A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 1. The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy

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Part II
The development of the basic antinomy in the cosmonomic idea of humanistic immanence-philosophy

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Chapter I
The basic structure of the humanistic transcendental ground-idea and the intrinsic polarity between the classical science-ideal and the ideal of personality

§ 1 - Introduction. Humanistic philosophy and the humanistic view of life and the world

At least in its dominating trends modern Western immanence-philosophy is rooted in a common Humanistic ground-motive of a religious character, which we learned to know in our Prolegomena as the motive of nature and freedom. The various forms of the transcendental ground-Idea of the different schools in which this central religious motive has found its theoretical expression may at first sight seem somewhat confusing by their great diversity. Nevertheless, this transcendental Idea possesses a fixed basic structure, which can be seen in each variation.

Of course historical connections between modern Humanistic philosophy and medieval and ancient systems are present everywhere. However, the former displays a new character, which is not to be explained in terms of a purely historical development of human thought.

In this philosophy the connection between the basic structure of the transcendental ground-Idea, and that of the pre-theoretic Humanistic world- and life-view has gradually developed to such an extent, that the boundaries between the theoretic and the pre-theoretical attitude of thought seem to have been wiped out. As a result, in most instances, the Humanist is unable to account for his cosmonomic Idea in philosophy. He thinks it is possible to philosophize in an unprejudiced fashion, because his religious presuppositions are accepted by the world- and life-view of Humanism, as self-evident and indubitable.

The autonomy of human reason was not - as in the ancient Greek world - a postulate of theoretic philosophy only. It was

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from the outset proclaimed by the Humanistic life- and world-view, itself. The dogmatic reliance on theoretical thought was not undermined until the modern crisis in the foundations of the Humanistic world- and life-view began to cast its shadow upon philosophical reflection. Modern existentialism was born out of this crisis. It broke with the scientific conception of philosophy and sought to play the same rôle that had previously been filled by the now uprooted world- and life-view.

Ancient and medieval philosophy respectively were balanced by the counter poise of the religious world- and life-view of the people and the church. The latter could criticize and stimulate philosophical thought from the practical, pre-theoretical point of view. Humanistic philosophy, on the other hand, does not find any counterpoise in its own world- and life-view. At the time of the Enlightenment and of the natural scientific positivism of the last century, Humanistic philosophy invaded the latter in popular form and imprinted upon it its quasi-scientific mask.

This theoretization of the world- and life-view of Humanism led to the serious eradication of the boundary between the scientific and naïve attitude of thought which we noticed above; and it undermined all sense of responsibility in the personal religious commitment implied in every philosophic standpoint. Modern existentialism has sharply taken exception to this impersonal attitude of philosophic reflection.

The undermining of the personal sense of responsibility in the religious commitment.

During the Enlightenment the Humanistic world- and life-view appealed to science as the crown-witness of sovereign reason. The personal responsibility involved in the choice of one's religious position was shifted without question upon the shoulders of ‘Reason’, the impersonal divinity which had been elevated to the throne.

Here could be observed a noteworthy interaction between the rationalistic philosophy and the world- and life-view of Humanism. At its beginning, at the time of the Renaissance, the latter was completely aware of its real religious motive. However, in the eighteenth century when Humanistic philosophy had been popularized, this notion gradually began to fade away. The Humanistic world- and life-view lost the impulse to arrive at religious self-consciousness in its pre-theoretical attitude. It now believed in the impartiality and sovereign infallibility of the-

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oretical thought. Even when philosophy chose to express itself in a metaphysical theology, it had lost the stimulus to religious self-consciousness. For it no longer had a counter-poise in a Humanistic world- and life-view which was conscious of its religious ground-motive¹.

The Humanistic world- and life-view allowed itself to be deprived of its initial vitality without offering the slightest opposition. It lost the notion of the irreplaceable significance of the naïve attitude toward reality. It preferred to be quasi-scientific and became static and abstract. No longer did it retain any proximity to life, but it made its pronouncements as from a theoretical distance. Neither did the Humanistic view of the world and of life protest against the falsification of naïve experience by the theoretical interpretation of rationalistic philosophy. This was only possible, because the Humanistic world- and life-view had itself been made into a theory.

It is true, that in the period of Sturm und Drang, and in the subsequent period of Romanticism, the Humanistic ideal of personality strongly reacted against rationalistic philosophy. But, this reaction was too much drenched with theoretical philosophical motives to keep a sufficient distance from Humanistic philosophy. And, just as the Renaissance, this reaction was too aristocratic in character to find any real echo among the larger classes of society. Its failure to appeal to the masses was most times the weak point of the Humanistic world- and life-view, and in this respect the latter was at a positive disadvantage, when compared with the Christian view.

Undoubtedly Humanism acquired an influence on the masses during the Enlightenment and in the period of natural scientific positivism by popular scientific literature, belles lettres, and other means of propaganda. However, this influence came from above, viz. from philosophy which was popularized. This was also the case at the time of the French revolution and in the rise of socialism as a mass-movement. Humanistic philosophy has never found a fruitful and deep inner religious contact with a life- and world-view which, as the Christian one, lives sponta-

1 To be sure, in so far as the Christian world- and life-view had not been unduly influenced by immanence philosophy, it vehemently opposed the latter. However, Humanistic philosophy does not have a common root with the Christian world- and life-view.

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neously in the heart of the simple man and calmly retains its pious certainty against all errors of theoretical thought.

The Dutch Christian statesman and thinker, Dr Abraham Kuyper, discovered this weak point in the relationship between the philosophical theory and the life- and world-view of Humanism. And, in his struggle against the enligthened liberalism of the last century, he concentrated his attack upon this very point.

It is true that, in the first decades of the XXth century, especially under the influence of the Kant-renaissance, a strong impulse was revealed to delineate the boundary between philosophical theory and a life- and world-view. We have paid full attention to this tendency in the latter part of the Prolegomena. In this very period, however, the undermining influence of philosophical historicism and relativism had penetrated into the latter. And this relativism has led to the modern crisis in Humanism. A historistic philosophy of life was born out of this crisis. And especially in the period after the first world war, it began to produce a new outlook¹ in syndicalistic and fascistic movements. This new outlook was concerned with the suggestion of the masses rather than with questions of truth.

1 Translator's note: Henceforth the term ‘outlook’ shall be used instead of the longer expression world- and life-view.
D.H.F.

The synthetic standpoint of Thomistic philosophy and the disruption of this synthesis by the nominalism of late scholasticism.

To gain an insight into the basic structure of the cosmonomic idea of Humanistic thought we must go back to the period of the origination of the latter. I treated the genesis of the Humanistic outlook in detail in my study-series entitled, In den Strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde (In the struggle for a Christian Politics)². Here I described the way in which the religious starting-point of Humanism was gradually applied to philosophic thought in the basic structure of a new cosmonomic Idea. Consequently, I shall now confine myself to a very short sketch of the main lines of this historical development.

2 I began this series in the first issue of the review ‘Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde’ (published by the Dr A. Kuyper foundation). The gradual clarification of my insights in this study will not escape the reader. I am no longer in complete agreement with what I have written in the first part of this study; it is too strongly under the influence of Troeltsch's and Dilthey's view of the Middle Ages and the Reformation.

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The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and medieval culture.

The Renaissance, which displayed such a varied picture in the different countries, began as a spiritual movement of a modern Humanistic character. It began when the medieval ecclesiastically unified culture¹ had collapsed. The latter had found its best philosophical expression in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy.

Following his teacher Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas sought to adapt to Christian doctrine the speculative Aristotelian philosophy in interrelation with neo-Platonic, Augustinian, and other philosophical motives that had already become the common property of Christian thought in the patristic period. He sought to effectuate this accomodation by curtailing the excessive pagan branches of speculative Greek philosophy. By so doing he followed the example given by Avicenna and Maimonides who similarly sought to effect a synthesis between Aristotelianism and the doctrines taught in the Koran and in the Old Testament, respectively.

In his transcendental basic Idea, the ‘lex aeterna’, with its subjective counterpart in the ‘lex naturalis’, Christian and pagan Ideas were brought to a seemingly complete convergence. Through the ‘lex naturalis’, the creation, in its essential nature, has a subjective part in the eternal law of reason of the divine worldplan.

1 This term is frequently used by Troeltsch; it designates the period in which the Church directed all human activity in the family, political life, science and art, school and business. It refers to the period in which all of culture bore an ecclesiastical stamp.

The integral and radical character of the religious ground-motive of creation, the fall and redemption in the Biblical sense.

In order to enable the reader to understand, that this convergence is not actual, it is necessary to give a more detailed account of the integral and radical character of the central ground-motive of the Christian religion in its Biblical sense, the motive of creation, the fall into sin, and the redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Ghost. To this end I may first recall the chief points of the explanation devoted to this subject in the Prolegomena.

As the Creator, God reveals Himself as the Absolute and Integral Origin of the ‘earthly world’, concentrated in man, and of the world of the angels. In the language of the Bible He is the Origin

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of heaven and earth. There is no original power which is opposed to Him. Consequently, in His creation we cannot find any expression of a dualistic principle of origin.

The integral character of the Biblical motive of creation is superbly expressed in the majestic 139th psalm:

‘Wither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.’

This is certainly the radical opposite of the Greek dualism of the form- and matter motive.

In the revelation that God created man according to His image, He discloses man to himself, in the religious radical unity of his created existence, and in the religious solidarity of mankind, in which was integrally concentrated the entire meaning of the temporal cosmos.

The integral Origin of all things according to God's plan of creation has its created image in the heart of man participating in the religious community of mankind. The latter is the integral and radical unity of all the temporal functions and structures of reality, which ought to be directed in the human spirit toward the Absolute Origin, in the personal commitment of love and service of God and one's neighbour.

This Christian view cut off at the very roots the religious dualism of the Greek motive of form and matter, which came to a head in anthropology in the dichotomy between a material body and a theoretical rational substance of a pure form-character.

Moreover, the creation implies a providential worldplan, which has its integral origin in the Sovereign Will of the Creator. We have indicated this world-plan in the transcendental Idea of the cosmic temporal order. Naturally, Divine Providence is not restricted to the law-side of the temporal world. However, in so far as it embraces also the factual side, this Providence is hidden from human knowledge, and therefore not accessible to a Christian philosophy.

The revelation of the fall into sin is inseparably connected with that of creation. Sin, in its radical Biblical sense, does not play any rôle in the dialectical basic motives of Greek and Humanistic thought. It cannot play such a part here, because sin can only be understood in veritable radical self-knowledge, as the fruit of Biblical Revelation.

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Sin and the dialectical conception of guilt in Greek and Humanistic philosophy.

The Greek religious consciousness only recognized the conflict between the principles of form and matter in man. Humanism only acknowledged the conflict between sensory nature (determined by the mechanical law of causality) and the ‘rational autonomous freedom’ of human personality. This latter opposition, even in its Kantian conception, only arrived at the recognition of an evil moral inclination of man to substitute in place of the moral law (the categorical imperative) the sensory desires as a motive for action.

Both the Greek and the Humanistic oppositions do not touch the religious root of human existence, but only the temporal branches of human life. They are only absolutized here in a religious sense. Their concept of guilt, in consequence, is of a merely dialectical character. It consists of a depreciation of an abstract complex of functions of the created cosmos over against an other abstracted and deified complex.

In its revelation of the fall, however, just like in that of creation, the Word of God penetrates to the root, to the religious centre of human nature.

The fall is the apostasy of this centre, of this radix of existence, it is the falling away from God. This was spiritual death, because it is the apostasy from the absolute source of Life. Consequently the fall was radical. It involved the whole temporal cosmos, since the latter had its religious root only in mankind. Every conception which denies this radical sense of the fall, (even though it uses the term ‘radical’ as in Kant's conception of the ‘radical evil’ in man), is diametrically opposed to the basic motive of Holy Scripture. Since, as we have seen, the revelation of the fall does not in any way mean the recognition of an antithetic principle of origin which is opposed to the Creator, sin cannot be thought of as standing in a dialectical relation to the creation.

And because of the radical character of sin, redemption in Christ Jesus must also be radical.

The Divine Word, through which, according to the pronouncement of John's gospel, all things were made, became flesh in Jesus Christ. The Word has entered into the root and the temporal ramifications, in body and soul, of human nature. And therefore it has brought about a radical redemption. Sin is not dialectically reconciled, but it is really propitiated. And in Christ as the new root of the human race, the whole temporal cosmos, which was religiously concentrated in man, is in principle again directed toward God and thereby wrested free from the power of Satan. However, until the return of Christ, even humanity which is renewed in Him still shares in the apostate root of mankind. Consequently, the struggle of the Kingdom of God continues to be waged against the kingdom of darkness until the ‘consommatio saeculi’.

God maintains the fallen cosmos in His gratia communis (common grace) by His creating Word. The redeemed creation shall finally

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be freed from its participation in the sinful root of human nature and shall shine forth in a higher perfection.

Once again the inner reformation of philosophic thought.

When the central motive of the Christian religion, which we have just described, rules theoretical thought, this must, as we stated in the Prolegomena, necessarily lead to an inner reformation of the theoretical vision of temporal reality. The integral and radical character of this ground-motive destroys at its very roots any dualistic conception of the coherence and mutual relation of the theoretically abstracted modal aspects.

There is no longer room for a so-called dichotomy between the pre-logical aspects on the one hand, and the logical and post-logical on the other. There is no place for a dichotomy between ‘sensory nature’ and ‘super-sensory freedom’ or for a hypostatizing of the so-called natural laws in opposition to norms which are set in contrast with each other without any mutual coherence and deeper radical unity.

On the contrary, in the structure of every aspect of reality is expressed the unbreakable integral coherence with all the others. This is explained by the fact that the aspects are one in their religious root and Origin, in accordance with the Biblical motive of creation.

And this motive will constantly stimulate theoretical thought to the discovery of the irreducible peculiar nature of the modal aspects, as well as of the total structures of individuality, because God also created the former according to their own nature.

The motives of the fall and redemption, which cannot be understood apart from the creation, shall then operate in the theoretical vision of reality, in the struggle against every absolutizing of the relative, by which the apostate religious motives withdraw thought from the radical unity and integral Origin of the temporal cosmos. They shall also find expression in the complete recognition of the conflicts in temporal reality which exist because of sin, and which cannot be cloaked or reasoned away by any rationalistic theodicy.

However, these conflicts shall never be ascribed to the cosmic order, as is done by dialectical irrationalism under the influence of an irrationalist turn of its dialectic ground-motive. The law of creation has remained the same in spite of sin. In fact, without the lex, sin would not be able to reveal itself in the temporal cosmos.

And finally the motive of sin will guard Christian philosophy from the ὑβϱις (pride) which considered itself to be free of theoretical errors and faults, and which believes itself to have a monopoly on theoretical truth.

Because of the solidarity of the fall and of the conserving operation of common grace, philosophical schools dominated by apostate ground-motives must be taken seriously. And in general the Biblical ground-motive will stimulate philosophic thought to an extremely

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critical attitude against the disguising of apostate super-theoretical prejudices by clothing them in the form of universally valid theoretical axioms.

If the central ground-motive of creation, the fall and redemption is to have the above-sketched reforming influence upon philosophical thought, this motive must, as we have shown in our transcendental critique, determine the content of our cosmonomic Idea and must exclude all dialectical motives which lead thought in an apostate direction.

However, Christian philosophy did not follow this course in the patristic or medieval period.

In the very first centuries of the Christian church, the latter had to wage a life-and-death struggle in order to save the Biblical ground-motive from being strangled by that of the Greeks. In this struggle was formulated the dogma of the Divine essential unity (homoousia) of the Father and the Son (this was soon to include the Holy Spirit) and the dangerous influence of gnosticism in Christian thought was broken.

The speculative logos-theory.

Before this period, we find in various apologists, especially in the Alexandrian school of Clemens and Origen, a speculative logos-theory derived from the Jewish Hellenistic philosophy of Philo. This logos-theory basically denaturalized the Biblical motive of creation (and so also the motives of the fall and redemption). It conceived of the divine creating Word (Logos) as a lower divine being which mediates between the divine unity and impure matter. The Alexandrian school thereby actually transformed the Christian religion into a high ethical theory, into a moralistically tinged theological and philosophic system, which as a higher gnosis was placed above the faith of the Church. Similarly, Greek philosophical theology had placed itself above the pistis of the common people.

It is in this period that the Church maintained unequivocally the unbreakable unity of the Old and New Testament in opposition to the gnostic division (which was also defended by Marcion in the second century A.D.). It thus overcame the gnostic religious dualism which had driven a wedge between creation and redemption, and thereby had fallen back into a dualistic principle of origin.

Philosophy as ancilla theologiae in Augustinian scholasticism.

In the orthodox patristic period philosophical thought reached its highest point in Aurelius Augustinus, who left his stamp upon Christian philosophy until the 13th century, and who even since then has exerted an important influence.

However, no one was yet able to express the central motive of the Christian religion in the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophy without the interference of the Greek form-matter motive. Besides,

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the relation between philosophy and dogmatic theology was not clarified, because the inner point of contact between the religious ground-motive and philosophic thought had not yet been accounted for.

The Christian character of philosophy was sought in its subservient attitude toward dogmatic theology¹. Philosophy was to be the ‘ancilia theologiae’. All philosophic questions were to be handled in a theological framework. Philosophy was denied an independent right to exist.

This denial is included in Augustine's famous statement: ‘Deum et animam scire volo. Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino.’ Augustine's denial of the autonomy of philosophy with respect to the divine light of revelation is in this way robbed of its critical significance. For philosophic thought itself was not intrinsically reformed by the Biblical ground-motive of the Christian religion, but in its theoretical vision of temporal reality it remained orientated to Greek philosophy (especially toward the Neo-Platonists and the Stoics). Augustine did not clearly see the religious character of the ground-motive of Greek philosophy, and therefore started on the path of scholastic accommodation of Greek thought to the doctrine of the Christian church.

1 This conception of philosophy as ‘ancilla theologiae’ is not Christian in origin, but is derived from Aristotle's Met. B. 996 b 15 where the Greek thinker proclaimed metaphysical theology (as the science of the end of all things and of the supreme good) to be the queen of the sciences. The other sciences are thus ‘the slaves of theology and may not contradict it’. This Aristotelian conception is now simply taken over and applied to the relationship between Christian theology and philosophy.

The scholastic character of Augustine's cosmonomic Idea.

Even in the Augustinian cosmonomic Idea (the lex aeterna with its expression in the lex naturalis) we encounter the neo-Platonic conception of the descending progression of degrees of reality accommodated to the Idea of the divine Sovereignty of the Creator². This latter, however, was again joined with the neo-Platonic logos-theory, after this theory had been accommodated to the dogma of the divine Trinity. In this way theology itself was encumbered with Greek philosophy. Even Genesis 1:1 was interpreted by Augustine in the cadre of the Greek form-matter motive!

In spite of all this, however, the integral and radical character of the central ground-motive of the Christian religion remained fore-

2 Cf. De Civitate Dei, x11, 3: ‘Naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinavit’ and his neo-Platonic theory of the ‘esse’ and ‘minus esse’. Cf. also his neo-Platonic theory of the different levels of the mystical elevation of the soul to God.

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most in the theological conceptions of the great church-father. This motive found expression in the strong emphasis which he laid upon the absolute creative Sovereignty of God, and in his rejection of any position which would attribute original power to evil. The central motive of Christian religion is also in evidence in Augustine's acceptance of the radical character of the fall and in his rejection of the autonomy of theoretical thought, because of the insight that the Word of God is the only firm ground of truth. However, this insight was only won from the central religious standpoint. It could, as we observed above, not yet lead to an inner reformation of philosophical thought for lack of a critical insight into the inner point of contact between religion and theoretical thinking.

Augustine's increasing reserve with respect to Greek philosophy is also to be explained in terms of his growing understanding of the radical character of the Christian religion. At the very least, the great Church-father regarded Greek philosophy as a natural foundation for a ‘super-natural revealed knowledge’. In his conception of world-history, developed in his famous work De Civitate Dei, an undeniably original Christian line of thought is followed. The central theme: the conflict between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena, is entirely dominated by the Biblical ground-motive.

The radical antithesis between the Christian religion and the ancient heathen world is openly and sharply laid bare, so that there is not the slightest suggestion of a religious synthetic point of view.

However, here too, the Christian ground-motive could not yet find expression in a genuine philosophy of history. To be sure, Augustine was the first to break radically with the Greek Idea of time, and to pave the way for an authentic Idea of historical development. But the periods of this development were not conceived in an intrinsically historical sense: rather they were construed from sacred history in a speculative theological way!

The entrance of the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace in Christian scholasticism.

The situation became quite different when the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace made its entry into Christian scholasticism. This occurred in the period of the Aristotelian Renaissance, in which, after a bitter struggle, the Augustinian-Platonic school was pushed out of the dominating position that it had hitherto enjoyed. Roman Catholicism now strove consciously to effect a religious synthesis between the Greek view of nature (especially the Aristotelian) and the doctrines of the Christian faith.

This synthetic standpoint found its most powerful philosophical and theological expression in the system of Thomas Aquinas. The two foundational tenets of this system were the positing of the autonomy of natural reason in the entire sphere of natural knowledge, and the thesis that nature is the understructure of super-natural grace.

Thomas took over the Augustinian pronouncement that philosophy is the ancilla theologiae, however, he gave it an entirely different

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meaning. For he considered that philosophy belonged to the sphere ruled by the natural light of reason, and ascribed to it independence of revealed theology. This would have been a gain for Christian philosophy, if Thomas had not withdrawn ‘natural thought’ from the central ground-motive of the Christian religion. The latter was now replaced by the form-matter-motive in its Aristotelian conception, but not without an accommodation of this pagan religious motive to the ecclesiastical doctrine of creation.

In this scholastic way of accommodation, required by the Roman-Catholic ground-motive of nature and grace, the form-matter motive lost its original religious sense. But at the same time the Biblical creation-motive was deprived of its original integral and radical character.

Creation as a natural truth in Thomas' theologia naturalis.

Creation is proclaimed to be a natural truth, which can be seen and proven by theoretical thought independent of all divine revelation. And we have seen in the Prolegomena, that the five ways of this proof pre-supposed the axioms of the Aristotelian metaphysics, and especially the Aristotelian idea of God as ‘pure Form’ opposed to the principle of ‘matter’.

This signified, ultimately, the elimination of creation in its Biblical sense as the religious motive of theoretical thought.

The elimination of the integral and radical meaning of the Biblical motive of creation in Thomas' metaphysics.

The Greek form-matter motive in all its different conceptions excludes in principle the Idea of creation in its Biblical sense. The sum total of Greek wisdom concerning the Origin of the cosmos is: ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ (from nothing nothing can originate). At the utmost, Greek metaphysical theology could arrive at the Idea of a divine demiurg, who gives form to an original matter as the supreme architect and artist. Therefore, the scholastic accommodation of the Aristotelian concept of God to the Church-doctrine of creation could never lead to a real reconciliation with the Biblical ground-emotive. The unmoved Mover of Aristotelian metaphysics, who, as the absolute theoretical nous, only has himself as the object of his thought in blessed self-contemplation, is the radical opposite of the living God Who revealed Himself as Creator. Thomas may teach, that God has brought forth natural things according both to their form and matter, but the principle of matter as the principle of metaphysical and religious imperfection cannot find its origin in a pure form - God.

Nor could the Aristotelian conception of human nature be reconciled to the Biblical conception concerning the creation of man in the image of God. According to Thomas, human nature is a composition of a material body and a rational soul as a substantial

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form, which, in contradistinction to Aristotle's conception, is conceived of as an immortal substance. This scholastic view has no room for the Biblical conception of the radical religious unity of human existence. Instead of this unity a natural and a supra-natural aspect is distinguished in the creation of man. The supra-natural side was the original gift of grace, which as a donum superadditum was ascribed to the rational nature.

The elimination of the radical meaning of the fall and redemption. The neo-Platonic Augustinian trend in Thomas' natural theology.

In accordance with this conception of creation, the view of the fall was also deprived of its radical meaning. Sin merely caused the loss of the supernatural gift of grace, and did not lead to a corruption of human nature. The latter was simply injured by its loss of the donum superadditum.

Redemption in Christ Jesus can no longer have a relation to the very religious root of the temporal cosmos, but it can only bring nature to its supra-natural perfection.

In his natural theology Thomas connected the Aristotelian Idea of God with the neo-Platonic-Augustinian Idea of creation. Just as he took over the Augustinian doctrine of the logos with its eternal Ideas, so he strongly developed the metaphysical theory, with respect to the analogical concept of Being (analogia entis), in the direction of negative theology. All this only led to new antinomies, because this trend of thought came into conflict with the foundations of Aristotelian metaphysics¹.

1 See my treatise in Philosophia Reformata (vol. 8, 9, 10), ‘De idee der individualiteits-structuur en het Thomistisch substantiebegrip’, (The idea of the structure of individuality and the Thomistic substance-cancept).

The Aristotelian cosmonomic Idea.

According to the scholastic ground-motive of nature and grace, the Thomistic cosmonomic Idea has a natural and a supra-natural side.

The former rules Thomas' philosophy, the latter his theology of revelation. The natural component is the Aristotelian transcendental ground-Idea, accommodated to the Augustinian Idea of the lex aeterna.

According to the Aristotelian cosmonomic Idea all of nature is dominated by a dual teleological order: every natural substance strives according to its nature toward its own perfection, which is enclosed in its essential form.

In their relationship to each other the substantial forms are arranged in a hierarchical order in which the lower is the

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matter of a higher form. This is the content of the lex naturalis. As pure actual form the deity can be accepted as the origin of the motion which proceeds from matter toward form as its goal. However, there is no way in which the deity can be considered as the origin of the principle of matter, with its blind arbitrary ἀναγϰή. Even the Aristotelian theory of categories is permeated with the dualism of its dialectical ground-motive. It makes a fundamental distinction between the specific categories of matter (spatiality, number) and those of form. The concept of substance, as the central category of being, pretends to unite into an absolute unity the form and matter of natural beings. But it cannot accomplish this union, because it lacks a real starting-point for this synthesis. To attain this desired result it would be necessary to have a deeper radical unity above the opposed principles of form and matter¹. And, as we saw in the Prolegomena, the metaphysical (transcendental) concept of being can only bring them into an analogical unity.

1 Apparently Aristotle tried to relativize the absolute contradiction between the two poles of the Greek ground-motive by conceiving of them in the modal meaning of the cultural aspect. In this modal aspect form-giving is related to a material which as ‘cultural object’ has a potentiality to cultural shapes. The orientation of the relation between matter and form to culture is entirely in keeping with the ascription of religious primacy to the form-motive of the culture-religion.

The content of the Thomistic cosmonomic Idea.

In Thomas' cosmonomic Idea the Aristotelian lex naturalis, which is immanent to natural substances, is related to a transcendent lex aeterna as the plan of creation in the divine Mind.

The latter is the Origin of the former. In conformity with the Aristotelian Idea of God, the lex aeterna was now considered identical with divine reason. As a compromise with the Augustinian conception, only the obligating force of the lex naturalis (what is here thought of is only the natural ethical law) is derived from the sovereign will of the Creator. The Christian Idea of divine providence in the order of creation is now transformed into the Aristotelian Idea of the teleological natural order, with its hierarchy of substantial forms, which conforms to the religious form-matter motive.

In the typical transcendental ground-Idea of Thomism the divine Origin of the natural order was conceived of as the

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first cause and final goal of the whole temporal movement in nature from matter to form, from means to end. And the supra-natural sphere of grace, in which the divine Origin is conceived in the light of Revelation and in which the lex naturalis finds its supra-natural complement in the lex charitatis et gratiae, was placed above the natural order as a higher level. It is this view that became the speculative philosophic expression of the Idea of synthesis which typified the entire ecclesiastically unified culture.

The intrinsic dialectic of the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace and the nominalism of the fourteenth century.

However, the intrinsic dialectic of the motive of nature and grace in scholastic philosophy soon became evident.

As long as the Roman Catholic church was strong enough, the artificial synthesis between the Christian and Greek world of Ideas could be maintained, and the polar tendencies in the ground-motive of nature and grace could not develop freely. Ecclesiastical excommunication was sufficient to check the development of these tendencies in philosophy and in every day affairs.

In the critical period of the Late Middle Ages however, as we shall see in the following paragraph, the ecclesiastically unified culture began to collapse. One secular sphere after another began to wrest itself free from ecclesiastical domination.

Since the 14th century the nominalism of the late scholasticism under the leadership of William of Occam, turned against the artifical compromise between Christian and pagan lines of thought in the Thomistic system. This reaction commenced after the Averroistic Petrus Aureoli and Durandus of St. Porcain, in a somewhat different philosophical and theological orientation, had taken up the nominalistic tradition of earlier centuries.

Before the 14th century nominalism had been always suppressed by realistic scholasticism with its doctrine of the reality of the universal forms (‘universalia’). It had repeatedly received the official condemnation of the church. In the 14th century, however, nominalism became a cultural factor of world-significance. It was able to pave the way for modern philosophical thought, since the church had lost its dominating influence on philosophy.

The Thomistic cosmonomic Idea required the realistic-meta-

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physical conception of the Aristotelian ‘substantial forms’. As soon as this conception would be abandoned, the whole Thomistic-Aristotelian Idea of the natural order, as an understructure of the supra-natural order of grace, was doomed to break down. And the same holds good in respect to natural theology as an understructure of the sacred theology of revelation.

At this very point Thomism was subjected to the criticism of Occam's nominalism, which, in the last analysis, was founded on an extremely nominalistic conception of the ‘potestas Dei absoluta’. It cut off every metaphysical use of natural reason by denying that the universal concepts of thought have a ‘fundamentum in rē’¹.

It joined forces with the so-called terministic suppositional logic as presented in the seventh treatise² of the ‘Summulae’ of Petrus Hispanus and conceived of ‘universalia’ as only being ‘signs’, which in the human mind stand for (supponunt) a plurality of individual things, but which themselves possess no reality ‘in’ or ‘before’ the latter. In so far as they do not rest upon arbitrary convention, as the ‘voces’, the ‘universalia’ are ‘conceptus’ or ‘intentiones animae’ formed by the understanding. They function merely as copies of the corresponding traits of individual things and only have a subjective value for knowledge. When Occam limited scientific knowledge to the logical judgment and the universalia, he thereby intended to depreciate science and not the Christian faith.

Faith, in a positivist manner bound to Holy Scripture - here conceived in a pseudo-juridical sense, as an ecclesiastical law book - and to the tradition of the Church, may maintain the

1 It may be observed in this connection that Occam started from the traditional metaphysical opposition between the logical thought-function and ‘reality in itself’; and that the only sources of our knowledge are to be found in sensory perception and logical understanding. We have seen in the Prolegomena, that this metaphysical pre-supposition excludes the insight into the integral horizon of our temporal experience.

2 Under the title ‘de terminorum proprietatibus’, later expanded to a separate textbook under the title ‘Parva Logicalia’. This part of the Summulae did not stem from Aristotelian logic. And in opposition to Prantl, recent investigations have established, that it was even less of Byzantine origin. The ‘Moderni’ grounded themselves just on this treatise, whereas e.g. Duns Scotus chose the whole book of Petrus Hispanus as the foundation of his logic, and joined the 7th treatise with realistic metaphysics.

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realistic conception of ‘substantial forms’. But philosophical thought can only hold to a completely sceptical attitude with respect to the reality of universals. This position destroyed the realistic metaphysical concept of truth.

The ‘primacy of the will’ in the nominalistic school of thought versus the ‘primacy of the intellect’ in the realistic metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. There is no essential connection between realism and the primacy of the intellect.

The brunt of the attack upon the Thomistic conception of the ‘lex aeterna’ lay in the nominalistic turning of the doctrine of the primacy of the will against the Thomistic doctrine of the primacy of the intellect. This whole controversy can only be understood in the light of scholastic and patristic syncretism. It is meaningless in a philosophy which in its transcendental ground-Idea holds to the integral and radical ground-motive of the Christian religion.

The conflict between the primacy of the will and the primacy of the intellect was originally unrelated to the conflict between realism and nominalism. Realists of the Augustinian school had contended for the primacy of the will. And Johannes Duns Scotus, the great opponent of Thomas Aquinas, was essentially a more consistent realist than Thomas. Nevertheless, in his doctrine of the Potestas Dei Absoluta, he gave a new stimulus to the conception of the primacy of the will.

The primacy of the will in the cosmonomic Idea of Augustine.

We have seen, that even in the cosmonomic Idea of Augustine the risky attempt was made to reconcile the Christian conception of the Absolute Sovereignty of God's Creative Will with the neo-Platonic basic Idea of the hierarchical ordination of reality in higher, more real and lower, less real spheres, in which pure matter formed the lowest level¹. In Augustine's later period we find priority being given to the Christian conception of God's Will als Creator and to the insight into the obfuscation of human reason by the fall. This Christian conception became involved in the proclamation of the ‘primacy of the will’, because it had

1 Cf. De civitate Dei XII, 2: ‘naturas essentiarum gradibus ordinavit’ and his neo-platonic doctrine of the ‘esse’ et ‘minus esse’. Compare also his neo-platonic levels of the mystical elevation of the soul to God.

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to wrestle with the competitive realistic metaphysics which sought its Archimedean point in theoretic reason.

Nominalism was related to the Augustinian tradition by way of Franciscan thought. However, Occam changed the doctrine of the primacy of the will in a radically irrationalistic manner. He totally deformed the Christian confession of God's Sovereignty as Creator.

The potestas Dei absoluta in Duns Scotus and William of Occam.

In Duns Scotus the potestas Dei absoluta, as distinguished from the potestas Dei ordinata, was bound to the unity of God's holy and good Being (essence). According to him, the lex aeterna also originates in the essence of God. And absolute goodness and truth are grounded in the divine Being¹. Consequently, the Scotist conception of the potestas absoluta cannot have any nominalistic purport. It had no further intention than to account for the fact that sometimes in the Old Testament God seems to give ‘dispensation’ of some commands of the second table of the Decalogue. This was doubtless a scholastic-juridical conception of the latter. However, in Duns the potestas Dei absoluta, too, is always the expression of God's holy and good Being.

William of Occam abandoned the idea of a lex aeterna and a potestas absoluta ‘being bound to God's Being’. In Aristotelian fashion the speculative-metaphysical theology had viewed the essence of God as pure Form. Nominalism now conceived of the potestas Dei absoluta in a sense which had some affinity with the unpredictable Anangkè of the Greek matter-motive. And by so doing, it separated itself from the integral Self-Revelation of

1 Cf. the following statements of Scotus: ‘Intelligere non est primum in Deo, sed primum dans esse est ipsum ens, tum quia potentia non potest esse prima ratio essendi, tum quia intellectus praesupponit rationem objecti et potentiae sicut per se causas ejus vel principia’ (R.P. I d. viii q. 1). ‘Deus est agens rectissima ratione’ (R.P. iv d. 1 q. 5, n. 9).
‘Quidquid Deus facit, propter se facit - omnia enim propter seipsum operatus est Altissimus - et ex charitate perfectissima quae ipse est, facit; ergo ejus actus est ordinatissimus, tame ex fine quam ex principio operativo’ (Ox. II d. xxvii, q. I, n. 2).
‘Nomine legis aeternae intelligimus judicium divini intellectus, qui producens omnia in esse intelligibile, subinde dat unicuique primum esse intelligibile, atque in eis omnes veritates relucent, adeo ut intellectus pervadens terminos necessario intelligat veritates omnes in illis involutas, tam speculativas, quam practicas’ (Ox. I, d. iii q. 4).

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God in His Word, to an even greater degree than the Thomistic realism had done in its theologia naturalis. It abstracted the Will of God from the Fulness of His Holy Being and conceived of His sovereign power as an orderless tyranny. In his De Trinitate Augustine had expressly warned against isolating the Will of God and the ‘ratio divina’.

The nominalistic conception of the potestas Dei absoluta entirely contrary to its own intention places God's Creative Will under the boundary-line of the lex.

This functionalistic, theoretical mode of contemplation is only possible under the boundary-line of the cosmic temporal order. Consequently, God's will was actually placed under the lex; a result entirely in conflict with the intention of Occam. In relation to religious and ethical laws we can only speak of ‘arbitrariness’ in the sense of an anti-normative behaviour, which supposes a norm. This is exactly what Occam does, when he allows for the possibility that God could have just as well sanctioned with His Will an ‘egoistic’ ethics, and when he even conceives of the central religious commandment included in the first table of the decalogue, as a mere product of divine arbitrariness. Idolatry, too, presupposes a religious norm, which is transgressed by it.

As we observed in the Prolegomena, the concept ‘possibility’ only has a reasonable sense, if we pre-suppose the necessity of a law in relation to which subjective individuality retains its full latitude but nevertheless remains subject to the necessary determinations and limitations imposed by it.

The nominalistic critique effectuated a radical disruption between the Christian and pagan motives in medieval scholasticism.

Nevertheless, nominalistic thought served as a liberator at least in one respect. Under its sharp critique the Christian and pagan motives, which had apparently been most effectively synthesized in the Thomistic transcendental ground-idea, were radically disrupted. ‘Nature’ and ‘grace’ were completely separated. Thus after a short time, Humanism could consistently develop the line of ‘autonomous natural thought’. This it did in a new manner based upon the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom. It might be expected, that the Reformation would have developed an essentially Christian philosophy, based upon

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the central ground-motive of Holy Scripture. That this did not occur for several centuries, is due solely to the fact that the Reformation was quickly captured by the scholastic ground-motive of nature and grace. This latter motive again led theological and philosophic thought along a scholastic path. We shall return to this point in part three of this volume. For the present we need only concern ourselves with the significance of late medieval nominalism as a condition for the rise of modern Humanistic thought.

As long as nominalistic scholasticism subjected itself in a positivistic faith to the dogma of the Church, it rested in an unreconciled dualism between faith and natural knowledge. In the late Middle Ages, however, some representatives of nominalism gave it a form which prepared the way for a complete secularization of the life- and world-view.

Secularization of nominalism in late scholasticism.

This process of secularization was introduced by John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua, which, just as Petrus Aureoli at an earlier period, belonged to the school of Averroistic nominalism¹.

1 In my work entitled In den Strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde (In the Struggle for a Christian Politics), Chap. I, XII (A.R. Staatk. Ist year, pp. 617 and following), I have established in detail the fact that we may speak of an Averroistic nominalism in these thinkers. In my analysis of the document Defensor Pacis I also showed the secularization of nominalistic thought.

§ 2 - The rise of humanistic philosophical thought

In the meanwhile the ecclesiastically unified culture broke down. It was no longer dominated by the high medieval conception of the ‘Corpus Christianum’. This breakdown was partially prepared by the powerful influence of nominalistic spheres of culture. They undermined the medieval hierarchical Idea of social life and they revealed individualistic tendencies wherever they unfolded².

2 In this connection see the important study of Paul Hönigheim, Zur Soziologie der mittelalterlichen Scholastik (Die soziologische Bedeutung der nominalistischen Philosophie) in Hauptprobleme der Soziologie, Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber (1923), S. 173-221. [On Sociology of Medieval Scholasticism (The Sociological Significance of Nominalistic Philosophy, in Chief Problems of Sociology, Memorial Gift for Max Weber (1923), pp. 173-221].

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The hierarchical institutional Roman Catholic Church had undermined its own influence by secularization. Political life and economy now broke loose from its unifying grasp. And science, art, ethics, and the faith of the individual soon followed suit.

The collapse of the ecclesiastically unified culture.

National states began to form which re-conquered piece by piece the terrain lost by the Church. They employed the most unscrupulous means to strengthen and maintain their power. Economic life emancipated itself by all sorts of evasion of the canon law's prohibition of interest and of the doctrine of the justum pretium. Supported by the discovery of the new gold- and silvermines, finance assumed an increasingly central position. The rise of large-scale industry and business brought about an expanded establishment of credit. An early capitalism arose with all of its social problems. And the discovery of the sea routes to America and India opened unlimited perspectives for the future.

Medieval society, impregnated with the organic guild-idea, saw its foundations methodically undermined. The process of social differentiation and individualization began: the individual began to feel free and independent in all spheres. The contact with the East, established by the Crusades, brought contact with other religions. Presently, when in the general process of secularization, the absoluteness of the Christian religion was relativized by philosophy to the highest stage in the development from natural religion, this contact became the stimulus of a strongly neo-Platonic and mystic-theosophically tinged ‘universal theism’. In Italy the prophet of this theism was Georgius Gemisthos Plethon, the spiritual father of the Platonic academy at Florence. In Germany, the movement was led by Mutianus Rufus, the Erfurter humanist.

After the discovery of the pure sources of Greek and Roman culture an additional resentment was present in the struggle against the barbarian linguistic forms of scholasticism. This resentment arose against the mutulation of the ancient world- and life-view due to its synthesis with Christianity. Especially in Italy, the first cradle of the Humanistic Renaissance, the side of the ancient world-view was often taken without reserve.

The transition to a new historical period announced itself in this revolutionary ferment. A great Humanistic spiritual move-

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ment arose. It soon methodically built its secularized outlook upon a new cultural basis and impressed its own religious mark upon philosophy.

In Germany, and especially in the Netherlands, the paths of a so-called Biblical Humanism and Reformation temporarily crossed; yet the tendencies to complete the secularization of Christian doctrine were present from the start in a preponderatingly moralistic interpretation of the Holy Scripture, as it was found in Erasmus and other Biblical Humanists. In my previously cited work, ‘In the struggle for a Christian politics’, this whole development has been treated in detail. In the present context it was only necessary, that we should prepare our inquiry into the basic structure of the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought.

A closer consideration of the religious ground-motive of Humanism: the motive of nature and freedom.

We have seen, that this transcendental Idea is determined by the religious ground-motive which since Kant must be designated as the motive of nature and freedom. We must now pay closer attention to the latter.

This new dialectical motive rests upon an absolute secularization of the Biblical motive of creation and Christian freedom (as a fruit of redemption). After introducing a fundamental change in their original religious meaning, it assimilated also the central motives of Greek and scholastic philosophy. We shall subsequently discover the form-matter motive and the motive of nature and grace in an entirely new Humanistic sense in the philosophy of Leibniz and Kant.

The ambiguity of the Humanistic motive of freedom.

Unlike that of the Greeks and the scholastic thinkers, the inner dialectic of the Humanistic ground-motive is not born out of a conflict between two different religions. The deepest root of its dialectical character lies in the ambiguity of the Humanistic freedom-motive. The latter is the central driving force of the modern religion of human personality. And from its own depths it calls forth the motive to dominate nature, and thus leads to a religion of autonomous objective science in which there is no room for the free personality. Nevertheless, the religious self-surrender to autonomous science is, in the last analysis, nothing but the religion of autonomous human persona-

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lity itself, which splits itself up into two opposite directions, not to be reconciled in a really critical Humanistic self-reflection. This is the result of the Humanistic secularization of the Christian motives of creation and freedom in Jesus Christ. By this secularization the insight into the religious radical unity of human personality is entirely lost.

In its motive of freedom, Humanism requires absolute autonomy for human personality. This implies a rejection of all faith in authority and of any conception according to which man is subject to a law not imposed by his own reason. However, this secularized freedom-motive displayed various tendencies which came into conflict with one another.

Modern man wished to have his destiny in his own hands, and therefore he wished to free himself from all faith in ‘super-natural’ powers. Humanism applied the Copernican revolution in astronomy to the sphere of religion. The latter must concentrate on man and his religious needs. It must no longer require man to surrender completely to a Sovereign Creator and Redeemer, it could no longer be based upon a ‘heteronomous’ Divine Revelation.

The Idea of a personal God could be accepted only in so far as the autonomous personality has need of it. This Idea could be accepted as a metaphysical foundation for the truth of mathematical thought (Descartes), as a postulate of practical reason (Kant), or as a requirement of religious feeling (Rousseau). It may be accepted in any other Humanistic form, but it may never be held to be the fruit of the self-revelation of a sovereign God.

The new ideal of personality of the Renaissance.

In the Renaissance the new religion of personality also secularized the Christian idea of regeneration. The ideal of personality preached by the Renaissance in its first appearance in Italy required a renascimento of man which should ring in a new period. This ideal of personality is permeated with an unquenchable thirst for temporal life and with a Faustian desire to subject the world to itself.

The individualistic orientation of the new Humanistic freedom-motive during the first phase of its development led the nominalistic tendencies of late scholasticism in a new direction.

The Occamist depreciation of natural reason was replaced by a truly religious confidence in its liberating power.

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The new ideal of personality expressed itself originally in a strongly aristocratically tinted life- and world-view. And it scarcely wished to mask its antithesis with the ecclesiastically bound outlook of the Middle Ages.

In Italy in the 15th century this ideal of personality had become the watchword of the new period which, as we observed above, expected a ‘renascimento’ in a Humanistic sense. The Idea of the ‘uomo universale’ is voiced in Leo Battista Alberti's autobiography as well as in the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci. This new ideal was soon to spread over all the lands which were bearers of the culture of the Renaissance¹. And even at the start it was filled with a Faustian spirit, which looked forward to the progress of culture, and sought this progress in the subjugation of nature by scientific investigation which knows no authority higher than science.

1 See Jacob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Ch. II in 1⁴, pp. 143 ff.

The motive of the domination of nature and the ambiguity of the nature-motive.

For from the very beginning the Humanistic motive of freedom led to a revolution in the modern view of nature.

The Greek vision of physis was, as we saw, dominated by the religious motive of matter and form. In the light of the form-motive nature bears a teleological character, and gives expression to the Greek Idea of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The motive of matter with its unpredictable and orderless anangkè led the Greek view of nature to the extreme counter-pole of the super-sensory form: the mysterious depths of life and death in the eternal process of growth and decay.

The Biblical Christian view of nature was dominated by the central motive of creation, fall, and redemption. The revelation of the radical depravity of nature due to sin casts an infinitely darker shadow over the temporal cosmos than that of the Greek motive of matter.

Humanism broke in principle with both the Greek and the Christian view of nature. It had intended to free human personality from all faith in super-natural powers. It also intended to emancipate nature from the bonds of this faith. Modern autonomous man considers the ‘immeasurable nature’ external to himself in the same way that he thinks of himself. That is to

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say, the same ambiguity which is inherent in the Humanistic motive of freedom will also reveal itself in the motive of nature.

‘Unmeasurable nature’ can be viewed as a macrocosmic reflection of the autonomous freedom of human personality. In this case Humanism yields to an aesthetic enjoyment of the ‘creating freedom’ which reveals itself in nature. But nature can also be viewed as a reflection of the Faustian domination-motive, which permeated the Humanistic ideal of personality from the very beginning. In this case nature can only be viewed as an object that can be dominated by autonomous science.

The motive of nature now becomes a new motive of domination, which can only lead to a deterministic theoretical view of reality. Galileo and Newton laid the foundations for modern mathematical natural science. Grasping the phenomena of nature, according to their mathematical aspects and their aspects of movement and energy, in a system of functional causal relations, natural science actually pointed towards the way which would enable us to rule natural phenomena.

After these foundations had been laid, Humanism embraced this new scientific method with a religious passion, and elevated it to a universal model for thought. All of reality should be construed in terms of this new method. To this end, all modal structures of individuality, which are grounded upon the divine order of creation, must be methodically demolished. Autonomous theoretical thought will now recreate the cosmos by means of the exact concepts of mathematical natural science. It will bring forth a structureless view of reality, in which all phenomena are ordered in a continuous causal series. At this point the dialectical tension between the motive of nature and that of freedom is directly in evidence.

Nature conceived of in this way does not have any place for an autonomous freedom of human personality.

This religious dialectic was henceforth to dominate Humanistic philosophy. In our transcendental critique of theoretical thought we have become familiar with the general lines of this process. We have seen how primacy is alternatively ascribed to either of the antagonistic motives, and how the attempt is made to draw a line of demarcation between their two separate spheres of validity while recognizing their polar antithesis. We have become familiar with the attempts to bridge over this religious antithesis by means of a dialectic manner of thought, and we are acquainted with the subsequent disruption of this apparent synthesis.

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The Renaissance did not explicitly develop the model of thought of modern natural science. Nevertheless, it displayed, in its developed ideal of personality, the germ of the ambiguity that we have indicated above. At least, we are safe in saying, that it contained the tendencies of a new science-ideal, which was directed toward the domination of nature. Naturally, as long as this motive of domination did not lead to a deterministic view of nature, the conflict with the motive of freedom was not in evidence. But this domination-motive was predisposed to a deterministic view of reality according to its religious meaning, and in time could only develop with an inner necessity in this direction.

Late scholasticism had lost itself in endless conceptual distinctions. The rising Humanism turned away from such ‘formalistic hairsplitting’ and wished to show its sovereign power over the cosmos. The watchword ‘to the things themselves’ was given; not only in critical philology, but also in the research of endless nature, in which, since Copernicus' introduction of the heliocentric view of the world, the earth had lost its central position. The autonomous human personality wished to test its unlimited power of expansion in the endless spaces of the universe.

The πέϱας and the ἄπειϱον. The antithesis with the ancient ideal of life.

For modern man the πέϱας, the limited, is no longer the highest principle that it was for the contemplative classical metaphysics of Greece. The highest principle is rather the ἄπειϱον, the endless, the Platonic μῆ ὄν. Modern man is obsessed and enticed by the endless, and believes, that he can rediscover himself in it, in his boundless impulse of activity (Cusanus, Bruno).

This tendency towards the infinite is not a passing attitude of the Renaissance. It became more deeply entrenched in the following period. In Leibniz, the limited even became ‘metaphysical evil’¹.

1 In this connection the comparison is interesting which Windelband makes in his Geschichte der neueren Phil. I, 508, between the metaphysics of Leibniz and that of Plato, Aristotle and Neo-Platonism: ‘das Chaos der Kosmogonien, das μὴ ὄν des Platon, die ὕλη des Aristoteles, das βάϑος des Neu-platonismus - sie sind in der rationalistischen Philosophie zu der “région des vérités éternelles” als der bindenden Möglichkeit der Weltschöpfung geworden.’ [‘The “Chaos” of the cosmogonies, the μὴ ὄν of Plato, the ὕλη of Aristotle, the βάϑος of Neo-Platonism - therefore, in rationalistic philosophy, have become the “région des vérités éternelles” (the region of eternal truths), as the binding possibility of the creation of the world’]. And yet Windelband in an inconceivable manner speaks of a ‘Platonic idealism’ in Leibniz.

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Even though the difference on this point remains within the immanence-standpoint and therefore is relative, this characteristic of the modern ideal of personality cannot be explained in terms of the conception of personality found in antiquity.

In the flourishing period of Greek and Roman culture, personality was considered as being harmoniously bound to an objective rational world-order. And in accordance with its appointed destiny it was dedicated to the all embracing state. Nominalistic subjectivism and individualism are here phenomena of decadence which were viewed as a mortal danger to the polis.

The Humanistic ideal of personality, however, was born in close contact with the Christian Idea of freedom. Humanism secularized the latter and animated its ideal of the free autonomous man with a strong belief in a great future of mankind.

The Cartesian ‘Cogito’ in contra-distinction to the theoretic nous as the Archimedian point of Greek metaphysics.

After much preparation in various sorts of directions (especially in the system of Nicolaus Cusanus) the principles of Humanistic philosophical thought received their first clear formulation in the system of Descartes. The cogito in which this thinker supposed he had found his Archimedean point, is in no sense identical with the ‘logos’ or ‘nous’ of classic Greek philosophy. In the latter, human reason was conceived of as bound to an objective metaphysical order of being, in which the thinking subject only has a part. This metaphysical order was considered as the standard of truth in respect to theoretical thought. Quite different from this Greek conception of reason is that of the founder of Humanistic philosophy.

By means of the ‘cogito’, Descartes called to a halt the universal methodical scepticism with respect to all the data of experience. The given world should be broken up in a methodical theoretical way in order to reconstruct it from autono-

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mous mathematical thought. It is the new ideal of personality which is active behind this philosophical experiment. It does not accept any order or law that the sovereign personality of man had not itself prescribed in rational thought. Although Descartes substantialized this cogito to a ‘res cogitans’ and thereby seemed to fall back upon scholastic metaphysics, no one should fail to recognize, that in his new regulatives for methodical thought the Humanistic motive of freedom and of the domination of nature is the driving force.

From his ‘cogito, ergo sum’ the French thinker directly proceeds to the Idea of God, and therein discovers the foundation of all further knowledge. This Idea of God is nothing but the absolutizing of mathematical thought to divine thought, which cannot mislead us. The whole Idea of God serves to imprint upon the new mathematical method the mark of infallibility.

The Jansenists of Port Royal who accepted Cartesianism as an exact method of thinking, supposed they had found an inner affinity between Descartes' founding of all knowledge in self-consciousness and the immanent Idea of God, and Augustine's ‘Deum et animam scire volo’. This was a grave error.

There is no relationship between Descartes' and Augustine's Archimedean point. The misconception of the Jansenists of Port Royal on this issue.

For this inner affinity does not exist, in spite of the appearance of the contrary. In an unsurpassed manner Calvin expounded in his Institutio the authentic Christian conception of Augustine which made all knowledge of the cosmos dependent upon self-knowledge, and made our self-knowledge dependent upon our knowledge of God. Moreover, Calvin dissociated this conception from Augustine's scholastic standpoint with regard to philosophy as ‘ancilla theologiae’. This view is radically opposed to the conception of Descartes. In his ‘cogito’, the latter implicitly proclaimed the sovereignty of mathematical thought and deified it in his Idea of God, in a typically Humanistic attitude towards knowledge.

Consequently, there is no inner connection between Augustine's refutation of scepticism by referring to the certainty of thought which doubts, and Descartes' ‘cogito, ergo sum’. Augustine never intended to declare the naturalis ratio to be autonomous and unaffected by the fall.

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The connection between Descartes' methodological scepticism and the discovery of analytical geometry. The creation-motive in the Cartesian ‘cogito’.

Let us not forget, that Descartes' universal scepticism with respect to the reliability of all experience except selfconsciousness, was very closely connected with his discovery of analytical geometry. The latter became for him the methodological model of all systematic philosophy. By the introduction of coordinates it became possible to determine every point of space by three numbers and every spatial figure by an equation between the coordinates of its points. In this way geometrical propositions were proven by means of arithmetical calculation apparently without any pre-supposition other than the laws of arithmetic. And the origin of the latter was sought in sovereign thought.

Descartes found the original pattern for clear and distinct thought in this method. According to the latter, thought does not take as its foundation anything which it did not itself produce in a supposed logical process of creation. In the Preface to his De Corpore the English thinker Thomas Hobbes describes, completely in terms of the story of creation in the first chapter of the book Genesis, the methodological demolition of all given reality executed by human reason in order to reconstruct the cosmos out of the simplest elements of thought. The logical activity of the philosopher must create, just like the artist or as God, Who gives order to chaos¹. This motive of logical creation - inspired by the deification of mathematical thought in the Idea of the intellectus arche-typus - was continually carried through in the first phase of Humanistic philosophy, especially by Leibniz.

This motive is modern and Humanistic. It is not found in ancient, patristic, or medieval philosophy. It can only be explained in terms of a secularization of the Christian Idea of creation in the Humanistic ideal of personality.

Modern philosophy proclaimed sovereign reason to be the origin of the theoretically construed cosmos. But, in this conception of sovereign reason, the two mutually antagonistic motives of ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ were active. And the polar tension between them reveals itself evermore intensively in the further dvelopment of Humanistic thought.

1 Opera latina, Vol. I, De Corpore Praef. The biblical conception of creation is evidently confused here with the Greek Idea of the divine demiurge.

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The polar tension between the ideal of personality and the ideal of science in the basic structure of the Humanistic transcendental Idea.

As we observed above, the ideal of personality is itself the religious root of the classical naturalistic science-ideal. As soon as the former began to unfold its tendency to dominate nature, it evoked this philosophical science-ideal with an inner necessity. However, the latter soon became the bitterest enemy of the ideal of personality.

To be sure, at the outset Humanism borrowed many motives of its life- and world-view from the Stoic ideal of the self-sufficient sage, from Epicurean ethics (Valla) and from other sources. But because of its inherent Faustian impulse to dominate nature, it had an inner predisposition to a deterministic view of the world of an entirely new character. Since the rise of mathematical natural science, the new mathematical ideal of knowledge became the transcendental ideal of cosmic order. It appeared to endow philosophical thought with the scepter of legislator of the world. In this way the new science-ideal only gradually became a basic factor in the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea. It is true, that the thirst after the newly discovered infinite nature, with all its mysteries, had from the very first manifested itself in the painting and poetry of the Renaissance.

It is true also, that before the rise of the new natural science, the Faustian passion to dominate had revealed itself in a flourishing growth of alchemy, by which it was hoped, that the mysteries of nature could be laid bare.

The French thinker Petrus Ramus had even developed a new semi-Platonic mathematical method in logic in which - in contradistinction to the Aristotelian syllogism - ‘invention’ should play a main part. This Ramistic method, which soon acquired a great influence, doubtless manifested a new spirit in scientific thought.

Nevertheless, originally, nature was not in any way conceived of as a mechanical system, but as filled with beauty, force, and life. Even Leonardo da Vinci, who anticipated Galileo's mathematical-mechanical analysis of empirical phenomena, conceived of nature as a teleological whole animated with life.

Lorenzo Valla had deified nature as the sphere of expansion of the ideal of personality: ‘Idem est natura, quod Deus, aut fere idem’ (De Voluptate I, 13).

Since the Copernican revolution in astronomy unlimited pos-

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sibilities seemed to be opened to the investigating mind. Modern man discovered in nature a macrocosmos which found its reflected image in his own personality as microcosmos¹.

1 Compare what Cassirer in his Erkenntnisproblem I, 18 and following, observes concerning the relation between the new Humanistic concept of the ego and the new concept of nature.

The tendency towards infinity in Giordiano Bruno's pantheism.

Giordano Bruno, in his pantheistic philosophy, joined Nicolaus Cusanus' doctrine of the infinite and his metaphysical mathematical doctrine of the coincidentia oppositorum; he religiously interpreted Copernicus' theory in a dithyrambic glorification of the infinity of the universe, and of its reflection in human personality as a monadic microcosmos. Here we see how the Humanistic ideal of personality becomes conscious of its power of expansion. The immeasurable space of the cosmos waited to be ruled by man. ‘Nature’ as ‘natura naturata’ is the self-development of God (natura naturans). The new ideal of personality here discloses itself in the original aesthetic character of the Italian Renaissance. It does not yet experience the close oppression of the deterministic science-ideal. The seeds of modern-astronomical thought are still shrouded in the aesthetic phantasy of the poet. Bruno's system is only a prelude to the development of the classic Humanistic ideal of science. The new ideal of personality assumes the new view of ‘infinite nature’ without perceptible tensions.

The entire opposition between the ‘Jenseits’ and the ‘Diesseits’ of Christian dogmatics was considered here as anthropocentric (in the sense of the astronomical theory which had been refuted by Copernicus) and ascribed to the standpoint of sensory appearance and imagination, a standpoint that ought to be conquered by philosophic consciousness.

In this view the religious freedom-motive is still in complete accordance with the nature-motive.

The former permeated the new Humanistic view of nature which as yet betrayed nothing of its later mechanization. The future tension between the ideal of science and the ideal of personality is at best intimated in Bruno by the trouble he takes to reconcile the unity and homogeneousness of infinite nature in all its parts to the Idea of the creating individuality

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of the monads, in which Idea the new ideal of personality is concentrated.

The decisive turn did not come before the mathematical conception of natural phenomena, which the Renaissance ascribed to Plato and Democritus, was made fruitful in an exact method of analysis and synthesis capable of dominating nature by means of the functional concept of mechanic causality.

Henceforth, the ideal of the free self-sufficient personality acquired a veritable counter-pole in the mechanical view of nature.

The proclamation of the creative sovereignty of the mathematical method implied the intention to logically construct the coherence of the world out of the continuous movement of thought. Directly after the rise of mathematical natural science the latter became the sheet-anchor of the new ideal of knowledge, which originally had been entirely orientated to this methodical pattern.

§ 3 - The postulate of continuity in the humanistic science-ideal and the basic antinomy in the humanistic cosmonomic idea

The new mathematical and naturalist science-ideal was typified by a particular postulate of continuity.

We have pointed out how the cosmic time-order grounds the modal aspects of reality in their sphere-sovereignty and brings them, at the same time, into a continuous temporal coherence¹. However, this cosmic order is eliminated, if mathematical thought is declared to be unconditionally sovereign in philosophy. For, if mathematical thought is sovereign, it can itself construe the coherence in the modal diversity of aspects. It need only eliminate the obstacles which the inner structures of the modal aspects of reality place in its way.

The cosmic temporal continuity in the inter-modal coherence of these aspects is then replaced by the mathematical-logical continuity in the movement of thought.

The same postulate of continuity of the mathematical ideal of science hides behind Descartes' universal methodical scepticism

1 Tranlator's note: Since meaning is the mode of being of all created existence, a temporal coherence is a coherence of meaning. However, for stylistic reasons I shall use the abreviated form ‘temporal coherence’ in italics.
D.H.F.

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and Hobbes' experiment of thought mentioned above. Both sought theoretically to demolish the cosmos to a chaos, in order that it should be reconstrued, in a continuous procedure of mathematical and natural scientific thought, as a theoretical cosmos.

This postulate of continuity pre-supposed that, by virtue of its methodical sovereignty, mathematical thought has the power to surpass the modal boundaries of the diverse aspects of experience and temporal reality.

Modern natural science, founded by Keppler, Galileo and Newton, turned away from the Aristotelian-Thomistic concept of substance which was rooted in the Greek form-matter motive. Such in order to scientifically investigate the physical aspect of reality by means of analytical and synthetical mathematical thought. With its concept of function, modern science wished to grasp the functional coherence of physical phenomena in mathematically formulated natural laws.

It had - correctly in its own field - cleared away the old obstacles that had impeded the application of mathematical methods in natural-scientific research. Modern natural science discarded the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian view of the universe with its distinction between the sublunary and supra-lunary world. It also discarded the Aristotelian ‘qualitates occultae’ and it proclaimed the universality of the laws of motion for the entire physical aspect of the cosmos¹. The Humanistic science-ideal, however, could not accept the limitation of this special scientific postulate of continuity to the field of physics.

Galileo's postulate for the modern physical method implied a reduction of all qualitative distinctions, in the sense of scholastic ‘qualitates occultae’, to mathematically determined differences of motion. According to its science-ideal, Humanistic philosophy now sought to apply this postulate to all other aspects of reality in order to construe a continuous mechanical image of the world.

1 For the details of the genesis of this new concept of science compare my In the Struggle for a Christian Politics, Chapter I, VI and VII (A.R Staatkunde, Vol. I). See also the literature cited in this series.

The concept of substance in the new Humanistic metaphysics is quite different from the Aristotelian-Thomistic or Platonic one.

In its first phase the science-ideal pointed towards the development of a new metaphysics. It was supposed that the true essence,

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the super-temporal substance of ‘reality in itself’ could only be grasped by the new mathematical method of thought. However, even in the Monadology of Leibniz, this new concept of substance does not have anything to do with the substantial forms of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, which were grounded in a lex aeterna.

The new concept of substance, if it is viewed in the light of the new Humanistic science-ideal, has in essence a nominalistic background. It is nothing but the hypostasis of the concept of function of the new scientific method. And this concept of function specifies the common denominator under which the science-ideal wishes to bring the different modal aspects of reality. It is, as it was defined by Leibniz, the hypostasis of the modern functional concept of law. The functional coherence between variant phenomena, construed by thought, becomes the ‘invariant’, the substance of reality¹.

Do not let us forget, that the new mathematical natural science had its precursor in the Occamistic school at the University of Paris during the 14th century. Remember, that before Galileo the new concept of the law of motion was formulated in full mathematical precision by Nicolaus of Oresme who also anticipated the discovery of Copernicus and invented the method of analytical geometry before Descartes. The whole functionalistic conception of reality was rooted in a nominalistic tradition.

The fact, that the ‘substance’ of nature was still conceived of as ‘Ding an sich’, in spite of the choice of the Archimedean point in the mathematical cogito, proves, that before Kant Humanist philosophy had not yet arrived at critical self-refection and was unaware of the very root of its science-ideal. It proves, that Humanistic thought was still formally wed to ancient and medieval thought; but it proves nothing against the new character of this concept of substance!

Therefore, one must be extremely careful in drawing consequences from an external agreement in the scholastic-Aristotelian and modern-Humanistic definition of this concept.

When Descartes defines substance as ‘res quae ita existit, ut nulla alia rē indigeat ad existendum’ (Princ. I, 51), this definition sounds rather the same as the one we find, for example, in Johannes Damascenus (Dial. 4, 1 p. 538) and later on in

1 Thus, explicitly in Leibniz' Hauptschr. 11 S., 292f. and 340, where substance is defined as the ‘abiding law for a series of changes’.

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Suarez (Disp., xxx, p. 299). And the definition which Descartes gives in his Rationes more geometrico dispositae (p. 86 V and VI): ‘omnis res cui inest immediate, ut in subjecto, sive per quam existet aliquid quod percipimus, ... vocatur substantia,’ is to be found again in rather the same formulation in Aristotle's Categ., c. 5, a 12.

In itself this agreement only indicates, that the metaphysical concept of substance ever rests upon the hypostatization of theoretical abstractions. But, even in view of this, we may not close our eyes to the new peculiar sense which the concept of substance acquires in Humanistic philosophy. It is the basic structure of the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea which is responsible for this new meaning. In this Humanistic philosophy the criterion of truth is not sought in an agreement between thought and ‘the essence of reality outside of our mind.’ It is sought in thought itself with the ‘more geometrico’ attained clearness and distinctness of concepts¹. This thought no longer finds its supposed fulcrum in a transcendent world of ideas reposing in itself, nor in the Aristotelian entelechies, which in a teleological world-order are inherent in the world of material things as its substantial forms. Thought now granted to itself a logically creating sovereignty. According to its own intention, it only rests upon a mathematical method which freely rules over ‘empirical’ reality. The clear mathematical concept is above everything else.

Besides, the metaphysical concept of substance is absolutely not essential to the Humanistic ideal of science. When the Humanistic metaphysics of nature collapsed under the critique of Berkeley, Locke, Hume and Kant, the mathematical concept of function or the transcendental form of thought rendered the same service as the common denominator under which philosophical thought could subsume the aspects of reality. In keeping with the Humanistic ideal of science reason must employ the method of continuity as the scepter of its absolute sovereignty. It must exceed all modal boundaries.

1 Even in Nicolaus Cusanus this changed attitude toward knowledge is evident. See my In the Struggle for a Christian Politics. In Dilthey I have encountered a relative agreement with my conception of the modern ‘cogito’ as Archimedian point. (See A. Metzger, Phänomenologie und Metaphysik, 1933, pp. 17ff.). Hower, Dilthey sees a Christian metaphysical background behind this ‘cogito’.

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The lex continui in Leibniz and in the Marburg school of Neo-Kantians.

Leibniz, still entirely caught in the pre-critical Humanistic metaphysics, even elevated this method to a metaphysical law: the lex continui. He gave it a scientific foundation in the differential calculus, his great discovery in mathematics. In the XXth century the anti-metaphysical neo-Kantian Marburg school, radically broke with the Ding an sich, but, nevertheless, elevated the ‘lex continui’ to the basic law of philosophical thought.

The Humanistic ideal of science can call into play its postulate of continuity in various forms; in the form of Humanistic metaphysics, in that of the transcendental ‘critical’ thought, and also in the form of the positivistic philosophy of the last century (Comte). It can ground this postulate in a metaphysical concept of substance, but also in the continuity of the movement of thought which arises out of a basic correlation of abstracting and combining (Natorp), or in a positivistically conceived natural scientific method.

In all these forms this postulate of continuity opposes the subjection of philosophical thought to the cosmic-temporal order originating in the Divine plan of creation. However, the sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects did not permit itself simply to be eliminated by the supposed continuity of a scientific method. The Humanistic science-ideal has led philosophy into a maze of antinomies. Every time philosophical thought tried to surpass the modal boundaries of the different aspects by means of a mathematical or mechanistic method, it punished itself by becoming involved in antinomies. In tracking down these intrinsic antinomies we shall later on discover a method of testing the correctness of our theory of the modal aspects of experience.

The fundamental antinomy in the basic structure of the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea.

At this stage we only wish to point out, that the consistent following out of the naturalistic ideal of science must reveal a fundamental antinomy in the basic structure of the Humanistic transcendental ground-Idea. This science-ideal, evoked by the ideal of personality, acknowledged no limits to the application of the new natural scientific method. Had not scientific thought been emancipated from the cosmic order and declared ‘unconditionally’ sovereign?

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But the moment must come when personality, the new sovereign in the Humanistic ground-motive which had glorified itself in its absolute freedom, must itself fall a prey to this ideal of science. Personality had been absolutized in its temporal functions of reason. The physical and biological functions had been subjected to the domination of the mathematical and mechanical method of thought. The postulate of logical continuity implied, that the psychical, logical, historical, linguistical, social, economic, aesthetic, juridical, ethical, and faith-functions of personality must also be subjected to the naturalistic science-ideal. Thereby, the latter dealt a death blow to the sovereignty of the ideal of personality! ‘Die ich rief, die Geister, Werde ich nun nicht los!’

In the consistent carrying out of its postulate of continuity, the ideal of science must abolish the ideal of personality and unmask the Idea of its unconditional freedom as an illusion.

The supposed solution of this antinomy in transcendental thought.

As we saw in an earlier context, the transcendental-idealistic trend in Humanistic philosophy thinks, that since Kant and Fichte this fundamental antinomy has been solved in a definitive way.

The discovery of the transcendental cogito had opened the way to self-reflection of thought, and had brought to light the absolute dependence of all natural scientific syntheses upon the transcendental-logical function of the ego. And the latter can never be made into a Gegenstand. Therefore, was it not true, that this discovery had established insurmountable boundaries for the naturalistic science-ideal, and fully guaranteed the absolute freedom of the rational functions over against the natural law of causality?

However, we have seen, that the conception of the ‘Unbedingtheit’ of the ‘transcendental cogito’ involves Humanistic philosophy in new antinomies. ‘Reason’ in its supposed autonomy should here appoint the boundaries of the ideal of science. In fact, it was nothing but the reaction of a threatened ideal of personality which established the illusive conviction, that by means of ‘pure thought’ the absolutism of the nature-motive in its transcendental ground-Idea could be bridled.

Let us grant, that the Humanist thinkers, who consistently followed the classical science-ideal, were guilty of a primitive

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naturalism, insofar as they supposed it to be possible to comprehend actual thought in a natural scientific manner. But the Kantian transcendental philosophy in no way denounced the expansion of the natural scientific method over the total concrete act of thinking in its empirical temporal character. It subsumed this latter without the least scruple under a naturalistically conceived, psychological common denominator of the ideal of science. Modern transcendental philosophy only wished to limit the science-ideal by means of a hypostatization of a ‘transcendental-logical subject’, which should be elevated above the inter-modal coherence of meaning between the different aspects of the concrete act of thought. As soon as the untenability of this presupposition is seen, it must become evident, that transcendental idealism is helpless in the face of the absolutistic pretension of the naturalistic science-ideal.

In keeping with the latter, this idealism can in fact only accept a cosmic determinateness of the empirical act of thought in the specific sense of a natural scientific relation of causality. Only the flight into an idealistic absolutization can procure to the Humanistic ideal of personality an apparent security against the consequences of the science-ideal with its postulate of continuity.

Consequently, we must establish the fact, that the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought in its basic structure discloses the irreconcilable conflict inherent in its religious ground-motive.

By the latter Humanistic philosophy seems to be placed in the face of an inexorable ‘either-or’.

A new struggle for primacy, this time for the ideal of science, and then for the ideal of personality, was unchained. And in this struggle no objective judge was present.

The tendency of continuity in the freedom-motive of the ideal of personality.

The ideal of personality, too, sought support in rational functions (which were isolated by theoretical thought in an intermodal synthesis of meaning). And its freedom-motive possesses the same tendency of continuity as the science-ideal which did not recognize heteronomous limits.

The attempt, soon to be made by Kant, to delineate the boundaries of each must lead to new antinomies, which we shall examine more closely in their proper places. After he had ascribed the primacy to the freedom-motive, the dialectical

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development of Humanistic thought offers a really fascinating spectacle.

I think, the more detailed exposition in the following chapters, which begins with the conflict between Descartes and Hobbes, and must be concluded with the last phase of Fichte's idealism, will gain perspective by letting precede a brief diorama of the whole dialectical development of the Humanistic ground-motive in post-Kantian thought up to the most recent phase.

§ 4 - A diorama of the dialectical development of humanistic philosophy after Kant. The process of religious uprooting and the actuality of our transcendental critique.

German freedom-idealism in the Restoration period no longer recognized the line of demarcation Kant had drawn between nature and freedom, between the ideal of science and that of personality. The attempt was now made to synthesize both antithetical motives in a dialectical mode of thought, and it was thought, that the hidden traces of freedom could be found in nature itself.

The freedom-motive and the ideal of personality, rooted therein, in this phase receive a new irrationalist and universalistic¹ form. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, and even Kant, had conceived them in a rationalist and individualistic sense.

1 The term ‘universalistic’ is meant here in contrast to ‘individualistic’.

The origination of a new historical science-ideal out of an irrationalistic and universalistic turn in the freedom-motive.

In our further exposition of the dialectical development of Humanistic philosophical thought we shall see, how there arose out of this new conception of the freedom-motive a new scientific mode of thought, namely, the historical. And we shall see, how the latter, in opposition to the natural scientific and rationalistic method of the Enlightenment, was elevated to the rank of a new ideal of science and a new universal thought-model. This led to an historicistic vision of reality which also permeated the view of nature. In the long run this historicism proved to be much a more dangerous opponent to the Humanistic freedom-motive than the science-ideal based upon classic physics.

As soon as it began to follow its own inner tendencies it under-

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mined the religious foundations both of the classical Humanistic science-ideal and of the ideal of personality. This led to the final phase in the development of the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom in philosophic thought: that of a spiritual uprooting.

In the first (Dutch) edition of this work my transcendental critique of Humanistic thought did not include any sketch of this further development of the religious dialectic in the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic philosophy since the historicizing of the science-ideal. I now feel the need of briefly sketching this final phase. For since the appearance of the Dutch edition it has become evident, that the phenomena of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic thought were not merely of a passing nature, but reflect a crisis in the very spiritual foundations of western culture.

For, since the time of the Enlightenment, Humanism has been the leading power in this culture.

As soon as historicism permeated the view of nature in the dialectical method of freedom-idealism, ‘natural history’ was conceived of as the basis of human cultural history.

In Schelling's speculative nature-philosophy the process of development moves in a series of lower and higher potentialities from the pole of mechanical necessity (inert matter) to the pole of creative freedom (the living organism).

But, according to him, there is also to be found in the history of culture a dialectical union of necessity and freedom.

Necessity is implied here in the individual nature of a nation, in its individual spirit (‘Volksgeist’) and tradition, which rule man to a great extent unconsciously. Freedom discloses itself in the awakening of historical consciousness. And in the work of art the polar tension between necessity and freedom should find its ultimate reconciliation.

The polar tension between the historicistic ideal of science and the idealistic dialectic of Hegel's freedom-idealism.

Now the historicistic ideal of science could not reveal its radical relativistic consequences so long as it was inspired and held in check by post-Kantian freedom-idealism. In this phase it remained bound to the irrationalistic and universalistic mode of thought in the Restoration-period. Hegel's dialectical logicizing of the historical process as a dialectical unfolding of the Absolute

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Idea in the objective spirit (‘objectiven Geist’) signified at the very least a return to the rationalistic and individualistic view of history of the Enlightenment.

Indeed it must contribute considerably to bringing the inner tension to light between the true historical science-ideal and the dialectical-metaphysical logic, inspired in the last analysis by the religious dialectic of necessity and freedom. For, it was impossible to conceive in a satisfactory manner historical development in its unpredictable course in the apriori dialectical thought-forms of the Hegelian system.

This idealistic dialectic must become unbearable to those who had welcomed the historical mode of thought as a new turn in the science-ideal. It bound empirical investigation to an apriori schematicism in which the ‘creative freedom’ of man in the historical process was reduced to the rôle of a puppet of the World-Reason.

Even the fact that Hegel had a deep historical insight and could fill up his dialectical-idealistic schematicism with a rich historical material, could not save this schematicism itself.

The rise of positivistic sociology and the transformation of the historical method of thought into a natural scientific one.

Even in the first half of the 19th century freedom-idealism was confronted with a dangerous competitor in the positivistic sociology of de St Simon and August Comte. These thinkers sought to unite the historical manner of thought of the Restoration with the natural scientific view of the Enlightenment. They tried to transform into a rationalistic Idea of progress, the irrationalistic idea of development, as it was conceived of in the Romantic and Historical school.

It is in this very period that the new historical mode of thought in the rising sociology began to relativize the Ideas which de St Simon and Comte - doubtless still under the influence of freedom-idealism - considered to be leading in the historical dynamic of society.

In his famous ‘law of the three stages’ (in passing formulated even by Turgot) Comte tried to conceive the historical development of Western society in terms of a necessary causal process. Historicist relativism, however, was not yet carried out here up to its ultimate consequences. Therefore, this first attempt at a historical relativizing of the leading Ideas of Western culture

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was still an inconsistent one. It is true, that the Ideas of the first two stages, viz. the theological and the metaphysical, were completely abandoned to historical relativity. The Ideas of the third stadium, however, as the embodiment of the classic science-ideal and its domination-motive in a positivistic form, are elevated to the rank of final goal of the entire historical process, and to the standard by which the latter is to be judged. This was nothing but the old faith in the freeing power of science, as we encountered it in the Enlightenment. This positivistic historicism is still firmly rooted in the religious basic motive of Humanism. Later on it proclaimed itself to be a new religion, ‘un nouveau christianisme’.

The transformation of historicism into naturalistic evolutionism.

At about the middle of the 19th century historicism took a new turn in evolutionism. The dogma of evolution spread from biology to all the branches of science. Thus there began a new triumphal march of the classic deterministic science-ideal in its historical transformation. Since Rousseau and Kant religious primacy had been ascribed to the motive of freedom. But now the religious dialectic again led Humanistic thought to the acceptance of the primacy of the nature-motive. Freedom-idealism began to collapse. Marxist sociology transformed the idealistic dialectic of Hegel into a historical-materialism. The latter explained the ideological super-structure of society in terms of a reflection of the economic mode of production. Marxism and Darwinism united, but they, too, did not carry historicism to its extreme relativistic conclusions. Both still believed in a final goal of development which is itself outside of the historical relativity. The religious ground-motive of Humanism dominates the trust of both in objective science and in its freeing activity for humanity.

The first expression of the spiritual disintegrating process in Historicism. Nietzsche's religion of power.

However, in the latter half of the 19th century the process of spiritual uprooting began to reveal itself in historicism in an almost pathological form. Nietzsche's gospel of the super-man is the first manifestation of this process.

In his first period Nietzsche was under the influence of Ger-

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man Romanticism and idealism from which he fell under the domination of Darwinian evolutionism. In the third and final phase of his thought, however, he developed a religion of power which completely broke away from the Humanistic motive of nature and freedom in its original religious sense.

The view of Nietzsche is based upon the Darwinian basic tenets and upon a radical historistic vision of reality. Proceeding on this foundation he views man only as an ‘animal’, which is not yet ‘fixed’, and whose sole superiority to other species of animals consequently consists in the fact that man is not bound to static instincts and to a statically circumscribed ‘Umwelt’.

In the historical development of culture man has his destiny in his own hands, and thereby displays an absolutely dynamic nature. Nietzsche wishes to build his anthropology exclusively upon the positive data of ‘nature and history’. He fulminates against the fact that man overestimates his own importance, views the whole cosmos as related to himself, and imagines himself to be a free rational personality, radically elevated above the animals.

Man is a ‘phantastic animal’ that from time to time has the need of reflecting upon the goal of his existence and thus posits ideologies concerning God and morality. However, science has progressed so far, that man has killed his gods, and now only retains his own historical future. But history - in spite of all Christian and Humanistic ideologies - is nothing but a struggle for power¹.

Thus the ‘Wille zur Macht’ is the only existential escape for man from the nihilism to which historicism leads.

The kingdom of the ‘super-man’, of the ‘blond beast’, in which this will to power will assume super-human forms, can only be established through an ‘Umwertung aller Werte’ (transvaluation of all values) on the ruins of Christian and Humanistic ideologies.

The ideal of science and the ideal of personality of Humanism are both rejected. Nietzsche considers science only as a biological aid in the struggle for existence. It only has a pragmatic value. Consistent historicism can no longer have faith in scientific truth. Nor can it believe any longer in the Idea of humanity

1 In our analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect in Vol. II, we shall see that domination or power is indeed the nuclear moment of this aspect.

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which was rooted in the religious motive of freedom. Thus Nietzsche introduced into Humanistic philosophy the great process of religious decay. And this would soon enough lead to a radical spiritual crisis in the culture of the West, accelerated by the two world-wars.

The rôle of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism in the crisis of historicism.

This inner decay even revealed itself in the philosophic movements which in the first decades of the 20th century sought to revive Kantian or Hegelian philosophy.

The neo-Kantians (the Marburg school and that of Rickert, Windelband and Lask) and the neo-Hegelians both tried to check the absolutism of naturalistic positivism, and to arrest the nihilistic consequences of historicism.

Under the influence of Rickert and his follower, Max Weber, historicism began to turn away from naturalistic evolutionism. In its apriori construction of the development of human society the latter could not keep its ground against an accurate cultural-historical investigation of the ethnological facts. The hypnosis of the ‘dogma of evolution’, wherein the XIXth century was dying away, again began to make room for the epistemological reflection upon the methodological difference between natural science and cultural science. For a time it seemed as though Humanistic thought would return to the great figures of German idealism. But the religious root of this idealism was too strongly undermined in Neo-Kantianism and Neo-Hegelianism by the all conquering historical relativism.

Consequently, they could not check the spiritual crisis. The rôle of Neo-Kantianism in Germany was in fact at an end with the rise of national socialism. And German neo-Hegelianism interpreted Hegel's dialectical freedom-idealism preponderately in a relativistic sense, so that it was soon a docile instrument of the Hitler-regime.

The classic ideal of science and the development of 20th century physics. The neo-positivism of the Vienna school.

On the other hand, a return to the old deterministic science-ideal was no longer possible. The development of micro-physics in the 20th century revealed, that the deterministic conception of the laws of nature could not be maintained. Quantum-mechanics

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dethroned the classical concept of causality. Neo-positivism, proceeding from Mach, acquired its centre in the Vienna school. At the very least, it expected from modern natural science, a more adequate approach to reality.

It viewed the formulas and concepts of physics as mere conventional symbols, which only had value for the economy of thought, but could never lay claim to truth.

Husserl's eidetic logic and phenomenology.

The ‘eidetic’ logic which Edmund Husserl established, sought to rejuvenate the Idea of mathesis universalis. But faith had been lost in the creative power of autonomous mathematical thought. So Husserl's introduction of an ‘eidetic method’ in his pure logic is to be understood only from the general decay of former certainties; it was an attempt at founding logical thought-itself on a direct intuition of the essences (‘Wesensschau’) which would not need a criterion of truth. The phenomenology which he developed later on was, to be sure, formally connected with the cogito of Descartes in its broad sense of reflecting self-consciousness. However, it was developed into a transcendental idealism in which both Descartes' mathematical ideal of science and Kant's faith in the practical reality of the Idea of freedom fell under the phenomenological epochè (ἐποχή)¹.

With this development the so-called transcendental Ego-logy was placed in a religious vacuum.

Radical historicism had denatured the central ground-motive of Humanism to a historical phenomenon. Husserl reduced it to a ‘phenomenon’ that is constituted by the transcendental ego itself. The transcendental-phenomenological consciousness becomes an ‘uninterested observer’; the phenomenologist believes, that in the theoretical epochè (ἐποχή) he can give an adequate essential description of the entire act-life of man in its intentional relation to the world. In this way phenomenology, as a universal philosophical science of the ‘essences’ (Wesenswissenschaft), should have to found all empirical sciences². But behind the absolutized transcendental the-

1 See Die Pariser Vorträge, Works, Vol. I edited and introduced by Prof. Dr S. Strasser (publ. M. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1950), p. 9.

2 Cf. Cartesianische Meditationen II § 15. Works, Vol. 1, 1950, p. 72 and following.

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oretical consciousness yawns the abyss of nothingness, and this in spite of the fact that a degenerate religious motive of autonomous freedom still operates in this very absolutizing. For, in fact, there is no religious neutrality in the seemingly purely theoretical attitude of this ‘Ego-logy’.

The second main trend in phenomenology which directly arose out of historicism and was established by Wilhelm Dilthey in his last period, was of an irrationalistic origin. It was assimilated by Heidegger in his philosophy of existence, after Sören Kierkegaard had laid the foundations of existential thought in strong opposition to the Hegelian idealism.

Besides, since Nietzsche, a strongly variegated philosophy of life was born out of historicism. It agreed with existentialism in its deep depreciation of the science-ideal and of the Humanistic freedom-idealism.

A general devalution of Reason here made its entrance. The ‘cogito’ was replaced by the ‘vivo’, the Absolute Idea by the mythos and the ‘stream of life’. In the latter the Humanistic freedom-motive sought its refuge after the decay of its religious ideal of personality. This ideal seemed to receive the death-blow from the side of depth-psychology. In the analytical way of the mechanicist science-ideal Freud had laid bare the dark depths of the unconscious.

Human consciousness seemed to be dethroned and with it the autonomous standards of Humanistic ethics and religion.

The attitude of decline in Spengler's philosophy of history and in Humanistic existentialism.

Since the first world-war the spiritual crisis of Western culture is expressed in Humanistic philosophy in an attitude of decline. Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and Sartre's l'Être et le Néant, are in this respect three extremely representative works. Modern man has gone through two world wars. Historicism only permits him to retain the insight into the meaninglessness of his existential freedom in the face of nature in which he is ‘thrown’. Western culture is doomed to decline (Spengler) and the freedom of human existence is a ‘freedom towards death’ (Heidegger), a nothingness (Sartre).

Since Roman Catholicism and the Reformation had been pushed away from their dominating position, Humanism had played the leading rôle in Western culture for two centuries.

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But now because of this intrinsic process of decay it has lost its monopolistic position of power. Anti-Humanistic spiritual movements (national socialism, fascism and bolshevism) have arisen out of the pathological degeneration of its religious freedom-motive caused by the radical consequences of historicism. Humanism was thus placed on the defensive.

A chaotic struggle for leadership in the future development of the West has now broken out. The older cultural forces, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, have also re-awakened out of their philosophical and cultural lethargy, and with a new force now seek in philosophy to take part in the gigantic struggle for the future of our culture.

The actuality of our transcendental critique of theorecal thought.

It is precisely in the light of this whole development of Humanistic philosophy that a radical transcendental critique of theoretical thought is highly necessary and actual. The foundations upon which our culture had sought to build have been shaken everywhere by the storms of a tremendous transitional period. Therefore, the autonomy of theoretical thought can no longer properly be posited as a philosophic axiom. It is understandable, that this has been done in the period in which the Humanistic ground-motive was practically unchallenged in philosophy. However, in the present spiritual crisis anyone who thinks he can take refuge on this dogmatic standpoint, in order to block the way to a radical critical self-reflection in philosophy, thereby displays the fact that he has understood nothing of the deepest causes of this crisis.

The following more detailed transcendental critique of Humanistic philosophy only wishes to show the development of the latter in the light of the dialectical tensions in its own transcendental ground-Idea. This is, in my opinion, the only way to do justice to the different movements within this philosophy.