The Star of Redemption

BOOK TWO: The World and its Meaning or Metalogic

49 BOOK TWO THE WORLD AND ITS MEANING OR METALOGIC W HAT is it we know of the world? It seems to surround us. We live in it, but it is also inside us. It gets into us, but with every breath we breathe and with every move of our hands, it flows back out of us. It is what is an obvious fact to us, as obvious as our own Self, more obvious than God. It is obviousness itself, that which has the property as well as the determination to be understood, and to be understood as obvious—as self-evident. But long ago, philosophy carried on regardless of this obviousness to turn to the order of the day, and in a ceaselessly renewed momentum, it wanted to make now the I, now God, into the starting point of understanding: in so doing, it reduced the self-evidence of the world exactly to zero. That which remains of the obviousness of the world then, as knowledge of the “thing in itself,” or however this infinitesimal little remainder is called, is what would very rightly be the object of a negative cosmology. The fact that one has not used this name with the same facility as that of a negative theology surely depends more on cultural sympathies or antipathies than on objective grounds. For, frequently, lovers of God are not lovers of knowledge, and vice versa. This opposition does not exist between lovers of the world and lovers of knowledge; on the contrary, they, like the concepts of world and knowledge themselves , more or less match each other. It is in this way that the “result of science” which wants it that nothing can be known about God is better accepted than the same result about the world. We resist the former “result” as we do the latter. We refuse to see results in this. If science could lead to such a result has itself led ad absurdum. To tell the truth, it is not the result that is necessarily false in this case, but the path that had to make it into a result. That is why, as previously for the question about God, we are taking this “result” as beginning. Of the world we know nothing. And here too the nothing is a nothing of our knowledge, and a definite and singular nothing of our knowledge. Here too it is the springboard from which the leap into the something of knowledge, into the “positive,” is to be made. For we “believe” in the world, at least as much as we NEGATIVE COSMOLOGY ON THE METHOD PART ONE: BOOK TWO 50 believe in God or in our Self. Therefore the nothing of these three entities can only be a hypothetical nothing; it is only a nothing of knowledge, owing to which we attain the something of knowledge that circumscribes the content of that belief. We can only hypothetically free ourselves from the fact that we have that belief; hypothetically because we are building it from the ground up; in this way that we shall finally reach the point where we shall see how the hypothetical had to turn back into the a-hypothetical , the absolute, the unconditional of that belief. Science can and must provide only this for us. We cannot count on it at all to free us from that threefold belief; science will teach us precisely that we cannot expect this and why we cannot. And so the apparently unscientific side of “belief,” that is to say according to older concepts, will be justified. The de omnibus dubitandum of Descartes was valid under the presupposition of the one and universal All. Facing this All, there was the one and universal thinking, and as instrument of this thinking the just as one and universal doubt de omnibus. If that presupposition vanishes—and our first concern was to show its unsteady character and in fact that it was already null and void for the conscious mind—so if that presupposition falls, then in the place of the one and universal doubt, thus of absolute doubt, there enters the hypothetical doubt; just because it is no longer de omnibus, it can no longer be perceived as an end of thinking, but only still as a means. So we are diving once again into the depths of the positive. OUT of the nothing there once again wells up, just because it cannot remain nothing, the original affirmation, the Yes of the...