321
13. Epilogue: Gnosticism Existentialism and Nihilism
In this chapter I propose, in an experimental vein, to draw a comparison between two movements, or positions, or systems of thought widely separated in time and space, and seemingly incommensurable at first glance: one of our own day, conceptual, sophisticated, and eminently "modern" in more than the chronological sense; the other from a misty past, mythological, crude—something of a freak even in its own time, and never admitted to the respectable company of our philosophic tradition. My contention is that the two have something in common, and that this "something" is such that its elaboration, with a view to similarity and difference alike, may result in a reciprocal illumination of both.
In saying "reciprocal," I admit to a certain circularity of procedure. My own experience may illustrate what I mean. When, many years ago, I turned to the study of Gnosticism, I found that the viewpoints, the optics as it were, which I had acquired in the school of Heidegger, enabled me to see aspects of gnostic thought that had been missed before. And I was increasingly struck by the familiarity of the seemingly utterly strange. In retrospect, I am inclined to believe that it was the thrill of this dimly felt affinity which had lured me into the gnostic labyrinth in the first place. Then, after long sojourn in those distant lands returning to my own, the contemporary philosophic scene, I found that what I had learnt out there made me now better understand the shore from which I had set out. The extended discourse with ancient nihilism proved—to me at least—a help in discerning and placing the meaning of modern nihilism: just as the latter had initially equipped me for spotting its obscure cousin in the past. What had happened was that Existentialism, which had provided the means of an historical analysis, became itself involved in the results of it. The fitness of its categories to the particular matter was something to ponder about.
320
GNOSTICISM, EXISTENTIALISM, AND NIHILISM
They fitted as if made to measure: were they, perhaps, made to measure? At the outset, I had taken that fitness as simply a case of their presumed general validity, which would assure their utility for the interpretation of any human "existence" whatsoever. But then it dawned on me that the applicability of categories in the given instance might rather be due to the very kind of "existence" on either side—that which had provided the categories and that which so well responded to them.
It was the case of an adept who believed himself in possession of a key that would unlock every door: I came to this particular door, I tried the key, and lo! it fitted the lock, and the door opened wide. So the key had proved its worth. Only later, after I had outgrown the belief in a universal key, did I begin to wonder why this one had in fact worked so well in this case. Had I happened with just the right kind of key upon the right kind of lock? If so, what was there between Existentialism and Gnosticism which made the latter open up at the touch of the former? With this turnabout of approach, the solutions in the one became questions to the other, where at first they had just seemed confirmations of its general power.
Thus the meeting of the two, started as the meeting of a method with a matter, ended with bringing home to me that Existentialism, which claims to be the explication of the fundamentals of human existence as such, is the philosophy of a particular, historically fated situation of human existence: and an analogous (though in other respects very different) situation had given rise to an analogous response in the past. The object turned object-lesson, demonstrating both contingency and necessity in the nihilistic experience. The issue posed by Existentialism does not thereby lose in seriousness; but a proper perspective is gained by realizing the situation which it reflects and to which the validity of some of its insights is confined.
In other words, the hermeneutic functions become reversed and reciprocal—lock turns into key, and key into lock: the "existentialist" reading of Gnosticism, so well vindicated by its hermeneutic success, invites as its natural complement the trial of a "gnostic" reading of Existentialism.
323
EPILOGUE
322
More than two generations ago, Nietzsche said that nihilism, "this weirdest of all guests," "stands before the door."1 Meanwhile the guest has entered and is no longer a guest, and, as far as philosophy is concerned, existentialism is trying to live with him. Living in such company is living in a crisis. The beginnings of the crisis reach back into the seventeenth century, where the spiritual situation of modern man takes shape.
Among the features determining this situation is one which Pascal was the first to face in its frightening implications and to expound with the full force of his eloquence: man's loneliness in the physical universe of modern cosmology. "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened."2 "Which know me not": more than the overawing infinity of cosmic spaces and times, more than the quantitative disproportion, the insignificance of man as a magnitude in this vastness, it is the "silence," that is, the indifference of this universe to human aspirations—the not-knowing of things human on the part of that within which all things human have preposterously to be enacted—which constitutes the utter loneliness of man in the sum of things.
As a part of this sum, as an instance of nature, man is only a reed, liable to be crushed at any moment by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident, no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction. As a thinking reed, however, he is no part of the sum, not belonging to it, but radically different, incommensurable: for the res extensa does not think, so Descartes had taught, and nature is nothing but res extensa—body, matter, external magnitude. If nature crushes the reed, it does so unthinkingly, whereas the reed —man—even while crushed, is aware of being crushed.3 He alone
1Der Wittc zur Macht, (1887), § 1.
2Pensees, ed. Brunschvicg, fr. 205.
3 Op. cit. fr. 347 "A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it."
in the world thinks, not because but in spite of his being part of nature. As he shares no longer in a meaning of nature, but merely, through his body, in its mechanical determination, so nature no longer shares in his inner concerns. Thus that by which man is superior to all nature, his unique distinction, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of his being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the rest of existence. Estranged from the community of being in one whole, his consciousness only makes him a foreigner in the world, and in every act of true reflection tells of this stark foreignness.
This is the human condition. Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logos my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place. That place appears now as a sheer and brute accident. "I am frightened and amazed," continues Pascal, "at finding myself here rather than there; for there is no reason whatever why here rather than there, why now rather than then." There had always been a reason for the "here," so long as the cosmos had been regarded as man's natural home, that is, so long as the world had been understood as "cosmos." But Pascal speaks of "this remote corner of nature" in which man should "regard himself as lost," of "the little prison-cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the (visible) universe." 4 The utter contingency of -our existence in the scheme deprives that scheme of any human sense as a possible frame of reference for the. understanding of ourselves.
But there is more to this situation than the mere mood of homelessness, forlornness, and dread. The indifference of nature also means that nature has no reference to ends. With the ejection of teleology from the system of natural causes, nature, itself purposeless, ceased to provide any sanction to possible human purposes. A universe without an intrinsic hierarchy of being, as the Copernican universe is, leaves values ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back entirely upon itself in its quest for meaning and value. Meaning is no longer found but is "conferred." Values are no longer beheld in the vision of objective reality, but are posited as feats of valuation. As functions of the will, ends are solely my own creation
4 Op. cit. fr. 72.
324
325
Will replaces vision; temporality of the act ousts the eternity of the "good in itself." This is the Nietzschean phase, of the situation in which European nihilism breaks the surface. Now man is alone with himself.
The world's a gate
To deserts stretching mute and chill.
Who once has lost
What thou hast lost stands nowhere still.
Thus spoke Nietzsche (in Vereinsamt), closing the poem with the line, "Woe unto him who has no home!"
Pascal's universe, it is true, was still one created by God, and solitary man, bereft of all mundane props, could still stretch his heart out toward the transmundane God. But this god is essentially an unknown God, an agnostos theos, and is not discernible in the evidence of his creation. The universe does not reveal the creator's purpose by the pattern of its order, nor his goodness by the abundance of created things, nor his wisdom by their fitness, nor his perfection by the beauty of the whole—but reveals solely his power by its magnitude, its spatial and temporal immensity. For extension, or the quantitative, is the one essential attribute left to the world, and therefore, if the world has anything at all to tell of the divine, it does so through this property: and what magnitude can tell of is power.5 But a world reduced to a mere manifestation of power also admits toward itself—once the transcendent reference has fallen away and man is left with it and himself alone—nothing but the relation of power, that is, of mastery. The contingency of man, of his existing here and now, is with Pascal still a contingency upon God's will; but that will, which has cast me into just "this remote corner of nature," is inscrutable, and the "why?" of my existence is here just as unanswerable as the most atheistic existentialism can make it out to be. The deus absconditus, of whom nothing but will and power can be predicated, leaves behind as his legacy, upon leaving the scene, the homo absconditus, a concept of man characterized solely by will and power—the will for power,
5 Cf. Pascal, loc. cit. "In short, it is the greatest sensible sign of God's omnipotence that our imagination loses itself in this thought (sc. of the immensity of cosmic space)."
the will to will. For such a will even indifferent nature is more an occasion for its exercise than a true object.8
The point that particularly matters for the purposes of this discussion is that a change in the vision of nature, that is, of the cosmic environment of man, is at the bottom of that metaphysical situation which has given rise to modern existentialism and to its nihilistic implications. But if this is so, if the essence of existentialism is a certain dualism, an estrangement between man and the world, with the loss of the idea of a kindred cosmos—in short, an anthropological acosmism—then it is not necessarily modern physical science alone which can create such a condition. A cosmic nihilism as such, begotten by whatever historical circumstances, would be the condition in which some of the characteristic traits of existen...
adad.molo