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I

We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life. Of all the things that we here on earth are the witnesses, this is obviously the most absurd and meaningless, the most terrible, almost unnatural, thing—which forces us irresistibly to conclude either that there is something that is not right in the universe, or that the way in which we seek the truth and the demands that we place upon it are vitiated in their very roots.

Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes’ clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness). Now, reality here shows us only an eternal, impenetrable mystery—as if, even before the creation of the world, someone had once and for all forbidden man to attain that which is most necessary and most important to him. What we call the truth, what we obtain through thought, is found to be, in a certain sense, incommensurable not only with the external world into which we have been plunged since our birth but also with our own inner experience. We have sciences and even, if you please, Science, which grows and develops before our very eyes. We know many things and our knowledge is a “clear and distinct” knowledge. Science contemplates with legitimate pride its immense victories and has every right to expect that nothing will be able to stop its triumphant march. No one doubts, and no one can doubt, the enormous importance of the sciences. If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world. The clare et distincte has justified all the hopes which were founded upon it.

But the haze of the primordial mystery has not been dissipated. It has rather grown denser. Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his “premonitions.” The world would remain for him, “in the light” of our “positive” sciences, what it was—a dark and sorrowful subterranean region—and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, “as in a battle,” to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which “dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.”¹ In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. And, conversely, our era would receive Aristotle with open arms but resolutely turn away from Plato.

But it will be asked: What is the force and power of the blessings and curses of men, even if these men be such giants as Plato and Aristotle? Does truth become more true because Aristotle blesses it, or does it become error because Plato curses it? Is it given men to judge the truths, to decide the fate of the truths? On the contrary, it is the truths which judge men and decide their fate and not men who rule over the truths. Men, the great as well as the small, are born and die, appear and disappear—but the truth remains. When no one had as yet begun to “think” or to “search,” the truths which later revealed themselves to men already existed. And when men will have finally disappeared from the face of the earth, or will have lost the faculty of thinking, the truths will not suffer therefrom. It is from this that Aristotle set out in his philosophical researches. He declared that Parmenides was “constrained to follow the phenomena.” In another place,² speaking of the same Parmenides and of other great Greek philosophers, he wrote, they were “constrained by the truth itself.” This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides’ unknown slave and the least of Alexander’s stable-men.

Why does the truth have this power over Parmenides and Alexander, and not Parmenides and Alexander who have power over the truth? This is a question that Aristotle does not ask. If someone had asked it of him, he would not have understood it and would have explained that the question is meaningless and obviously absurd, that one can say such things but one cannot think them. And this is not because he was an insensible being who was indifferent to all and to whom everything was the same, or that he would have been able to say of himself, like Hamlet, “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter.” For Aristotle oppression is bitter. In another passage of the same Metaphysics he says that it is hard to bow down before Necessity: “everything which constrains is called necessary and that is why the necessary is bitter, as Evenus says: ‘every necessary thing is always painful and bitter.’ And constraint is a form of necessity—as Sophocles also says: ‘But an invincible force necessitates me to act thus.’”³ Aristotle, we see, feels pain and bitterness at ineluctable Necessity, but, as he himself adds immediately, he distinctly knows that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And since it does not listen to persuasion and is not to be overcome, one must submit to it—be this bitter or not, painful or not—submit and henceforth renounce useless struggle: anankê stênai, “cry halt before Necessity.”

Whence comes this “cry halt before Necessity”? Here is a question of capital importance which contains, if you wish, the alpha and omega of philosophy. Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, it does not even listen. The injustice cries to heaven, if there is no longer anyone here to whom one can cry. It is true that in certain cases and even very often, almost always, the injustice will cry and protest only to end up by becoming silent; men forget both their sorrows and their cruel losses. But there are injustices that one cannot forget. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . . let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”⁴ For two thousand years we have all repeated the Psalmist’s oath. But did the Psalmist not “know” that Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, that it does not listen to oaths or prayers, that it hears nothing and fears nothing? Did he not know that his voice was and could be only the voice of one crying in the wilderness? Of course he knew it, he knew it quite as well as Aristotle. But, doubtless he had something more than this knowledge. Doubtless when a man feels the injustice as deeply as did the Psalmist, his thought undergoes, in a way that is completely unexpected, incomprehensible and mysterious transformations in its very essence. He cannot forget Jerusalem, but he forgets the power of Necessity, the omnipotence of this enemy so terribly armed—one does not know by whom or when or why; and, without thinking of the future, he begins a terrible and final, battle against this enemy. This is surely the meaning of Plotinus’ words: “A great and final battle awaits human souls.” And these words of Plato have the same meaning: “If it is necessary to dare everything, should we not dare to defy all shame?”⁵ Man decides to take up the struggle against all-powerful Necessity only when there awakens in him the readiness to dare everything, to stop before nothing. Nothing can justify this boundless audacity; it is the extreme expression of shamelessness. One has only to look at Aristotle’s Ethics to be convinced of this. All the virtues are placed by him in the middle zone of being, and everything which passes beyond the limits of “the mean” is an indication of depravity and vice. “Cry halt before Necessity” rules his Ethics as well as his Metaphysics. His final word is the blessing of Necessity and the glorification of the spirit which has submitted to Necessity.

Not only the good but the truth as well wishes man to bow down before it. All who have read the famous Twelfth Book, especially the last chapter, of the Metaphysics and the Ninth and Tenth Books of the Ethics know with what fervor Aristotle supplicated Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded and which he had not the power to overcome. What irritated him or, perhaps, disturbed him most in Plato was the latter’s courage or rather, to use his own expressions, Plato’s audacity and shamelessness, which suggested to him that those who adore Necessity only dream of reality but are powerless to see it in the waking state. Plato’s words seemed to Aristotle unnatural, fantastic, deliberately provoking. But how to silence Plato, how to constrain him not only to submit to Necessity in the visible and empirical world but also to render to it in thought the honors to which, Aristotle was convinced, it is entitled? Necessity is Necessity, not for those who sleep but for those who are awake. And the waking who see Necessity see real being, while Plato, with his audacity and shamelessness, turns us away from real being and leads us into the domain of the fantastic, the unreal, the illusory, and—by that very fact—the false. One must stop at nothing in order finally to extinguish in man that thirst for freedom which found expression in Plato’s work. “Necessity” is invincible. The truth is, in its essence and by its very nature, a truth that constrains; and it is in submission to the constraining truth that the source of all human virtues lies. “Constrained by the truth itself,” Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras accomplished their work. It has always been so, it will always be so, it must be so. It is not the great Parmenides who rules over the truth but the truth that is the master of Parmenides. And to refuse obedience to the truth that constrains is impossible. Still more: to do other than bless it, whatever be the thing to which it constrains, is impossible. Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.

II

Let us stop and ask ourselves: why does the truth that constrains need men’s blessing? Why does Aristotle put himself to so much trouble to obtain for his Necessity men’s blessing? Can it not get along without this blessing? If Necessity does not listen to reason, is it more receptive to praises? There is no doubt that constraining Necessity listens no more to praises than to prayers or curses. The stones of the desert have never replied “Amen” to the inspired sermons of the saints. But this is not necessary. What is necessary is that to the silence of the stones—is not Necessity, like the stones, indifferent to everything?—the saints should sing hosannas.

I would recall in this connection the chapters already mentioned of the Metaphysics and Ethics of Aristotle, the high priest of the visible and the invisible church of “thinking” men. We are asked not only to submit to Necessity but to adore it: such always has been, and such is still, the fundamental task of philosophy. It is not enough that philosophy should recognize the force and power, in fact, of such or such an order of things. It knows and it fears (the beginning of all knowledge is fear) that empirical force, that is, the force that manifests itself in constraining man only once, may be replaced by another force that will act in a different way. Even the scientist, who refuses to philosophize, has, finally, no need of facts; the facts by themselves give us nothing and tell us nothing. There has never been a genuine empiricism among men of science, as there has never been a genuine materialism. What scientist would study facts merely for the sake of facts? Who would wish to observe this drop of water suspended from a telegraphic wire, or this other drop that glides over the window-pane after a rain? There are millions of such drops and these, in and of themselves, have never concerned the scientists and could not concern them. The scientist wishes to know what a water-drop in general is or what water in general is. If, in his laboratory, he decomposes into its constituent elements some water drawn from a brook, it is not in order to study and know what he has at this moment in his hands and under his eyes but in order to acquire the right to make judgments about all the water that he will ever have occasion to see or never will see, about that which no one has ever seen and no one ever will see, about even that which existed when there was not a single conscious being or even any living being on earth. The man of science, whether he knows it or not (most often, obviously, he does know it), whether he wishes it or not (ordinarily he does not wish it), cannot help but be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. He is distinguished from the philosopher only by the fact that the philosopher must, in addition, explain and justify the realism practiced by science. In a general way, since empiricism is only an unsuccessful attempt at philosophical justification of the scientific, i.e., realistic, methods of seeking the truth, its work has, in fact, always led to the destruction of the principles on which it was based. It is necessary to choose: if you wish to be an empiricist, you must abandon the hope of founding scientific knowledge on a solid and certain basis; if you wish to have a solidly established science, you must place it under the protection of the idea of Necessity and, in addition, recognize this idea as primordial, original, having no beginning and consequently no end—that is to say, you must endow it with the superiorities and qualities that men generally accord to the Supreme Being. As we have seen, that is what was done by Aristotle, who thus deserves to be the consecrated pope or high priest of all men who think scientifically.

Doubtless Kant did not exaggerate Hume’s merits when he wrote in his Prolegomena that since the beginning of philosophy no one had ever discovered a truth equal in importance to that which Hume discovered. As if scales had suddenly dropped from his eyes, Hume saw that the “necessary” bonds established by men between phenomena are only relationships of fact, that there is no “necessity” in the world, and that those who speak of necessity only “dream of being” but cannot see it in waking reality. Hume was too balanced a man—and one, moreover, who valued his equilibrium more than anything else in the world—to be able to appreciate and utilize the great discovery that he had made. One may, if one wishes, say as much of all those men whose eyes have been opened and who have been permitted to see extraordinary things; the sun of truth blinds the inhabitants of the kingdom of darkness with its brilliance. Hume ended up by restoring to Necessity almost all its sovereign rights; but Kant, not being able to bear the “almost” that no one had noticed, accomplished his Copernican task and directed our thought anew into that “sure and royal way” which mathematics had followed for centuries.

Hume’s sudden discovery had awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. But is it given to men to be awake on earth? And is “nature that does not sleep,”⁶ to use Plotinus’ term, man’s natural state? On the other hand, does not “to dream in sleep or while awake mean to take that which resembles (reality) not for something that resembles (reality) but for the reality that it resembles?”⁷ Necessity resembles what really exists like two drops of water resemble each other, but it is not what really exists; it only seems really to exist for him who dreams. Hume’s barely perceptible “almost” would have been able to render immense services to thinking and searching humanity if it had been preserved under the form in which it first appeared to the Scottish philosopher. But Hume himself was afraid of what he had seen and hastened to throw away everything that had fallen to his hand so as to have it no longer under his eyes. As for Kant, he found that this was still not enough and he transferred Hume’s “almost” outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori into the transcendental and noumenal—i.e., completely inaccessible, without relationship to us and without usefulness for us—world of things in themselves (Ding an sich). The shock that he had received from Hume awakened the great philosopher of Königsberg from his sleep. But Kant understood his mission and destiny to mean that he must at all costs defend himself and others against the eventuality of sudden and brutal shocks that interrupt the peace of our somnolent waking, and he proceeded to create his “critical philosophy.” At the same time as Hume’s “almost,” all metaphysics was transferred outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori which, since Kant, have inherited all the rights of the old Necessity and have, for a century and a half, guaranteed to European humanity undisturbed sleep and faith in itself.

It is obvious that for Aristotle the most intolerable and distressing of thoughts was that our earthly life is not the last, definitive, truly real life and that an awakening, be it only in a certain measure, is possible—an awakening similar to that which we know in coming out of sleep. When he attacked Plato’s “ideas” he was trying above all to rid himself of this eventuality which was, to him, worse than a nightmare. And his distress was, in a certain sense, completely justified, as was Kant’s distress when Hume, with his “almost,” so brutally awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Plato’s “they dream,” quite like Hume’s denial of any necessary bonds between phenomena, undermines the very foundations of human thought. Nothing is impossible. Anything that one wishes can flow from anything that one wishes and the principle of contradiction, which Aristotle wished to consider as “the most unshakable of principles,” begins to totter, discovering to the frightened human mind the kingdom of the absolutely arbitrary which threatens to destroy the world and the thought which seeks to know the world; einai kai noein (being and thought) become phantoms. How could Plato have permitted himself to speak of his cave? How could he have imagined it? How could Hume have dared to deny the rights of Necessity? And does not humanity owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Aristotle and to Kant, to the first for having put an end, by his severe criticism and indignant cries, to the fantastic tendencies of his teacher, and to the second for having led our thought back into its natural groove by his doctrine of synthetic judgments a priori?

There cannot be two answers to these questions. Aristotle is the founder not only of the positive sciences but also of the positive philosophy. It is not for nothing that the Middle Ages saw in him the only guide through the labyrinth of life and did not dare to open the books, written without him (and perhaps also not for him), of the Old and New Testaments. The new philosophy has always followed, and still continues to follow, the paths that he marked out. One can say the same thing of Kant: he subdued the disquieting spirit of doubt and “forced it to bow its rebellious head before the angelic visage of the universal and the necessary.

Necessity has obtained its justification—a justification of which it had no need at all. The celebrities of science, like all the ordinary scientists, glorify Necessity, even though it be as indifferent to blame as to praise. Only the wicked or the foolish can doubt its sovereign rights. But has this human defense rendered it stronger and more vigorous? Or should we not, perhaps, put the question differently: does not its force come from the fact that men have taken it under their protection and have surrounded it with an insurmountable wall made of formulas of incantation forged through the centuries?

III

Although Seneca may not have been an original philosopher, he succeeded quite well at times, as is known, in expressing the thought of others. Everything discussed in our preceding chapters was formulated by him in a few words that have become famous: Ipse omnium conditor et rector . . . semper paret, semel jussit (The founder and guide of all things . . . always obeys, but has commanded only once). So thought Seneca, so thought the ancients, so all of us think. God commanded only once and, thereafter, He and all men after Him no longer command but obey. He commanded a long time ago, an infinitely long time ago, so that He Himself has forgotten when and under what circumstances there occurred this absurd, unique of its kind, and consequently unnatural, event. Perhaps, having taken on this habit of passive and submissive existence, God has even forgotten how to command; perhaps, like us ordinary mortals, He can only obey. In other words, the will to act that He once manifested forever exhausted His creative energy, and now He is condemned, like the world that He created, to fulfill His own prescriptions, prescriptions that He Himself can no longer violate. To put it still differently, the Creator of the world has Himself become subordinate to Necessity which He created and which, without at all seeking or desiring it, has become the sovereign of the universe.

I repeat: Seneca’s formula belongs unquestionably to him, but the thought that he expresses is not his own. So thought and so continue to think all the learned men of all countries. Why do they think so? Were they witnesses of the world’s creation, or did the Creator reveal his secret to any of them? No one was present at the creation of the world, no one can any longer boast of any special intimacy with the Creator. The thought expressed by Seneca allured men because the mysterious and inconceivable moment of command (jubere) as pushed back into the eternity of the past and declared unique (semel jussit), while for ordinary usage men chose obedience, the parere, which seems to be the comprehensible, natural, and normal fate not only of the creature but also of the Creator Himself. And, indeed, Seneca was right: in the parere everything is comprehensible, clear to all, and—consequently—natural, while in the jubere everything is mysterious, arbitrary and—consequently—fantastic, eternally inconceivable and puzzling.

Had it been possible, Seneca and those from whom Seneca learned to “think” would have preferred not to remember the mysterious jubere at all. No one has ever commanded anything, all have always done nothing but obey; for there has never been anything supernatural or mysterious, either in the remotest times or in our own day. Everything has always been dear and natural. And the task of philosophy is then to strengthen and sustain Necessity by all the means at its disposal. But what are these means? It is not given mortals to change anything whatsoever of the nature of Necessity, to enhance or strengthen it in its own being. There remains, then, only one thing to do: to convince men by reasoning or by incantations that, on the one hand, Necessity is omnipotent and to fight it serves no purpose; on the other hand, that Necessity is of divine origin (that is why the semel jussit is preserved) and that it is impious and immoral to refuse it obedience. This same Seneca is inexhaustible in his praise of God who has forgotten how to command and of men who manifest a boundless submission. “I do not obey God, I agree with Him; I follow Him with all my soul, but not because it is necessary.” Or again, in the famous translation of the words of the Stoic Cleanthes which Cicero so admired: “the fates lead the willing, but the unwilling they drag.” One could cite hundreds of pages from Seneca or Cicero filled with reflections of this kind.

It will be said that Seneca, as well as Cleanthes on whom Seneca relied, expresses the ideas of the Stoic school, and that we have no right, in speaking of Aristotle, to refer to the Stoics whose narrowness of mind was already well known to the ancients. But I believe that Dilthey was right when he frankly admitted that the modern age received the philosophy of antiquity through Cicero and Seneca, and that it is with their eyes that we see the ancients. It is even more exact to say that the narrow philosophy of the Stoics and the overly simple logic of the Cynics at times reveal to us the essence of ancient thought (and of our own) better than the works of Plato and Aristotle. The Stoics are regarded with scornful condescension, but it cannot even be imagined what would have become of European thought if the ideas sown in the world by the Stoics had not produced so abundant a harvest. The Stoics at times were only too frank. Now, many ideas are admitted only if they agree not to show their true face and, when necessary, to deny it. Ham, who turned around to look at his father’s nakedness, has been nailed to the pillory by history. But how many have turned around without anyone thinking of blaming them? To turn around, to reflect, besinnen, is considered one of the most honorable of things; Hegel’s entire philosophy reduces itself finally to a looking around. It will be said that the “nakedness of the father” did not interest Hegel. I would answer that he looked at nakednesses that are even more criminal to contemplate than one’s father’s. But Hegel knew what one can say and what must be passed over in silence. This knowledge was foreign to the Stoics, and even more so to the Cynics. The Cynics’ whole error derives from the fact that they had an absolute confidence in reflective human reason. Other men, almost all, especially the philosophers, have committed the same mistake. Who does not trust reason? But others knew how to keep to themselves the greatest part of what they had received in payment for their absolute confidence in reason, and they are praised as sages while the Cynics are called “dogs.” Noah’s third son, the Cynics and, to some extent, the Stoics are not reproached for turning around and looking at the completely “naked” truth; this is permitted and even encouraged. What is not forgiven them is only their calling things by their right names, their saying that they are looking around when they are looking around and that nakedness is nakedness. Blessed are those who look around and are silent, blessed are those who see but hide what they see. Why is this so? No one can answer. It seems that every man, like Socrates, has at his side a demon who, in decisive moments, demands of him judgments and acts whose meaning remains incomprehensible to him and forever hidden. But if such a demon exists in nature and if even the most courageous of men dare not disobey him, how can one not ask whence, from what worlds, this mysterious being has come to us? But no one greatly desires to ask this. People know that there is someone (or perhaps even something: it is not known in advance how the demon should be spoken of, whether as a thing or as a being) that has received or has arrogated the right to present to men completely unmotivated demands, and they are satisfied with that. The demon prescribes, men obey. And all are happy that a power should finally be found which binds and decides, which delivers us from freedom of the will, and that one can, one should, one must stop—“cry halt before Necessity.”

Again it will be said that I have exceeded the limits, that I began by speaking in the name of “all” and ended with the words of a famous philosopher. For the phrase, “cry halt before Necessity,” that I have just quoted belongs to Aristotle. But the average person is not so far removed from the philosopher. Somewhere, at the beginning or at the end, in the depths or at the surface, the average man and the philosopher meet. Seneca, who proclaimed his paret semper, jussit semel as the last word of the philosophers’ wisdom, was only paraphrasing Aristotle. Quite like the average man, Aristotle wishes to know nothing of commanding (jubere); he needs only to obey (parere) in order to accomplish, in obeying, what he believes, what all men believe, to be the destiny of man. It does not matter to him at all whence the commandment comes—all the more so since, as Seneca has frankly admitted to us, the sources of jubere are now forever dried up. No one in the world will ever again command, all will forever obey—the great and the small, the righteous and the sinners, men and gods. “Truth” does not make any distinctions; it constrains all alike, the great Parmenides as well as the humblest day laborer.

“Parmenides is constrained” and the day laborer is constrained. The gods themselves are in the power of Necessity: “Not even the gods fight against Necessity.”⁸ It is impossible to investigate whence Necessity derives this power of constraining all living beings. One cannot even ask what the nature of this Necessity is and why it must constrain living beings. Not only will it not reply, but it will not even hear the questions that are addressed to it. And still less is it capable of allowing itself to be persuaded or convinced. Aristotle himself, like no one else, knew how to look around and investigate what was before him and behind him; he tells us that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”

Whatever field of philosophical thought we approach, we always run up against this blind, deaf and dumb Necessity. And we are convinced that philosophy begins only where the kingdom of strict Necessity discloses itself. Our thought, in the final analysis, is only the search for this strict Necessity. And still more, it is not for nothing that Parmenides affirmed “being and thought are one and the same.” To think is necessarily to take cognizance of the necessity of everything that forms the content of being. Whence comes Necessity? Does it come from being and end in thought? Or does it come from thought and end in being? We do not know. We do not even raise this question, knowing—doubtless instinctively—that such questions not only would not reconcile the theory of Knowledge which is concerned with “thought” (noein) with the ontology which is concerned with “being” (einai) but would forever separate them and set them at enmity with each other. No one wishes to take upon himself the responsibility for the results to which so ancient and universally recognized an idea as that of Necessity may lead. Thought would have preferred to consider Necessity a creation of being, that being, which by its very nature is more turbulent, might easily repudiate Necessity and declare it to be the child of pure thought. Being, despite what Parmenides says, is not the same as thought. But, on the other hand, being, at least within the bounds of philosophical systems, has not been able to find any adequate expression outside of thought. Even though it is not always submissive to Necessity, its attempts at struggle do not reach the domain of philosophy. We have said that philosophy has always meant and wished to mean reflection, Besinnung, looking backward. Now it is necessary to add that “looking backward,” by its very nature, excludes the possibility and even the thought of struggle. “Looking backward” paralyses man. He who turns around, who looks backward, must see what already exists, that is to say, the head of Medusa; and he who sees Medusa’s head is inevitably petrified, as the ancients already knew. And his thought, a petrified thought, will naturally correspond to his petrified being. Spinoza was in error when he said that if the stone were endowed with consciousness it would imagine that it falls to the ground freely. If someone had endowed the stone with consciousness, at the same time preserving for it its nature as a stone (this is obviously possible—the authority of the sober-headed Spinoza is sufficient guarantee for it), it would not for a single moment have doubted that Necessity is the primordial principle upon which all being in its totality—not only the real, but also the possible—is based. Is not the idea of Necessity the most adequate expression of petrification? And would not the thought and being of a stone endowed with consciousness be completely exhausted by the content that we find in the idea of Necessity?

But let us go further. Philosophy—we have seen—was, is, and wishes to be, a looking backward. To look backward does not at all mean, and we know this well, merely to turn the head. When Noah’s third son turned around he drew upon himself universal scorn. When the Cynics turned around they became dogs. But even worse things happen: one who turns around sees the head of Medusa and is changed into a stone. I know that the philosophers do not believe much in the possibility of such miraculous transformations and do not like to have them spoken of. But this is why I have reminded myself of Socrates’ demon. If Socrates had prejudices, if Socrates was superstitious, if Socrates sought protection against the light of his reason in the fantastic, if Socrates fled the clear and distinct world of ideas that he had himself created in order to take refuge with his demon—have we not the right, are we not obliged, even if it be only once in our life and only for a moment, to doubt, not our existence (there is no need for us to doubt this, any more than there was for Descartes), but that our thought, which we have become accustomed to consider as the only possible thought, leads us precisely to the sources of the final truths? Should we not tell ourselves that to think means not to look backward, as we habitually believe, but to look forward? And that we may even not look at all but proceed venturously forward with eyes closed, without foreseeing anything, without asking anything, without being disturbed by anything, without being concerned with adapting ourselves to the laws, great and small, the observance of which has always appeared to men as the condition of the possibility of seeing truths and the realities which these truths uncover? In general, must we forget fear, apprehension, anxiety?

It will be said that this is not given to man. But, then, let us recall once more the divine Plato, the great pupil of a great teacher, and his lesson: “everything must be dared.” We must try to stand up against Necessity itself, try to free the living and feeling Parmenides from dead and altogether indifferent power. To Necessity all things are indifferent, but to Parmenides all things are not indifferent. On the contrary, it is infinitely important to him that certain things should be and that certain other things should not be—for example, that the hemlock should be dependent on Socrates and not Socrates on the hemlock. Or rather, to make the matter still clearer, let us say this: in the year 399 B.C. the aged Socrates, condemned to death by his fellow citizens, took from the jailer’s hands the cup of hemlock and in that very moment, by Socrates’ will, the hemlock became a healthful drink. And this is not imagination or fantasy but reality, that which actually was. Imagination and fantasy, rather, are all that is related of Socrates’ death in the history manuals. And similarly, what Aristotle teaches us, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded,” is also only an invention. Necessity does listen and does allow itself to be persuaded, and it cannot oppose itself to Socrates; it cannot in general oppose itself to any man who has discovered the secret of its power and has enough audacity to command it without turning backward, to speak to it as “one who has power.”

Aristotle would certainly have paid no attention to thoughts of this kind. And Seneca and Cleanthes would have completely ignored them as being of no concern to themselves. But Epictetus, perhaps because he was more sensitive or perhaps because he was less well-bred, would have been enraged by them. Is this not an attempt to escape the principle of contradiction? In his eyes, as in Aristotle’s, this was clearly a mortal sin, and he considered that he had the right in this instance to give free reign to his anger. “I should have wished,” he said, “to be the slave of a man who does not admit the principle of contradiction. He would have told me to serve him wine; I would have given him vinegar or something still worse. He would have become angry and complained that I did not give him what he asked. But I would have answered, ‘You do not recognize the principle of contradiction; hence, wine, vinegar or any loathsome thing are all the same. And you do not recognize Necessity; therefore, no one has the power to compel you to regard the vinegar as something bad and the wine as something good. Drink the vinegar as if it were wine and be content!’ Or again, the master orders me to shave him, and I cut off his nose or his ear with the razor. He would again cry out, but I would repeat to him my argument. And I would do everything in the same way until I forced my master to recognize the truth that Necessity is invincible and the principle of contradiction omnipotent.”

We see that Epictetus repeats what Aristotle said or, more precisely, gives a commentary of Aristotle’s words. And, as almost always happens with the Stoics, Epictetus, in commenting, discovers what in Aristotle had been intentionally left in the dark, and so betrays the secret of the philosophical foundation of the Aristotelian truths. The principle of contradiction, as well as Necessity and the truth itself, with a capital letter or a small letter, are supported only by threats: one cuts off your ears or your nose, one pierces your eyes, etc. . . . Before such constraint all living beings—men and devils and angels, and even the gods—find themselves equal. Epictetus speaks of an imaginary master, but he would say the same thing of Heraclitus, of Parmenides, of Socrates and of God Himself.

IV

“Parmenides constrained, Socrates constrained”: it seems to Aristotle—no, it does not seem to him, it is obvious to him (and he is convinced that the whole world considers it obvious along with him)—that the truth has the power to constrain the great Parmenides, the great Socrates, anyone whomsoever. And (this is the most important thing) it is also obvious to him that it is completely absurd to ask who endowed the truth with this extraordinary power, and still more absurd to fight against this power. Whence came this conviction to him? From experience? But experience—Aristotle knew from Plato—is never the source of eternal truths. Experiential truths are just as limited and contingent as experience itself. “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded”—the source of this truth is not experience but something else.

Even the most ordinary experiential truth, even what is called the establishment of a fact, does not wish to be a relative and limited truth; the truths of fact claim, and indeed successfully, the title and dignity of eternal truths. I have given examples of this. In the year 399 B.C. Socrates was poisoned at Athens. This is a truth of experience, the establishment of a fact. But it does not wish to remain in this state. “That Socrates drank a cup of poison is, it is true, something that in reality happened once; but the historical truth that this was so will remain for all time, independently of the fact whether it is forgotten or not”—this is what we read in a book by a very prominent modern philosopher. No one will ever again have the right to say, “No, it was not so. It did not happen. Socrates was not poisoned.” Whether it be a question of the poisoning of Socrates or the poisoning of a mad dog is of no importance. The eternal truth, just like the necessity of which it was born, does not listen and does not allow itself to be persuaded. And, just as it does not hear or listen to anything, it does not make any distinctions: that Socrates should have been poisoned or that a mad dog should have been poisoned is absolutely indifferent to it. It automatically affixes the seal of eternity on both events and thus forever paralyses the seeker’s will. Once Necessity has intervened, man no longer dares to doubt, to be indignant, to contradict, to struggle and say, for example, “Yet it is not a dog but Socrates, the best and the wisest of men, a saint, who has been poisoned!”

Even if one agrees to recognize the proposition “a dog has been poisoned” as a truth which, though it establishes something that happened only once, is nevertheless an eternal truth, one cannot willingly resolve to fix the seal of eternity on the proposition “Socrates has been poisoned.” It is already quite enough that this truth should have subsisted for a long period of history. It has lived in the world all too long—almost twenty-five hundred years. But to promise it immortality, an existence outside of time that no forgetfulness will ever be able to destroy—who has taken upon himself the right to give such promises? And why does philosophy, which knows that everything that has a beginning must also have an end, forget this “eternal truth” and grant everlasting existence to a truth which did not exist before the year 399 B.C., which was born in 399 B.C.? Aristotle did not ask himself such questions. For him the truth was more precious than Plato, more precious than Socrates, more precious than everything in the world. Plato and Socrates, having had a beginning, must therefore have an end, while the truth which had a beginning, quite like the truth which had no beginning, will never have an end. And, if you should try to argue with Aristotle or to persuade him, it would be in vain; he would not hear, as Necessity does not hear. Even Aristotle is ti “something” (not tis, “someone,” but ti, “something”) that “does not hear”; he can but will not, or perhaps he cannot and will not, listen to any argument. He has lived so long in the company of “the truths” that he has assimilated their nature; he has himself become like a truth and sees the essence of his being, of all being, in “constraining and being constrained.” And if anyone should refuse obedience to him he would—as the honest Epictetus has told us—cut off his ears or his nose. He would force him to drink vinegar, and if all this were not enough, he would present him the cup of hemlock which, as we know, finally and once and for all (an eternal truth!) finished Socrates himself. Whatever one might say to him, Aristotle would not renounce his statement, “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And he does not rely, I repeat once more, on experience; experience does not give us eternal truths, it gives us only empirical, provisional, temporary truths. The source of his truths is something quite other.

In 399 B.C. the Athenians poisoned Socrates, and Plato his disciple, “constrained by the truth itself,” could not do other than think that Socrates had been poisoned. He speaks of Socrates’ death in the Crito, in the Phaedo and in his other dialogues. But in everything that he writes, there is always apparent this question: is there really in the world a power to which it is given to constrain us finally and forever to admit that Socrates was poisoned in 399? For Aristotle such a question, which in his eyes was obviously absurd, did not exist. He was convinced that the truth “Socrates was poisoned,” quite like the truth “a dog was poisoned,” is beyond all divine or human objections. The hemlock makes no distinction between Socrates and a dog. And we, “constrained to follow the phenomena, constrained by the truth itself,” are obliged in our judgments, whether mediate or immediate, to make no distinction between Socrates and a dog, even between Socrates and a mad dog.

Plato knew this no less than Aristotle. He also, let us recall, wrote: “Not even the gods fight against Necessity.” Nevertheless he himself did struggle against Necessity all his life. From this derives the dualism for which he has always been reproached; from this come his contradictions and paradoxes which so infuriated Aristotle. Plato was not content with the sources of truth that satisfied the curiosity of his great pupil. He knew that it is difficult to find “the Father and Creator of all the universe” and that “if one finds Him, one cannot show Him to everyone.” Nevertheless, he strained all his powers in an attempt to overcome these difficulties as well as this impossibility.

It seems at times that it is only difficulties that attract Plato, that his philosophical genius deploys its full activity only before the impossible. “It is necessary to dare everything,” and it is all the more necessary to dare when there are fewer chances, in the eyes of the average man, of obtaining anything. There is no hope of wresting Socrates from the power of the eternal truth, which is as indifferent to Socrates as to a mad dog and which has swallowed him up forever. Therefore, philosophy and the philosophers must think of nothing other than to deliver Socrates. If one cannot do this otherwise, he must go down to the netherworld, as Orpheus did. He must implore the gods, as Pygmalion once did, whom the inert Necessity which directs the natural course of things would not hear. Pygmalion’s desire to animate the statue that he had made—was this not and is it not still, for logical thought, the height of madness and immorality? But before the tribunal of the gods, who, unlike Necessity, know how and are willing to allow themselves to be persuaded, the impossible and the senseless become possible and sensible. God thinks and speaks quite otherwise than Necessity. “Everything that is bound,” says God in the works of Plato, “may be dissolved; but only the wicked can wish to dissolve that which is well bound and holds together as it should. This is why, in general, you who were created are not protected against dissolution and are not immortal; but you will not be dissolved and you will not experience the fate of mortality because, by my will, you will receive a more lasting strength than that which you had at your birth.”⁹

Not only Aristotle but no one, not even the most ardent admirers of the Platonic truth, can read these words without irritation or resentment. What is this “my will” which arrogates to itself the right and power to change the natural course of things? We “understand” Necessity, and we “understand” also that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded” (why we understand it and who the “we” are who understand—these questions we do not even wish to raise). But when “by my will” intervenes, the whole spiritual nature of thinking man, his soul (in general the soul does not exist, but for this occasion it will be rehabilitated), is indignant at the daring and impudence of these pretensions. “By my will” is nothing else than the deus ex machina; but we think, with Kant (can we think otherwise?), that “in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge, the deus ex machina is the greatest absurdity that one could choose.” Or as the same Kant says elsewhere with still greater force, “to say that a supreme being has wisely introduced into us such ideas and principles a priori is completely to destroy all philosophy.”

Why does Necessity which does not listen and does not allow itself to be persuaded seem to us a reasonable supposition, while the deus ex machina seems to us to open the way to, and protect, all kinds of caprices (jeder Grille . . . Vorschub gibt) and appears to us so absurd? The deus ex machina threatens to destroy the very possibility of knowledge. But Kant’s task was not to defend and glorify knowledge at all costs. He had undertaken the “critique” of pure reason. He should therefore have put, before everything else, this question: are our knowledge and that which people ordinarily call philosophy so precious that we must take up their defense at the cost of any sacrifice, no matter how great? On the contrary, perhaps, since knowledge is so intimately bound to Necessity that it becomes impossible when one admits the deus ex machina (höheres Wesen), would it not be better to renounce knowledge and seek the protection of the “caprice” that so frightened Kant? To show oneself ready to renounce knowledge—is this not the only means (or at least the first step) to free oneself from that so greatly detested Necessity (which as we know, sometimes made Aristotle himself groan), from that Necessity which is not even afraid to offend the gods?

What Kant and all of us after Kant judge to be the most absurd of suppositions allows us to entertain the possibility of freeing mortals and immortals from that implacable power which, by some unknown miracle, has conquered the world and subjugated all living beings. Can it be that the deus ex machina might put an end to the hateful parere (obedience) and return to men the creative jubere (commanding) which the gods themselves had to renounce at some mysterious and terrible moment of the distant past? Can it be that the fall of Necessity would bring about the fall of the other usurpers to whom we feeble slaves, accustomed to the parere, have handed over our destiny? The principle of contradiction and the principle of identity have also been introduced into the world without authorization to act as masters therein. When we affirm that sound is heavy, these principles intervene and immediately oppose their veto: “we do not permit this, therefore it is not so.” But when it is said “Socrates has been poisoned,” these two principles remain passive and even give their blessing to this judgment and confer upon it, as we recall, eternity. But does there not exist somewhere in the depths of being a “reality” wherein the nature of the principles of contradiction and identity undergoes a radical transformation, wherein it is not they but man who commands, wherein they obey man’s commandments, i.e., wherein they do not intervene when sounds become heavy but protest when righteous men are put to death? Then the proposition “sound is heavy” would not seem absurd, while the proposition “Socrates has been poisoned” would become contradictory and, by that very fact, non-existent.

If such things be possible, if it be possible that Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded bows down before the caprice (Grille) of man, if the principles of contradiction and identity cease to be principles and become merely executive instruments, if the impossible becomes possible—what is then the value of the “eternal truths” accumulated by thinking humanity? It will be asked: how is one to know if such a reality is possible? That is just it: how is one to know? Once we begin to ask, we shall be told, as we have already been told, that such a reality is impossible; that Necessity, the principle of identity, the principle of contradiction and the other principles have ruled, do rule and will forever rule in our world as well as in all the worlds which have existed and will ever exist; that there never have been and never will be heavy sounds; that people have put to death and will continue to put to death wise men; and that the power of the gods themselves has limits that cannot be transcended.

But what if we do not ask anything of anyone? Are we capable of such daring and of so realizing the free will with which the philosophers entice us? Or better still, do we desire such freedom—a freedom such that the principles of contradiction and of identity and Necessity itself should be under our command? It seems that we have no great desire for it and that we should be afraid to grant such freedom to God Himself.

V

Aristotle and Epictetus submitted to Necessity and reconciled themselves to it. Plato did not reconcile himself to Necessity, even though he understood, quite as well as Aristotle and Epictetus, what dangers threaten the man who refuses to submit to this power. Plato saw quite well, just as all of us see, that in the year 399 Socrates was poisoned. And nevertheless, or rather precisely because he had seen it, because he had been “constrained” to see it with his own eyes, he suddenly had for the first time that deep, indestructible suspicion which is so incomprehensible to men: are our own eyes, then, really the source of the final metaphysical truths? In the Symposium he writes: “The spiritual eye becomes keen when the corporeal eyes begin to lose their sharpness” (219A).

It may be assumed that when this idea came to his mind for the first time Plato himself was frightened by it and, before deciding to express it aloud, had more than once to give himself courage by remembering “it is necessary to dare everything.” And indeed, if there are two kinds of eyes, who will say with which eyes we see truth and with which error? With all the good will in the world we should never be able to answer this question. Is it the corporeal eye that discovers the truth or is it the spiritual eye? The one supposition is as admissible as the other. The physical eyes can distinguish truth from error. Epictetus could force a man to distinguish vinegar from wine, shaving from cutting, etc., but Epictetus, quite like Aristotle, had no power over the spiritual eyes. For both of them relied on Necessity, both of them were “constrained by the truth itself,” and they wished and were able also “to constrain” others. But this was possible only so long as those to whom they addressed themselves were beings equipped with corporeal eyes. These one can constrain by threats. Necessity has power over them. But he who has lost his corporeal eyes, who, instead of corporeal vision, possesses “spiritual vision”—does Necessity have any power over him? Is it not in this that that miracle of transfiguration which was mentioned above consists? Parmenides is no longer constrained but rather constrains; the principle of contradiction does not command but obeys; the vinegar becomes wine, the razor does not cut, etc. And the whole arsenal of Aristotle’s and Epictetus’ threats loses, like salt which ceases to be salty, all sense and meaning.

I think that there cannot be two opinions on this matter: Plato’s “spiritual vision” is nothing other than a desperate attempt to tear himself away from the power of Necessity which has been throughout all time the foundation of human thought. The best commentary on the passage of the Symposium that we have quoted is found in the words of Plotinus: “Thought was granted to the divine, but not to the best beings, as an eye intended to correct their natural blindness. But what would it serve for the eye to see what is, if it were itself the light? And so if someone has need of eyes, it is that, being himself blind, he seeks the light.”¹⁰ “Spiritual vision” is no longer vision in the proper sense; that is, the passive consideration and acceptance of truth prepared in advance, imposed by an external constraint—as truth, according to Aristotle or Epictetus, is imposed. What appears to the latter as the essential moment of truth, the power of constraining all men, is found to be a mere accident. Circumstances change and this constraint becomes at first useless, inconvenient, intolerable, then finally a distortion of the very nature of truth—at least of the metaphysical truth concerning which we are here speaking. The truth of the corporeal eye maintains itself by force, by threats. Sometimes it also employs allurements. It forces the disobedient to drink vinegar; it cuts off their noses, their ears, etc. . . . It does not know any other means of bringing it about that men should agree to recognize it. If you deprive such a truth of the means of coercion that it has at its disposal, who would then be willing to follow it? Who would recognize of his own free will that Socrates has been poisoned? Who would delight in seeing the phenomena lead the great Parmenides, as if he were not Parmenides but a horse or a mule? All that is human in the living being imperiously demands that no one should be permitted to touch Socrates, and that the phenomena should not lead the great Parmenides as they wish but rather docilely and trustingly follow Parmenides.

Spinoza’s stone endowed with consciousness would have approved, one may believe, the order of existing things or, rather, the ordo et connexio rerum visible to the corporeal eye. But the living person will never accept this order. And if, nevertheless, many have sincerely sought to secure such a state of affairs in saecula saeculorum, it is not at all necessary to deduce therefrom what people ordinarily deduce: namely, that one can see the final truths with the corporeal eye and that Necessity has at its disposal a miraculous power, a supernatural force, to transform the temporal into the eternal. It is necessary to draw therefrom a conclusion which will perhaps seem at first sight paradoxical and consequently completely inadmissible for our ignava ratio (lazy reason) but which, it is to be believed, is the only truth: “Not all are created under the same conditions but to some eternal life is preordained, to others eternal damnation.” Or, if you do not care for theology and Calvin, the same thought may be formulated using Spinoza’s words: most men only resemble men, in reality they are not men but stones endowed with consciousness. And what we customarily call “the laws of thought” are only the laws of the thought of stones endowed with consciousness. Or again: it seems that, in the course of man’s brief existence, each of us often has occasion to see himself transformed into a stone endowed with consciousness—and this precisely when he turns backward, inquires, and begins to reflect. Plato sadly felt this and sought with all the powers of his soul to escape the petrification that threatened him. For Aristotle, on the other hand, to try to fight what he considered the natural order of things and, consequently, the final and definitive reality, was the height of folly.

Can it be hoped that the enfeebled physical eye may be replaced by a spiritual eye that will permit us to see another world and no longer that which we have always seen and shall always and everywhere see? It is here that there begins, for Aristotle, the domain of the fantastic, against which he defends himself and others by means of his logic as well as his metaphysics and his ethics, by his categorical statement “Cry halt before Necessity.” Plato, on the contrary, drew his inspiration from the fantastic. For Plato, the corporeal vision was so intimately bound to the idea of “constraining and being constrained,” to the idea that the death of Socrates is an eternal truth in the world where it is the corporeal eyes that discover the truth, that it did not seem to him sufficient to weaken our physical vision and our physical being in general. As long as we exist physically we are under the domination of Necessity. One can put us to the torture and force us to recognize anything whatever.

I shall recall again—for one repeats these things in vain, people always forget them—how the noble Epictetus treated all those who were unwilling to follow him, how he pierced their eyes and cut off their noses and ears, and how Aristotle forced the great Parmenides to accept his truths. Can one live in a world where the truth—i.e., that which, according to us, is the most powerful, the best, and the most desirable thing on earth—tortures men and transforms them into stones endowed with consciousness? We must flee this world, flee it as quickly as possible, flee it without turning backward, without asking where we are going and without considering what the future will bring us. We must burn, tear out, and destroy in ourselves everything that stupefies, petrifies, crushes, and draws us towards the visible world, if we wish to save ourselves from the terrible danger (damnatio aeterna) that lies in wait for us. Not only the corporeal eye but all of the “corporeality” through which we arrive at the constraining truths must be torn out of man, so that the vinegar may become wine and that a new eye may arise in place of the pierced eye. But how can we do this? Who can do it? Plato replies: this is the task of philosophy, of a philosophy that is no longer science and no longer even knowledge but, as he says in the Phaedo, meletê thanatou, “the practice of death”—of a philosophy capable of replacing the natural eye of man by a supernatural eye, i.e., an eye which sees not what is but thanks to which what one sees “by one’s will” becomes what is.

Aristotle does not understand Plato’s “practice of death,” even though this “thought,” if one may call it a thought, is developed in the Phaedo and emphasized with all the force of which Plato was capable. Plato says that all those who sincerely devoted themselves to philosophy were doing nothing but preparing themselves by degrees for death and to die. It is true that he adds immediately afterwards that the philosophers generally hide this from the whole world. But there was no need even, it seems, to hide it. Plato did not hide it: he proclaimed his “practice of death” aloud and yet no one understood it. Before as after Plato, the whole world is convinced that truths and revelations are not to be sought in death but that death is rather the end of revelations and truths.

People do not argue with Plato or contradict him, but almost no one speaks of the “practice of death.” The only exception is Spinoza, who, like Plato, was not afraid “to dare everything” or to approach the limits of being. As if in answer to Plato, he declares: “a free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”¹¹ This is basically what Aristotle would already have had to say. Here is the only way of freeing oneself from Plato with his spiritual eye and his “preparation for death.” There are no eyes other than the corporeal eyes, and even Spinoza’s oculi mentis (eyes of the mind) are in a certain sense only the corporeal eyes arrived at a higher degree of evolution or, if you wish, the corporeal eyes par excellence. The oculi mentis bring us to the tertium genus cognitionis (third kind of knowledge), to cognitio intuitiva (intuitive knowledge), that is, precisely to the kind of knowledge where Necessity shows itself to us in all its omnipotence and terrible magnificence. Sub specie necessitatis is transformed, through Spinoza’s will, into sub specie aeternitatis, that is, Necessity becomes an ideal at the same time that it is a reality. It comes from reason, which Spinoza, forgetting his promise to speak of everything as the mathematicians speak of lines and surfaces, calls “the greatest gift and the divine light,” and to which he erects an altar as the only god worthy of veneration: “what altar will he build for himself who insults reason’s majesty?” Reason alone can give us that “one thing necessary” which, as all the wise men have taught, makes man, whom we see and who exists, and the gods, whom no one has ever seen either with corporeal eyes or with spiritual eyes, to live. “Contentment with one’s self can spring from reason, and that contentment which springs from reason is the highest possible.”¹²

Spinoza did not like Aristotle, perhaps because he did not know him well enough but more perhaps because even in Aristotle he discovered too obvious traces of that “mythological” thought of which he wished to believe himself completely freed. Spinoza endeavored to create not the “best philosophy” but the “true philosophy.” He assured everyone else as well as himself that man has no need of the “best,” that it is enough for him to have the “true.” But Spinoza was doubly wrong. Aristotle, as we have seen, believed in the sovereign rights of truth and never attempted in his philosophical and scientific researches to protest against the subordinate and dependent situation to which the very conditions of our existence condemn us. He spoke, it is true, of the purposes of creation, he said that nature does nothing in vain, etc. But this was only a methodological procedure, a procedure for seeking truth, just as his primum movens immobile (first unmoved mover) was no longer a living god inhabiting Olympus or any other place in the real universe, however distant from us, but only an active force determining the formation and succession of all the observable phenomena of the external world. For him, the summum bonum (highest good) of men is limited by the possible, and the possible is determined by reason.