desire to get through the work. Difficulties are settled, not solved.
Everything is done in a dilatory fashion, it is postponed and
brought into an atmosphere of unclarity. The official enjoys power
as one who is powerless in all other respects, but in certain con-
nexions is in a position to decide the fate of individual men. The
climate of aridity is galvanised by figures of speech concerning
official duty, the interests of the community and justice. He works
off his ill-humour on those who cannot defend themselves. In his
dealings with the public he shows not the friendly helpfulness that
characterises the attitude of an undertaking to its customers, but
the attitude of dominion to its object* The bearer of this 'arrogance
of the civil servant' becomes rude, inconsiderate in his dealings
with the public, sly and patronising, given to procrastination,
keeping people waiting, evasion and negation.
Objectively, this degeneration of bureaucracy from an origin-
ally meaningful form of sovereignty that kept within bounds and
was sustained by human personalities, to an arid apparatus of
universal inhibition and oppression, can be characterised in the
following manner:
Bureaucracy is a means. But it tends to make itself its own end.
The crucial step is the one that leads from bureaucracy as a tool
X 8 2 PRESENT AND FUTURE
that serves, to bureaucracy that becomes autonomous. In this
autonomous bureaucracy, the ethos of self-limitation is replaced
by the tendency to boundless self-expansion.
In the first place, this lies in the nature of government by
regulation. If the measures taken by bureaucracy bring about
disaster and chaos at the expense of the population there is no
longer any feeling of responsibility to make it reverse its own
mistakes. On the contrary, all that happens merely serves as an
excuse for the issue of fresh and more extensive regulations. Faith
in the panacea of government by regulation seeks to extinguish
initiative in the free play of activity and self-help through invent-
ive achievement. There is one remedy for difficulties: fresh
regulations. This path represents a levelling down through the
subaltern mentality of bureaucrats to the point at which the
subaltern mentality is common to all in the absence of any con-
structive idea. The complication of orders and the disenfranchise-
ment of the populace simultaneously compel this populace to
place a greater amount of labour-power at the disposal of bureau-
cracy for the execution of its orders. Ultimately everyone ends up
in the service of the unproductive apparatus.
To this is added the solidarity of interests of all the officials of a
bureaucracy. The apparatus must continue to exist and expand,
because it is a matter of life and death for the value and status of
its bearers. The apparatus, which is supposed to serve the interests
of the population, serves itself. It demands stabilisation and
security for itself.
This is possible because its very complexity removes it from
public control. It becomes opaque and moves continually further
out of reach of criticism. Finally no one can see through it, save
those who are within it, and even they can only see through their
own special field. It becomes immune to attack either from the
side of the populace or from the side of the supreme organs of
government. It lives from the solidarity of interests of the em-
ployees.
This condition persists even when a dictator makes the appara-
tus his tool with all the means of terrorisation. Then the apparatus
is indeed transformed as regards the mental climate of its function-
aries; it becomes a means to the implementation of political
terror. But the process is one of the favouring or victimisation of
individuals and groups, without anyone coming into possession of
absolute power. Through its participation in the terror, the
apparatus grows anew in its autonomy. Even the dictator who
issues the orders must fall in with the solidarity of interests of this
apparatus, and permit the corruption he has himself intensified.
THE FUTURE 183
6. The limits of meaningful planning
Planning first becomes a problem for discussion at the point
where the question arises: Shall planning be confined to palpable
individual purposes, and the course of events as a whole be left to
the free play of forces or shall the whole of everyone's activity
be ordered by a plan? Shall we confine ourselves to short-term,
circumscribed plans, or shall we adopt total planning?
The crucial question is: Is there a dividing-line between that
which it is possible to plan, and that which it is impossible to
plan with any prospect of success? If such a dividing-line exists,
can it be determined?
Total planning would necessarily have to be supported upon
total knowledge. Total planning is preceded by the decision as to
whether a true total conception, a knowledge of the whole, does
or does not exist.
Total knowledge would appear to render possible an adum-
bration of the future. This adumbration becomes the programme
for action. The intention is to foster by one's own actions that
which is bound to come, to participate by informed activity in the
necessary course of events. The wish is to take an active grasp of
the whole, by virtue of one's knowledge of it.
The prerequisite total knowledge does not exist however. This
is true even of the economic realm.
No one can oversee the entanglement of economic realities. Our
knowledge never extends beyond simplifying aspects. We are
already living in an unintentionally created world. If we pursue
within it our finite purposes on the basis of our finite knowledge,
we bring about with these purposes results that we could not
foresee. No will can create this world in its entirety, no cognition
can know it. Just as we cultivate organic life, but destroy it by
total interventions without being able to reconstitute it, so we do
the same to the world of existence historically created by man. A
virtually infinite number of factors determine the prosperity of a
flourishing economy. No intelligence can calculate them in their
totality. The science of economics itself is a means of experiment,
not a system for the cognition of the whole.
Now, however, we possess a knowledge of man and of history
that is different in character from the knowledge of nature and the
interconnexions of economics. It is a contemplative knowledge, of
which practical application forms no part. Thus we see the
spiritual worlds of a culture, understand them, make them vividly
real to ourselves by research and analysis. Thus, further, we see
the meaning of human personalities, visualise the possible exist-
1 84 PRESENT AND FUTURE
ence of man in relation to transcendence. But we cannot make it
our purpose to become a personality, to create a culture, to pro-
duce a spiritual work. What we purpose is at any given time the
prerequisite or path to such possibilities, which are realised in the
main unintentionally. More than this: We here destroy, if we^turn
into a purpose the thing for instance, to become a personality
which, by its very nature, cannot be willed, but must be bestowed
upon us, even though our volition and action within a purposive
framework, our constant activity, remain a precondition of this
bestowal upon us. A fundamental misconstruction is involved if
we attempt to act purposefully on the basis of our contemplative
or visualising knowledge. Only in the realm of finite purposes can
we reach our goal according to a plan through information and
the utilisation of means. In the realm of the living, things are
different. To make this a purpose and to plan it simply causes it
to disintegrate. That which is possible cannot, on that account,
also be purposively willed, without disturbing or even destroy-
ing it.
Nietzsche says: 'In any case, if mankind is not to condemn itself
to destruction through the agency of a consciously total govern-
ment, a knowledge of the preconditions of culture, surpassing in
extent anything we have acquired up to now, will have to be
found as a scientific criterion for ecumenical goals. 5 This contains
a warning for all present abortive endeavours but at the same
time commits the error of supposing such a total knowledge to be a
sufficient prerequisite for a total planning that takes its direction
from it or employs it as a means. Total knowledge is impossible, on
account of the non-objective nature of the comprehensive whole.
Let us convince ourselves. From a rational point of view, total
planning is not possible at all. It presupposes illusion as to our
own knowledge and ability. In all planning, the crux of the matter
is to see, in the concrete situation of the moment, the borderline
at which one steps over from reasonable particular planning into
the sphere of senseless and destructive planning of the whole.
Hence the question arises: What is the extent of a reasonable and
beneficial plan? In principle, the limits can be demonstrated by
the following facts :
(1) We never know the whole in its entirety, but are always in
the midst of it.
(2) Every action produces effects that were not intended and not
foreseen.
(3) Planning is possible only in the realm of the mechanical and
rational, not in that of the living and of spiritual reason.
THE FUTURE 185
The inclination to aim at total plannings, despite their im-
possibility, has two paramount sources: The model of technology,
and the misleading influence of a supposed total knowledge of
history.
The source of total planning in technology; Where disturbances
appear in technology, the attempt is made to overcome them by
means of purposive plans. Technological development itself
achieves remarkable things in order to master through technology
the damage that technology has wrought. Machines are improved
and conditions of work made as favourable as possible. Beyond
this reasonable point, however, recourse is had to dubious
rational measures.
The dangers of a too rapid switch-over are countered by the
purchase and sterilisation of new patents. It is sought to counter-
act the discontent, exhaustion and emptiness of men by the
planned moulding of leisure, by organisation of the home and of
private life.
More than this: It is hoped to obviate technology's lack of direc-
tion as a whole by the technicisation of its administration. Organisa-
tion of the whole in State socialism is intended to enable the correct
path to be found, as it were, automatically, through the medium
of control and computation on the basis of cogent knowledge.
Since such remarkable things have been achieved through
planning within the realm of technology, the road leads from
here, in intellectual thoughtlessness attendant upon fascination
by technology, to the idea of a technocracy the administration
of technology by technology itself which will put an end to
every evil. It is superstitious belief in the universal constructive
ability of science that presses along the road of total planning.
The Age of Technology seeks the technological realisation of the
idea of the overall reconstruction of human existence.
Attempts to put technology on the road to salvation through
technology, however, do not suffice, and are, in fact, bound to
make matters worse. In the last analysis, the Devil will not be
driven out by Beelzebub.
The reconstruction of human existence cannot be planned and
organised in toto. Firstly: Man must go on living all the time, he
cannot take a moment off in order to begin the whole thing over
again from the beginning. He has always to proceed from the
status quo at any given time. Secondly: Dominion over technology
is not to be attained through technology, nor its conquest by
technocracy, which would rather represent a final levelling down,
paralysis and enslavement.
Liberty on the bournes of technology is man himself, who does
!86 PRESENT AND FUTURE
not allow himself to sink into the constraints of the merely tech-
nological, but draws from deeper origins the sustenance to keep
alive his powers. The boundary of all planning and fabrication is
set where man must give himself freely to his opportunities. Here
what he can achieve is essentially incalculable; when purpose-
fully willed it is spoiled or destroyed. It comes toward us from out
of the future, astonishing, simple, and overwhelming, beyond and
before all technology, including technology within itself. Where
man has this openness in front of him and first lives out of and
toward it, he is liberated from technicisation of his view of ^the
world, from the technicist forms of the consciousness of being,
whose operation is today taken for granted.
The source of total planning in the supposed total knowledge of history:
Historical philosophy, as a terrestrial total knowledge^ developed,
through secularisation, from Christian historical thinking the
unique history of mankind made up of Creation, the Fall, the
appearance of the Son of God, the end of the world and the Last
Judgement. St. Augustine's total conception, based on the religious
idea of Providence, was transformed into the idea of the necessity
of the concept, which, with Hegel, governs history dialectically, and,
as the dialectical idea, enters into an obscure combination with the
idea of causality in the necessity of which Marxism thinks. Finally,
in the vulgarised interpretation of history, the scientific idea of
causality was transferred onto the totality of events, in the shape
of beliefs in the knowable necessity of the historical process.
With this spiritual world as its point of departure, it is today an
almost natural illusion to suppose it possible to apprehend history
in toto. In this assumption there prevail the inexact ideas, which
do nothing to clarify themselves, that: The total course of events
is necessary, is fundamentally already laid down sufficient
investigation will enable it to be recognised in this necessity the
future follows from the past with cogent necessity the course of
the future may be inferred from the past wrong prognoses do
not rest upon a pre-assumption that is erroneous in principle, but
upon inadequate insight, which, in principle, can be improved and
developed to a point at which it is adequate.
Isolated prognoses that hit the mark seem to substantiate this
basic conception; for example, Burke J s astonishingly accurate
prognosis of the further course of the French Revolution, Burck-
hardt's adumbration of future conditions, Nietzsche's prophecy of
nihilism. Nevertheless, these were all accurate predictions based
on clear discernment of what was already present.
The world of history as a whole, however, is incalculable; in
THE FUTURE 187
detail it is full of connexions of causality, motive, situation and
meaning that are susceptible of investigation. All of them are par-
ticular when they become realisable to our perception. Their
cognition will never become a proven cognisance of the whole.
The error of the total conception is shown in monocausal think-
ing that traces everything back to a single principle, either
through the absolutisation of a tangible causal factor (e.g. the
economic factor in history), or through the totalisation of a single
process, which has allegedly been apprehended in its substance
(e.g. in the dialectic of the objective spirit in Hegel).
The task is to live in the area of historical possibilities, to see
the open world; man lives in the world and not above it. We
illumine this area by our hypotheses, by the play of internally
consistent images of evolution, by the attempt to draw various
lines into the future from the realities of the past and present. But
we do not permit such images, ideas and constructions to domin-
ate us. They are orientations and remain questions. To take them
for knowledge of reality is deleterious both to truth and to our
actions. Only by holding open possibilities do we preserve the
meaning of action in the particular.
Interpretation of meaning is, of course, different from causal
historical cognition. What happens behind consciousness, and
from there furthers or inhibits, we apply interpretively to what
constitutes for us the whole issue of history: To be human means
to be free; to become specifically human is the meaning of history.
It is a European hope that something will come to meet this our
meaning, ready to assist it; but it will render us assistance only if
we actively lay hold of it. For without freedom, without merit and
blame, spontaneously as in nature, nothing of that which con-
stitutes for us the major issue happens in history.
All total planning in the human kingdom operates with man as
though he were known, and with expectations based on know-
ledge of man. In this situation there are two contrary positions :
Man is always the same. The edifice of society is erected with
him as he is, in order to provide all, who as humans do not change
their nature, with as many goods and as much liberty as possible.
Or else: Man is not always the same, he changes with the con-
ditions under which he lives, through these conditions themselves,
along the opaque path of a metamorphosis through which he
passes in the course of generations hence the edifice of society is
erected in such a manner as to enable the metamorphosis of man
to take place through development of the specifically human ele-
ment in humanity. An ideal of humanity is the target at which plan-
1 88 PRESENT AND FUTURE
ning is aimed. The new condition of society is possible with trans-
formed man, the new man is possible only through this condition. It
is as if the planner were able to oversee man in knowledge, as though
he wished to create him as an artist creates the work of art out of
the material available to him, a presumption that sets man above
man (as in the idea of the young Marx, or in Nietzsche's superman) .
Neither of these positions is true, however. Neither shows the
right road. Rather can we only live from the decision to work for
freedom, and make this decision itself a factor, but in the humility
of not knowing the final outcome. That is why the modern ques-
tion is such a burning one: What is it reasonable to plan, and
where does the boundary of planning and fabrication lie?
Thus there arises the necessity of acting without knowledge of
the whole, and hence without knowledge of all the consequences
of my actions and at the same time, of these actions becoming a
factor in the whole, in which I desire that my actions shall con-
tribute toward the true and the best.
If the right organisation of the world does not exist, either for
my knowledge or as the factual pattern of a possible future, then I
must relinquish the instinctive touchstone of the understanding,
consisting of the right organisation of the world, of perfection and
the comprehended whole. Instead of this we must think and act in
the totality of the world, each of us at his place. We must plan and
purpose, surrounded by the whole, which, however, is present not
as something that can be known, but as idea.
For this reason, openness to the future is a precondition of
liberty, latitude of interpretation a precondition of the clarity of
the present decision. Speculation on the future is precisely not
insight into an unequivocal necessity, but into an open space of
possibilities and probabilities.
7. Socialism and total planning
Socialism which, as communism, in its enthusiasm for the
salvation of mankind that it feels certain of securing, takes steps to
mould the future by force in total planning, and socialism as the
idea of gradual realisation in the intercommunity of a free
democracy, are alien to one another. The former consumes the
man who surrenders himself to it in a faith that appears in the
guise of a science; it treats the unbeliever as a material available
to manipulation by force. The latter casts no spell, lives in the
present, requires the sobriety of reason and the humaneness of
unceasing communication.
When, in the course of its implementation, socialism comes up
THE FUTURE 189
against limits, only the calm of reason can be of assistance. An
example is the question of how far the planned organisation of
work can and must go at any given time, and the way in which it
puts an end to liberty when it oversteps this limit. Another such
question is how far justice is conditional upon equality, and how
far precisely upon the diversity of tasks and the conduct of life
determined by them. Justice cannot be achieved solely by quan-
tity and calculation. Over and beyond this, in the realm of
qualitative differences, it is a task of infinite dimensions.
Communism may be characterised in contradistinction to
socialism as the absolutisation of tendencies which are true in the
first place. They then become fanatical through this absoluteness,
and in practice cease to operate as a recasting of historical reality,
which instead they melt down to a dead level. Some examples:
Firstly: Socialism sets itself in opposition to individualism. It
sets community against isolation, against self-will, self-interest
and the caprice of the individual.
This opposition, one-sidedly absolutised, means: The individual
is denied his rights altogether. Whereas socialism started out with
the intention of giving all men the chance to realise their per-
sonalities, it becomes, through the levelling down of the individual,
the destroyer of personality.
Secondly: Socialism sets itself against capitalism. It desires to
substitute common ownership of the means of production for their
private ownership.
Absolutised, this has as its result: Instead of the question being
confined to the private ownership of the means of production of
machine technology large-scale undertakings the abolition of
private property in general is demanded. Property the way in
which the environment is made up of the objects of daily use, the
dwelling and the works of the spirit, that are at the disposal of the
individual and that furnish him and his family with the basis of
their existence, which is animated by them and in which they
mirror their nature is abolished. This means that man is deprived
of his personal world, of the vital precondition of his historically
unfolding being.
Thirdly: Socialism sets itself against liberalism. It desires the
planning of human affairs, as opposed to preservation of the inter-
play of forces in competition and the free market, and as opposed
to indifference toward the evils that develop out of the free inter-
play of forces.
Absolutised, this means: Instead of planning for definite pur-
poses, whose effects can be kept under surveillance, planning in
toto is desired. Justified opposition complacent to laissez-faire,
i 9 o PRESENT AND FUTURE
laissez-passer is transformed into opposition to liberty, which is
realised in openness to unpredictable possibilities through experi-
mental initiative in intercourse.
If these examples are compared, one will in every case begin by
agreeing with socialism. But in each case, unconcrete hypothesis
arises the moment indication of direction changes into absolutisa-
tion of a position that excludes alternatives. Instead of succumbing
to such an absolutisation we should rather ask ourselves on every
occasion:
How far must guidance of the single individual go, how far
behest and compliance? How far common ownership and how
far private ownership? How far reasonable and necessary plan-
ning, how far trust in the impenetrable course of events through
free human initiative?
As long as socialist demands are concretely visualised and
thought out they remain within bounds. It is only when concrete
reality is lost sight of and a fantastic paradise of man is pre-
supposed as possible, that its demands become abstract and
absolute. Socialism ceases to be an idea and becomes an ideology.
The demand for complete implementation in fact leads away from
its fulfilment. Along the path of coercion it leads to servitude.
There is no such thing as the right organisation of die world.
Justice remains a never-ending task. It cannot survive violent
fixation in human planning as the alleged establishment of the
right organisation of the world. For where liberty ceases, justice
too is impossible.
Total emancipation of the arbitrary will of all, or of single
individuals, on the historical road that remains open, would not
accomplish the task either, however. For it would kad to the
growth of injustice, and liberty is not possible without justice.
Socialism retains from its origin the idea of liberty and justice
for all. It avoids absolutisation. It is accessible to everyone through
insight. It can link everyone. This is no longer possible once it
becomes a fanatical faith and, through absolutisation, doctrinaire
and violent.
Socialism today sees the great task of the common liberation of
all through dispositions in which they accept the dominion of
necessity, but in such a manner that they thereby enhance their
freedom. It is an exceptional situation, in which the laying of fresh
foundations in the historical context seems possible to an un-
precedented extent. The ordering of existence is the great unsolved
task of the epoch. Socialism is the spokesman of all tendencies
directed toward this ordering. It will approach its goal in the
measure in which it attains unanimity without force, moves
THE FUTURE 191
forward gradually along the route of history and does not, in the
will to immediate total realisation, fall into the abyss in which
history would come to an end, if man did not, in spite of every-
thing, find new paths again out of the depths of his nature. 12
We do not know whether political freedom will increase in the
world with the advent of socialism, or whether it will be lost.
Whoever renounces the presumption of a total knowledge, knows
only that liberty neither comes nor remains of its own accord.
Because it is in such immense peril, it can flourish only if all who
desire it work for it at all times, in word and deed, with their whole
beings. Indifference toward liberty, and taking the possession of
it for granted, are the beginning of its loss.
The idea of freedom is part of humanity's truth. But we see the
strength and self-assurance of the other element in man, the power
of the unfree existence. Our understanding may well take fright,
and in gloomy moments place a low assessment on the chances of
liberty. When we recall our humanity, however, faith comes to
life again. We have more confidence in the man who sees the peril
soberly and the free man can see it no otherwise than the
man who sees humanity's incapacity as definitive, without com-
prehending himself in the barbaric weight of his unillumined
vitality or of his doctrines.
8. The motive of total planning and its mastery
Unclarity leads to the need to believe in salvation through total
planning. To the superstitious belief in science it seems as though
good might be obtained from a superior knowledge, which it sup-
poses to be already in existence somewhere. The yearning for this
helping knowledge in the shape of a leader, a superman, whom
one can simply obey and who promises to accomplish every-
thing, leads to the self-incurred illusion of the man who gives up
enlightenment and ceases to think for himself. All salvation is
expected from an impossible source.
Innumerable people regard total planning as the sole deliver-
ance from distress. Unquestioning acceptance of total planning
as the best solution has become for many a fundamental viewpoint.
Coercive organisation will overcome want and disorder, it will
bring happiness. 13
It seems then that man veils from himself, with Utopian visions
of the totality of things, what really happens in the whole, in
order to perform, in the narrower area of purposes he can grasp,
the tasks imposed on him by power. But some time or other the
illusion of this conduct is bound to become manifest to him. For
in the service of the veiled powers he has merely worked on his
192 PRESENT AND FUTURE
own downfall. Those achievements which, in his illusion, he
deemed successes, were merely steps along the road to his ruin.
He was not willing to look the Gorgon in the face, but he fell
victim to it all the more completely.
It is uncanny how the delusion of total planning, which is not
infrequently sustained by manifest idealism, leads man step by
step through his own actions deeper and deeper into precisely that
which he wishes to overcome, into want, unfreedom, lawlessness.
This only happens, however, when that dividing-line is passed
at which reasonable planning changes into calamitous planning,
and particular planning that can be determined in its entirety into
total planning that cannot be determined as a whole.
When man supposes that he can survey the whole, instead of
pursuing concrete, tangible aims in the world, he is, so to speak,
making himself into God he loses his relationship to transcend-
ence he dons blinkers through the operation of which he loses
sight of the experience of the origin and fundament of things, in
favour of a semblance: mere movement in the world the estab-
lishment of the right organisation of the world for all time he
loses the possibility of upsurge, because he succumbs to an
apparatus of terror and despotism he brings about a perversion
of the apparently loftiest idealism of the goal of humanity, into the
inhumanity of the squandering of human life, into the trans-
formation of all the circumstances of life into an unprecedented
slavery he annihilates the forces that carry man forward when
he fails, he gives way in despair to the urge to ever more loathsome
acts of violence.
No total plan will furnish adequate aid. Another origin, which is
possible out of man as man, must be revealed. What is at issue is a
metaphysically founded basic attitude, revealed in ethos, that
guides the organisational plans. The control of an intrusive
conscience, that cannot be objectivised in its entirety, must
prevent the will to liberating reconstruction from leading ever
deeper into servitude.
Knowledge of the obscurity of the whole may lead to the ques-
tion: Is not the best thing inaction?
A trivial answer is: I must act in order to live, inaction is an
illusion. Action is itself a factor in events.
Above and beyond this, we hear the doubtful alternative:
Either total planning of 'life in the narrowness of the contingent
either participation in the high knowledge and dignity of man in
the creation of his' own happiness, or the aloofness of nugatory
passivity!
THE FUTURE 193
Total knowledge, and the total planning founded on it, has in
practice a miraculous consequence. It is no longer necessary to
enquire and reflect. In time of distress we deceive ourselves: in
order to gain false certainty for our actions, because we feel our-
selves secure in that which must necessarily come or in order to
give ourselves grounds for despair, so that we can abandon effort
and endless patience within the area of the possible in both
instances we are on a false road that will lead to frustration.
To live in the narrowness of the contingent, on the other hand,
thoughtlessly robs life of the sense of participation in history, which
passes interminably through time none knows whither.
We are set free from this alternative by humility. Truth and the
purity of our volition are determined by our knowledge of the
limits of knowledge and ability.
B. WORLD UNITY
Technology has brought about the unification of the globe by
making possible a hitherto unheard of speed of communications.
The history of the one humanity has begun. A single destiny
governs the whole of it. Men from all parts of the world can see one
another.
Since the whole sphere of the earth is more accessible to the
technology of communications than in former times Eastern Asia
was to the Central Empire, or the Mediterranean world to Rome,
the political unity of the earth can only be a matter of time. The
path seems to lead from national States, via the great continental
areas of government, to world empire or world order. It will
eventually be enforced by the will to power and dominion which,
by all historical analogies, is always there, has as its more or less
conscious goal the largest world empire it is possible to attain at
any particular time, and then, out of the will to peace, seeks a life
free from anxiety in an order of the world.
Thus, in fact, the various local histories have today already
become one continental history. To begin with, the universal
tendencies proceed toward the structuring of great continental
areas of life, which are related to one another. The spheres of the
American continent, Eastern Asia, the Russian Empire and the
territories of Europe, Hither Asia and Africa cannot continue to
live alongside each other without connexions or in mutual in-
difference. They do not merely observe each other's existence;
they either live in de facto material and spiritual exchange, or in a
self-enclosure that heightens the tension.
, 94 PRESENT AND FUTURE
INTRODUCTION
The historical analogy with the end of the Axial Period
Man's self-consciousness developed during the Axial Period.
The compelling spiritual images and ideas appeared in the
transition to the unmythological or at least no longer naively
nivtholorical ages. Endless possibilities were evolved in the free
struggle of the spirit of a world rent by power politics. Every
force awoke and stimulated the rest.
Through his highest upsurge, however, man first experienced all
his distress, the insight into his imperfection and imperfectibihty.
The ffoal was redemption. t , .
Rational thinking developed and, m conjunction with it, dis-
cussion in which one throws the ball to the other and a perennially
creative growth and deepening of consciousness takes place
through generations. To every position there was the counter-
position On the whole, everything remained open. Insecurity
became conscious. An unparalleled disquiet took possession of
man, The world seemed to consciousness to be growing more and
more chaotic.
In the end, the collapse took place. From about 200 B.C. on-
wards great political and spiritual unifications and dogmatic
configurations held the field. The Axial Period ended with the
formation of great States, which forcibly realised this unity (the
unified Chinese Empire of Tsin-Shi-Hwang-Ti, the Maurya
dynasty in India, the Roman Empire). These great change-overs
from the multiplicity of States to universal empires word
empires in the sense that they embraced the whole of the world
process known at the time in the three regions, which at that
period were almost completely ignorant of one another took
place simultaneously. The metamorphosis was everywhere
remarkable: The free conflict of spirits seems to have come to a
standstill The result was a loss of consciousness. Only a few
suitable intellectual possibilities and spiritual figures from the
bygone Axial Period were seized upon to impart spiritual com-
munity lustre and concordance to the new State authorities. The
imperial idea was realised in forms founded on religion. There
arose spiritually stable, long-enduring periods of great empires,
attended by a levelling down to mass culture and by the sublime,,
butunfree, spirituality of conservative aristocracies. It is as though
the world fell into a centuries-long sleep, accompanied by the
absolute authority of great systems and mummifications.
Universal empires are widely extended empires. Such empires
are, for the vast majority of their peoples, foreign dominations, in
THE FUTURE 195
contrast to the Greek City States and limited, self-governing
tribal and national communities, The latter's self-government
rested on active participation in political thought and action in
the aristocratic form of democracy as it existed, in a different
shape, in Athens and Rome. This democracy vanished with the
transition to the equalising pseudo-democracy of extensive
empires (to a great extent in Athens with the end of Pericles,
totally in Rome with the transition to Caesarism). Where par-
ticipation in political activity finally gave way to mere obedience
and subjection, all sovereignty per se became foreign domination
to the consciousness of the individual, at least for the greater part
of the population of the empire.
Hence a profound transformation of man accompanied the
transformation of his conditions into those of extended empires.
Political impotence altered consciousness and life. Despotic forces,
which seemed to be inseparable from the extended empire, threw
the individual back upon himself, isolated him, levelled him down.
Where no real share in responsibility and no intervention in the
whole were possible, all were slaves. This slavery was veiled by
figures of speech and sham contrivances from the free past. There
was hardly ever so much talk of Greek liberty, which was again
and again guaranteed by the victors, as when it was finally
destroyed in favour of an imperial regime. That which took place
in men who asserted their existence in community, to the accom-
paniment of a continual outer and inner fight for a better order,
from out of the existing de facto orders in the Greek City States,
was now lost. Something quite different then constituted a bond
between the powerless: membership of a divine kingdom, belief
in resurrection and redemption (the Christians). On the other
hand, there developed magnificently in the rulers (the Romans)
an all-embracing consciousness of responsible guidance of the
State in the universal interests of mankind, a high art of govern-
ment, of the construction of a world-spanning authority.
The analogy may, perhaps, cast some light on our future,
despite the fact that this will look quite different. It is, at the same
time, a warning for all who desire the liberty of man.
What will unity look like? If the first termination of the present
development, which may not be so very far off, is the World State,
this may appear either as an empire won by conquest and subject
to a unified rule (perhaps in the form of a government which is in
actual fact centralised, but which recognises the sham sovereignty
of many States), or the outcome of agreement and treaty as a
world government of united States which have renounced their
individual sovereignty in favour of the sovereignty of mankind,
196 PRESENT AND FUTURE
that is seeking its way with legal order as the sovereign authority.
Motives on.this passage to world unity are, for one thing^ the
will to power, which is no less alive today than at any other time,
and which knows no bounds until it has subjugated everything,
and, for another, amongst powers none of which dare risk a
decision by force in view of the monstrous perils, the great
planetary distress that presses toward agreement and above both
these, the idea of human solidarity.
All the phenomena of the present have the appearance of a
preparatory struggle for the points of departure of the final battle
for the planetary order. Contemporary world politics are seeking a
basis for the ultimate settlement, whether this is to be reached by
military or peaceful means. Until this has been achieved, all con-
ditions and power relationships are temporary. Hence the present
appears as a transition to this final planetary order, even ^ if the
exact opposite develops first: e.g. the radical interruption^ of
communication on earth for the majority of people by totalitarian
regimes. We shall now proceed to a more detailed analysis of the
tendencies which are leading out of this transition period into the
future.
/. World empire or world order
The question is, along what path will the unitary world order
be attained. It might take place along the desperate road offeree,
as, in the words of Bismarck, the unity of Germany could be
achieved only by 'blood and iron 3 . Or it might take place through
an order arising by negotiation out of maturing understanding in
mutuality, in the same way as, in the eighteenth century, the
States of North America found their way to union at the cost of
abrogating an essential part of their particular sovereignty in
favour of the sovereignty of the whole.
The shape of the order would, in the first case, be the static
peace of despotism, in the second case, a peaceful community of
all subject to transmutation in perennial democratic unrest and
self-rectification. Reducing the possibilities to a simple antithesis,
therefore, the issue is between the path to world empire or the
path to world order.
World empire. This is world peace through a single power, which
coerces all from one point on the earth. It maintains itself by the
use of force. It moulds the levelled masses by terror and total
planning. A uniform world view is forced upon all, in simple
outlines, by propaganda. Censorship and direction of spiritual
activity compel the latter to play its part in the plan of the
moment, which may be modified at any time.
THE FUTURE 19?
World order. This is unity without unifying force other than that
afforded by common decision in negotiation. Orders agreed upon
can only be altered along the legally fixed path by new decisions.
The supremacy of this procedure and of majority decisions has
been accepted in common; it guarantees the common rights of all,
which also protect those who are for the time being in a minority;
these rights remain an order of mankind in movement and self-
rectification.
The enslavement of all from one point stands in contrast to the
order of all attendant upon renunciation by each single State of
absolute sovereignty. Hence the road to world order leads via the
voluntary renunciation of those with power as a precondition of
liberty.
Where a sovereignty remains which is not that of mankind as a
whole, there also remains a source of unfreedom; for it must assert
itself by force against force. The organisation of force, however,
conquest and empire-building by conquest, lead to dictatorship,
even if the starting-point was free democracy. So it happened in
Rome in the transition from the Republic to Caesarism. So the
French Revolution changed into the dictatorship of Napoleon.
Democracy that conquers abandons itself. Democracy that lives
on good terms with others lays the foundations for the union of all
with equal rights. The demand for full sovereignty is rooted in the
energy of self-assertion destitute of communication. In the age of
absolutism, when the concept of sovereignty was defined, the
consequences were ruthlessly made conscious in word and deed. ^
Where the right of veto remains in decision by vote taken in
common by the great powers, the claim to absolute sovereignty is
maintained. If men assemble with peace, which is unconditionally
desired by all, as their aim, they will be bound by agreement _ to
accept the decision of the majority. There remains the possibility
of further work to convince the rest that the decision was wrong
and to have it rescinded by a fresh decision. Neither veto nor
force is permissible however.
The motives for renouncing veto and sovereignty spring from
the humaneness that desires peace shrewd foresight that sees
one's own power coming to grief unless there is unison with all the
res t the prospect of losing so much in a war, even in the event of
victory, that this disaster outweighs everything else the pleasure
of mutual acceptance in spiritual conflict and the building up of
the world pleasure in life with men of equal status, and un-
pleasure in dominion over the vanquished and over slaves.
World order, with the abolition of absolute sovereignty, would
mean the abolition of the old concept of the State in favour of
i 9 8 PRESENT AND FUTURE
mankind. The outcome would not be a World State (that would
be a world empire), but an order, perennially re-established in
negotiation and decision, of States governing themselves within
legally restricted domains: an all-embracing federalism.
World order would be the continuation and universalisation^of
internal political freedom. Both are possible only through restric-
tion of the political order to questions of existence. On the plane of
existence, the issue is not the development, moulding and fufil-
ment of humanity in to to, but that which is or may be common to
all men by nature, that which links men together above ^all
diversities, above divergences of faith and world view that which
is universally human.
Natural law has, since early times, sought to give prominence to
this common bond. It is the foundation of the rights of man, and
in world order would erect an authority that would also protect
the individual person from acts of violence on the part of his
State, through the possibility of effective legal action under the
sovereignty of mankind.
It is possible to evolve principles which are judicious for man
as man (such as Kant's principle of perpetual peace). The con-
cepts of the right of self-determination, equality of rights, the
sovereignty of the State, retain their relative, but lose their
absolute significance. The total State and total war can be demon-
strated as contradictory to natural law; because in them the means
and prerequisites of humanity become the final goal, or because
through absolutisation of the means the meaning of the whole, the
right of man, is destroyed.
Natural law is confined to the ordering of existence. Its end-
purpose is always a relative one, that of the ordering of existence,
but from the motive of the absolute end-purpose of authentic and
complete humanity in the world.
The age of world unity cannot be adumbrated in advance,
however fervent our interest in it may be. It is perhaps possible,
however, to discuss the possibilities and limits of what will be:
(i) All happening will now be from 'within'. It will no longer be
possible for any foreign powers, any barbarian peoples, such as
have always existed for the universal empires of the past, to break
in from outside. There will be neither limes nor Chinese wall
(except that during the transition period the major areas will be
divided off against one another) . World unity will be single, all-
embracing, enclosed, and hence not directly comparable to
earlier empires.
THE FUTURE 199
If there is no further menace from without, there will no longer
be a foreign policy, there will be no further need to adjust the
order to the needs of defence against outside attack. The maxim of
the primacy of foreign over domestic policy will have lost its
meaning, as the validity of this maxim always has diminished
when the threat from without was slight (for instance in England),
and in the times of the great empires, at least for short periods
(in Rome and in China) .
The whole of production can be for the benefit of existence, and
not of military destruction.
The necessary interconnexion between military organisation
(against a threat from without or for purposes of conquest), total
planning, force and unfreedom will break down, There remains,
however, the possibility of the same interconnexion in a State
based on terror and playing the role of a world empire. In the
event of a general disintegration of human life, however, and of
hidden anarchy, the whole will not, as heretofore, be galvanised
into activity by a threat from without.
(2) A coming world order could not arise as a finished whole,
but in numerous gradations of freedom. There will be stages in the
evolution of the order. That which holds all men together as their
common concern may be confined to a few factors, but it must
under all circumstances take sovereignty away from all in favour
of one comprehensive sovereignty. This sovereignty can be
restricted to the elementary power-problems the military, the
police, the creation of laws and in this sovereignty the whole of
mankind can participate by voting and collaboration.
The order of human life, however, would be much richer than
the all-embracing legality of mankind. What it will be like in
universal peace must depend upon the various orders with their
origins in history; the manifold pattern of life will be determined
by the remoulding imposed upon it by technological conditions. ^
Restricted orders on the way to this final world order will
become points of departure for the formation of a public spirit
of mankind based on ethical considerations.
All this will take place only in the absence of total planning if
the sole plan consists of the laws and agreements that are valid
for all in a free market economy that is still decisive in essential
domains in free competition and in the rivalry of the spirit, in
free intercourse, especially in the realm of the spirit.
(3) The metamorphoses that will overtake the soul and spirit of
man in a world empire, as opposed to a world order, can be con-
jectured by analogy with the Roman and Chinese Empires. An
unparalleled levelling down of humanity is probable, an ant's life
200 PRESENT AND FUTURE
in empty industriousness, a stiffening and desiccation of the spirit,
a conservation in hierarchies of power through authority that is
losing all trace of spirit. Yet these perils cannot become absolute
in man. In imperial world unity there will be new modes of
movement, fresh possibilities of individuation, of revolution, of
the bursting apart of the whole into new parts, which will once
again be in conflict with one another.
(4) Is a legal world order through a political form and a binding
ethos possible to mankind at all? This question can only be
answered in the future, by ages of fulfilment that have enjoyed
peace and creativeness for a time in great orders. To seek to
anticipate it would mean to create it out of thought. That is
impossible. The expectation that primordial truth will play a part
in the reality of the new world order tells us nothing about the
content of this new order. For the common ethos which will in the
future become the public property of mankind cannot arise in
the re-establishment of vanished realities, but must consist of
unpredictable constructions kindled afresh from the contents of
the old.
The question of whether a world order based on converse and
joint decision, as the precondition and consequence of liberty, is
possible must be answered by saying that it has never before
existed. This is no contra -indication of its possibility, however. It is
analogous to the evolution of bourgeois liberty in a democratic
order, to that conquest offeree by law and justice, which, although
seldom and never more than imperfectly, has nonetheless in fact
been successful in exceptional instances. That which happened in
circumscribed States, and therefore became real at some point, is
not, in principle, impossible to mankind as a whole. But even if
the idea is easily grasped, its realisation is immensely difficult, so
difficult that there will always be many who are disposed to con-
sider it impossible.
In any case, the way leads historically via the de facto political
powers.
2. The political powers
( i ) The road to world order runs solely via the sovereign States,
whose forces are organised for immediate military action in the
event of conflict. The manner in which they escape from this state
of tension, through negotiation or war, and find their way to one
another, will decide the destiny of mankind.
A picture of the States as they actually are will give us a picture
of the political situation of the world. There are the Great
Powers America and Russia then the allied European nations.
THE FUTURE ' 201
then the neutrals, and then, in stages, the vanquished. The com-
plete powerlessness of the latter corresponds to the complete
sovereignty possessed by the first alone. In between lie those who
are autonomous, but yet more or less dependent and not infre-
quently compelled to make their decisions at a sign from the
Great Powers.
Looking at the situation as a whole, it is obvious that the day
of national States is over. The world powers of today comprise
several nations. The nation, in the sense of the European peoples,
is too small to be a world power as such.
The issue today is the fashion in which nations come together to
constitute a world power: whether they are subjugated by one
nation, or whether they find their way to each other as living
nations of equal status in a community of States, to which they
have sacrificed their particular sovereignty. This community of
States may in turn call itself a nation, out of a political principle
of the life of the State and of society, in which the members of
several different peoples find their way to each other. The mean-
ing of national consciousness has been transformed from an ethnic
to a political one, from something naturally given to a spiritual
principle. Yet today, by virtue of the survival of spectres from the
past, there is still, and even increased, talk of nationalism, whereas
it has already ceased to be a factor in politically decisive events.
Alongside the existing Great Powers of today, which industrial
development has made mighty, there are the powers of the future;
above all, China, which through its raw materials, human masses,
aptitudes, cultural heritage and geographical position may per-
haps become a key to political events at a not too distant date;
in addition, there is India, which like a separate continent, on the
fundament of a unique spiritual heritage handed down by its
various peoples, presents the possibility of a power developing
which, despite all movements of liberation, is still in fact slumber-
ing there.
Seen within the totality of history, the two most powerful con-
temporary States, America and Russia, are historically quite
young formations. It is true that the culture that took thousands of
years to evolve has become theirs. But it is like something thrust
upon them from without. Christianity came to Russia, Europe is
spiritually present in America. Both America and Russia, how-
ever, measured against the primordial, world-creating cultures,
are characterised by a lack of roots and thereby, simultaneously,
by a magnificent open-mindedness. To look at them is singularly
instructive and liberating for us, but also frightening. It is only to
us in Europe that our cultural heritage is exclusively valuable, as,
202 PRESENT AND FUTURE
in a different fashion, their heritage is to the Chinese and Indians.
To us and to them, in every situation, it gives a feeling of proven-
ance, security and demand upon ourselves. By contrast, it is
astonishing how those who are today the mighty of this earth are
often oppressed by a slight feeling of inferiority, which they veil
in a peculiar childishness and in the anger of their demands.
To see through the manner in which the play of political forces
takes place, changes with the manoeuvres of the States in the
confused maze of the chances of power, and how, nonetheless,
certain great basic trends are preserved, would be of the greatest
interest. For intellectual ideas of political order will come to
realisation only on the road via the power that is to be won in this
interplay of forces.
In the foreground of everyday life there is a great deal that
looks fortuitous. Harm is wrought by everything that stands in
opposition to organisation in larger contexts; such, for instance, as
national claims that are made absolute, all particular artifices
intended to gain special advantage for oneself, all attempts to
play the Great Powers off one against the other in the hope of
profiting by it.
(2) The whole population of the globe, more than two thousand
million people in all, is drawn into the interplay of these powers.
But guidance and decision is in the hands of the peoples who,
comparatively, constitute no more than an infinitesimal fraction
of this total mass. The majority is passive.
There is a primal distribution of the world which has existed since
the dawn of history. Only once since the sixteenth century has
this primal distribution been changed on a grand scale in relation
to large areas that were unpopulated or settled by primitive
peoples incapable of resistance. The white race took possession of
the regions of America, Australia and Northern Asia as far as
the Pacific Ocean. This established a new distribution of the
earth.
A coming world federation will have to start from this dis-
tribution of the world as a reality, if the road to a forcible world
order is to be avoided. On the path of violence the extermination
of peoples, deportations, the annihilation of whole races, and
thereby the negation of humanity, seem possible. It will not be
possible for the Europeans permanently to dominate, or even
merely to guide, the great human masses of China and India,
which have stood firm, nor the peoples of the Near East. The
prodigious difficulty is, however, that all these population masses
must first reach the political maturity which will render them
capable of emerging from the estate of violence into that of
THE FUTURE 203
mutual agreement, and of grasping the nature of political free-
dom as a life-form.
These mighty, but still largely passive powers give rise to the
question: Will the peoples conscious of liberty, numbering at most
a few hundred millions, be able to bring conviction to the spirits
of more than two thousand million others, and enter with them
into a free, legal world community?
(3) The road to world unity starts from a few historical origins and
from a quantitatively infinitesimal minority of man. World order
springs from the same motives as the order of bourgeois society.
Since bourgeois liberty was won at only a few places on the earth
in historical processes unique to each, and since these constitute,
as it were, the school of political liberty, the world will have to
accomplish on a large scale what was there exemplified on a small
one.
The classical development of political freedom, which gives at
least an orientation to all and is for many exemplary, occurred not
more than seven hundred years ago in England. On this spiritual-
political fundament, liberty was created afresh in America.
Within a very small area Switzerland realised this freedom in its
federalism, which may appear like a model of possible European
and world unity.
Today political freedom has almost disappeared amongst the
defeated peoples. Here it had already been destroyed when the
apparatus of a terrorist order declared that it was defending it.
The road to world order leads via the awakening and self-
understanding of political liberty in as many countries as possible.
This situation is. without analogy in the conditions of transition to
earlier world empires after the Axial Period. The idea and the
task were scarcely conscious at that time; the reality of free States
did not exist amongst the powers that were coming to sovereignty.
World order today, if it is realised at all, will start from the
federalism of the States which are already free. It will be success-
ful only if it exercises a sufficiently strong attraction to lead others
to follow it out of conviction, and peacefully to join in with the
world order which brings liberty, wealth and spiritual creative-
ness, the potentiality of humanity in its plenitude and multi-
formity.
(4) If the unity of the earth is forced upon us by communica-
tions, a crucial factor will be the sense of the earth and of power
imparted by the perspectives of travel.
For centuries England, through its domination of the ocean,
saw the world from the sea as coasts which all lay as though
enclosed within the private empire of dominion over the waves t
204 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Today air-traffic has been added; although It is not yet equal to
sea-traffic in its performance in transporting goods and travellers,
it is nevertheless such an important extension that, to ^the politi-
cally seeing eye, the world becomes a whole from the air as well.
Power on the water and in the air seems more essential to the
unity of the earth than power on land, even though in the last
resort the latter must everywhere accompany the final act of
decision in war.
The omnipresence of the legally directed world police would
probably be most rapidly and safely implemented in the air.
3. The perils on the road to world order
Before the constitution of a dependable world order, there lies
the transition period, which is full of perils. To be sure, all human
existence is at alltimes a transition. But now the very foundations
of humanity are tottering, the elementary groundwork of the
future must be laid down.
We should like to be able to characterise this transition period
that lies before us. It is our immediate future, whereas everything
that will begin with world order or world empire will take place
only in succession to it.
World order cannot be realised directly. Hence the nugatoriness
of the enthusiasm, the invective, the projects, which are supposed
to contribute immediately to its achievement, as though they
represented the philosopher's stone.
Much more clearly than world order itself, we can see the perils
that threaten on the way thither. Every peril bears within itself,
through the fact that it is known, an element of surrnountability.
In human affairs there is no intrinsically mortal danger, if man can
be free in accordance with his nature.
(i) Impatience: The road will reach its destination only if the
active participants are possessed of infinite patience.
It is fatal, in the desire to force through that which one has
recognised as right, to let failure cause one to refuse further
collaboration, obstinately to break off converse, and to have
recourse to violence or the preparation of violence.
The momentary supremacy of the one who holds the trump
card, threatens force, or blackmails, proves in the long run to be
weakness, and is in any case to blame for the lengthening or
blocking of the road. The exceptionally difficult task is, without
becoming weak, not to forget force when confronted by force, but
to postpone its use until the very last moment. For the responsible
statesman there is no prestige reason for the use of force, no reason
for a preventive war, no reason for breaking off negotiations. In
THE FUTURE 205
every situation there remains human speech until one party,
possessing sufficient force to do so, breaks off and is now a criminal
in the measure in which all the rest had, and still have, patience.
It is impossible to assess what will, in the future, aid this
process and what will hinder it. Situations continually change.
The attempt must not be abandoned, even in relation to the
malevolent and underhand. Intolerance must be patiently led to
tolerance. We must relegate to the final stage the goal of rendering
all force harmless as criminality by means of the one legal force
of humanity. Until then the possessor of great force (the magnitude
of which alone distinguishes him from the criminal, if he makes use
of it) must be treated with the circumspection and patience that
may win his friendship. If this is to succeed at all, it can do so
only if the rest remain calm and do not throw away the slightest
opportunity for reconciliation.
An example of the fact that the craving after immediate
realisation of the right may be a mistake is perhaps provided by
the following: The right of veto is in itself an evil. But its abolition
would presuppose that all the interested parties were ready, even
in a serious instance, to bend their wills to the majority decision,
that in their ethos they had really renounced sovereignty, in the
same way as the citizens within a State. This calls for essential
human community realised in every phase of intercourse. Before
this has been attained, abolition of the right of veto would be
fruitless. For if a Great Power were to oppose a majority decision
and its execution, this would mean war.
It is stimulating to see how, in participation in political negotia-
tions, in so far as they are made public, this patience finds a
language, seeks paths, and evokes intercommunity again through
repeated new flashes of inspiration. It is disheartening to see how,
against all reason, ignoring all facts and motives, in perpetual
disruption of converse, the sovereignty of the veto smashes what
all the rest sought to build up.
And it is magnificent to see from a study of history particularly
the history of the English, Americans and Swiss how man had
patience, overcame himself, and even in hatred, came to terms
with his opponent at the dictate of reason and how ways were
found of carrying out peaceably the revolutionary changes for
which the times were ripe.
Patience obduracy steadfastness these are indispensable
to the politically active man. This patience consists in the ethical
attitude that does not succumb to personal mortifications, that
keeps the objective whole always in view, that appraises and dis-
tinguishes the essential from the inessential. It consists in the
206 PRESENT AND FUTURE
watchfulness that remains undiminished in waiting and in
apparent fruitlessness: comparable to the huntsman at his station,
who waits for hours, but at the instant when the fox leaps across
the woodland path, has to raise his gun, take aim, and fire in the
fraction of a second. This untiring alertness that misses nothing
and is watchful, not for one single thing, as for a wild animal, but
for all unforeseeable favourable opportunities, is indispensable to
the active statesman. The great danger to human activity lies in
impatience, exhaustion and the climate of fruitlessness.
(2) Once a dictatorship has been set up it cannot be got rid of again from
within: Germany and Italy were set free from without. All attempts
from within came to grief. This might be a coincidence. But if we
call to mind the way in which a terrorist regime operates with the
means of total planning and bureaucracy, it becomes evident
how fundamentally insurmountable is the machine that maintains
itself almost automatically, and in which everything that appears
to oppose it from within is obliterated. The means of modern
technology give the de facto ruler a tremendous preponderance of
power, if he makes ruthless use of all the means at his disposal.
There is just as little chance of overthrowing such a regime as
there is of the inmates of a penitentiary overthrowing the governor
and his staff. The machine reaches the peak of impregnability
when the terror includes all, in such a manner that those who do
not wish it become terrorised terrorists, killing in order not to be
killed themselves.
Hitherto such despotic terrorist regimes were local. Thus they
could be annihilated from without, if not from within. If, however,
the peoples should fail to absorb this into their consciousness and
into their concern for the future, if they should all slip unawares
into such a dictatorship in the shape of a world dictatorship,
there would be no further prospect of liberation. The danger of
this state of affairs coming about is all the more acute when people
feel safe from it, and suppose, for example, that only the servile
Germans could find themselves in such a situation. If the same
fate befalls the rest of the world, there will be no more outside.
The rigidification of the whole in total planning, stabilised by
terror, would annihilate liberty and mean the road to increasing
ruin for all.
(3) The danger of absolute destruction: On the road to the order of
the World State events might take place which, before the goal
had been reached, might inflict such destruction upon mankind
that we can hardly imagine the continuation of history. A miser-
able remnant would be left living scattered over the surface of the
earth, to start all over again as thousands of years ago. The links
THE FUTURE 207
between men would have been torn apart, technology would be
at an end and life dependent upon the local possibilities of the
moment, which would just suffice to maintain it in extreme want
to the accompaniment of exhausting effort demanding vital force
and youthfulness. This end would arise if a war resulted in the
demolition of the structure of technology, if raw materials were
used up without the discovery of a substitute, if war did not cease
but crumbled 3 as it were, into more and more circumscribed local
hostilities a state of perpetual warfare such as existed prior to
history.
The meaning of warfare has undergone a metamorphosis in the
course of history. There were wars that were the chivalrous sport
of aristocrats and conducted according to the rules of the game.
There were wars whose purpose was the decision of a question, and
which came to a timely end before all organisable forces had been
thrown in. There were wars of extermination.
There were civil wars and ministerial wars between nations,
which nevertheless retained some sort of solidarity, through the
fact that both parties were European. There were more pitiless
wars between cultures and religions alien to one another.
Today war seems transformed by the extent of its means, the
magnitude of its consequences. It has acquired a different mean-
ing:
(i) All the most extreme elements foreshadowed during his-
torical epochs seem to have combined to such a degree that there ,
are absolutely no moderating tendencies left in war. Hitler
Germany was the first country in the Age of Technology to
embark in principle on the path which the rest then followed of
necessity. Now we are threatened by a war which the Age of
Technology and the abolition of all restraints will make so differ-
ent that extermination and deportations, which to a certain extent
also occurred in earlier times with the Assyrians and the
Mongols do not suffice to characterise the disaster.
This uncontrolled totality of war, with no moderation of its
means, is due in part to the interrelationship between total plan-
ning and war. The one lends impetus to the other. Power that
seeks to reach absolute ascendancy is bound to tend toward total
planning. Since, however, this reduces economic prosperity, there
comes a point at which the optimum of armament has been
reached. War is forced on the country by its inner development,
which, with the continuance of peace, would lead to its growing
weaker.
In the long run wealth, progress and vigour are attendant upon
liberty; for a short time, however, and transitorily, supremacy
208 PRESENT AND FUTURE
comes with total planning and terrorist force, with its organisation
of all the energies of a population for the destructive gamble, into
which everything is thrown without reservation.
The way of the world seems to lead to such catastrophes, whose
consequences in anarchy and misery beggar description. The only
salvation is a world order based on the rule of law and possessing
the power to preserve peace, by meeting every act of violence with
superior force that robs it of all chance of success, and by punish-
ing it as a crime.
(2) If war cannot be avoided, the crucial thing for world history
is what manner of men emerge victorious; whether they are the
representatives of naked force, or a human type that lives by the
spirit and by the principle of freedom. The factor that will decide
the issue of war is technology. And here we come face to face with
an ominous fact: Technology can be used by everyone. Not every-
one can discover it, but once it has been discovered even primitive
peoples can learn its ways, can learn to serve machines, to fly
aeroplanes and drive tanks. Hence technology in the hands of the
peoples which did not invent it, becomes an immense danger to
the spiritually creative peoples. If it comes to war, the only chance
is that the inventive peoples will gain the military advantage by
means of new inventions.
It is true that decisions on the nature of the new world order
will not be wrested from the struggle of spirits alone. If, however,
decisions are reached on the way to this new order ^through the
agency of technology, which, at the last moment, is carried to
fresh heights by free, creative spirits, its victory might be of
spiritual significance also. What will to free order prevails in the
warring powers might, through this new order, lead simultan-
eously to liberation for the world, if the sense of freedom is
assimilated by men who are becoming more and more awakened,
while, at the same time, it is fostered by the victors themselves.
(3) In the shape of the atom bomb as a means of destruction,
technology opens up a completely different vista. Today everyone
is aware of the threat to human life represented by the atom
bomb. On its account there must be no more war. It becomes a
motive though up to now only a weak one for the preservation
of peace, because of the immense danger with which this kind of
war threatens everyone.
In very truth, technology may cause destruction on a scale
which it is still impossible to predict. If it is reproached with
having .set free the elemental and brought it to destructive
effectiveness, this has been its nature since the beginning, when
man learnt to kindle fire. Today the Promethean idea does not
THE FUTURE 209
bring with it anything new in principle, but quantitatively it
increases the peril beyond all measure, to the point at which we
contemplate the possibility of pulverising the globe in space with
which the Promethean idea becomes something qualitatively
different as well.
With the atom bomb, a piece of solar substance has been
brought to the earth. The same thing happens to it on the surface
of the earth which has hitherto happened only in the sun.
Up to the present, the application of nuclear chain reactions
has been confined to those substances extracted with great
difficulty from uranium ores. The fear that this type of atomic
fission might spread to other elements, to matter itself, as fire
spreads to all inflammable material, is stated by physicists to be
groundless. Nevertheless, there is no certain limit valid for all
time. Giving oneself up to the play of fantasy it is possible to
imagine:
It is uncertain beyond what dividing-line the explosion will lay
hold on further elements and terrestrial matter as a whole, like a
conflagration. The whole globe would explode, whether intention-
ally or unintentionally. Then our solar system would be tempor-
arily lit up, a nova would have appeared in space.
We can pose a singular question. Our history has lasted some
six thousand years only. Why should this history occur just now,
after the immeasurable ages of the universe and of the earth that
have preceded it? Do not humans, or at all events, rational beings,
exist anywhere else in the universe? Is it not the natural develop-
ment of the spirit to extend its operations into the universe? Why
have we not long since had news, through radiations, from the
universe? Communications from rational beings infinitely further
advanced in technology than ourselves? Can it be because all high
technological development has so far led to the point at which the
beings have brought about the destruction of their planet with
the atomic bomb? Can some of the novae be end-effects of the
activities of technological rational beings?
Is the progidious task then to recognise the gravity of this
danger, to take it really seriously, and to introduce a self-education
of mankind which, despite the constant danger, will avert such an
end? The peril can be overcome only if it is consciously seen, if its
menace is consciously prevented and rendered impossible. This
will only happen if the ethos of man is equal to the task. It is not
to be accomplished technologically: man as such must become
trustworthy in the preservation and effectiveness of the institu-
tions he has created.
Or are we confronted by a necessity before which there is
2io PRESENT AND FUTURE
nothing left but capitulation where sentimental visions and
unreal demands become unworthy of man/ because they deprive
him of his veracity? No, and even if it had happened in the world a
thousand times which is in any case pure fantasy each fresh
instance would present afresh the task of preventing the catas-
trophe, and that by means of every conceivable direct measure.
Since, however, all such measures are unreliable in themselves,
they require to be founded in the ethos and religion of all. In this
way alone can the unconditional no to the atom bomb provide
support for those measures which will be effectual only if they
apply to everyone.
Anyone who regards the terrestrial catastrophe, whatever its
nature, as inescapable, must see his life against this background.
What is a life that must come to such an end?
All this is the play of ideas, however; its only meaning is to bring
the factual danger into consciousness and to call up a vision of a
world order based on the rule of law, which, in its all-decisive
significance, evokes the whole earnestness of man.
4. Ideas opposed to the possibility of world order
The idea of world order, this European idea, is disputed. It is
supposed to be Utopian.
Men are supposed to be incapable of communal order. World
order is supposed to be possible only through the power of an
ordering dictator. The national-socialists' plan of subjugating
Europe and then, with the combined force of Europe, of conquer-
ing the world, in order to Europeanise it, is supposed to have been
good and workable as an ideal; only the bearers of the idea were
evil.
This is not so. These basic ideas of contempt for man and of
force, which, in the last resort, is always terrorist, are inseparably
bound up with men of just this type.
But, the thesis goes on, the world dominion which will naturally
arise out of the quantitative preponderance in territory, popula-
tion and raw materials will, in the last analysis, be just as much a
rule of force, as far as the less fortunate peoples are concerned,
as a dictatorship. Along a seemingly peaceful road, certain men
will enforce their will on all the rest through economic expansion.
This is an exaggeration if the situation is compared to the
ruin of war. And it is a mistake to forget that there are, in prin-
ciple, peaceful means of redressing injustices arising out of
economic power. There is here, however, a real question for the
success of true world order. Economic power must also be pre-
pared to accept self-limitation under laws, and to subject itself to
THE FUTURE 211
conditions; it too will have to serve the idea of world order, if the
idea is to become a reality.
World order the thesis continues is not a desirable goal at all.
If it were once stabilised, it would probably result in a totality of
knowledge and valuation for all, a complacency, and an end of
humanity, a new sleep of the spirit in the tranquillity of recollec-
tion that understands less and less, a state of fulfilment, a univer-
sality of that desired by all, while their consciousness diminishes
and they undergo a metamorphosis into creatures that are hardly
human any more.
All this might apply to the subjects of a world empire, if it
lasted for hundreds and thousands of years. It certainly does not
apply to world order. In the latter the elements of unrest remain.
For it is never perfected; it is always in mutation. New decisions
and enterprises are called for. The manner in which the position
reached will give birth to fresh situations requiring mastery can-
not be foretold. Discontent and insufficiency will seek a new
break-through and upsurge.
World order this thesis finally states is impossible because of
what man is and because of the situations in which, by the nature
of the matter, agreement is out of the question, and decision by
war the 'appeal to heaven 5 is inescapable. Man is inadequate.
He falls short of what is required of him in possessiveness in dis-
regard of others in the flight from order into confusion, and then
into the spiritless struggle for power in self-assertion through the
breaking-off of communication with 'irreducible' demands in
the urge to destruction.
5. The idea of world order
In opposition to all denials of the possibility of a just and legal
world order of peace, observation of history and our own wills
again arid again gives rise to the question: Will this new order not
one day become possible, this convergence of all into a realm of
peace? The trail toward it was blazed at the very beginning, when
men founded State communities for the creation of order among
themselves. The only question was the size to be attained by these
communities of peace, within which the settlement of conflicts by
force became a crime and hence punishable. In such large com-
munities there already prevailed, even if only for limited periods
and under a constant threat, dependability and the outlook that
sustains legal order. There is, in principle, no boundary to the
endeavour to expand such a community, till it becomes the com-
munity of all men.
Hence the readiness to renunciation and compromise, to
2i2 PRESENT AND FUTURE
mutual sacrifice, to the self-limitation of power not only from
considerations of advantage, but also from the recognition of
justice, has been as perennial a feature of history as the urge to
force. The greatest proclivity to such an attitude was perhaps to
be found in aristocratic, moderate, inwardly cultured men (like
Solon); less in the average man, who is always disposed to con-
sider himself right and the other in the wrong; none whatever in
men of violence, who are not prepared to come to terms at all, but
want to hit out.
In view of this human diversity, doubt will be justified: In
world unity whether it is a unity of world order or world empire
there will be no permanent calm, any more than within the
State formations we have seen up to now. Jubilation at the attain-
ment of pax aeterna will prove illusory. The forces of remoulding
will assume fresh shapes.
In his finitude, man is left with basic instincts and resistances
which render it improbable that we can expect a condition of the
world in which the liberty of all is so integrated as to become an
absolute power capable of finally exorcising everything that
threatens freedom, including finite aspiration to power, finite
interests, and self-will. We have rather to reckon that the wild
passions will be re-established in new forms.
Above all, however, there is an essential difference between
what the individual can at any time become through his own
agency, and what the community of political order can become in
the course of history. The individual can become existence that is
capable of finding its own eternal meaning in the manifestation of
the epoch; the human group and mankind, however, can become
an order that is a communal product of history only through
generations and that gives scope to the potentialities and limita-
tions of all individuals. But order only exists through the spirit
with which individuals animate it and which gives individuals
their stamp in the sequence of generations. All institutions are
dependent upon men, who are individuals. The individual is here
the crucial factor in so far as it takes many or the majority of
individuals to sustain the order and yet, at the same time, as an
individual, he is powerless.
The singular fragility of all orders, with the spirit that bears
them, is reason enough to regard the future with uncertainty.
Illusions and Utopias are certainly powerful factors in history,
but not of the kind that create order for liberty and humanity.
Rather is it of crucial importance to liberty that, in thinking out
the possibility or impossibility of a world order, we should not lay
down any picture of the future, any devised reality, as the goal
THE FUTURE 213
toward which history is of necessity steering, which we ourselves
assimilate as such into our fundamental wills, and with the attain-
ment of which history would be consummated. Never shall we
find a fulfilment of history, save in every present as this present-
ness itself.
The limit of historical possibilities has its deep foundation in
humanity. No perfect end-state can ever be attained in the human
world, because man is a creature that constantly strives to thrust
out beyond itself, and is not only imperfect, but imperfectible. A
mankind which desired only to be itself would, in restricting itself
to itself, lose humanity.
In history, however, we may and must lay hold of ideas, if we
want to gain a meaning for our life in community. Projects of per-
petual peace, or of the prerequisites for perpetual peace, remain
true, even if the idea is incapable of realisation as a concrete ideal,
but remains rather an infinite task beyond the possibility of being
fashioned into a reality. An idea can be brought into congruence
neither with the anticipated image of a possible reality, nor with
the reality itself, even though it is the meaning implicit in planning
fork.
Its basis, however, is an inexplicable confidence, namely the
certitude of faith that everything is not null and void, not merely
a senseless chaos, a passing from nothing into nothing. The ideas
that guide our passage through the world are revealed to this
confidence. For this confidence, truth consists in the vision of
Isaiah, in which the idea becomes a symbolic image, this vision
of universal concord: 'And they shall beat their swords into
ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more. 3
c. FAITH
Introduction
The task of mastering the Age of Technology in favour of the
specifically human element in humanity has become conscious
in the major tendencies of this age, socialism and world order.
It is not enough, however, to found them on science, technology
and civilisation. These do not afford a reliable foundation. They
are in the service of evil as well as good. Man himself must live
from a different origin. Hence flaws have today appeared in our
trust in science. Superstitious belief in science, enlightenment that
has proved deceptive, and the disintegration of its contents bear
witness against it.
Even the great spiritual powers handed down to us no longer
214 PRESENT AND FUTURE
support life. There is no longer any complete trust in humanism:
it seems to stand aloof, as though it were not there at all.
It is no longer possible for the masses to place entire trust in the
Churches as such; they were too impotent when evil triumphed.
Science, humanism and the Churches are too indispensable to
us, we shall never relinquish these powers. They do not suffice,
they conceal in themselves evil aberrations, but by virtue of their
potentialities they are indispensable preconditions for the whole
of man.
Today the situation demands: We must return to a deeper
origin, to a fountainhead from which all faith once welled forth in
its particular historical shapes, to this wellspring which can flow
at any time man is ready for it. When trust in that which is mani-
fest and given in the world no longer supports life, then trust in the
origin of all things must lay the foundations. Up to now we have
hardly got further than feeling the task to exist. So far, it seems,
we have all failed to accomplish it.
The question is: How will the content of our cultural heritage
be preserved under the conditions of the Age of Technology and
the reorganisation of the whole human community? How shall we
preserve the infinite value of the individual, the dignity and rights
of man, the freedom of the spirit, the metaphysical experiences of
the millennia?
The specific question of the future, however, which conditions
and includes everything, is how and what man will believe.
Faith cannot be discussed in the same terms as those in which
we spoke of socialism and the trends and counter-trends of total
planning, of world unity and the trends to world empire or world
order. Faith is not a matter of the goals of volition, nor of the
contents of reason that become purposes. For faith cannot be
willed, it does not consist in propositions, between which one has
to choose, it evades the programme. But it is the Comprehensive,
by which socialism, political freedom, and world order must be
borne along their path, because it is from faith alone that they
receive their meaning. Without faith there will be no guidance
from the fountainhead of humanity, but a falling prey to that
which has been thought, conjectured and imagined, to doctrines,
and then, as a result, to chaos and ruin. At no point is it possible
to discuss faith in tangible terms, but perhaps something can be
said about it. One can circle round its potentialities. We shall
attempt this.
/. Faith and nihilism
Faith is the Comprehensive that holds the reins even when the
THE FUTURE 215
understanding seems to be autonomous. Faith is not a particular
content, not a dogma dogma may be the expression of an
historical shape assumed by faith; but it may also be a delu-
sion. Faith is the fulfilling and moving element in the depths
of man, in which man is linked, above and beyond himself, with
the origin of his being.
The self-evidence of faith is achieved only in historical patterns
no truth may regard itself as the sole and exclusive truth for all
men, without becoming intolerant and at the same time untrue
but between all believers there exists a hidden common element.
The only antagonist, the antagonist that lurks in readiness in
every one of us, is nihilism.
Nihilism is the sinking down into lack of faith. It may seem as
though man, as an animal species in the realm of the living, could
live in his immediacy from his instincts. But he cannot. He can
only, as Aristotle said, be more or less like an animal. If he denies
this and seeks to live self-evidently from nature like the beasts, he
can follow this path only in conjunction with the consciousness of
nihilism, and therefore only with a bad conscience or with the
presentiment that he is lost. In nihilism he shows himself to be still
a man and not a beast by cynicism and hate, by negative thinking
and acting, by a condition of chronic indignation.
Man is not merely a creature of instinct, not merely a point of
understanding, but also a creature that is, as it were, above and
beyond itself. He is not exhausted by that which he becomes as an
object of physiology, psychology and sociology. He can win a part
in the Comprehensive, through which he first becomes authenti-
cally himself. This Comprehensive we call idea, in so far as man is
spirit; we call it faith, in so far as he is existence.
Man cannot live without faith. For even nihilism, as the
opposite pole to faith, exists only in relation to a possible, but
denied, faith.
That which is happening today in the direction of socialism,
planning and world order will never become real and find its
meaning solely and decisively through rational cognition, nor
through the instincts of man, but essentially through the way in
which men believe and through the content of their faith or how
they stand nihilistically at the opposite pole to faith.
The important thing for the course of events is what ethical
standards we recognise factually in our practical activity, from
what origin we live, what we love.
2. The aspect of the present situation
When Rome drew the whole of the ancient world into its
ai6 PRESENT AND FUTURE
empire, it completed the levelling which had been going forward
since the time of Alexander. Links of national custom were
weakened, the local historical heritage ceased to sustain the proud
life of autonomous energies. The world was levelled off spiritually
into two languages (Greek and Latin), into a shallow ethical
system which, because it was without effect on the masses, made
room for enjoyment for its own sake and for the desperate suffer-
ings of slaves, of the poor, and of the vanquished. The ultimate
wisdom of the individual lay in shutting himself off from the
wicked world. A philosophy of personal steadfastness based
either on dogmatic doctrines or on scepticism, it made little
difference which afforded an escape to many, but could not
permeate the masses. Where nothing is really believed any more,
the most absurd beliefs gain the upper hand. Superstition in
manifold guises, doctrines of salvation of the most extraordinary
kinds, circles gathered round peripatetic preachers, therapists,
poets and prophets, in an endless confusion of vogue, success and
oblivion, present a garish picture of narrow fanaticisms, wild
adorations, enthusiastic devotion, and also of opportunism, im-
posture and knavery. It is wonderful to see how, in the midst of
this chaos, Christianity ultimately gained paramountcy this
spiritual organism which, although it is by no means unequivocal,
is yet of all faiths the one with the incomparably most profound
implications, which was then, and for all time continued to be,
typified by an absolute earnestness, before which all other species
of faith vanished. This was not planned and not fabricated. When
plan and purpose become involved in Christianity, which they did
finally after Constantine when it was misused, it was already
there out of its deep origin, and its links with this origin held fast
through all distortions and perversions.
We find in our own period much that is analogous to this
ancient world. But the great difference is that contemporary
Christianity has no parallel there, and that nothing corresponding
to the Christianity which, at that time, was new and world-
transforming, is in any way visible today as a solution. Hence
comparison is relevant only in respect of particular phenomena,
for instance in analogy with the workers of magic, the com-
munities formed around them, and doctrines of salvation of an
absurd kind.
The picture of the modes of faith current in our era may be
seen in a totally different light. To statements regarding the age's
loss of faith, the factual impotence and ineffectiveness of the
Churches, and nihilism as the basic feature of our world, the reply
THE FUTURE 217
is made: This picture of ruin emanates from false standards
derived from the past and from that which is outmoded beyond
recall. Today, it has been said, there are mighty faiths, capable of
moving mountains, derived from a new origin. This was already
said of the Jacobins of the French Revolution and their faith in
virtue and terror, reason implemented by the most radical force.
Similarly, the great liberal movements of the nineteenth century
have been called a religion of liberty (Croce). Thus, finally,
Spengler asserted the appearance of fundamental conceptions with
a religious character and an irresistibly cogent power of conviction
as the end-stages of cultures; thus the end for the West is socialism
as for India it was Buddhism, and for the ancient world stoicism.
The religion of socialism moves the human masses of our era.
Total planning, pacifism and so forth seem, as it were, like
social religions. They have the appearance of being the faiths of
men without faith. Instead of living in faith, man lives in illusions
concerning realities in the world, concerning the future and the
course of events, which, in his faith, he thinks he knows. 14
The thesis that justifies this out of nihilism runs: Man always
lives on illusions. History is the course taken by changing illusions.
In contradiction of this it must be said that history is traversed
not only by the many illusions, but also by the fight against them
for truth. Admittedly, the man without power is particularly
disposed to illusions, and today the individual is perhaps more
powerless than ever before. But he can also lay hold of the only
chance open to powerlessness, unconditional striving for truth.
The nihilist declares this in turn to be illusion. For there is no
truth. Hence he finishes up with the thesis: One must believe, no
matter what the necessary illusion will be extracted from one's
own energies, which can say: I do not believe it, but one must
believe it.
If we are speaking of faith psychologically, and do not enquire
into the content, the truth ah(robjectivity,"we are dealing here at
all points with analogies to religious faith: Claim to the exclusive
validity of one's own truth, fanaticism, lack of understanding
for anything else, absoluteness of the postulates, readiness for
sacrifice and for devotion of one's life to the cause.
Images arise with the appeal of religious symbols, as for
instance when the young Marx thinks in his writings of a new
man, the truly human man, who has never before existed, who
will now awake, the man who will divest himself of his self-
estrangement. Or when today the new man of machine labour,
the hard man with masklike features, reliable in his service and
impersonal, is glorified in his sovereignty.
218 PRESENT AND FUTURE
Psychological features cannot, however, impart to a faith ^ the
character of religious faith. These features are characteristic
rather of substitutes for religion and of anti-philosophy. In the
medium of rationality, in the misuse of science for the establish-
ment of a superstitious belief in science, a demonstrably fallacious
idea of the possible perfection of the world, of the right organisa-
tion of the world, is perverted into the content of a faith. But these
perversions are powerful; they are at work throughout the world,
and impel the course of events into the danger of intensified ruin.
In actual fact, no fresh content of faith exists, the emptiness of this
faith seems rather to be a correlate of man's loss of himself. It is
typical that the advocates of such faiths respect nothing save force
and power. They can no longer listen to reason, an origin of truth
with its provenance in the spirit has no validity for them.
Let us pose the question once more in principle: Is faith
possible without transcendence? Can man be taken possession of
by a goal belonging to the inner world, that has the character
of faith, because its content appertains to the future and is there-
fore, so to speak, transcendent to the present and in contrast to
the suffering, discordancy and self-contradictory reality of the
present? a goal which, like so many religious faiths, has the
tendency to delude us concerning the present, to console, to find
a substitute in something non-existent, non-present? and is
nevertheless capable of successfully calling for self-sacrifice and
renunciation in the interests of this illusory future?
Will the consequence of such a faith, in which all enchantment
is lost, and in which, with transcendence, the transparency of
things is also extinguished, be a decline of the human spirit and
creativeness? Will there remain only skill, intensity of labour, and
an occasional striking of the right solution, a Promethean en-
thusiasm for the technological, for the learning of manual dex-
terity? Or will the road lead here into fresh depths of being, which
are not yet visible to us because, as yet, no language speaks to us
from out of them?
We deem it improbable. It is more likely that to all this is
opposed the consciousness of man's eternal origin, the conscious-
ness of man who, in manifold historical garbs, is essentially the
same through the content of his faith, which links him to the
matrix of his being. Man can veil himself and his origin, he can let
it slip from consciousness, he can invert himself. But he can also
re-establish himself.
This is at all times possible to him. From the mystery of self-
discovery in existence the profound consciousness of being grows
in him it requires thought and finds communicability in the
THE FUTURE 219
products of thought his consciousness of being becomes sure of
itself in love out of love the content of being is revealed. Out of
the attitude of man to man in the acceptance of concern for others,
in converse, in communication, there grows up the perception
of the true, and the absolute is aroused.
Notions and ideas come and go, and the language in which we
call to mind the eternal. The latter itself cannot undergo muta-
tion. It is. But no one knows it as such. If we now attempt to call
to mind eternal faith, we do not cease to be aware of the fact that
such abstractions are almost empty indications, and that these
abstract formulations also wear an historical garb.
5. The basic categories of eternal faith
We shall venture to formulate the nexus of faith by a few pro-
positions: Faith in God, faith in man, faith in possibilities in the
world.
(1) Faith in God. The notions of God produced by man are not
God Himself. But we can bring the Godhead to consciousness only
through the medium of mental images that operate like a
language. These mental images are symbols, are historical, are
always inadequate.
In some way or other man becomes certain of transcendence--
it may be the space of nothingness in which everything is, this
nothingness which may then suddenly become plenitude and
authentic Being.
The Godhead is origin and goal, it is peace of mind. There is
security.
It is impossible for man to lose transcendence, without ceasing
to be man.
Negative speech relates to mental images. It is founded on the
presence of a profound idea of God, or on the remoteness of end-
less longing.
Always we live with symbols. In them we experience and
apprehend transcendence, authentic reality. Loss of this reality
occurs both in making this symbol a real existence in the world,
and in aestheticising the symbol into an optional guide for
emotions.
(2) Faith in man. Faith in man is faith in the possibility of free-
dom; the image of man remains incomplete if it lacks this basic
feature of his existence, which does not take shape as an image:
that he, bestowed upon himself by God, shall thank or blame
himself for what becomes of him.
The echo from history, that which lends wings to our inter-
course with our ancestors as far back as the origin of the human
220 PRESENT AND FUTURE
race, is their quest for freedom, the fashion in which they realised
freedom, the forms in which they discovered and desired it. We
recognise ourselves in what men were capable of, and what they
say to us out of their historical reality.
To freedom pertains authentic communication, which is more
than contact, compact, sympathy, community of interests and
enjoyment.
Liberty and communication, both of them evade demonstra-
tion. Where demonstration by experience begins, there is no
liberty and no existential communication. Both of them give rise
to that which then becomes the object of experience, without
being adequately explicable as a phenomenon, and to that which
is then a pointer to the processes of liberty, which in itself, where
we gain a share in it, is understandable and compelling.
I Faith in man is faith in his potentialities arising from liberty,
not faith in a man in the sense of the deification of that man. Faith
in man presupposes faith in the Deity through whom he is. With-
out faith in God, faith in man degenerates into contempt for man,
into loss of respect for man as man, with the final consequence that
the alien human life is treated with indifference, as something to
be used and destroyed.
(3) Faith in possibilities in the world. Only to fallacious cognition is
the world self-enclosed, does it contract into an allegedly know-
able mechanism, or into an indefinite, unconscious all-life.
What critical cognition reveals at its limits, and what corre-
sponds to the immediate experience of self-discovery in this
enigmatic world, is the openness, the incalculably of the whole,
the inexhaustible possibilities.
Faith in the world does not mean faith in it as a self-sufficient
entity, but holding fast to the fundamental enigma of self-
discovery in the world with its tasks and possibilities.
The world is a place of tasks, is itself derived from transcend-
ence; in it befalls the language to which we listen when we under-
stand what we really want.
The consequences of faith (in God, in man, in possibilities in
the world) are essential for the paths of socialism and world
unity. Without faith we are left with the understanding, mechanis-
tic thinking, the irrational and ruin.
(i) Strength from ruin: Faith alone sets in motion the forces that
master man's basic animal instincts, deprive them of overlord-
ship, and transform them into motors of upsurging humanity: the
brutal force of the desire to dominate delight in violence, in
cruelty the empty will to prestige the desire for wealth and
THE FUTURE 221
pleasure the erotic instincts, which force themselves to the front
wherever they are given the opportunity.
The first step toward the taming of the naked instincts is
external force accompanied by terror and the engendering of
anxiety, then the already indirect force of the tabu] then adaptive
conquest takes place through the faith of the man who masters
himself through the meaning of his actions out of his faith.
History is man's advance toward liberty through the cultivation
of faith. Out of faith are devised the laws that subjugate force,
legitimacy is constituted, without which there can be no reliance
on anything, man becomes himself through his subjection to
absolute imperatives.
(2) Tolerance: The road to world order can only reach its
destination if tolerance prevails. Intolerance means force, repul-
sion and conquest.
Tolerance does not imply indifference, however. Indifference is
born rather of the arrogance of one's own truth and is the mildest
form of intolerance: secret contempt let others believe what they
like, it doesn't concern me.
Tolerance, by contrast, is open-minded; it knows its own
limitations and seeks to integrate them humanly into diversity,
without reducing the notions and ideas of faith to an absolute
common denominator.
It may be that every human contains all potentialities, but only
a restricted reality is ever sure. It is restricted firstly by the finitude
of existence. Secondly because in the origin of manifestation there
is a manifoldness of historicity, through which we not only remain
differentiated, but at the same time acquire our natures and our
unconditionality. Man in his manifestation should certainly not
be of one single type, but he should be concerned with himself in
all his multiformity. For our roots extend beyond our historically
particular origin to the one origin that comprehends us all. This
origin is the source of the demand for boundless communication,
which, in the manifest world, is the path along which truth is
disclosed.
Converse is therefore the indispensable path not only in ques-
tions of existence for our political order, but in every aspect of
our being. But the impetus and content of this converse are fur-
nished by faith alone; by faith in man and his potentialities, by
faith in the One that can guide the association of all, by the faith
that I myself only become with the becoming of the other self.
The bournes of tolerance lie at absolute intolerance. But every
living man, however intolerably he may behave, must bear within
him the possibility of tolerance, because he is human.
222 PRESENT AND FUTURE
(3) The animation of all activity: Whatever becomes a reality on
the roads of socialism and planning, on the road of world order
institutions, works, regulations governing human intercourse, and
behaviour-patterns will undergo metamorphoses according to
the kind of people involved in them. Their ways of thought, their
faiths, and their characters will determine the mode of realisation
and the further consequences.
Everything which the understanding devises, sets as its aims, or
introduces as a means, because it is done and suffered by men, is
ultimately guided by motives of which the understanding did not
think; these motives may be either instincts and passions, or the
impulses imparted by faith, or ideas.
Hence it is fatal for consciousness to seek to devote itself
entirely to the realm of understanding. In so doing it succumbs
in an all the more veiled fashion to the elemental.
In the critical consciousness, faith leads to the self-regulation
of finite things: of power and force, of the plans devised by the
understanding, of science, of art. Everything is situated within its
frontiers, and over all extends a guidance which is not a plan.
Guidance stems from a more profound order that becomes
conscious of itself in the illuminations of faith. The finite is thereby
given a soul, as it were, and is the manner in which the infinite
becomes present. The finite becomes, so to speak, a vessel or a
language, and through its effects the bearer of a presence of the
infinite, when it does not forget its finitude.
Hence also the possibility of an appeal to men in institutions,
in bureaucracies, in science and technology: from the idea of
faith, at all small and great turning-points, to find the way to
bring the spirit of the whole to manifestation, in self-limitation to
bring forth meaning and humaneness out of the unending. States-
men, civil servants, scientists they all gain status and meaning
by testifying to guidance from the Comprehensive through the
self-limitation of their power.
4. The faith of the future
The aspect of the present and the categories of eternal faith
seem so totally disparate as to be mutually exclusive. The diversity
between them adds poignancy to the question of the future: In
what shape will man's faith manifest itself?
For a start we hear radical pessimism: In the immensity of
distress everything will disappear, faith along with culture;
nothing will be left but lack of reflection, paralysis of soul and
spirit; for this distress is the decline on the way to bodily destruc-
tion. Such statements contain a pitiless truth. For the moments of
THE FUTURE 223
revelation from the depths of the soul in the greatest distress
remain so it seems without effect on the world, without ^ com-
munication; or they vanish for the world in the most intimate
communication between those nearest to each other. Once
distress had been overcome, the question of the faith of the future
would be almost due for an answer. Beyond annihilation lies
silence, the horrible silence out of which^something like a mirage
advances upon us, and yet nothing more is said to us,
If in the future, however, faith is going to exist, communicate
itself, and link men together, one thing is certain: We can do
nothing to plan the future realities of faith. We can only be ready
to receive it, and live in such a manner that this readiness increases.
We cannot make our own transformation the goal of our wills; it
must, rather, be bestowed upon us, if we live in such a fashion
that we can experience the gift. With this, it seems proper to
keep silent about the faith of the future.
But if it is true that faith is present at all times, even a public
opinion which accepts the proposition c God is dead' as a believed
truth cannot completely extinguish that which exists always. Then
this residue, or the germ of this faith, will seek its language. And
philosophy can conceive the area within which such a language
is possible. It springs from two motives:
(1) He who believes loves the believing man, wherever he meets
him. Just as freedom strives that all around it shall become free,
so faith strives that all shall come to their historical faith. It is not
compulsion that is meaningful, and not enforcement, but to
arouse attention through a language in which, no matter how,
transcendence is testified to. It is true that we cannot render each
other decisive aid in the province of faith, but only meet one
another. If transcendence helps, it helps only the individual by
his selfhood. In converse we can, however, encourage and unfold
one another out of that which is innate in each individual.
(2) If the work that plans can never engender a faith, it can
nonetheless excogitate, and perhaps create, possibilities out of
faith for faith.
This fact is inescapable for the future: The way of the spirit and
the fate of mankind pass through all men. What they do not absorb
has little chance of survival. As ever, sublime unfoldment and
creation will become aristocratic. But the substratum of these and
the simple fundament, to which everything brought forth by the
spirit is related, must have become a reality in the consciousness of
the majority, or it must meet it half-way as an unexpressed yearning.
224 PRESENT AND FUTURE
In this process, it is today more crucial than ever what the
people who have learnt to read and write prior to this they were
slumbering and ineffectual masses now really do read. For many
centuries the Bible was the book which every reader contemplated
from childhood to old age. Today this method of passing on the
cultural heritage and of education seems, in a large section of the
population, to be disappearing in favour of sporadic reading.
Newspapers, including those of high intellectual quality and
written by the best brains of the day, indispensable to ^ every
contemporary person, become a danger when they remain the
only reading matter for the type of person who skims through his
paper and quickly forgets what he has read. It is impossible to
predict what reading that dominates his life will operate for the
education of man in the future.
Because it depends upon all men, those endeavours have pre-
eminence for the determination of the future that are addressed to
the whole population, if they really succeed in piercing the hearts
of men and do not merely produce factitious constructs. The
latter, because they have not taken root in men's hearts, break
down' at once in the face of real catastrophe, as happened
with the sham constructs of fascism, that had been affirmed,
known and lived with such a paralysing effect.
No one can foretell what might be possible through the reju-
venation of the Churches. We can see forces emanating from
ecclesiastical faith which, in their personal shape, are of poignant
absoluteness. But today we do not see the great, widely effective
manifestation as a whole.
Ecclesiastical faith is expressed in notions, ideas, dogmas and
becomes creed. It is capable of forgetting its origin, and identify-
ing itself with these particular contents and objectifications, and
must then lose its strength. But it also needs this integument for
the preservation of its heritage.
The majority of people seem bound to faith in some kind of
palpable reality. In their shrewdness, institutions that desire
power over the people and, at the same time, to help everyone,
therefore always address themselves to the craving for sensible
reality and definite religious dogmas, when everything else seems
unable to strike roots in the masses.
Opposed to this is a metamorphosis of the mode of faith which
is foreign to the Churches. Man, aware of his liberty, leaves his
faith in suspension in an inexpressible general implication, and
is decisive in his historicity, in the decisions of his personal life; he
tests and holds himself open, and takes as his foundation the
THE FUTURE 225
authority of the whole heritage of history. The question is whether
the epoch, which has taught whole populations to read and write
for the first time, does not by this very fact afford new possi-
bilities for a free faith that is undogmatic in its tenets, without
diminution of earnestness and unconditionally. Up to the present
such a mode of faith has at all times failed to arouse any response
in the mass of the population.
Hence it is despised as private and powerless by the function-
aries of dogmatic, doctrinaire, institutional modes of faith, secure
in the sense of power they derive from membership of mighty
organisms, that are effective in the world and at times omni-
potent on a broad front. Since however, in the last analysis, the
mass consists of separate individuals, so that the elements of
private life have an ubiquitous influence, it is crucial for the course
of events whether these tangible aids to faith, even if they are
forms of superstition, bear in themselves that which can be recog-
nised in sublime unfoldments and from the origin in man as an
individual, in his manner of living directly to God.
If doubt concerning the contemporary Churches and their
capacity for transformation is not inclined to give them a favour-
able prognosis possibly quite erroneously this doubt need by
no means apply to the Biblical religion. It is probable that the
faith of the future will continue to move within the fundamental
positions and categories of the Axial Period, from which the
Biblical religion stems: because for our overall view of history, the
spiritual paramountcy of those centuries of origin is so great
because science and technology, with the contents arising out of
them, cannot hold out against the lofty contents of the faith and
humanity of that origin because the dissolution of modern
thought has not been able to offer anything of real content out of
its own origin to overcome it because the simplicity of depth
does not exist in any new shape, and could hardly assert its new
shape, if it were to come into being, without having preserved the
former content.
What seems probable today, therefore, is a transformation
wrought by re-establishment of the Biblical religion. In opposi-
tion to the tendencies of the age to severance, enclosure and
fanaticism in groups (corresponding to the enclosing boundaries
arising out of the outlook of total planning), stand the tendencies
to amalgamation on the basis of a great, simple truth.
But who could disclose in the individual instance what today is
fundamentally extinct, what represents a vain clinging to lost
causes, and what is original and capable of supporting life!
226 PRESENT AND FUTURE
That in the last resort the decision on the future of our Western
humanity lies in the relation of our faith to the Biblical religion
seems, however, to be certain.
We may consider a transformation of the Biblical religion to be
no longer possible, that it is likely to die out in benumbing creeds
(instead of being carried alive through the ages in these protective
integuments), and hence may simply be extinguished in the
coming political catastrophes; in this event, because man cannot
cease to be man, something different ^ in its origins is bound to
appear. This new manifestation, of which we can form no notion,
would cause the Biblical religion to vanish into a mere recollec-
tion, such as the Greek myths are for us; even this recollection
might be lost. The religion of the Bible would have had a long
run, as long as Confucianism, which is today in the same uncertain
situation, but not yet as long as the ancient Egyptian religion.
This new manifestation would not come to life through an act of
establishment which, in correlation to the rule of force of a world
empire, would have outward chances only. IHt is really to take
hold of men, something like a new Axial Period would have to
come to pass. Then the loosening up of mankind would show what
is developing in the communication of spiritual conflict, in the
harnessing of spiritual unconditionally, in the beatitude of
knowing the new process of revelation to be borne by the God-
head.
We may think further: In coming centuries men will perhaps
arise who, sustained by the sight of the origin of the Axial Period,
will proclaim truths replete with the knowledge and experience
of our era that will really be believed and lived. Man would once
more experience in full earnestness the meaning of the fact that
God is, 'and once more know ihepneuma that sweeps life along
To expect this in the shape of a fresh revelation from God,
however, would seem to be mistaken. The concept of revelation
belongs exclusively to the Biblical religion. The revelation has
taken place and is complete. The idea of revelation will remain
inseparably bound up with the Biblical religion. In the lucidity of
our world, a prophecy that made its appearance with the claim to
a fresh divine revelation would perhaps always give the impression
of madness or false prophecy, of superstition, that collapses before
the one great, true prophecy which occurred thousands of years
ago. And yet, who knows?
At all events, any such new revelation would become untrue in
a merely usurped and enforced exclusivity. For that the truth of
faith lies in the multiplicity of its historical manifestations, in the
THE FUTURE 227
self-encountering of this multiplicity through ever deeper com-
munication, is an insight and experience of latter centuries which
cannot be reversed. This experience cannot be fallacious in its
origin.
In view, however, of the possibility of a totalitarian world
empire and a totalitarian doctrinal truth corresponding to it, the
only hope left is for the individual, for innumerable individuals,
as they have lived from the Axial Period until today, from China
to the West, to preserve the stream of philosophy, however
narrow it may become. The independence from both Church
and State of the deepest inner being of the man related to trans-
cendence, his liberty of soul, that draws courage from discourse
with the great cultural heritage, this remains the last refuge, as it
has been so often before in evil periods of transition.
If it be deemed improbable that a world order will develop
without unity of faith, I venture to assert the reverse. The univer-
sality of a world order obligatory to all (in contrast to a world
empire) is possible only when the multiple contents of faith
remain free in their historical communication, without the unity
of an objective, universally valid doctrinal content. The common
element of all faith in relation to world order can only be that
everyone desires the ordering of the foundations of existence, in a
world community in which he has room to evolve with the peace-
ful means of the spirit.
So we do not expect a fresh revelation from God in the exclusiv-
ity of an annunciation with validity for the whole of mankind.
Something else is possible. Perhaps we may expect something
resembling a revelation through a prophecy (in using this word we
are speaking imprecisely of a future phenomenon in a category
belonging to the past) credible today, which would then assume
manifold shape, or else, through sages and lawgivers (speaking
again in categories of the Axial Period), make possible an ascent
to high-minded, devoted, penetrating, pure humanity. There is in
us an insufficiency, something resembling waiting, resembling
readiness. Philosophy is incomplete and must remain aware of the
fact, if it is not to slip into fallacy. We are wandering in the
obscurity of the future, on guard against the enemies of truth,
incapable of relinquishing our own thinking nescience in obedi-
ence to an imposed knowledge but above all ready to hear and
see when fulfilling symbols and profound thoughts once more
illumine the path of life.
In this process, philosophising will in any case accomplish an
essential task. It will repay us thoughtfully to resist the absurdities,
falsifications and perversions, the claim to exclusive possession of
228 PRESENT AND FUTURE
historical truth, and blind intolerance. Philosophy leads us along
the road to the point at which love acquires its depth in real
communication. Then in this love, through the success of com-
munication, the truth that links us together will be disclosed to
those who are most remote in the diversity of their historical
origin.
Today individuals are palpable. He who would like to live in
the unclosed and unorganised and unorganisable community of
authentic human beings in what used to be called the invisible
Church does in fact live today as an individual in alliance with
individuals scattered over the face of the earth, an alliance that
survives every disaster, a dependability that is not fixed by any
pact or any specific imperative. He lives in complete insufficiency,
but in a communal insufficiency, and obdurately seeks with others
the right road within this world and not outside it. These indi-
viduals meet one another, exhort and encourage one another.
They repudiate the modern combination of eccentric faith con-
tents with the practice of a nihilistic realism. They know that the
task imposed upon man is to realise in this world that which is
possible to man, and that this possibility is not a single and solitary
one. But every individual must know where he stands and for
what he will work. It is as though everyone were charged by the
Deity to work and live for boundless openness, authentic reason,
truth and love and fidelity, without the recourse to force that is
typical of the States and Churches in which we have to live and
whose insufficiency we should like to oppose.
PART THREE
THE MEANING OF HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
The Meaning of Conceptions of History
WHAT does a universal view of history mean to us? We wish
to understand history as a whole, in order to understand
ourselves. History for us is the memory which is not only
known to us, but from which we live. It is the groundwork which
is laid down and to which we remain bound, if we do not want
to melt away into nothing, but desire to win a part in humanity.
A view of history creates the area out of which our conscious-
ness of humanity is aroused. The picture we form of history
becomes a factor in our volition. The manner in which we think
of history sets limits on our potentialities, or sustains us by its
implications, or lures us away from our reality. Even in unim-
peachable objectivity, historical knowledge is no mere indifferent
factual content, but an active element in our lives. The use of
this knowledge for purposes of propaganda in the interests of a
power amounts to a lie about history. The task of ascertaining
history as a whole is one of grave responsibility.
We can either know of our historical fundament through the
contemplation of the greatness that lies close to our hearts. We
raise ourselves up on that which was, through which we became,
which is an exemplar to us. When a great man lived is then of no
consequence. Everything then lies, as it were, on a single, timeless
plane of the valid. The historical heritage is then unhistorically
present to us, so to speak.
Or we can view greatness consciously historically, in the
temporal sequence of events. We enquire as to the when and
where. The whole is a passage through time. Time is subdivided.
Everything does not exist at all times, but every age has its own
greatness. The past has peaks and valleys in its significance. There
are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last
for ever, and which feel themselves to be final. And there are ages
of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear
to go to the roots of humanity itself.
Hence, along with history, the historical consciousness itself
changes. In our era it is determined by the consciousness of crisis,
which has been growing for more than a hundred years, and has
today become universal as the consciousness of almost all men.
231
232 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
Already to Hegel, the European world showed its sunset ^glow.
'Only at dusk does the owl of Minerva begin its flight 5 it was
thus that he understood his own philosophic activity, not yet in
the consciousness of decline, however, but of consummation.
Intellectually, the consciousness of crisis reached its zenith with
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Since their time the knowledge that
we are at a turning-point in history, at the termination of history
in the existing sense, that we are witnessing the radical meta-
morphosis of humanity itself, has been gaining currency.
After the First World War, it was no longer the sunset glow
merely of Europe, but of all the cultures of the earth. An end of
mankind, a recasting from which no people and no man was
exempt whether it was to annihilation, or 'to rebirth could be
felt. It was still not the end itself; but the knowledge of its possible
imminence became prevalent. The anticipated end was either
experienced in fearful horror, or cold-bloodedly interpreted on
the one hand naturalistically-biologically or sociologically, on the
other as a metaphysico-substantial process. The atmosphere is
totally diverse as between, say, Klages or Spengler or Alfred
Weber. But there can be no doubt that the reality of crisis, on an
historically unparalleled scale, underlies all of them.
In this crisis of consciousness, the contemplation of history may
help us to understand ourselves and our situation.
One thing, it seems, is always able to stand firm: humanity as
such, and its self-reflection in philosophic activity. Even in periods
of disintegration, so history shows us, high philosophy was still
possible.
The will to self-understanding on the basis of a universal view
of history is perhaps an example of this philosophic activity that
stands firm and, seeking its fundament, looks into the future, not
prophetically but in faith, not dishearteningly but encouragingly.
We cannot push our historical memory deep enough nor far
enough. It may be that we hear what history means as a whole
most readily from the margins. These margins are experienced by
contrast with that which is not history, by contrast with the before
and the beyond, and in the process of penetrating into the con-
cretely historical, so as to apprehend it more profoundly, more
clearly, and on a broader front.
Enquiry into the meaning of the whole of history leaves us
without the final answer, however. Yet this enquiry, and the
critically intensified endeavours to find an answer, help us against
the short-circuits of facile pseudo-knowledge that vanishes as
quickly as it comes against the inclination merely to traduce
INTRODUCTION 233
one's own epoch, which it is so easy to discredit against the
declarations of total bankruptcy, which to us today sound almost
old-fashioned against demands to bring into being the entirely
new, the originating, which will now save us, and which is set in
opposition to the whole line of development from Plato to Hegel
or Nietzsche, as its invalidation. A marvellous enhancement is
imparted to one's thinking, to the accompaniment of a poverty of
content (in mimicry of an extreme, but well-founded, state of
consciousness in Nietzsche). The pompous comportment of the
no and the affirmation of nothingness is not a reality of one's own,
however. It is possible to lead a spiritual sham life on the sensation
of combating something only so long as one's capital holds out.
The unhistorical element in history consists of the simple
physical substratum and the identically recurrent, the regular
causalities.
In the flux of mere happening, the specifically historical
possesses a unique character. It is the heritage through authority
and, within this, a continuity through reminiscent relationship to
the past. It is the transmutation of phenomena in consciously
achieved connexions of meaning.
Historical consciousness registers the presence of something
irreplaceably its own, something individual, whose validity for
us cannot be adequately explained by any universal value, an
entity possessing a temporally evanescent shape.
The historical is that which comes to naught, but is everlasting
in time. It is the hallmark of this Being that it is history, and
thereby not permanence through all time. For in contradistinction
to mere happening, in which, as matter, the universal forms and
laws simply repeat themselves, history is the happening which in
itself, cutting across time, annulling time, lays hold of the eternal.
Why is there any such thing as history? Because man is finite,
imperfect and unperfectible he must, in his metamorphosis
through time, become aware of the eternal, arid he can do so only
along this path. Man's imperfection and hi historicity are the
same thing. Man's limitations exclude certain possibilities. There
can be no ideal state on earth. There is no right organisation of the
world. There is no perfect man. Permanent end-states are possible
only as a regression to mere natural happening. In consequence of
perpetual imperfection in history, things must perpetually become
different. History cannot be brought to a conclusion through its
own agency. It can come to an end only through an inner break-
down or cosmic disasters.
But although the question of what in history is the specifically
234 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
historical, in its fulfilment from the eternal, impels us to descry it,
it nevertheless remains impossible for us to judge an historical
phenomenon in toto and definitively. For we are not the Deity, who
sits in judgement, but men, who open their senses in order to gain
a share in the historical, which we therefore seek with all the
greater concern the more we comprehend it.
History is at one and the same time happening and conscious-
ness of this happening, history and knowledge of history. This
history is, so to speak, encompassed by abysses. If it falls back into
one of these, it ceases to be history. To our consciousness, it is to
be merged in itself and picked out:
Firstly: History has boundaries that divide it off from other
aspects of reality, from nature and the cosmos. Around history lies
the boundless space of the existent in general (i).
Secondly: History possesses inner structures through the trans-
formation of the mere reality of the individual thing and of the
purely transient. It becomes history only with the unity of the
universal and the individual, but in such a way that it exhibits
the intrinsic individuality of irreplaceable significance, an unique-
universal. It is transitionality as the fulfilment of being (2).
Thirdly: History becomes the idea of a whole, through the
question: In what does the unity of history consist? (3).
The abysses : Nature outside history and as the volcanic matrix
of history the reality that appears within it as its ephemeral
transitionality endless dispersal, out of which the always dubious
unity seeks to achieve itself to see these abysses consciously
heightens our feeling for the specifically historical.
CHAPTER ONE
Boundaries of History
A. NATURE AND HISTORY
WE have the notion of the history of mankind as a minute
part of the history of life on earth. The history of man-
kind is very short (at the very most it dates from the
tertiary formation, and is probably later) in comparison with the
history of plants and animals, which completely dominate the
historical picture of the earth from a temporal point of view. The
six thousand years of recorded history known to us is in turn a very
short happening in comparison with the long, unhistorical history
of mankind, that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.
This notion is not incorrect. But it contains no hint of what
constitutes history proper. For history is not itself like nature,
but exists on the groundwork of nature, which was in the im-
measurable aeons before history, is today, and sustains everything
that we are.
To be sure, we speak of the history of nature and of the history
of man. Both together constitute an irreversible process in time.
But the two of them are disparate in nature and meaning.
The history of nature is not conscious of itself. It is mere hap-
pening that does not know itself, but is first known by man.
Consciousness and purposiveness are not a factor in this happen-
ing.
By human standards, this history is of very long duration. Its
foreground aspect, by the criterion of human life, is the repetition
of the same. Nature is in this sense unhistorical. 15
Hence we are being misled by our habit of thinking in the
categories of nature, when we look at history itself on analogy with
natural processes:
1 i ) We have a picture of endless coming and going, of extinc-
tion and repetition in endless time there is an opportunity for
everything, but no meaning that runs through time. In such a
picture there is no true history.
(2) The life process causes the genesis of man as a species of
animal. Man spreads over the face of the earth as do some other
forms of life, but not all.
235
1236 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
(3) Mankind as a whole is a life process. It grows, blossoms,
ages and dies. This is pictured not only as an unique process of
mankind, but as a repetitive, multiple process of human cultures,
in succession to and concurrently with one another. Out of the
amorphous material of natural mankind, cultures grow as his-
torical bodies whose course is subject to laws, with life-phases, with
a beginning and an end. Cultures are, so to speak, organisms,
drawing their life from their own sources, unconcerned with one
another, but modified or deranged by contact with each other.
Such views, shackled by the categories of natural processes,
do not reveal what is specifically historical, however.
B. HEREDITY AND TRADITION
We humans are, at one and the same time, nature^and history.
Our nature is disclosed in heredity, our history in tradition.
Stability through heredity, which shows us, as natural creatures,
the same for thousands of years, stands in contrast to the imperil-
ment of our tradition. Consciousness may sink away, the spiritual
acquisitions of millennia are not a dependable possession.
The historical process may come to an end through forgetting,
through the disappearance of what has been acquired historically.
Even the almost unconscious stability of the mode of life and
thinking arising out of habit and unquestioned faith, which is
formed daily in the overall condition of communal circumstances
and is seemingly fixed in the depths, becomes insecure the moment
this condition is altered. Then everyday life breaks loose from
tradition, the historically evolved ethos ceases, the life-form
crumbles, absolute undependability develops. Atomised man
becomes the indeterminate mass of an unhistorical agglomera-
tion of life, which, however, as human life in turmoil and anxiety,
whether open or concealed, lives on, veiled by the vital force of its
existence.
In short, it is not heredity that makes us human, but always
the content of a tradition. In heredity man possesses something
virtually indestructible, in tradition something that may well get
lost.
Tradition leads back into the matrix of prehistory. It com-
prises everything which is not biologically inheritable, but an
historical substance of humanity.
Long prehistory, short history what can this difference sig-
nify?
At the dawn of history, acquired from prehistory, there stands
as it were humanity's capital, which is not a biologically inheri-
BOUNDARIES OF HISTORY 237
table, but an historical substance, a capital that may be increased
or squandered. It is something that is real prior to all thought,
that cannot be fabricated or intentionally created.
This substance first becomes mature and clear through the
spiritual movement that takes place in history. In this movement
the substance passes through metamorphoses. Perhaps new
origins make their appearance in history, which as realities the
prime example is the Axial Period are in turn presuppositions.
All this does not occur in the whole of mankind as such, however,
but only at the heights attained by individuals, who flower and
are forgotten again, misunderstood and lost.
There is in history a trend toward liberation from the pre-
suppositions of substance, away from tradition and toward the
point of mere thinking, as though something could be brought
forth out of this insubstantial work of reason. It is enlightenment,
which, inverting itself, no longer enlightens anything, but leads
into nothingness.
C. HISTORY AND COSMOS
Why do we live and accomplish our history in infinite space at
precisely this point, on a minute grain of dust in the universe, as
though in an out-of-the-way corner? Why just now in infinite
time? What happened to cause the commencement of history?
These are questions whose unanswerability makes us conscious of
an enigma.
The fundamental fact of our existence is that we appear to be
isolated in the cosmos. We are the only articulate rational beings
in the silence of the universe. In the history of the solar system
there has arisen on the earth, for a so far infinitesimally short
period, a condition in which humans evolve and realise know-
ledge of themselves and of being. Only here is this inwardness of
self-understanding to be found. At least we do not know of any
other reality of inwardness. Within the boundless cosmos, on a tiny
planet, for a tiny period of a few millennia, something has taken
place as though this planet were the all-embracing, the authentic.
This is the place, a mote in the immensity of the cosmos, at which
Being has awakened with man.
But this cosmos is the obscurity of the comprehensive existent,
in which, from which, and through which that happens which we
are, and whose provenance is itself uncompreheiided. This
obscurity as a whole only shows us the foreground aspect of the
inert processes investigated by astronomy and astrophysics, which,
in their fantastic magnitude, are suddenly hardly more to us than
238 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
a cloud of dust in the room lit up by the rays of the sun. The
cosmos must be infinitely more than this foreground aspect of
investigable facts, something deeper than that which has begun
to unveil itself, namely that to which our human historical mani-
festation gives birth.
For our terrestrial existence, however, another abyss has been
reached. With the accessibility of the planet as a whole, the road
of space is closed. Up till now, man was able to roam, to move
into unknown distances, and to live in the background of those
distances, which remained boundlessly accessible to his foot when
it drove him forth. Now the house of our existence is closed up, its
size is known exactly; it can be pictured as a whole for purposes
of plan and action. But this whole is radically isolated in the
universe. Through the actuality of this situation the human
world condenses, as it were, on earth. Outside it is a universe
which seems, spiritually, to be entirely empty and into which it
appears as though the human world will never be able to enter.
In this isolation all that remains to it is the reality of self-under-
standing related purely to itself. This isolation in the cosmos is a
real boundary of history. Up to the present, nothing but empty
notions and unfulfillable potentialities have crossed it with the
vain question: Are there life and spirit, are there rational beings,
elsewhere in the universe?
Negative replies are given to this question:
(a) The indispensable preconditions of life are a coincidence in
the almost empty, frozen universe sprinkled here and there with
incandescent masses at great distances from one another. On the
other planets of our solar system life is either not possible at all,
or possible only in the shape of low forms of plant-life. It is not
absolutely beyond the bounds of possibility that other solar
systems may contain planets of the same type as the earth, but it
is improbable on account of the number of chance circumstances
which would have to coincide to produce such a result (Edding-
ton).
(b) The specific characteristics of man, according to the pro-
found conception arising out of the Judaico-Christian revealed
religion, possess uniqueness; God's creation is a single one, and
man is the likeness of God; there cannot be many 'worlds' (so says
Christianity and so says Hegel). Both revelation, through which
man comprehends himself in his nullity and grandeur, as well as
the natural tendency through which man feels himself to be the
centre and unique, lead to this conclusion.
Positive answers are also given:
(a) It may be a coincidence, but there is plenty of room in the
BOUNDARIES OF HISTORY 239
infinite world for this coincidence to take place contemporan-
eously, or in the sequence of time. In fact it is extremely probable
that, amongst the thousands of millions of suns in the Galactic
System, and amongst the innumerable galactic systems besides
our own, the coincidence in its conjunction of circumstances
might occur several times.
(b) Man has at all times assumed the existence in the world of
other rational beings besides himself: demons, angels, star-gods.
In this manner he surrounded himself with mythical relations.
The world was not empty. With the transformation of the world
into a mechanism of mere inert masses, this emptiness has become
complete. It seems impossible that alone in the world man
possesses consciousness and thinks, once we visualise this in all its
implications. Is this vast world only there for man? We cannot
even comprehend all life on the earth as being in relation to man.
Everything exists for itself, and the long history of the earth was
life without man.
(c) If man were not alone, one might perhaps say that there has
been plenty of opportunity during infinite ages for any creatures
with spirit in the world to give evidence of their presence : the
world would long since have been 'discovered' from somewhere,
and any newly evolving rational life would immediately have been
assimilated into a continually existent community of communi-
cation in the cosmos.
To this we might perfectly well reply, however: We are per-
petually encompassed by the beams of this communication, as by
radio beams, which we do not observe if we have no receiver. We
have not yet progressed far enough to perceive the beams which
are continually diffused through the cosmos and emanate from a
cosmic community that has long since been realised. We on the
earth are only just starting. The moment of awakening has begun.
Why should we not one day discover the language that does in
fact pervade the world, first of all picking it up without under-
standing it, and then, so to speak, deciphering it like the Egyptian
hieroglyphics? Until we incessantly hear the messages com-
municated by rational beings in the world, and until we become
capable of replying?
All further picturing of this idea is objectless, like the idea
itself such things, for instance, as the consequences which the
distance of light years might have upon possible exchanges.
Up to the present all speculations of this kind have only the
one meaning of holding potentiality open, and making papable
the isolation of man's position on earth. No sort of consequences
arise for us as long as there is no real trace of rational beings in the
240 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
cosmos. We can neither deny the possibility, nor reckon with the
reality. We can, however, become conscious of the astonishing and
always disquietingly poignant fact that man, in the infinite spaces
and aeons, upon this small planet, has only during the last six
thousand years come to himself in the enquiry and knowledge that
we call philosophising.
The prodigious historic phenomenon of this thinking con-
sciousness, and of the humanity in it and through it, is, in its
entirety, an evanescent event in the universe, entirely new, entirely
of the present instant, just beginning in fact and yet, for itself and
seen from within, as old as if it comprehended the universe.
CHAPTER TWO
Basic Structures of History
THE history of man stands out from the rest of the world
through its possession of a mode of being all its own.
Within the sciences, a peculiar cognition corresponds to it.
We will pick out two fundamental characteristics of history.
A. THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INDIVIDUAL
If we apprehend history in universal laws (in causal relation-
ships, morphological laws, dialectical necessities), this universal
never gives us history itself. For history in its individual occur-
rence is something ipso facto unique.
What we call history is external, that which happens in space
and time at a particular place. This is true of all reality, however.
Although in principle the natural sciences possess knowledge of the
universal laws underlying all natural happening, they have no
knowledge of such things as, for example, why accumulations of
sulphur are found in Sicily, and none whatever concerning the
reason for the de facto distribution of matter in space. The limit
of natural scientific cognition is individualised reality, which can
only be described, not comprehended.
But to be localised in space and time, to be an individual
these hallmarks of all reality do not suffice to distinguish indi-
viduality in history. That which is repeated, that which as an indi-
vidual is replaceable by another individual, which amounts to an
instance of a universal, none of this, as such, amounts to history.
To be history the individual must be unique, irreplaceable, single.
To us, this mode of uniqueness exists only in man and Ms
creations, in all other realities only in so far as they are related
to man and become his means, expression or purpose. Man is not
history as a natural being, but only as a spiritual being.
In history we are accessible to ourselves as ourselves, but in that
which is our essential feature we are not accessible to ourselves as
an object of investigation. It is true that we can also become an
object of investigation to ourselves as nature, as an instance of a
universal, as real individuals. In history, however, we encounter
241
242 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
ourselves as freedom, as existence, as spirit, as the earnestness of
decision, and as independence from the whole world. In history
we are addressed by that which does not address us in nature, the
mystery of the leaps into liberty, and the manifestation of Being
in human consciousness.
Our understanding is inclined to regard that which is thought
and imagined particularly as Being itself, and, as it were, to
possess Being in this excogitated thing; so it is in history with the
individual, which is thought only in respect of the universal
The individual is not historical by the mere fact of being called
by name as a reality in its place in space and time, however; nor
is the universal that appears in such individuals as universal law,
as typical shape, as universally valid value. We ^ fall HI to a trap
every time we suppose ourselves to see the historical itself in this
universal.
The historical is rather the single, the irreplaceable not the
real individual, which is, rather, permeated, consumed and
transformed by the specifically historical individual not the
individual as a vessel for the universal or as the representative
of a universal, but rather the reality that first animates this
universal It is the self-existent which is bound up with the
origin of everything existent, sure of itself in this matrix in its
consciousness.
This historical individual is disclosed only to love, and to the
power of intuition and clairvoyance that grows in love. Entirely
present in love, the single individual becomes endlessly open to
the desire for knowledge that is guided by love. It is revealed in
phenomena which also become unpredictably different. It is real
as an historical individual, and yet to mere knowledge it is, at
the same time, non-existent as such.
To love of the historical individual, the matrix of Being to
which it is attached becomes simultaneously perceptible. In the
infinitude of the loved individual, the world becomes manifest.
Hence genuine love experiences expansion and intensification
through itself, spreads to everything historically existent, becomes
love of Being itself in its origin. Thus it becomes manifest to loving
intuition how Being, this one single vast individual, is historical in
the world. But it is revealed only in the historicity of the love of an
individual to an individual
To the Being of history corresponds the particularity of his-
torical cognition. Historical research creates the prerequisites in
real insight, through which and on the margins of which there
may dawn upon us that which is no longer accessible to research
BASIC STRUCTURES OF HISTORY 243
itself, but from which research is guided in its choice of themes and
in its differentiation between essential and inessential. On the road
via the always universal object of our cognition, research shows
at its margins the irreplaceable individual of history as that which
is never universal. To catch a glimpse of this individual links us
with it on a plane that lies above and beyond cognition, but is
attainable only through cognition.
That which we make our own in the shape of the historically
particular enables us to go forward to total history as to a single
individual. All history is rooted in the matrix of this one com-
prehensive historicity.
B. THE TRANSITION ALITY OF HISTORY
In history nature is still present at every moment. It is the
reality that supports, the repetitive, the enduring, that changes
only very slowly and unconsciously like all nature. But where
spirit appears there is consciousness, reflection, incessant move-
ment in work with oneself, on oneself, in an interminable open-
ness of the possible.
The more decisive the uniquely single, the less identical repe-
tition there is, the more authentic is history. Everything great is
a phenomenon in transition.
If history is the manifestation of Being, then truth is at all times
present in history, never consummate, however, but always in
motion. It is lost where it is believed to have become a final
possession. The more radical the movement, the greater the depth
out of which truth may appear. Hence the greatest spiritual works
are those of transition, at the boundary of epochs. Some examples:
Greek tragedy stands at the transition from myth to philosophy.
Still creating myths out of the primeval substance of tradition,
and rendering them more profound in the image, the tragic poets,
despite the fact that they drew their intuition from original
sources, lived by questioning and interpreting. They heightened
the content and were on the road to its dissolution. They were the
creators of the most profoundly significant configurations of the
myth, and at the same time of the end of the myth as all-embracing
truth.
The mysticism of Echhart was so uninhibitedly audacious because
it was in line with the creed of the Church and the origin of new,
free reason. It had not yet slipped into the noxious play of irre-
sponsible paradoxes, had no destructive impulse, and, because it
lived from the potentialities of the man with the broadest outlook,
who set no bounds to thought, it opened the path to the most
244 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
profound insight as well as to the decomposition of tradition.
The philosophy of German idealism, from Fichte and Hegel to
Schelling, stood at the transition from faith to godlessness. The
age of Goethe lived an aesthetic religion in the radiant lustre of
the understanding of all the depths of the spirit, nourished by
the bygone substance of Christian faith, which was then lost by
its successors.
Analogously, Plato or Shakespeare or Rembrandt are to be
understood in terms of transition. Transition in this sense applies
to whole epochs above all, the centuries of the Axial Period from
600 to 300 B.C.
But there is always transition. The depth of the movement of a
transition brings the highest clarity of Being and truth. The weak-
ening of transition to an apparently permanent set of circum-
stances causes consciousness to decline along with the sense of
time, and man to fall into the sleep of external repetition, into
habituation and nature.
The greatest phenomena in the history of man's spiritual evolu-
tion are, as transition, simultaneously conclusion and commence-
ment. They stand between the old and the new as truths that are
originally valid only at their particular place in history, and which
then remain to memory as irreplaceable figures, which are also,
however, unrepeatable and inimitable. Human greatness seems
to be conditional upon such a transition. And therefore its work,
although it surmounts time in the timeless construct, is yet never
for posterity the truth with which we can become identical, if we
too kindle ourselves at it and are set in motion by it.
We should like to see consummate truth and lucid life springing
from the depths of Being somewhere in history. But when we
believe we can see it, we are falling prey to illusions.
Romanticism imagined a remote antiquity in which the zenith
of humanity was a life with God, of which we have no record
beyond interpretable traces, and which is for us a poignant silence.
Then there was truth. We snatch at a last spark as it goes out.
From this vantage point, the whole of history looks like the loss of
an initial capital. Where empirical research uncovers remote
antiquity in the shape of remains, however, it finds no cor-
roboration of such dreams. The primeval ages it discloses were
harsh, and man infinitely helpless and dependent. Humanity is
first apprehensible to us through that which becomes spirit and
communicable.
Even in the sequence of phenomena of which we have historical
information and real cognisance, however, we never find absolute
consummation (save in art, but here in play and symbol). Every-
BASIC STRUCTURES OF HISTORY 245
thing great is transition, even and precisely that which, in its
meaning and purpose, records everlasting permanency. The
spiritual creation of the Middle Ages, which reached consum-
mation in the system of St. Thomas and the poetry of Dante, and
was still the product of faith, was the picture of something which,
at the moment at which it was thought, was already over and
irrecoverably lost. During the transition, men who still lived in
the dying world, but stood under the threat of a new epoch, set
down their idea of this world for it was never a reality in this
form and secured it for ever.
There is no human permanency of duration, and perhaps least
of all where it is desired. The truth through which Being becomes
conscious appears in time. Temporality acquires content through
this appearance, in impermanence and evanescence. Essential
repetition is therefore life out of present origin in communication
with that which is past as the road to the one origin of every-
thing. Empty repetition, on the other hand, is the mere repetition
of a phenomenon in imitation, without metamorphosis out of one's
own origin. Progress exists only in the knowledge of the under-
standing a movement which, in itself, is mere opportunity that
may equally well have the result of deepening man or of rendering
him shallower; it too is an element in the incessant movement in
time, not the meaning of this movement itself.
All that is essential in history is that in it men are able to
remember, and thereby to preserve what has been as a factor in
what will be. For man, time acquires the unique meaning of
historicity, whereas the nature of existence is the perpetual
repetition of the same, which changes over very long periods of
time, but only unconsciously for what reason, we have only an
inkling or no idea at all.
The enduring whether it is order or anarchic chaos that
lasts through time, to which time is of no significance, immediately
loses historic import.
Every phenomenon of authentic truth, however, is related in its
origin, in that permanency which is not duration in time, but
time-effacing eternity. This truth I meet only in the present, only
in my own transition, but in understanding, not in imitation, and
not in the identical repetition of a phenomenon that has occurred
before.
Historically every transition is also a particular one. The
question is: What transition makes possible precisely this mode of
the manifestation of being? It is only to such processes of making
possible that we can refer in relation to the great transition
periods of the past.
246 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
The basic feature of history therefore is; It is ipso facto tran-
sition. It is not typified by that which is essentially enduring
everything enduring is its groundwork, its material and its means.
Concomitant with this is the notion: Sometime or other there will
be an end of history, of mankind, as there was once its beginning.
The latter the beginning as well as the end is in practice so
distant from us that it is not perceptible to us, but from out of it
comes an all-overshadowing criterion.
CHAPTER THREE
The Unity of History
INTRODUCTION
MAN'S historicity is, from the outset, multiple historicity.
But the multiple is subject to the imperative of the One.
This is the exclusivity of the demand of an historicity to
be the only one and to dominate all others, but it must develop
for consciousness in the communication of the multiply historical
as the absolute historicity of the One.
It is the unity of the history of mankind, to which everything
that has value and meaning seems to be related. But how are we
to think of this unity of the history of mankind?
To begin with, experience seems to testify against unity. His-
torical phenomena are immeasurably dispersed. There are many
peoples, many cultures, and in each of these again an endless
multiplicity of peculiar historical facts. Everywhere on the face of
the earth where there was any possibility of gaining a livelihood,
man has settled and brought himself to particular manifestation.
There appears to be a multiplicity which develops and passes
away concurrently and successively.
To regard man in this light means to describe and classify him
as is done with the multiformity of the vegetable kingdom. It is
the fortuitousness of a many, which, as the genus 'man', exhibits
certain typical basic features, and therein, like all living things,
deviations within an area open to the play of possibilities. Any
such naturalisation of man, however, causes the specifically
human in man to vanish.
For in all the dispersion of the phenomenon man, the
essential is that men are concerned with each other. Wherever
they meet they are interested in one another, confront one another
in antipathy or sympathy, learn from one another, exchange.
When they meet it is as though each recognised himself in the
other, and at the same time made himself independent of the
other, whom he recognises as himself. In this meeting man learns
that, however he may be in his particularity, he is related to all
others on the basis of the one thing which, though he neither
247
248 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
possesses nor knows it, imperceptibly guides him or, at moments,
seizes him with an all-pervading enthusiasm.
Seen thus, the phenomenon of man in the dispersal of history is
a movement toward the One perhaps it is provenance from a
single matrix in any case, it is not an existence that shows its
ultimate nature in the dispersion of the multiple.
A. FACTS THAT POINT TO UNITY
j. Unity of the human make-up
We have some such trivial notion of humanity in history as this.
Man is a totality of innate tendencies. At any given moment,
under the particular conditions, parts of his energies, gifts and
impulses are realised, whilst others slumber unawakened. Since,
however, man is always the same potentially, everything remains
possible at all times. The varying unfoldment of his parts does not
mean a difference of nature, but a difference of manifestation. In
the collation of all manifestations, as the development to varying
degrees of common potentialities, the totality of humanity is first
disclosed.
The question of whether man's make-up has been transformed
during the few millennia of history, or whether the nature of man
has remained the same throughout this period, must be answered
by saying that no facts are available in evidence of any such
transformation. Any changes that have taken place are rather to
be understood in terms of the selection of that which was already
present. That which is given in the basic make-up as permanent
and unchanging appears at different times, through the agency of
varying selection, in quite different directions. At any given time
those men become visible, successful, and then numerically
preponderant whose personal qualities satisfy the particular con-
ditions of the current society and its situation. Conditions may be
characterised by the type of human make-up they fostered. With
the alteration of conditions, selection changes, and previously
hidden types of make-up, which have long been suppressed and
reduced to a small number by negative selection, now come to
the fore. The varying manifestation of the same nature under ever
diverse preconditions, with a diverse selection, is disclosed.
Nevertheless, to this train of thought the rejoinder must be
made that the whole of humanity can in no wise be pictured as the
totality of innate human tendencies. There is no man who is or
can be everything Jniman, neither in reality nor in the projection
of an idea of him.
The further objection must be made that the essential variation
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 249
of the make-up with which an individual is naturally endowed is
elemental. Especially when we look at the personal qualities and
character traits which already make their appearance in earliest
childhood does the ineluctable course taken by the innate dis-
position become visible. These qualities and traits create a gulf
of difference between the make-up of one man and another.
These ideas, and the objections to them, all contain an element
of truth, but they do not go so far as to explain man.
To reach the unity of humanity which is revealed in history,
we must pass beyond the biologico-psychological plane of con-
sideration.
In what does the enduring nature of man consist, which alone
makes understanding between us, and our solidarity, possible at
all? Again and again unity is doubted. For in all history there is
a mutation of human knowledge, consciousness and self-conscious-
ness. There is a coming into being and a dying away of spiritual
potentialities, an estrangement, and finally an incomprehension.
Is there unity in this notwithstanding? At all events, as the
unrestricted will to comprehension.
If this unity cannot be understood as being derived from the
biological scaffolding, because we cannot approach its meaning in
the biological sphere, it must have some other basis. What is
meant by this origin is not a biological make-up, or derivation
from one root, but humanity as a unity from a higher origin. This
can be visually imagined only in a symbol: in the idea of the
creation of man by the Deity after His image, and of the Fall.
This origin which links all us humans together, impels us
toward dhe another, causes us to presuppose unity as well as to
seek it cannot, as such, be either known or contemplated, nor
does it stand before us as an empirical reality.
The objection to the idea of unity, based on the indication of
the signal innate diversities between the make-up of individuals
and peoples, which in life cause mutual repulsion and are seem-
ingly the source of radical divisions, is fallacious if it is intended to
assert the existence of a diversity of the inner being of man down
to his ultimate roots, of such a kind as to create an unbridgeable
gulf between man and man. Greatly as we experience, in their
manifestation, the separating chasms, and great as is the conflict
between those of disparate natures, or the indifference with which
humans pass one another by, the factors that potentially link
together, which slumber in the depths and which cannot be over-
looked, are equally great. The Comprehensive remains the reality
over and above all reality that has become particular. One can
250 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
never foretell what may be aroused under new conditions in new
situations. No one can draw a line under a man as though^ he
could calculate what would or would not be possible for him.
Still less can peoples or epochs be finally determined. The
characterisation that can be made of peoples and epochs is never
absolutely valid. For at all times there are other possibilities.
What the individual, or small circles, succeed in doing need by
no means be universally adopted and become a character of the
people and its culture as a whole, and yet it forms part of it.
Aristarchus' astronomy (the Copernican universe) was without
effect in Greece, as were the wisdom and divine faith of Amenem-
hope in Egypt, So often have the highest achievements stood on
one side, uncomprehended and isolated, and either attained an
ineffectual prestige for particular contingent reasons of the moment
or taken effect through being misunderstood and distorted. It can
be doubted whether Plato had any real effect in Greece, or Kant
in Germany, outside a narrow, though magnificent, spiritual
current.
Thus the unity toward which man lives, if he becomes authen-
tically historical, cannot have its basis in a unity of biological
derivation, but only in the higher origin that causes man to
become directly out of the hand of the Deity. This unity of origin
is not the continuance of a status quo. It is rather historicity itself.
This is evident from the following:
(1) The unity of man in the movement of his metamorphoses is
not a static unity of persisting, and merely alternately realised,
qualities. Man has become man in history through a movement
that is not a movement of his natural make-up. As a natural being
he is given his make-up in the area open to the play of its varia-
tions, as an historical being he reaches out beyond this natural
datum. From this origin he must press on toward the unity that
links all. This is a postulate: Without this unity understanding
would not be possible, there would be a chasm between those of
disparate natures, an understanding history would be impossible.
(2) The manifestation of individual men is of a self-exclusive
character in its particular reality. Man as an individual cannot
unite what he realises out of essentially disparate origins, for
instance, the hero and the saint.
Man, even the individual man, is from his origin potentially
everything, but in reality a single thing. In this he is not a
restricted part, however, but historical, an origin of his own,
turned to the other historical origin in the consciousness of the one
historical fundament that links all.
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 251
The individual man is never a complete, never an ideal man.
The complete man cannot, in principle, exist; for everything
which he is and realises, can be, and is, broken through again, is
open. Man is not a finished and not a perfectible being.
(3) In history, that which is unrepeatable and irreplaceable
comes to light in unique creations, break-throughs and realisa-
tions. Because these creative steps cannot be in any way con-
ceived causally, nor deduced as necessary, they are like revela-
tions from some other source than the mere course of happening.
But once they have come into existence, they lay the foundations
of the humanity that comes after. From them man acquires his
knowledge and volition, his prototypes and antitypes, his criteria,
his thought-patterns and his symbols, his inner world. They are
steps toward unity, because they appertain to the one self-
understanding spirit and address themselves to all.
2. The universal
The unity of mankind is impressively evident in the fact that
similar basic traits of religion, forms of thought, implements, and
social forms recur all over the earth. The simplicity of man
is great, despite his diversity. Psychological and sociological^ facts
are such that comparison is possible everywhere, and a multitude
of regularities can be noted, which demonstrate fundamental
structures of humanity in the psychological and sociological
provinces. Precisely through observation of the common element,
however, does that which is divergent become clear, whether it
is to be comprehended from specific types of human make-up, or
from historical situations and events. If we turn our gaze upon
the universal, we shall find congruence in that which is essential,
and comprehend particularities as local, attaching them to place
and time.
It is precisely this universal, however, which cannot constitute
the true unity of mankind. Just the reverse. If we turn our
gaze upon the depths of the truth that is manifested, we shall find
the historically great within the particular, but in the universal
the commonplace, the unhistorically constant, which is, so to
speak, the fluid medium of the factual and the correct.
If, between the most distant cultures, a common possession
forms the substratum of humanity, it is quite especially surprising
and important to note that there are always divergences as well,
where we thought we had found an absolute universal that
somewhere something is missing which is otherwise typical of
man, and also that the absolutely universal always possesses an
abstract character, a uniformity.
252 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
That which, by the yardstick of the universal, is a mere par-
ticularisation, may be precisely the fulfilment of true historicity.
The unity of mankind can take root only in the relationship
of these historical particulars to one another, which is not
essentially divergence, but rather a positively original content, not
the instance of a universal, but a link in the one comprehensive
historicity of mankind.
5. Progress
The road leads forward in knowledge and technological ability,
one step succeeds the other, that which has been acquired may be
passed on in the identical shape and become the property of all.
As a result, there passes through the history of individual cultures,
and of all cultures, a line of growing acquisitions, which is, however,
confined to the impersonal, universally valid knowledge and
ability of consciousness in general.
In this domain, world history may be conceived of as a develop-
ment in an ascending line, with retrogressions and standstills it
is true, but on the whole with perpetual augmentation of the
possession to which men and peoples make their contribution,
and which, by nature accessible to all men, also becomes the
possession of all Historically we see the stages of this advance, and
in the present we stand at the highest point. This is only a line in
the whole, however. Humanity itself, the ethos of man, his goodness
and wisdom, make no progress. Art and poetry are indeed com-
prehensible to all, but not typical of all; they are bound to peoples
and their epochs, each one at. a unique and unsurpassable height.
Hence there is progress in knowledge, in technology, in the
prerequisites for new human possibilities, but not in the substance
of humanity. Progress in substance is refuted by the facts. The
peoples which had reached the highest levels perished, succumb-
ing to those inferior to them. Cultures were destroyed by bar-
barians. The physical annihilation of the highest types of men by
the oppressive realities of the mass is a fundamental phenomenon
of history. The average that multiplies the most, the growth of the
thoughtless populace, triumphs without a struggle through mere
existence en masse over that which is spiritually higher. There is
a constant counter-selection of those who are inferior, e.g. in
conditions under which cunning and brutality promise lasting
advantages. One inclines toward the proposition: Everything
exalted perishes, everything inferior endures.
Against such a generalisation, we can point to the recurrence of
the great, even if it remains silent for centuries and longer. But
how fragile, how dubious and uncertain is this endurance!
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 253
These are said to be only setbacks, only contingent ruin. In the
long run there is reason to believe in substantial progress. But
precisely these contingencies, these destructions are, at any rate
in the foreground, the overwhelming basic happening of history.
It is said things need not continue to be as they have been till
now. It is up to us to guide the course of events better. But this
is the Utopian idea that everything can be fabricated, the prin-
ciple of 'breeding 5 applied to the realm of man, where the object
can never be known, surveyed and manipulated.
It is said ruin is the consequence of guilt. If we only expiate
our sins and prove ourselves in a pure life, things will be different.
Indeed, this has been the exhortation since the ancient prophets
but we do not know upon what route, when or how, the good of a
world order will follow from the ethically pure life. We may not
deny the reality that the ethically good as such is by no means
crowned with success nor is it done for the sake of success. But
the ethically good that assumes responsibility for success and the
consequences remains the one great chance.
Progress will indeed bring a unity of the knowable, but not the
unity of mankind. The unity of universally valid truth which,
wherever it is found, remains the same in its unending advance,
appears only in science and technology. This universally com-
municable and transferable truth, which addresses itself to the
understanding alone, is not the unity of mankind. This progress
brings a unity of the understanding. It links men in the under-
standing, so that they discuss rationally with one another; but it
leaves them capable of annihilating each other with the same
weapons of technology. For the understanding only links under-
standing as a whole, not men. It brings no genuine communica-
tion and no solidarity.
4. Unity in space and time
The unity of man springs from life on the common natural soil
(unity of the planet), and from existence in the one common time.
In the course of history intercourse developed with setbacks.
The multiplicity of the naturally given, the manifoldness of
peoples and countries, existed for a long time in unrelated con-
tiguity. The path of intercourse linked them, caused tribes to
amalgamate into peoples, peoples into groups of peoples, countries
into continents, and then to fall apart again. It enabled men of
different peoples to catch sight of one another and then forget
each other again, until the moment of conscious and factual con-
nexion of all to all began, and intercourse became uninterrupted
either in real consummation, or in the rupture of warfare. The
254 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
history of mankind as perpetual mutual exchange in the unity of
intercourse commenced.
Men had long ago taken possession of the surface of the earth,
with the exception of the polar regions, deserts and high mountain-
chains, in the course of many thousands of years of migration.
Mankind was always mobile. Amazing journeys were made at the
threshold of history. The Northmen came to Greenland and
America, the Polynesians crossed the whole Pacific, the Malays
reached Madagascar. The languages of Negro Africa and of
America are each so closely related amongst themselves as to
indicate continual intercourse within these continents. Inventions,
tools, ideas, legends travelled long distances across the earth in
primeval historical times, always in short stages, as though passed
from one hand to the other. Only Australia, and perhaps America,
remained in isolation for a long time; but even they were not
absolutely isolated (there are striking parallels between Eastern
Asia and Mexico). Isolation does not mean that no man of
another country was ever carried to their shores, but that they
were never subjected to any perceptible foreign influence.
In the course of history great empires were formed, which, for
a while, increased the contact between men within their domains.
Then they disintegrated again, the highways of intercourse were
interrupted, relations broken off, knowledge of the existence of
the others forgotten. There were peoples which, from time to time,
shut themselves off from the outer world such as Egypt, Japan
and China; but every wall erected was ultimately broken through
again.
During the last five hundred years, the Europeans have drawn
the whole earth into their communications net. They have carried
their civilisation to all parts of the world and have taken for
themselves goods of civilisation which they did not possess. They
brought their domestic animals, useful plants and weapons, their
manufactures and machines, their customs and their beliefs and
all the evils of their world; they fetched potatoes, maize, quinine,
cocoa, tobacco, the hammock, etc. It was they who first made the
unity of the earth conscious, intercourse systematic, lasting and
reliable.
This intercourse between peoples has meant a continual
growing together of mankind, the creation of unity through the
planet's becoming one to the consciousness, and ultimately to the
actions, of men.
There is no sign of a unity of the most ancient history of cul-
tural evolution as radiating out from one point on the earth. As
far as empirical vision can see, there is rather a dispersion of men;
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 255
we see the many endeavours and then the stimulus afforded by
contacts between men and cultures, development resulting from
the superimposition of various cultures and peoples ensuing upon
conquests, and the significance of racial mixture, which either had
a levelling effect or brought about exceptional achievements.
Always happening is rendered historical by intercourse; it is a
thrusting toward unity, not procedure from an originally given
unity.
Unity through the one terrestrial soil, through common
enclosure in space and time, is nevertheless the most superficial
unity, which is certainly not identical with the unity of history. It
is common to all reality and not the portion of man alone. The
mere co-existence of men on the closed surface of the earth, which
they fill, does not of itself constitute the unity of mankind. This
unity is made possible by intercourse. It is by no means this inter-
course per se, however, but only the outcome of that which takes
place in this intercourse.
A glance at the globe shows the narrow strip, which is further-
more interrupted at several places (it runs from the Mediter-
ranean region to China), that gave birth to everything spiritual
which is valid today. There is no geographical right to historical
equality.
5. Particular unities
In the movement of human affairs there are, to our cognition,
many lines which run separately from one another and sub-
sequently meet or particular lines which, although they recur
typically, represent only features of the whole, not the whole
itself.
Thus there is the circumscribed sequence of a particular set of
cultural phenomena. A few generations cohere in typical stylistic
sequences or developments of thought, from their origin to their
disintegration.
There are unities of cultures as de facto common worlds of life-
forms, dispositions, ideas, units of faith, the peoples in their
provenance, their language, their destiny the religions as 'world
religions', which disseminate transcendentally procured attitudes
to life in ethos, faith and outlook over wide areas the States as
power units which mould everything else.
These unities lack universality. They are individual unities
alongside others, cultures alongside cultures. There are many
peoples, religions, States. These stand in relation to one another,
cultures in silent exchanges, States in warfare and the mutual
acceptance of politics, religions in mission and disputation. All
256 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
of them undergo transformation, are not finally fixed, run into
one another.
History shows the great factual unities in their powerfulness, the
spheres of culture as, so to speak, subterranean dissemination that
forms men without the use of force, the peoples as unconscious,
pre-historical movements, the religions as 'world religions',
though always within limits, the States as empires.
All these unities are wont to intersect and overlay one another.
The coincidence of all unities reached its peak in China after the
founding of the United Empire. Culture, religion and the State all
coincided. The whole was the one world of man, the one empire,
beyond which, to the consciousness of the Chinese, there was
nothing except the primitive barbarians on the frontiers, who, as a
potential component of the empire, had mentally already been
incorporated into it. If the c Central Empire' is compared with the
Roman Empire the difference is considerable. The Roman
Empire was a relatively transient phenomenon, although in the
sequel the idea of this empire cast a spell that lasted for a thousand
years. Beyond its frontiers there were Teutons and Parthians as
real forces which were never vanquished. Despite the cosmic-
religious unity of paganism, it was unable to permeate its peoples
with this unity, as happened in China; its genesis rather caused
the simultaneous growth of Christianity, which broke through it.
B. UNITY THROUGH MEANING AND GOAL
If the manifold facts which represent a unity, or point to unity,
do not suffice to constitute the unity of history, a different starting-
point is perhaps possible. Unity is not a fact, but a goal. The
unity of history is perhaps produced by men's ability to under-
stand each other in the idea of the One, in the one truth, in the
world of the spirit, in which all things are meaningfully related
to one another and belong together, however alien to each other
they may be at the outset.
Unity springs from the meaning in the direction of which his-
tory occurs, a meaning that lends significance to that which,
without it, would remain nugatory in dispersion.
This goal may appear as a concealed meaning, which no one
intended, but which the observer tries out interpretively, or then
apprehends as conscious purpose, as will to unity. The meaning is
expressed as the goal of history:
(i) The goal is taken to be civilisation and the humanisation of man.
What this may be, beyond the ordering of existence is, however,
by no means clearly determined, but itself historical. As the
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 257
ordering of existence, however, the goal is legal world order. The
path of history leads out of dispersion via merely de facto contact
in peace and war to cohabitation on earth in a real unity achieved
through the rule of law. This unity would, through the ordering
of existence, give scope to all the potentialities of the human soul
and spirit.
(2) The goal is taken to be liberty and the consciousness of liberty,
Everything that has happened up to now is to be construed as an
attempt to attain liberty.
But the process that will reveal to us what liberty is has no end.
The will to a world order of law does not make its immediate
goal liberty, but only political liberty, which gives human exist-
ence scope for all the possibilities of genuine liberty.
(3) The goal is taken to be the noble man and the creation of the
spirit, the production of culture in communal conditions; it is
taken to be the genius.
The urge is to the most lucid consciousness. The unity of mean-
ing originates from the point at which man becomes most
decisively conscious of himself in extreme situations where he
puts the most profound questions where he finds the creative
answers by which his life is guided and which give it its characteris-
tic stamp. This unity in the nobility of humanity does not consist
in the diffusion of implements and knowledge, not in the extent of
conquests and imperial jurisdiction, not in extreme formations
such as killing asceticism or the sort of training imposed on the
Janizaries not in the permanence and stability of institutions and
fixations but in the radiant moments of the most profound
lucidity of consciousness, of essential revelations.
This most essential element may then be a minute speck in the
stream of history. But it may begin to work like a ferment in the
totality of events. Or it may remain ineffectually in memory,
ready to take effect, a question put to the future. Or it may find
in the world no echo to its unique nobility, vanish without recol-
lection, and exist only for transcendence.
That such peaks appear irreplaceably valuable to us, rests upon
the fact that they fall within the province of a unity which we
have always presupposed and never really known, a unity without
which, as its goal, origin and justification, there would be no
history.
(4) The goal is taken to be the manifestation of Being in man., the
perception of being in its depths, that is, the manifestation of the
Godhead.
Such goals are attainable in every present, and indeed are
258 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
attained up to a point; they are regained in a perennial process
of loss and devaluation. They are realised by every generation in
its own way.
This does not mean that the single, overall goal of history is
achieved, however. The imaginary goal of the future tends rather
to turn our attention back to the present, which must not be let
slip.
The unity of history per se is not laid bare by any interpretation
of meaning. Every formulation, even if it hits the highest target,
remains at a goal which is not the Comprehensive, at least not in
the sense that all other goals could be derived from one par-
ticular concept, so that the unity of the goal would lay open to
view the one meaning of history. Hence all supposed goals do
indeed become factors within history, if they are desired or if
faith is bestowed on them, but they are never anything that covers
the whole of history.
Every meaning is present to the consciousness of men as an
intended meaning in manifold shape. Within it we humans raise
ourselves aloft to the One, without having it at our disposal as a
content of knowledge.
At all times, however, the craving to know and believe one
meaning as single and all-embracing is satisfied. And if every
meaning that is absolutised is bound to come to grief, new genera-
tions in their turn immediately seek, through their philosophers,
an all-embracing meaning that has governed, and is governing,
history, and which, once it has been conceived, can also be
assimilated into their own will as an intended meaning and taken
as a guide (as in the Christian philosophy of history, as in Hegel,
in Comte, etc.).
This unity is brought into view in an interpretive total con-
ception of history.
C. UNITY FOR THE THINKING TOTAL CONCEPTION
To comprehend the unity of history, i.e. to think of universal
history as a whole, is the urge of historical knowledge in search
of its ultimate meaning.
Philosophical consideration of history has therefore enquired
after the unity that holds mankind together. Men settled the
globe, but they were scattered and did not know of one another,
lived in the most diverse guises and spoke thousands of languages.
In earlier times, anyone who thought of universal history, because
of the narrowness of his horizon, constructed a unity at the
expense of restriction; amongst ourselves, for instance, he restricted
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 259
himself to the West, in China to the Central Empire. That which
lay beyond had no part in it and was regarded as a life of bar-
barians, primitive peoples, which were certainly an object of
ethnological interest, but not of history. Unity consisted in the pre-
supposition of the tendency to cause all the still unknown peoples
of the earth to participate, stage by stage, in the one namely,
one's own culture, to bring them into one's own sphere of order.
If faith presupposed one fundament and one goal, the idea
sought to recognise these in real history. Assumptions of a know-
ledge of unity, either given by divine revelation or intelligible to
reason, were attempts at constructing the one history of mankind.
God's passage through history became visible in the West in the
succession of His acts running from Creation, via expulsion from
Paradise, announcement of His will through the prophets,
redemption through His appearance in person at the turning-
point of the ages, to the end in the anticipated Last Judgement.
That which was first thought of by the Jewish prophets, then
assumed Christian form through St. Augustine, which was
repeated and inflected from Joachim Fiore to Bousset, secularised
from Lessing and Herder to Hegel, was always this knowledge of
the one whole history, in which everything has its place. A series
of fundamental principles of human existence made their appear-
ance which, apprehended in their depths, taught what truly
is and happens.
Such a construction, however magnificently as it has been
believed and expressed throughout two millennia breaks down:
(a) If I know the whole, every human existence has its place in
the whole. It is not for itself, but serves a path. It is not immediate
to transcendence, but through the medium of a position in time,
which narrows it and makes it a part. Every human existence,
every period, every people, is mediatised. Against this the original
relationship to the Godhead, the infinitude of the Comprehensive,
which can be whole at any time, revolts.
(4) In the knowledge of the whole, the greater proportion of
human reality, whole peoples, epochs and cultures, fall to one side
as of no account. They are no more than chance and incidental
products of natural happening.
(c) History is not closed and does not reveal its origin. For this
construction, however, it is closed. The beginning and end are
invented as an addition in the shape of an alleged revelation. In
fact, two mutually exclusive fundamental conceptions of history
confront one another.
Either history is visible as a whole, and as the unity of a know-
able evolution with a beginning and an end. I myself with my
2 6o THE MEANING OF HISTORY
period stand at the particular point, thought of either as the
lowest or the highest point yet reached.
Or history is actually, and for my consciousness, unclosed. I
hold myself open to the future. It is an attitude of waiting and of
seeking the truth, of not yet knowing even that which already is,
but which will be fully understandable only from the vantage
point of the future. In this basic attitude even the past is uncon-
cluded: it still lives, its decisions are not totally, but only relatively,
final; they can be revised. That which was is still capable of re-
interpretation. That which seemed to have been decided becomes
once more a query. That which has been, has still to reveal to us
what it is. It does not lie there as an inert residue. There is more
in the past than what has so far been objectively and rationally
extracted from it. The thinker himself is still standing in the
evolution that is history; he is not at the end, and hence from
his position on a hill with a restricted view, not on the world-
mountain from which everything is visible he knows the direc-
tions of possible ways, and yet does not know the origin and goal
of the whole.
Hence history may appear to us as a field for experiment, unity
vanishes in the infinitude of the possible. The permanent basic
attitude is one of questioning. The calm of a great symbol of the
whole, of an image of the unity of everything, that erases time
and with it past and future, is only a halting-place in time, not
the finality of a known truth.
If history is not to disintegrate into the dispersion of the for-
tuitous, into a coming and going without direction, into the
pathlessness of many sham paths, then the idea of the unity of
history is inescapable. The only question is the manner in which
it is apprehended.
We have drawn up a long list of negations: The unity of
history is not to be apprehended by knowledge. It cannot be
construed as the unity of man's biological origin. As the unity of
the earth's surface and as common enclosure by real time it is a
purely external unity. The unity of the all-embracing goal cannot
be demonstrated. The idea of a world order of law is directed
toward the substrata of human existence, not toward the meaning
of history in toto, and is itself still a query. Unity cannot be com-
prehended by reference to the identity of a universally valid
truth, for this unity relates only to the understanding. It is not
progress toward a goal or in a process that goes on into infinity.
Unity does not consist in the most lucid consciousness, nor in the
nobility of spiritual creation. It is not contained in a meaning
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 261
toward which everything happens or ought to happen. Nor is
unity to be discerned as the articulated organism of a totality of
mankind. The totality of history is not truly present in a visual
image either as reality or as meaning.
He who does not fall in with the arrogant assumption of an all-
embracing comprehension of history as a unity, will nonetheless
see in all these strivings for unity a dash of truth. This becomes
fallacious if the particular is carried over onto the whole. It
remains true as an indication and a sign.
Every line of development, every typical form, all facts of unity
are simplifications within history that become fallacious when they
are used as a means of seeing through history in its totality. The
important thing is to apprehend the manifoldness of these lines,
forms, unities, but to remain open to that which lies beyond
them, in which these phenomena occur, to remain open to man
and to the always present whole of humanity; this humanity
embraces everything and bears within itself that which, despite
all its magnificence, is never more than one phenomenon amongst
others.
There remains the demand constituted by the idea of unity. We
are confronted by universal history as a task.
(a) At the least, there remains the scanning of all human
happening in the whole world. In the alternative between dis-
persed isolation and essential centralisation, neither of the two
extremes is accepted; instead a pertinent, constructive classifica-
tion of history is sought. Even if every construction of the unity of
history will always make abysmal nescience felt in knowledge, the
way of classification under the idea of a unity is nevertheless
possible.
(b) This unity is then supported by the closedness of the planet,
which, as space and soil, is entire and susceptible of control;
furthermore, by the exactitude of chronology in the one time, even
if it is abstract; in addition, by the unity of the root of the human
race, which is of one species, a biological fact which points to
common derivation.
(c) The principal basis for unity is the fact that men meet each
other in the one spirit of a universal capacity for understanding.
Men find one another in a comprehensive spirit, which, although
no one sees it as a whole, nonetheless contains all. Unity finds its
most decisive expression in relation to the one God.
(d) The idea of unity is concretely present in the consciousness
of universal possibilities. The openness with which things are
looked at increases the claim that everything can acquire import-
2 6a THE MEANING OF HISTORY
ance for everything, and is of concern to everything through the
mere fact of its existence. We live in the consciousness of a space
in which nothing is indifferent, which opens up distant vistas as
concerning us, and which at the same time indicates the current
present as a decision over the road that will be taken. With our
eyes on the earliest beginnings, which never go as far back as the
origin, and with our eyes on the future, which is always uncon-
cluded, possibilities become known in an incomprehensible whole,
so that the unity of the whole is manifested in the decisiveness of
the present fulfilment of the task.
(e) If a tenable and finished picture of the whole is out of reach,
there remain forms in which images of the whole are from time
to time disclosed. These forms are:
History is seen in hierarchies of value, in its origins, in its
crucial stages. The real is divided up into the essential and the
inessential.
History stands under a whole that was called Providence, and
was later conceived of as a law. Although the concrete shape it has
taken is erroneous, this idea of the whole will remain an extreme
notion of that which is not seen, but within which we see, which
cannot be planned, but within which planning must be carried
out. History as a whole is unique, is specifically historical and
not merely natural happening. There remains the idea of an order
of the whole, in which everything has its proper place. It is not
mere fortuitous multiformity, but all the features of the fortuitous
are merged in the one great basic feature of history.
As an interpretation of unity we, for our part, have projected
a schema of world history which seems today in the closest ^accord
with openness and unity and empirical reality. Our exposition ^of
world history sought to derive historical unity from the Axial
Period, which was common to the whole of mankind.
The word axis was not intended to convey the concealed
interior, round which the foreground of phenomena at all times
revolves, that element which is itself timeless, but which extends
through all ages and is enveloped by the dust-clouds of the solely
present. The appellation axis was bestowed rather upon an era
around the middle of the last millennium B.C., for which every-
thing that preceded it would appear to have been a preparation,
and to which everything subsequent actually, and often in clear
consciousness, relates back. The world history ^of humanity
derives its structure from this period. It is not an axis of which we
might assert a permanent absoluteness and uniqueness. But it is
the axis of the short world history that has taken place up till now,
that which, in the consciousness of all men, might represent the
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 263
basis of the historical unity they recognise in solidarity. This real
axis would then be the incarnation of an ideal axis, around which
mankind in its movement is drawn together.
Summary
We seek to apprehend the unity of history in images of the
whole, which demonstrate the historicity of mankind per se in an
empirically founded structure wherein the fundamental fact
remains the boundless openness into the future and the short
beginning: we are just starting. Into the future in fact, and as the
past in interpretation, history is an open, infinite world of rela-
tionships of meaning, which, at any rate from time to time, seem
to flow into one growing common meaning.
The theme is: not one of those universal categories, not his-
torical laws, but enquiry after the unity of history in its factual,
perceptibly given, unique shape, which is not a law, but the
historical arcanum itself. This shape we call the structure of
history. It must be construed, in its spatial-temporal localisation,
as the spiritual reality of humanity.
The interpretive contemplation of history becomes a deter-
mination of man's will. Unity becomes his goal. Contemplation
of the past is related to this goal. It becomes conscious, for
example, as world peace in world order through a legal order
aimed at the liberation from want and the bestowal of happiness
upon, as nearly as possible, everyone.
This goal relates, however, only to the substratum of existence,
which it is possible for all to attain in common. It is true that this
unity in the preconditions for all human possibilities would be of
immense importance; it is not the final goal, however, but in
turn a means.
Unity is sought at a higher level in the totality of the world
of human being and creating. With this in view, the unity of past
history is derived from the emphasis of that which concerns all
men, of that which is essential to all.
What this is, however, can become manifest only in the move-
ment of living together. The demand for boundless com-
munication testifies to the solidarity of all men in potential under-
standing. But that which is known, fashioned, aimed at does not,
in itself, constitute unity, nor does the image of a goal; all these
constitute unity only when they enter into the communication of
man with man. The ultimate question is then:
Does the unity of mankind consist in unification on the basis of
a common faith, in the objectivity of that which is thought and
264 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
believed in common to be true, in an organisation of the one
eternal truth by an authority that spans the earth?
Or is the only unity truly attainable to us humans unity
through communication of the historically manifold origins, which
are mutually concerned with one another, without becoming
identical in the manifestation of idea and symbol a unity which
leaves the One concealed in manifoldness, the One that can
remain true only in the will to boundless communication, as an
endless task in the interminable testing of human possibilities?
All assertions of absolute alienness, of the permanent impossi-
bility of mutual understanding, remain the expression of resig-
nation in lassitude, of failure before the most profound demand of
humanity the intensification of temporary impossibilities into
absolute impossibilities, the extinction of inner readiness. 16
The unity of history will never be consummated in the accom-
plished unification of mankind. History lies between origin and
goal, the idea of unity is at work in it. Man follows his great
highway of history, but never terminates it by realising its final
goal. The unity of mankind is, rather, the bourne of history. That
is to say: Achieved, consummate unity would be the end of
history. History remains movement, under the guidance of unity,
accompanied by notions and ideas of unity.
Unity is contained in such notions as these: Mankind stems
from one origin, from which it has evolved in infinite division, and
strives toward the re-unification of that which has been split up.
Complete obscurity surrounds the one origin, however. Wherever
we come across man he is already in the dispersion and differen-
tiation of individuals and races; we see several cultural evolutions,
manifold beginnings, which must have been preceded by an
already human evolution that we do not know. Unity guides us as
the notion of an organism which is reaching perfection in the
mutuality of the many. All such notions are vague, however.
Notions of unity delude us, if we take them to be more than
symbols. Unity as the goal is an unending task; for all unities
which become visible to us are particular, are only preconditions
for a possible unity; or they are levelling processes, behind which
abysmal alienness, repulsion and conflict lie concealed.
It is not possible to formulate a clear and consistent picture of
perfect unity, even in the realm of ideas. This unity cannot
become real, either as the complete man, or as the right organ-
isation of the world, or as final, penetrating and open mutual
understanding and agreement. The One is rather the infinitely
remote point of reference, which is origin and goal at one and the
THE UNITY OF HISTORY 265
same time; it is the One of transcendence. As such it cannot be, so
to speak, taken captive; it cannot become the exclusive possession
of an historical faith that could be enforced upon all as truth
per se.
If universal history as a whole proceeds from the One to the
One, it does so in such a way that everything accessible to us lies
between these ultimate poles. There is a becoming of unities, an
enthusiastic seeking of unity; and then again a passionate smash-
ing of unities.
Thus this deepest unity is elevated to an invisible religion, to
the realm of spirits, the secret realm of the manifestation of Being
in the concord of souls. Historically, however, there remains
movement, which, always between beginning and end, never
attains to, nor continuously is, what it really signifies.
CHAPTER FOUR
Our Modern Historical Consciousness
WE live in a great heritage of historical knowledge. The
great historians since antiquity, historico-philosophical
total conceptions, art and poetry fill our historical
imagination. To this has been added during recent centuries in
a thoroughgoing fashion in the nineteenth century critical his-
torical research. Never did any age possess so much information
concerning the past as our own. That which the generations
before us did not possess at all is at our finger-tips in the shape of
publications, reconstructions, collections and classifications.
Today a transformation of our historical consciousness seems to
be in progress. The great achievement of scientific historical
research is being preserved and continued. But now we have to
see how this material is to be given a fresh shape, how, after being
refined in the melting-pot of nihilism, it can serve to become a
single, marvellous language of the eternal origin. History will
cease to be a mere field of knowledge, and become once again a
question of the consciousness of life and of existence; it will cease
to be an affair of aesthetic culture, and become the earnestness of
hearing and response. The way in which we look at history is no
longer harmless. The meaning of our own lives is determined by
the manner in which we know ourselves in the whole and obtain
from this whole an historical fundament and goal.
Perhaps we can characterise a few features of the historical
consciousness which is coming into being:
(a) New is the many-sidedness and precision of the methods of
research, the feeling for the infinitely complex tissue of causal
factors, as well as for objectification in categories quite other than
causal, in morphological structures, in laws of meaning, in ideal-
typical constructs.
To be sure, we still take pleasure in reading simple narrative
expositions. We seek with their aid to fill the space of our inner
intuition with images. But intuition first becomes essential to our
cognition with the analyses that are nowadays comprised under
the term sociology. This is represented by Max Weber and his
works, with his clear and multi-dimensional conceptuality in this
266
OUR MODERN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 267
widest of all the horizons of historical interpretation, which he
keeps free from fixation in a total conception. Today anyone
acquainted with such thinking reads many pages of Ranke's with
reluctance, on account of the vagueness of his concepts. Pene-
trating comprehension demands a wide variety of specialised
knowledge and its combination in the formulation of questions
which are illuminating in themselves. In the process, the old
method of comparison, through its newly acquired acuity, causes
the unique to stand out all the more clearly. Engrossment in the
specifically historical brings the enigma of the unique to more
lucid consciousness.
(b) Today the attitude to history that knows it as an overseeable
whole is being surmounted. No exclusive total outline of history
is still capable of satisfying us. We do not obtain a final, but only
a currently possible, integument for the totality of history, which
breaks up again.
Furthermore, we find no historically localised revelation of
absolute truth. At no point is anything to be found which it would
behove us to repeat identically. Truth lies in the never known
origin, from the vantage point of which everything particular is
circumscribed in its manifestation. We know: Wherever we find
ourselves on the way to historical absolutisation, fallacy will one
day be revealed and the painful recoil of nihilism will set us free
for fresh original thinking.
Nevertheless, we do not possess, but we at all times seek, a
reminiscent knowledge of the totality of history in which we are
situated at a unique instant. It is the total conception which gives
our consciousness its horizon at any given moment.
Today, in the consciousness of calamity, we tend not only to
discern a relative closedness in individual developments of the past,
but also to see the whole course of history up to the present as
being rounded off. It seems to be concluded and irretrievably lost;
something new must take its place. We have grown used to state-
ments concerning the end of philosophy, that takes leave of us in
the persons of elaborators of the ideas of their predecessors and
historians concerning the end of art, that behaves with the des-
peration of approaching death in the repetition of bygone styles,
accompanied by caprice and private longings, and the substitution
of the functional forms of technology for art concerning the end of
history altogether in any hitherto accepted sense. At the eleventh
hour, exercising the power of understanding, we can form a
picture of that which is already growing strange to us, that which
no longer is, and never again will be; we can once more put into
words that which will soon have been completely forgotten.
268 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
Such propositions carry no convictions at all; their conse-
quence is always a nihilism that makes way for something
about which we can make no clear statement, but about which,
perhaps for that very reason, we speak in all the more fanatical
terms.
In contrast to this, the modern approach is to render all total
conceptions, including negative ones like the foregoing, pro-
visional, to present all possible total conceptions to our imagina-
tion in order to test how far they fit the facts. This process will
sooner or later result in a comprehensive conception, in which the
rest are individual elements; with this conception we shall live,
make our present conscious to ourselves, and illumine our
situation.
In actual fact, we are at all times formulating total views of
history. If these develop into schemata of history as possible
perspectives, their meaning is distorted as soon as a total con-
ception comes to be taken for real knowledge of the whole, whose
course is apprehended in its necessity. We attain the truth only
so far as, instead of total causality, we investigate particular
causalities extending into the infinite. To our contemplative gaze,
however, there are in history the leaps of human creation, the
revelation of unexpected contents, and self-transformation in the
succession of generations .
Of every construction of a total conception we say today: it
must be empirically proven. We reject conceptions of events and
conditions which are only conjectural. We search hungrily in all
directions for the reality of tradition. That which is irreal can no
longer survive. What this means can be seen from the extreme
example that Schelling still clung with complete conviction to
the theory that the creation of the world took place six thousand
years ago, whereas today no one doubts the bone finds which prove
man's life on earth to have gone on for more than a hundred
thousand years. It is true that the resulting chronological criterion
of history is purely external, but it cannot be forgotten and has its
effects on consciousness. For the ephemeral briefness of the history
that has passed is clear.
The totality of history is an open whole. Vis-a-vis this whole the
empirical approach, conscious of the small extent of its factual
knowledge, is ever ready to assimilate fresh facts; the philo-
sophical approach discards all totality of an absolute mundane
immanence. If empiricism and philosophy mutually aid one
another, the thinking man is left with the area of possibilities, and
thereby with freedom. The open whole has for him no beginning
and no end. No termination of history can enter his ken.
OUR MODERN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 269
The method of the total thinking that is still possible, and that
sees through itself, contains the following elements.
Facts are taken up and, so to speak, tapped to hear what sound
they emit and to get a hint of the meaning they may possibly
have.
At all points we are led to the frontiers, in order to obtain the
most extreme horizons.
From out of these horizons demands come to us. A reaction
throws the viewer of history back upon himself and his present-
ness.
(c) Mere aesthetic consideration of history is done away with. If,
vis-a-vis the endless material of historical knowledge, it is deemed
worthwhile recalling everything, simply because it was in a
spirit of detachment that merely ascertains actual facts without
end this unselectiveness arises out of an aesthetic attitude, to
which everything can in some way be considered as a means to
the stimulation and satisfaction of curiosity: one thing is beautiful
and so is the other. This historism devoid of obligations, whether
it be scientific or aesthetic, leads to a state of mind in which, after
everything has become of equal value, nothing has any longer any
value at all. Historical reality is not free of obligations, however.
Our true approach to history should be to wrestle with it. History
concerns us; that in it which concerns us is continually expanding,
which makes it a question of immediate importance to mankind.
History acquires increasing immediate significance, the less it is
an object of mere aesthetic enjoyment.
(d) We are attuned to the unity of mankind in a more compre-
hensive and concrete sense than previously. We know the deep
satisfaction that comes when we gaze into the origin of the one
mankind, from the wealth of its ramifications in manifestation.
It is from this area that we are first thrown back upon our own
historicity, which becomes, through consciousness, both more
profound to itself and more open to all others and to the one com-
prehensive historicity of man.
It is not a question of 'mankind' as an abstract concept in which
man disappears. Rather is the abstract concept of mankind
dropped from our historical consciousness. The idea of mankind
becomes concrete and perceptual only in real history as a totality.
There, however, it becomes a refuge in the origin, from whence
come the right standards, after we have become helpless in
bewilderment amidst catastrophe and the destruction of all the
habits of thought which previously gave security. The origin
brings the demand for communication in an unrestricted sense.
It imparts the satisfaction of affinity in the midst of the alien, and
270 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
of the community of the human running through all peoples. It
shows the goal that leaves a possibility open to our longing for and
our will to life in community.
World history may look like a chaos of chance events in its
entirety like the swirling waters of a whirlpool It goes on and on,
from one muddle to another, from one disaster to another, with
brief flashes of happiness, with islands that remain for a short
time protected from the flood, till they too are submerged; all in
all, in a metaphor of Max Weber: World history resembles a
street paved by the devil with destroyed values.
Seen in this light, history has no unity and hence no structure,
and no other meaning than that contained in the incalculably
numerous causal concatenations and constructions, such as also
occur in the processes of nature, save that in history they are much
more inexact.
But historical philosophy means the search for such a unity,
such a meaning, for the structure of world history and this can
concern only mankind as a whole.
HISTORY AND THE PRESENT BECOME INSEPARABLE TO US
(e) Historical consciousness is situated in a polarity: I step back
before history and see it as something confronting ^rne, like the
whole chain of a distant great range of mountains, in its general
outline and in its details. Or I become aware of presentness as a
whole, the Now, which is and in which I am, in the deepening
of which history becomes to me the present that I myself am.
Both are necessary, the objectivity of history as the other, that
exists even without me, and the subjectivity of the Now, without
which no other has any meaning for me. The one comes really
alive through the other. Each one by itself renders history in-
effectual, either as the unending content of the knowledge of that
which is open to indifferent choice, or as oblivion.
But how are the two to be linked? Not by any rational- method.
Rather does the one control the movement of the other by simul-
taneously stimulating it.
This fundamental situation in historical consciousness deter-
mines the manner in which we are convinced of the structure of
history as a whole.
To forgo the latter is impossible; then it would simply take
unconscious and uncontrolled possession of our outlook. To for-
mulate it, however, renders it provisional as a piece of know-
ledge, while it remains a factor in our consciousness of Being.
While research and existence with their consciousness of Being
OUR MODERN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 271
attain consummation in mutual tension, research itself lives in
the tension between the current whole and the smallest detail.
Historical total consciousness, in conjunction with loving near-
ness to the particular, visualises a world in which man can live as
himself with his matrix. Openness into the breadth of history and
self-identity with the present, perception of history as a whole,
and life from present origin, these tensions make possible the man
who, cast back upon his absolute historicity, has come to himself.
A universal view of history and consciousness of one's present
situation mutually sustain one another. As I see the totality of the
past, so I experience the present. The deeper the foundations I
acquire in the past, the more outstanding my participation in
the present course of events.
Where I belong and what I am living for I first learn in the
mirror of history. 'He who cannot give himself an account of three
thousand years is left without landmarks in the dark, and can live
only from day to day 5 this represents consciousness of meaning,
then consciousness of place (orientation) and, above all, con-
sciousness of substance.
It is an astonishing fact that presentness can vanish from us,
that we can lose reality, by always living elsewhere, so to speak,
by living in fantasy, in history, and avoiding complete present-
ness.
It is, however, wrong to contrast this with the presentness of the
mere instant, life in the Now destitute of recollection or future.
For such a life is the loss of human potentialities in a Now that is
becoming more and more empty, in which there is nothing left of
the plenitude of the Now drawn from the everlasting present.
The riddle of the fulfilled Now will never be solved, but
deepened, by historical consciousness. The depth of the Now
becomes manifest only hand in hand with past and future, with
memory, and with the idea of that toward which I am living.
Therein I am certain of the everlasting present through the shape
of history, through faith wearing the garb of history.
Or can I elude history, escape from it into the timeless?
CHAPTER FIVE
Overcoming History
WE have called to mind: History is not completed hap-
pening conceals in itself infinite possibilities whenever
history takes shape as a known whole this shape is
broken through, that which is remembered discloses, through
fresh data, hitherto unobserved truth; that which was discarded
as inessential acquires overriding essentiality. The conclusion of
history seems impossible; it proceeds from the endless into the
endless, and only an external disaster can break off the whole
process in a fashion alien to its meaning.
We are seized by a feeling of dissatisfaction with history. We
should like to force our way through history to a point before and
above all history, to the matrix of Being, before which the whole
of history becomes a phenomenon that can never be "right 3 in
itself, to the point at which, sharing knowledge with creation so to
speak, we are no longer entirely at the mercy of history.
But for us the known Archimedian point can never be situated
outside history. We are always within history. In forcing our way
through to that which lies before, or athwart, or after all history,
into that which comprehends everything, into Being itself, we are
seeking in our existence and in transcendence, what this Archi-
medean point would be if it were capable of assuming the form of
objective knowledge.
(i) We overstep history by addressing ourselves to nature. Face
to face with the ocean, in the mountains, in the tempest, in the
radiance of sunrise, in the iridescence of the elements, in the
lifeless polar world of snow and ice, in the primeval forest,
wherever nature that is alien to man speaks to us, we may experi-
ence a feeling of liberation. A homecoming into unconscious life,
a still deeper homecoming into the clarity of the inanimate
elements, can sweep us along into stillness, into exultation, into
painless unity. But all this is a deception if it is more than the
transient experience of the mystery of natural Being, which
maintains a total silence, this Being beyond everything that we
call good and evil, beautiful and ugly, true and false, this Being
that leaves us in the lurch without heart and without compassion.
272
OVERCOMING HISTORY 273
If we really find sanctuary there, we have run away from men and
from ourselves. But if we take these momentarily overwhelming
experiences of nature as mute signs, pointing to ^ that which is
above all history but which they do not make manifest, then they
remain true in that they impel us forward and do not hold us back
with ourselves.
(2) We overstep history into that which is timelessly valid, into
the truth that is independent of all history, into mathematics and
into all cogent knowledge, into every form of the universal and
universally valid, which remains unaffected by all mutation,
whether recognised or unrecognised. We may be seized with
fervour at the apprehension of this clarity of the valid. We have a
fixed point, a Being which persists. Again, however^ we are
misled if we attach ourselves to this. This validity too is a sign,
but it does not bear the import of Being. It leaves us singularly
unconcerned, it is disclosed in the continuous advance of its
discovery. It is essentially the form of validity, whereas its content
coincides with the endless plurality of the existent, never with
Being itself. Only our understanding here enjoys the peace of
something that persists. Not we ourselves. The fact that this
validity exists, however, independently and freed from all his-
tory, is once again a pointer to the supra-temporal.
(3) We overstep history into the matrix of historicity, that is,
to historicity in the entirety of the world's being. From the history
of mankind a road leads into the matrix out of which the whole of
nature unhistorical in itself moves into the light of an his-
toricity. But only to the speculation for which it becomes a
language that something in his own biological scaffolding, in
landscapes and natural events, comes from nature to meet the
historicity of man. To begin with these are all alien in meaning
and inconclusive, catastrophes or the indifferently existent; they
are then, as it were, invested by history with a soul, as though they
were correspondences springing from a common root.
(4) It is the historicity of our own existence that leads us into
this matrix of historicity. From the point at which, in the uncon-
ditionally of our adoption and choice of the way we find our-
selves in the world, of our bestowal upon ourselves in love itself,
we become Being athwart time as historicity; from this point,
light falls upon the historicity of history through the agency of
our communication, which, passing through the knowable data
of history, comes upon existence. Here we overstep history to the
everlasting present; as historical existence in history we are above
and beyond history. .
(5) We overcome history by entering into the unconscious. The
274 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
spirit of man is conscious. Consciousness is the medium without
which there is for us neither knowledge nor experience, neither
humanity nor relationship to transcendence. That which is not
conscious is called unconscious. Unconscious is a negative con-
cept, endlessly ambiguous in its implications.
Our consciousness is directed toward that which is unconscious,
that is, toward everything we encounter in the world from which
nothing inward communicates itself to us. And our consciousness
is borne by the unconscious, it is a continual growth out of the
unconscious and sliding back into the unconscious. But we can
gain experience of the unconscious only through consciousness. In
every conscious step of our lives, especially in every creative act of
the spirit, we are aided by an unconscious within us. Pure con-
sciousness is incapable of doing anything. Consciousness is like the
crest of a wave, a peak above a broad and deep subsoil.
This unconscious that bears us has a dual meaning. The un-
conscious that is nature, per se and for ever enigmatic and the
unconscious that is the germ of the spirit, that strives to become
manifest.
If we overcome history by entering into the unconscious as the
existent which becomes manifest in the phenomenon of con-
sciousness, this unconscious is never nature, but that which is
revealed in the outcrop of symbols in language, poetry, repre-
sentation and self-representation, in reflection. We live not only
from out of it, but also toward it. The more lucidly consciousness
renders it manifest, the more substantially, profoundly and com-
prehensively it becomes actual itself. For within it that germ is
awakened whose wakefulness heightens and widens consciousness
itself. The passage of the spirit through history not only consumes
a pre-existent unconscious, but also produces a new unconscious.
Both modes of expressions are fallacious, however, in relation to
the one unconscious, to penetrate which is not only the process of
the history of the spirit, but which is Being, above, before and
after all history.
As the unconscious, its characteristics are purely negative,
however. No cryptograph of Being is to be gained with this con-
cept, as Eduard von Hartmann vainly sought to do in a world of
positivist thinking. The unconscious is of value only to the extent
to which it takes shape in consciousness, and thereby ceases to be
unconscious. Consciousness is the real and true. Heightened
consciousness, not the unconscious, is our goal. We overcome
history by entering into the unconscious in order, rather, to attain
heightened consciousness.
The urge to unconsciousness, which takes hold of us humans at
OVERCOMING HISTORY 275
all times of adversity, is illusory. Whether a Babylonian god seeks
to put an end to the uproar of the world with the words 'I want to
sleep', or whether Western man longs to be back in the Garden of
Eden, before he ate of the Tree of Knowledge, whether he con-
siders it best he had never been born, whether he strives to find his
way back to a state of nature prior to all culture, whether he
deems consciousness a calamity and looks upon the whole of
history as a false trail and desires to bring it to an end it is
for ever the same thing in manifold guises. It is not an overcoming
of history, but an evasion of history and one's own existence in it.
(6) We overstep history when man becomes present to us in his
most exalted works, through which he has been able, as it were, to
catch Being in motion, and has rendered it communicable. What
has here been done by men, who allowed themselves to be
absorbed by the eternal truth which became language through
them, although it wears an historical garb, is above and beyond
history and leads us along the route that passes over the world of
history into that which is prior to all history and becomes language
through history. In this realm there is no longer any question of
whence and whither, of future and progress, but in time there is
something which is no longer solely time and which comes to us,
above all time, as Being itself.
History itself becomes the road to the supra-historical. In the
contemplation of the great in the provinces of creation, action
and thought history shines forth as the everlasting present. It no
longer satisfies curiosity, but becomes an invigorating force. The
great things of history, as objects of veneration, bind us to the
matrix above all history.
(7) The apprehension of history as a whole leads beyond history.
The unity of history is itself no longer history. To grasp this unity
means to pass above and beyond history into the matrix of this
unity, through which that unity is which enables history to
become a whole. But this ascent above history to the unity of
history remains itself a task within history. We do not live in the
knowledge of history; in so far, however, as we live by unity we
live supra-historically in history.
Every ascent above history becomes an illusion if we abandon
history. The fundamental paradox of our existence, the fact that
it is only within the world that we can live above and beyond the
world, is repeated in the historical consciousness that rises above
history. There is no way round the world, no way round history,
but only a way through history.
(8) A glance at the long ages of prehistory and the short span of
history, gives rise to the question: Is history not a transitory
276 THE MEANING OF HISTORY
phenomenon, in view of the hundreds of thousands of years of
prehistory? At bottom, there is no other answer save the general
proposition: that which has a beginning also has an end even if
it lasts for millions or billions of years.
But the answer which is impossible to our empirical know-
ledge is superfluous to our consciousness of Being. For even if
our view of history may be considerably modified according to
whether we see unending progress, or the shadow of the end, the
essential thing is that historical knowledge as a whole is not the
ultimate knowledge. What matters is the demand for presentness
as eternity in time. History is encompassed by the broader
horizon, in which presentness counts as abode, verification,
decision, fulfilment. That which is eternal appears as decision in
time. To the transcendent consciousness of existence, history
vanishes in the everlasting present.
Within history itself, however, there remains the perspective of
time: perhaps the history of mankind will continue for a long, a
very long time on the earth that has now become unitary.
Within this perspective then, the question for everyone is: where
he will stand, for what he will work.
Notes
1 (Page xiv) : Of imperishable importance to the philosophy of history are
the relevant writings of Vico, Montesquieu, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Fichte,
Hegel, Marx, Max Weber. A general view is given by: Johannes Thyssen,
Geschichte der Geschichtsphilosophie, Berlin 1936. R. Rocholl, Die Philosophic der
Geschichte, Band I, Gottingen 1878,
2 (Page xv) : O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918. Alfred Weber,
Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, Leiden 1935. Das Tragische und die Geschichte ,
Hamburg 1943. Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte., Hamburg 1946. Toynbee,
A Study of History > London 1935 ff.
3 (Page xv) : Toynbee is careful about this. He breaks through or arches over
his conception with a Christian outlook. In his view it is fundamentally possible
for a culture to continue to exist without going under. It is not subject to the
blind necessity of biological old age and death. What will happen is also
dependent upon human freedom. And God may help.
Spengler claims that he the first to do so in his opinion formulates an
historical prognosis methodologically with the certitude of an astronomer. He
predicts the decline of the West. Many people found in his book the corrobora-
tion of a state of mind which they brought with them to the reading of it.
Two insights are, in principle, to be set in opposition to the dictatorial
certitude of his brilliant conception of the play of relationships, which fluctuates
between arbitrariness and plausibility: Firstly, Spengler 3 s interpretation in
comparisons and analogies is frequently appropriate to the characterisation of a
'spirit', of an atmosphere, but it pertains to the nature of all physiognomic
definition that it involves not the methodological recognition of a reality, but
an interpretation extending to the infinite in terms of possibilities. In the
process, the imperious idea of the 'necessity' of events becomes confused. Mor-
phological form-sequences are construed causally, the evidence of the senses as
a real necessity of events. Spengler is methodologically untenable where he
gives more than a characterisation of phenomena. If real problems very often
lie hidden in his analogies, they come to light only when it becomes possible
to test his statements causally and particularly by investigation, and not simply
in the physiognomic view as such. The playful approach, which, in the par-
ticular, always supposes itself to have the total within reach, must be trans-
muted into definiteness and demonstrability; this calls for renunciation of
insight into the whole.
The substantialisation or hypostasisation of cultural totalities will then
cease. There will then be only ideas of a relative spiritual whole and schemata
of such ideas in ideal-typical constructions. These are able to bring a great
multiformity of phenomena into context through the application of principles.
But they always remain within the comprehensive whole; they are not capable
of taking a total grip of any such whole, as though it were a circumscribed body.
Secondly, in opposition to Spengler's absolute separation of cultures stand-
ing side by side without relations, we must point to the empirically demon-
strable contacts, transferences, adaptations (Buddhism in China, Christianity
in the West), which for Spengler lead only to disturbances and pseudo-
morphoses, but are in fact indications of a common fundament.
277
278 NOTES
What this fundamental unity is, remains for us a task both of cognition and
of practical implementation. No definitely construed unity such as biological
make-up, the universally valid thinking of the intelligence, common
attributes of humanity is unity per se. The presupposition that man is the
potentiality for being the same everywhere, is just as correct as the contra-
dictory assumption that man is everywhere disparate, differentiated down
to the particularity of the individual.
In any case, the capacity for understanding pertains to unity. Spengler
denies this capacity: the various cultural realms are irreconcilably diverse,
incomprehensible to one another. We, for example, do not understand the
Ancient Greeks.
This side by side coexistence of the everlastingly alien is contradicted by the
possibility, and the partial reality, of understanding and adoption. Whatever
men think, do and create concerns the rest; ultimately it somehow or other
involves the same thing.
4 (Page 37) : Adolf Portmann, Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre vom Menschen,
Basle 1944. Vom Ur sprung des Menschen> Basle 1944. From my book Der Philo-
sophische Glaube, Munich 1948, Zurich 1948 (English translation by Ralph
Mannheim, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950),
the third lecture: 'Man'.
5 (Page 53): A similar conception was formulated by Alfred Weber. He
places the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia alongside the still sur-
viving cultures of China and India as belonging to the same type of primary
culture that remains unhistorical and bound to magic, with which he contrasts
the secondary cultures that have arisen solely in the West.
We find this differentiation to be particularly inapplicable to the variation
between China and India on the one hand, and the West on the other. Once
we have become aware of the spiritual compass and depth of the Axial Period,
we cannot retain the parallel: Egypt, Babylonia, India, China in contrast to
all of which the West, with its Graeco-Jewish foundations, is to be considered
the only new culture. On the contrary, the Axial Period very definitely has a
place in the Indian and Chinese worlds as well.
The India and China that we know were born from the Axial Period, not
primary but secondary; spiritually they penetrated to the same depth as the
West, which happened neither in Egypt and Babylonia, nor in the aboriginal
cultures of India and China (the existence of these latter is attested by a few
archaeological finds, which, however, are not sufficient to enable us to form a
broad picture of them, as we can of Egypt and Babylonia). Hence China and
India as a whole are not to be set alongside Egypt and Babylonia as primary
cultures. At the earliest stages of their development they were comparable to
the primary cultures; but following the break-through of the Axial Period they
became parallels to the secondary cultures of the West. The parallel between
Egypt and Mesopotamia, and India and China, holds good only in respect of
their de facto synchronicity. From the Axial Period onward China and India
can no longer be thought of as parallels to the ancient civilisations; they can be
reasonably compared only to the Axial Period of the West. Egypt and Baby-
lonia did not give birth to any Axial Period.
Alfred Weber's historical edifice is buttressed by the principle: 'In the frame-
work of a consideration of the total process we must depict the growth and
dissolution of closed cultural wholes.' Hence he expressly repudiates operation
with world epochs, which he regards as 'empty perspectives'. But his undog-
matic approach and his perspicacious historical vision see the same facts as
we do. Like a fragment out of another historical edifice, we find in his work a
NOTES 279
passage that might be cited as chief witness for our interpretation. With him it
remains parenthetic and without sequel:
'From the ninth to the sixth century B.C. the three cultural spheres of the
world, which had formed in the meantime the Hither Asiatic-Greek, the
Indian, and the Chinese came, with remarkable simultaneity and apparently
independently of one another, to a religious and philosophic quest, enquiry and
decision directed toward universals. From this starting-point, in a syn-
chronistic world epoch dating from Zoroaster, the Jewish prophets, the Greek
philosophers, from Buddha, from Lao-tse, they evolved those religious and
philosophic interpretations of the world and those attitudes of mind which,
developed and recast, merged, reborn, or transformed and. reformed under
mutual spiritual influence, constitute mankind's criteria of faith in the world
religions and its criteria of philosophic interpretation, to the religious side of
which nothing fundamentally new has been added since the end of this period,
i.e. since the sixteenth century.'
Alfred Weber's interpretation of the effect of the equestrian peoples points
to a reason for the genesis of the secondary cultures in the West (which we call
the Axial Period) ; it was at the same time, however, the reason for the spiritual
upheavals in China and India, which he nevertheless leaves in the category of
primary cultures.
Alfred Weber does in fact portray the deep dividing-lines in India and
China, which, at the outset, represented changes of essence as in the West: the
original Buddhism in India, the transmutation of the magico-metaphysical into
ethicism by Jainism and by Buddha and in China the transmutation by
Buddhism. He deems it of crucial significance, however, that the magical was
re-established, that it is a matter not of a 'fundamental*, but of a 'superficial'
transmutation of the eternal and immutable fabric in which China as well as
India was enveloped. The dominion of a supreme immutable is supposed to
distinguish Asia from the West,
Is there really a radical difference here? Is there not rather here too a
common factor, which may be termed the constant peril to us all, namely the
risk that having ascended into the unrnagical, human, rational, above the
demons to God, we may in the end sink back again into the magical and
demonological?
6 (Page 91): My book Descartes und die Philosophie, Berlin 1937; French
translation, Descartes et la Philosophie, Paris 1938.
7 (Page 124): To elucidate such tendencies means to demonstrate possi-
bilities, the compass of whose realisation remains uncertain. It is a different
matter to treat the technological world as a whole as something that has been
seen through, whether as the manifestation of a new heroic figure of humanity,
or as the work of the devil. The demonism of technology is then substantiated
into something really demonic; with this interpretation, the meaning of labour
is either heightened, or denied altogether, technology's world of work is either
glorified or repudiated. Both arise out of the possibilities inherent in tech-
nological labour. But these opposed possibilities are both fallacious in their
absolutisation. This is the manner in which they are presented by the brothers
Junger in writings that make a strong impression on the reader.
Ernst Junger in his book Der Arbeiter, 3. Auflage, Hamburg 1932 sketched
a visionary picture of the technological world: labour as total mobilisation,
culminating in the battle of equipment the figure of the worker hard as
bronze the sense of the nihilistic, aimless, intrinsically destructive. Junger
adumbrates the 'figure of the worker* as the future lord of the earth. The
latter is beyond humanity and barbarism, beyond individual and mass. Work
280 NOTES
is his life-form, he knows himself responsible in the total fabric of work. Tech-
nology objectifies everything as a means to power. Through it, man becomes
master of himself and of the earth. Man, as this new man, as the figure of the
worker, acquires a countenance bearing the stamp of rigidity. He no longer
asks: why and to what purpose? He wills and believes, irrespective of the con-
tents which this volition and faith give themselves.
Friedrich Georg Jiinger (Vber die Perfektion der Technik, Frankfurt 1944), on
the other hand, presents a desolate, hopeless picture of technology: The
elemental, coerced by technology, spreads precisely within technology.
Rational thinking, itself so poor in elemental forces, here sets huge elemental
forces in motion, but through coercion, by hostile forcible means. 'The in-
dustrial landscape has something volcanic about it', all the phenomena of a
volcanic eruption recur in it: 'Lava, ashes, fumes, smoke, night-clouds lit up
by fire, and widespread devastation.'
F. G. Jiinger impugns the thesis that technology diminishes man's labour
and increases his leisure. He rightly points out that there is no question today
of a decrease in the labour-quantum. But on the whole it is certainly incorrect
to say, as he does, that every seeming reduction of work is bought at the
expense of an increase at another point. When he contests the thesis that
technology increases wealth, he does so with a leap into a different signification
of 'wealth', according to which wealth is a being, not a having. It is also no
stricture on technology, when Jiinger erroneously imputes to rationalisation
the want (entirely due to military destruction) which it is intended to combat.
His topical depiction of this organisation of want hits the nail on the head:
It does not create wealth, but is a procedure for the distribution of what little
there is in times of shortage. The organisation of distribution in an economy
operating at a loss remains inviolable amidst the ruins; it grows all the more
powerful the greater the poverty becomes. Its collapse comes about only when
there is nothing left to distribute. Such statements obviously relate not to
technology, but to a terrible phenomenon resulting from the war, which we
happen to be living through today, and which has been fallaciously construed
as the necessary outcome of technology.
The two formulations of the brothers Jiinger are contrary in character in
respect of the general tone of their evaluation of technology but they are
similar to one another in their mode of thought. This is analogous to mytho-
logical thinking: not cognition, but an image not analysis, but the adum-
bration of a vision but through the medium of modern categories of thought,
so that the reader may be of the opinion that he is dealing with rational
cognition.
Hence the one-sidedness and fervour. There is no sifting of the evidence, no
contrary instances are adduced save those selected in such a manner that, by
their demolition, the speaker increases the height of his own platform.
There is no sobriety of cognition, but an emotionalism which is not over-
come either in the comportment of exactly formulating sobriety, nor in the cold
climate of dictatorial observations and valuations. It is above all an aesthetic
attitude that draws its sustenance from delight in the spiritual product, and
which has indeed, in the case of Ernst Jiinger, led to works of the highest
literary merit.
Seriously speaking, there is no element of truth in thinking of this kind. But
it is seductive on that inordinately modern plane, on which reflection has been
lost, methodical cognition abandoned, basic knowledge, or the life-long search
for it, cast aside. Hence the tone of decisive authority lacks any authentic
nexus perceptible to the reader. It is an easy matter to vary the content,
NOTES 281
indeed the whole approach and atmosphere: the way of thinking remains;
subject, opinion and aim alter.
8 (Page 128): Concerning the 'mass 1 : Le Bon, La psychologic desfoules, Paris
1895. Ortega y Gasset, La rebelidn de las masas, 1930.
9 (Page 132): See note 13.
10 (Page 147): The views put forward in the text would not have become
clear to me without the brilliant insight of Hannah Arendt ('Organised Guilt',
Die Wandlung, Jahrgang I, p. 650, reprinted in Six Essays by Hannah
Arendt, Heidelberg 1948 'Concentration Camps 5 , Die Wandlung, Jahrgang
III, p. 309).
11 (Page 1 80): Concerning total planning: Walter Lippmann, The Good
Society, 1938. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. J. Wilhelm Ropke, Die Gesell-
schaftskrise der Gegenwart, 4. Aufl.> Zurich 1942.
12 (Page 191): Walter Lippmann and F. A. Hayek have provided a funda-
mental elucidation of the problem of total planning. According to Lippmann
the consequences of total planning can be formulated in a few sentences:
The extended compass of the plan is accompanied by a reduction in mobility
and capacity for adaptation.
The road to mastery of want and disorder through total planning in fact
intensifies both. The coercion that is intended to overcome chaos evokes chaos
in real earnest.
The coerciveness of organisation is heightened to the point of terrorisation,
For the growing dissatisfaction under compulsion can only be prevented from
breaking out by the continual increase of compulsion.
Total planning goes hand in hand with armament and war; it is cold war
through the breaking off of free intercourse.
Total planning is carried over onto the smallest of groups. There develops
a tendency to erect barriers, ruthlessly to force through particularisms of all
sorts with the aid of political power.
These tendencies of planned economy force themselves through even with-
out the wish of the active participants; they grow because they are in the nature
of the matter. Beyond them, planned economy contains tendencies to the
modification of the whole of human existence, including its spiritual con-
ditions, tendencies which the idealistic champions of planning conceal from
themselves. Hayek has convincingly characterised them:
1 i ) Planned economy destroys democracy. If democracy is government and
government control through Parliament, discussion and majority decisions, it
is possible only where the tasks of the State are confined to provinces in relation
to which decision can be reached along the path of free discussion and by
majorities. But a parliament can never control total planning. It rather dis-
misses itself through so-called delegation of authority.
(2) Planned economy destroys the constitutional State. The constitutional
State lives by laws that remain operative even vis-a-vis the dictatorship of
majorities, because a majority cannot abolish them immediately, but only in a
legal procedure that takes time and enables majorities to be controlled by other
majorities. Total planning, however, requires sovereignty through dispositions,
regulations, delegations of authority, that represent a so-called legality, but
rest upon the uncontrolled arbitrariness of bureaucracy and those to whom
authority is delegated, and can be altered at will.
The constitutional State affords a safeguard against the arbitrary dominion
of majorities whose only claim to absolute validity rests upon the fact that they
are the product of a democratic electoral procedure. Such majorities, however,
may be as arbitrary and dialectical as individuals. It is not the origin, but the
2 8a NOTES
limitation of government power that preserves it from arbitrariness. This
limitation is provided by orientation by fixed norms, which, in the constitu-
tional State, are valid for the power of the State as well. Total planning,
however, leads to direct appeals to the majorities of the^mass, who vote without
having any idea of the issue upon which they are deciding.
(3) Planned economy tends towards absolute totality. It is an illusion to
suppose that authoritative direction can be confined to economic questions.
There are no purely economic goals. At the end of total planning stands the
abolition of money, that instrument of freedom. 'If all rewards, instead of being
paid in money, were distributed in the form of public distinction and privileges,
of positions of power over others, better living conditions and better food, in
the form of travel or educational facilities, this would mean no more and no
less than that the recipient would be deprived of choice and that the person
responsible for fixing the reward would decide not only its level, but also its
concrete form. 1 The question is 'whether it is to be we who decide what is
more important and what less important to us, or whether this is to be decided
by the planning authority'.
(4) Total planning produces a selection of leaders in which low characters
gain the upper hand. Totalitarian discipline demands uniformity. This is most
easily achieved at the lower spiritual and moral levels. The lowest common
denominator contains the greatest number of people. Paramountcy is in the
hands of the malleable and the credulous, whose vague notions are easily led,
and whose passions are easily whipped up. Unity is most simply attained in
hate and envy. .
Particularly serviceable are the industrious, disciplined, energetic and ruth-
less, who possess a sense of order, are conscientious over their work, remain
absolutely obedient to the authorities, and are characterised by a readiness for
sacrifice and by physical courage. Unserviceable, on the other hand, are the
tolerant, who respect others and their opinions, the spiritually independent,
who stand up for their convictions even against a superior, people possessed of
civil courage, who are inclined to consideration for the weak and the sick and
who repudiate and despise mere power, because they live by an ancient
tradition of personal liberty.
(5) Total planning requires propaganda and causes the disappearance of
truth from public life. Men who serve as tools must believe in the aims for
which they are being used. Hence directed propaganda as a vital necessity to
the totalitarian system. News and opinions are prepared. Respect for truth,
indeed the feeling for truth, must be destroyed. Conducted doctrines aimed at
perpetual self-justification, and denying a hearing to other doctrines, are
bound to paralyse spiritual life. The thinking of total planning begins with
reason, with the aim of elevating it to absolute sovereignty; but it ends by
annihilating reason. For it has not grasped the process upon which the growth
of reason is dependent: the interplay of individuals with various knowledge and
various opinions.
(6) Total planning destroys liberty: 'Market economy resting on com-
petition is the only economic and social system calculated to reduce to a
minimum, through decentralisation, the power of man over man.' 'The
transformation of economic power into political ends by transforming a power
that is always limited into one from which there is no escape.* Total planning,
in order to maintain itself on its disastrous course, has to destroy everything that
threatens it: Truth, i.e. free science and the free word of the writer just legal
verdicts, i.e. the independent judiciary public discussion, i.e. the freedom of
the press.
NOTES" 283
Interrelationships appear to have been demonstrated by Lippraann and
Hayek, whose inevitability it is not easy to meet with effective counter-
arguments. This conception, which every actively engaged person ought to
visualise, at least as a possibility, is compounded out of experiences of our era
and ideal-typical constructions.
13 (Page 191) : The attempt at a direct realisation of justice by force leads to
conditions in which not even the most elementary justice is fulfilled. Trotzky
(quoted by Hayek) shows that the differences of income in Russia and America
are by no means favourable to Russia from the point of view of justice: Between
the lowest and the highest salaries, the ratio, in Russia as in America, is in the
neighbourhood of i : 50. In Russia the upper 1 1 or 12 per cent of the total
population receive some 50 per cent of the national income; in America
approximately 35 per cent of the national income goes to the upper 10 per cent.
14 (Page 217): Concerning Marxism, psychoanalysis and racial theory, cf.
my Geistige Situation der Zj&it^ Berlin 1931, Sammlung Goschen Band 1000, 6".
unveranderte Aufl., Berlin 1948, pp. 135 ff.
I consider this earlier work supplementary to the present one. The earlier
was conceived unhistorically, this present historically. Both relate to the present,
15 (Page 235): But even that which, in the history of nature, is reversible,
definitive, unique, does not possess what in man we call 'historicity'.
Human history first acquires an essential meaning from the 'historicity* of
'existence'. No doubt its fundament is a process analogous to the processes of
nature. This fundament is not its essence, however.
The objectivising categories of a natural process do not apply to the being
of man, which is made up of spirit and existence, for the understanding
experience of which radically different objectifying categories are requisite.
Concerning 'historicity' cf. my Philosophic, Berlin 1932, Bd. II, pp. 118 ff.
Zweite Auflage 1948, pp. 397 ff.
1 6 (Page 264): It is a question of a great polarity: catholicity and reason,
cf. my book Von der Wahrheit, Munich 1948, pp. 832-68.
Other Works by Karl Jaspers
Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 1913. Fifth edition 1948. 748 pages.
Springer- Verlag, Heidelberg and Berlin.
Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. 19^9. Third edition 1925. 486
pages. Springer- Verlag, Heidelberg and Berlin.
Strindberg and van Gogh. 1922. 131 pages. Third edition 1949. Joh.
Storm- Verlag, Bremen.
Max Weber , Rede bei der Trauerfeier. 1920. 30 pages. Second edition
1926. Verlag Siebeck, Tubingen.
Die geistige Situation der eit. 1931. 191 pages. Seventh edition
1949. Verlag W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. (English transla-
tion by Eden and Cedar Paul: Man in the Modern Age, Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1951.)
Max Weber, Politiker, Forscher, Philosoph. 1932. Second edition
1946. 58 pages. Joh. Storm- Verlag, Bremen.
Philosophie. 3 vols. 1932. Second edition in one vol. 1948. 913
pages. Springer- Verlag, Heidelberg and Berlin.
Vernunft und Existent 1935. New edition 1947. 124 pages. Joh.
Storm- Verlag, Bremen.
Nietzsche ', Einfuhrung in das Verstdndnis seines Phil 'osophier ens. 1936.
Second edition 1947. 487 pages. Third edition 1949. Verlag
W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
Descartes und die Philosophie. 1937. Second edition 1948. 104 pages.
Verlag W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
Existenzphilosophie. 1938. 86 pages. Verlag W. de Gruyter & Co.,
Berlin.
Nietzsche und das Christentum. 1946. 87 pages. Verlag der Biicher-
stube Fritz Seifert, Hamelin.
Die Idee der Universitdt. 1946. 132 pages. Springer- Verlag, Heidel-
berg and Berlin.
Vom lebendigen Geist der Universitdt. 1946. 40 pages. Verlag Lam-
bert Schneider, Heidelberg.
Die Schuldfrage. 1946. 106 pages. Verlag Lambert Schneider,
Heidelberg, and at the Artemis- Verlag, Zurich, 95 pages.
(English translation by E. B. Ashton; The Question of German
Guilt, Dial Press, New York, 1948.)
Antwort an Sigrid Undset u. a. Aufsatze. 1947. 31 pages. Siidverlag,
Constance.
Vom europdischen Geist. 1947. 31 pages. R. Piper & Co. Verlag,
Munich. (English translation by Ronald Gregor Smith: Euro-
pean Spirit, SCM Press, London, 1948; The Macmillan Co.,
New York.)
284
WORKS BY KARL JASPERS 285
Der philosophische Glaube. 1947. 136 pages. Second edition 1948.
R. Piper & Co., Verlag, Munich, and at the Artemis- Verlag,
Zurich. 158 pages. (English translation by Ralph Manheim:
The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, Philosophical Library, New
York, 1949; Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1950.)
Von der Wahrheit. 1947. xxiv, 1 103 pages. R. Piper & Co., Verlag,
Munich.
Unsere ^jukunft und Goethe. 1948. 43 pages. Artemis- Verlag, Zurich,
and at the Joh. Storm- Verlag, Bremen.
Goethes Menschlichkeit. 1949. 33 pages. Helbing & Lichtenhahn,
Basel.
Vom Ur sprung und %iel der Geschichte. 1949. Second edition 1950.
349 pages. R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich. (English transla-
tion by Michael Bullock: The Origin and Goal of History, Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1953; Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1953.)
Philosophie und Wissenschaft. 1949. 16 pages. Artemis- Verlag,
Zurich.
Einfilhrung in die Philosophie. 1950. Artemis- Verlag, Zurich.
(English translation by Ralph Manheim: Way to Wisdom:
An Introduction to Philosophy, Victor Gollancz, London, 1951;
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1951.)
Vernunft und Widervernunft in Unserer Zjzit. 1950. 71 pages. R.
Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich. (English translation by Stanley
Godman, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time, SCM Press,
London, 1952; Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952.)
Rechenschaft und Ausblick; Reden und Aufsatze. 1951. 368 pages.
R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich.
Tragedy Is Not Enough. 1952. Beacon Press, Boston. (Part III of
Von der Wahrheit.}
Existentialism and Humanism. 1952. Edited by Hanns Fischer, R.
F. Moore, New York.
INDEX
Abschied von der bisherigen Geschichte,
Alfred Weber, 277
Adam, xv, 113
Aegean world, 45; culture, 71
Africa, 22, 33, 193, 254
Age of Discovery, 71, 125
Age of Technology, 25, 67, 96, 115,
121, 131, 135, 139, 185, 207, 213 f.
Agon, 177, 1 80
Alexander, 216
Alexandria, 14
Alluvium, 33
Alogon, the, 92
Amenemhope, 250
America, 13, 22, 23, 25, 33, 42, 44 f.,
73, 77, 121, 126, 137, 142, 160,
193, 201 f., 254
Americans, the, 142 f., 169, 205
Amlda, 1 1
Anaesthetics, 105
Anatomy, 82
Anaximander, 9
Antiseptics, 105
Anxiety, 150
Arabia, 44
Arab Empire, 59
Arabs, the, 59
Arbelter^ Der, Ernst Jiinger, 279
Archimedes, 2, 84
Arendt, Hannah, 281
Aristarchus, 250
Aristotle, 58, 87, 91, 215
Art, 222, 244, 252, 266
Asia, 15 ff., 22 f., 42, 44, 49, 53 if.,
57, 68-74, i*6> 170, 193, 196, 200,
202, 254, 279
Asoka, 6
Assyrians, the, 46, 207
Astronomy, 83, 86, 237
Astrophysics, 237
Athens, 153, 170, 195
Atlantic Ocean, 22, 44
Atman, 4
Atom bomb, 208 f., 210
Atomic energy, i2of., 144
Augustan Age, 56
Augustine, St., xiii, i, 20, 58, 186, 259
Augustus, 6, 20, 58
Australia, 202, 254
Axial Period, 1-21, 25, 44, 49, 53,
55 ff., 62, 72, 75, 96 f., 131, 139 f.,
203, 225 fF., 237, 244, 262, 278 f.
Babel, Tower of, 31
Babylon, Babylonia, 6, 44 f. s 48, 511!.,
57, 73 f., 275, 278
Babylonians, the, 52, 56, 71
Bach, 75
Bachofen, 32, 41
Bacon, 89, 131
Barbarians, 67
Baroque Period, 118
Being, xv, 2, 4, 18, 41, 48, 57, 84, 270,
272 f.
Belief, 131
Bering Straits, 42
Bible, the, 224
Biology of man, 36-40
Biologische Fragmente %u einer Lehre vom
Menschen, A. Portmann, 278
Bismarck, 196
Bousset, 259
Buck vom Ursprung, Keyserling, 15
Buddha, 2, 4, 8 f., 73, 140, 279
Buddhism, 6, 9, 11, 14, 217, 277, 279
Burckhardt, J., 122, 143, 147, i$&,
186
Bureaucracy, bureaucracies, 123,
i8of., 222
Burke, 136, 153, 186
Bushmen, the, 73
Byzantium, 59, 65, 77
287
288
INDEX
Caesar, 58; Caesarisin, 195, 197
Calvinism, 113
Canada, 175
Capitalism, 134, 173, 189
Carolingian renaissance, 56
Caspian Sea, 49
Categories, 87
Catholic Church, the, 60; Catholicism,
65
Celts, the, 55 f.
Central Empire, see Chinese Empire
Charisma, 159
Chemistry, 103; agricultural, 120
China, xiii, 2 ff.,6 ff., 10, 12, 14, i6 5
*9> 23, 25, 33 f., 44 F., 4-8 F., 52-62,
65 f., 70-7, 104, 120, 138 f., 170,
199, 201, 227, 254 fF., 259, 277 fF.
Chinese, the, 16, 51 f., 67, 138 f.,
202, 256; spirit, 89
Chinese language, 49
Chinese philosophers, 3 f.; philosophy,
2, 69
Christ, 8, 58
Christendom, 52, 68
Christian axis, 58, 96
Christian Church, 58
Christianity, i, 19, 58 fF., 65, 74 f.,
134, 136, 164, 201, 216, 238, 244,
256, 277; Eastern, 23
Christians, i, 112, 131, 164, 195
Christian view, philosophy, of his-
tory, 1 86, 258, 277
Chou dynasty, 4
Chuang-tse, 2 f.
Churches, the, 214, 216, 223, 225
Civilisations, the ancient historical,
44-50
Columbus, 22
Communication, 19, 219, 228, 239,
253* 26 3> 2 73
Communism, 173, i88f.
Communities, formation of, 40
Competition, free, 130, 166, i76f.,
i 80, 199
Comprehensive, the, 137, 2i4f., 249,
258 f.
Comte, 258
Concentration camps, 42, 147 f.
Confucianism, 6, 56, 60, 226
Confucius, 2, 4 f., 7 f., 139
Constant, Benjamin, 153
Constantine, 59, 216
Constantinople, 57, 74; see also
Byzantium
Constitutional State, the, 158 f., 160,
165 f., 1 80, 281 f.
Converse, 162, 200, 204 f., 219, 221,
224
Creation, 141, 186, 259, 268
Credit system, 103
Crete, 12
Croce, Benedetto, 2 1 7
Cromagnon race, 34
Crowd, the, 169
Copernicus, 250
Crusades, 59 f., 88
Cultural heritage, the, in, 123, 128,
131, 201, 214, 224, 227
Daniel, 8
Dante, 245
Democracy, 150, 161 fF., 165^, 169,
195 fF., 200
Democracy in America, Tocquevilie, 142
Democritus, 91
Deutero-Isaiah, 2
Descartes, 89, 91, 94
Descartes und die Philosophic, Karl
Jaspers, 279
Despotism, 168, 174, 196
Dessauer, too , 114
Dictatorship, 157, 165, 167, 173, 182,
. I97 .
Diluvium, 33 f.
Dionysius the Areopagite, 58
Division of labour, 107 f.
Dogmatism, 168
Domestication, effects on animals and
man, 38 f., 146
Dorians, 8
Doubt, 131
East, the, 71, 74, 202, Near 4, 82
Eckhart, 243
Economics, 183
Eddington, 238
INDEX
289
Egypt, xiv, 6, 12, 23, 34, 44 f., 48 f.,
51 ff., 57, 68, 71, 73 f., 82, 123,
1 80, 250, 254, 278
Egyptians, the, 46, 52, 56, 67
Eleatics, 8
Elections, 1 66 f.
Elijah, 2
Elphinstone, Lord, 53
Empiricism, 268
Engels, 1 08, 136
England, 89, 121, i36f., 160, 170,
*99> 20 3
English, the, 169, 205
Enlightenment, the, I36f., 160
Epic, the, 56
Equestrian peoples, the, 16
Eskimos, the, 73
Euclid, 84
Euphrates, river, 45, 48
Eurasian bloc, 16, 49
Europe, 16, 22 f., 25, 33, 45, 54, 57,
68 f., 70, 74, 76 f., 82, 89, 96, 115,
126, 139, 151, 153, 192, 201, 210,
232
European culture, 143; peoples, 201 f.
Europeans, the, 67, 139, 254
Eve, 1 1 2
Evolution, biological and historical,
35
Existence, 242, 245, 273
Ezekiel, 8
Faith, 137, 152, 164, 172, 214, 221-
224, 227, 259, 263, 265, 271; lack
of, 148
Fall, the, 1 86
Fascism, 168, 224
Federalism, 198
Ferrero, 152, 158
Fichte, 96, 137, 244, 277
Fiore, Joachim, 259
Florenz, 1 1
Force, 158, 171, igSf., 199, 204,
2IO f., 2l8, 224
France, 34, 89, 121, 160
Freedom, see Liberty
French Revolution, i36f., 142, 153,
160, 169, 1 86, 197, 217
Galileo, 82
Ganges, river, 73
Geistige Situation der eit, Die, Karl
Jaspers, 283
Genocide, 43
Geography, 83
Germanic peoples, 7 ; see also Teutons
Germano-Romance world, 34
German Reformation, 60
Germans, the, 134, 206
Germany, 89, 121, 196, 206 f., 250
Geschichte des Altertums, E. Meyer, 14
Geschichte der Geschichtsphilosophie, Jo-
hannes Thyssen, 277
Gesellschaftskrise der Gegenwartj Die,
J. W. Ropke, 281
Gilgamesh, the, 7, 49, 56
God, xv, i, 3, 91 ff., 113, 137, 144,
148, 155, 169 f., 219 f., 223, 225,
227, 238, 244,259, 261,277; Father-
God (nordic conception of), 56;
Son of God, i, 19, 1 86
Goethe, 122, 131, 142, 244
Good Society, The, F. A. Hayek, 281
Gothic cathedrals, 54
Graeco-Roman culture, 53
Greece, xiv, 2 f., 55 f., 59, 61, 73, 82,
250
Greek City States, 180, 195
Greek cosmos, 84; thought, 87
Greek language, 2 1 6
Greek philosophers, 3, 8 f., 20, 63, 65
Greeks, the, 45, 49, 51 f., 56 ff., 67 f.,
71, 75, 82-6, 91 f., 112
Greenland, 254
Groot, de, 138 f.
Groups, formation of, 40
Habbakuk, 8
Han dynasty, 6; period, 56
Hartmann, Eduard von, 274
Hayek, 152, 281, 283
Hegel, xiv, i, 10, 53, 76, 96, 108, 1 10,
113, 132, 137, 153, 186 f., 232 f.,
238, 244, 258 f.
Hellas, 3, 4, 8
Helmolt, xiv
Heraclitus, 2, 9, 58
290
INDEX
Herder, 259, 277
Heredity s 146, 236
Herodotus, 67
Hindu-Rush, 53
Hippocratic writings, 84
Japanese, 7, 54
Java, skeletal finds in, 33
Jeremiah, 2, 8, 20
Jerusalem, 9
Jesuits, ii
Historicity, 224, 233, 242 f., 245, 247, Jesus, 20, 58
25> 2 52, 263, 269, 271, 273, 283 Jewish prophets, the, xiii, 2, 8, 63, 65,
Hitler, 151, 178, 207
Hittites, the, 55
Holland, 137
Homer, 2, 20, 58, 131
Horse, introduction of the, 46
Hrozny, 45
Humanism, 59, 132, 214
Humanist movement, the German,
56,58
Hwang-ho, river, 12 f., 23, 45, 71
Iceland, 170
Icelanders, 64
Jews, the, 45, 49, 51 f., 56 ff., 64, 75,
112, 134
Job, 91 f.
Jiinger, Ernst, 279 f.
Junger, F. G., 280
Justice, 48, 130, 137, 145, 163, 1 66,
169, 171 ff., 176, 180, 189 f., 200
Idealism, German philosophical, 96, Keyserling, 15
Kadesh, account of the battle of, 56
Kant, 43, 75, 90, 136, 160, 178, 198,
250, 277
Kepler, 82
136 f., 244
Ideology, 132 f., 157, 164, 190
Illegitimacy, 159
Imperium Romanum, see Roman 'Empire
India, 2 ff., 7-10, 14, 16, 19, 23, 39,
52-9, 62, 67, 70 f., 73-7, 138 f.,
170, 194, 201, 217, 278 f.
Indian philosophers, 3; philosophy, 69
Indians, the, 46, 49,51 ,56,67, 89,202
Indo-Europeans, 16
Indo-Germanic languages, 55 f.; peo- Lasaulx, 8, 15
Kierkegaard, 99, 133, 232
Klages, 1 37, 232
Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie*
Alfred Weber, 277
Kurdistan, 49
Language, languages, 40 f., 45, 49,
71, 127 f., 138, 162 f,, 239, 258,
274
Lao-tse, 8, 279
pies, 56
Indus, river, 6, 1 2 f., 23, 34, 45, 52 f., 73
Interbreeding, 39
lonians, 8
Iran, 2, 16, 55
Iranians, 51
Irrigation, 13, 45
Isaiah, 213
Islam, 51, 57, 59, 64, 68
Israel, 3, 8
Italian Renaissance, 60
Italy, 55, 89, 206
Jacobins, 217
Jamism, 278
Japan, 11, 254
Last Judgement, the, 141, 259
Latin language, the, 216
Law, 43, 63, 158, 198, 200, 208, 221
Leeuwenhoek, 81
Legitimacy, 159, 167 f., 221
Leonardo, 75
Lessing, 259, 277
Liberalism, 134, 189
Liberty (also freedom), 62, 71, 136 f.,
H3 145, 150, 152-7, 165 ,
i68ff., 171, 173, 179 f., 185, 187 f.,
i9 f - r 95) ! 9 8 > 200, 203, 207, 212,
214, 217, 219 f., 223 f., 257, 268
Lieh-tsu, 2
Lippmann, W., 153, 177, 281, 283
Logos, the, 3, 92
INDEX
291
Love, 152, 228, 242, 273
Luther, 91
Lutheranism, 11
Macedonians, the, 53
Madagascar, 254
Malays, the, 7, 54, 254
Man, creation of, 26; genesis of, 34 f.,
235; monophyletic or polyphyletic
origin of, 41 f.; unity of, 246-64
Market, the, 107, 177 f., 199
Marx, Karl, 98, 108, 132, 136, 188,
217, 277
Marxism, 132 ff., 164^, 174, 186, 283
Masculine solidarity, 40
Mass, the (also masses), 127-31,
178, 216, 252
Mass-production, 98
Materialism, 2
Mathematics, 82 f., 87, 273
Maurya dynasty, 5, 194
Mechanics, 102 f.
Mechanisation, 122, 125, 150
Medicine, 83, 123
Mediterranean, the, 16, 193, 255
Mental illness, 147 f.
Mesopotamia, xiv, 12 f., 23, 34, 44 f.,
49>5i> 68
Mexico, 12, 44, 71, 73, 254
Meyer, E., 14
Michael, archangel, 1 1 3
Michelangelo, 75
Microscope, the, 82, 117
Middle Ages, 23, 58, 63, 75, 82, 245
Milton, 113
Miscegenation (see also Interbreed-
ing), 146
Missionaries, 89
Money, 107
Mongolia, 55
Mongols, 22, 55, 60, 207
Monopoly, monopolies, 174, i76f.,
179
Morse, 104
Mo-ti, 2, 4
Mozart, 75
Mythical Age, the, 2
Myths, 3, 40 f., 45, 49, 82, 226, 243
Napoleon, 197
National-socialists, 42, 147, 210
Nature, 98, 101, 106, 122 f., 132, 145,
243, 272 ff., 275
Neanderthal man, 38
Neolithic Period, 34
Neuer Versuch einer Philosophie der Ges-
chichte, Lasaulx, 8
Newton, 122
Nietzsche, 99, 131 ff., 144, 147, 184,
1 86, 1 88, 232 f.
Nihilism, 2, 131 f., 144, 148, 150,
152, 186, 214 ff., 217, 266 f.
Nile, river, 13, 44 f.
Nirvana, 4
Nomads, 46, 55
Nominalism, 75
Nordic peoples, 53 f., 57, 59, 88; cul-
ture, 64
Northmen, 22, 254
Numa, King, 8
Ochlocracy, 162 f., 166 ,
Old Testament, the, 74
Ophthalmoscope, the, 104
Orient, the, see East, the
Oriental empires, 65
Orphic mysteries, the, 62
Ortega y Gasset, 281
Ottoman renaissance, 56
Pacific Ocean, 22 f., 254
Pacifism, 217
Palaeolithic Period, 34
Palestine, xiv, 2, 17
Parmenides, 2, 9
Parthenon, the, 54
Parthians, the, 256
Parties, political, 162 f.
Pascal, 113
Peace, 145, 193, 196-9, 211 ff., 263
People, the, i28; will of, 168
Perennial Scope of Philosophy, The, Karl
Jaspers, 278
Pericles, 58, 195
Persia, 4, 8 f., 53, 56
Persians, the, 46, 51, 56 f., 68, 71
Peru, 12, 71, 73
292
INDEX
Philosophies Karl Jaspers, 283
Philosophic der Gesckichte, Die, Jo-
hannes Thyssen, 277
Philosophised Glaube, Der, Karl Jaspers,
278
Philosophy, 65, 125, 168, 223, 227 f.,
232, 243, 268; historical, 270
Phoenicians, 45
Physicists, 209
Physics, 87, 1 02, 116
Plato, 2, 5, 7, 58, 233, 244, 250
Planning, 177, 199, 214 f., 217, 222,
281 f.
Poetry, 252, 266, 274
Polynesians, the, 73, 254
Pompeii, 82
Portmann, Adolf, 35, 37 ff., 278
Pre-Axial cultures, 6
Prehistory, 28-43, 236
Prognosis, historical, 141 f., 146, 148,
150 ff., 186
Promethean Age, the, 23, 25, 97, 139
Propaganda, 127 f., 134, 162, 231, 282
Protestantism, 1 1, 58, 65; protestants,
113
Providence, 113, 186, 262
Psychoanalysis, 132!, 283
Psychologic desfoules, La, Le Bon, 281
Psychoses, the, 37, 147
Public, the, 129
Pygmies, the, 73
Pyramids, the, 54
Pythagoras, 9, 62
Races, the, 39, 41
Race, theory of, 132, 146, 283
Ranke, xiv, 267
Raphael, 75
Rationality, 3, 62 f., 218
Reason, 75, 87, 130, 136 f., 155 f.,
169, 171, 189, 214, 218, 237, 243,
283
Rebelitin de las masas, La, Ortega y
Gasset, 281
Red Indians, the, 22, 42
Religion, 3, 52, 58 f. s 63, 91, 130 f.,
136, 194, 197, 210, 217 f., 225 ff.,
238, 252, 255, 265
Rembrandt, 43, 75, 244
Renaissance, the, 56
Research, 83, 86, 116, 123, 141, 143,
145, 242 ff., 270 f.
Revelation, xiii, 19, 131, 226 f., 238,
259, 267
Rights of man, the, 137, 165 f., 198
River-control, 45
Road to Serfdom, The, F. A. Hayek, 281
Rocholl, R., 277
Romance-Teutonic world, see Teuto-
Romance world
Roman Empire, 5, 55, 58 f., 60, 68,
123, 126, 194, 199, 256
Romans, the, 53, 57 , 71, 195
Rome, 8, 52, 73, 153, 170, 193, 195,
'99> 215
Ropke, 153, 281
Russia, 23, 77, 121, 175, 200 f.; Rus-
sian Empire, 193
Russians, the, 142 f.
Sakyamuni, see Buddha
Salamis, battle of, xiv
San-kwo tshi, 56
Sanskrit renaissance, 56
Sasanian culture, 52; Empire, 58;
Sasanids, 59
Saussaye, Chantepie de la, 1 1
Scepticism, 2, 136, 216
Schelling, 96, 244, 268
Schliemann, 82
Science, 61, 68, 75 f., 82-96, 103, 1 18,
123, 138, 142, 145, 173, 185, 191,
214, 218, 222, 225, 241, 253
Scipios, the, 59
Semites, 16
Shakespeare, 75, 244
Shinran, 1 1
Siamese, the, 7
Sicily, 241
Simplification, 134
Slavs, the, 7, 54 ff.
Slav world, the, 34
Socialism, 152, 172, 185, 213 ff., 217,
220, 222
Socrates, 140
Solar energy, 1 20
INDEX
293
Solon, 20, 58
Sophism, 2 ; Sophists, 63
Soviets, the, 55
Spain, 34, 89
Specialisation of organs, 36
Spengler, xiv f., 73, 217, 232, 277
Speech, see Language
Spinoza, 75
Stoicism, 217
Study of History, A, Toynbee, 277
Stone Age, 29
Strauss, Viktor von, 8, 15
Sudan, xiv
Sumerians, the, 13, 44 f., 48, 55, 71
Sung period, 56
Swiss, the, 205
Switzerland, i36f., 203
Syracuse, 5
Tabus, 40, 221
Tacitus, 170
Too, 4, 139
Technicisation, in, 125
Technocracy, 124, 185
Technology, 61, 75, 76, 82, 96-125,
142, 176, 178, 180, 185, 189, 193,
206-9, 222, 225, 252 f., 267; see
also Age of Technology
Telescope, the, 82, 117
Tests, selection, 112, 128
Teu to-Romance culture, 53 f.; peo-
ples, 6 1, 65
Teutons, 54 ff., 256
Thales, 9
Theology, 65
Thomas, St., 91, 245
Thucydides, 2, 84
Thus Spake arathustra, Nietzsche, 144
Thyssen, Johannes, 277
Tigris, river, 45
Tocqueville, 142, 153, 168
Tolerance, 221
Totalitarianism, 150, 281
Toynbee, xiv f., 277
Transcendence, 218 ff., 223, 227, 257,
259> 265, 272, 274
Troy, 12
Truth, 154, 171, 187, 193, 217^.,
221, 225, 243 ff., 253, 256; claim
to exclusive possession of, 64 f., 131,
158, 165,217, 227 f.
Tshangan, 74
Tsin Shi hwang-ti, 5, 194
Turks, the, 55, 60
Tyranny, 162, 1 66 f. ; tyrants, 130
LJber die Perfektion der Technik, F. G.
Jtinger, 280
Unbelief, 131, 137
Unfreedom, 170, 173, 192, 197, 199
Unto mystica, 3
Unity of mankind, 2 1
Universism, 138
Untergang des Abendlandes> Spengler,
277 t
Upanishads, the, 2, 73
Utopias, 145
Vedic period, 73
Veracity, 91, 210
Vesal, 82
Vico, Giambattista, 277
Violence, see Force
Virgil, 20, 58
Vom Ursprung des Menschen, A. Port-
mann, 278
Von der Wahrheit, Karl Jaspers, 283
Weber, Alfred, i6f., 232, 277
Weber, Max, xv, 153, 159, 266, 270,
277
Wei, the court of, 5
Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Burck-
hardt, 143
West, the, xiii ff., 2, 7, 10, 14, 16, 19,
23, 52, 57~ 6 9> 74> 9 6 > IQ 2, i53> l6o >
170, 217, 227, 259, 277 ff.; Western
culture, 44
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 178
Will to destruction, the, 90
knowledge, 90
liberty, 164, 168
power, 89, 171, 176, 196
truth, 92
Work, 1 06, 214
294 INDEX
World empires, empire, 45 , 193, World unity, 172, 193, 198, 200, 203,
196,203,214 214,220
World government, 195 Writing, 35, 41, 45, 48, 56
World history, 22-6
World order, 152, 196, 214!*., 222, Xenophanes, 9
257, 260, 263
World State, the, 195, 198, 206 Zarathustra (Zoroaster), 2, 8f., 279
DP
z
1 26 874
73
