Nature and History in the Greek Conception of the Cosmos

Extract

Nature and history are for us two diametrically opposed possibilities of organization, knowledge, interpretation, and evaluation of the reality around us. Since the Renaissance, the world can no longer be thought of as a structured and coherent whole, and its meaning always remains partial. The world bears within it a duality which nothing can surmount: Nature and mind represent the two poles of a reality which Jean Mair described as early as the end of the fifteenth century as non facientia unum. The being of Nature consists henceforth in being an object of representation, of scientific knowledge, and of technical exploitation. The being of man consists in placing himself as subject opposite the world, which is conceived as an object essentially foreign to man, “mute” in what concerns his ultimate destination. Up to that time, man knew himself by referring to an “objective,” undiscussed world; existence could be constantly shaken by the deepest terrors, but it was not problematical : man knew his natural place in a world ordered by a sovereign reason. Now with the destruction of the theophanic universe, it was not only man's place in the world which became problematical but the very idea of the universe; the experience of the living totality of the world was progressively drained of its substance. The new “situation of man in the world” is that of a being savagely freed of everything, profoundly isolated in the midst of an infinitely open world in which the global has less and less meaning and in which it is no longer a question of participating in being but of doing and of having. Rimbaud's remark, “We are not in the world,” began to be true; incapable of finding his support in the universe, placing all his pride in seeking his truth within himself, man then turned to history to ask of it those answers which the former wisdom, the former Weltweisheit, or revelation could no longer give him. In the “ocean of Cartesian doubt” Vico saw history as the only firmum et mansurum to which man could lay claim. As the work of a freedom progressively creating its own content for itself, as a return to itself of the mind lost or “alienated” in matter, history was becoming the only humanly possible way of conceiving the “natural” place of man in the world, the sole encompassing (τɛρι∊χoν) totality still capable of serving as a horizon for his triumphant self-certainty, the only world still conceivable after the suppression of transcendency and the loss of presence. According to Marx’ profound observation, history had the mission, “once the thither side of truth had vanished, to establish the truth of the hither side.” To the “dead” or “hidden” God and to “mute” or inaudible Nature, man opposed this derisory fragment of time which he had succeeded in making his and from which he hoped to derive at once the truth of his being and the norm of his action.