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16 - WHAT ARE QUESTIONS MADE OF?
We are told that it is natural for man to ask questions, and that the innermost essence of the soul expresses itself in the ability to ask questions and find answers. Animals ask few questions, plants and inanimate things none at all, but this is precisely why man is so audacious: because he is no animal, no plant, and no inanimate thing. And further, questions are not thought out; they arise in some fashion of themselves in natural wise: it is impossible for a reasonable creature not to ask. Let us assume this to be true. But then that means that a reasonable creature can be nothing else but limited. For he alone asks, who does not know and who lacks knowledge. "None of the gods", says Plato, "philosophizes and seeks to become wise." It is obvious that the reasonable creature's desire for knowledge is born of his limitations. Consequently reasonableness is itself limitation. Of course if one compares man with a plant or a stone, the natural conclusion will be that to be reasonable is the same thing as to be more highly perfected.
But who forces us to compare ourselves with stones? Why should we not follow the example of the ancients and direct our eyes to the gods? That is to say, why should we not add to all our questions one more: what are questions made of? For I hope that it is now clear that questions are made, and always by the same limited, intimidated, preoccupied human being and, of course, of the material which lies directly to its hand. These conditions also determine the result achieved. We have before us a stone, a plant, an animal, man.
Question: How did man become so reasonable, seeing that he is composed of the same material as stones, plants, and animals? It seems unthinkable not to pose such a question. It seems that even a god might ask it. And the answer is taken from the same source as the question: from usual, normal, daily experience. We know that we can accomplish nothing at one blow. To create a statue out of a stone we must slowly and painfully chisel small pieces of it out until the formless block is turned into a beautiful work of art. And here we have already the theory of evolution, of slow, imperceptible changes. Imperceptibly the plant turns into the animal, the animal into man, and even into civilized man. Since it happens imperceptibly, since no one can notice it, one need not look at it. Consequently there is no exciting surprise and we are content: we think that we have freed ourselves from our limitations and no one is disturbing the natural course of life. I repeat once again: it seems to us that question and answer both originated spontaneously, that no one interfered in this - neither we, nor any other beings. We only registered objectively something which originated spontaneously, as though it was not we but some ideal registering apparatus. But answer and question alike are purely human.
God could never have asked such a question, and He would never have accepted such an answer. And precisely the thing which distresses us most, the thing which we first reduce to an infinite number of infinitely small changes, and then painfully try to make into something unnoticed and more or less non-existent - precisely that, far from distressing God, far from seeming to Him something which ought not to be, something intrusive, unnatural, is, on the contrary, in His eyes, the beneficent essence both of His own life and of life in general. We are terrified by every creative fiat, by every inexplicable miracle, we are afraid of discovering a break in the course of historical phenomena. We devote all our efforts to banishing out of life everything "sudden", "spontaneous", "unexpected". We describe all such things as chance, but chance in our tongue means something which, strictly speaking, cannot exist. If in any theory, not only scientific but also philosophic (meaning by this a theory which rejects in advance all presuppositions), we discover anything "sudden" or "all at once", we consider our theory irretrievably ruined. And we hold our conviction of the faultiness of everything "sudden" for no premise, but the very truth made word. It cannot be that stones and plants were, and that then "suddenly" beasts appeared, much less men. Nor can it be that man should "suddenly", "for no reason", "precipitately" take some decision or feel some desire; if he took a decision or felt a desire, he had "grounds" for it. Free will in its pure form is a myth, which has come down to us from the distant ages of humanity's prehistoric existence. Not only the determinists, but also the opponents of determinism, who maintain that man is a free creature, yet hold it necessary to reduce freedom into an infinite number of infinitely minute elements, of which the decision which determines our action is then composed imperceptibly. The cult of the imperceptible has permeated our whole being to such a degree that there is in fact much, very much, that we now do not notice. And we dream, as of an ideal, of that blessed age in which no one will any more ask any questions. This will be the final triumph of theoretical reason. Man will cease to ask; he will himself be as God. But this is just where the fatal self-deception is hidden.
Man will ask nothing because he will see nothing, because he will transform everything into the "imperceptible". By plucking the fruit off the tree of knowledge man became as God - but only in his negative attributes, or rather, in one of his negative attributes, in that which God has not. But the object was not to possess one or more of God's negative attributes. We are as God in having no horns, hoofs, tails, etc. - is that a reason for gratification? What we have to aim at is to possess what God has. Consequently we must not be anxious to transform the perceptible into the imperceptible, but rather to make visible even the barely perceptible. We must accordingly throw ourselves greedily upon each "sudden", "spontaneous", "creative fiat", each absence of purpose and motive, and screen ourselves with the utmost care from that emasculator of thought, the theory of gradual development. The dominant of life is audacity, tolma, all life is a creative tolma and therefore an eternal mystery, not reducible to something finished and intelligible. A philosophy which has let itself be seduced by the example of positive science, a philosophy which endeavours, and believes its essential task to be, to differentiate everything problematic and surprising into infinitely minute quantities, is not only bringing us no nearer the truth, it is leading us away from it.
And I wish to repeat once again what I said before: the Fall of philosophy began with Thales and Anaximander. Thales proclaimed that All is One. Anaximander saw in multiplicity, that is, in the eternal problematical, an impiety, a something which ought not to be. After them philosophers began systematically to eschew multiplicity and to esteem uniformity. The comprehensible and the uniform became synonymous with the real and with that which ought to be. The individual, the independent, the different were looked on as unreal and audacious. Some qualification, of course, is necessary. Interest in the mysterious has always lived on in philosophy, particularly in ancient philosophy. Plato and Plotinus lent a shuddering ear to mysteries, knew the meaning of initiation, were themselves initiates. They honoured with reverence the memory of the great sages of the past. At the same time, however, they wanted to be lords over the spirit of man. That is, the esoteric and the exoteric attracted them equally. Aristotle alone forsook the esoteric. But precisely for that reason history left the victory with Aristotle. Even the Middle Ages, which sought so greedily after the mysterious and guessed at it everywhere, took Aristotle for guide. Modernity has now broken altogether with antiquity. Descartes is generally looked on as the father of modern philosophy.
The true father of modern philosophy was, however, Spinoza. Spinoza's whole philosophy was imbued with the thought that God's reason and will differ toto caelo from human reason and will, that God's reason and will have as little in common with human reason and will as the dog-star has with the dog, the barking animal: that is, only the name. Hence he drew the conclusion that what we call beautiful, perfect, good, etc., has no relationship with God. Consequently one has not to laugh, nor weep nor be wroth, but to understand; that is, to ask no questions relating to the things which mean most to us, and to give answers which are totally unnecessary to us. Thus Spinoza taught, and his commandments were received as a new revelation. And no one noticed (men prefer not to notice) that Spinoza himself acted, both as man and philosopher, in the diametrically opposite way. He asked no questions which he did not need, and found no answers which did not concern him. "Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" - with these words he closes his Ethics. That is, the "beautiful" which, if one bears Spinoza's earlier words in mind, stands in no relationship to God, is restored to its divine rights precisely because human reason and human will are so loyally devoted to it. And it is towards the beautiful alone, although it is so difficult to attain and is found so rarely, that Spinoza's soul aspires. Further: his "amor Dei intellectualis", the intellectual love of God - why, it consists simply of "ridere, lugere et detestari", and has as little in common with the scientific "intelligere" as the dog-star has with the dog, the barking animal. That is to say, Spinoza, like so many of his ancient predecessors, held that the "intelligere" was only there for the crowd, for "every one". It was an outer decoration: when one mingles with men, one must wear the appearance of an understanding, quiet, composed man, untroubled with doubts. To the crowd one must always speak in the tone of a man in whom power reposes. But for himself and for the initiated Spinoza used quite another language.
Modern philosophy, which has made herself the handmaid of science, has only taken from Spinoza what he kept for the crowd, for the uninitiated: only his "intelligere". It is convinced that questions ought to be made of indifferent, worthless material. It sweeps away beauty, good, ambition, tears, laughter, and curses, like dust, like useless refuse, never guessing that it is the most precious thing in life, and that out of this material and this alone, genuine, truly philosophic questions have to be moulded. Thus the prophets questioned, thus the greatest sages of antiquity, thus even the Middle Ages. Now only rare, lonely thinkers comprehend this. But they stand aside from the great highway, aside from history, aside from the general business of philosophy. Official, recognized philosophy, which aims at being science, does not go beyond the "intelligere", and is, moreover, quite genuinely convinced that it alone is seeking the truth. But precisely it should halt and ask itself: Of what are questions made? Perhaps it would then renounce the idea of transforming all that is important into the imperceptible, which is so imperceptible that it cannot be seen. And then, instead of a world which always and in all its parts remains the same, instead of a process of development - then before man's eyes would arise a world of sudden, wonderful and mysterious transformations, each of which would mean more than the whole process of today and all its natural development. Such a world, cannot, it is true, be "comprehended". But such a world need not be comprehended. In such a world comprehension is superfluous. Comprehension is necessary for the natural world from man, who came in natural wise into it. But in a world of wonderful transformations, in an eternally unnatural world, comprehension is only an ugly, crude extra, a meagre and wretched gift of the pauper world of limitation. So it was felt by the best representatives of humanity in moments of inspiration and of spiritual ecstasy. But humanity has not been granted to think thus. Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt. How much divine laughter, how many human tears and curses are needed to learn how to live in such a world, to penetrate into such a world! But we want peace, first and last, we want to count, measure, and weigh automatically, and we assume that this is lofty science and that such science will reveal to us all secrets! And we even hesitate to ask ourselves of what questions are made, being convinced in advance that all questions are made of one and the same material and that the justified questions are simply those which arise from untroubled spirits and can be solved through self-satisfied comprehension.
17 - MORALITY AND PESSIMISM
Whence came good, whence evil? Anaximander, the first Hellenic philosopher, thought that evil began when individual things escaped from the womb of single Being and insisted impiously on beginning a separate, independent existence. So the Pythagoreans thought also. The same idea runs more or less distinctly through the whole philosophy of antiquity. The last great Hellenic philosopher, Plotinus, is of the same conviction. He says that the individual souls tore themselves audaciously free from the One and live in evil so far as they maintain their independence. Plotinus, of course, is expressing Anaximander's thought more accurately. One can, of course, only speak with qualifications of individual things. Only living beings and not things, are normally individuals. Can one describe a stone, a mountain, a river, a piece of iron, as individuals? Have they escaped from the womb of the One? So, too, with the house, the table, the clock, the pen, the statue, etc. All these are "things" and "individuals" only for us, for men. For nature, this or that form assumed by iron, marble, or plaster, has no meaning. Marble in the block or marble in the statue of Apollo is for nature only marble; nature preserves or destroys it with equal indifference, whether it received its shape in "natural" wise or through the artist's hand. In earthquakes, landslides, fires, works of nature crumble or burn equally with works of art, one and the other accepting their fate with equal readiness and passivity.
Consequently one cannot say of things that they have asserted themselves audaciously or impiously; things stand beyond (or this side of) good and evil. Only living creatures assert themselves. They want to "be" and revolt against every attack on their individuality or their "ego". It is here that questions of good and bad begin, as of good and evil. Individuals which assert themselves meet with some resistance. They want, let us say, to eat - but there is no food there; they want to drink - there is nothing to drink there; they want to warm themselves - they cannot. And conversely, sometimes food, drink, and warmth are there in abundance. Why is this so, why is there sometimes everything in abundance, and sometimes too little? Further: all these beings which assert themselves want to "be", while nature, without heeding their wishes, arbitrarily sets a limit to their being by sending them death. And then these creatures revolt and declare that if they are refused food, drink, and warmth, or their lives suddenly cut short without asking them, that this is bad, but if they are given superfluity and a long life, and particularly such a life that the thought of death does not even enter their minds, so that they think there is not and never will be any death, then this is good. In a word, for nature, for that which we call nature, there is neither a good nor a bad. Only for individuals is there a good and a bad, particularly, of course, for man, precisely for the thinking man who remembers the past and imagines the future vividly. And thus man, through his thousand years of experience, has come to the conviction that life holds too much that is insuperably bad. Man must constantly fight and yield. For a moment one can arrange one's life, but only for a moment. To none is it granted to escape death. Even the students sing, "nemini parcetur". The fool, the sage, the serf, the prince, all must pay tribute to death. Before the inevitable man must bow, and accept passively the blows and gifts of fate.
Most men, the overwhelming majority, bear this lot patiently. But there are also some who think, who seek to reach the heart of things. Why is Nature indifferent to that which seems to us supremely important? Nature is infinitely powerful, surely she is right? Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps we cannot succeed in understanding Nature, in raising ourselves to her level? I think it was thus that the question posed itself to Anaximander and thus to Plotinus, and that it was taken over in the same form by later philosophy and religious consciousness. When man had to choose between the mutually conflicting and irreconcilably opposed endeavours of the insignificant atom-individual, and the vast, infinite universe, it seemed to him quite clear that he could not be right and that the universe was right. An infinitely small part cannot hope for its cause to be of greater import than the cause of the colossal whole. What men hold for good and bad is in reality neither good nor bad. Before the supreme judgment it is one whether a man is full or hungry, warm or cold, sick or sound. It is even one whether he is alive or not. The only thing that is not "one" is that which is specially guarded from the first and for ever. In contrast to the good and bad, i.e. to the valuable from the point of view of the individual, there arose the autonomous, ethical values - the idea of good and the idea of evil. They are autonomous - that is to say, they have no connection with the usual conceptions of good and bad; indeed, they exclude them. In the light of these new ideas of good and evil, the very existence of the individual was revealed as audacity and impiety. What wonder if nature is indifferent to its "good" and "bad"? On the contrary, one may wonder that these bold and impious creatures have so much good provided for them on earth. Nourishment, drink, and much else is, at least, there for them. If one looks rather closer, one may perhaps soon come to the conclusion that all these blessings are only supplied in order that the individuals should pay the fitting penalty for their sin. They must first be given the opportunity to assert themselves to their heart's desire - then the disappointment will be all the more painful and torturing.
However this may be, the contrast between good and bad on the one hand and good and evil on the other can be expressed and explained in this way. Good and bad is what individuals need or do not need. But if the individual comprehends the secret of existence, it must renounce both itself and also its needs, forget good and bad and strive only after the general good. For its own "good" is precisely the fundamental arch-evil, while the real arch-good is the complete renunciation of self, self-annihilation. This I repeat, is the fundamental idea of Hellenic philosophy, from Anaximander to Plotinus. It is also the point of departure of modern philosophy. With Schopenhauer this idea assumes, for the first time, an entirely new form, that of pessimism. For Schopenhauer too the principium individuationis is the beginning and the source of evil. All that is born must perish, all that begins must end. The individual begins, consequently it must perish. In this Schopenhauer differs in no wise from his predecessors. But his attitude to life, his evaluation of life, is different. He might have said with Plotinus, that death is the fusion of the individual with the original One. And he almost does say so. Only - and here is the difference between him and Plotinus - he sees in this neither something beautiful, nor something bad. Existence - whether as an empirical individual or as a metaphysical principle - seems to him equally pitiable and valueless. Or, to put it better, the "will" (as Schopenhauer calls the metaphysical principle), although eternal and real, does not, in its superhuman being, attract Schopenhauer's attention. With all its reality will remains absolutely strange to him. He esteems supreme human creative achievement - philosophy, religion, art - solely because he is convinced that it kills the will to live. It teaches man to raise himself above the good and bad in which life has its only hold, and to aspire towards the real good which denies life.
In no single philosopher is the link between morality and pessimism so clearly expressed as in Schopenhauer. Not only has man no need to be - there is no need for anything empirical, and far less metaphysical, to be. Schopenhauer rejects suicide, in the name of supreme morality, of the supreme good. For with him good requires more than this. It is not the individual entity that must be killed, annihilated, but the will itself, the metaphysical principle: that is the last task of philosophy and of those religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity, which are sufficiently advanced. And now, when Anaximander and Plotinus created their "life", when they exalted their "One" and spurned all that was individual, were they not doing just what Schopenhauer did in our days? Were they not expressing pessimism and the negation of the will to live, only in a less frank and consequently a more dangerous form? The Greeks work out the contempt of the individual, the illusory and senseless character of the existence of the individual human being, as consistently as Schopenhauer himself. They do so, indeed, only in the name and to the glory of the One. But this is precisely the heart of the riddle: what is the point of the whole world-comedy? Why does the One, which is so self-satisfied, so peaceful, so all-comprehensive, need to split itself into myriads of souls, to throw them out into the world, to lodge them in these mysterious, alluring body-cells, if it turns out afterwards that the best that souls could do would be to leave their bodies and return to the One whence they came? It is impossible, with the worst will in the world, to conceive anything more senseless - and the One of the Greeks, in face of all this, is primarily a rational principle. Both in Plato and in Plotinus we find suggestions of an answer to this question, but they are so clumsy that it is not worth while discussing them. It looks as though they had no answer of any sort ready. But if they spoke - not spoke, but sang, and how nobly they sang ! - of their joy at the possibility of returning to "that world", so Schopenhauer, too, exalted with no less joy, and often with real enthusiasm, the philosophy of renunciation. Now, enthusiasm, delight and even ecstasy are psychologically comprehensible to us, especially in men like Plotinus who felt so bitterly the degrading necessity of abiding in the burdensome, despised body.
18 - QUASI UNA FANTASIA
I know not at which to wonder more: man's willful blindness, or his natural timidity. Although one can assume that these two characteristics are interdependent. Man refuses to see because he is afraid. Afraid of what? Often he does not truly know himself. His greatest terror seems to be to violate the "law". Every one is convinced that there are certain laws, eternally existent, and that failing these laws, or outside them, there is only destruction. Our spiritual vision creates for itself horizons as limited as our physical. How alarming to men, even today, is Protagoras's doctrine that man is the measure of all things! And what efforts human thought makes to kill Protagoras and his teaching! They have stopped at nothing, not even at direct calumny - even men like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who loved uprightness and honesty with their whole souls and honestly desired only to serve the truth. They were afraid that if they let Protagoras prevail, they would become misologoi, despisers of reason, that they would commit spiritual suicide. They were afraid: that is the point. But there was no reason to be afraid. One may begin by pointing out that Protagoras's doctrine does not in the least commit us to hate or despise reason. Protagoras himself, as Plato's dialogues show, did not at all despise reason; he respected it, he genuinely, fervently, honoured and loved it. It is true that Protagoras clearly does not see in reason the last or the first principle of being (archê). He places man above reason. From this to contempt is, of course, a long step. Consequently Plato's and Aristotle's agitation was quite superfluous, and they committed, perhaps, the supreme crime in concealing Protagoras' s teaching from the later world. They were abetted by Anytus and Meletus - the same who poisoned Socrates. Protagoras's book treating of the gods was burned! But Plato and Aristotle committed a worse crime than Anytus and Meletus. They did not kill Protagoras himself, but they annihilated his spiritual heritage. For all the efforts of modern historians, we cannot rescue Protagoras's spirit from oblivion and give it new life. Protagoras was a Sophist, he traded with truth - that is practically all we know of him. One can, of course, suspect that the "judgment of history" was unjust, that Protagoras had real, great philosophical purposes, even if the Sophists did trade with truth. But what were they? Again one must surmise, try to guess, and create for oneself quasi una fantasia of Protagoras even at the risk of error.
"Man is the measure of all things." "Every assertion can be countered with an opposite assertion:" that is all that is left of Protagoras, unless one counts the famous but inconclusive opening sentences of his book on the gods. How is one to understand the meaning of these sayings? On the one hand, they are senseless, as Plato and Aristotle tried to prove, because they contain an obvious contradiction. But just because they are so challenging, so openly senseless, we must assume that a different meaning is hidden behind them from that attributed to them by hostile interpreters. The more benevolent modern criticism does, indeed, try to soften the senselessness of the former assertion by interpreting it in the sense of "specific relativism": not each individual man is the measure of all things, but man in general. Such an interpretation seems more acceptable. But the basic contradiction is still not eliminated, it is only driven underground and made less visible: as Husserl proved conclusively, specific relativism, considered closely, has no advantage whatever over individual relativism. The restrictive interpretation only suspends the verdict; it does not alter it. But Protagoras cannot plead in his own defence; thanks to Plato's and Meletus's efforts he has been robbed once for all of the possibility of defending himself by his own words. But our curiosity, our desire to know, is only fanned by this. The gods are jealous; they will not reveal to mortals the secrets of existence. Perhaps that was just the reason why they helped Plato and Aristotle to finish off Protagoras, and even brought about so unnatural an alliance between them and Anytus and Meletus, the murderers of Socrates - because more had been revealed to Protagoras than the councils of the gods had decreed that man might know.
"The inner strength of a religious idea never ensures it world supremacy" - so says A. Harnack, the learned historian of religious ideas (Dogmengeschichte, II, 272). The inner strength of a religious, and, of course, also of a philosophical idea, never ensures it world supremacy. I am even inclined to express myself more strongly still. I think - and the whole history of human seeking clearly confirms this - that the ultimate religious and philosophic truth, even if it were to be discovered and enunciated, would never be able through the "potentia ordinata", or even the "potentia absoluta" of the gods, to achieve supremacy over human spirits. Truth, the last truth, will always remain hidden from us; that is the law of fate. St. Augustine says: ipsa veritatis occultatio aut humilitatis exercitatio est aut elationis attritio. ("The truth has been hidden from us either to practise us in humility or to punish our arrogance.") (De civitate Dei, XI, 22.) Augustine's explanation may be too tendentious (it is not so easy to unriddle the decisions of the gods), but the fact - occultatio veritatis - remains: truth is hidden from us. And the decision of the gods, I repeat, is unalterable. The means that they employ are, however, manifold. They will always find men both among the common herd and among the elect who are ready to persecute truth in every way. And they succeed easily in this, since every new truth is frightening at first sight. And for this reason the gods have ordained - only gods could invent this - that the last truth is always veiled in contradictions which are simply unacceptable and absolutely intolerable to our spirit, and scare off even the boldest inquirers.
How much has been spoken and written on this, from Heraclitus and the Eleatics, to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer! It is a generally known fact that the leading philosophic systems are "permeated" with contradictions - one would think it was time to get used to them and to learn to see in them a "gift of the gods" - and yet men still think and will certainly always think that contradictions are something which have attached themselves unlawfully to our cognition and have to be overcome, or if one cannot overcome them, to be disregarded on principle. And how striking is this: not only do the philosophic truths, that is the truths "of the roots and sources of things", always seem, at first, to contradict both appearance and themselves, but all great scientific cognitions at first appear to man to be plainly nonsensical. It has therefore happened more than once that a truth has had to wait for recognition whole centuries after its discovery. So it was with Pythagoras's teaching of the movement of the earth. Every one thought it false and for more than 1,500 years men refused to accept this truth. Even after Copernicus savants were obliged to keep this new truth hidden from the champions of tradition and of sound common sense. Similarly, Newton has been ignored by the majority of mankind until today. Indeed, how could a man accustomed to "see" that weight and solidity are inseparable attributes of all material things - how could he reconcile himself with the thought that bodies in themselves have no weight, that a thin spider's web and a huge stone fall with equal velocity in a vacuum? Aristotle, of course, held such a supposition to be the summit of unreason.
Protagoras's assertion that man is the measure of all things is another flagrant violation of common sense. Put in another way, it is not the objective being that conditions our judgment, but vice versa. One must further assume that Protagoras was not speaking of specific relativism, but of individual: he thought that each individual man measured things according to his own judgment, and there were thus as many truths as men. Worse still, there were more truths than men, since one and the same man thinks one way today, another tomorrow. Where then is the criterion of truth and how shall we distinguish truth from falsehood? And how is man to live if it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood? This last question makes even the Pragmatists, the modern defenders of Protagoras, uneasy, and they try to prove that man can still live and still find a criterion of the truth from Protagoras's point of view, and even give very good grounds for it. One has only to follow the example of the Pragmatists and esteem the useful alone; then one would have a criterion which answers the most exacting demands. The Pragmatists' line of argument reminds one of the logic of some savage tribe or other - I forget which: On what does the earth rest? On an elephant. And on what does the elephant rest? On a snail. This satisfied their curiosity; the earth rests on something, it has a support.
The thought that the earth need not rest on anything would be senseless and even nonsensical to the savage, and even to many Europeans. If they knew Aristotle they would say: "One can say that; but one cannot think it." Even the idea of the force of gravity which carries objects with it has become so closely entwined with man's intellectual nature that he thinks that he would have to renounce thought if he freed himself from this idea. So it is also with Protagoras's teaching of the criterion of truth. Man is the measure of all things! According to Husserl only a madman could think thus. Aristotle says: One can say this but one cannot think it. And yet Protagoras was neither a madman nor a cheat. He simply realized, it seems, that a little snail is as unfitted to be the support for a great elephant as the great elephant for the giant earth. And then a bold and splendid thought came to him: need one support "truth" at all, would truth "fall" if not supported? Indeed it might not fall. Perhaps "general validity and necessity" are no "attribute" of truth, as weight is no "attribute" of a body. In the conditions under which we live, weight is indeed "practically" an attribute of bodies; no man has ever been able to lift up a thing in his hands without feeling its weight. And no one has seen truth, and no one can see it, unless it first fulfills the demands made on it by the law of contradiction. But all probabilities go to show that Protagoras was not speaking of empirical truth but of metaphysical, truth as the immortal gods bear it in themselves.
Even here on earth we can perceive a difference in the relation of different people to truth. I will illustrate this with an example. A queen and her ladies-in-waiting enter a box in a theatre. The queen sits down without looking round. Since she sat down, therefore there was a chair under her. The ladies-in-waiting looked round first, and after they had convinced themselves that chairs had been pushed forward, they sat down. A queen does not have to look round first and convince herself. She has a "logic" all her own: there is a chair there because she sits down. Common mortals, on the other hand, only sit down when there is a chair. This was perhaps Protagoras's thought. Although daily experience testifies to the contrary, he saw, or perhaps believed, that it is granted to man to create truth, and that royal blood flows in man's veins. One need look round at each step and ask "truth" for permission only in so far as man belongs to the empiric world, in which rules, laws, regulations, real and imaginary, do in fact reign; where all things, even truths, have a weight and fall unless supported. But man strives for freedom. He yearns passionately to the gods and to the divine, although he "knows nothing" of the gods and the divine, or, if you prefer it, because he knows nothing. One need know nothing of the gods, it is enough to hear that they call one to themselves into that lofty place in which freedom rules and where the free rule. And the first step towards the gods is the readiness to overcome, if only in thought, that weight, that centripetal force, that attraction to the earth, to the steady and stable, to which men have now so accustomed themselves that they see in it not only their own nature but the nature of all living things. There are no laws above man. Everything is made for him, both the law and the Sabbath. He is the measure of all things, he is called to be a law-giver like an absolute monarch and has the right to counter every thesis with another directly opposite to it.
19 - TWO KINDS OF LOGIC
"A whole eternity thou wast not, and didst not mourn thereover, didst not say thou couldst not comprehend how the world could exist without thee. But with respect to the eternity in the future in which thou wilt not be, thou dost maintain that this is unacceptable. It is clear that thou art inconsistent." Thus reason speaks to man. "It is, indeed, clear to thee, for thee I am inconsistent. But there is also another kind of logic. When I am once arisen out of nothingness, then it is done; I shall not return again into nothingness, and the second'eternity' is mine." This is the answer of the irreconcilable and willful debater. Against such a one reason can do naught with its own means.
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