The Star of Redemption

THRESHOLD

273 THRESHOLD T HE sinking into the subterranean Kingdom, where the figures resided singly, unknown to each other, an All split in pieces, was followed by the ascent— the ascent above the arch of the visible heaven. In this ascent, the pieces of the All that fell apart in the sinking were assembled again but not again into a unity like the one philosophy had previously sought and hence presupposed, not into the unity of a sphere that everywhere returns to itself. For in its first beginnings, philosophy, with naïve candor, had claimed that it wanted to regard “being” as a sphere, or at least as a circle, and this thought dominated it till its end in Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic believes it still can and must justify itself by leading back into itself. It is into a different unity into which the pieces of the All now enter. That unity of running back into itself, into its own beginning, the in-finite in the sense that the end is immediately changed again into the beginning and therefore is never graspable and conceivable as end, that unity was therefore situated for us at the outermost boundaries of our world; only at the stroke of the two midnights, as it were only before the beginning and only after the end, the sea of the infinite unfolded; the beginning itself, the first hour, was really in the beginning; the end itself, the twelfth hour, was really at the end of days; these two, first hour and last hour, really still belonged to the day of life, as much as did life’s noon of lived experience. Indeed, diverging from this comparison, it is not the noon of life that is the most solemn time, but the last time is the “highest”; as indeed also only the midnight of the beginning is darkness, but that of the end is light. So the world that comes together for us in the ascent does not grow together and circle into itself; it breaks forth from the infinite and plunges back into the infinite, both an infinite outside of them, in relation to which it is itself a finite reality, whereas the circumference or even the sphere had the infinite themselves, indeed was itself infinite and therefore all apparently finite reality emerged in it from their own infinitude and joined in their own. In order to make visible this infinity that did not curve back on itself, hence precisely the “bad” infinity according to the philosophical opinion, we had had to shatter therefore idealism’s infinitude that curved back on itself; since, that is to say, instead of the circumference perfectly determined by the relation of one of its own points to a relative point, we set single points against RETROSPECTIVE : THE ORDER OF THE PATH THE NEW UNITY THE NEW TOTALITY THRESHOLD 274 each other, none of which could be clearly taken as a relational point for the others, we forced the construction of the line through these three points, and through these only, without there being a law of construction that set an “absolutely mentally” valid relation between “just any” point of the line and a common relational point. Through such a relation, namely in the formula made possible through it, even the infinity that is “bad” in itself, namely the non-enclosed one, a hyperbola, say, becomes the “good” infinity, namely the one that can be formulated as closed. This impossibility of formulating the course of the path we are seeking is already determined by the manner in which we found the three points—as singular points with no connection between them and arbitrary in themselves, changeable, capable of coming together only in the sign of the perhaps. If a relationship existed between the singular points, obviously this could not be in the manner of a geometric relationship. And really, the three lines to which, in the three Books of this Part, we joined the three points discovered in the first Part, are not lines in the geometric sense nor the shortest connections between two points, but through an act of reversal grounded in the history of the emergence of these three points, yet in itself groundless, these lines sprang from these points—therefore real lines, and not mathematical ones. But how would we designate this reality, this factuality of the lines that join the points? Doubtless, because it nevertheless has to be a matter of lines, only by explicitly and clearly...