The Star of Redemption

BOOK THREE: Man and his Self or Metaethics

71 BOOK THREE MAN AND HIS SELF OR METAETHICS A BOUT man—about him, as well, are we supposed to know nothing? The Self’s knowledge about itself, consciousness of self, has the reputation of being the surest of all knowledge. And common sense bristles up almost more fiercely than does scientific consciousness when it is a question of pulling the true foundation from under its feet, and it goes without saying, literally the scientific foundation. And yet it happened , though only a late hour. One of Kant’s most surprising facts is that he made this most obvious thing, the I, the problem par excellence, the most problematic thing. With regard to the cognizant I, he teaches that it is only cognizable in its relationship to cognition, to its fruits, consequently, and not “in itself.” And even about the I that wills, he claims that morality in the proper sense, that is to say merit and blame for actions, including our own actions, remains always hidden from us. So he establishes a negative psychology that gave food for thought to a whole century, the century of a soulless psychology. We hardly need to underline that, here, too, the nothing does not represent a result for us, but rather the starting point of thinking. Doubtless the absurd once had to be thought. For this is the profound meaning of the so much abused credo quia absurdum: all belief needs to presuppose an absurdum of knowledge. So, in order for the content of faith to become obvious, it is necessary that that which apparently goes without saying in knowledge receive the stamp of the absurd. This happened respectively with the three elements of this content, with God, the world, and man: with God, from the beginnings of the Middle Ages; with the world, at the start of modern times; with man, at the start of the last century. Only after knowledge no longer left anything in its simplicity and in its clarity, only since then has faith been able to take under its wing the simplicity that was expelled from knowledge, and so become itself perfectly simple. Man cannot be proved any more than can the world or God. Yet, if knowledge takes it into its head to prove one of these three, then it will necessarily disappear into the nothing. From these coordinates, between which it leaves traces with every step NEGATIVE PSYCHOLOGY ON THE METHOD PART ONE: BOOK THREE 72 it takes and with every move it makes, knowledge cannot escape —whether it takes the wings of dawn or stays at the ends of the sea, for it cannot break free from the orbit defined by those three elements. So the nothing of demonstrating knowledge is always only a nothing of knowledge and more exactly a nothing of the demonstration; in relation the demonstration, the fact which is involved in establishing the space where the knowledge itself lives and moves and exists, stays quite simply unmoved in its factual status. And knowledge can therefore here do nothing more than to follow the road from the non-demonstrable, from the nothing of knowledge to the factual status of the fact— that is to say precisely what we have already done here twice and now shall do a third time. ABOUT man also we know nothing. And this nothing, too, is only a beginning, and even the beginning of a beginning . In him, too, the original-words awaken, the Yes that creates, the No that generates, and the And that articulates. And here, too, the Yes creates the true being, the “essence,” in the infinite not-nothing. What is this true being of man? The being of God was simply being, being beyond knowledge. The being of the world was in knowledge, a known being, a universal being. But facing God and the world, what is the essence of man? Goethe teaches us: “What distinguishes the gods from men? It is that many waves go past the gods—us, the wave raises, the wave swallows, and we sink.” And Ecclesiastes teaches us: “A generation goes, a generation comes, but the earth remains eternal.” The ephemeral, which is foreign to God and the gods, and which for the world is the bewildering experience of its own force always and at all times renewed, is therefore for man the abiding atmosphere which envelops him, which he inhales and exhales—with every breath of his breathing. Man is ephemeral, being ephemeral is his essence...