which, wherever its authority remained unchallenged, stood be-
tween the impact of modernity and the masses of believers. Just as
the immediate consequence of this loss of certainty was a new zeal
for making good in this life as though it were only an overlong
period of probation,34 so the loss of certainty of truth ended in a
34. Max Weber, who, despite some errors in detail which by now have been
corrected, is still the only historian who raised the question of the modern age
with the depth and relevance corresponding to its importance, was also aware
that it was not a simple loss of faith that caused the reversal in the estimate of
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The Human Condition
new, entirely unprecedented zeal for truthfulness—as though man
could afford to be a liar only so long as he was certain of the
unchallengeable existence of truth and objective reality, which
surely would survive and defeat all his lies.86 The radical change in
moral standards occurring in the first century of the modern age
was inspired by the needs and ideals of its most important group of
men, the new scientists; and the modern cardinal virtues—success,
industry, and truthfulness—are at the same time the greatest
virtues of modern science.36
The learned societies and Royal Academies became the morally
influential centers where scientists were organized to find ways
and means by which nature could be trapped by experiments and
instruments so that she would be forced to yield her secrets. And
this gigantic task, to which no single man but only the collective
effort of the best minds of mankind could possibly be adequate,
prescribed the rules of behavior and the new standards of judg-
ment. Where formerly truth had resided in the kind of "theory"
that since the Greeks had meant the contemplative glance of the
beholder who was concerned with, and received, the reality open-
ing up before him, the question of success took over and the test of
theory became a "practical" one—whether or not it will work.
Theory became hypothesis, and the success of the hypothesis be-
came truth. This all-important standard of success, however, does
not depend upon practical considerations or the technical develop-
ments which may or may not accompany specific scientific dis-
coveries. The criterion of success is inherent in the very essence
and progress of modern science quite apart from its applicability.
Success here is not at all the empty idol to which it degenerated in
work and labor, but the loss of the certitudo salutis, of the certainty of salvation.
In our context, it would appear that this certainty was only one among the many
certainties lost with the arrival of the modern age.
35. It certainly is quite striking that not one of the major religions, with the
exception of Zoroastrianism, has ever included lying as such among the mortal
sins. Not only is there no commandment: Thou shalt not lie (for the command-
ment: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, is of course of a
different nature), but it seems as though prior to puritan morality nobody ever
considered lies to be serious offenses.
36. This is the chief point of Bronowski's article quoted above.
[ 27* ]
The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
bourgeois society; it was, and in the sciences has been ever since, a
veritable triumph of human ingenuity against overwhelming odds.
The Cartesian solution of universal doubt or its salvation from
the two interconnected nightmares—that everything is a dream
and there is no reality and that not God but an evil spirit rules the
world and mocks man—was similar in method and content to the
turning away from truth to truthfulness and from reality to relia-
bility. Descartes' conviction that "though our mind is not the
measure of things or of truth, it must assuredly be the measure of
things that we affirm or deny"37 echoes what scientists in general
and without explicit articulation had discovered: that even if there
is no truth, man can be truthful, and even if there is no reliable
certainty, man can be reliable. If there was salvation, it had to lie
in man himself, and if there was a solution to the questions raised
by doubting, it had to come from doubting. If everything has be-
come doubtful, then doubting at least is certain and real. Whatever
may be the state of reality and of truth as they are given to the
senses and to reason, "nobody can doubt of his doubt and remain
uncertain whether he doubts or does not doubt."38 The famous
cogito ergo sum ("I think, hence I am") did not spring for Descartes from any self-certainty of thought as such—in which case, indeed,
thought would have acquired a new dignity and significance for
man—but was a mere generalization of a dubito ergo sum.S9 In
37. From a letter of Descartes to Henry More, quoted from Koyre, op. cit.,
p. 117.
38. In the dialogue La recherche de la verite par la lumiere naturelle, where Descartes exposes his fundamental insights without technical formality, the central position of doubting is even more in evidence than in his other works. Thus
Eudoxe, who stands for Descartes, explains: "Vous pouvez douter avec raison de
toutes les choses dont la connaissance ne vous vient que par l'office des sens; mais pouvez-vous douter de votre doute et rester incertain si vous doutez ou non? . . .
vous qui doutez vous etes, et cela est si vrai que vous n'en pouvez douter davan-
tage" (Pleiade ed., p. 680).
39. "Je doute, done je suis, ou bien ce qui est la meme chose: je pense, done je suis" {ibid., p. 687). Thought in Descartes has indeed a mere derivative character: "Car s'il est vrai que je doute, comme je n'en puis douter, il est egalement vrai que je pense; en effet douter est-il autre chose que penser d'une certaine
maniere?" {ibid., p. 686). The leading idea of this philosophy is by no means that I would not be able to think without being, but that "nous ne saurions douter sans etre, et que cela est la premiere connaissance certaine qu'on peut acquerir" {Prin-
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The Human Condition
other words, from the mere logical certainty that in doubting some-
thing I remain aware of a process of doubting in my consciousness,
Descartes concluded that those processes which go on in the mind
of man himself have a certainty of their own, that they can become
the object of investigation in introspection.
39
I N T R O S P E C T I O N A N D T H E L O S S
O F C O M M O N S E N S E
Introspection, as a matter of fact, not the reflection of man's mind
on the state of his soul or body but the sheer cognitive concern of
consciousness with its own content (and this is the essence of the
Cartesian cogitatio, where cogito always means cogito me cogitare) must yield certainty, because here nothing is involved except what
the mind has produced itself; nobody is interfering but the producer
of the product, man is confronted with nothing and nobody but
himself. Long before the natural and physical sciences began to
wonder if man is capable of encountering, knowing, and compre-
hending anything except himself, modern philosophy had made
sure in introspection that man concerns himself only with himself.
Descartes believed that the certainty yielded by his new method of
introspection is the certainty of the I-am.40 Man, in other words,
carries his certainty, the certainty of his existence, within himself;
the sheer functioning of consciousness, though it cannot possibly
assure a worldly reality given to the senses and to reason, confirms
beyond doubt the reality of sensations and of reasoning, that is, the
reality of processes which go on in the mind. These are not unlike
cipes [Pleiade ed.], Part I, sec. 7). The argument itself is of course not new. One finds it, for instance, almost word for word in Augustine's De libero arbhrio (ch.
3), but without the implication that this is the only certainty against the possibility of a Dieu trompeur and, generally, without being the very fundament of a philosophical system.
40. That the cogito ergo sum contains a logical error, that, as Nietzsche pointed out, it should read: cogito, ergo cogitationes sunt, and that therefore the mental awareness expressed in the cogito does not prove that I am, but only that consciousness is, is another matter and need not interest us here (see Nietzsche,
Wille zur Macht, No. 484).
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The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
the biological processes that go on in the body and which, when
one becomes aware of them, can also convince one of its working
reality. In so far as even dreams are real, since they presuppose a
dreamer and a dream, the world of consciousness is real enough.
The trouble is only that just as it would be impossible to infer from
the awareness of bodily processes the actual shape of any body, in-
cluding one's own, so it is impossible to reach out from the mere
consciousness of sensations, in which one senses his senses and in
which even the sensed object becomes part of sensation, into reality
with its shapes, forms, colors, and constellations. The seen tree
may be real enough for the sensation of vision, just as the dreamed
tree is real enough for the dreamer as long as the dream lasts, but
neither can ever become a real tree.
It is out of these perplexities that Descartes and Leibniz needed
to prove, not the existence of God, but his goodness, the one dem-
onstrating that no evil spirit rules the world and mocks man and
the other that this world, including man, is the best of all possible
worlds. The point about these exclusively modern justifications,
known since Leibniz as theodicies, is that the doubt does not con-
cern the existence of a highest being, which, on the contrary, is
taken for granted, but concerns his revelation, as given in biblical
tradition, and his intentions with respect to man and world, or
rather the adequateness of the relationship between man and world.
Of these two, the doubt that the Bible or nature contains divine
revelation is a matter of course, once it has been shown that revela-
tion as such, the disclosure of reality to the senses and of truth to
reason, is no guaranty for either. Doubt of the goodness of God,
however, the notion of a Dieu trompeur, arose out of the very ex-
perience of deception inherent in the acceptance of the new world
view, a deception whose poignancy lies in its irremediable repeti-
tiveness, for no knowledge about the heliocentric nature of our
planetary system can change the fact that every day the sun is seen
circling the earth, rising and setting at its preordained location.
Only now, when it appeared as though man, if it had not been for
the accident of the telescope, might have been deceived forever,
did the ways of God really become wholly inscrutable; the more
man learned about the universe, the less he could understand the
intentions and purposes for which he should have been created.
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The Hu?nan Condition
The goodness of the God of the theodicies, therefore, is strictly the
quality of a deus ex machina; inexplicable goodness is ultimately the
only thing that saves reality in Descartes' philosophy (the co-
existence of mind and extension, res cogitans and res extensd), as it saves the prestabilized harmony between man and world in Leibniz.41
The very ingenuity of Cartesian introspection, and hence the
reason why this philosophy became so all-important to the spiritual
and intellectual development of the modern age, lies first in that it
had used the nightmare of non-reality as a means of submerging all
worldly objects into the stream of consciousness and its processes.
The "seen tree" found in consciousness through introspection is no
longer the tree given in sight and touch, an entity in itself with an
unalterable identical shape of its own. By being processed into an
object of consciousness on the same level with a merely remem-
bered or entirely imaginary thing, it becomes part and parcel of
this process itself, of that consciousness, that is, which one knows
only as an ever-moving stream. Nothing perhaps could prepare our
minds better for the eventual dissolution of matter into energy, of
objects into a whirl of atomic occurrences, than this dissolution of
objective reality into subjective states of mind or, rather, into sub-
jective mental processes. Second, and this was of even greater
relevance to the initial stages of the modern age, the Cartesian
method of securing certainty against universal doubt corresponded
most precisely to the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from
the new physical science: though one cannot know truth as some-
thing given and disclosed, man can at least know what he makes
himself. This, indeed, became the most general and most generally
accepted attitude of the modern age, and it is this conviction, rather
41. This quality of God as a deus ex machina, as the only possible solution to universal doubt, is especially manifest in Descartes' Meditations. Thus, he says in the third meditation: In order to eliminate the cause of doubting, "je dois examiner s'il y a un Dieu .. . ; et si je trouve qu'il y en ait un, je dois aussi examiner s'il peut etre trompeur: car sans la connaissance de ces deux verites, je ne vois pas que je
puisse jamais etre certain d'aucune chose." And he concludes at the end of the
fifth meditation: "Ainsi je reconnais tres clairement que la certitude et la verite de toute science depend de la seule connaissance du vrai Dieu: en sorte qu'avant
que je le connusse, je ne pouvais savoir parfaitement aucune autre chose"
(Pleiade ed., pp. 177,208).
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The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
than the doubt underlying it, that propelled one generation after
another for more than three hundred years into an ever-quickening
pace of discovery and development.
Cartesian reason is entirely based "on the implicit assumption
that the mind can only know that which it has itself produced and
retains in some sense within itself."42 Its highest ideal must there-
fore be mathematical knowledge as the modern age understands it,
that is, not the knowledge of ideal forms given outside the mind
but of forms produced by a mind which in this particular instance
does not even need the stimulation—or, rather, the irritation—of
the senses by objects other than itself. This theory is certainly
what Whitehead calls it, "the outcome of common-sense in re-
treat."43 For common sense, which once had been the one by which
all other senses, with their intimately private sensations, were
fitted into the common world, just as vision fitted man into the
visible world, now became an inner faculty without any world re-
lationship. This sense now was called common merely because it
happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is
not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot
have in common, strictly speaking; their faculty of reasoning can
only happen to be the same in everybody.44 The fact that, given the
problem of two plus two we ail will come out with the same answer,
four, is henceforth the very model of common-sense reasoning.
Reason, in Descartes no less than in Hobbes, becomes "reckon-
ing with consequences," the faculty of deducing and concluding,
that is, of a process which man at any moment can let loose within
himself. The mind of this man—to remain in the sphere of mathe-
matics—no longer looks upon "two-and-two-are-four" as an equa-
tion in which two sides balance in a self-evident harmony, but un-
derstands the equation as the expression of a process in which two
and two become four in order to generate further processes of addi-
42. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Ann Arbor ed.), p. 32.
43. Ibid., p. 43. The first to comment on and criticize the absence of common sense in Descartes was Vico (see De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, ch. 3).
44. This transformation of common sense into an inner sense is characteristic
of the whole modern age; in the German language it is indicated by the difference
between the older German word Gemeinsinn and the more recent expression
gesunder Menschenverstand which replaced it.
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The Human Condition
tion which eventually will lead into the infinite. This faculty the
modern age calls common-sense reasoning; it is the playing of the
mind with itself, which comes to pass when the mind is shut off
from all reality and "senses" only itself. The results of this play
are compelling "truths" because the structure of one man's mind is
supposed to differ no more from that of another than the shape of
his body. Whatever difference there may be is a difference of
mental power, which can be tested and measured like horsepower.
Here the old definition of man as an animal rationale acquires a ter-
rible precision: deprived of the sense through which man's five
animal senses are fitted into a world common to all men, human
beings are indeed no more than animals who are able to reason, "to
reckon with consequences."
The perplexity inherent in the discovery of the Archimedean
point was and still is that the point outside the earth was found by
an earth-bound creature, who found that he himself lived not only
in a different but in a topsy-turvy world the moment he tried to
apply his universal world view to his actual surroundings. The
Cartesian solution of this perplexity was to move the Archimedean
point into man himself,46 to choose as ultimate point of reference
the pattern of the human mind itself, which assures itself of reality
and certainty within a framework of mathematical formulas which
are its own products. Here the famous reductio scientiae ad mathe-
maticam permits replacement of what is sensuously given by a sys-
tem of mathematical equations where all real relationships are dis-
solved into logical relations between man-made symbols. It is this
replacement which permits modern science to fulfil its "task of
producing" the phenomena and objects it wishes to observe.46 And
the assumption is that neither God nor an evil spirit can change the
fact that two and two equal four.
45. This removal of the Archimedean point into man himself was a conscious
operation of Descartes: "Car a partir de ce doute universel, comme a partir d'un point fixe et immobile, je me suis propose de faire deriver la connaissance de
Dieu, de vous-memes et de toutes les choses qui existent dans le monde"
(Recherche de la verite, p. 680).
46. Frank, op. cit., defines science by its "task of producing desired observable phenomena."
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The Vita Activa and the Modern Age
40
T H O U G H T A N D T H E M O D E R N
W O R L D V I E W
The Cartesian removal of the Archimedean point into the mind of
man, while it enabled man to carry it, as it were, within himself
wherever he went and thus freed him from given reality altogether
—that is, from the human condition of being an inhabitant of the
earth—has perhaps never been as convincing as the universal doubt
from which it sprang and which it was supposed to dispel.47 Today,
at any rate, we find in the perplexities confronting natural scientists
in the midst of their greatest triumphs the same nightmares which
have haunted the philosophers from the beginning of the modern
age. This nightmare is present in the fact that a mathematical
equation, such as of mass and energy—which originally was des-
tined only to save the phenomena, to be in agreement with observ-
able facts that could also be explained differently, just as the
Ptolemaic and Copernican systems originally differed only in sim-
plicity and harmony—actually lends itself to a very real conversion
of mass into energy and vice versa, so that the mathematical "con-
version" implicit in every equation corresponds to convertibility in
reality; it is present in the weird phenomenon that the systems of
non-Euclidean mathematics were found without any forethought of
applicability or even empirical meaning before they gained their
surprising validity in Einstein's theory; and it is even more trou-
bling in the inevitable conclusion that "the possibility of such an
application must be held open for all, even the most remote con-
structions of pure mathematics."48 If it should be true that a whole
universe, or rather any number of utterly different universes will
spring into existence and "prove" whatever over-all pattern the
47. Ernst Cassirer's hope that "doubt is overcome by being outdone" and that the theory of relativity would free the human mind from its last "earthly re-mainder," namely, the anthropomorphism inherent in "the manner in which we make empirical measurements of space and time" (op. At., pp. 389, 382), has not been fulfilled; on the contrary, doubt not of the validity of scientific statements
but of the intelligibility of scientific data has increased during the last decades.
48. Ibid., p. 443.
f 28! 1
The Human Condition
human mind has constructed, then man may indeed, for a moment,
rejoice in a reassertion of the "pre-established harmony between
pure mathematics and physics,"49 between mind and matter, be-
tween man and the universe. But it will be difficult to ward off the
suspicion that this mathematically preconceived world may be a
dream world where every dreamed vision man himself produces
has the character of reality only as long as the dream lasts. And his
suspicions will be enforced when he must discover that the events
and occurrences in the infinitely small, the atom, follow the same
laws and regularities as in the infinitely large, the planetary sys-
tems.50 What this seems to indicate is that if we inquire into nature
from the standpoint of astronomy we receive planetary systems,
while if we carry out our astronomical inquiries from the stand-
point of the earth we receive geocentric, terrestrial systems.
In any event, wherever we try to transcend appearance beyond
all sensual experience, even instrument-aided, in order to catch the
ultimate secrets of Being, which according to our physical world
view is so secretive that it never appears and still so tremendously
powerful that it produces all appearance, we find that the same
patterns rule the macrocosm and the microcosm alike, that we
receive the same instrument readings. Here again, we may for a
moment rejoice in a refound unity of the universe, only to fall prey
to the suspicion that what we have found may have nothing to do
with either the macrocosmos or the microcosmos, that we deal
only with the patterns of our own mind, the mind which designed
the instruments and put nature under its conditions in the experi-
ment—prescribed its laws to nature, in Kant's phrase—in which
case it is really as though we were in the hands of an evil spirit who
49. Hermann Minkowski, "Raum und Zeit," in Lorentz, Einstein, and Min-
kowski, Das Relativkatsprinzip (1913); quoted from Cassirer, op. cit., p. 419.
50. And this doubt is not a