The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence 9780226038056, 9780226185156, 2015010509, 022603805X

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The Second Birth

The Second Birth On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence T i l o S c h a b e rt T r a n s l at e d b y Jav i e r I bá ñ e z - N o é

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Tilo Schabert is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Erlangen in Germany and has taught at several other institutions around the world. A former secretary general for the International Council for Philosophy and the Humanities at UNESCO, he is the author of many books in several different languages, including, in English, Boston Politics and How World Politics Is Made. Javier Ibáñez-Noé is associate professor of philosophy at Marquette University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America Original publication: Tilo Schabert, Die zweite Geburt des Menschen. Von den politischen Anfängen menschlicher Existenz © 2009 Verlag Karl Alber, part of Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg im Breisgau 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03805-6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18515-6 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226185156.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schabert, Tilo, author. [Zweite Geburt des Menschen. English] The second birth : on the political beginnings of human existence / Tilo Schabert ; translated by Javier Ibáñez-Noé. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-03805-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-18515-6 (ebook) 1. Political science—Anthropological aspects. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. Political anthropology. 4. Civilization. I. Ibáñez-Noé, Javier, translator. II. Title. ja71.s276813 2015 320.01—dc23 2015010509 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

My friend, why are the great gods in council? E n k i d u , after a dream, addressing Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh 6.11)

Contents

Preface xv

Introduction 1 At the Start 5 In Number 9 In Body 15 In Action 32 In Consciousness 36 In Grace 43 In the Divine 53 In Thought 65 In Creation 72 In Eros 81 In Time 96 In Law 105 In Freedom 113 Epilogue 123 Acknowledgments 131 Notes 133 Index 161

Analytical Table of Contents

Introduction Distinction between “first” and “second” birth The Gestalten of human life are Gestalten of power The reflection on the “political” To exist means to govern creatively At the Start Distinction between “start” and “beginning” What are beginnings? The first— bodily— birth Power is the Gestalt of humanity In Number Number is the mode of all creation From the One to the Many The world in an order of number Human beings in the order of number Number and language The beginning in number The One and the Many In Body The power of bodies The political problem of a bodily-spatial presence The primary question of power among human beings Body-politics: the image of the train station Bodies are prevented by bodies from reaching an understanding Bodies necessitate politics: comparison of human beings and angels The civilization humans need: a creation made of power

1 1 2 2 3–4 5 5 6 7 8 9 9 9–10 10 10 11 11–12 13–14 15 15 16 16 17 17 17 18

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The science of the founding of politics: Ibn Khaldûn on the establishment of a civilization that fashions human beings into human beings 18–20 Human beings and their bodies: lonely and yet eloquent 20 The message of bodies 21 The doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings 22 The beginning from which human beings become sociable to each other 22 The anthropophanous event 23 Unsociability and sociability are never interchangeable conditions 23 Toward a political world of human beings: a politics for bodies 24 A world different from the world of bodies: visions of paradise 25 The specific mode of bodily existence under paradisiacal conditions 25–26 Ibn Khaldûn’s distinction between a “hypothetically” and an “empirically” proceeding political science 26 Beyond historical time: paradisiacal times 26 Images of human society under paradisiacal conditions: Hesiod, Empedocles, Plato, Huainanzi, Rousseau, Fichte, Sartre 27 The para-empirical product of “natural man” 29 Anthropogonic logic: its formulation in Chinese thought 29 The modes of creation: political processes 30 Through their beginnings human beings are actors in the politics of creation 31 In Action Human beings exist in action and in no other way Pascal and Plato on human existence in constant movement The existence of human beings: an existence oriented toward power The great question: to act toward what and for what? Human beings as the beginning and the begetters of their actions Human beings come to the power of their action out of the beginning Lines of meaning in relation to the totality of existence The freedom of human beings to exist creatively

32 32 32 33 33 33 34 34 34–35

In Consciousness For human beings the soul is the faculty of their existence In the clarity of consciousness The eyes of cognition are in principle not opened In the night of cognition The power to create as a power to destroy A Gestalt of power for the recognition of meaning The work of the soul In the soul what consciousness is becomes apparent Human beings as capable of humanity The polis “human being” The soul’s work of government

36 36 36 36 37 37–38 39 39 40 40 41 41

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The beginning of political society in the Gestalt of the power of consciousness The culmination of human life occurs politically

41 42

In Grace 43 The figuration of creation in the process of creation 43 Humans on the “path” to their “beginning” 44 The human way and a “more beautiful” way: grace 45 Knowing in the Gestalt of grace 46 The commandment of grace: you shall know, but you shall not be like God 47 The modern revolt against the commandment 47 The promise that human beings will become gods: the final motif in European (Western) thought 48 The beginning that human beings earn through grace for their second birth 49 Augustine’s anthropogonic-political interpretation of the biblical creation story 50 Two political societies from the very beginning (in primo homine) 51 The anthropogonic freedom that is revealed to human beings in grace 51–52 The estrangement of the first human beings from God out of arrogance (superbia) and greed (avaritia) 52 Unselfish love (caritas) and self-love (amor sui) 52 In the Divine 53 Divinity and thought: the Gestalten for any initiation of human civilization 53 The care for freedom 54 The architecture of human existence in the architecture of the world 54 How do human beings learn to be “human beings”? 55 Plato’s myth of the rule of Kronos, the “god of care” 55–56 The message of the myth: human beings are now alone, and this is their “great predicament” 57 Human beings must lead themselves and themselves take care of themselves 58 There is a word for the care of human beings for themselves: politics 58 Politics is mimesis of God 58 The fundamental and the pragmatic meanings of political thought 59 The question regarding political theory 59 The care of human beings for their existence 60 A political theory is present in every human society 60–61 Political theory in the modern age 61 A theory of politics is always a theory of a crisis of politics 62 The classical nature of political theory 63 Political theory and political practice 64 In Thought The sociability of thought Thought: start and beginning

65 65 67

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The path toward the human community begins in thought Plato’s poleogony: (a) The founding of human civilization in the gradual process of its political formation Plato’s poleogeny: (b) A history both of falling apart and of creation The paradigm (paradeigma) of human society The power of actualization of the paradigm A creative power to give form or a creative power to annihilate In Creation Creation is separation Creation falls apart as it emerges Reports: Dao De Jing, Huainanzi, Upanishads, Hesiod’s Theogony, ancient Egyptian hymns, the Koran, the Bible The falling apart of the One brought about by the One itself The world is a society of the unsociable A “history” lies in things In Eros Eros, the “twofold” beginning: both of the falling apart and of the unity of creation Order is the structure of chaos The dialogue on Eros in Plato’s Symposium Eros according to Empedocles: sociable love and divisive strife Who is Eros? Plato’s images of Eros: (a) The “androgynous” kind (genos androgynos): human beings, once a whole, were cut up and their nature is now desiring Plato’s images of Eros: (b) Souls of wax: in caring for their souls, human beings prepare their thought. They are the shapers, the form givers of their thought. Human beings become human beings in the structure of Eros Plato’s images of Eros: (c) Humans as marionettes: Eros, the choreograph, shapes human beings according to the way in which they have become disposed toward Eros The “common” and the “heavenly” Eros Everything finds itself in a Gestalt among Gestalten “Caring for” and “healing” Eros The night of evil The monstrous human being The eros tyrannos The caring, conciliatory, just Eros The way we should live The culture of the soul

68 68–69 70 70 71 71 72 72–73 73 73–77 78–79 79 79–80 81 81 81–82 82–83 83–84 84

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86–88

88–89 89 89 90 92 92 93 93 94 94

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The eros philosophos The feast of thought

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94–95 95

In Time 96 Human beings are occurrences of time 96 What are human beings in time? 96 Time is a deactualizing power 97 Human beings can change “time” in time 97 Time Gestalten 97 The time of Creation and the time of annihilation 98 In the Gestalt of time all civilization is a civilization of “recurrence” 98 Plato on the question: Since when have human states existed? 98 The extinction of states: the beginning is the creation of the end 99 Plato on the beginnings of states in the Laws 99 The highest form of civilization manifests itself in the time-Gestalt of the “beginning” 101 The beginning of legislation 102 Humans create, within time, their times 102 “Progress” toward the good as well as toward the bad 103 The temporal course of political civilization 103–104 In Law Human beings alone can never guarantee the soundness of a society composed of human beings The poachers of the good of the community Human existence is shaped from the beginning for the law The second, “political” predicament The rule of law (“an empire of laws, and not of men”) Is the law the “Absolute”? Not one answer, but different answers Empirical exposition (Anonymous Iamblichi, Chrysippos, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes) The validity of human laws Foreknowledge of the law in human beings The power of the law is the power that frees human beings for their humanity In Freedom The special status of the Gestalt of freedom Freedom as a “guideline” for making a choice Questions to ask on the basis of the preceding investigation Freedom and the power that comes into being from the soul The work of the soul: a political project The animae anarchia

105 105 105 106 106 107 108 108 109 110 111 112

113 113 113 113–114 114–115 115 115

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The framing of the “first” constitution of human beings: the emergence of the community of the forces of the soul The “politics of the soul” The essential elements of political reality (constitution, power, government) are prefigured in the “politics of the soul” The freely chosen constitutions of the soul of different human beings The reality of freedom is power Power is the paradigm of human politics Every human being defines his or her “constitution” Freedom opens up every form of politics. It is both a “good” power and a “bad” one The construction of a society of human beings in and according to the Gestalt of freedom The paradox of freedom Human beings’ “natural right” to freedom Every human being is the sovereign of his or her existence The transformation of bodily relations between human beings into juridical ones A “constitution” for freedom From the paradox of freedom to the paradox of power What is the paradox of power? How the paradox of power is put on stage The regency of freedom The second birth: human beings’ own free work

115 115 115 116 116 116 116 117 117 118 118 118 119 120 120 120 121 122 122

Preface

This book inquires anew into the question: Whence originates the political Gestalt of human life and what does it entail? In pursuit of this question the book attempts to undertake a transcultural and transhistorical grounding of political theory. The material for it has accordingly been taken from classical works of different cultural spheres. Ancient Greek, Jewish and Christian, Chinese, Arabic, ancient Egyptian, and Indian texts have been examined with regard to their fundamental claims. Analysis of these texts showed that the visions of the political existence of human beings that they entertain can be surprisingly similar. The parallels between pre-Socratic thought and Taoism, for instance, are striking. To take another example, Philo of Alexandria’s hermeneutical method is in no way inferior to modern hermeneutics. In this way, a body of knowledge that had largely fallen into oblivion owing to the advent of modernity could be recovered and made available for contemporary political theory. It is precisely this knowledge that has the potential for providing the foundation for transcultural commonalities in our own times. The methodology of the book is both transdisciplinary and empirical. I have had recourse not only to philosophical and political writings, but also to mythical, religious, and literary ones. The material itself has been allowed to set the course of the investigation; nothing has been introduced that is not present in that material or that cannot be illustrated through it. In order to compare and present traditions of thought from different civilizations, generous quotations from original documents— in translation— were unavoidable. In order to do justice to these texts, the scholarly diction utilized in their presentation and analysis had to be adapted both to their individual peculiarities and to the need to mediate among them. This was the only way to make accessible premodern, “other” rhythms of thinking and the mythical

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imagination, as well as the evocative style of traditions of thought that often believed themselves to be in direct contact with reality. Human dignity is closely connected with the dignity possessed by politics in human life. When politics is despised or abused, human beings despise or abuse themselves. But if they understand politics as their most important activity, and if they act accordingly, human beings make themselves in fact worthy of themselves. The present book proposes to validate this claim.

Introduction

We must begin with a distinction: the distinction between the “first” and the “second” birth. The “first” birth yields a “finished” human being, but finished only in his or her bodily constitution, and in no way in his or her “human” constitution. This is because human beings, through their bodies, and merely by the fact that they exist, are put in an inescapable predicament that encompasses the totality of their being. This predicament is associated with the need for food, clothing, space, assistance, protection, instruction, welfare, and, in consequence, the need for association with others. In a certain, apparently contradictory, manner, their bodily existence, for which they were born into life, takes away their very capacity to live. Human beings must first regain this capacity in, with, and through their bodies, i.e., through the event of their “second” birth.1 This second birth is, as will be shown, a political birth, because it is carried out (by virtue of the primordial predicament that explains everything concerning human beings) in an act of political caring for human beings by human beings. They take themselves caringly “into their own hands,” and make themselves the beginning of the work that is required of them, for the sake of securing their life and survival. This work is the work of government. The reason is this: before human beings lay the foundation for a political community, certain Gestalten are pregiven to them for the conduct of their life that make them entirely “political” from the very start of their life. What is meant here by Gestalt? This term may be generally defined as follows. If one wants to be creative, whatever is intended in the creative process must be attained within certain boundaries: an intended configuration within certain forms that have been observed, a wished- for consummation within certain solutions that have been found, and a desired connection within cer-

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tain structures that have been discovered. Or— to give a different example— human beings, by reason of their bodies, take up a certain amount of space, each one for himself or herself, and have thereby “a position of power.” This is the reason why the act of maneuvering through a crowd in a train station is itself already a form of acting “politically” between the poles of discreet diplomacy and a war of bodies. The Gestalten pregiven to human beings for the conduct of their life are Gestalten of power. No one can evade them, unless he were to escape from life itself. The Gestalten of power, which inhere in their existence by reason of their existence, take hold of human beings from the very beginning, with their entrance into the world. This is the logic of “creation.”2 These connections explain the view of the origins and primary forms of “the political” offered here. While the tradition of political thought, from its beginning, has equated the start of human politics with the founding of human communities, the possibility is explored here that the disposition for politics may be found already in the disposition of human creation (i.e., in bodies) and, in general, in the form of this world as a creation. Let it be clearly understood that there is nothing arbitrary about this enterprise. Rather, the materials for the present reflection on “the political” are taken, without exception, from the vast repository of mythical, philosophical, religious, and political reflection that informs us of the intellectual traditions of different civilizations. This reflection on “the political” is empirically found in these traditions, and the only surprising fact is that there is not already a book that presents it. An attempt to provide such a presentation is offered here. “The political” in human life must be exhibited in the “in-between” in which it is empirically located, i.e., between the “start” of human existence (which while giving rise to this existence is not identical to it) and the “beginning” that is then made by human beings themselves through the founding of political communities. The interpretation of this beginning offered by Aristotle has had too normative an effect. It prevented a visualization of the political cosmology and the political anthropogony that must be grasped prior to the zōon politikon.3 The book is accordingly organized as a successive consideration of what we call here “Gestalten of power” in the development of human life as well as in the establishment and preservation of a civilization for this life. This organizational sequence is indicated in the thematic table of contents and clarified step by step in the analytical table of contents. A second thematic sequence may be drawn by focusing on key points. The discussion here starts— as demanded by the book’s empirical methodology— with the fact of the body, and it determines “the political” in its primary physico-cosmological emergence;

introduction

3

in the next logical step, it proceeds to grasp “the political” in those modes in which the subsequent creative efforts of human beings establish it, so that its power may be a civilizing power and may thus break and replace the power of bodies. (The actual history of Western civilization, which is based on the principle of freedom, starts, for example, with freedom rights vis-à-vis bodily force, namely, in the legal agreements concerning habeas corpus). A third and final organizational stage consists in the constant reiteration of the central claim of this book: Human beings are placed by their very birth (i.e., their “first” birth) in the mode of “the political,” and in this mode they are “subjects of a government.” They are such subjects throughout their whole existence, and that is exactly the problem: Why is human existence a matter of “governing”? Why are the concepts “human being” and “government,” considered existentially, identical? If and when human beings become conscious of this question— or, as happens more often, are made conscious of it— their existence opens itself to their true beginning. They then see the work of governing that lies before them. If they take it up and assume it, nothing changes, obviously, in their primarily political mode of existence, in which they are “subjects of a government.” And yet they become empowered in a unique way: They may now begin their existence— in the political mode of this existence— in a totally different manner. They themselves can consciously and purposefully appoint the government in their lives. Through this beginning, human beings create for themselves a freedom to be themselves. Through “the political,” they become creators of a political creation. They insert the work of the political world, which they have created, into a world that they have not created. On the one hand, everything stays for them the way it was, i.e., everything remains dominated by that first and unceasing question of human existence as such: Who governs? But, on the other hand, nothing stays quite the same, because now, in their capacity as authors of a work of government for the sake of their own existence, human beings are the agents who, in their creative freedom, work on the form that the political takes in their existence. This book proposes to show that human beings own their existence only when they are creative for it. If they are not, they lose their existence, and they perish with their bodies, which did not receive the care that they required. In carrying out their existence— and they do not have the option not to carry it out, because nothing in their existence stands “still”— human beings are always, in one way or another, making themselves human beings, i.e., capable of government. Human beings exercise, of course, “government” over themselves. Such a government takes place against the background of a vast and confused multiplicity of “forces” that exist “in” them and that pull them or “speak” to them: passions, desires, resolutions, yearnings, fantasies, voli-

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tions, thoughts, reasonings, all of which are called, in a simplifying manner, “soul,” as though there were already certainly a unity here. Human beings must exercise this “government” over themselves, precisely because, when obeying those forces, it is not possible to achieve everything at the same time; indeed, in most cases it is possible to achieve only one thing. But who will steer human beings toward this one thing if not they themselves? In dealing with their own existence, therefore, human beings must first of all deal with their “soul,” that field of multiple forces, in which and through which they must find their bearings, in order to be in this or that existential condition. But dealing with their “soul” in this manner is a creative form of governing, as is manifest in its paradigmatic mode. Here human beings, according to Plato’s description of this paradigmatic mode (which will be discussed in greater detail later in the book),4 go about “the work of the soul” (psyches ergon), i.e., they engage in an activity that is, if we are permitted the word, entirely “soul- like,” insofar as it creates the “soul,” i.e., the governing work called “soul.” For this activity aims at really bringing into being, for the first time, a “soul” out of the multiplicity of those forces in human beings that pull them and speak to them. This “soul,” which is supposed to be the aim of the activity in question, is to be understood as a faculty that, once it is acquired by being exercised, enables human beings to be themselves, so that they govern—kratein is Plato’s word5— the forces that exist in them, and not the other way around. All that is meant by the word “human being” is creative politics. Its beginnings are a beginning toward humanity. To evoke this truth is the purpose of this book.

At the Start

We must distinguish between a “beginning” [Anfang] and a “start” [Beginn]. First, we must distinguish them according to cosmological knowledge, as expressed for instance in the Dao De Jing: “All things arose from it [the great Tao/Way], but it is not their originator. . . . The Tao protects and nurtures all things but does not claim to be their master”1 And, second, we must distinguish them by emphasizing the atemporal meaning of the word “start,” since this word is intended to designate precisely that start which creates time— the sequence denoted by it— but which is itself prior to all time.2 On the other hand, to make a beginning means to go beyond the start that is to be actualized in this beginning, and to add to this start— prior to which there was nothing that might have shown it3— that which follows from the beginning made. Beginnings are not identical to their start.4 Beginnings do not simply repeat the start for which they are a beginning, in the sense of the beginning of a thing, an event, or a Gestalt (for the sake of a start), that is to say, in the sense of the beginning, in one way or another, of “something.” Beginnings lead away from their start. They emancipate themselves from it and transform what arises from them into an objectivity of their own freedom. The work conceived in the start is anything but clearly determined by the beginning. Such a work “obeys” the beginning made, because it started with this beginning; but it also does not “obey” it, because it is what sets out to develop into itself out of this beginning. A work must thus, once started, be recognized from the beginning as having a “nature of its own,”5 and must be directed precisely by that nature toward the work started.6 This is the reason why all creative power is also political power.7 God is a politician, kyrios kyriōn, a magistrate of the world.8

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Out of beginnings something arises. Beginnings are beginnings of . . . , and to that extent they are also something other than a mere manifestation of the start. In their difference from the start, beginnings bring power into play, which is expressed by the restriction of the start through that beginning. Out of beginnings something arises; and in order that it may endure, what arises needs a power that determines it and thus limits it. A beginning gains its power over the start already at the start made by the beginning. In order for something to arise, it must be given a Gestalt— or, we could also say, it must be fixed— at the beginning, for it could not arise unless it was begun in the direction of this or that Gestalt. The beginning is the first power; and this power gives to what arises its constitution and also rules over it. It “exists [continues to exist],” as Maimonides puts it, “in the thing whose beginning it is,”9 and it retains its power over this thing until the latter reaches its full Gestalt. This Gestalt had, out of all possible beginnings, precisely that beginning which restricts it and is specific to it, and which is completely different from an infinitely open, absolute start.10 Such a Gestalt is a Gestalt out of this specific beginning and not out of any other. This is the mark of its power. Beginnings open the world. They make the Other actual. A beginning is a different book, a different song, a different painting, a different piece of equipment, a different state, a different economy, a different city, a different law, a different religion. A beginning opens the world up as at its start. At the start was opened, for the very first time, that which was always already without a beginning, and which always is that which exists “at the start”: the Tao, the One, the Divine. The start is characterized as “not having arisen” (arche ageneton), as Plato said in the Phaedrus. “Everything must arise out of it, but it does not arise out of anything.”11 Yet beginnings are a revelation of the start,12 of that first beginning among all beginnings through which the Infinite— in which everything possible is One— was relativized and through which a beginning was made of the start, i.e., of a starting.13 According to the Huainanzi, a philosophical work composed by the Taoist author Liu An in the second century BC, at the beginning there was “a beginning” (chu).14 Thus arose that boundary of the beginning within which that which was to be “something” could be constituted, i.e., demarcated and limited by reason of its being something that has begun (and hence is finite), and thus also able, through this limitation, to be this “something” (as opposed to being nothing or simultaneously being something other). The boundary of the beginning is the “actual” start;15 we might also say it is the creatively opening start.16 In the Actual, the boundary— the form-giving power of the boundary— is the sign of actuality. Only through such a boundary can there be a number valid in itself, a clearly outlined body, a completed action, a fragmented time, a deter-

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mining law, an independent individual, a separate part, individual freedom, a particular grace, a fitting narrative, this or that chapter of “history,” a truth understood, and the moment of wisdom.17 Bodily birth— the first birth— individualizes human beings. Such a birth brings them into the total separateness of their bodies. All human beings find themselves through their bodies, as individuals, in all the dimensions of life in their existence, i.e., in time, in space, in the multitude of all other living beings and things. Every human being is born in his own time and will die in his own time. The time that is allotted to him and the time that passes for him is his lifetime, exclusively. Wherever he goes, he will be alone with his body, and wherever he has gone with his body, he will again be alone in this different place.18 His appearing is the appearing of his body, i.e., the determinate (and as such unequivocal) presence of this one perceptible body in the midst of all physical appearances. And thus, whatever or whoever perceives him will perceive first and foremost that in which this human being himself is— and is in his entirety: the unmistakable concrete separateness of his body. He is everywhere, in the midst of all things, and for all time the One, an individual, standing for himself, a distinctly detached Gestalt. Yet the first birth, as will be shown, does not release human beings into their entire existence. The human being who has arisen is only the beginning. In his individuation, he is not completely himself. On the contrary, individuation is the unequivocal sign of the predicament of not being complete at all. Existing as separate— and he could not exist in any other way19 — a human being exists alone for his beginning. He is a beginning, nothing more. But he is also the beginning in which the Gestalt of the human being is started through this beginning: a human being among human beings, a separate being among separate beings, an individualized being among individualized beings. He is certainly all this; and yet, individualized though he is, he is also— along with many others, who are also individuals just as he is, and on the basis of a universally shared beginning— this one thing: a human being. Beginnings open up the world for the creative power that shines forth in it. Something from this power enters the created world through these beginnings, as though they were gates for the “Divine.” Something becomes possible through them by virtue of which a “world” as such is. Through them human beings become creative for the creation “human being.” Beginnings make human beings knowledgeable, for through them they experience that knowledge of power which they need for their existence— a knowledge, indeed, without which they could not even lead an existence. This is the knowledge— for the “leap of a moment”20— of that absolute power which can give testimony, at once and comprehensively, of its own resolve (and which, as

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human beings then realize, is possible for God only); it is also the knowledge (an enduring one in this case) of that power which manifests itself in each of the creations to which human beings have directed their efforts, and which, while it rules them, lies within them, and both forms them and directs them toward themselves. Beginnings affect human beings educationally. For it is through these beginnings that they come to know the power of the Creative and thus its formative force— first and foremost in its effect on human beings and its image in them. Power civilizes human beings. It creates them for a second time. It is the first sovereign over their existence, which rises out of every beginning they make as the ruling Gestalt of the work that was started in that beginning. Power raises human beings toward a life with their peers, according to the image of the political nature of their existence. Power gives birth to humanity, since it first makes human beings actual, i.e., sociable, humans. It is the mother of the truth designated by the concept “human being,” which comes to light, in different ways, in every human society. Power is the Gestalt of humanity; human beings enter into it by actualizing their life. It is the creative path on which they find the way to their existence. Power is “their” beginning, which is always in them and with them, toward that work which is their own life.

In Number

As a beginning, number is the handle of the creative, the handle it uses for creating. It is the articulation that divides every creation. For something actual exists only in the manner of there being the One, and then the second, and then the third, and so on. “If there is One (en),” Plato sets forth in the Parmenides, “then there is necessarily also number (arithmos). And if there is number, there exist also the many and an infinite quantity (plethos apeiron) of beings.”1 Everything created is ordered in a sequence, since every single created thing follows one after the other and thus forms a quantity that is to be counted from the One to the many and so on to the infinite.2 “The Way generates One” (dao sheng yi), says the Dao De Jing in a way surprisingly similar to the Parmenides. “One (yi) generates two (er), two generates three (san), three generates the ten thousand things (wan wu).”3 That which is, as the Pythagoreans said, exists in the image (mimesis) of numbers.4 “For no things would be clear to anyone in their relation either to themselves or to one another,” as Philolaos explained, “if number (arithmos) and their essence were not.”5 Number is the mode of all creation. It “is the ruling and uncreated bond of the eternal persistence of things in the world.”6 No thing is, if it is not in number. Or it would be nothing, and would thus be the Nothing. Even if there is only the One, there is two: the One (which encompasses in itself everything in a being-less manner) and the One that is (and that shows itself as “being”).7 From the day— days— of creation, all creation becomes “worn out” according to number.8 Creation is many things and thus, as the Parmenides sets forth, is “divided” and “cut up” into these many things: “Being is dispersed among all the things (panta) that are in the mode of the many (polla onta). . . . Thus cut up (katakekermatistai), Being is divided into smallest and largest and into all possible kinds of things, and is partitioned (memeristai) more than anything,

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and there are countless (aperanta) parts of Being.”9 In its duration, all creation numbers itself in the direction of its future, which is demarcated, to be sure, through numbers (because it exists in accordance with numbers), but is also, through numbers, unbounded in the direction of the infinite.10 A creation that both exists according to number and yet is infinite would be a nonenumerable creation and thus not an actual creation, one to be measured against its Gestalt. It would not be a something and there would not be a something in it; thus, it would not be a settled creation (a world), and there would be no determinate thing in it that stands in relation to a determinate thing, i.e., there would not be a series of world things. In order to be an actual creation, a creation cannot be, in its numeric mode, without an order according to numbers. “The elemental order of all things,” as Philo of Alexandria declared, “is established through numbers” (Principium itaque universorum constituunt numeri).11 If there is to be a beginning of the world, it is required that there be a power that enumerates the world. If there is to be a beginning for creation, there must be a summing-up of creation. But who does this? Who is the power who intervenes in the world and directs it toward its Gestalt? One answer is found in Plato’s Philebus. “There is in the universe a great deal of the unlimited as well as enough limitation. And besides these,” it is further stated, “there is also a nonmean cause (aitia) that orders and determines years, seasons, and months.” The power of measuring introduces measures for things into the unmeasuredness of things. The power of measuring that does this is obviously not a “mean cause.” Such power limits the unlimited and thus sets creation into a Gestalt. Thus, it can “rightfully be called,” as the Philebus concludes, “wisdom (sophia) and reason (nous).”12 As human beings, too, emerge in the process of creation, they become and are human beings in the modes of creation. They exist in creation just as everything else exists in creation, first and foremost in the manner of a beginning. From the start, they exist in the mode of a beginning. Or, to put it the other way around, human beings need beginnings in order to start existing. And the first among these is their beginning in number, i.e., that beginning which brings human beings into a numerical order. After all, human beings arise numerically in the manner of the many, who are each of them just individuals. But how do they exist numerically, i.e., how are they together the many? And further, human beings have, numerically speaking, a thousand sounds and combinations of sounds, in order that they may hear one another while they are with one another. But how can they understand one another by means of specific sounds understandable to all, given the enormous number of possible sounds? When Democritus expressed his view regarding the beginnings of all

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things and, more particularly, of human beings, he was beholden to a particular idea thereof. And yet he saw all the more distinctly, in the emergence of all things, the consequence, peculiar to creation, of the sought-after beginning in time: “In the beginning, human beings (ex arches anthropoi)— we are told— found themselves in a disordered and semibestial condition of life (bios); they gathered food, each man for himself, and sought the most beneficial fruits of wild-growing trees. Since they were attacked by wild animals, they would assist one another, instructed by common interest; and since, driven by fear (dia ton phobon), they would then stay together, they slowly learned to distinguish themselves from each other by attending to their external appearance. Their language (phone) was, at the beginning, a mishmash of indistinct sounds, but it slowly developed into articulate expression, and, by agreeing on particular designations (symbola) for each object, they found a way to communicate about everything. But since many different associations (systematōn) of this sort came into existence throughout (kath’ apasan) the inhabited world (oikumene), humans could not all have, through a common speech (homophōnos), the same language in their respective vernaculars, because each of these associations fashioned words in its own haphazard manner; and this is the reason why there are so many different linguistic modalities. The nations (ethnoi) of human beings, however, came into being out of these first (linguistic) associations (systemata).”13 One might be inclined to think that a beginning toward an order in number of human existence might just be “made,” in the way that beginnings are ordinarily made. But, as Democritus’s account makes clear, the matter is not at all that simple. We need here first an answer to the question concerning the beginning (the making of a beginning). The quotation above, couched in mythological language, makes it clear, to be sure, that the “disordered condition” of human beings “in the beginning” is not their true condition and that this state of affairs is to be superseded, as this turn of phrase suggests, by an “ordered condition.” But how is this to take place? Who would do it? Further, the initial intelligibility of communication among human beings (their homophony) is followed, by reason of the multiplicity resulting from the fragmentation of humanity into distinct “linguistic associations,” not by one single language, but rather by a Babylonian confusion of languages. What has happened? Is it not the case that the one language, which determines all speaking, is to be found in every speech? Or could it be the case that all numeric orders are overtaken by an irregular and thus chaotic power of number?14 Yet the beginning in number has a thorough Gestalt character, a Gestaltproducing power. The Gestalt-producing force that manifests itself in such a beginning outlines a creation in numeric units of measure and carries it

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out toward its actuality in the realm of numbers. This realm is creative from the beginning, but the creative itself is not in this beginning. The beginning in number is not the “beginning” in itself and as such, but clearly just one beginning among other beginnings. Since it is a beginning of this kind, the beginning in number stands in relation to a different beginning, which lies prior to and encompasses it: Plato’s “nonmean cause.” Plato had already characterized the excellence of this cause through the concepts “wisdom” and “reason.” Cicero, in a passage from the third book of De re publica devoted to elucidating the beginning in number, characterized the manifestation of the Creative in this beginning in even stronger conceptual terms. He speaks of the figure of a “divine mind” who intervened directly as an agent in the still Gestalt-less life of human beings.15 They did not really make themselves understood, Cicero explains, but emitted “amorphous and confused sounds with untrained voices.”16 It is in such a confusion of sounds that the divine mind intervened. It transformed the “disordered condition” of human beings in the beginning into an “ordered condition,” for it classified human sounds into distinct groups by imposing names on things. It thus united the human species “through the pleasant bond of mutual speech.” Previously, human beings had still lived isolated from each other.17 But a beginning was made at this point, out of the Unlimited, i.e., out of the confusion, toward their unification, because particular things were now endowed for them with particular names. Language and number are interconnected; numbers have conceptual character only in speaking, according to the order of a language; and language is always an enumerated language, a language ordered sequentially through acts of naming. What Cicero meant by this “divine mind” is obviously the creative figure that reason is for him when reason makes human beings keen to count and speak, i.e., to speak and count. Indeed, when he goes on, in De re publica, to describe the beginning of a unity of human beings in number, he introduces reason (mens) as that Gestalt-producing power which, in the subsequent unfolding of this beginning, laid also the foundation of the alphabet. Reason— which in this case must be understood as a power that is indeed human but also divinely inspired— achieved this by “designating and symbolizing the vocal sounds, which appeared to be infinite in number, with a few written characters” (a simili etiam mente vocis, qui videbantur infiniti, soni paucis notis inventis sunt omnes signati et expressi).18 Finally, Cicero goes on, the art of writing letters was complemented with an additional skill. This skill, says Cicero— surely with an eye toward the more comprehensive theme of the beginning— is not only necessary for life. It is also “unique” in the sense of being an “unchangeable and eternal” art.19

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This it certainly is, because it is the art of numbers. This art has the same radical character of a beginning as the beginning itself, i.e., as the beginning of the Creative, through which the One came into being, and thus two, and thus three, in a word: many. In the Gestalt of the art of numbers, beginnings in number overlap with the beginning in the One. The Many touches the One, out of which alone the many exist.20 Indeed, all beginning in number is a beginning in the One. Or, the other way around, without the presence of the One in the many, the many would be perfectly relationless within itself. It would not actually be many, for in this case each of the many is still each in the Many; instead, it would only be many times one, indeed infinite times the One. But this could hardly be assumed, unless there were something in the nature of a “divine paradox,” such that the Absolute would be absolutely relative. But how could the One really be the One and at the same time be the contradiction of itself, namely, the One in countless one-parts? How could all those one-parts stand in relation to one (the One), given that each of them would have to be the One but none could be the only One? The One, in the form of infinitely many times one, encounters itself at most in its own emptiness— in nothing. Then the One, indeed, is not, and also provides evidence that Being is always the Being of many. Wherever there is many, there is also something actual. Beginnings are to be found there, but beginnings, as already shown, reveal a creative power, which is a power of actualization.21 The Many is not only the many. It is also the many out of the One. But how? How is the One present in the many? How is it that, in counting, counting does not become endless? What is the foundation, in the midst of the varying multiplicity of numbers, for the absolutely valid measure of each and every number? The answer to this last question, and also, by extension, the answer to all the questions just posed, is that the measure of number in the multitude of all numbers has its ground in that beginning of enumerating, which is a beginning of the many in the One. It has already been stated that a certain power is needed to enumerate the world. We have encountered metaphorical descriptions of this power: Plato’s “nonmean cause” (i.e., the cause that measures the world) and Cicero’s “divine mind,” which intervenes in human affairs. A further metaphorical description is found in Augustine’s De civitate Dei. His figurative speech in this context emphasizes in particular the Gestaltproducing, indeed craftlike, character of the power in question. When discussing the creation of the human being by God, Augustine touches explicitly upon the divine Gestalt- producing force that manifests itself therein and which he calls “the power of God.” He describes it paradigmatically through

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the use of images. He says that the creative God is a Gestalt-producing power for the creation of human beings by virtue of his “hand”: manus Dei potentia Dei est.22 It is with his hand that God enacts his creative power. He takes matters in hand and forms the human race in a direct, concrete manner, i.e., by means of a bodily creation. For he wanted to make a beginning— hence a beginning in number— but also to ensure the presence of the One in the subsequent multiplicity. The beginning toward multiplicity had to be, just as with every beginning, a beginning for a unity, namely, a unity in multiplicity. Human beings are not human beings if not all human beings are human.23 In the creation of the human being, according to Augustine, God proceeded creatively from number. He knew in his providence how his work would one day appear. Thus, he knew that there would be, as Augustine says, a plurality (multitudo) of human beings.24 Precisely for this reason, the creator started with one human being. “God, for the sake of creating a plurality, created but one human being.”25 Here the question poses itself again: Why? Augustine explains: “It pleases God when humans are one in their multiplicity (in pluribus unitas).”26 It should be possible for human beings, even as “many” (in multis), to form a harmonious unity (concors unitas).27 But how is this possible for them? Augustine answers: It is possible because God created this possibility for them by creating them many in one. By his hand’s creative power he formed all human beings in the human being. Or put differently: human beings are from their beginning one through “the human being” from whom they arose.28 In their beginning, human beings are all human—the human being. No matter how many human beings there may be in existence, they will always abide in the unity of their beginning, of that one beginning called “human being.”29 It is not easy— to argue e contrario— to conceive of human beings differently, namely, only as many, for they would then have no beginning. But, in this case, how could the many be at all?

In Body

Human beings are bodily beings, and with this form of their existence they are already, through themselves, power. With their bodily birth they physically enter a physical world where they can no longer be “overlooked” or “passed over.” They are there, like a demand that their body makes. As though it were a matter of course, a woman’s or a man’s body takes his or her own, unique, space-occupying, and weighty place in the world of bodies. Here is a body, this body in its whole bodily presence. Here is Being— well-rounded Being. “Nature fills me up with a body,” observes the narrating voice in the Huainanzi.1 Human beings are thus power vis-à-vis other beings of their own kind as well as other living and nonliving beings. And in turn they are also themselves objects of the power of each of these other beings. If one speaks (as some are fond of doing) of the power of things over human beings and of the power of human beings over other human beings, then both these statements, if they correctly signify their object, must be visualized against their proper background. This background is that truth of the human being which has its beginning in this human being’s body. It is the truth of the existence of human beings, which is uncovered by their bodies, and which they constantly exhibit in their protection-seeking nakedness. It is for their bodies that human beings actualize power, and it is precisely thereby that they attract power to themselves. They are figures of power, engaged in unceasing movements of power that either have their origin in these figures themselves or, on the contrary, come to them from elsewhere, and for which they are always the beginning (as their bodies demand). Every human being can visualize the power emanating from his or her body. A simple thought experiment suffices to explain this. I see that I occupy with my body a particular realm of space. In a certain sense, with my

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body I “take possession” of the space needed by my body. On the basis of this perception, one can discern without difficulty the political problem associated with my spatial presence. This presence demands a particular type of behavior via an exercise of power. It demands a solution in the mode of power. For in the moment that I find myself somewhere— and I always find myself somewhere— I am a phenomenon of power. I stand somewhere, for example, and unavoidably take up a space of more or less half a square meter. As long as I find myself in this space of half a square meter and take it up as “my” space, no other human being can take it and be on it. This space of half a square meter is filled up with my body; no other body fits in it. The presence of my body excludes, in the presence of this body, all other bodies. I am physically “exclusive”— an excluding power, indeed, with regard to the space of half a square meter that I take up with my body.2 But I do not live alone. My presence in space, either standing still or moving, raises a question. It is the primary question of power among us human beings. It is an acute question in a classical manner. What happens when somebody else wants to be where I am or where I want to be although I am not there yet? Human beings are beings of motion; in their spatial existence they live in a constant coming and going, between departure and arrival. They never really stay in one spot.3 They are constantly navigating. What happens then when someone else wants to be where I am? Obviously only one of two things can happen. Either the other attempts to expel or remove me from that place in space which only one of us can take up, or he comes to terms somehow with my presence in space. Whatever the outcome, I come to know the political nature of my bodily existence. We human beings learn political science through our bodies. Our bodies establish relations among us. They tell us that we are political beings simply because we are spatial beings. Existing spatially, we move in spaces, which are spaces for us all to move and come to rest; in these spaces not only do we relate to each other physically but we also determine “together” a space that is for all of us and is divided among all of us. In one way or another, we negotiate with one another our individual spatial presence; in a certain sense we render it identifiable to one another. This happens either through recognition (“I leave you in your place”) or through disregard (“Go away from my place!”); either by stating a temporal sequence (“When you go away, I will replace you”) or through agreement (“Could I have your place?”); either by allocation or by aggression; by unmistakable signs or merely by hints. The political in human existence lies in the event of this existence itself. This existence happens in a way that renders it, as existence, completely political. It is bodies that put this event called “human being” on stage; and it is in bodily

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events that the play of movements among human beings, which they call “politics,” begins. There is no division of space that is not a distribution of bodies, no striving for welfare that is not a striving for the welfare of the body, no sociability that is not a sociability of bodies, no peace that is not a peace of bodies. Let us consider one more example. In a railway station someone is coming my way. Given the direction in which we are moving, we are walking right at one another. A few more steps and we will collide, unless we negotiate the direction that each one of us is to go. We are strangers to each other and have no intention of coming to a stop. Will we clash? Not normally. By means of discreetly transmitted signals— with the eyes, motional indicators, and bodily gestures— we negotiate in the blink of an eye the map of the few square meters that is relevant for both of us. We have worked out an understanding as to which side we will pass each other on and thus how each will continue on his way without being hindered by the other. Of course, things can take a different course. In many public places, especially in big cities, the force of the rules of civilized intercourse has considerably deteriorated. Here I may come across someone who comes toward (or even directly at) me brutally and intentionally and with the obvious purpose of shoving me. He (assuming that it is a male) wants to force me to get out of his way and thus to bow to the gesture of domination that he so clearly expresses in his rage- filled stride as he approaches me. And his strategy of brutality works. I do get out of his way. What else could I do at that instant? Come to blows with this embodiment of violence? Or try to come to an understanding in this encounter with someone who does not want to meet me except in the way that bodies meet bodies? But bodies do not speak, they collide . . . Human beings are bodily beings, and it takes a special effort, while existing in their bodies, for them to be human also in their bodies and be, thus, more than merely human bodies. As long as their existence is reduced to their bodies, what Plotinus describes in the Enneads will be true of them: “Through bodies, bodies (sōmasi men gar sōmata) are prevented from reaching an understanding (koinōnia) with one another; nonbodily beings, on the other hand, are not kept away from each other by bodies; nor are they separated from each other in space.”4 We may assume that James Madison knew nothing of this statement by Plotinus when in article 51 of the Federalist Papers he made human beings momentarily, and for the sake of argument, disembodied beings.5 Let us imagine, Madison said, human beings to be angels. What would happen then with our problem of the necessary establishment of a society in which human beings,

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through their common power, have attained— via agreement— executive power over themselves as a multiplicity? The problem would not exist, Madison responds, because angels are disembodied. They are, in Plotinus’s words, “not kept away from each other by bodies; nor are they separated from each other in space.” They have no need of a governing power to unite them in the multiplicity of their bodies. It would be delightful if the way that angels are to be conceived were also valid of human beings. If this were the case, all reflection on “ruling” and “governing,” all political science, would be superfluous. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.”6 But human beings, as we know very well, are not angels, and thus a special effort is required of them. As Dante puts it in his book On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia), “not even by means of a spiritual, angelic, vision is it possible for anybody to go into somebody else, since the human spirit is covered with thickness and opacity.”7 As far as reading his or her mind is concerned, every human being is a mystery to every other human being; his or her every bodily movement must be interpreted: What possible inner stirring of a human being does a particular movement translate into the world of bodily human beings? No one can tell for sure of anyone else; one can only assume, for instance, that a previously valid understanding continues to be valid, and that the same love, or the same peacefulness, or the same desire to coexist is again on display. Human beings interpret one another constantly, and yet they know with certainty only this of one another: that they interpret one another. Given all this, how can they be helpful to one another, how can they “build” upon each other? Human beings require a civilization, their second birth. Human existence, which is begun in bodies, requires a civilization precisely for the sake of these bodies. Such a life is another Gestalt through which they find the way to themselves, as human beings who are also human beings. But this Gestalt is not just given to them; it must first be produced by them. It must be a Gestalt that forms human beings, that encompasses human beings with and in their bodies, and that contains them in itself. According to its meaning, then, the civilization that is necessary for human beings can only be a creation made of power. Once created, civilization is a Gestalt of power. And according to its effect, for which it is after all to be produced, civilization is the unfolding of that power which causes human beings to carry out through themselves their second humanization: the birth of civilized human beings, who, as human beings, carry out the beginning of their humanity on the basis of their quite insufficient beginnings and further make this humanity the work of their life. In his preliminary considerations on universal history, which became a classic work of Arabic political thought under the title Muqaddima, Ibn Khal-

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dûn (b. 1332 in Tunis, d. 1406 in Cairo)8 spoke of a science (ʾilm)9 that arises from reflecting on human beings insofar as they are engaged in the process of their second birth and thus on the path to their humanity. It is a “political” science, namely the science of the founding of politics (siyâsa), for it concerns the grounding and establishment of a civilization (ʿumrân) that fashions human beings into human beings. It is a science of the beginnings, for it gives human beings the blueprint for their existence in the beginning of their humanity. And it is a science of power (mulk), for it discovers in power the Gestalt from which human beings emerge.10

This science discovers the creative power in human beings: the power of existence that lies in their beginnings, as well as the power that is allotted to them for their existence. Political science is an anthropogonic science, because along with human beings it travels the path of their worldly creation. It knows that, for human beings, needful as they are of a second birth, power is the Gestalt for their beginning. And it also knows that power is that Gestalt of human beings in their social existence which they create for themselves via their second birth. The first sentence of the first chapter of Ibn Khaldûn’s work reads: “The social organization (ijtimâʿ) of human beings is something necessary,”11 because, as Ibn Khaldûn continues after this terse sentence, human beings cannot live without a “society” (ijtimâʿ). They require for their life that form for which philosophers use the concept “city” (Arabic: madîna, Greek: polis). They are reliant on the existence of a human civilization.12 But unimpressed by the brevity of Ibn Khaldûn’s claims, one might want to ask: Why? He must have had good reasons for beginning his work with such decisive claims. What are these reasons? They are, first of all, reasons that deal with the bodily constitution of human beings. God, Ibn Khaldûn wrote, has created human beings in a form such that a person can exist and survive only with the help of food. But this necessity brings people together, because the abilities of a single human being are not sufficient to procure all the food that he or she needs. Even procuring the basic necessities of life is more than an individual can cope with. Take for example a daily ration of meal, just enough for survival. The meal must first be ground and then kneaded and baked. All of this requires tools, instruments, utensils. These tools, in turn, require, in order to be manufactured, a craftsmanship such as that of a blacksmith, a carpenter, or a potter. And let us suppose that someone consumed only unprocessed wheat grains; in that case an even greater number of operations would be required: sowing, harvest-

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ing, threshing. This is because each of these actions would require an even greater number of tools and a greater craftsmanship than in the case of a daily minimum ration of meal. It is beyond the capacity of a single person to master all— or even merely a portion— of the skills and actions required for his nourishment. An individual cannot physically get by if he does not combine his abilities with that of other people. The solution is a merger (taʿâwun) of a relatively large number of people for the cooperative procurement of food. The needs of this multitude of people— and the needs of the whole, Ibn Khaldûn emphasized, are much greater than the sum of the parts— can then be satisfied in this social form.13 Every individual requires the help of his peers for his defense (difâʿ) as well, because aggression (ʿudwân) belongs to the nature of all living beings. Among animals there are many that, compared with human beings, are primitive but that have far “more perfect” capacities of self-defense than those which human beings received from God. A snake has its poison, a scorpion its sting, cattle have their hooves. Human beings alone have by nature no analogous means of self- defense. But they must defend themselves. What, then, can a human being do for his defense? How can he manage to defend himself? Again, he can merge with other human beings and find assistance in this way. Human beings have the ability to think, and they have hands (alfikr wa-l-yad). When they join their efforts, they can design equipment for defensive purposes and then jointly produce them. Only through cooperation, therefore— as Ibn Khaldûn concludes— are human beings in a position to defend themselves. The elemental requirements of the physical existence of humans make their organization in a human-made society indispensable. This fact, according to Ibn Khaldûn, lays the foundation for understanding the meaning and aim of civilization (ʿumrân). Without civilization human beings could not cope with their existence. They first become human beings in human society.14 The “new” science with which “we are concerned,” the author of the Muqaddima adds, develops this insight and the knowledge that lays its foundation. It is political science.15 Their bodies, one could say with this science, leave human beings alone with themselves. Everyone is lonely in his or her body. There is no understanding between these mutually impenetrable bodies; there is only the perception of the expansionary outreach through which each body challenges all other bodies. This being so, how could they appear to one another if not as Gestalten of naked power? The appearance of a man or a woman among such Gestalten of naked power is indeed “eloquent” enough, as we will presently

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elucidate. Only by his or her presence does he or she refract the motion of bodies in the world of bodies. He or she “just” appears; but, in doing so, he or she signals a universal urgency to circumvent, adapt, and pay attention. They are each of them lonely, these Gestalten of naked power; and yet, through their mutually refracted form of appearing, they “give expression” to something that applies to all of them: an aggressiveness that proves to be a weakness, a bodily concentration that renders the body needy, and the making of a demand that betrays the predicament that lies at its foundation. The bodies of human beings bear a message. They bear it in a nonsimple, i.e., in a pre-actual or not yet actual manner. For the message lies “in” them but cannot be inferred “from” them. The message is heard only in that space where human bodies are “eloquent” toward one another. This space is the “in-between” that lies between human bodies, in which they become physically aware of each other, and which thus make that space appear. Here, with their bodies, they “say” the same things of themselves: weakness, need, predicament. These modes of attunement disclose that, between human beings, bodies are affected in an identical manner. And in this “in-between” human bodies become aware of each other as what they are. This message, borne to human bodies by human bodies, becomes explicit in the physical appeal that each one of them is. “My body demands that your body give way.” “Let’s see which body is weaker, yours or mine.” “My body wants more room than I have for it. It commands: give me more room!” “I am heavy with all the body that is mine. How great is the strength that is in it and that drives me! It forces me to keep up with it. I require external resources for my body. Only other bodies possess these resources or can convey them to me!” The compact form “body,” it bears repeating, keeps human beings away from each other. In this form, they lack understanding of each other, and in this lack of understanding— which is a correlate of pure physicality: “human beings” move about as corporeal masses among corporeal masses— there is nothing that would render them sociable to each other. Bodies by themselves are just bodies, not a society. But precisely here is the message. It is a bodily message, but it is also more than that. For its beginning is that “in-between” in which bodies are “eloquent” toward one another and in which society itself becomes explicit. Thus the message reveals to human beings this beginning of a beginning of a civilization among themselves: that there can be an “inbetween” for them that arises from their bodies— those bodies that reach out in an expansionary manner, refract one another, and bring about their own weakness, need, and predicament. However much their bodies keep away from each other, they refer human beings to each other in the peculiar— one might say paradoxical16— manner

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just described. This is what may be called the doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings. With regard to this formulation let us immediately note that the word “doctrine” is not used here accidentally or lightly. Careful reflection preceded the word’s inclusion in the formulation, and it was deliberately made the guiding concept in it. There are two main reasons for this, one historical and one theoretical. The first reason pertains to the history of ideas. This is obviously not the first time that in a discourse on human existence the “doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings” has been evoked; rather, the opposite is the case. The purpose of this book is not to peddle novelties but rather, on the contrary, to strive for a knowledge that can be gleaned from the history of philosophical and political thought. Therefore, we begin (or continue) on this path at the point marked for it in advance. What this means, at the present time, may be indicated through the quotations below. They will show that the message borne to human bodies by the bodies of human beings was received very early on in Western thought and was formulated in an explicit “doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings.” This doctrine, as can also be gathered from the texts, was not forgotten in subsequent times, but was formulated anew by a variety of authors in the same, similar, or different words, but always conveying the same message: In all human achievements need (chreia) has been the teacher of man.17 —Democritus Human beings were not able to live in isolation (anthrōpoi adynatoi kath’ ena zēn), and they banded together out of necessity (anankē).18—The Anonymous Writer Quoted by Iamblichus “A city (polis),” I said, “comes into being, I believe, because no individual is self-sufficient (ouk autarkēs), but each one of us needs many things (pollos). Or do you think that a city has a different beginning (archē)?”19 —Plato It is the weakness ( faiblesse) of man that makes him sociable; it is the adversities common to us all that draw our hearts toward humanity: we would be in no debt to it, were we not human beings. Every attachment is a sign of insufficiency; if each one of us had no need of others (n’avait nul besoin des autres), we would hardly think of associating with them.20 —Jean-Jacques Rousseau Nothing is more certain than the ineluctable necessity of government.21 —John Jay

Human beings become sociable (“political”) to one another “from a beginning.” This beginning can be determined with precision in that history of their own existence which they record after their bodily birth. Such a begin-

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ning is, in human existence— and at this point we provide the theoretical ground for the introduction of the word “doctrine”— an “anthropophanous” event in a single and unique place. What place? If this place is to be determined with such exactitude, we can also ask: Where is this place? We would have to reply that it is not found in the bodily birth of human beings, because this birth is precisely that which individualizes; nor could it be found in some “state of nature” (which is always a purely imaginary thing); nor in some “social contract” (which is always appended after the fact, given that people must have already come to a political understanding before they could even begin to think of entering into such a contract). The beginning out of which human beings (human beings in general) become sociable to each other takes place only when people— one group of people or another— receive the message with which their bodies are eloquent toward one another, and then make it known to each other that they have received, understood, and appropriated the doctrine contained in it. The masses of people streaming toward one another at a train station make way for one another by means of civilized intercourse, in acts of conscious avoidance of bodily conflict. They negotiate their paths and “order” these paths in the space of the train station in a mutually recognized, and naturally constantly changing, structure of the routes that each of them is to follow. To someone in an elevated position (say, a raised balcony,) the whole gives the impression of wild confusion. But something else can also be discerned here: the image of mutually created civilization. This example illustrates the anthropophanous event through which human beings provide information about themselves: as we attend to each other we are turned toward each other. It is an event, because it always occurs and can only occur actualiter. And it is an event of an anthropophanous nature, because there never is, was, or will be a historical occurrence in general, such as (for example) a leap of human beings into a civilization for the span of their whole future existence. Rather, a beginning always happens through the appearance of individual human beings— a sign for the “doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings,” planted by human beings for other human beings in order to unceasingly declare their civilization-founding intention, for a particular reason, in a particular situation, and at a particular moment. For this reason, unsociability and sociability are never, in the human world, a “condition” interchangeable with a different “condition.” Throughout their whole existence, human beings find themselves, through their bodies, in a world of bodies. Hence it is always the case with human beings, first, that their bodies are in themselves bodies, not a society; and, second, that they can be sociable to one another if they have received the message that enables

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their bodies to be eloquent toward each other and signify to each other that they have appropriated the doctrine contained therein. Nothing, then, neither the war of bodies nor the peace among bodies, is historical here in the sense of a temporal sequence. Neither could the war of bodies (assuming that it is the “state of nature”) ever be replaced by a peace among bodies (the dream of a “social contract”), nor could a peace among bodies, no matter how obedient bodies were made to such a contract, change anything in the laws of the world of bodies, into which human beings are born by reason of their bodies. No civilization will ever take human beings out of their bodies. Even if they created for themselves a government founded on perfect justice, or if they lived under a government that controlled them with exquisite refinement, they would still be, and could not help being, simply bodies among bodies, i.e., Gestalten of naked power.22 The “doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings” is not a law inscribed in human beings; a person may be deaf to it, or refuse to follow it, or oppose its application. This doctrine is true only in the anthropophanous event. And this event is always possible as well as always necessary. Whoever thinks of a political world of human beings, therefore, must think of a politics for bodies, i.e., of the creation of a political world in, through, and from a world of bodies. The world of human bodies is the first reality in any beginning of human existence. As soon as there is a human being and a human action, the power of the body makes itself felt. Once this power is in place, everything immediately becomes arduous, a great many things become impossible, and most things must be either executed against it or done precisely because of it. How could it be otherwise? Only for “angels” could it be otherwise: This was the first half of James Madison’s, Dante Alighieri’s, and Thomas Aquinas’s answer,23 in the context of their methodological development of a negative anthropology, prior to offering the second part of their answer, namely, that it cannot be otherwise for human beings. For human beings, not being bodiless angels, belong to the order of the power of their bodies. This order would be completely different if human beings were so constituted in their bodies that they could be free of their bodies. Would be, for undoubtedly there exists in reality no such “order” in the world of bodies. A different perception would be alien to the historical consciousness of human beings; in fact, it would be an empirically false perception. But along with the knowledge of what is, there are also to be found in the historical consciousness of human thought certain memories, images, and visions that tell of, or foresee, a condition of human life that could not be more different from our present existence in the world of bodies. It is commonly called the “paradisiacal” condition. In this hypothetical condition—

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the state evoked in mythical narratives of the “Golden Age” and in religious and religio-political visions of “paradise” (in Hebrew pardès, in Greek parádeisos)24 — their bodies have no power over human beings, i.e., bodies do not shape human existence in the forms of aggression, naked power, distress, need of protection, and affliction. In a “paradisiacal” world— it is said— everything bodily is gentle and permeated with a well-being that brings forth pure peace among bodies. Human beings feel their existence to be altogether uncomplicated, merry, and carefree. They exist bodily, to be sure, and yet they partake, through their bodies, of a purely wholesome life, thanks to which they have need neither of a government for society nor of individual selfgovernment. Is this possible? Can a body be a body and yet not a body? Is something affirmed of bodies under “paradisiacal” conditions that contradicts the nature of the bodily? One must indeed wonder, and obviously— assuming that we associate the bodily existence of human beings as described in mythical narratives of the “Golden Age” and in religio-political visions of “paradise” with the ordinary concept of “body”— one can find no answer other than the contradiction just stated. A semblance of verbal parallels may suggest that the “race of frail humans” mentioned in Hesiod’s description of the Golden Age— which we will presently discuss— is actually a bodily race, one that is “frail” precisely on account of its bodily nature. But the parallels in question must be illusory, for Hesiod also says about the humans who belonged to this race: “And they lived like gods, free of need, far away from all evils.” Many more similar examples from comparable texts could be cited. (We will likewise presently deal with them.) The specific mode of bodily existence under the conditions of a paradise or a Golden Age cannot be grasped by means of the ordinary concept of “body.” Indeed, this concept is more likely to obstruct than to aid the understanding of that mode, because it leads us astray through a sort of conceptual deception. The peculiar bodily constitution of human beings in paradise or in the Golden Age— existing in bodies that in no way possess them and that exert no bodily power over them— must, therefore, be grasped through fitting concepts. We propose to this end the expression diamorphous bodies. This expression designates exactly the essential difference between human bodies in the familiar world of bodies and bodies in paradise or the Golden Age: in the latter the human body is diamorphous, in the former it is not.25 Whoever envisions a human world under the conditions of a “paradise” or of a “Golden Age” must, then, conceive an entirely different politics of bodies. Or, to put it differently (and with reference to the project of a “paradise in politics,”26 which has from the beginning regularly surfaced in the history

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of political thought): Whoever wants to speak of a human society in which there is no need of a government, or indeed of any governmental organization whatsoever, presupposes a “paradisiacal” condition of diamorphous bodies, because in such a society human life is not characterized by the needs of human bodies and, hence, it is not characterized by the power of bodies over human beings either. A society such as this exists only for human beings with diamorphous bodies. In the context of the present empirical investigation, the existence of this society must of course be understood merely as a hypothetical claim. Ibn Khaldûn outlined with all desirable clarity the difference between a political science that proceeds “hypothetically” and one that proceeds empirically in the following passage from the Muqaddima: We do not speak here of politics in the so-called “perfect city” (as-siyâsa madaniyya).27 Philosophers designate with this concept a type of human society, the members of which are so constituted in their existence that they manage with no government whatsoever. They call it the “ideal city [society]” (al-madî al-fadila). This political order is also called the “utopian city” (siyâsa madaniyya). It is not a political order that members of society give to themselves through laws aiming at the common good. It is, rather, a completely different thing. Even for philosophers themselves the “perfect city” is something rare; they speak of it merely as a hypothesis ( fard) or a mere supposition (taqdîr).28

According to certain myths, revelations, and visions, the existence of human beings with diamorphous bodies is not impossible. Quite the opposite: They tell (or proclaim the approach) of times in which this “paradisiacal condition” is a reality, so that human beings exist in bodies that in no way possess them and that exert no bodily power over them. Such bodies are pervious to one another, and the same life of well-being permeates them; they are all one in this life. These “paradisiacal” times, however, are always clearly distinguished, in the texts that describe them, from ordinary, historical times. Being outside all historical time, these “paradisiacal” times— so we are told— either precede historical time, or irrupt into it, or will come only after it. Paradisiacal times— as is obvious from the descriptions that are given of them— are quasi- historical conditions generated by an imagination operating in a visionary, poetic, or speculative manner (or in a combination of two or of all three of these possibilities). Such conditions occur only in these imaginatively created representations. A human society under “paradisiacal” conditions is visualizable only in a “time” that is represented through an imaginative act.29 The images produced by such acts of the imagination belong to a tradition as old as the human race, a tradition that represents an attempt to think

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through the problem of a bodily— and hence politically— constituted existence of human beings. Some examples from this tradition are reproduced here, divided into an “ancient” and a “modern” section. Ancient Section Golden was first created the race of frail human beings (genos meropōn anthropōn) by the deathless gods, who inhabit heavenly abodes. This was during Kronos’s time (epi Kronou), when he was still king in heaven. And they lived like gods (ōste theoi d’ezōon) and had no cares in their hearts. Removed from toil and free of pressing needs, cumbersome Old age did not weigh them down, but with legs and arms never failing They would make merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all Good things; for the fruitful earth, unforced, bore them fruit Abundantly and without stint. They carried out in peace, Glad and cheerful their work, blessed with an abundance of goods.30—Hesiod And to them (the human beings of the Golden Age) Ares was not a God (for war and battle), nor were Kydoimus (for battle), King Zeus, Kronos, or Poseidon gods to them, but solely Kypris (Kypris basileia, the goddess of Love).31 In those days, all creatures, wild animals as well as birds, were tame (ktila) and well-disposed toward humans (anthrōpoisi prosēnē), and the flame of friendship (philophrosyne) radiated from living being to living being.32—Empedocles For in those times ruled first the god (the god of care: epimeloumenos theos) . . . and as for the regions of the world, in their turn, it was just the same, the different parts of the world- order being under ruling gods (theōn archontōn). As for living things, divine spirits had divided them among themselves, like herdsmen, by kind and by herd, each by himself providing independently for all the needs of those he tended, so that none of them was wild, nor did they eat each other, and there was no war (polemos) or strife (stasis) at all; . . . God himself tended them (theos autos epistatōn) and presided over them. Under his care (nemontos) they had no civil constitutions (politeiai) nor did they acquire wives and children, . . . they had an abundance of fruits from trees and many other plants, which grew not through cultivation but because the earth sent them up of its own accord. For the most part they would feed outdoors, naked and without bedding; for the blend of the seasons was without painful extremes.33—Plato

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Burr keeps growing everywhere But I cannot fill with it even A flat basket. What a pity! I think of the person I love And leave my basket On the great road. These words express the yearning for a long-gone, Perfect time.34 There once were human beings, who lived obscurely and inconspicuously; their spirit and their breath was not noticeable. The thousand beings were full of peace and quiet, joy and mirth. The thousand nations, in their rural simplicity, could not tell, at that time, East from West. . . . Shrouded in the harmony of heaven and nourished by the fruits of the earth, they never set upon each other by giving false pretexts in order to justify themselves and shift the blame onto others. This state of well-being in the absence of all coercion is the highest form of government.35 —Huainanzi

Modern Section They departed yesterday, and we are recommencing among the three of us a company all the more charming because nothing remains in our hearts that we wish to hide from each other (une société d’autant plus charmante qu’il n’est rien resté dans le fond des coeurs qu’on veuille se cacher l’un à l’autre). . . . After six days wasted in frivolous discussions with indifferent people, we have today spent a morning in the English manner, gathered in silence, enjoying at once the pleasure of being together and the bliss of contemplation. . . . It is certain that this state of contemplation constitutes one of the great charms of sensible men. . . . One wants to be received, so to speak, each within the other (On veut être recueillis l’un dans l’autre). . . . Two hours thus went by between us in this ecstatic immobility, a thousand times sweeter than the cold repose of Epicurus’s Gods.36—Jean-Jacques Rousseau I am related to thee [the infinite = God], and what I behold around me is related to me; all is living and animated, and regards me with bright spiritual eyes, and speaks in spiritual tones to my heart. In all the forms outside myself, I see myself again, broken up into countless diversified shapes, just as the morning sun, broken into a thousand dewdrops, shines toward itself.37 Borne onward in this stream of light, thought floats from soul to soul, ceaselessly and unchanging, and returns purer and brighter from a kindred mind. Through this mystery, each individual finds himself, and understands and

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loves himself, only in another; every spirit unfolds only by means of other spirits, and there is no longer an individual, but only one humanity; no individual thought or love or hate, but only thought, love, and hate, in and through each other.38—Johann Gottlieb Fichte I think that transparency (transparence) should replace secrecy at all times, and I can well imagine the day when two men will have no more secrets from each other (n’auront plus de secrets l’un pour l’autre), because they will have no secrets from anyone, because subjective life, in the same way as objective life, will be totally offered, totally given (totalement offerte, donnée). . . . I believe that such a transformation will take place only through a real revolution (une véritable révolution). Every person should exist entirely for his neighbor, who, in turn, should exist likewise entirely for him, in order that real social harmony may be established. . . . Such a society, obviously, must be a world society encompassing all human beings, because, if there remained any inequalities or privileges in a single place in the world, the conflicts occasioned by these inequalities would eventually affect the entire social body.39—Jean-Paul Sartre To be sure, communication would be able to develop into that dominationfree dialogue of all with all which has provided the model for our ideas both of a mutually formed identity of the self and of a true consensus, only in an emancipated society, in which the mental independence [Mündigkeit] of its members would have become reality.40—Jürgen Habermas

A person completely received within another, a thought and a love in and through one another, transparency ruling everywhere, domination-free dialogue of all with all— what a beautiful human society in the temporal appearance of the imagination! But such charming— and, as is well known, also bewitching41— representations created poetically, philosophically, and speculatively by an unfettered fantasy come all to grief when they have to face the hard evidence of the world of human bodies. In this world, and from that very “beginning”42 out of which they emerged, human beings are subject to the power of their bodies; indeed, they are subject to the power of bodies as such.. Their bodies make them into body politicians; they force them to engage in self-government in the bodily world in which they actually exist. The well-known figure of the “natural man,” which was so fashionable at one point in modern political thought,43 is not only a para-empirical product; it is also put together in thought without consideration of anthropogonic logic, a logic that is demonstrated in a truly exemplary manner in every human being in the nakedness of his or her bodily existence. This logic was formulated by Chinese thinkers with a clarity that can only be called brutal, for instance in the Huainanzi and by Han Fei, a philoso-

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pher and statesman from the third century BC, whose writings are known as the Hanfeizi. The passages quoted below from these works show the extent to which reality is also “injury.” They touch on a wound that human beings always have. It is the wound of their existence: their body. We can do as little about this wound as we can about our body. If human beings wanted to cure their existential wound, they would have to “cure” their bodies, i.e., they would have to be cured of their bodies and thus become bodiless. But how could they make themselves into human beings who are no longer human beings? No one can choose the manner of the creation of his or her existing. Once in existence, human beings have no choice regarding the nature of their existence. They are creation, and hence that law of the Gestalt (as we may call it) that is in force for all that is creation is also in force for them. They are human beings. It follows that they exist in a particular form: human beings are human beings in the form of their body.44 But whoever has form is not autonomous. He is not “alone,” because the form in which he is is not merely his affair. He is subject to the modes of his creation and thus to a law of the Gestalt that entails that he is from the beginning— because he is completely exposed to another— an object of power. Modes of creation, however, are political processes. The Huainanzi tersely states this cosmological prototruth by saying: “In the primeval time, in the epoch of the great beginning, human beings came into being out of nonbeing in order to receive bodiliness from Being. But whatever has bodily form is dominated by external things.”45 Power is present in human beings to the same extent that their body is present to them. Power resides in their intimacy, it belongs to them, they catch sight of themselves in it. It is their form. Thus, what I am is not merely my affair. It is also, and indeed above all, the affair of others. As the Hanfeizi puts it, “In general, anything that has a form can be easily cut and easily trimmed. How can I prove this? Well, if the thing has form, it has length; if it has length, it has size; if it has size, it has a shape; if it has a shape, it has solidity; if it has solidity, it has weight; and if it has weight, it has color. Now, length, size, shape, solidity, weight, and color are called principles. As these are fixed, the thing can be finished, easily cut up.”46 To the extent that human beings exist in bodies, they are subject, through these bodies, to the modes of the “external things” that dominate them and, thus, fashion their life and even “finish and easily cut” them: the sun’s heat, the cold of the night, exhaustion after a long exertion, vulnerability in sleep, the pangs of hunger, the heaviness of the body, the constraints of time, the gash of death, the attachment to a partner for the sake of procreation, the imperative of protection and prevention vis-à-vis life-threatening forces of

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nature. From the very beginning, human beings submit to the law of the Gestalt, which is in force for all creation. This life is restless, and by no means only peaceful, by no means undisturbed, by no means filled with the enjoyment of life. The “things” that dominate human beings never let go of them; on the contrary, these things maintain their grip on them in multifarious ways and permanently. It would be a grave mistake to think that human beings themselves have brought this law of their beginnings to bear on their life. The law of the Gestalt, which makes every thing “thingly” for every other thing, originates in creation; it is in the “nature of things” (to take up one of the concepts that the Enlightenment substituted for the concept of “creation” without changing in the least anything in the law of the Gestalt or going beyond it).47 “For ‘to be,’” as Leo Strauss formulated the creation law of the Gestalt, “means ‘to be something’ and hence to be different from things which are ‘something else.’” 48 Human beings, therefore, are political from the moment of their worldly beginning, with no intervention needed on their part. (We could also say that they are already political, if we understand the word already in a logical, and not a temporal, sense.) As they are, they are form, and as form they find themselves in the midst of a process of forms, in which and through which things are sorted out. Using the language of the Hanfeizi, we may say that they are “easily cut and easily trimmed, finished, cut up.” They are actors in the politics of creation. Thus, nothing is required in order to make human beings political or to make them act politically; nothing, except the event of their appearing in their Gestalt. Their ex-istere— their first birth— is sufficient. From “day one” they find themselves, insofar as they are a Gestalt that gives Gestalt to themselves and to other things, in the process of political creation. They “are there,” and creation is affected by their “being- there,” for a Gestalt, among all Gestalten, has thereby again taken its Gestalt in creation. The “political living being” is political through creation. Such a being becomes political in the same way that it becomes creative: according to the existent manner of creation.49

In Action

Human beings are always doing something. They are active beings by nature; they exist in action and in no other way.1 Their life is movement, transformation, change. It is formed consciously, and, as this consciousness varies, life is formed differently, constantly, from beginnings to completions, through plans and intentions, changes of mind and influences, through both the stillness and the speed of time, through the ruptures and the extremes of existence. As Pascal described the human condition in his Pensées: “We float through a vast immensity, ever uncertain, ever drifting, driven from one end to the other. When we think of attaching ourselves to a point and holding firmly onto it, it wavers and leaves; and if we go after it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and escapes us forever. Nothing stops for us (Rien ne s’arrête pour nous). This is our natural condition and yet the most contrary to our inclination. We burn with desire to find a firm ground (assiette ferme) and an ultimate, stable foundation upon which to build a tower reaching to the Infinite; but our whole groundwork cracks and the earth opens to the abyss.”2 A similar statement is made, in typical Taoist style, by Liu An, who writes in the Huainanzi: “It is in the nature of human beings that they constantly, over and over, go from change to change and from one transformation to the next.”3 Life under these conditions, however, no matter how unstable and fluid it may be, cannot take place without contexts, goals, or pathmarks. In the confusion of the movements affecting it, there is a need to act such that life is encompassed, given a direction, and shaped according to certain standards; in one word, it needs to be “governed.” “To behave always in the same, uniform manner and to remain unchanged,” as Plato says in The Statesman, “is possible only for that which is the most divine of all things.”4 The human situation, in contrast, is thoroughly changeable; each and every thing always

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happens in a different manner. And this is again why human beings are in themselves already political. Their existence in the constant mode of acting is an existence oriented toward power. After all, human beings must govern themselves. They must be power for themselves and exert an influence on their own life that this life itself demands. Thus, we can clearly formulate what must be attained here. The proper aim of every human being is to become powerful in relation to himself in the existential realm of his acting so that he can steer and shape— and thus “determine”— the movement of his life. But how can human beings do this? To be sure, their existence always takes one form or another, but what form does it take, what form can and should it have? This question arises, unavoidably. It is the first— the political or, more precisely, the action-political— question, the question that existence poses to every human being. Or to formulate it with even greater precision: For each human being, his entire existence is a question. It is the great question. Toward what and for what should he act, and in what way? He is inexorably faced with questions that demand a decision. But decisions presuppose the capacity— the power— to decide. How then can a human being govern himself? How can he be power for himself, for attaining this or that form of life? The situation is apparently paradoxical. Movement must be governed through movement. But how? “In the realm of actions, as in that of health,” Aristotle wrote, “there is nothing stable. This is true of the universal and even more so of the particular, with regard to which nothing can be ascertained with exactitude. There is here no science, no general recommendation, that can help; rather, the agents themselves must ponder the situation.”5 But this is precisely the question: A movement must be channeled, out of movement, toward a particular form, a particular Gestalt. But how? Under what conditions can a human being, in the flux of his life, be the helmsman of his life? This is the great question. The answer is: In the beginning. In beginnings is found the power of human beings to decide, by means of the creation of Gestalten, in the movement of their existence, with regard to this movement. For, as Aristotle stated in the Nicomachean Ethics, our actions cannot “be traced back to origins other than those that are in ourselves and the origins of which, in turn, are also in ourselves.”6 Human beings, in their acting, are themselves a beginning (arche). They can be at the very beginning of their actions— hence their begetters (genetes). Thus a creative power belongs to them. When they begin a movement, and in the movement of their existence, they are an entirely Gestalt-giving beginning. They “de-cide”: Within the movements that constitute the movement of their existence, another, different movement branches out. This movement inserts itself into the interplay of all movements, in one way or another, and

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gives this interplay a different Gestalt. The beginning is a Gestalt-making beginning. The beginning is, within existence, a movement for existence. It is an action that affects existence in its entirety. Or to put it in a different, final, way: Whoever makes a beginning aims at having an encompassing effect on his existence. The power not merely to live human existence but rather to direct it comes from himself: he is the beginning. Human beings come to the power of their action out of the beginning. They are in their existence, since they act for their existence. The concept “existence” is too narrowly interpreted when it is taken to refer just to human life. In order to do justice to this concept, the expression must be expanded by adding a decisive adjective, so that we speak of an “acting existence.” How do human beings exist? Not simply by “being.” Rather, they exist in a particular way: they “are” insofar as they “are acting.” Human existence takes place in action. Thus, there is human existence: an acting that is an existing. “The reason for this is that Being is desired and loved by all beings, and that we are or exist to the extent that we are active in living and in performing acts. Thus, the creator, through his activity, is in a certain sense his own work (poiēsas to ergon esti).”7 Every action of a human being describes a line of meaning in relation to the totality of his existence. I act when I act—“I” in the sense of the person that I am, in the sense of the actuality of my existence. In the final analysis, little more can be said of actions than what Aristotle stated: Every action has an “aim” (telos).8 Out of a beginning, actions are always a movement with an aimed effect, for every movement in existence is a movement for this existence. It clearly follows from this that, in human action, all aims are pursued for the sake of a supreme aim. This aim of “any acting whatsoever” is the existence of human beings in the process of becoming real through acting.9 To the extent that he acts, a human being both is in his existence and acts for his existence. Action renders a human being real. Thus, with each of their actions, human beings aim both at the aim of the action and at themselves. The “highest aim” is always given along with the aim of each action; this highest aim is the acting existence itself in the sense of human existence or, as Aristotle calls it, “the Good for a human being” (anthrōpinon agathon).10 Human beings come to the power of their action out of the beginning. They also come to the freedom of their existence. They can act and they must act. But precisely to the extent that they “must” act, their existence takes place as their existence. For it is in their power to give a Gestalt to their existence in their own way. Through action, they are themselves the beginning and the authors of what they do. In their existence, they are creators for this existence.

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Human beings attain the status of supreme freedom— the freedom to exist creatively— in the reality of their acting. They also find the truth of their political existence here, because their acting is reciprocal. Human acting is always, in one way or another, an encounter, an exchange, a communication, an assistance. It generates a society. The freedom of human beings in their creative existence is the freedom to exist in a social form that, as a political form, they themselves build. In this way they are really creative, namely, when the beginning of society is in them and they are the originators of society. The power that human beings find in action is the power to create. They gain this power when they act beyond the circle of their individuality toward common goals, i.e., when they act politically. Such political action constitutes both the freedom and the condition for the power unto creation: “Even if the Good (agathon) is the same for both the individual and the state (polis), taking up and preserving the Good of the state nonetheless seems to be something greater and more perfect; and although it is pleasing for the individual to secure his own good, it is a nobler and a more divine thing to secure it for nations and states.”11

In Consciousness

For human beings, their soul is the faculty of their existence. Through the soul they attain “consciousness.” The same is true of the grace that falls into the soul, which is why the topic of grace will be discussed presently (and why the whole of the next section will be devoted to it). Consciousness and grace bring clarity into human perception. They operate in human beings as if they were eyes of cognition, which, once open, “transform” everything that is within their sight. In the clarity of consciousness or in the light of grace, human beings may come to know what they did not know before and to see what they did not see before. They see indeed all that they see. Actually, they see more than that, for in all that they see, they now also discern what they see. They “really” see things for the first time. The world is transformed when it is illuminated by consciousness and enlightened by grace. “When” . . . if it is ever the case. For this is not the initial situation. In the act of beginning that they are in themselves, and in the beginnings that they put in place when they act— and they are always acting and, therefore, always beginning something— human beings, to be sure, acquire a power to create, which may be called “divine,” assuming that the adjective is understood symbolically and not literally.1 But human beings do not automatically see the consequences of the act of beginning. At the beginning, they are blind to what they have initiated and activated as a beginning as well as to what this beginning will entail in the end. The eyes of cognition, through which alone human beings see what they are doing, are not opened in principle from the beginning and for all beginnings. This is the difference, which is everywhere and always coming to the fore, between humans and that which is truly divine. There, in the realm of divinity, the end is always contained in the beginning, just as it is in a circle and in every perfect movement, in which

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all beginning reaches into its end and all ending reaches into its beginning. God is transparent to himself with regard to what he is as well as with regard to what he does. Everything is already present in the divine, no matter what may yet happen. Divine consciousness is the absolute presence of everything and for everything. Here, in the realm of humans, on the other hand, everything lies in the future, hidden and unknown, and extended in time, which splits things apart and devours them. Nothing can be known with certainty; a good many things remain obscure. Everything consists in waiting for the “more” that comes later. Everything is a delay of what is to come; everything is extended into hours, days, months, years, decades. Time constantly slips away into the future, and nonetheless it is the future for whose sake all time passes. The future never occurs in the future of time. The future is not a reality that approaches but one that passes by; it is a scattering of the original fullness and a weakening of the original forces; it is an annihilation that takes place through the vanishing of things.2 Nonetheless, human beings want to be creative. And indeed they are creative, because they exist; and they exist only in a creative manner, namely, insofar as they are a beginning for beginnings. When human beings use the power to create that lies in their hands in the mode of “seeing,” this power is “divine.” But it adopts a different nature— a truly, thoroughly different nature— when human beings, as creative beings, are still “blind” and hence neither know nor understand the power that is in their hands or what they can effect with it. The power to create, which belongs to human beings, carries the seed of catastrophe in itself. For in the dark night of a cognition that perceives and yet does not see, the power to create is a power to destroy.3 Here, everything is the same and everything is different.4 Power— the pure effectual force— is not different. Its quality remains constant; hence, it is a “creative” power, which, in the world’s flow of Gestalten, is a power to give rise to Gestalten, i.e., a power to create reality. As soon as it unfolds, this power is, according to its nature, a power unto “creation.” Within a world that already has a Gestalt, it is a power that gives Gestalt to this very world. Through this power, a world that has already been given a Gestalt inexorably becomes, in a smaller or greater degree, “different.” Whenever and wherever it unfolds in the world, this power creates a peculiar configuration of Gestalten within a realm where everything is already Gestalt. Thus, everything will be different here. What, indeed, is achieved by a creator who sets to work blindly? What happens through the agency of human beings who intervene in the occurrence of Gestalten of the world as they see fit and who, paying no heed to the fact that this world has already been given

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a Gestalt, operate in it with Gestalt-creating power? What comes out of the activity of human beings when they direct the Gestalt- creating power that has been given to them at their own life— for their life demands to be governed and ordered— and they misjudge the degree to which their life already is a configuration of Gestalten? As Heraclitus said, “They sunder themselves from that with which they deal unceasingly, the Logos (logō), which governs (dioikounti) everything; and what they encounter daily appears to them as alien (xena).”5 Power, thus exercised, will destroy the reality of reality in reality (i.e., the world of Gestalten).6 To be sure, this power will operate in a “Gestalt-giving” fashion, but in a manner totally unconcerned with those Gestalten among which it has a creative effect insofar as it exerts this effect upon them. It will indeed be a “creative” power, but a creative power of a “contrary” kind. Born in the dark night of cognition, it is totally “misshapen” (ungestalt) compared with the world of Gestalten; it is applied to this world according to a false measure. Hence, this power will not proceed to “unfold” in this world in any other way than by clashing brutally with Gestalten and by dislodging them from the places in which, and only in which, each of them is a Gestalt. Within a realm already ordered according to Gestalten, these Gestalten are displaced, confounded, and upset by what is still a “creative” power. This power tears them out of their ordered whole by wreaking havoc on it. A destruction of Gestalt takes place within a world in which nothing is “world” if it is not Gestalt. A disintegration of creation takes place within a reality in which nothing is “reality” if it is not a form of creation. A meaningless, worthless action takes place within an existence in which there is no “existence” if it is not an existence in action. Through the death of Gestalten, the meaning of reality disappears, because this meaning was embodied in those Gestalten. Reality becomes “empty”; the reality of reality is annihilated. Thus, the power to create has a twofold character in human hands: it is the power to give meaning when human beings “see” by virtue of this power, and it is the power to bring about death when they, along with this power, remain “blind.”7 Among the various Gestalten of power, by virtue of which human beings are on their way to their second birth, i.e., to their civilization, a certain Gestalt must be developed in which they recognize the meaning of their second birth and through which they are enabled to erect a civilization, i.e., to give rise to a creation in the world of creations. This political-civilizing power has been portrayed, from time immemorial and customarily, in a body of myths, teachings, and traditions. It is represented in a binding manner and brought into full display by men and women invested bodily with the representative

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signs of social-political authority, such as the “king,” the “parliament,” or the “government.” But it is not merely a matter of myths and traditions. Here, these bearers of representation and figures of authority are not the first Gestalt (in the sense of the beginning). After all, they themselves are created bearers and figures, Gestalten that come forth out of beginnings such as the founding of political societies, elections, the formation of governments, coronations, and revolutions. The power of human beings over their existence is a First. Plato’s words come to mind in connection with this power: “we are talking not about just anything but about the way that we ought to live.”8 The question that is posed at the beginning is: When human beings apply the power through which they are in command of themselves, what is it that enables them to find a way for their existence by means of this application? How do they orient and guide themselves in such a way that they arrive at their existence within their existence? In what manner do the “eyes of cognition” become open for them? What provides them with “illumination,” “light,” “divine” clarity? What is it that allows human beings to tie the creative power given to them, not to the Gestalt of the power of death, but to that of the power of meaning? Plato answers: it is the work of the soul (psyches ergon) that does all this. In the Republic, he says: “Well then, ponder next the following question: Doesn’t the soul have an office (psyches ergon) which you couldn’t discharge with anything else in the world, as for example managing (epimeleomai), ruling (archein), deliberating (bouleuein), and the like? Is there anything other than the soul to which you could rightly assign these activities and say that they were its peculiar office? There is nothing else. And what about living? Shall we say that living too is the office of the soul? Yes, most certainly.”9 Human beings come to the Gestalt of their consciousness through the Gestalt of their “soul.” In this Gestalt it becomes apparent what “consciousness” is: light, clarity, cognition. The illuminated soul “sees,” because it is the consciousness that differentiates one thing from another within the plurality of all existing things and, through further cognition, decides in favor of one and not the other (or vice versa) and is thus able, in the midst of this plurality, to find the figure of the “way.” Where do I go? The soul is the work of the response. It is through the soul that a human being’s questions become the figure of the meaning of his or her existence. The soul is the creative meaning through which one knows or becomes “conscious” of what one wants in life. It is the work of governing existence, and it discharges the functions of “managing,” “ruling,” and “deliberating.” Out of the work of the “soul”— a work of cognition that weaves meaning— a work of power arises. Just as the soul that becomes apparent is

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transfigured in human beings into a “seeing” soul through illumination, the Gestalt of the power of that consciousness that tells them what the right life is takes shape within them. Human beings become “capable of humanity” through the work that creates their “soul” by forming a consciousness that “governs” them. They produce in themselves that which (to use Aristotle’s words) is “proper” to them in contrast with other living beings such as plants and animals: “the act of carrying out the proper work of the soul” (to ergon anthrōpou psyches energeia).10 For in contrast to plants and animals, as Aristotle elaborates, it is only human beings, insofar as they are endowed with a soul, who are capable of “producing representations (aisthesis) of good and bad and right and wrong.”11 Human beings become capable of humanity through their consciousness, because it is through consciousness that they attain the capacity to reach for their nature, i.e., the power of their creative existence. They acquire the power of judgment and gain a view of their own effectual power, and in consequence they also gain a view of the field of what is possible for them. They can make distinctions among those Gestalten of power that arise alongside the beginnings that human beings themselves are able to set in motion through creative action, i.e., in the act of giving Gestalt to their existence. They catch sight of what that power, which they themselves are, effects. Human beings are now capable of living as human beings. They are in a position to carry out the creation to which they are appointed by their second birth: the work of their society. Their entire existence is needful of society from its beginnings, as is made distinctly clear in the materials of a long tradition of thought, with many places of origin, which are presented here discursively. But the logic we are pursuing has its foundation in an even stricter science of humanity, one that calls for more fundamental principles. We would have to say, accordingly, that human beings are in themselves political simply on the strength of the fact that they are creation.12 Insofar as they exist as a plurality of the many, and yet really have both their origin and their destination in the One, they are human beings only as human beings in the form of society, namely, in that One (the form of society) that is in the realm of many (a society), their unity in plurality.13 But there is more to say, because the polis, which a human being is, must be grasped even more narrowly. Every human being— we may say— is, in his or her individuality, already “society,” because “thinking,” as it is enacted in human beings, always brings forth sociality and is enacted as sociality. While thinking, human beings are never really “alone,” but are always already in society, even when such thinking apparently takes place in solitude.14 The reason (logos) that knows, as Heraclitus explained,

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is not “just any reason, but one that is common (koinos) and [hence] divine (theios).”15 Whosoever is a human being is also a polis. This is why human beings, even in the mimesis of the paradeigma that they themselves are, have the capacity to carry out the creation assigned to them in the form of their second birth: the work of their society.16 The society to be built will be a mirror of the paradigmatic polis in every human being.17 However, human beings can also implement their society because they carry in their soul— i.e., in the Gestalt of the power of their consciousness— the work of government. Through this work, “politics” has already taken place in human beings even before they move on to politics as a form of existence by means of founding and establishing their societies and before they make this form of existence the activity of their life. If we follow Plato’s conceptual analysis, the work of governing the soul is essentially no less complex than the great invention of modern political theory called the “constitutional state.” The “separation of powers” is a structure of the soul; it appears alongside the Gestalt of power of human consciousness. When the soul “manages,” “rules,” and “deliberates,” it is divided in a threefold manner and yet is active politically as one “soul” just like a constitutional state. We recognize here the three powers: judiciary and administration (“management”), the government (“ruling”), and finally the representative and legislative corporation (“deliberation”). The beginning of all governing is in the soul. Human society has its existence here, in that tension between multiplicity and the One in which alone plurality can exist,18 and here also the consciousness of a human being is constituted like a commonwealth, when his or her soul relates to its parts as a whole.19 The soul teaches human beings that they are political, and through the soul they practice the activity of governing, by which they fulfill the task of their second birth: self-government in community with others. Here, in political science and in their political praxis, all human beings are equal to one another. Every woman and every man is a community in himself or herself, a society of his or her soul. Every woman and every man engages in selfgoverning, in one way or another.20 Human equality, in the sense that everyone is a polis and a self-governing being, is the path to the second birth of human beings. For in this equality they are really capable of humanity, because through this equality they are capable of society. By means of their soul they always already live in community, and in the Gestalt of the power of their consciousness they have knowledge of this fact and they enact this knowledge consciously. The way to civilization, i.e., to the human society that is to be established, is already prefigured: Wherever human beings have knowledge of “community”— and

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they do have this knowledge, since they are indeed cognizant of their community with themselves— they find themselves in the community that shares this knowledge. They are “one” among themselves by means of an equally shared conception of their “political” consciousness. The communal character of this conception, however— and this is the way Aristotle took up the logic of beginnings—“brings into being the domestic community (oikia) as well as the politically constituted society (polis).”21 The culmination of human life is a political culmination. It consists in the path that human beings take toward themselves: “And this shows that a constituted human society (polis) is not simply a community (koinonia) of a shared place of residence, nor is it meant to function merely as protection against unjust mutual interference or for the promotion of trade. Rather, it shows that all this, to be sure, must be present, if a constituted human society (polis) is to come into being, but that it is not sufficient to bring into existence a constituted human society (polis). Rather, such a society is found only in the community of families and clans who live a good life (eu zen) and have as their goal a complete and self- sufficient life (zōes teleias charin kai autarkous).”22

In Grace

The previous pages of this book represent an “ascending” movement. The beginnings of a creation that are made by a creative force directed toward this creation became visible as in the beginning. They became visible in the guise of a morphonoesis,1 i.e., in the guise of a disposition and discipline of the human mind that is known as nous or intellectus, and by means of which reality is understood in its Gestalten from the “start” of the process of the Gestalt, and thus understood alongside the effectual power of the “creative” force that creates Gestalten.2 It was possible to see successively those Gestalten, in which a creation acquires creative power, i.e., acquires the character of a reality that founds reality. All reality is Gestalt, and therefore that power which, as creative power, is the creative “figure” in the process of creation is able to be found only on the path from Gestalt formation to Gestalt and from creative force to creation.3 Where does creation take place? The answer is: Creation takes place in a process of creating Gestalten that lies between creative power and creation, i.e., in an event that lies between the giving of a Gestalt and the Gestalt. “Real” creation, i.e., that process of Gestalt giving which I would like to call the figuration of creation in the process of creation, lies in such an “in-between.”4 Every creation has been created in its Gestalt as specifically directed toward this Gestalt. It has taken place in its creation in the mode of a creation directed toward the creation that it represents. Every creation has occurred in the manner of a process of Gestalt giving that progressively actualized that Gestalt in which it exists now as this specific creation. In a creation, both things always take place: creation and the giving of a Gestalt. The power of the creative element is the power to create as well as the power to give a Gestalt.

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Or, to put it more precisely, its action is both a figurative and a creative power, i.e., a creation through the giving of Gestalt. We may thus formulate the principle: The figuration of a creation in the process of its creation is the “act,” i.e., the execution of this creation. This is how creation takes place. This is its actuality. The first question, How does creation take place? now gives rise to a further question: What is creation? And the answer to this question is: Creation consists in the work of its figuration. An execution takes place and this execution determines what the emerging creation will be, because the execution gives rise to this creation by giving it a Gestalt. Only in this way will the work of creation appear. Or to formulate it more correctly, the work of creation appears in this way, because this work takes place through one and the same process. In the execution of a creation, in the execution of this or that work by a creative hand, a “decision” regarding this creation occurs. What the creation will be is hereby established. Every creation follows the power by which it has been produced. The creation “fits” itself into this power. But in what way? That was the question that the present reflections were meant to explore from the start, in the form of an investigation concerning human beings in the process that leads to their second birth. In the course of this investigation, we have “seen” human beings on the “path” to their “beginnings.” We saw the creative element in the process of beginning, which is the method leading to human life. And we grasped the fact that this creative element always has the character of Gestalt. Beginnings take place only insofar as they fit themselves into Gestalten. These beginnings, thus fitted into Gestalten, are: Gestalten of power for human existence, through which human beings acquire the power to exist; The polis that every human being is in himself, a person’s “human polis” as we might call it, in which human beings find themselves already marked for a path that leads to themselves; The Gestalt of consciousness, that work of cognition by means of which human beings themselves become Gestalten of the power to give direction to their life. They now know the way; they inspect, as from a summit, the end of the way.

How could human beings “ascend” higher? After all, with the knowledge of the way and of the end of the way, they have, to be sure, the vision of a completion, but they have also reached a boundary. Their power to find the way goes no farther than the way they know. Their knowledge circumscribes the range of their power. It is the boundary of their power. Consciousness’s

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work of cognition is confined to the realm of the light of cognition: a ray of light against the darkness. Plato’s Socrates did not remain content with this. He spoke of more, or to put it more precisely, he spoke of something different. The ascent of knowledge proceeds within the Gestalt of consciousness. Certainly. This is the “human” way. But in the dialogue reproduced in the Philebus, Socrates asks himself whether there may not be a better, “more beautiful” way (odos) leading to the event of knowledge besides the “human” way just described. And the question is answered in the affirmative, but, more than this, the interlocutors also reach a shared view. They agree that the better, more beautiful way is more difficult to follow. For it is no longer the human way, but a divine way. It is the way of grace: It is a gift (dosis) of the gods to men, or so it seems to me, hurled down from heaven by some Prometheus along with a most dazzling fire (pyr phanotatos). And the people of old, superior to us and living in closer proximity to the gods, have bequeathed us this tale, that whatever is said to be consists of one and many, having in its nature determination and indeterminacy. Since this is the structure of things, we must in each case always assume and search for a concept (idea) for every one of them, for we will indeed find it there.5

The knowledge of the way can thus come to human beings as a gift. A power “above” them intervenes and puts them on the way to their second birth. It shines with the light of a radiant “fire” in order that they may truly see the way. They discover the fractured Gestalt of creation. What is one is nonetheless also divided. Everything slips away within the solid outlines within which everything is held. Human beings become aware that creation is completely dissolved, as creation, into itself: it disintegrates into its fragmenting unity and into the parts of its infinite division. What is it that appears then to human beings under the “fire”? Things that are not things? A being that escapes from its actuality? In this case, human beings would not have received what Socrates calls a “gift of the gods.” This gift is indeed “divine,” a gift that “some Prometheus” “hurled down” from the gods to humans. It brings clarity to human beings. All of a sudden, they see things in a full light. They recognize the chaosmos of the world6 and seize upon the experience, which is given with the world, of orientation and confusion, order and chaos. They find the way that leads to their world and to their life. The way lies in the midst of the world but not within it. It leads to a “world” that they must first find in the world. This is the worldly knowledge of human beings, which they preserve by means of

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the “tale” of the “people of old”: their way in the world is a thinking of the world. For the creation comes asunder, as they know with certainty. But they also know that the order of the world is not absent from this disintegration. In human beings, knowing eyes acquire sight by virtue of this “most dazzling fire,” the fire of knowledge. They now understand the method of their existence. This method is thinking. Their existence in the “world” is structured by means of such thinking. They find this world through thinking, whenever “they assume and seek a concept (idea) for everything.” Creation is many-in-one only for a thinking that knows. And human beings come to the power of this knowledge only in the Gestalt of grace. Only in the Gestalt of grace. Let us repeat this qualification (“only in the Gestalt of grace”) because it calls to mind ancient teachings concerning the human being that knows. How do specifically human knowledge and cognition take place? An answer to this question has been sought from time immemorial. It is for the sake of finding such an answer that human beings have built the cultures of knowledge that they have created. The question has been surrounded and guided by rites and commandments, rules and admonitions, instructions and initiations that supported and accompanied human beings on the path of their “curiosity.” But they also caused them to persevere wisely and to stay within the boundaries set for them as human beings. These boundaries, however, are not narrow, and to a certain degree they are also fluid. Human beings can go far on the way to knowledge, and they can expand the boundaries of their knowledge more and more, even beyond the boundaries themselves. They can come into contact with the “divine.” To put it in more analytical terms, they can come in open contact with that experience which, from their perspective, must be called “divine,” because it is that infinity of knowledge within which the totally Other vis- à- vis themselves shows itself: instead of boundaries, the unbounded; instead of things of reality, reality itself; instead of something conditioned, communicated, and restricted, knowledge that is unconditional, self-nourishing, inexhaustible. How is the awareness of the boundary in this contact to be maintained, a boundary that, though fluid, is also inalterably clear? Do not human beings partake of the “divine” infinity of knowledge by being cognizant of it? Couldn’t human beings overstep the boundary that they set themselves, even though it cannot be obliterated? Must human beings be like God in order to find themselves within that totality of knowledge which they after all know exists? As far as we know, the qualification “only in the Gestalt of grace” was felt from the beginning to be a burden. Human beings did not always submit to it, but rather resented that power above themselves; they even attempted to

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break out of the boundaries set for them. They rejected the commandment given alongside grace: you shall know, indeed, but you shall not be like God. The creation story in the Bible tells us of this event, and from it originated that experiment in civilization which began in the seventeenth century in Europe7 and which has become known as “modernity.” The modern revolt was a continuation of the biblical one, or, still better: the modern revolt was an attempt to “carry out” the biblical one, even though their protagonists explicitly proclaimed it in opposition thereto, as a revolt breaking the connection with a “god,” and as being, therefore, thoroughly areligious and “secular.” This interpretation is false, for in its own way modernity is a religious phenomenon.8 Modernity is the exemplary case of the pathology of creative power in human worldly actions and projects of civilization. Indeed, it has an incomparably bizarre character: never before has there been such a concentrated power to create. And, nonetheless, modernity is no more than a figment of the imagination, namely, the power fantasy of modern human beings. They fancy that they are about to create their world for themselves, hence a world totally subordinated to them and created in their image, and instead they only deform and destroy precisely the one world in which they live.9 We must, therefore, briefly depict the events that took place in the seventeenth century in Europe, as it was here that an experiment was conducted (under the name of “modern” civilization) that is unique in the history of the human race. The primordial world, which is pregiven to human beings from the first beginning, was to be replaced by “another” world, in which human beings see the image, created by themselves, of their own godlike omnipotence. Such a plan had never before been conceived by any other civilization. Both premodern Western and non-Western civilizations had always anchored their self-interpretation in a primary order encompassing all things and events, within which (it was said) the human race lives from its beginnings and learns the meaning of its existence.10 But here, in seventeenth-century Europe, natural scientists, men of letters, philosophers, and humanists posed the old question— the classical question in the history of human self-understanding— in a completely new way: What is the place of human beings in creation?11 And they questioned not only what their own spiritual tradition, Christianity, had taught about the human being. They questioned everything that had been previously said about the human being. They doubted the truth of the old cosmological myths that occur in all civilizations and that plant in human beings the belief that a comprehensive order of things and living beings— called kosmos in Greece, maat in Egypt, Brahma in India, Tao in China, Haqîqat Mohammadîya in Islam— preceded and prefigured their existence. Who ennobled the world if not the human

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being? Would not all things and living beings (they intimated) remain in a condition of dim apathy if they did not come into the light of human intelligence and into the circle of human creative power? Nearly no wise man was able to resist the logic of the thought that the creator of this world could ultimately take no pleasure in his creation if there were not an alter Deus who views and understands this creation in its entirety.12 Hardly anyone in Europe was blind to the triumph of the nuova scienza, through which it apparently became possible for human beings to do the unimaginable and to master nature.13 Had not this subjugation of nature been demonstrated by the fact that human beings had freed themselves from the bonds of the cosmos and had risen to an autonomous existence in their world?14 A new image of the human being arose in the thoughts of European philosophers, natural scientists, men of letters, and humanists: The human being is a unique being that has the freedom to choose its own nature,15 to transform nature into a pure manifestation of its self-actualization,16 and to transform itself into a god— as roi de la terre, master of nature, centre de tout, moi suffisant à soi-même, as absolute I, divine I, as ens realissimum, ens causa sui.17 If it had occurred to anyone to subvert that which had always been viewed as the conditio humana, he could not have thought up anything different from this anthropological revolution. And attentive observers did realize that this was a revolution.18 These were people who were familiar with both the Judeo-Christian and the Greco- Roman civilizations, and who knew the anthropological truth conveyed in mythical and biblical narratives about the man who succumbs to the illusion that he can make himself god. They also knew that human beings cannot place themselves at the beginning of all beginnings or make themselves the original and ultimate foundation of all that is, the first movers of everything that happens under the sun. They can only commit the arrogant act of hybris, the sin of superbia. Superbia, gloria, vanitas, avaritia— these were, according to the Doctors of the Church of medieval Europa, the vices of evil that must be forsworn, rejected as abominable, and suppressed. God’s people, the theologians said, do not listen to the promises enunciated by false prophets; they loathe the deceptive lures of the world: glory, fame, and pleasures. Such things, they said, only flatter human pride, self-love, and conceit, because they prod men and women to inflict on themselves the greatest cruelties. These things blunt the consciousness of the true conditions of human existence. For the human being, according to the theologians, exists by the grace of God. If he turns away from the origin of his existence and attempts to become a god himself, he faces a life of unending misery: he is haunted and driven by unceasing selftorment because of his inability to satisfy his self-love, he pines for love and

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is at the same time prepared to destroy everything that might stand between himself and his self-enjoyment, and he strives for worldly possessions while his world is hollowed out.19 As it turned out, pride, arrogance, and jealousy achieved victory and drove away reason, the master of fantasy, installing the latter as the master of all human enterprises. Reason “merely” recognizes barriers and discovers not untouched islands but only a reality that it is not the first to touch. Reason discovers in reality the presence of the ground of all reality. For reason, all reality is classic. Whatsoever it “discovers,” it always also discovers the ground that precedes reason, the preexisting reality, the world that is pregiven to it. There is nothing new under the sun. The discoveries of reason are new only in the sense that what it discovers was already discovered, in order that it may be discovered anew by reason. But there is another thing that arouses human pride: To come to know what has not yet been known, to say what has not yet been said, to construct worlds that have not yet been built, to actualize what is not yet actual— is not all this worth a revolt? A revolt against reason, against the world that says to human beings: You, human beings, you have not created me? Their fantasy promises human beings complete success; it feeds their pride and lets it grow infinitely. Fantasy is free and knows no barriers. Human beings fancy that they can achieve anything: any cognition that they may want to affirm, any thing that they may want to produce, any event that they may want to bring about. In their fancy, they can be anything: autonomous creators of their knowledge, autonomous creators of their world, autonomous creators of their history. They can be God. Modern fantasy promised: Eritis sicut dii: You shall be like gods. This motif— the promise that human beings will become gods— has been the final motif in European (Western) thought since the seventeenth century. But the truth is something different. The freedom of a human being lies in grace. Through grace, a human being is confronted with himself, for grace constructs “the” human being before his own eyes. In grace, a human being stands in relation to himself; as if by a divine glance, he sees himself—“the” human being— writ on reality. He is revealed to his own eyes in such a way that he becomes completely manifest to himself. And what does he see then? The answer is: he sees his “free” nature. Human beings catch sight of the reality of their existence in its “undecided” boundaries. The reality of their existence challenges them to determine themselves as “human.” It demands that they make a choice regarding their boundaries. The boundaries of “human” reality are fluid, but this reality exists only within certain boundaries. Human beings are determined as being “indeterminate” in a manner wholly

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specific to human beings. What is revealed to human eyes in grace is an anthropogonic freedom: human beings can choose themselves. A human being can decide to be the being who, going beyond himself on his way to being something completely other (which he is not), discovers in the light of grace (this “most dazzling fire”) how he stands in relation to himself, i.e., to the reality that he is insofar as he determines it (and must determine it, because he can have being only as a “determinate” reality). In their freedom to overstep boundaries, human beings find their boundary. Given the prospect of their own possible unreality in an infinite reality, they may decide to determine their existence in a limiting and perhaps even “restricting” way, and they may thus, guided by a divine glance, see again what they initially overlooked, namely, the boundaries for their own existence in the infinity of reality. Grace is the light. It frees human beings from the fetters of their fantasy. The latter suggests to them the notion of their omnipotence and makes them believe that they have no real boundaries. But in grace, human beings recognize the sentence of death that they would impose upon themselves if they were to choose this path. Grace is the light. And it is the freedom of the human being. Let us once again repeat the qualification: Only in the Gestalt of grace . . . For this is not only a maxim of restriction, as it has just been shown to be. It is also a maxim of the beginning. It designates the beginning that human beings earn in grace for their second birth. Augustine has provided an exemplary analysis of these connections in the anthropogonic-political interpretation of the biblical creation story he gives in De civitate Dei and in De Genesi ad litteram.20 Augustine saw human life as life in a political society (societas tamquam civitas) from the standpoint of its beginning. Human beings exist in creation according to the Gestalten of creation: in creation, there is not the one human being but rather, in one human being, there is already plurality (multitudo).21 Hence, in the rebellion of the first human beings against God, there took place at the same time a political upheaval. A wholly other society, one set in opposition to the divine creation, arose from human beings. Augustine called it the society of human beings (civitas hominum) or the society of this world (civitas huius saeculi). This society is characterized by human self-love in contempt of God (amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei). It is also characterized by death. For Adam and Eve became mortal on account of their disobedience; they brought the rule of death (mortis regnum) upon themselves. Human beings fell, Augustine writes, into an “endless death.”22 God had already known this. He had foreseen that human beings would rise against him, although, as Augustine says, this was not evident when they

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were created. For in God’s foresight, human beings committed what they absolutely should not have committed: they rebelled. And they lapsed into death and its rule. But God did not abandon human beings. He did not deliver them to an “endless death.” Rather, human beings— potentially all human beings— were emancipated from death by him. Already before their creation, God, in his providence, had broken their fall by placing human beings— who had rebelled and would fall into death— in a political Gestalt aiming at the recovery of life. This Gestalt was his grace (gratia): God’s most perfect way to give human beings the gift of freedom from death. For God’s grace lays the foundation of a society in which human beings are (again) “alive” as in no other society. Since human beings turn toward God to the extent that they open themselves to God’s grace, grace inserts human beings into life itself. They live no longer in a society “according to the flesh” (societas secundum carnem); rather, they become members of a society “according to the spirit” (societas secundum spiritum).23 From the beginning, God offered humans beings, who had fallen under the power of death, the possibility of a new beginning. Already with their creation, he established the (later) dominion of life beyond the dominion of death. Thus, as Augustine summed up his train of thought, two political societies (societates tamquam civitates duas) came into being in the first human being (in hoc primo homine). Even though these societies were not yet visible, they were nonetheless already in existence in God’s prescience (praescientia). One of them owes its allegiance to the bodily element, the other to the spirit. As already noted, the first is characterized by the human being’s self-love in contempt of God, the other by the human being’s love of God in contempt of self (amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui).24 In formulating this vision of the societas sancta25 in opposition to the civitas hominum, Augustine wrote one of the great texts that have made their mark on the spirituality and the civilization of Christian Europe. And he provided a classic example of a type of political analysis that alternates with anthropological analysis. By probing the soul of the human being who knows himself as imago Dei, he grasped the principles of a Christian society. And by investigating the soul of the human being who yearns to be God, he identified the lack of peace in a society that damns itself. What Augustine said about the beginnings of two political societies in the first human being is also valid of human beings as such. His anthropogonicpolitical reading of the biblical creation story is of contemporary relevance in a classic manner. For this reason, I would like to reproduce this reading in each of its argumentative steps. For it describes quite forcefully the an-

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thropogonic freedom that is revealed to human beings in grace: from their beginning, they are themselves a beginning. Each and every human being is the human polis, and they themselves configure it. It is their work. The estrangement of the first human beings from God resulted from arrogance (superbia), from a certain infatuation with their own excellence (amor excellentiae propriae). The root of all evil was greed (avaritia). It was a greed not simply with respect to money, for example, but rather a “general greed,” which makes a person covet everything more than is proper.26 Arrogance, in which human beings turned away from God, was a form of this desire for a perverse loftiness (perversae celsitudinis appetitus). If human beings had not already been absorbed in their own self-satisfaction, they could not have been seduced and would have taken no pleasure in the dictum: You shall be like gods (eritis sicut dii). But in their arrogance, human beings demanded that they themselves be the ground of their own existence (suum sibi existendo principium)27 and altogether their own master (in sua esset omnimodis potestate).28 But their wretchedness consists precisely in this: being so pleased with themselves, as if they were their own light, they turned away from the light, to which they would have been made equal had they taken pleasure in it. Augustine emphasized that this fall happened through free will. Now human beings have become blind and cold. The more they want, the smaller they become.29 Instead of becoming their own masters, as they wanted, they have exchanged the freedom to which they laid claim for a crushing servitude, in which they have become willingly dead in spirit and unwillingly subject to death in the flesh30— a mere animalis homo.31 This is the reason why there are two kinds of love, according to Augustine. One is untarnished, the other impure; one is sociable, the other privatistic; one is subservient to God, the other a rival of God; one is quiet and peaceful, the other full of restlessness and turmoil. While the unselfish love (caritas) demands nothing for itself, self-love (amor sui) strives to take possession even of what is common to all (res communis) on the basis of an illegitimate claim to dominion.32 Accordingly, two principal kinds of society (civitas) may be distinguished based on which of these two kinds of love holds sway among human beings. One society originates in self-love in contempt of God, the other in the love of God in contempt of self. In the latter, Augustine concluded, everyone serves one another in unselfish love. The former, however, tyrannizes its princes as well as the nations that it subjects to itself in its lust for power (libido dominandi).33

In the Divine

The divine and thought are the two Gestalten for any initiation of human civilization. With the Gestalt of the power of the divine and that of the power of thought, the second birth of human beings takes place. They are the “start”1 of this second birth. In the beginnings of any human civilization, a start is always found that constitutes a field of influence for these beginnings. They are beginnings (hence, they have creative consequences) insofar as a beginning (toward this or that form of human civilization) is made (or has been made) through them for a start (of human civilization). There are many beginnings of civilizations. In contrast, the start of human civilization is the one start for all beginnings. Every beginning is always merely one beginning among others. In contrast, the start is unique: that creative element in every creation of human civilization out of which this creation comes. The creative element in the creation of human civilization consists in the two Gestalten mentioned: the divine and thought. These two Gestalten of power constitute the start of all human civilization in this twofold manner. It is the start that founds a field of influence for all beginnings: Human beings can posit beginnings for the creation of their civilization(s) out of and by means of this start, but also only out of, and only by means of it. The power of the divine and the power of thought are “always already” with them. The creative start is opened for human beings in these two powers, and it gives them a path and a direction for their civilizing creation. Human beings can begin with their work, which started in the divine and in thought. But why this start and not a different one? Why is it that all human civilization comes from the power of the divine and the power of thought? What

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does it mean to say that these two Gestalten of power are at the start of the second birth of human beings? The first answer is: everything is explained by the predicament of human beings. In order to clarify this answer— and at the same time to give a second, more comprehensive answer— let us bring up the two Gestalten of grace and consciousness once again. Grace, let us repeat, is the chance for human beings to attain their free nature. Grace makes their freedom visible. But how does it come about that, being free, they become free? This question should be posed now. It should be posed alongside two further questions: Is not part of freedom to care for freedom? And, assuming that freedom is care, in whose care will freedom be? Consciousness, let us also repeat, is the cognitive Gestalt of human beings in the work of their soul.2 Through it, human beings acquire power over both themselves and their life and start down their path in the world. Through the Gestalt of consciousness, they can think the “world.” They “see” and grasp it: directions, place signs, bodily boundaries, units of time, spatial extensions, geometrical figures, pillars and contexts for the architecture of their existence in the architecture of the world.3 But how, being “seeing” entities, will they become “seeing” beings? How, being thinking entities, will they think? How, being a Gestalt of cognition, will they grasp themselves in relation to the Gestalt of the cognized and find in the architecture of the world the architecture of themselves?4 These questions are also posed, just as are the following two. Does not a discipline of thinking belong to thought, and a culture of the soul to the cognitive work of the soul?5 And if thought is a practical discipline, and the world-cognizing seeing of human beings is a school of seeing, then is not all consciousness, first and foremost, in the case of human beings, a question of the start— and, indeed, a question of the start toward a praxis of their consciousness, inasmuch as they begin to set up their existence in this start by means of their consciousness? That which exhorts and speaks to human beings from out of their existence and says to them “Start” is the voice of their predicament. And what is thus assigned as a task, the content of that voice, is, concretely speaking, the care of freedom. Practically speaking, it is the education of thought.6 But, above all, it is the paradigmatic path, the active element in the creative element. Grace and consciousness introduce human beings to the Gestalten of their life. They are doors to the architecture of their existence. But they are not life in its completion. They are not the structure of their existence. In the fullness of knowledge, which can be generated by the fire of grace and the lucidity of consciousness, it might appear to human beings as if they could abide therein, as if they might no longer have to become separated from the

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light of knowledge and the splendor of grace.7 But in the power Gestalten of their existence, there is no settled existence for human beings in One— or the One— thing; rather, constantly fading paths toward their existence are laid out. They find themselves not within an existence that closes in on itself like a circle, but rather within an existence that is creatively open. The architecture of this existence is incomplete in a “completed” manner (a “completion,” therefore, that is tied to a contradiction). This architecture, as we can now see, is an architecture of beginnings. Human beings see the architecture of their existence (or, to put it in a more longwinded but also more precise way, they see the architecture of their existence in the architecture of the world) in the light of grace and consciousness. But there is no permanence for human beings through seeing alone; for to the extent that they see at all, they also (and above all) see that life is motion. They live by virtue of the fact that they “begin” their life again and again within a variety of Gestalten and in the activity of creating Gestalten. They live through the architecture of their existence, i.e., through an architecture of beginnings. To be sure, all Gestalten of life are already given within this architecture, but their life is not already configured according to any of these Gestalten. Rather, in order to live, they depend on the beginnings that they themselves posit for their life for the sake of giving Gestalt to their life. They cannot help being active within the creative element. This is their business, or, we could also say, it is their dignity and bliss. And it is also their predicament. How do they become human beings? How do they learn to “be” “human beings”? What do they do for the care of freedom? How do they relate to it? What do they do for the education of their thought? How do they set about it? The first question, the question concerning how human beings care for themselves, was addressed by Plato in the Statesman in the form of a mythical narrative.8 It is the story of Kronos’s rule. It tells of the beginnings of human beings. Plato’s narrative begins with the most fundamental observation that must be made regarding the Gestalt of human beings in the mode of their creation. “To behave in one and the same manner,” Plato writes, “can be predicated only of the most divine of all things.” For what is divine is that which always already is what it is and has no need of moving toward itself out of beginnings. “But bodily nature is not part of this order (taxis),” Plato continues, and further explains: “To be sure, what we call heaven and world has received many and wonderful things from its progenitor, but it has also come to participate in the nature of body, and this is why it is absolutely impossible for it to be free of all change.” Human beings have bodies, and their entire predicament derives from this obvious fact. Being of a “bodily nature,” just like the cosmos of creation

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in general, human beings find themselves in a particular “order” (taxis). This is not the order that should be called “divine,” because in this divine order everything always exists in the same manner. Rather, the order in question is the one that corresponds to the bodily nature and that thus follows the power of change to which everything that has Gestalt in bodies is subjected. Human beings belong to an “order” that is open, uncertain, mutable. In this order, they have need of care. They require a protective vigilance of a kind apt to “preserve” them in their existence vis-à-vis the power of change that comes from their bodies. Thus, in order to explain these connections, Plato tells his story of the rule of Kronos, the “god of care” (epimeloumenos theos). In the first part of the myth, Plato describes the beginnings and the early stages of human culture in terms of historical circles. This is not accidental, given that the tale— as we will see presently— deals with the epochs of the divine in human history. At first, that is, in the time of the beginnings of their history, the life of human beings was completely effortless, for God himself protected them and presided over them. There were no political constitutions or domestic communities. Humans had fruits and many other plants for their food. They did not have to produce it by tilling the land; they received their food from the earth, which gave them fruits and plants. They lived without clothes or bedding and were able to live in the open, for the weather was arranged in such a way that it did not cause any hardship for them. Thus human beings lived their life under Kronos. They were then “a thousand times happier than today.” For they—“the nurselings of Kronos” (trophimoi tou kronou)— enjoyed much “leisure and had the capacity to engage in intelligent conversation, not only with human beings but also with animals,” and they used “all this to engage in philosophy, conversing both with animals and with each other, and inquiring of each of them whether, having a special capacity, it had apprehended anything different from the others that would contribute to an increase in understanding.”9 However, this first age of human beings— just like all ages— had a fixed duration. It reached its fullness, and a reversal (metabolē) had to follow. Divine care disappeared. The “pilot,” as Plato figuratively describes it, let go of the oar’s handle and withdrew. As a consequence, the world came under the power of “the desire that is implanted” in it (xymphytos epithymia)— and regressed. Initially, it carried on as before, but now, in the end, it has grown careless. The world does not really care about what it itself generates. Repulsive and unjust forces assert themselves. The more time moves forward and the more oblivion creeps in, the more the condition of the old “confusion”

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comes again to the fore. This “confusion” had held sway before all beginning, i.e., before divine care had made a beginning toward a world. The world, deprived of God’s care and delivered over to its own desire, goes to ruin. In Plato’s story, however, the line of world-time bends backward in the end and once again touches its beginning. The world is rescued from its decline and brought back into the figure of a historical circle. In this circle, the world is preserved or, we may also say, is saved from itself. This does not happen by its own power. Thus, the question is posed: Who can bend the world back to its beginning? What power? Again, it is the god of care. As the world goes to ruin, the god who established it intervenes in the process. Concerned that the world may dissolve itself completely, he takes it in his hand— he ends his seclusion from the world and returns to the world— and improves everything. The world appears new, “ageless and immortal.” Having come to the second part of his myth, Plato wants to share the insight at which the “whole discourse aims.” And the mythopoet’s news is not good: the dominion of Kronos has come to an end. God’s care will remain absent. Human beings are alone. “The daimon who ruled and protected us has abandoned us.” This is the conclusion of the insight into the history of the world and of human beings; it is Plato’s message. It concerns all human beings who live in the present age. They can listen to the myth concerning both the “divine” age, which has ended, and the age of human beings, which now dawns. It was for their sake that the myth was told. They experience a “great predicament” (megalē aporia) in their specifically human, god- forsaken situation. This situation must be understood and interpreted. It was with this purpose in mind that the philosopher and philomyth10 used this imagery to tell his story. The insight that human beings gain from this story acquaints them with the deprivation that lies in every beginning before the event of the beginning. This insight drives them out of the age of their divine beginnings, when Kronos used to care for them, and leads them into the emptiness of “another” time that has not yet dawned. This emptiness is the open presence of beginnings that are entirely their own— or “are” not, since they have not yet taken place. An emptiness that extends beyond every beginning that has not yet been made gapes open before human beings. Everything is now in their own care, including their own existence, which says to them “Start”— despite the fact that they have not even reached the point from which they can make a beginning for the start. They have been released from the “protection of the gods.” There is only one beginning by means of which the beginning to be

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made can take place. Plato captures it in one sentence at the conclusion of his story: “Human beings must lead (diagogē) themselves and must themselves take care (epimeleia) of themselves.”11 There is one word for the care of human beings for themselves: politics. Under this word, human beings carry on what started with the gods. They caringly worry about their world. They do not relate to anything in the same way that they relate creatively to their world.12 They create an actuality of “world.” They generate sustaining bonds and permanent connections within the creative falling-apart of all creation. Human beings do all this according to a kind of care that is identical to God’s care as described by Plato in his myth. They respond to the falling-apart with structuring, to the unmeasured with measure, to the many with unification, to the flow of time with temporal barriers, to the unsteady with steadiness, to the different with the undifferentiated. They seek a sort of actuality that is more “divine” than “human” for the world created by their own care. In visualizing this actuality, what really is at stake for them is their world— their world in the midst of the infinite number of existing or possible things, the things that are and then are not, the ones that are continuously one way and yet again a different way. This is a “divine” mode of actuality. “Only what is most divine among all things,” Plato says, “has the character of existing in one and the same manner and of being the same.” But exactly the same thing is true of human care, i.e., of the project of their politics. The world of human beings is a “world” only in a manner that is continuously one, identical, and the same. However, everything that is in the hands of human beings slips away from their hands. The world of human beings does not endure through human hands alone. “To make something persist,” to create constancy, duration, stillness, unity— this is a divine matter. The care of human beings for themselves is the kind of care that only a God can have for human beings. Or, to put it differently, there are two ways of naming the care of human beings for themselves. One is “politics.” The other is “mimesis of God.” In their care for themselves, human beings imitate a god’s care. Otherwise, the mode of “making something persist,” which is the goal of all care, would not exist among the modes of their existence. “The care that only a god can have for human beings.” No other paradigm can be found to describe the way that human beings care for themselves. Politics is mimesis of God. Or, to speak figuratively, politics is the “divine hand,” and, in reaching for it, human beings reach for their own life. In their birth toward their existence, human beings would fall behind if they overlooked the “divine hand” or if they saw it but did not take it.13 And yet, why would they not want to understand what Cicero captured in these lucid words: “There is

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no activity that comes as close to the power of the divine (deorum virtus) as the founding of political societies (civitates novas condere) or the preservation of those already in existence (conservare iam conditas)?”14 Other lines may be traced within the history of political thought that converge on the present topic, “The Divine and Politics,” because the “divine hand” has played and continues to play a particular role therein. It appears in political thought in the form of its “primary purpose.” Political thought, in turn, has the pragmatic purpose of providing justification. It is put in motion by those questions which are always and everywhere posed regarding political creations: Why do they exist? Why should they exist? For what purpose were they made? What purpose do they serve? What purpose should they serve? (For example, every political order, if it is to be established for the first time, or if, once established, it is to continue existing, must pass the test of the question regarding its “legitimation” or “legitimacy.”) But this pragmatic purpose of political thought would be inoperative in the end if it itself remained unjustified.15 The fundamental question would thus be: How is the political thought of human beings justified? On the basis of what principles can it be explained? To pose the question in precise terms: How does a specifically “political” thought come into being? What is its meaning, and, hence, what is the meaning of political thought in general? These questions deal with the grounds for political thought, and when they are asked, they lead to the one question: the question regarding a political theory. A political theory is a theoria in light of which we recognize a confluence of political knowledge and political purpose. In this confluence a political purpose appears as obvious, on the basis of its being already known, and political knowledge has an obvious validity, on the basis of its showing itself as wholly purposeful. To formulate the question in conformity to the present train of thought: is there any purpose in human beings’ having a theoretical understanding of the purpose of their care for themselves— politics— so that they also know the answer to the question “Why?” and are thus able to say, “It is on these grounds that we think politically”? Let us remember— let us start with the remembrance— that human beings are alone, in truth, terribly alone, in the business of “having to lead themselves and take care of themselves.” Yet precisely for this reason, they must also realize that they are capable of taking care of themselves. They must be able to conceive of their capacity to take complete care of themselves. This thoughtful care— undertaken in the way of a “political thought” formed with and through such care— is different from caring about existence. For as an effort directed at cognition, it can reach into the comprehensive knowledge from which we learn what must be done for human existence. It is for this

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reason that, along with caring for their existence, human beings also have, indeed have above all, the task of thoughtfully caring for this care. They must know what caring for their existence in all things means, and must thereby understand this caring as a care such as a “God” would have. The whole point of human political thought is to attain the knowledge of such a “divine” care. For human beings see thereby that they are not completely alone with the care assigned to them; a knowledge such as a God would possess accompanies them in their “watching over” their existence. They discover that they are able to take care of themselves. As they think about this “divine” care, a measure appears to them, by which they arrange the care of their existence. Whereas this latter care sooner or later leaves them (when a practical matter has been taken care of, other cares always present themselves), the “divine” care never leaves them. It is always with them, solid, lasting, and unchanging, like a piece of knowledge that is the most reliable object in the economy of human cognition. Such an economy cannot (can no longer) be conceived of without this object. This is why it is a good sign when the political existence of a society is taken for granted in this society. In such a situation, the members of society know why they belong to this and not to a different society, they know the origin of their political Gestalt and the goal of their society, and they also know what follows from all this for them as individuals, as a community, and as people interacting with one another. In such a case, a society is evident to itself. Its existence is essentially “unproblematic.” For it takes itself as being “true” in the sense that theoretical questions regarding the principles and paradigms of politics are actually superfluous in such a society— it itself constitutes such principles and paradigms. Such a society also demonstrates that political theory may be present even if nobody speaks of it. A society can certainly exist in the absence of a political theory that is publicly developed and undertaken in an analytic-reflective way. However, every society always possesses, in the form of public “knowledge,” a body of universally accepted “political” convictions, on the basis of which and from which a “political theory” can be developed as soon as this “knowledge” is reflected upon consciously. In any case, people always believe that they know, on the basis of their “convictions,” the answers to questions such as: What is the meaning of a society? What is the meaning of this (particular) society? Why does it exist in this particular form? These are all theoretical questions, even if they are neither posed nor answered theoretically. Objectively speaking— the empirical fact is undeniable— these questions and answers anticipate a political theory, and they fulfill “already” that which, judged from the standpoint of such a theory, seems to be only theoretically knowable.

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Or, to put it the other way around, political theory, as Bernard Crick stated, even if it does not exist or does not appear to exist in the mode of a “theory,” is “an essential component of every political system. There is not a single case of a political system that did not contain a body of political thought.”16 “The life of human beings in a political society,” Eric Voegelin wrote with regard to this topic in his book Die politischen Religionen,17 “cannot be circumscribed to a profane region, in which we are concerned only with questions regarding the organization of law and power. A community is also a realm of religious order, and the knowledge of a political condition will be decisively incomplete if it does not take into account the religious forces of the community and the symbols through which they are expressed. . . . Human beings live in a political community in all aspects of their being, bodily as well as spiritual and religious. The political community is always inserted into the life-context of world and gods. . . . The language of politics is also permeated with religious motivations and thus becomes a symbolic system in the distinct sense of the permeation of worldly experiences with transcendent-divine experiences. Elements of the language of symbolic forms, which we have exhibited in Mediterranean-European examples, can be found in all advanced civilizations.”18 Empirical research confirms this assertion. Going back to the oldest civilizations, we can find texts that deal with and interpret the political conditio of human existence, e.g., Hammurabi’s Code in the Babylonian empire, the I Ching in ancient China, the Theology of Memphis in ancient Egypt, and the “constitution” of the Mosaic theopolis (as contained in Exodus 20:2– 17) in ancient Israel. The history of such interpretations continues without interruption up to our own days, including our own chapter devoted to the theory implicit in today’s political orders. In contemporary constitutional states, the great majority of citizens have no acquaintance with this thing called political theory. Nonetheless, they confirm the meaning of this theory in their everyday life. As citizens, they take part, to a degree unmatched by any other political form, in the existence of a modern constitutional state, a societal form that is a construct invented and supported by a specific form of political theory. They carry out the theory of political modernity, i.e., they carry out what was thought by the creators of this theory: Jean Bodin, Sir Edward Coke, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams. What citoyens carry in their heads, however, is not the construct but the given political life. The point of the law prohibiting arbitrary arrest, for instance, is evident to all. What would be the point of painstaking deductions of the postulate of a freedom that is factually given to human beings as human beings?

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Indeed, what would be the point? Leo Strauss once offered a sardonic criticism of those vain scientistic fields of investigation in the American behaviorist school of political science, on the basis of which this science does not realize how systematically it is oblivious to the real state of the world. He wrote: “Political science fiddles while Rome burns, which is excusable for two reasons: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome is burning.”19 Leo Strauss had learned something that truly destroys any belief in the obvious and that renders the assumption of unshakable standards in politics a vain enterprise. Formerly a scholar in Berlin, he had fled National Socialist Germany for the United States. He had eluded a “politics” that, perverting the word “politics,” which designates what gives life, was the exact opposite: annihilation. Politics is creative.20 Because of this characteristic, politics always takes place in the mode of producing certain effects. A certain power is contained in the creative potential of politics, and this power is not neutral. Just like human beings, power has two faces; it can be either good or evil, and in most cases it is a mixture of both, in which sometimes one element predominates, sometimes the other. Human beings want to be political because they want to live. But only under paradigmatic circumstances, which, as we know, are never actualized (see, for example, Plato’s paradox of the philosopher-king), would it be possible for them to prevent the creative power of politics from degenerating again and again into a mere politics of power. In extremis, in many cases, power eventually turns against politics, the fulfillment of life itself. John Adams certainly chose his words with care when he called the “science of politics” a “divine” science and said that it is the “science of social happiness.”21 Precisely for this reason, the theory of politics is also always a theory of its crisis. Normally, politics as practiced is not what politics is in its essence. Part of the point of political theory is to remind us of this fact and to articulate the knowledge of politics in the predicament of politics. And it has proved itself in this task. Plato wrote his works during the crisis of Athens, Augustine formulated Christian politics during the decline of the Roman Empire, Bodin founded the modern state during the experience of the religious wars, Tocqueville drew up his theory of freedom during the confrontation with the democratic revolution, and in the century of evil, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin set political theory to work against death. Political theory is orientation. In politics, there is a constant need for solutions, for explications that facilitate understanding, and for models of procedure for action. In most of these cases, our political fantasy is not as rich in ideas as political reality. The latter takes even the most experienced prac-

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titioner by surprise. Not for nothing did Machiavelli symbolize it with the image of infinitely capricious fortuna. Political theory offers throughout its history— which is neither brief nor limited to Western culture— an encyclopedic manual of models for interpretation and action in political situations. Plato’s analysis of the progressively self- paralyzing power of a tyrant explains in exemplary fashion the loss of dominion of the dictators of the Soviet empire. The doctrine of medieval political theory regarding the two bodies of the king— the physical and the symbolic bodies— captures in a thoroughly intuitive manner the critical problem of power, its “secret,” as it were: power is always (symbolically) assigned, never a (physical) possession. When Robespierre proclaimed his despotisme de la liberté, he revealed for all time the connection between freedom and terror: whosoever wants to make freedom so powerful that freedom is no longer the boundary of power walks the path of oppression. Human beings live to the extent that they live in society. For political theory, the anthropological consequence of a transhistorical human being follows from this natural conditio. Inasmuch as they are political beings, human beings are and remain equal, regardless of other differences. The questions regarding their political existence are classic questions; they constitute a transtemporal and transspatial ground for reflection. Political theory discovers the classic element in human beings. “Human beings are prepared to sacrifice their life for a liberal state; under a tyranny, even the family bonds are dissolved.” This sentence is found, not in Tocqueville, but in a Chinese disputation on politics from 81 BC.22 Human beings live in a society because they are many. In their plural appearance, they are not one, but rather individuals who are not identical to one another. Their number is the mode that separates them. Every individual is other, different from all. Each one of them is distinct from the others. Their individuality is the mode that keeps them existentially apart from each other in their numeric separation. Their difference within plurality makes human beings incapable of society rather than the opposite. Yet each of them is a human being, and hence the same in the common connection of this nature equally shared by all of them: human beings in the society of human beings. They live in the creative paradox of their existence: dispersed into plurality and nonetheless, in turn, One therein. This paradox is a permanent ground for political theory. Political theory has evolved in the process of coming to terms with it. It reached its first classical age with Plato and Aristotle, and ever since it has evolved, over and over again, into a thinking paradigm for this paradox— the paradox of the actuality of the human being among these many human beings.

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Living in society, human beings choose their society. All political action, as Leo Strauss explained, aims either at preservation or at transformation, and it follows, in consequence, a certain idea of “good” and “bad.”23 The society does not exist; rather, it is always this or that society willed by human beings. Every society built by human beings is always the result of the actions of those human beings in and vis- à- vis this society. In a certain sense, this society is the constantly “new” work of their political imagination— the expression of that for which human beings take a position in view of their social and political situation and toward which they act accordingly. If we regard political theory under this aspect, we will see that it plays an eminently political role in human affairs. In its history, it has shown itself to be the classic medium for facilitating the debate that human beings carry out regarding the form of their society, and for transforming it into projects that they may decide to support. Political theory is both a stimulus and a mode of political inspiration; it brings the motif of political knowledge into political action. Politics becomes conscious of itself in political theory; through it, politics attains its dignity and the awareness of the “divine” care assigned to it.24

In Thought

Through thought, human beings found a community among themselves, through which their life in the mode of power appears in the mode of completion. In their individual existences, they find themselves together in conformity with their existence as such. Being many, they become one to such an extent that unity out of multiplicity appears to be “beautiful.” Their community fits together in every regard. It does not need to be different in any other respect.1 The members of such a community experience a beauty achieved in the dimension of power. In the interplay of their common understanding, they see the play of thought; in their mutual accordance, they discern politics brought to the point of beauty. Thought, so they comprehend, is sociability. Thought is the paradigmatic reality of power, of the community of human beings with human beings produced and preserved through this power. It is a choreography of ideas. It is the wisdom of the senses in a culture of Eros.2 It is a dance of words. Thought is a feast. There is a standing invitation to this feast that is found and read in the experience of thought itself. The invitation informs us that we think not alone but in society; that we think not merely by ourselves but with reference to another human being, other human beings, together with him, her, or them. Empirically speaking, this inviting element of thought is not unknown to any human being, for otherwise we would not know (regardless of how little we may care to know it) why one “hears” in oneself what or who “is speaking” when one “is thinking” (to whatsoever degree one may be thinking). In order to know exactly what one generally knows only faintly, one could obviously

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undertake a deliberate exercise and focus on the experience of one’s thought in such a way that one could discern the choreography that produces or “puts on stage” every thinking act. By means of thought, one could then understand this about thought: in thinking, I am invited by myself to listen to myself, to find out what I have to say to myself. I am anxious to see what I will discover, and I push myself on whenever my thought proceeds too slowly and the riddles that I pose to myself appear to be insoluble. Do you really believe, I ask myself, what you have so far thought about this particular thing? Is it enough? If not, my invitation to myself is still valid: think, hence listen. Read yourself, speak to yourself, and say to yourself that the false is false and the true is true. Say to yourself that you are always still in conversation— in conversation with yourself, with the Other who you are in yourself and who, being an Other in you, is different from you. I was not the only one who accepted the invitation to the feast of thought. Or, to put it more precisely, I was not the only one present from the beginning. The invitation to the feast, to the sociability of my thought, was already written in my thought. In my thought, an invitation was expressed that had already been issued. Thought is a feast, and thus human beings experience the sociable structure of their thought through thought itself. In thinking, they speak and listen, and they listen and speak— they are in society. With these claims, we have ventured into Plato’s thinking society. “By ‘thinking,’ do you mean the same as I?” Plato makes Socrates ask Theaetetus this question in the dialogue named after the latter. Theaetetus inquires back, “What do you mean by thinking?” Socrates answers: “A discourse (logos) through which the soul goes, within itself, concerning the objects it wants to investigate. . . . For it seems to me that the soul, when it thinks, is simply carrying on a conversation (dialegesthai) in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself, affirms and denies.”3 In thinking we are not alone, because in thinking we hear that we are spoken to. The words are already present, like a dance in which arms reach out for us in order to integrate us into the motions of the dancers. Socrates’s words, written by Plato, expressed the invitation to join in the feast of thought, which founds a community in Plato’s dialogues and also gives our thought its sociability. The motion of the dance takes place in a dialogical Gestalt in the dance of words. Whoever steps forward, Socrates explains in the Gorgias, steps back thereby, in order to discern and continue the motion of the dance through his motion: “I say what I say, not as one who knows it, but rather as one searching for it in community (koinē) with you.”4 In the dance of words, we follow our thought as if our thought were that which leads us. By integrating ourselves into the dance, we experience for our thought, i.e., for our discourse, the se-

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curity of which Socrates speaks in the Phaedrus: “I know with certainty that I have not invented by myself any of these things.”5 Thought is a beginning preceded by no “start.” This is why human beings also experience a recollection of the divine therein. I continue what has always already started. In thinking, I make a beginning only in the sense that I continue to think, i.e., to direct the conversation (the form in which thought enacts itself) hither and thither in the back-and-forth of the dialogue, toward this or that form of continuation of the dialogue. In thinking, I am again and again “in the beginning,” but never “at the start.” For the conversation in which I find myself while thinking did not first start when I, thinking something, began something in thought. Conversation and thought go on simultaneously. Conversation connects with the beginning like a conversation whose start has already taken place, and in which I myself now engage, but without having started it myself. The interlocutors appear as such directly with the beginning, which is also at the same time the beginning of the dialogical back-and-forth, i.e., the alternating sequence of voices in the conversation. In the beginning that I make in thinking, there is— truly— a thought that has already started, a thought that really provides a structure for the thought taken up with the beginning. Thought is “governed” in such a way that it is already a conversation. Before I begin, therefore, thought has already been put on stage. We human beings can, thus, make a beginning with thought an infinite number of times, again and again. But we cannot make a start with thought. However, this barrier is precisely what provides human beings with stability. They find an extraordinary certainty in this barrier. Let us recall a point already addressed.6 And let us pay attention to the Cartesian connotations as well.7 Everything in human existence under the laws of the first birth of human beings says to them: Start. They understand that their existence is their predicament. They must, as discussed above, become something else, namely, actual human beings. They are able to do this, and yet the paradoxical question is now posed: Where should they “start,” if they themselves are that for which the start is made? Are they to enact their own start? But on what ground are they to start— this is the absurd situation— if the start is precisely their deprivation? The answer is the feast of thought. Here, human beings experience the opposite of their predicament. Thought has already been put on stage; it does not have to be started by human beings. They find the start that their predicament demands of them in thought. Their care for themselves is supported by the care that makes thought into a feast, into the community of human beings with human beings. Thought is the certainty of care. Human beings must still always “start” in order to make a beginning toward their humanity

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out of their insufficient beginnings. Yet, they can also think. Thinking, they know that the start has already been made for any beginning that they make in thinking. Among all Gestalten of power, thought is the one that can bring them closer to the fulfillment of their care— the civilization that was assigned to them— than any other. They find the community that is to be founded in the sociability of thought; in the latter the former is already present. Thought is what is common to all of them; in it, they are always already political.8 To the question asked by human beings— How do we become human beings?— they find this answer in thought: Found the community that you recognize in the feast of thought. Give to the polis of your civilization the beauty of this feast. Follow the mode of its being put on stage and arrive thus at your second birth. This was the Platonic wisdom in the Republic. Plato makes Socrates ask in this dialogue: What is the right life for human beings? The long ensuing conversation leads to the exhortation: “Let us then found a city from the beginning in thought” (to logō ex archēs poiomen polin).9 The path toward the human community, the polis, begins in thought. This path is sought in thoughtful dialogue and leads through a series of pathmarks of “thoughts.” In the interlocutors’ consciousness, these pathmarks express the creative force directed toward the image of the human being in his polis. A creation story that, in its unfolding, resembles a cosmogony unfolds in the dialogue. Eric Voegelin coined the expression “poleogony”10 to designate the creation of the polis, a word created in linguistic correspondence to the thematic parallel. Just as the creation of the world is described in a cosmogony in the sequence of its emergence, Plato’s poleogony sketches the founding of human civilization in the gradual process of its political formation. Prior to the description of this process, however, Plato explains the reason that human beings set themselves the task of founding a civilization in the form of a polis. Why, indeed? “To found a city from the beginning in thought” means, after all, to begin with the “beginning” of a polis and to say why this beginning must be made or— to the extent that human societies already exist— why it has been made. Is the creation of a civilization merely an idea that human beings once had or now have, while remaining completely free to either take it up creatively or not? Or is there an unconditionally compelling reason to lay the foundation of their society’s civilization? Why should human beings have thoughts about themselves at all? Is living not enough for their existence? What can the meaning of asking for the meaning of human associations be? Human beings are always among themselves— is not this fact in itself a proof?

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Human beings lack that which human beings are. This is Plato’s answer. They found societies out of bodily necessity. They lack everything. They could not really be, they could not be at all, if they did not make the beginning toward a creation. Born in deprivation, human beings need a second birth, their birth in the polis. “Our need founds them [human societies]: first, the need for food; second, the need for a dwelling place; and, third, the need for clothes.”11 Living is not enough for the existence of human beings. This is the truth about human beings. Human life requires a creation: the civilization of the polis. Plato’s outline of this civilization contains five sequentially ordered levels. The poleogony presented by him— i.e., by the interlocutors of the Republic— starts with the “simple, healthy city,” followed by the “opulent city,” the “luxurious city,” the “purified city,” and, finally, the “beautiful city” (kallipolis).12 The last is the philosophically inspired city. It is formed by the wisdom of those who, on the basis of their wisdom, have brought this city under the rule of wisdom. It is a portrait of the human being who is complete both in himself and in his community. Plato speaks of this human being’s “justice,” of his “justly” structured existence within a “justly” structured community of human beings.13 In the “beautiful city,” society, power, and thought are in thorough correspondence; they are reflections of each other and constitute a triad— one could be tempted to use the word “trinity” here14— in which they are different from one another and yet again equal to one another. A line of correspondence translates thought wholly into society, society wholly into power, and power wholly into thought. Alternatively, we could also say that a line of correspondence translates power wholly into thought, thought wholly into society, and society wholly into power. This makes no difference with regard to the fundamental point: Thought, power, and society are constituted in such a way that they are always with one another and “in one another.” Power is the Gestalt of society, society the Gestalt of thought, thought the Gestalt of power. The “beautiful city” is constituted in a thoroughly equal manner whether in the realm of thought, power, or society. In each of them, the city is the same, and of the same Gestalt, in which “thought,” “power,” and “society” accord with each other. The same wisdom holds dominion in the society of human beings and in their thought. Among human beings, wisdom is the constitutional power in all things. This is why this city is “beautiful”: everything in it is wise. Whatever the elements of which it is composed, each of the parts of this city’s Gestalt fit in with each of the other parts as well as with the whole. In each of its parts, the “beautiful” city does justice to the whole Gestalt of these parts. It is in many

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parts. And it is one. “In establishing our beautiful city,” the interlocutors of the Republic say, “we are concerned with making not a particular class eminently happy, but rather, as much as it is possible, the whole city.”15 Thought is truly a feast. It casts a Gestalt’s web over the diverging modalities of human beings. It leads human beings from a plurality that drives them to deformations of their relationships back to a unity, a symmetrically structured commonality. The poleogony sketched in the Republic is the narrative of a creation story. Just as some other creation stories (and perhaps all of them, as comparative empirical studies suggest) report, this narrative of creation tells of a falling-apart that sets in with the emergence of any creation.16 The initial “simple, healthy” city transforms itself into an increasingly differentiated city, in which human beings progressively distance themselves from the cohesion of their existence owing to the increasing specialization of skills.17 A “city” of human beings is founded and falls in disarray; the political creation that was begun develops into the work of its disfigurement; vis-à-vis its beginning, all its parts have become dislocated; they reproduce the city in the mode of its deformation. Thus, Plato’s poleogony is a history both of a falling-apart and of a creation. It is more than this: it is the whole story of a creation. It tells the history of a city from beginning to end. The city falls apart and is wholly grasped in this falling-apart. This can take place only in thought, in a thoughtful conversation that itself remains free of the forms of creation. Only in thought does creation remain undetermined, not yet incorporated in a particular form, and hence not yet brought into the process of the creative dissolution of every creation. Insofar as it is undetermined, it is still an undivided whole and not yet actual in the parts of which it will consist. In thought, a creation is divided and differentiated and at the same time held together; in thought, it remains one. This is the feast: to see the creation without its falling apart, to sketch the “city” of human beings without its becoming deformed, to enact the power of the Gestalt of thought without its removing itself from thought, to become a human being without anyone’s losing himself or herself in the society that he or she is. What, then, does it mean to “found a city from the beginning in thought”? It means to know that the city has already been founded. It means to know that this “city” will be the start toward which human beings make a beginning by founding it. It means to know that the act of putting creation on stage comes to light by means of putting thoughtful dialogue on stage: “It was in order to have a model (paradeigma),” Plato writes, “that we attempted to discover what justice itself is like and what the perfectly just human being would be like, if he can exist, and what kind of human being he would be, if

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he existed, and likewise with regard to injustice and the most unjust human being, so that, by looking at him, we may be forced to admit about ourselves that whoever resembles him most will also share a similar fate.”18 This is the answer. Plato attempts to forestall immediately the fundamental misunderstanding of taking the creation story represented and completed in the thoughtful dialogue of the Republic as a set of instructions as to how human beings can create. It may seem natural to assume that human beings, on their path to their second birth, could make the paradigm of the “beautiful city” their beginning. But nothing could be more misleading. The kallipolis already “existed” before human beings discovered it.19 It lies in the act of putting thoughtful dialogue on stage; it is not fashioned for the first time in this dialogue. A paradigm’s strength lies precisely in its power of actualization. Human beings can follow a paradigm because it is already a form of their actuality, not because it first becomes a form through their actuality. If the attempt is made to drag it into human actuality, the “beautiful city” loses its whole paradigmatic strength. It is weakened into an “ideal,” a “utopia,” a “political metaphor,” or some other such thing. It becomes a standard devoid of validity. Instead, on their path toward their second birth, human beings should see in the “beautiful city” the start of their path, and not the beginning from which they start out on this path. “It was in order to have a model that we were trying to discover justice,” Plato explains, “not in order to prove that it is possible for it to actually exist.”20 However, when the interlocutors of the Republic accept this methodological reserve regarding a false idealism— a reserve magnified through the paradox of the “philosopher-king”21— their intention is not to limit the creative power of human thought. On the contrary, human life requires a creation. It is the civilization of the polis. Thus, the thoughtful dialogue must be carried on, and the question must be posed: What happened that prevented human beings from living in the “beautiful city,” even though this would be the fitting city for them, a form of community that would suit their humanity? Indeed: What happened to human beings? They were creative. They created their civilization on the basis of the Gestalt of power. They wrote the history of their second birth, the history of their beginnings. This history was carried by Gestalten of power that conferred upon human beings a creative force such as only a “god” possesses vis-à-vis human beings: a creative power to give form or a creative power to annihilate. “Our next task should be to discover and point out what is now badly done in cities that keeps them from being governed in this way and what changes would enable our city to realize our sort of constitution.”22 This is the task of a political cosmology. The next chapter offers the outline of such a cosmology.

In Creation

The abundance of things is at first their falling apart, their unity at first their division, and their community at first their estrangement. Few things stand together in the world, because the world is creation and creation is, at first, form, but form is the individual entity and the individual entity is infinite multiplicity. Notions such as “dividing,” “separating,” and “isolating” are used in creation stories to refer to the process of creation. To them may be added the notions of “extending,” “expanding,” “counting,” “increasing,” as well as those of “twofold,” “threefold,” “a hundredfold.” All these concepts are applied to “a thousand things” of “a different nature.” The creation of the world is related with the same words in different languages, in the Dao De Jing as well as in the Koran, in the Bible as well as in Hesiod’s Theogony or in the preSocratic cosmology, in the Bhagavad Gita as well as in the ancient Egyptian hymn to Amun- Re.1 Creation is separation, the segregation of the creative from the created, the appearance of separated things that detach themselves from the motion of the creative to engage in their own reversals and to keep driving the creative process of separation to a point where nothing remains that is homogeneous with anything else. Anaxagoras taught that “all things that now exist and whatever shall exist— all were arranged by Mind (nous), as also the revolution now followed by the stars, the sun and moon, and the air and aether that were separated off (apokrinomenoi). It was this revolution that caused their separation (apokrinesthai). And dense separates (apokrinetai) from rare, and hot from cold, and bright from dark, and dry from wet. There are many portions of many things. And nothing is absolutely separated off (apokrinetai) or divided (diakrinetai) the one from the other except Mind (nous). Mind is always homogeneous (omoios), the greater as well as the smaller. But nothing else is homogeneous

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(omoios) with anything else, but that which enters into the composition of a thing in the highest proportion is what is most clearly knowable, and this is the individual thing. And when Mind began the motion, there was a separating off (apekrineto) from all that was being moved; and all that Mind (nous) set in motion was separated (diakrithē); and as things were moving and separating off (diakrinomenōn), the revolution greatly increased this separation.”2 Creation is a giving of form, and every form is a form because, as this one form, it is different, separated from another form or from many other forms, configured within the multitude of all created things so distinctly that it is therein “form,” i.e., this “one,” “peculiar,” wholly “determinate,” and “individual” form. These creation stories may be surprising, and it would be strange indeed if they did not cause amazement. What causes surprise is this: that creation falls apart as it emerges. The creative element is present in creation in the mode of the “path” followed by the creative element in creation. But what a path! One can only be amazed. It is the path that the creative element follows away from itself toward a Gestalt in which it takes form. The creative “is” there, but only in this form, that is to say, as a “path” of the creative element “toward” and “within” the forms of its creation. The Dao De Jing says: A thing was formed chaotically (you wu hun cheng); It was generated before heaven and earth. Silent and vast, unique it stands and does not change; It turns full circle and is not used up. It can be regarded as the mother of all that stands under the sky (tian xia mu). I do not know its name; I entitle it the Way (dao). (25) The Way generates one (dao sheng yi), One (yi) generates two (er), Two generates three (san), Three generates ten thousand things (wan wu). (42)

The Huainanzi says: Emerging out of the One, things carry differences in themselves; there were birds, fishes, and quadrupeds; they constituted what are called the individual living beings, which are divided into kinds and are separated into groups, and which, divided from each other, have no common nature or purpose. By being formed in Being, they went away from each other and separated from each other in order to be ten thousand things, such that none of them is able to return to the beginning.3

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In an old Brahmanic Upanishad we read: At that time, the world was undivided. Name (nāman) and form (rūpa) were divided in such a way that we say: this thing has this name and this form. In the present day, name and form split up the world in such a way that we say: this thing has this name and this form.4

Creation is individuation; it is the appearance of the creative in the individual forms through which creation emerges. The creative element is the individual entity insofar as it becomes “divided” in creation; the creative is divided into one thing and the other, each of them separated from the other, into this or that, each of them in its Gestalt, here and there, and thus always in some other place. Creation, as creation, comes “apart”; it is creation in the individual entity, “abundance divided.” Hesiod sang of this in his Theogony: Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song. Celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods Who are forever: Those that were born of Earth (Gaia) And starry Heaven (Ouranos) And gloomy Night And them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, And rivers, and the boundless sea With its raging swell, And the gleaming stars, And the wide heaven above, And the gods who were born after them, The givers of good things, And how they divided (diēllonto) their abundance (aphenos), And how they shared their honors amongst them, And how they started And took many-folded Olympus.5

All is multiplicity. The individual is multiplicity. Creation “on the level of the individual” produces a great multitude and the strongly concrete. What is created is very multifarious and eminently plastic. Since the creative element is in the individual, the creative element unfolds in the many. Because so much in it is individual, creation becomes creation. Creation is the structure of the world, the cosmos of animals, plants, and humans. It is abundance of life; it is event.

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This is said of Amun-Re, creator god and god of the world for the ancient Egyptians: Hail, the One (ua) who made himself millions (hehu), Who is long and wide without boundaries; The armed image of power that created itself. . . . The mightily strong one did raise the heavens And he spread out (schem) earth and heaven on their foundations. He gathered the whole firmament and showed the stars their way. . . . He created human beings out of his divine eye And he spit the gods out of his mouth. He raised the heavens, propped up on their foundations, Abiding and lasting with their sun disk. He (laid the foundation) of this great earth, And the ocean stretches out to embrace it. He built human beings, cattle and wild animals, What flies up and swoops down, fishes and plants. . . . He separated (iud) countries and drew their boundaries (tasch), And they eat of the food. He made the geese fly up in the expanse of the air, And they hover down upon the breath of his mouth. He submerged the fish in the center of the water stream And enlivened their noses in water. He removed himself to the heavens and contemplated his creation And we see through his seeing.6

The creative element of creation appears in the multifariousness of creation; wherever creation is, it becomes manifest in all the forms in which it takes Gestalt. What creation is prior to the forms of creation is a “secret,” yet creation reveals itself in the multiplicity of the forms of creation. The cosmos of creation acquires Gestalt through every individual entity in this cosmos; each of them is, in creation, a form of creation. Thus, it is also more: each individual entity is a sign of creation, a sign of the One from which all creation comes. We read in the thirteenth surah of the Koran: Allah is he who raised the heavens without any pillars that ye can see; he is firmly established on the throne; he has coerced the sun and the moon into service. Everything (kullun) runs its course for an appointed term. He regulates all affairs, explaining the signs in detail. . . . And it is he who spread out

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(madda) the earth and set thereon (mountains) standing firm and flowing rivers, and he made fruit of every kind (min kulli t-tamarāti) in pairs, two and two (zaugaini tnataini). He draws the night as a veil over the day. Behold, verily in these things there are signs for those who consider! And on the earth are (diverse) tracts close side-by-side (mutagāwirātun), and gardens of vines and fields sown with corn and palm trees growing singly or multiply (sinwānun wa-gairu sinwānin) out of the root. Watered with the same water (bi-māʿin wāhidin), yet some of them (ba ʿdahā) we make more excellent than others (ʿalā ba ʿdin) to eat. Behold, verily in these things there are signs for those who understand!7

What causes surprise is this: that creation falls apart as it emerges. But there are signs set in the “falling-apart.” The style of speech of the Bible’s creation account makes the signs set in creation accessible. These signs show that everything comes apart, that everything is the story of the creative God, and that in him everything is one. Creation, the Bible tells us, comes into being in a sequence of acts by the creative God. Created reality emerges from these acts according to a pattern of succession. God generates different things and beings one after the other. But every time that God increases the diversity of the world, he does so in the same manner. Each time, he “separates,” “divides,” or takes “apart,” and thus makes two or more out of one. According to the language of the biblical account of creation, the creative God operates by drawing boundaries in creation and, thus, by making things separated and distinct from each other for the first time.8 God is the boundary of creation. Creation is created by God by giving rise to the “individual”; it is the processio Dei ad extra. Every individual entity is, through the creative God, an individual, the individual thing that it is. Hence, every individual entity is also a sign, namely, a sign of God set by God in a creative, boundary-setting way. Creation fell apart as it emerged. The signs— the signs of creation— were set in this falling-apart. For regarded in its individuality, every individual entity in the cosmos is this individual entity through God: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, . . . Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. . . . And God said, Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate (bēin) the waters from the waters. So God made the dome and sepa-

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rated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. . . . And God said, Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. . . . God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. . . . Then God said, Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind (l·mĭnāh). . . . And God said, Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. . . . God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. . . . And God said, Let the waters bring forth swarms (schādăs) of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth. . . . So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind . . . . And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind . . . . God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind.9 (Emphasis added.)

Every individual entity in the multiplicity of the created speaks of the one creation, which acquired Gestalt in the created. It is what it always is: human being, animal, thing, or plant. And it is a symbol, a symbol of the One that is present creatively in creation. Creation is a giving of form, and thus, conversely, every formed thing in creation is a form of creation. It speaks the language of the creative; it is a word in the text of the world. Creation, as creation in forms, can be read, heard, and understood through these forms. Or, to put it the other way around, creation is a language composed of all the individual entities that constitute the world, in such a way that both every individual part of this language, and (by means of each individual entity) the language itself, are already spoken.10 Whatever exists in the world is an entrance to the world, a symbol of creation. It “speaks” by being the way it is and not something else, by existing in the way it exists and in no other way, by being, in its form, a boundary by which everything else is differentiated, and, hence, by being no more than an individual thing among many and yet unique, namely, this particular word in the language of the world. Being unique, every individual entity renders something divine “symbolically” present within the multiplicity of the created. It is one among many and is to be known “for itself ” as this one entity; thus, it is “wholly” the same thing that must be seen here.

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It is “in itself ” what it is, and hence it is thoroughly “finished.” It is determined “by itself,” and is (to that extent) indeed “absolute.” And it is to be understood only “from itself ” and is, therefore, ultimately indissoluble in its nature or essence.

The “one” shines through in what is, and is called “divine” because it is one. And nonetheless this one, which, as human being, animal, thing, or plant, is one among many, always remains only one among many. It is to be known only among other things; it is to be determined in connection with other things and to be grasped only via others, in its relations to others. It is reference but also presence, announcement but also manifestation, sign but also signified, imago but also imaginatio. The creative element is “not”— assuming that the word “is” means that the creative is. It may also not be something (anything) in something (anything). But it “is” when “something” (else) is that comes from the creative (that is unique as an individual) in such a distinctive manner that the creative is the creative, as it were, through itself: absolute for itself in creation and, precisely for this reason, an absolute sign of creation. The falling-apart of the One in creation occurred necessarily. Had it not occurred, there would have been no creation, and therefore there would have been no beginning toward any beginning. It is indeed surprising what creation stories tell us. Must things— meaning by “things” in general what is naturally different in concrete reality: human being, animal, plant, object— show their sameness all the more the more alien they are to each other? The more peculiar each thing is, the more it must manifest the universal? The more extensively things are varied, i.e., the more they are a great chaos, the more the One, their commonality, must appear through them? The questions that are provoked by surprise often subsequently transform a pleasant surprise into a surprising pain. What was stunningly secure is dissolved through such questions, and now the questions become more urgent than anything else. They have produced something that is absurd, contradictory, and confusing, and things cannot remain in this condition. What arose so gloriously in wonder is still a fresh memory, and thus one wants to investigate where and how it can be restored. It is a wondrous pain to feel what one seeks and to seek what one feels. “The drive (ormē) that drives you to these investigations,” Plato wrote in the Parmenides, “is beautiful, indeed, and divine— this you must know.”11 The thoughtful dialogue of the Parmenides elucidates the descriptions of creation stories. It documents the falling-apart of the One brought about by the One itself.12 When the One

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is not nothing, but rather is— when, therefore, it possesses Being— the One is both, the One and Being. It is the One that is, and it is the One that possesses Being. “The Way generates one, one generates two”— thus is it written in the Dao De Jing. “If, therefore, One is,” Plato says for his part, “number also necessarily is. And if number is,” he continues, “many (polla) also is and also an infinite multitude (plethos apeiron) of beings.”13 The Being of the One— or, to put it mythically, creation— is the One in the falling- apart: that which is chopped up, which has come apart, which cannot be seen in its entirety, and which has been partitioned. None of this is similar to anything else. And yet it is not dissimilar in one respect: each one belongs to creation. “Has Being, then,” Plato writes, “been distributed (nenemetai) to all things, which are many (polla), and is it missing from none of the beings, neither the smallest nor the largest? . . . Being is chopped up (katakekermatistai) into beings of all kinds, from the smallest to the largest possible, and is the most divided (memeristai) thing of all; and there are countless parts (merē aperanta) of being.”14 The world is a society of the unsociable. Every thing and every being within it exists in a division of the whole; the whole exists only through its parts; every part excludes the whole through itself. The world comes apart as a world. And, nonetheless, everything is this: a society. For every being and thing, insofar as it is a part, is a part of the whole; it participates in the whole, just like all other things; everything is equal in all respects with regard to the whole; everything is one in the whole. In its parts, the world comes to itself.15 There lies a “history” in things. From their beginning, they come apart, and they come together through their beginning. Here is chaos and creation. And here things exist in one as well as in the other, in chaos and in creation. They are “in between,” or to give a more precise formulation, they are the world- event, they constitute the society of the unsociable, in which everything that exists exists wholly only through something else. The whole is only in its parts and each part is only as part of the whole. Nothing is in this world without its also being something else. “Given that the One, therefore,” Plato posited at the “start” of everything, “is always in itself as well as in an Other, it must always be in motion as well as at rest.”16 This is the “history” of things. Things are not, but they take place by being similar to one another but also dissimilar, the same but also different, the one and the other. They fall apart and they are one; and they are both together: falling apart and one. They “are” then things, the world-event. They are the Earth, from out of Chaos, and above all a third thing: Eros, the “history.” As Hesiod relates in the Theogony:

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Verily at the first Chaos came to be, But next wide-bosomed Earth, The ever-sure foundations of all . . . And Eros (Love), fairest Among the deathless gods, Who unnerves the limbs And overcomes the mind and wise counsels Of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; But of Night were born Aether and Day, Whom she conceived and bare From union in love with Erebus. And Earth (Gaia) first bare Starry Heaven (Ouranos), Equal to herself, To cover her on every side, And to be an ever-sure abiding-place For the blessed gods. And she brought forth long hills, Graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs Who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless deep With his raging swell, the sea (Pontos), Without sweet union of love.17

In Eros

What things are takes place through Eros. It is the history that lies in things. In Eros, in this state of motion that generates only motion, all things come apart and in it they also come together. Things are parts in Eros and they are a whole in Eros.1 Thus, according to early Greek, pre-Socratic thought, Zeus, transformed into Eros, was the “twofold” beginning both of the falling-apart and of the unity of creation. We read in a fragment by Pherecydes of Syros: “Zeus, when he set about to create the world, transformed himself into Eros, since he brought the Cosmos into being out of opposites [opposite elements] (ek tōn enantiōn), but reunited it into harmony (omologia) and love (philia), and he sowed in all things the same striving and the [desire for] unification (enōsis) extending through all things.”2 The world is a world in Eros. For this reason, it is a world that is only motion. “It is never the case,” Plato writes in the Theaetetus, “that something is, in the proper sense of the word; rather, it is always only becoming.”3 Things are things in motion, things in the moving condition of Eros. They are things “in between,” both in one and in the other: in chaos, in which Eros, the creative one, is divided up, and in creation, toward which Eros, the unifying one, strives. Things enjoy their “order” in the god Eros, and to this extent the word “order” is appropriate here. It is indeed. For things are “ordered” according to Eros, according to the “in between” motion, in which they are between their falling-apart and their unity, are here and there, chaos as well as creation. Being ordered according to Eros, everything finds itself in motion toward a point at which it is something other than what it is, and at which, therefore, it introduces confusion into things for the sake of bringing about their unification. Creation orders itself in chaos. Or, to put it the other way around, order is the structure of chaos.4

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But what is this “structure”? What is chaos in order? And how is order in chaos? How is it that Eros, the god of worlds, brings things together as well as apart? How does it come to pass that the motion of the creative element is a motion toward falling- apart as well as toward the giving of a Gestalt? How are things structured in such a way that they are “order” and “chaos,” “creation” and “falling-apart,” sociable world and individual things alone in mutual estrangement? How do they move in their motion such that, in this motion, they not only move but also appear and are something? How is it that something is— and “something” always is— although there is never merely something, but always only the one and the other? How is Eros as the god of abundance also in Eros, the desiring god? Eros is the choreographer. We should ask him how he puts the world on stage. Plato gave the answer in the Symposium. Aristodemos, Socrates, Agathon, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and other (unnamed) persons have gathered in Agathon’s house. At Phaedrus’s suggestion, they have resolved to dedicate their feast to Eros, “this ancient and potent god.”5 They want to sing a song of praise to Eros, each one in turn, since none of the great multitude of poets has ever done so.6 They carry out their plan, and when four of them have already taken their turn, Agathon, the host, begins his speech on Eros. Agathon praises Eros, the community- founding, the sociable Eros. He refers to Eros, the one who moves him to give his speech, as something that takes place in this very speech. The world opens itself to its paradisiacal feast, to the choirs and dances of its things, and to the meetings of gods and human beings, in which all of them stand in relation to one another and find themselves next to each other in perfect sociability. At first, however, everything had fallen apart, everything was in a condition of estrangement (allotriotēs), as Agathon calls it.7 Each thing was separated from the other. Many things were, precisely as many, in a state of confusion; individual entities stood opposite one another. But now, with the appearance of Eros taking place in Agathon’s speech, the Gestalt of the world emerges out of the world. This is the feast of creation. Everywhere, estrangement gives way to the sociability (synodos) of all by virtue of Eros. “The poetic drive awakens in me, which inspires me to make verses,” Agathon says, “to the effect that it is Eros who gives peace to human beings and stillness to the sea Lays winds to rest, and careworn men to sleep.

Love fills us with togetherness and drains all our divisiveness away. Love calls gatherings like these together. In feasts, in dances, and in ceremonies, he gives

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the lead. Love moves us to mildness, removes from us wildness. He is giver of kindness, never of meanness. Gracious, kindly— let wise men see and gods admire! Treasure to lovers, envy to others, father of elegance, luxury, delicacy, grace, yearning, desire. Love cares well for good men, cares not for bad ones. In pain, in fear, in desire, or speech, Love is our best guide and guard; he is our comrade and our savior. Ornament of all gods and men, most beautiful leader and the best!”8 Eros is the choreographer of the feast that we behold in the world— and that does not take place therein. The feast of creation, the perfect sociability of all beings and things together, is, in creation, only the paradisiacal remembrance, the remembrance of the great event. This event is put on stage, and, by being put on stage, it is the feast at which everything is ordained. A feast lies in creation and the feast is absent— in the same creation. The world shows a Gestalt that it does not have. Why? Eros carries the answer in itself. It divides itself and is thus twofold: Eros in the Gestalt of friendly, sociable love and Eros in the Gestalt of quarrelsome, divisive discord. Empedocles of Agrigentum, a pre-Socratic thinker of the fifth century BC, understood the world in this way, through the two Gestalten of Eros. He declared that the event of the world is both an event of sociable love (philia) and an event of divisive strife (neikos) in a continuous alternating cycle. “I shall tell of a double process: at one time the One increases so as to be the totality of Being out of Many; at another time again it grows apart so as to be Many out of One. There is a double emergence of mortals and a double decline. One generates and destroys the union of all elements; the other, just grown, flies asunder when the elements come apart. And this exchange never ceases; sometimes, everything is united under the influence of Love, so that all become One; at other times again the elements move apart through the hostile force of Hate. Thus, insofar as they have the power to grow into One out of Many, and again, when the One grows apart and Many are formed, in this sense, they come into being and have no unchanging life; but insofar as they never cease their continuous exchange, in this sense, they remain always unaltered in the course of this cyclic process.”9 What happens in the process of the world repeats itself in the case of human beings, as Empedocles goes on to explain: “This strife is clearly to be seen throughout the mass of mortal limbs: sometimes through Love all the limbs which the body has as its lot come together into One, in the prime of flourishing life; at another time again, sundered by evil feuds, they wander severally by the breakers of the shore of life.”10 Let us note that Empedocles thought exclusively in the context of a compact cosmology. Things are as they are; philia and neikos, sociable love and divisive strife, were always already,

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and ever will be, in the world, among things, and in human beings; everything exists incessantly in the cycle of unification and feud. But is it really so? Is Eros truly a self-opposing Eros in its two mighty Gestalten? Is Eros the structure of creative falling-apart by dividing itself and thus being the strife of the world? Is the path from One to Two already bifurcated in the One, such that Two is as “old” as One? Are there two paths or is there perhaps only one, the path, which is what it is called— path? The cosmos that we see is stunningly beautiful. Everything, even what is refractory and unsuited, is compacted together, and its beauty consists precisely in this self-sustaining density. But beauty cannot exist alone, and it is here that questions are posed. Eros, sociable on the one hand and divisive on the other, invites investigation. Eros is the Eros of a twofold Gestalt, but it cannot be one and two, an Eros divided in itself, opposed to itself. Who is Eros? The story of Eros is told in images, because it itself— motion that generates only motion in its turn— is always in between, never settled in one place, as, for instance, in a word, a sentence, or an explanation. Eros is the story, the dance of narration. This is why there can be only images, allegories of Eros, which, in things, tell the story through these things themselves, in a word: mythical images. In the Symposium, the Theaetetus, and the Laws, Plato has told three such allegories, which draw three portraits of Eros, the creative god. In them, Eros appears thus: Human nature, we are told in the Symposium, has not always been the same as it now is, but was once completely different.11 Once, there were three kinds of human beings: male, female, and also a third kind, consisting of what was common (koinos). This third kind has vanished and only its name has survived: the androgyne, the “male- female” kind (genos androgynos). This kind is described by Plato as composed of male and female elements in equal parts. This kind had a round figure, “with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces, exactly alike, on a rounded neck. Between the two faces, which were on opposite sides, was one head with four ears. There were two sets of sexual organs, and everything else was the way you’d imagine it from what I’ve told you.”12 Human beings of the androgynous kind, Plato continues, were “similar” (omoios) to their progenitors, the gods; to a certain extent, they were their “equals.” For they were one, not two, in themselves; they united in themselves both elements; in their difference they were nonetheless solidary, in a word, “round.” Accordingly, Plato describes them as “circular” (peripherēs) and attributes to them the character of the divine. Recall that the circle is the geometrical figure of divine existence.13 The story of the androgynes continues from

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the point of similarity they have with the gods. In a certain sense, the story first begins with this similarity, given that what makes the story an allegory takes place at this point. The androgynes became conscious of themselves. They realized what force and strength they possessed, which made them, in their own view, like gods. In their elation (phronēma), they became arrogant.14 They resolved to go up to heaven and take the seat of the gods by storm. At first, the gods, Zeus and the others, were at a complete loss. They did not think it right to kill the androgynes, because they did not want to be deprived of their acts of homage. But they also understood that they could not countenance their sacrilege. Zeus found it difficult to devise a way to put down their wantonness (akolasia). But in the end, he found the way to weaken them. “I shall cut each one of them in two,” he said. “So saying,” Plato writes, “he cut those human beings in two, the way people cut fruits. . . . As he cut each one, he commanded Apollo to turn its face and half its neck toward the wound, so that each person would see that he’d been cut and keep better order.”15 The message is that human beings are now divided, after having been both man and woman. Each one of them is now only one half missing the other half; each sees the other and is only the one and not the other. Each is really the one only in the other, for there would not be the one without the other. The other, each would say, belongs to me, because otherwise I myself would not be; I want the other as I want myself. My nature is to want— Eros. “Now, since their natural form had been cut in two,” as Plato tells it, “each one longed for its own other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together. In that condition, they would die from hunger and general idleness, because they would not do anything apart from each other. . . . Then, however, Zeus took pity on them, and came up with another plan: he moved their genitals around to the front! . . . The purpose of this was so that, when a man embraced a woman, he would cast his seed and they would have children. . . . This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love (eros) is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”16 But who is this Eros? Eros is the weakness of human beings, measured against their earlier nature, in which, being still androgynous, they were godlike and “circular.” Eros is the strength of human beings, measured against their present nature, given that, though divided, they can unite themselves. It is the mixture of human nature. Human beings are weak and they want something to which they are not entitled: a divine existence. They fail and Zeus chops them up.

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Human beings are strong and they want that to which they are entitled: their one, entire existence. They thus attain themselves in the way designed for them by Zeus. Eros is the strength and the weakness of human beings. If they follow Eros, they accept that they are not one but two, and they find precisely therein the path to being one in their dividedness. Eros protects human beings, and to the extent that they come to terms with their own weakness, it makes them strong. Human beings are weak, because they are sensitive, i.e., because they may experience something that changes them. Nothing can change the nature of a god. Even when he changes and appears in an altered Gestalt, a god is always one and the same. Human beings, on the contrary, are exposed to being confounded by all sorts of things, by a shimmering pebble lying by the side of the road that catches their attention as well as by a shattering piece of bad news. Owing to the constitution of their nature, they have a disposition to being overwhelmed by certain impressions; what takes place in their existence is always something that happens to them. It is as if they were swept along by these impressions, elevated and stirred up in the texture of their person, and as if, hovering freely, they would turn to and fro, before sinking into that which they again would build up in the texture of their person. But is it then the same texture? What exactly does it mean to say that human beings are swept along, elevated, and stirred up, that freely hovering, they turn to and fro? What is the sensitivity of human beings, this weakness that renders them the malleable, moldable material of their experiences? In the Theaetetus, Plato tells the allegory of human souls that are as soft as wax. Let us imagine, he writes, that we have in our souls a block of wax, larger in one person, smaller in another; of purer wax in one case, dirtier in another; in some people rather hard, in others rather soft, while in some it is of the proper consistency. When we want to remember the things we have seen, heard, or thought, we stamp this on the wax, just as we make imprints with signet rings. We remember and know whatever is imprinted upon the wax so long as the image remains in the wax. But when this image is erased or has not been properly imprinted upon the wax, we also forget the matter it is supposed to refer to and know nothing about it.17 Souls are as soft as wax; they are the malleable, shapeable material of their experiences. But in this weakness, souls are also the shapers of themselves. As Plato further explains, they could be composed of true or false ideas according to the way they turn and twist within all that “which we know and perceive.” Accordingly, when a soul proceeds in a straight line and combines matching impressions and perceptions, its ideas will be true; however, when it proceeds obliquely and crosswise, its ideas will be false.18

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In caring for their soul, human beings prepare their thought. Because they are weak, they are the masters of their thought, and they arrive at thought only through the artistic turning of their soul toward the correct idea. But in this artistic process, they are the shapers, the form-givers of their thought. They can shape their thought by means of their soul, and by means of the care of their soul, they make a decision concerning the nature of their thought, i.e., whether it is true or false. Human beings are bound to the structure of Eros. There is both the one and the other, the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the true and the false. And human beings are free within this structure; Eros takes hold of the soul according to the way they care for their soul. “In some men,” Plato explains at the conclusion of his allegory, “the wax in the soul is deep and abundant, smooth and worked to the proper consistency; and when the things that come through the senses are imprinted upon this ‘heart’ of the soul . . . the signs that are made in it are lasting, because they are clear and have sufficient depth. Men with such souls learn easily . . . ; they do not get the signs out of line with the perceptions, but judge truly. . . . But it is a different matter when a man’s ‘heart’ is ‘shaggy’ . . . or when it is dirty and of impure wax; or when it is very soft or hard. Persons in whom the wax is soft are quick to learn but quick to forget; when the wax is hard, the opposite happens. Those in whom it is ‘shaggy’ and rugged, a stony thing with earth or filth mixed all through it, have indistinct impressions. So too if the wax is hard, for then the impressions have no depth; similarly they are indistinct if the wax is soft, because they quickly run together and are blurred. If, in addition to all this, the impressions in the wax are crowded upon each other for lack of space, because it is only some little scrap of a soul, they are even more indistinct. All such people are liable to false judgment . . . and these in turn are the ones we describe as in error about the things that are and ignorant.”19 Human beings become human beings in the structure of Eros. Or, to put it more precisely, human beings finish themselves up. They creatively form the chaotic material of their experiences into the Gestalt of their existence. In material terms, in the Eros of perceptions, this Gestalt tears everything asunder and produces a decayed, deceptive understanding of things. Human beings see things, even when they form a false conception of everything. But given that things do not fit together in this case, they actually apprehend a chaos that is totally “chaotic.” Formatively, however, in the Eros of the seeking soul, things come together. A soul can turn to and fro, such that it apprehends things with its conceptions. The soul then generates its Gestalt with reference to a world of Gestalten. This is the culture of the soul. By virtue of this culture, a light goes on for the soul. This light illuminates things: in the perception of

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things, the world of things comes to light. Being itself a Gestalt vis-à-vis the chaos of perceptions, the soul now grasps the Gestalt of the thing perceived. It sees the Gestalt of chaos in itself, an Eros creatively disciplined for the culture of the human soul. In this context, Plato, in the Laws, tells the allegory of the marionettes as symbols of human beings.20 Again, the dialogue turns on the One and the Many, the one Gestalt that constitutes each human being in contrast to the many sensations that pull him away from himself, or to put it precisely: in contrast to the Gestalt of sensation. The initial question of the dialogue is rhetorical: “Are we to assume, then, that each of us is a single individual?” Or to formulate the question differently, “does not the proposition, ‘each one of us is a person for himself or herself,’ have validity for us?”21 This is certainly the case, but each one of us also has, on the one hand, as Plato further remarks, two witless and mutually antagonistic advisers called pleasure and pain, and, on the other hand, the different expectations that manifest themselves in confidence and fear. In addition to all this, we also have ideas concerning which one is better and which one worse. We are a chaos, but we are this chaos only through ourselves, i.e., in the creation of our own Gestalt out of chaos. Let us listen to Plato: “let’s imagine that each of us living beings is a marionette of the gods. Whether we have been constructed to serve as their plaything, or for some serious reason, is something beyond our ken, but what we certainly do know is this: we have these emotions in us, which act like cords or strings and tug us about; they work in opposition, and tug against each other to make us perform actions that are correspondingly opposed; back and forth we go across the boundary line where vice and virtue meet. One of these dragging forces, according to our argument, demands our constant obedience, and this is the one we have to hang onto, come what may; the pull of the other cords we must resist. This cord, which is golden and holy, transmits the power of reason; . . . being golden, it is pliant, while the others, whose composition resembles a variety of other substances, are tough and inflexible. . . . One should always cooperate with it, because although reason is a noble thing, it is gentle, not violent, and its efforts need assistance, so that the gold in us may prevail over the other substances. If we do give our help, the moral point of this fable, in which we appear as marionettes, will have been well and truly made; the meaning of the terms ‘being master of oneself ’ and ‘being dependent on oneself ’ will somehow become clearer, and the . . . individual . . . must digest the truth about these forces that pull him, and act on it in his life.”22

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Eros, the choreographer, shapes human beings according to the way they, for their part, have become disposed toward Eros. Eros puts their existence on stage in one way or another according to the script they give to it. Eros corresponds to a wild disposition by being wholly free of rules, while it corresponds to the forms created by human beings by being wholly creative of Gestalten. In the Symposium, Plato summed up these connections with a simple reflection. Nothing we do now in the way of drinking, singing, or speaking, he says, is beautiful in itself. The qualities of “beautiful” and “ugly” do not lie in the actions we do; to do them is, in itself, neither beautiful nor ugly. Rather, an action becomes one or the other depending on the way it is carried out. “For it becomes beautiful when it is beautifully and rightly done, and it becomes bad when done in the wrong way.”23 Plato adds that the same is true of Eros. Not every Eros is beautiful or worthy of praise.24 Both gods and human beings have given the lover a great deal of freedom.25 How does a lover meet the desiring god? How does he approach him? In Eros, the lover determines what kind of Eros he has; he is creative within the desiring god. In the lover’s Eros, Eros is split in two; on the one side is the “common Eros,” and on the other the “heavenly” Eros, on the one hand the “decent,” “right,” “beautiful” love, and on the other the “bad” love. Eros offers in Eros these two options: the love that becomes reconciled with things in contrast to the love that rises up against all things.26 Obviously, we are not talking here about Cupid, that flirtatious love which flits about among things like a thoughtless child. We are speaking of Eros, this mighty Gestalt of creation. Let us remember: everything that is creation is also a falling- apart. The things of the world take place in a structure of chaos. They are quite alien to each other and yet entirely with each other. It is not the case that a decision lies in things themselves, such that they would alternatively develop into disorder or order, falling-apart or creation, chaos or structure. This is not how things really are. This would be a dream, not the waking world; it would be the lightness, not the gravity of the world. Each thing stands out in the sunlight in sharp contrast to everything else and tears asunder the common space by its massive presence. And yet this is the way we see each thing most clearly. Gestalten are in one another: the stranger in the friend, the one in two, the decisive clause in a subordinate clause. Everything finds itself in a Gestalt among Gestalten: in almost perfect friendship or in feud, or in a sequence of successive sentences, because the one conclusively eloquent sentence will not come off. Nothing is except in a Gestalt; in the case of the things of the world, the question is what their Gestalt is, in the sense of what becomes of them. In

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creation, what is interesting is not the creation itself, but rather its history: the Eros striving toward this or that Gestalt of the things of the world. This is because every force possesses Eros, as we read in Plato’s Symposium.27 Eros “does not occur only in the human . . . it is a significantly broader phenomenon. It certainly occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe.” Eros “is a god of the greatest importance: he directs everything that occurs, not only in the human domain, but also in that of the gods.”28 Creation falls apart. But it is all of us who, placed in the midst of Eros, decide how creation, in falling apart, is the falling-apart and how it is creation in the sense of the creation. This is why every form of encounter between gods and human beings, as Plato further explains in the Symposium, serves the exclusive goal of “caring for” and “healing” Eros (peri erotēs phylakēn te kai iasin). For Eros can easily become unbound and immoderate if a human being lets himself or herself go, and then, instead of a “beautiful,” “heavenly” Eros, which is conciliatory toward and in harmony with the things of the world, there arises a “common,” “sacrilegious” Eros, which “corrupts” (diaphtherei) and “harms” (edikēsen).29 My soul (as one must say to oneself) is anything but a private thing. It is a public thing more than anything else in me. My soul is a manifestation of my Eros; if the strings of the marionette go the opposite way, I also go the opposite way and reject my fellow community members. I seek what is common in the particularity of my existence; I split apart and have an equal satisfaction in violating the law and in demanding that everybody else respect it. If my soul attaches itself to the wrong block of wax, I attach myself to the wrong conception, throw everything into confusion, and look as though I am deprived of reason. I could continue to say to myself: The things of the world go through me. My Eros is the cut. I meddle in everything. I harm things. I heal things. My soul is a polis. I must do a great deal for it. My soul wants to be made ready for the feast of creation through a life of “healing” practice: “Or have you not noticed that imitations, when one frequently engages in them from one’s early years, become habits and nature, irrespective of whether the body, or sounds, or the mind is involved?”30 It would seem easier to leave the soul to its own devices. Would I notice (I may nonchalantly ask myself) that to which the soul would then give birth: the night of evil? In the Theaetetus, Plato, in Socrates’s words, says something terrible: “Evil (ta kaka) . . . can neither be extirpated, because there must always be something that is opposed to the good, nor have its seat with the gods. But it moves

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about (peripolei) in mortal nature (thnētēn physin) and in this region according to that necessity.”31 When one speaks of the good, evil is assumed, even if it is not explicitly mentioned. To call some human beings good means to undertake a division: not anyone is good, but rather these particular human beings, and the others are obviously the others, the evil human beings. The latter must be present, because otherwise it would make no sense to look for those among human beings who are also good. In this manner, it might occur to one not to want to be with the “good ones,” because one must grant that this is possible only if there are also “evil” people. But this is not the correct way to approach in thought the present question. A more adequate approach is suggested through the second distinction drawn by Plato in the passage just quoted. Evil necessarily moves not among the gods but only among human beings. Evil would then be a human affair.32 The possibility of evil lies in “human beings” as a possibility, that is to say, in the possibility for human beings to relate to themselves by fashioning themselves, and, in so doing, being not just a “human being,” but rather a “human being” in an extreme mode. Evil is the extreme human Gestalt in the Gestalt of a human being, something thoroughly contradictory, divisive, oppositional, and chaotic— and, of course, terrifying. For it is then that kind of evil which cannot leave anything alone and must harm everything. An extreme human being is an undecided human being— always and everywhere. It annoys him that a rose is a rose, for he would like for it to be a carnation. But it is still a rose. How enraged he becomes because the world does not dance to his bizarre tunes! “There lies an immense, destructive power in raving souls, a nonhealing power, which causes only misery for all other living beings in the world.”33 One must have seen the human soul in its evil mode to know the nature of the culture of the soul, at which Eros’s caring and healing aim. Plato proposes in the Philebus to look to sickness, not to health, in order to see the “greatest pleasure” in human beings. Obviously, this does not mean that the sick enjoy themselves more than the healthy. The point relates, rather, to the “quantity of pleasure and its intensity,” and in this regard it is clear that the greatest pleasure and displeasure come from a certain corruption of the body and of the soul, not from their right disposition.34 What is it exactly that a human being experiences when he lets himself go completely in everything that comes upon him, and when he thus allows all the diverse things that he can be and feel play themselves out in him to their highest pitch? For one thing, according to Plato, such a human being always perceives himself as another, as someone who at this precise moment he is not. He has fallen apart, fallen into parts, parts that are purely and only

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parts. Anytime he is something, he lacks his self. For whatever he feels at a given moment is evidently always precisely what he was not looking for in this feeling; it is indeed the opposite.35 But such things can be exciting. The suffering described, according to Plato’s second observation, is “bittersweet.” Our human being, having become evil— everything is always false— may enjoy the evilness of evil: it causes him to be aroused about everything; it is pure excitement. “When someone,” Plato writes, “undergoes restoration or destruction, he experiences two opposed conditions at once. He may feel hot while shivering or chilled while sweating. . . . He will then want to retain one of these conditions and get rid of the other. But if this so- called bittersweet condition is hard to shake, it first causes irritation and later on turns into wild excitement.”36 The evil human being is essentially a perplexed person. To use Plato’s words, he is excited by a “surplus of pleasure.” It is almost deadly how these pleasures— all sorts of changes in color, distortion of features, and wild palpitations— delight the human being in question. For they let go of him no longer.37 Yet the aimlessly erotic soul manifests itself in a monstrous manner. The human figure that arises from it is grotesquely disfigured. It is a creature of the night, of the night of evil. “In the case of pleasures, by contrast,” Plato concludes his analysis, “when we see anyone actively engaged in them, especially in those that are most intense, we notice that their effect is quite ridiculous, if not outright obscene; we become quite ashamed ourselves and hide them as much as possible from sight, and we confine such activities to the night (nyx), as if the light (phōs) must not witness such things.”38 This shame is understandable, but it is inappropriate. Evil leaves its night behind and enters into the light of day. And it is here that a stand must be made against it. For, prey to the obsession to try out everything, this human monster meddles in the affairs of others. He casts upon them the hopeless restlessness that holds sway in his own soul. Evil is inflammatory. It confounds the entire human community. It is unjust. It is therefore no coincidence that Plato goes into such depth in his discussion of evil in the Republic, this dialogue devoted to elucidating the origin of political constitutions in the constitutions— the Gestalten— of the soul.39 Plato shows here that one must take a stand against evil. Evil is no longer receptive to persuasion, to any influence or negotiation, for it has taken insanity for its armor. Chaos extends from out of this human monster. The things of the world are progressively drained, there are greater numbers of damaged beings, communities become more and more disintegrated. But neither is there pure chaos, nor is the most extreme chaos “something.” For when there is “something,” there also is the Way, which generates one, and then two . . .

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Eros lives; creation becomes ordered in chaos. Eros lives, indeed, even in the human monster. This is why he has armored himself against Eros by making Eros, which creatively confounds the things of the world, the lord of creation. As a lord, Eros is tyrannical, is erōs tyrannos.40 For then it wills the things of the world, and no longer wills the things. In the erōs tyrannos, Eros, which brings forth the things of the world, has become perverted into an Eros that devours things. The human being’s face becomes grotesquely disfigured and cries out: I, I am it, am it— a human.41 But this grotesquely disfigured face is not the human being, and the truth of the human being must be opposed to this delusion of the tyrannical man (tyrannikos anēr). Let us depict this truth, the image of the caring, solicitous, conciliatory, just Eros. We find it in the Republic. Socrates sketched it as follows in conversation with Glaucon: “Well, then, fashion a single kind of multicolored beast with a ring of many heads that it can grow and change at will— some from gentle, some from savage animals. . . . Then fashion one other kind, that of a lion, and another of a human being. But make the first much the largest and the other second to it in size. . . . Now join the three of them into one, so that they somehow grow together naturally. . . . Then, fashion around them the image of one of them, that of a human being so that anyone who sees only the outer covering and not what’s inside will think it is a single creature, a human being. . . . Then, if someone maintains that injustice profits this human being and that doing just things brings no advantage, let’s tell him that he is simply saying that it is beneficial for him, first, to feed the multiform beast well and make it strong, and also the lion and all that pertains to him; second, to starve and weaken the human being within, so that he is dragged along wherever either of the other two leads; and, third, to leave the parts to bite and kill one another rather than accustoming them to each other and making them friendly. . . . But, on the other hand, wouldn’t someone who maintains that just things are profitable be saying, first, that all our words and deeds should insure that the human being within this human being has the most control; second, that he should take care of the many-headed beast as a farmer does his animals, feeding and domesticating the gentle heads and preventing the savage ones from growing; and, third, that he should make the lion’s nature his ally, care for the community of all his parts, and bring them up in such a way that they will be friends with each other and with himself?”42 Among human beings, as we read in the Gorgias, there can be no more earnest conversation than a dialogue concerning the way that they ought to live.43 Our story— that story of things falling apart that is called “Eros”— started after the androgynes were cut in half. This story also has an end, and

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we obviously must not go past this end in silence. The end of the story is the knowledge of how we ought to live. If we enter into this knowledge— if it becomes our soul— then we put more than a dance of words on stage in our Eros, in the Eros of the world: we put on a dance of the things of the world on stage. For the just soul is just to the world: it is the structure of chaos. Plato has depicted the culture of the soul in different passages from his works. In them, he explains how the soul attains the Gestalt that suits it, i.e., the “good” Gestalt, in the process of caring (epimeleia) for itself. In the Gorgias, he alludes to a certain peculiar order that acquires form in each person and that makes everything and everyone good. Among other things, this order is presumably peculiar because it seeks the One within the multiplicity of the soul’s strivings by expecting each part of the soul to attend exclusively to the performance of its proper function. In this way, all the parts of the whole are brought into “proper harmony with one another” (symphona auta).44 The human being whose soul is thus ordered is prudent (sōphrōn), because he consistently does what is proper—“vis- à- vis gods and humans”45 — and he is just (dikaios), because he does not flee what is proper, even if it is difficult and he has no inclination toward it. Finally, he is also wise (sophos), because he knows what he does, in sharp contrast to unbridled people who, pulled to and fro, always end up with the exact opposite of what they want to be or feel. A human being with an ordered soul does not suffer any part of his soul to engage in an activity alien to it, nor does he allow the faculties of his soul to meddle in one another’s affairs. Such a human being has truly put his house in order, has gained control over himself, is friends with himself, and has brought the faculties of his soul into accord, as if they were the keynotes of a musical harmony; thus, he is no longer a multiplicity, but has rather become wholly one, prudent, and properly organized. Only then does he proceed to act . . .46 This is the goal at which we must aim in the conduct of our life. For the just human being lives justice; he operates among things for the sake of these things, for their permanence, their coexistence, and their sociability. He is the communitarian human being, the creative friend, who loves things so wisely that he lets them be. He loves the creative element in things: their multiplicity, the individual that is unique, the other that shows him that he is the other for the other, i.e., the one. He loves the wisdom of things— they are the infinitely wide, infinitely multifarious space for an infinitely wide, infinitely multifarious love. Inspired, as he is, by an Eros formed in wisdom (the eros philosophos),47 he does not desire that things that are so different be different from what they are.

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Things pass through human beings. The cut could not be sharper. On the one hand, the human being in the eros tyrannos lives a robber’s life, as Plato calls it, friends neither with other human beings nor with a god, because he cannot live in a community. On the other hand, the human being in the eros philosophos stands in a relation to things that is good for these things. The wise assert, Callicles says in Plato’s Gorgias, “that also heaven and earth, gods and human beings remain in existence only through community (koinonia), friendship (philia) and skill, prudence and justice (kosmos), not through confusion (akosmia) and incontinence (akolasia).”48 In the eros philosophos, i.e., in the Gestalt of the just human being, the human being enters into a divine element. He produces the structure in which the things of the world, which have come apart, are reunited. This producing, we read in the Symposium, is a divine thing: a birth in the beautiful. For it is as thoroughly appropriate here as beauty is appropriate to the gods. Eros does not relate to the beautiful, as is generally believed. It relates to the divine, to producing and giving birth in beauty.49 Let us think of the feast of thought once again. It would be a beautiful thing. What kind of thing would it be? As Socrates says, “[it] consists in seeing together things that are scattered about everywhere (ta pollache diesparmena) and collecting them into one kind, so that by defining each thing we can make clear the subject of any instruction we wish to give. Just so with our discussion of love, whether its definition was correct or not.” And what else would the feast of thought be? “Likewise, to be able to cut up (temnein) each kind into species along its natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher might do. In precisely this way, our two speeches classified all mental derangements within one common kind (en ti koinē eidos). Then, just as each body, being one (ex enos), has parts that naturally come in pairs of the same name (one of them being called the right and the other the left), so the speeches, considering unsoundness of mind to be one single kind within us (en ēmin eidos) by nature, proceeded to cut it up. The first speech cut the left part, and continued to cut until it discovered among these further parts a sort of love that can be called ‘left-handed,’ which it correctly denounced. The second speech, in turn, led us to the right side, . . . discovered a love that shares its name with the other but is actually a divine love (theios eros), set this love before us, and praised it as the cause of our greatest goods.”50

In Time

Let us dream: Human beings succeed in bringing about their second birth. They are on the path toward their civilization. And let us be watchful: Human beings go off the path toward their civilization. They obliterate the creative life they created. The truth of this dream lies in the fact that human beings fall prey to time. Everything that human beings are and do exists only in the Gestalt of time. Time is the power in whose mode human existence occurs. Human beings are occurrences of time, their life takes place as an event of time. Time encompasses human beings, takes them along, carries them forth, and covers them with its Gestalt. Human beings are the time in whose Gestalt they live. They wear time as their countenance, and their entire existence shows what they have become in time. Time makes human beings. It creates its work in them; it transforms, adds, repels, shapes anew, leaves alone, and exercises a forceful domination. Time gives itself a Gestalt for its own history in human beings, as if they were the material of its power. Time leaves no doubts about its power over human beings. With irresistible force, it exhibits to human beings that power through which it acts upon them. Human beings behold themselves in time, and they behold the power of death. What are human beings in time? Are they completely powerless vis-à-vis time? Or can they resist the clutch of time? Are they pure creatures of time? Or can they also, in time, act for themselves? Is the occurrence of their existence nothing but a temporal occurrence? Or can it also be an event that they themselves determine? Does time always force them into its Gestalt? Or are they not, in the end, also the creators of their Gestalt in time? As before,1 we find only one answer to this question. Human beings are beings toward birth; they come to their existence in the Gestalten of the power

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for their existence. One aspect of these Gestalten is that a human being is able to be himself a beginning and an author, a force creative of works; in a word, he is able to be toward himself. Taking the measure of the power of time once again, we must say that time settles upon human life and makes it heavy, refractory to the creative. Time is the deactualizing power that dissolves that complex of Gestalten into which life emerged and in which it had its consistency. “I am time (kala), the destroyer of worlds,” says the Bhagavad Gita.2 However, the power of the beginning is given to human beings in order to oppose the power of time. It is true that they cannot indefinitely stop the effects of time or, to put it precisely, its deactualizing. Everything that has Gestalt has been fashioned in time and also becomes dissolved again in time. Nor can human beings stave off their own “faulty behavior in the conduct of public affairs” forever, to use Plato’s words. Any discipline that aims at the “right form” is erected against time and is, in contrast to the infinity of time, finite, because it will inevitably break down at some point, when the exertion that produced and sustained it begins to flag. But there is one thing human beings can do: they can, in time, change “time,” by reaching out to the power of time that encompasses them. This possibility or, more precisely, these possibilities are given them by time itself. To be sure, this is the time in whose Gestalt human beings live. But insofar as it is “time,” and thus changeable and changing, time surrounds them with wholly different Gestalten. I shall call these Gestalten “time-Gestalten.” From among these Gestalten, there is always one, namely, that time-Gestalt which encompasses and determines human beings at any given moment. We might also say that there is a time-Gestalt every “time.” But then there is also a sequence of time-Gestalten, in which time is successively a “different” time. This sequence is, in Plotinus’s words, the “life of the soul (bios psyches) in the transitional movement from one form of life to another (en kinēsei metabatikē ex allon eis allon bion zōen).”3 As “time,” time flows in a variety of forms. Its “duration (chiu) comes into being through an interpenetration of alternating times (shih),” as is said in the book Mo Tzu, which summarizes the doctrines of the Chinese master Mo Ti.4 It is in this sequential multiplicity of time-Gestalten that human beings find the scope of their own power in time. For whenever one time-Gestalt follows another, hence when time becomes a “different” one, a “beginning” comes to the fore— time opens up. Something different from what has hitherto been the case can then happen. Or to put it precisely and with specific reference to human beings, the occurrence of human existence can be different from what was the case hitherto. A different event— human life in a different time-Gestalt— is to be expected. And time “waits”; it shows that “it is time” for something different to begin in time.

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What do human beings await then? They can make a beginning. They have the power for it. What do they await? “It is time.” “Contemporary states are not in the situation described.” They are far from being complete like the “beautiful city.” Something has happened to human beings that explains why they do not live in the “beautiful city,” although this city would be that form of their community which is appropriate and correct for them. What, indeed, has happened to human beings? They were creative. They created their civilization on the basis of the Gestalt of power. They created it, among other Gestalten of power, in the Gestalt of time. This was the time of creation. And this was also the time of annihilation. Being a completion in time, the work of human beings— their civilization— breaks apart in the time of its completion. It is a work of time, but there is no time to achieve this work. Already before the time in which this work is supposed to be produced and to devote itself fully to its purpose, it is already time to begin anew with it in time. The time of civilization— of the work of human beings— is a time of beginnings. Only here, in these beginnings, are “time” and “civilization” wholly together, namely, when the work is laid out with reference to time but is not yet in time. Thus, it would be erroneous to start with time in our interpretation of human civilization in time. We must adopt a different course and go back to the beginnings. In the Gestalt of time, every civilization is a civilization of “recurrence.” Civilization is most actual at this “time,” namely, in the time of its birth, of its beginnings.5 An empirical investigation— as undertaken by Plato in the Laws— leads quickly to the corresponding insight that there is not one “beginning of the state” (arche politeias), i.e., of the life of human beings in a political community. Since when have human states existed? The question, as Plato writes, gets lost in an “immeasurable and incalculable time period.” In this period, “thousands of states have come into being . . . and become extinguished.”6 If anyone looks for the one beginning, he finds instead many beginnings. This certainly increases considerably our acquaintance with empirical material. But material is not knowledge. The diversity of a subject matter is not commensurable with the degree of our insight into this subject. By following beginnings in their sheer endless number, one never arrives at the beginning. The question remains: How are we supposed to grasp the “beginning” in which a state comes into being? Plato chooses what I would call a “relative” method in contrast with the “absolute” method, which might initially appear to be the most appropriate. He does not search for a beginning, as it were, out of nothing, which would

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be an absolutely “first” beginning. Such a procedure would project into the question of the beginning the question of the start. It would confuse the question of the beginning by introducing, through the analytical backdoor,7 as it were, the false problem of the one beginning in time. No, Plato perseveres in searching for the beginning in that which has already started, and he does so with such logical determination that he looks to the end of states. He grasps the beginning of states in the “relatively” most intuitive manner: from the standpoint of their end. States came into being, Plato says, they existed, and they became extinguished. The causes and the resulting sequences of events leading to their extinction are universally known: floods, epidemics, and many other such factors.8 But— to formulate the question that naturally poses itself at this point— what happens then, after the extinction of a state? One must answer, if one looks around, that “something” happens, or rather has happened. For human beings are still living, and they live in political societies built by them. Obviously, a “beginning” took place after the end. But now it is no longer necessary to search for this beginning. It is already in the preceding “end.” The beginning is the creation of the end. It is recurrence, a beginning in a series of beginnings. What does this beginning of “states,” which emerges from the extinction of “states,”9 look like? In the Laws, Plato draws a detailed picture that makes it radically discernable.10 According to this picture, the beginning of states is a beginning for which the word “emptiness” is certainly the most suitable, if one wants to describe it in the most accurate and succinct way. The few human beings who still live find themselves in a condition of “immeasurable, ghastly forlornness.”11 There are huge deserted regions around them, in which there might be a few animal herds here and there that were not subjected to annihilation like the other animals; but their numbers are too small to suffice for the survival of the human beings who encounter them. The “emptiness” of the “beginning” in the “end,” as Plato describes it, is truly and completely made for beginning again, for it encompasses not only the physical- spatial world. It stretches beyond it into the spirit of human beings in the manner of a great forgetting: Human beings are no longer conscious of that power which their whole life presupposes, i.e., those political forms that alone allow them to keep up with their existence. They have “absolutely no recollection” of the existence of a “political community (polis), a political constitution (politeia), or a legislation (nomothesia).”12 In the beginning of their existence, which is a political existence from the beginning,13 human beings know nothing of politics; they are “political” at this “time” (through the Gestalten of the power of

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their existence since their first birth), and they are not (since they are in the condition of the “great forgetting”). This, then, is a “time”— a time-Gestalt— in which time has not yet carried forth human beings from out of the beginning and swept them away along its course. Everything is in the beginning, and in this beginning everything is together, not partitioned, not expanded into multiplicity or developed into different elements. The “emptiness” of the beginning is an “abundance.” Whatever is available is so minuscule that this minuscule quantity remains entirely equal to itself, as though it were already finished though not yet begun, as though it were atemporal-temporal, and as though it were sufficient for its own birth. It would thus appear as if everything had already been accomplished and as if there were nothing that might disturb the floatingundecided state of a beginning that begins but leads to nothing— something that might interrupt this state of indecision by making a beginning and setting out toward that which would then have begun. Plato widens the scope of his reflection in order to describe this timeGestalt of the beginning (at the “end” of states) at the beginning (of a new temporal course of states). He devotes to it a broad and wide-ranging discussion, which is, analytically considered, structured around a series of fundamental statements about that “time.” The aggregate effect of these statements is to clearly show the “abundance” in the “emptiness” of that beginning that begins but does not lead to anything (yet). As one sentence follows the other, the wonder grows, such that the question becomes increasingly urgent: Is that possible? A beginning with which nothing begins? A beginning that, as “time,” does not become time, i.e., an occurrence that takes place and follows a course and that thus leads farther and farther, away from the beginning? “For several reasons, then,” the first statement says, “war (polemos) and civil war (stasis) alike came to an end.” And further statements follow: Men’s isolation (erēmia) prompted them to cherish and love one another. Their food supply was nothing they needed to quarrel about. There was no shortage of flocks and herds, which is what men mostly lived on in that age. They always had a supply of milk and meat, and could always add to it plenty of good food to be got by hunting. They also had an abundance of clothes, bedding, houses, and equipment for cooking and other purposes, because molding pottery and weaving are skills that have no need of iron. Both these kinds of art (technē) were a gift from God (theos)14 to men— his way, in fact, of supplying them with all that kind of equipment. His intention was that whenever human beings were reduced to such a desperate condition

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(anagkazomenoi), they could still take root and develop (egignonto) [i.e., they could undertake their second birth].15 Because of all this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the prevailing lack of gold and silver. Now the community (xynoikia) in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the highest ethical nobility (genaiotata ēthē) because tendencies to violence and crime, and feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. Presumably they felt no need for legislators. Men born at that stage of the world cycle did not yet have any written records, but lived in obedience to accepted usage and “ancestral” law, as we call it. But this is already a political system (politeia) of a sort (tropos). The name which everyone, I believe, uses for the form of government of that age is “political rule” (dynasteia).16

In the time-Gestalt of the beginning (at the “end” of states) at the beginning (of a new temporal series of states), the highest form of civilization manifests itself. We could say in a very pointed manner: the beginning is the highest form of civilization (“the highest ethical nobility”). In a similarly pointed manner the opposite could be said: the beginning is not the highest form of civilization. For human beings certainly live then “in” the beginning, but they have by no means made “the” beginning, i.e., their beginning (toward the work of a civilization created by them): their technical manual skills are the gift of a deity. It is true that, at this time, human beings are “political” (“but this is already a political system of a sort”), but only in a clan living in isolation, not participating in any sort of political life among themselves beyond this clan: “They have no laws, no debating councils; they live on the top of lofty mountains in caves; each man lays down the law to wife and children, with no regard for neighbor.”17 This state of affairs could have continued “forever,” and these human beings living “in caves” would then have possessed that which, according to all we know, can be brought about only by the success of a perfect civilization. They would have had no injustice, no conflict, no war. They would— if it were not for time. For time had already taken hold of these human beings on the occasion of their fresh beginning following the extinction of the preceding state. While they are still “in” the beginning and appear to persevere in it, these human beings living “in caves” interrupt the floating-undecided state of this beginning by making a beginning and setting out toward that which has then begun. Being in the clutch of time, but also being obviously, at the

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same time, creators of their own Gestalt in time, they show that the beginning “in” which they are is not really a beginning with which nothing begins but rather one that, as “time,” also becomes time, i.e., a supervening development that leads farther and farther— away from it. The reason for this is the bodily nature of human beings. We know that because of their bodies, i.e., of their existing also in the bodily world, nothing happens for human beings in exactly the same manner. On the contrary, everything in their life is motion; life itself is motion and nothing but motion, as though it were “never” supposed to stay the way it is at any given moment. The human beings living “in caves” do not remain “scattered in separate households and individual families.”18 Rather, their numbers increase, they gather together in a common place and form more extensive associations. They “come down,” namely, from the high mountains, where they exclusively led their life up to that point, and they begin to cultivate the land in the foothills.19 They fence in their plantations to protect them against wild animals and create thus “a single large community, a common homestead (oikia).”20 The growth of each of these “smaller initial communities” as well as their multiplication leads to the formation among them of “different ideas and customs relating to the gods and themselves.” They all have a common beginning: they live “scattered in separate households and individual families.” It is precisely this beginning that causes their progressive differentiation in the course of time. For in their initial isolation, each of them was molded by the eldest member in a markedly individual manner. They formed their own conceptions of the order most conducive to the right conduct of life, and these were passed on to the younger generations through education. By the time a great number of these human communities have come into existence, each of them in possession of its own laws, a set of laws binding them all together has become necessary. To this goal, each of them elects its representatives, called lawgivers (nomothetēs), who, together with the representatives of the other communities, and in association with dynastic rulers, constitute a “government of the best” (aristokratia). All this happens in the mode of time. Plato repeatedly points at this fact by means of linguistic marks signifying temporal course, temporal distances, and temporal moments, e.g., “at this time,”21 “an infinitely remote time,”22 the men of “that time,”23 an “enormous and unimaginable duration,”24 “many generations have lived in this way,”25 an “infinite number of [time] changes,”26 “an extremely long time,”27 “enormous stretches of time,”28 “at the end of a great number of years after the flood.”29 And he makes it very clear that in the course of all the time so described, human beings act with time in time; they insert breaks into time (“come down from the high mountains,” form “a single

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large community,” “constitute a government of the best”), and create thus, within time, “times” that are their times, and with which they impose measures of “time,” according to the different modes of their conduct of life, upon the measure that determines their existence.30 They achieve that “progress (epidosis) in conformity with which states develop toward the good (aretē) as well as toward the bad (kakia).”31 They move toward increasingly more polished and “better” political-civilizatory forms of their life, and in and through these forms they lay the groundwork for the extinction of their state. Abandoning the protection of the “summit of high mountains,” they build cities on the open plains (usually near rivers or the sea, making attacks by ship easier), they accentuate their mutual differences (thus allowing for tensions and conflicts, leading to revolts by one group against the other), pass laws for all possible situations (laws that are not always necessarily good and that thus weaken their loyalty to “the” law), do not care sufficiently about good governments (and thus make worse governments likely), and finally, spoiled by “their” long time in time, no longer recognize the meaning of political rule in an increasingly larger multitude of people. At this point, they have completely forgotten the catastrophe of the “flood” (kataklysmos)32 in which their state had its beginning; they have become ignorant in a manner that corrupts them: “What finally causes their extinction is their badness (kakia) in every respect and above all their ignorance (amathia) concerning the most important human concerns (ta megista tōn anthrōpinōn pragmatōn).”33 This is the final time-Gestalt before the extinction of their state, which takes place at the end of a temporal course of political civilization, which itself began at the end of a previous such temporal course. The two ends meet. This resulting condition may be formulated in two sentences: A political civilization becomes extinguished because its meaning is forgotten. A political civilization is begun in the best possible way by human beings who remember nothing of such a civilization.

The beginning of a state is “recurrence,” in a temporal sense, on the one hand (in the sense of a beginning in a sequence of beginnings), and in a fundamental sense, on the other (in the sense of a beginning that is always for human beings their beginning when they confront their existence): they are political by their very nature, even when they either do not yet know it or no longer know it.34 As soon as they forget that their life is to govern, the political world in which and through which they live is extinguished. But this extinction is the extinction of this particular political world, for human beings can survive the catastrophe, and when they do, human existence is the same as before, i.e., political in and through itself. Human beings do not need to recollect this,

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because even without recollection, they “know” that the beginning that enables them to live is the beginning of a polis. Plato’s humans, who live “on the summits of high mountains”— the small number who survived the flooding that destroyed the previous human world— have “absolutely no recollection” of their earlier political existence. Nonetheless, it is they who show what a “perfect” human civilization can be.

In Law

With regard to their political civilization, human beings may care primarily only about its duration and permanence. However, they do not possess by nature the constructive load-bearing elements required for ensuring this duration and permanence, because everything in them is, to use Philo of Alexandria’s words, “impermanent and fleeting (inconstantes sunt et caducae hominum ordinationes) and can, depending on behavior, events, and fate, lean toward either the superior or the inferior.”1 An “anarchy of the soul” (animae anarchia)2 is always a possibility for the human constitution. But how are human beings, continually exposed as they are to this danger, to keep their community safe from dangers and to give it a firm constitution— they, who are never in a position to provide such a firm constitution for themselves? Human beings alone can never guarantee the soundness of a society composed of human beings. Were we to assume the opposite, we would realize that what they build breaks down all too easily because of what they are. They are more likely to oppose each other than to be always in agreement. They become enamored of the principles they have adopted for themselves and do not necessarily realize that there might be others who should respect or even follow these principles. They associate with each other in order to remove the predicament of their existence, with which no man or woman can cope on his or her own; but like poachers living on the good of their community, they take from this association only their own advantage, which is measured according to the force, capabilities, and skills that each one possesses, and by virtue of which he or she gets his or her way (or not). They came together at the beginning of a community, and in doing so they followed the imperative of their predicament; but this imperative, which forced them to associate with one another, is not theirs, and hence, even “in community,” they continue to

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take themselves to be entirely free, and they act accordingly, as if they have not yet acknowledged what they nonetheless had already acknowledged when they came together in their predicament: their existential solidarity. They enact this solidarity every day and they break it every day, as if they were “free” with regard to it, even though there is a “law” pertaining to their existential solidarity with respect to which no man or woman is in any way “free” or “sovereign,” namely, the law of their bodily existence: that they can live only in community. From the beginning, their existence has the form of law. Their existence itself is “law”: the law regarding an existence common to them all. In order to gain the life for which they are born and for the sake of which they come together, human beings must give their life the Gestalt of law. If they do not do so, and instead bypass the fundamental law of their existence (or believe themselves to be able to bypass it), they create for themselves a predicament worse than the one with which they attempted to cope by coming together. For now they must deal not only with their physical existence but also with a lawless existence, i.e., one threatened from all angles. They are no longer isolated but rather already “together”; nonetheless, each one of these humans living in a community “at the beginning” continues to assume that there is nothing that binds them to such a “togetherness.” They are quite inconsistent regarding the business of their life. They want to master their physical existence as a community, but create instead the predicament of a community that is not communitarian toward itself. They themselves hinder the life that should be their supreme concern. Yet there is a way out of this second, “political” predicament affecting a human community that, standing “at the beginning,” is not initially communitarian toward itself. This way out was described by Anonymous Iamblici,3 at the end of his already cited description of the first (i.e., physical) predicament of human beings: Human beings were not able to live in isolation, and they banded together out of necessity (anagkē). All the arrangements of their life and all their technical achievements were invented with this predicament in mind; but it proved impossible for them to dwell together while living in lawlessness (anomia)— for an evil greater than a solitary life would have resulted from this; as a consequence of this predicament, law (nomos) and justice (dikaios) have become the rulers (eubasileuein) of human beings. For law and justice have their firm foundation in the nature of things (physei ischyra endedesthai).4

A rule of law, and thus of justice, is the answer to the second, political predicament of human beings at the beginning of their community. Human be-

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ings recognize in the law the force that really gives their community the form of “community,” that holds them in community and maintains their fitness for the community. There must be something working in them that works through them, something that, in Anonymous Iamblichi’s words, “brings together in one house (synoikizon) cities (poleis) and humans (anthropoi) and holds them together therein (to synexon einai).” It is “the laws (nomoi) and the just (dikaios),” he declares,5 that bring this about. Why? Aristotle gave the classic answer in the Politics: The law is “reason (nous) without desire (orexis).”6 In a sense, the law is “bloodless.” Unlike a human being, it does not think of itself, it does not develop and pursue its own ideas, and it does not fly into fits of blind rage. The law remains “cold.” This is an advantage that no human being can match. Human beings have desires, cravings, and passions, and thus every woman and every man is potentially a poacher of the good of her or his community.7 In these circumstances, the idea of measures for establishing a kind of power that, while being immune to the power of human desires and passions, shapes coexistence for the sake of coexistence is quite compelling. The law— or, more precisely, the “idea of a political community with the same laws for all” (phantasia politeias isonomou), in the words of Marcus Aurelius8— consists in this measure: The law replaces the sovereignty of every person over himself or herself with its own sovereignty over everyone. The decisive power in a society, as Aristotle explains in the Politics, pertains to the law alone; the law is kyrios.9 This rule— the rule of law— is then no longer a “human” rule. For the law is “set” explicitly against human desires and passions; in a certain sense it is set against human beings themselves. “An empire of laws, and not of men.” This formulation, which originates from Anglo-Saxon, and more particularly, in this case, from American political thought— a battle cry not least of the protagonists of the American Revolution— expresses the relevant distinction with exemplary brevity.10 In order for the world of human beings to be well governed, the governing power ought in no case to be a human power. It should be solely a power of the law. This is the reason why, in the Laws, Plato maintains that it is not linguistically correct to call those who conduct the affairs of the government “governors” (archontoi). Instead, these people should be named “servants of the law” (hypēretas tois nomois).11 This, Plato adds, has nothing to do with an obsession with neologisms; his argumentation is rather guided by the conviction that “the salvation and its opposite, the ruin of states, depend” more on such a linguistic clarification than on anything else. For it can be predicted with confidence that a polis in which the law is subject to the power of the ruler and is not itself the master will perish. In contrast, a polis in which “the

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law is the master of rulers (despotēs tōn archontōn) and the rulers are servants of the law (douloi tou nomou)” “is assured well-being and everything good that the gods have in store for human societies.”12 The order to be achieved by human governments could not be formulated with greater clarity or sharpness: the law is the “master of the rulers” and the rulers are the “servants of the law.” There is nothing to quibble about here. What is valid is absolutely valid: all political power is subject to the power of the law. The law alone governs the human world, this world that must always be governed and hence always is governed; this is true even though the business of governing is solely carried out by human beings. Those who govern do so as “servants” of the law, according to the law, for the law, and through the law. All power over human beings belongs to the law and there is no power besides the power of the law. There is nothing to quibble about here— certainly. But someone may marvel. It seems as though the law is the “absolute.” Hardly anyone would hesitate to approve this principle if he were to bring to mind the fact that human beings cannot themselves guarantee the soundness of a society composed of human beings and that, consequently, if such a society is to endure, it requires a firm constitution. This— a “firm constitution” for the coexistence of human beings (to use the words of Anonymous Iamblichi)— is precisely what the law provides. But one may wonder what exactly it is that one sees in the law when one sees the “absolute” in it. Is the law absolute in itself, wholly by itself, i.e., truly the absolute? Or is it rather the case that something absolute is “merely” in the law, while the law itself “merely” stands for such an absolute thing? Empirically speaking— i.e., from the standpoint of the history of legal thought— there is no one, easy formula to answer this question. There are different answers, each of which may be modulated in a variety of ways, and these answers partly overlap, partly are connected with each other. They can, however, be ordered according to type, such that we may identify three “typical” answers that assume the law to have an absolute validity: (a) because the law is the same as the “divine” or “God,” (b) because the law lies in “reason,” and (c) because the law is given through the “nature of things” or follows from the “art of creation,” according to which the things of the world have been created. The following may serve as a diagram for this classification: the law = the divine = God the law = reason the law = the nature of things = the art of creation

An empirical exposition of these different concepts may be given by citing exemplary statements by Chrysippus and Heraclitus (for a), Aristotle (for b),

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Cicero (for a, b, and c), and Hobbes (for c). The passages quoted above from Anonymous Iamblichi are to be counted as testimony for c. According to Chrysippus, the law presides over everything, even “divine” things. But the law can also be identified with Zeus, “king of all things”; in this case, Zeus would be identical to the law that presides over all things. Law is the king of all things, both divine and human (nomos pantōn esti basileus theiōn te kai anthrōpinōn pragmatōn). It must command (archōnta) and rule (ēgemōna) both the good and the bad, and hence be a standard (kanōna) of the just and the unjust and a director of beings political by nature (physei politikōn zōōn), enjoining what ought to be done and forbidding what ought not to be done.13

Heraclitus draws a hierarchical distinction between the “divine” and the “human” law. The latter proceeds from the former; the human law is the texture of the divine law in the human world, such that this world is built with human laws but has its ground in the divine law, which alone is firm. If we speak with intelligence, we must build on that which is common to all, as the city is built on the Law, and even firmer. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it governs as far as it will, and is sufficient for all, and is stronger than all.14

“Reason” manifests itself in the law, and hence, as Aristotle explains, one may call for the rule of law, in the sense of a true rule of reason and God. (According to Aristotle, human beings partake in God’s reason through their own reason, and they actualize God’s reason by rationally giving themselves laws). Therefore, he who demands that the law shall govern seems to demand that God (theos) and reason alone shall govern.15

According to Cicero, there is a law that comes from “God” and that is valid for all human beings always and everywhere. Cicero, however, immediately connects the correct notion of law with “reason” and “nature.” There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature (est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens),16 universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable (sed et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis). It is the

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sovereign master (magister) and commander (imperator) of all beings. God himself is its author (inventor), its judge (disceptator), and its bearer (lator).17

According to the “nature of things” (physis)— as Anonymous Iamblichi understands it— laws are unavoidable, and they follow “naturally” from this nature. When human beings see what the nature of things is, they recognize the laws according to which all things operate as well as the laws that they must give to themselves. They comprehend the art of creation that gave rise and continues to give rise to the “world” (the world of “things”). Hobbes (still) acknowledged that this “art”— as he called it— is to be understood as belonging to God. Yet, like some of his contemporaries,18 he also believed that human beings can exercise this art, just as it is exercised by God, by freely applying it to the creation of their own works. The “great Leviathan called a Common-wealth or state (in Latine Civitas),” of which Hobbes wrote, is supposed to be a work of contract and law, which must be regarded as a human creation, but which could also have been created by God, the creator of the world. Hobbes’s Leviathan begins thus: Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal.19

A few sentences later, he writes: [T]he Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.20

One cannot think about the law without thinking about its validity, which is “more” than a mere human postulate. Nonetheless, as has been shown, the law is not simply the absolute. Things would be otherwise quite simple. Everything in the human world would already be lawfully determined, i.e., it would be evidently governed by the law. The dominion of the law would not need to be established at first, for it would already be in place, and human beings would have learned this from the beginning of their life. As a matter of fact, however, they learn something different, although not the exact opposite. It is not as if in thinking about the law they do not discern anything that resists their vocation to create laws. Rather, there is something antecedent to their lawgiving that has the validity of the absolute for the laws as well as prior to the laws. We have already encountered it. Human laws have validity to the extent that they are validated by “God,” the “divine law,” “reason,” the “nature of things,” or the “art of creation” that brings them into existence. In the laws, there is (already) more of “law” than they (first) produce. Or to

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give a formulation that takes into account the lawgiving nature of human beings: In all laws made by human beings, there operates a beginning toward law that precedes and determines these laws. Human beings cast their civilization in the form of laws, because, prior to all civilization, they already look solely to an existence characterized by the form of law. “For everyone has the presentiment (manteuontai ti pantes),” Empedocles explains, “that there exists by nature a common Just and Unjust (physei koinon dikaion kai adikon), even in the absence of a community (koinonia) or contractual association (synthēkē).”21 “Everyone has the presentiment”— the point is made in such a delicate way that it is actually reinforced. The law is already valid for human beings by virtue of their existence, even if each of them lived in isolation from the others, without an understanding or connection with one another. Even though in such a situation there would be no law among them, the law would still have a certain presence to them. Human beings have an understanding of law for the purpose of laws, as if they already knew— prior to the existence of formally promulgated and valid laws— that laws ought to be formulated, as if they knew what the standard for measuring them is and how they are to be recognized as laws. If this is the case, the question must arise, what could this foreknowledge be? It is a kind of foreknowledge, a “foresight of human beings regarding the law” (pronoia anthrōpōn kata nomon), according to Chrysippus’s formulation,22 that, precisely because it is a foreknowledge, can never be grasped explicitly. Rather, it can be grasped only by means of expressions that are apparently inapplicable to it but that are nevertheless valid when this foreknowledge is used as the obvious standard, as the confidently assumed possibility for correct judgment, and as the encompassing horizon for true knowledge. “The law is not the herald of inequality” (non est lex inaequalitatis enarratrix), Philo of Alexandria wrote.23 Indeed, it would occur to no one, not even to an enemy of the law, to deny the universal meaning of “law.” But how does everyone know this, if not on the basis of a common “presentiment” of what “law” means? “Whoever seeks the just (dikaion),” Aristotle declared, “seeks something impartial, and the law is impartial (mesos).”24 Indeed, human beings have already made a judgment before making a judgment that will affect them. The decision must be made according to a neutral standard. But human beings are aware that such a neutral standard is not found among their own kind, because everyone naturally has his or her own interest in mind. If so, how can they come by the standard of the “law,” if they are not “aware” that there is no better judge than the law? “The law (lex) concerning the regulation of bequests and inheritance,” remarked Cicero in De re publica, “was

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promulgated only for the benefit of men and is full of injustice for women (in mulieres plena est iniurae). Why should a woman not have her own money? Why can a Vestal virgin have an heir, while her own mother cannot?”25 Yes, that is the way it is: The law ought not to discriminate. Every person is liable to be disadvantaged by a given law, but no one wants to be disadvantaged; all want the law to be just to them. But how could they demand this, if they simultaneously asserted that some are excluded from justice? Would they not know, even if they denied it, that in this way they deprive their own demand of its “meaning”? The demand for justice is a judicial instance that has existence only when every man and woman can appeal to it. Whoever does not “know” this wantonly refuses to know it. And beyond doubt, this knowledge would be immediately in his or her possession as soon as he or she became a victim of discrimination. How could anyone, Cicero asked, who does not desire to be in society (humanitatis societas) and in a community of law (iuris communio) with his own kind be called a “human being”?26 Human beings, Cicero stated in this rhetorical question, are defined as “human beings” precisely by reason of that desire. They would fail in their existence if they did not associate with one another and if they did not make their association durable and lasting through laws. Yet no one forces human beings to do so, as Cicero implies by concealing his statement in a rhetorical question; “community” and “law” are the work solely of human beings. Their existence as such, “in the beginning,” is nothing but predicament— the physical predicament emanating from their bodies and the political predicament emanating from their creation of an existence as individuals. But through them and in them certain beginnings toward the law are constituted in the way of a sense for the presence of the “absolute” in the law (the “divine,” “God,” “reason,” the “nature of things,” an “art of creation”) as well as of a “foreknowledge” of the final authority of the Just. In creating their humanitatis societas and their iuris communio, human beings build for the sake of these beginnings. In this case too, as always, they have a choice: They must get on with the beginnings and establish through law that power which molds their coexistence to the requirements of coexisting and then maintains their coexistence in this mold. Will they give this power to their civilization? They will, Democritus declared, if they grasp in the power of the law that power that frees human beings for their humanity: The law (nomos) wishes to benefit men’s life; and it is able to do so only when they themselves wish to receive benefit; for it shows its excellence (arete) only to those who allow themselves to be persuaded by it.27

In Freedom

Among the Gestalten pregiven to human beings for the conduct of their life, there is one unlike all others, one that has a very special status compared with them: the Gestalt of freedom. Just like all such Gestalten, it is a pattern for human life, and yet it is, at the same time, the Gestalt, which, in contrast to all other patterns, opens up everything in human life for a particular kind of life, one developed by each human being for him- or herself. Precisely this fact gives this Gestalt its special status among Gestalten. The Gestalt of freedom holds this status owing to its being an essential and decisive part of each of the other Gestalten, insofar as it is the “guideline” that “explodes” the determining element in each of these other Gestalten and thus introduces an element of indeterminacy into it. This Gestalt assigns to human beings the task— the execution of which must thus be possible— of relating to the Gestalten pregiven to them in a “free” manner and to make a choice. On the basis of, and as a way of summing up, the preceding investigation, we may now ask: Will I move alone in the multiplicity of things— in the Gestalt of a world caught up in numbers— and thus go from one to the other for the sake of enjoying the constant excitement that such a going-about affords? Or will I want to know the interconnections among the Many, so that I may see where I really am and where I move, and thus say: this is my “world”? Will I identify myself completely with the Gestalt of the power of my body and will I speak to other human beings only through it, or will I listen to the society-founding teaching of the bodies given to us humans, no matter how much these bodies separate us from each other and how much they also refer us to each other?

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Will I give free rein to the constantly active being that I am and always act without carefully considering for what purpose and why? Or will I begin to govern myself and thus, as the author of the work of my own existence, be able to find the highest freedom possible for human beings, the freedom of a creative existence? Will I persevere in the initial blindness of my spirit and interfere in the affairs of the world as I see fit, completely disregarding the Gestalten of this world? Or will I direct my activity toward the soul, that Gestalt in which it becomes manifest what consciousness is: light, clarity, knowledge? Will I remain silent and unsociable in my thought, that is to say, will I refuse to be in community with others, who are always already present in my thought? Or will I join in the feast of thought and find in this experience the answer to the question: How do I become a human being? Will I, in the falling-apart of creation, take the road of the tyrannical Eros, which compels everything to gather around it and thus only corrupts, damages, and devours? Or will I bring about a culture of the soul through which I may be a human being in the eros philosophos, the caring, conciliating, just Eros? Will I leave everything— including my memories— to time, the world destroyer, and forget that time has a beginning that makes it repeatable and by no means irrevocable? Or will I see the difference of time in its time-Gestalten and understand that I can give a Gestalt to time at the time of the beginnings? Will I refuse to realize, in the predicament that leads me to associate with others, that I have entered an existential solidarity with them, and will I continue behaving as if I were sovereign in myself with regard to all things? Or will I, along with other human beings, grasp that we now have need of laws that shape our still natural solidarity and thus make it lasting?

I can and must say to myself: Human beings have the power to give a Gestalt to the reality of their existence. When they make the relevant decision, they are, in their existence, creators for this existence. Their freedom, as it pertains to this decision, begins with their “soul,” or, more precisely, with the work of “soul,” that work of knowledge which weaves meaning and through which one “knows” what one wants in life. The soul is the work of the government of our existence; it is in charge of “managing,” “ruling,” and “deliberating.” From the soul, power comes into being. For to the extent that the soul that appears in human beings clarifies itself and thus becomes “lucid,” there is formed in them the Gestalt of the power of consciousness that tells human beings, in their life, what the right conduct of life is. All of this is, first and foremost, the business of every individual human being. The questions just formulated have already taken this fact into consideration. However, from the very beginning, the question of the political, the

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question of a political civilization that must be created by human beings for their existence, is posed as well. For the basis upon which the soul is supposed to be developed is a multiplicity of divergent and mutually conflicting forces,1 which, if left to themselves, produce only a negation of soul, an animae anarchia. Thus, the endeavor to build the work of the soul is a political project. Whoever executes it is the framer of a constitution. He or she undertakes the nomothetic task of establishing a constitution for the multiplicity of the forces of his or her soul, a constitution that makes a soul out of these forces, in the sense of the work of government necessary for the conduct of his or her existence. For human beings, this is the framing of the “first” constitution, as opposed to the “second” and better-known constitution of a society of human beings. In the first case, a “soul” or “constitution” emerges as a community of all the forces of the soul. These forces become connected with one another in such a way that they are able to work together. They are thus constituted as the koinonia (the community) of a polis.2 It is in the framework of this constitution that the preeminent and general power of the polis itself is brought forth (as conveyed by the Greek concept of politeia, which means both “state constitution” and “state authority”). In order for the soul to last and to be preserved as polis, it must be that driving force which, in opposition to the individual forces of the soul, governs them as their “political” constitution. The soul is political by itself— the soul is the politician that a human being always encounters in him- or herself. One may, therefore, speak of a “politics of the soul” and state that this politics of the soul is that which provides the foundation for the “politics of human beings regarding human beings.” The latter politics is a consequence of the “politics of the soul,” i.e., it has its beginning, in both a temporal and a causal sense, in the “politics of the soul.” The essential elements of political reality— constitution, power, government— are prefigured in the “politics of the soul.” The “politics of the soul” acts upon them in tandem with a further Gestalt, in conformity with which these elements must be shaped: the Gestalt of “freedom.” Human beings determine the kind of communal life they have on the basis of this Gestalt. “Or do you believe,” Socrates asks rhetorically in the Republic, “that constitutions (politeias) come from oak or rock rather than from the constitutions of the character (ēthōn) of those who live in a state, which constitutions favor one side or another and drag the rest along with them?”3 A koinonia of the polis of the soul is not pregiven to any human being; it must first be established. The forces of the soul of a human being may have very different constitutions in their mutual relations, and an anarchia animae is by no means rare among them. In a certain sense, such an anarchia

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animae is much more natural than the koinonia of the polis of the soul, since no special effort is required for the former; it arises by itself and exercises its dominion in and over a human being, when he or she does not make him- or herself the nomothete of his/her own existence. Through the Gestalt of freedom, human beings are free to choose this or that constitution of themselves. But they are political in each of their constitutions and appear to each other politically according to the particular model of their constitution (just, unjust, caring, tyrannical, autocratic, democratic, etc.). They translate freedom into power by means of their constitution: This is my constitution (they say)— why is your constitution not the same as mine? Do you not see what I know, that this is the way politics works? Do not refuse it and do not project a different constitution upon me instead, which could only be a false one! The reality of freedom is power. Every exercise of freedom is an exercise of power in the modes of deciding, choosing, constituting, and determining. Human beings are power-ful in the Gestalt of their freedom, for within this Gestalt, they always make fixed an aspect of their existence. They cannot do otherwise, even if they want to (and there are people who want to do otherwise). They cannot discard the Gestalt of freedom from their existence. Their experience of themselves is always an experience of the power that their freedom gives them. They are power-ful with regard to themselves in every moment that they think up a project and in every beginning they make toward something. Power (mulk), wrote Ibn Khaldûn, is a mode of human existence that is given along with this very existence (tabî ʿiyya) and without which no life is possible for human beings.4 The paradigm of human politics is power, not a model for a perfect society, regardless of how this model may be represented. The paradigm is “power” in the modality of the creative process that results from “freedom.” Human beings “make” their life, arrange it, and give it a Gestalt; they “rule” this life by “making” it, both in the sense of a life in the polis of themselves and in the sense of the polis they form with others. The creative process that results from freedom— power, in other words— is determined by the constitution of each individual human being, which, as mentioned, can vary considerably. “For just as man, in his perfection, is the most noble of living beings,” Aristotle wrote, “he is also the worst of all when sundered from law and right.”5 “He who has power,” as Sallust said, “has the possibility of doing evil.”6 Theodore H. White wrote that the president of the American republic, at the moment of his election, receives “the most awesome power in the world: the power to marshal and mobilize, the power to send men to kill or be killed, the power to tax and destroy, the power to create

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and the responsibility to do so, the power to guide and the responsibility to heal— all committed into the hands of one man.”7 Freedom opens up every form of politics. To be sure, freedom does not have power over these forms themselves— the constitutions of human beings and the constitutions of human societies— since human beings and their societies find themselves always already in a particular constitution. But it has power over the type of constitution in each case. Freedom is the creative power within an always pregiven Gestalt for a constitution. It can do anything within this Gestalt: it can open up bad constitutions and make them good, it can cause the degeneration of the best-functioning constitutions, it can throw human beings as well as societies off track, and it can also save a declining society or a despairing human being. Freedom is a “good” as well as a “bad” power. It seems as if human beings are in a world in which they find no element for the construction of their political civilization that would match their freedom. As should be now sufficiently clear, they are not up to this task in and of themselves. Nor is the law sufficient in itself, no matter how great the dominion it exercises in and over a society; after all, all work of law is the work of human beings, with regard both to its creation and to its application, and is thus not beyond the possibility of being used “for evil,” regardless of what refined and clever protective measures may have been taken. Finally, the work of a political civilization cannot be built by human beings by means of freedom alone, because freedom is both a creative and a destructive power. Since a political civilization is first to be established and then to remain in place, freedom would have to be a purely creative and “good” power; but this is not the case. Is it the case, then, that there is no way to create a society of human beings in and according to the Gestalt of freedom? Indeed, this seems to be the case, if we go by the preceding reflections. And this would appear to be the last word on the matter. It is not, however, the last word. For it is possible to conceive in a different way of a society of human beings in and according to the Gestalt of freedom. Let us simply invert the process of reflection. We thus start from the point of the intended result and say: A human society ought to be built under the power of freedom. Such a society can exist if it is constituted “correctly.” There is no need of an element for its construction; human beings, for example, do not need to be “good” with regard to this construction. The construction is self-sustaining; it is a work created by art, and this work is “empty” in itself (i.e., it is pure space provided by “freedom”). Can we think in this way? Can we find a construction for the freedom of

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human beings in which freedom holds power over all of them and nonetheless remains their freedom? What does this mean? Such an idea seems to imply that freedom must be “constituted” into the construction thus conceived. But in that case freedom too would have a constitution! Would this not be a procedure that runs exactly counter to freedom, one that would take from human beings what belongs to them in the first place? “This weak and needy entity that is the human being,” wrote Pierre Manent, “wants to survive. This natural necessity (nécessité naturelle) is its natural right (droit naturel): who would dare to say that he does not have a right to something that he needs unconditionally?”8 It seems that our reflection on freedom has led us to a paradox. Let us call it the paradox of freedom. And let us make it quite clear. But how? Let us go back in our reflection to the problem of the body, i.e., to human beings’ “natural right” to freedom (to a life “free” in its necessity). For it is from the problem of the body that there arises the paradox according to which, while freedom is given to us all, we must, in order to be truly free, transform this freedom into a freedom that holds power over us. Let us state once more the crucial point: that we exist only to the extent that we are body. Everything bodily, however, can be violated and destroyed, seized and dragged away, taken prisoner and locked up, exposed to extreme weather without protection and robbed of all food. Our existence is governed by this law of the body from our first birth. We are already subjects of power by virtue of our body. But who will exercise this power? Will it be others who establish their dominion over our bodies, and thus over us, through our bodies? Or will it rather be each one of us, entirely by him- or herself, as the owner, and thus sovereign, of his or her own body? Is not the government of my body, after all, my exclusive affair, since I am the body that governs me? Yes, certainly, we will reply, and we will thus continue on that path of reflection opened up by our insight into the political evidence of our body,9 a path on which this insight was also our lodestar. No sooner do I imagine being told, for instance, that I (i.e., my body) may no longer move freely in this world than I immediately cast my hopeful glance upon this lodestar, because the promises given us with our body so that we may live in the form of our body radiate from it. We call these promises “natural rights”: Every human being is the sovereign of his or her existence. Other people are allowed to have power over him or her only to the extent that he or she has transferred this power— or, more precisely, this measure of power— under conditions set by him or her. The sovereignty of human beings over themselves binds every form of universal power and dominion to the realms of interaction among them. In this way they are, on the one hand, protected in

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their bodily identity against power and dominion, and, on the other, such power and dominion become objects of reciprocal agreements freely made by human beings with each other. These agreements, which are called “laws,” transform the originally bodily relations between human beings into juridical relations. The “wonder” of juridical principles takes place every day. Through such principles, human beings find themselves within an order that abstracts their mutual relations from their bodies and thus “frees” these relations from the bodily fate of their existence. Instead of being merely bodies in a purely bodily world governed by the power of bodies and characterized by the arbitrariness of such power, they are citizens within a spiritually constituted space of self-rule born out of their rights. But does it make sense to speak of being “freed for an order”? Does this not appear to be an odd idea? It will not appear so, however (and perhaps surprisingly), if we look back at the path already followed and then ahead— in thought— to the road before us. As owner and sovereign of my body, I am obviously “born free,” but I quickly become a helpless creature in this natural freedom. How am I to provide for my food, clothing, and shelter, to protect myself against animals and an inhospitable nature, to cultivate the many and mighty capacities given to human beings, and to create with them works in the world (which go into and become parts of the world), as if I had a creator’s hand? Alone? What if there were no other beings of my kind, with the same needs and desires? Or would it perhaps be preferable to be in competition with them? To be in confrontation with them, perhaps even in war, which can only result either in the subjugation of whoever opposes me or in my subjugation by him and thus my becoming unfree? Rhetorical questions. If things stayed at the level of being “born free” and did not go a great deal farther than that, my natural freedom would be the most fleeting phenomenon in my existence. I have freedom to have a free existence only when others share it with me, when they recognize their freedom in my freedom and I recognize mine in theirs. Only in such a space of freedoms will the care for my existence become free and will I be able to let my life flourish, free of menace and in community with others, who also participate in this space of freedoms for the sake of a full flourishing of their life. But given that such a space of freedoms does not exist by itself, “by nature,” as it were, this space must first be developed through mutual recognition of the freedom of each individual. It must be built up through measures, through a structure, and through forms of its existential condition, as well as furnished with the functions necessary for its maintenance. To formulate it in the language of political science: In order for this space to become and continue to be a reality, it must be “founded,” “constituted,” and “governed.”

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But have we not become entangled in a contradiction? What can possibly be the meaning of the demand to put freedom into a “constitution” and to “govern” its reality within this constitution? Is this not a conditional freedom, always directed to abide by this or that rule? Certainly. But then, what— we must now ask— remains of “freedom” at all? Could it be that we took away our own freedom by inserting it into an order? What is this paradox in which we have got ourselves tangled up? A freedom that is taken away for the preservation of freedom! Yet this apparent paradox is not the result of our reflection. It is given with the political structure of our existence, which is bodily and always a subject of bodily power at first. With our reflection, we have only made this paradox transparent. It is the “paradox of freedom.” To come right to the point: From the perspective of this paradox of freedom, we may also speak of a “paradox of power” with respect to the structure of a truly liberal government. For we intend to establish in thought the rule of freedom, i.e., an order of the government of human beings that obeys freedom. Therefore, two tasks must be accomplished with regard to its constitution: first, the establishment of configurations of power by means of which a government is put in place and, second, an arrangement of these configurations of power such that every activity of government is an activity for the sake of freedom, and such that these activities hinder themselves, by means of their own mechanisms, from serving anything other than our freedom. This is the paradox of power that we ourselves cause, and with which we do justice to the existentially given paradox of freedom in an institutionally creative manner.10

Here is a path on which a sort of marvelous transformation occurs. We indeed take away our natural freedom by inserting it into an order of government, but we obtain in its stead a governing freedom. Such governing freedom is vastly superior in power to natural freedom. A governing freedom renders everyone who is united under it my friend and, when it is a matter of defending this freedom, my ally. With natural freedom I am always alone with myself and my only ally is merely my own naked power, which will inexorably abandon me one day, namely, the day when I will be unable to provide that care for my existence which, under these conditions, is demanded solely of me. But what exactly is this paradox of power that we ourselves are to cause? It is this: A thorough negation of political power in all processes of its development. We transfer power and then take it away again. We appoint holders of power and then obstruct their path. We create configurations of power and insert them

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into a play that confuses them. We initiate processes of power and interrupt them regularly. We delegate power and keep it with us. We proclaim power and do not want that it shows itself.11

A paradoxical procedure, to be sure. How can we explain it? We can say: To govern means to exercise power. But in order that power may be exercised, power must first be developed. Every form of governing, therefore, requires power. But how much? From the standpoint of governing, the logical answer would be that there cannot be enough of it. To govern means to put something in motion, and an infinity of things can be put in motion. Every experience of governing is accompanied by the experience of a “lack” of power. In other words, more power must be added to the already existing power, and this hunger cannot be satisfied.12 Once we recognize this fact, we should not complain, as we might be tempted to do at this point in our reflections. If we did raise complaints, we would be unreasonably indicting the situation of human beings. For human beings, things are the way they are. Human beings govern themselves as they must, namely, by exercising power. We, in the natural sovereignty over ourselves (we who are the sovereigns of the liberal rule appropriate to us), can do better than complain. We can put our paradox of power on stage in a practical manner. How? By partitioning all political power in the organization of our government into many centers of power, distributed horizontally beyond it as well as vertically at all levels of government. By limiting all power in time by way of transferring it only for fixed periods, thus ensuring that it always “comes back” to us and that we can decide on a new assignment of power. This would require that we arrange things in such a way that the absolute interruption of power by us happens as often as possible— by means of the vaunted elections— in order that, by virtue of the restlessness thus created and the insecurities thus generated, our paradox may preserve its force, indeed, may increase it through the rule that those we have elected to political office shall be allowed to run for reelection only once, or at most twice. Last, by making it possible in a variety of different ways to recall the holders of power from office before the end of their term, when they, in exercising their power, seem to take this power to be theirs and not to remember that they have all their power only on loan from us. Whoever wants freedom to be the regent must create a governmental structure wholly tailored to the paradox of power. There is no need of an

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element for its construction, and human beings do not need to be “good” in relation to it. The construction sustains itself; governing under the paradox of power hinders itself, by means of its own mechanisms, from serving anything other than our freedom. The construction is a work created by art; it consists only of measures, rules, and aggregates (“institutions”) for the production as well as for the negation of power.13 In itself, this construction is “empty,” insofar as it has transferred the freedom of human beings into a pure regency of freedom; it opens up a space of freedom in which the same Gestalt that was given at the beginning of that construction is “again” given to all those who are in this space for carrying on, if not perfecting, their political existence. A regency of power (or, to put it constructively, a paradox of power) has been a success when it can be said that The state is a community of free people (polis koinonia tōn eleutherōn). (Aristotle)14 Only a few partake in wealth, but everyone partakes in freedom (eleutheria). (Aristotle)15 State and government are the property of the people (est igitur res publica res populi). (Cicero)16 Nothing can be more magnificent than freedom (libertas), but when it is not the same for all, it does not deserve the name of freedom. (Cicero)17

Human beings could easily complete (they could have always easily completed) their second birth— the work of political civilization that they must create for their life— if the power that gives them their freedom were always directed, as it were by itself, toward this work. They would carry it out with a secure hand in all the Gestalten in which it is supposed to be shaped. Politics, which is the exertion for the sake of this work, would be an activity of unmediated, pure, absolute creation. Politics would bring about this work exactly as instructed. But human beings are also free with regard to the power that gives them their freedom. They truly are creators of their political civilization. The path toward this civilization is charted for them in the Gestalten in which it is supposed to be put to work. Human beings are acquainted with the beginnings of their political existence. But what comes out of these beginnings is their own free work.

Epilogue: On the Dignity and Importance of Politics

A Eulogy of the Human Creativity unto Government1

I have been elected to political office twice, first in 1964, when I became a member of the Student Parliament at the University of Munich, and then in 2002, when I won a seat on the Town Council of my hometown (Baierbrunn, County of Munich).2 I should like to begin the following reflections with a report of one particular observation that I made while serving in these two assemblies. Having emerged from a democratic election and having been appointed to represent the “people”— the student body and the townspeople, respectively— both bodies had, as to their composition, the demeanor and habits of the members, nothing extraordinary about them. Everything— the procedural nature of the deliberations during sessions, the legal conditioning of action, the language in which opinions and views were exchanged, the assembly members’ personal interests and preoccupations in life— this all seemed, as diverse as it was, quite ordinary. If it had not been for the institutional function— to be a “Student Parliament” or a “Town Council”— one would have wondered what difference there might be between the life and the activities of the assembly members and that of people in general. And yet there was a difference. It was not visible, though, by itself. Nor was it something that became suddenly manifest. It dawned on the observer’s mind only gradually and indirectly, as an imprint on his imagination caused by a variety of perceptions and taking shape in the mode of a mental image. The observer would see, in looking at the members of the assemblies in session, what would seem to him to be instances of a metamorphosis. The reality of the “ordinary” would not of course disappear from his view. While conducting their business, however, the political representatives appeared to wish to perform in a particular way. As if, by having been elected to their political

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office, they had experienced a transformation, they engaged in modes of behavior that could undoubtedly be read as signs of a firm faith in the dignity and importance of politics. Their behavior seemed to imply that their meetings were a sort of stage, where, of course, ordinary men and women carried on their deliberations, but where these same ordinary women and men made present, too, a body of people that among human groups appears particularly enhanced. When the stage was filled by the members of these two assemblies enacting those modes of behavior, there was to be seen what I propose to call the “people of politics,” and it was extolling politics while it carried on the business of politics. At the beginning of every session, for instance, the minutes of the previous session had to be approved. This could be a dry affair, dealt with routinely. But every so often, one or more members of the assembly would express reservations about the phrasing of a particular passage or the recording of an issue that had been debated or of a decision that had been made. The reason for this was not at all (or very rarely) just a mood for grumbling. The critical remarks rather were prompted by the concern, clearly stated, that the records of the assembly’s meetings be accurate, objective, and complete. Those who made these remarks seemed to affirm implicitly that they wished indeed to see minutes “for the record,” that is, words and phrases written down that gave a true and full representation of the debates and the decision-making of the assembly. They obviously held the view that political representatives dealt with things of considerable import. They clearly carried themselves with a certain gravitas. This should never be forgotten. The members of the assemblies could be observed to adopt the same attitude with regard to the rules for the conduct of their proceedings. Such rules were of course defined by the law and by the formal statutes specific to the particular assembly. Again, any departure (or even any attempt to depart) from these rules would not pass unnoticed. And it was promptly rejected. The respect for the rules was enforced with sharpness, even vigilance. Some protests were undoubtedly motivated by a certain procedural dogmatism. But there was quite another, indeed significant motive for the general sensitivity regarding the rules. It was the wish to protect the essence of that specific order of things political, for which everyone had agreed, as a member of the respective political assembly, to be officially and actively responsible. In the case of a democratically constituted republic— let us note in passing— the essence of the political regime is liberty. Here the respect for the rules is especially crucial. There is no liberty if the sovereign power is not invested in the rules by which the political regime is constituted and guaranteed. Such sublime thoughts, well known of course to political theorists, were perhaps in

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some minds when exhortations were made in the assembly to the effect that the rules were not to be trifled with, that they should be respected and honored, so that they might serve as a shield against any arbitrary or unrighteous conduct of affairs. For such an exhortation to have an effect, however, these sublime thoughts were not essential. The important thing was the strong, habitual attention given to the reign of rules. The members of the assemblies apparently knew that they themselves “were” rules. They understood, of course, that the rules stood above them, but also that in a certain sense they embodied these rules. And thus the demand to abide by the rules quite often swelled up in the manner of a passion. Occasionally, the words then articulated had even a celebratory tone. Obviously, the rules were held to be a sanctuary. In 1964 I had envisioned a career in politics. In 2002 I could look back on a lifelong career as a scholar in the service of universities. In the end, one career had not been pursued, and a different one, which had not been even planned, had become my path. In “biographical” terms these careers differ greatly from each other. Some people, considering the degree of difference, would even be astounded at the shift. A true politician, they might say, is superlatively interactive. A true scholar, in contrast, is decidedly withdrawn. An election is won by attending as many meetings with as many voters as possible. A scholarly book is never written by going out for as many lunches with as many colleagues as possible. Who would wish to contradict such observations? However, while two different professional careers might indeed impose correspondingly different modes of life, they by no means preclude that the same quest is pursued, in either this or that profession. In my case, at least, there was no real shift. Politics remained at the center. Its significance and importance were felt to the same degree and with the same intensity. The difference was that the relevant experience was not obtained at electoral campaigns, party meetings, or sessions of political assemblies (with the exceptions just related), but rather in classrooms, lecture halls, libraries, archives, and at the writing desk. One reason for this was, of course, that the academic discipline that had become my professional occupation was political science. But even then, with the profession of a political scientist, the two spheres, that of the scholar and that of the human polis, can appear to be quite removed from one another, the contacts between them, as sufficient examples show, being casual and perfunctory. An American colleague liked to recall jokingly the scholarly existence of a sociologist of religion he had known who published in his field book after book without ever having seen, as my colleague said, “a church from the inside.” Was this not a kind of betrayal?, one might thus be tempted to ask upon reflection. A manifestation of contempt? A contempt for the human communities that are supposed to be subjects of “scholarly” stud-

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ies? If, as I reported with regard to my own experience, politics remained at the center of my professional life even after the turn toward scholarship, this was not exclusively the result of choosing political science as my discipline. The polis, I wish to assert with the purpose of a retrospective explanation in mind, deserves not only the attention but indeed also the nurturing care of every scholar. On the one hand, it is the polis from which he has received and to which he always owes, in one way or the other, the foundation of his existence, namely, the great privilege of being able to devote himself entirely, among all possible endeavors, to a praxis of thinking and studying.3 On the other hand, through this praxis the scholar becomes endowed with a great deal of power with respect to the polis. There is no scholarly discipline that does not bear upon the life and the existence of the polis, directly or indirectly, and to a certain frequently considerable or in same cases even decisive degree. Both the polis and the scholar (the scholar of any discipline, I should wish to stress again) are actors within the same process of creativity. To sustain its existence the polis must be a producer of knowledge, and in this production the scholar is the essential figure. All pursuit of scholarly knowledge, in this sense, is a political undertaking. It is not an activity separate from “politics,” that is, from the process of the “governing” creativity that gives rise to human societies and through which these societies live. The pursuit of scholarly knowledge is indeed part of this “governing.” It is, in more precise terms, part of the continuing creative efforts through which a society operates and through which it conceives and guides itself. Consequently, every scientific discipline takes part in the governing creativity directed at the polis. There is one discipline, however, whose subject matter is this governing creativity: political science. With some reason, it can claim, therefore, to have a particular significance in the domain of scholarly disciplines. Political science is the architectonic science for the architecture of the polis. Any science of politics must indeed be a science of architecture. For the reality of the polis is supremely pluralistic. It is entirely an event of incessant movement and fluid diversity. As such, it thwarts all attempts to seize it and to have it as an “object” of study. In the moment someone says that “this” is the reality of the polis, the reality he has in mind has become different. The polis is, of course, a possible object of factual perception, and thus political science is entirely at liberty to make it the subject of empirical studies— indeed, it would abandon its mission if it did not do so. But the idea that such studies could render the reality of the polis effectively present is utterly illusionary. Who could capture an incessant movement, a fluid diversity as such? Yet both things— all that movement and all that diversity—shape the

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reality of the polis. They cause the reality of the polis to be elusive but also discernable in the shapes, structures, configurations, gatherings, associations, aggregations, rules, procedures, laws, customs, dispositions, styles, rituals, and many other events of a Gestalt that constitute a great social and political fabric, generally called the “order” of a society. In this fabric the polis is indeed present for us, in both our sensory and our mental perception. For we have produced this fabric. It originates in the human creativity toward a human polis, and the power by virtue of which it exists is present to the extent that this creativity is a political creativity, a creativity unto government. Political science usually starts with a scrutiny of government(s). It “ends” in the form of a study of political creativity, where “ends” has to be understood in the Aristotelian sense: achieving, in a process of formation, the proper form. The reflections offered in this book set forth this notion of political science.4 As other studies demonstrate,5 this notion is of course the result of strict research and analysis, not of any scholarly fantasy. It could hardly have been in my mind when I embarked on practicing political science. And yet “something” that related to politics was also at work here. For the present purpose, I should describe it as a “certain sense of significance with regard to politics.” This sense of significance, as I see it now, stimulated, alarmed, excited curiosity, gave direction, provided judgment, signaled meaning. It certainly served political science, and even if this practice had followed conventional scholarly paths, the result would have been fine and acceptable. But it was also enticing to see a wide field of things political opening up, and this field largely surpassed the confines of common political science. In fact, everything by means of which human societies operate, conceive of, and guide themselves seemed to belong to this field of investigation. Hence the practice of political science I pursued needed adjustment. What had come into view as “politics” was, in a formulation I would later find, human creativity directed at the human polis. Consequently, political science, in order to be fully adequate, had to trace and retrace the process of creativity that engenders and maintains the polis. Manifestations of this process, which, as phenomena of human existence, are naturally universal, can be found everywhere, in all human societies, and in every sphere of society, in literature, art, philosophy, architecture, religion, economics, law, and of course in the realm of government. In principle, therefore, a study of the political process can work with materials taken from, say, ancient China as well as from the contemporary United States, from the tradition of legal thought as well as from discourses on literary theory. In each case, the scholar’s quest aims at disclosing a process of creativity that, in its political bearing, is generally the same. For actually perceiving this “classic” nature of the process, however,

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comparative studies are required. The practice of political science to which I was led meant to cross borders and to choose for its mode the state of a journeying through and between different areas and disciplines of study, different cultures and countries, different eras and epochs. The scholarly work that resulted from the studies undertaken conveys, in a way, a traveler’s tale. Each part speaks of a particular territory or particular territories visited and explored in the course of a cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-disciplinary, and cross-historical quest for the creative movement and power of politics. All parts, each in a different way, document an instance of this movement and power. In two major sections of the tale my narrative notably recounts excursions made into the realm of governments.6 These “field” explorations were phases of the journey, as it turned out, of the highest significance for the view on politics I eventually attained. The practice of border-crossing scholarship, and here especially that of crossing the border between the world of academics and the world of the “people of politics,” proved to be most instructive for an understanding of politics. It is reality that is the instructor, not a ready-made science with its models and methods. This appeared to be the first and foremost lesson. A second lesson pertained to the common perception of politics. Here misunderstandings and false views abound, with which the insights that emerged through the research in the field sharply contrasted. For these insights summoned a conception of politics exceedingly different from the shades of contempt and mockery, of delusion and prejudice that usually accompany the speech of people when they voice opinions on politics. Here, too, the approach to politics now appeared to lie in a recognition of “dignity” and “importance.” In the history of political science “new” departures in the science of politics have repeatedly been formulated. In each case— and we may think in particular of the prominent examples evoked by the names of Niccolò Machiavelli, Ibn Khaldûn, Alexis de Tocqueville, Eric Voegelin— these departures were explained by the insight that there was a reality of politics with which the accepted ways of understanding did not tally.7 In consequence, the necessity of a realignment of the science of politics with the reality of politics was postulated. Such realignments were made by the masters mentioned as well as by other master thinkers. They form a venerable tradition in the practice of political science. This tradition is recognized in this book with a bow toward the masters. A further word has to be said about the genetic setting of the scholarly work to which my reflections refer. In view of the aforesaid it will hardly come as a surprise that the thematic orientation and construction of this work has

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been marked by the knowledge of the horrors of the twentieth century. The total betrayal of humans by humans, the praise of murder as a virtue, the substitution of phantasy for reason— all these were motifs that demanded a political theory as broadly based and as comprehensive as possible. A body of research and analysis was to be built up along themes like this: revolution, revolutionary consciousness, the vicissitudes of modernity, the triumph of a radically secular mind, the illusion of human perfectibility, the contortion of language, the moral and intellectual deception unto existential despair. In order to be in any way meaningful, however, all related inquiries needed to be pursued through the perspective of this question: Was there a truth of humanity to be found anew? Whatever the response or, rather, the responses were, one thing was certain: the paramount actuality of politics in anything human. Politics is always the first reality for humans. It is the force that impels misfortune, when minds gone wrong rule over humans; it is the force that engenders welfare, when the wisdom of justice tames politics and shapes the polis. The quest for the truth of humanity couldn’t be anything other than a quest for the creative power of politics in these two forms: the form that perverts this power but still uses it, and the form that leads humans, as they assume the responsibility entailed by the creative power of politics, to their humanity. The polis is a human artifact, whether it takes the form of a constitutional government or that of an evil regime. Humans are given the extraordinary dignity of understanding the force of politics as well as of being the creators of what their political nature is the promise.

Acknowledgments

For their collaboration in bringing this book to a successful completion, I am grateful to: Lukas Trabert, director of Alber Verlag, for including this book in its publishing program as well as for his patience with delays in its completion. Karl-Heinz Nusser for his untiring and encouraging interest in the progress of the book. Ina Schabert for her willingness to sacrifice some of our time together while I was busy writing as well as for her advice and suggestions for improving the argumentation and style of the book. I take pleasure in also expressing here all my gratitude to the persons who took part in the production of the American edition of this book. T. David Brent as executive editor took up the translation project and steered it toward its completion with, as I gladly noticed, an accomplished professionalism and exquisite graciousness. I increasingly knew that my book had found at the Press a congenial mind. I am greatly indebted to Priya S. Nelson, David Brent`s editorial assistant, for her efficient and encouragingly amiable way in her collaboration with me. To Ellen Kladky, her successor, I give my sincere thanks for a flawless working relationship. I owe a special gratitude to Javier A. Ibáñez-Noé. For I find his translation to be exceptional. We had most pleasurable exchanges on it. While working on the translation, he regularly consulted with me on every new piece of translation he had done and thus made sure that what he had rendered from German into English faithfully conveyed the meaning of the original, and perfectly so. Now, thanks to his work, I fully recognize the original in this American edition.

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I am sincerely appreciative of the copyediting provided by Susan Tarcov. And I compliment Isaac Tobin on the book’s splendid design. I express my heartfelt thanks to the late James Rhodes for his help at a crucial moment. T. S. Baierbrunn (County of Munich) August 2015

Notes

Introduction 1. Under the thematic heading “The Naked Human Being and Political Rule,” Peter Nitschke writes: “Nakedness is . . . an ontological metaphor for the anthropological neediness of human beings. Human beings cannot cope without the structure of a herd, without political leadership. . . . If we remained just naked, we would be in the end apolitical. Politics leads to providing human beings with clothes.” P. Nitschke, “Der ‘nackte Mensch’— oder— Wie wird man Politiker?,” in Politikos—Vom Element des Persönlichen in der Politik. Festschrift für Tilo Schabert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. K.-H. Nusser, M. Riedl, Th. Ritter (Berlin, 2008), 121. 2. Cf. above, p. 15, 29–30. 3. In her book The Human Condition, however, Hannah Arendt begins with reflections concerning an “inceptive” transition of human beings from their “original human appearance” and their true “human distinctness” prior to the conventionally assumed “beginning” of the founding of political communities. She also compares this transition to a “second birth,” a comparison that is obviously of interest in connection with the present book. Arendt, however, understands this “second birth” not as one made necessary by the creative situation of human beings after their “first birth” and preformed in the Gestalten of power that are pregiven to them with their existence. Rather, this is, according to her, only a “second birth” toward which human beings are merely “stimulated” and which is carried out exclusively through speaking and acting. “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative.” H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 176–77. The concept of a “second birth” does not come up again in Arendt’s book. Aristotle’s key formulation, at the very beginning of the Politics, that the human being is a “being that strives by nature toward a community” (physei politikon zōon), must be interpreted from the standpoint of the concept of “nature” (physis). This concept designates “nature” not in the sense of something given at the start for every beginning but rather in the sense of the “nature” of a thing understood from the standpoint of its “end goal” (telos). As Aristotle says:

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“nature means precisely end goal” (physis telos estin). Human nature is a polis-related nature for Aristotle because the consummation of human existence— its goal or aim— is a life in a constituted community, in the polis. “[T]hat constitution, which every thing reaches when its development is complete, this is precisely what we call its nature, as, for example, the nature of a human being, of a horse, of a house.” In the context of his natural-teleological way of thinking, Aristotle regards the order of things as determined by the order of the ends toward which their existence is ordained. It is this order of ends that constitutes what is “natural” for them: that which is to be carried out and fulfilled by them (cf. Politics 1252b30–1253a3). According to this claim, there can be no beginnings of the political prior to the polis. Aristotle repeats his statement later on in the Politics— physei estin anthrōpos zōon politikon— and emphasizes that human beings would desire to live together “even if they felt no need for mutual assistance.” But he adds that this fact does not exclude that “they are also brought together by mutual benefit” (Politics 1278b19–22). Regarding the ideas that form the background for the formula physei politikon zōon, cf. E. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (henceforth CW), vol. 16, ed. D. Germino (Columbia, MO- London, 2000), 370, and K.-H. Nusser, Menschenrechte und Leistungsgerechtigkeit. Philosophische Lehren in den Zeiten der Globalisierung (Hamburg, 2007), 72–77. 4. Cf. below, the chapter “In Consciousness.” 5. The concepts of “governing” (kratein) and “government/rule” (kratos), in connection with the way human beings are supposed to direct themselves (with reason and prudence), are found in Phaedrus 237e. At the Start 1. Lao Tse, Dao De Jing 34. I use the following edition: Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 1: Lao-tseu, Tschouang-tseu, Lie-tseu, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 2002). Cf. Ch.-Y. Chang, “Creativity as Process in Taoism,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 1956, vol. 25 (Zürich, 1957), 391–415. Moses Maimonides drew the same distinction in the first sentence of chapter 30 of the first part of his work, written in Arabic, Guide for the Perplexed (Dalālat al ha`irīn; title of the Hebrew translation: Moreh Nevukhim). Maimonides writes: “There is a difference between first and beginning (or principle).” Using the terms introduced by us, we must take ‘first’ to mean “start” [Beginn] and ‘beginning’ to mean “beginning” [Anfang]. Maimonides continues developing his distinction in the following way: “The latter (beginning) exists in the thing of which it is the beginning, or co-exists with it; it need not precede it; . . . The term ‘first’ is likewise applied to things of this kind; but it is also employed in cases where precedence in time alone is to be expressed; and the thing that precedes is not the beginning (or the cause) of the thing that follows. . . . The Universe has not been created out of an element that preceded it in time, since time itself formed part of the Creation. For this reason, Scripture employs the term ‘bereshit’ (in a principle), in which the beth is a preposition denoting ‘in.’ The true explanation of the first verse of Genesis is as follows: ‘In [creating] a principle, God created the things above and the things below.’” Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (New York, 1956), 212. In a recent Spanish translation, the first sentence is rendered through the helpful distinction between “primero” and “principio”: “Has de tener en cuenta la diferencia existente entre el primero y el principio.” D. G. Maeso, ed., Guía de Perplejos (Madrid 1994), 318. Cf. M. Mottolese, “Inizio come ‘renovatio’ (hiddush), Note sulle concezione ebraica della creazione e del tempo,” Teoria 1 (2001): 61–74. 2. One could take as the model for this type of distinction the one made by Philo of Alex-

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andria in his work on the creation, De opificio mundi (see 26–27). When quoting from the first book of Moses— God “at the start (en arche) created heaven and earth”— he adds immediately that “to start” is not to be understood here, as many do, in a temporal sense (kata chronon). The reason is that “time started either immediately with the world or after it.” And a few lines further down, he reiterates that in this context the word arche is not to be taken kata chronon. 3. Regarding the idea of a “start prior to which there was nothing that might have shown it,” cf. the chapter, “Das Schöpferische und das Nichts— Über den Chaosmos städtischer Architektur,” in T. Schabert, Die Architektur der Welt. Eine kosmologische Lektüre architektonischer Formen (Munich, 1997), 133–52; as well as the section “Der göttliche Kreis” in T. Schabert, Modernität und Geschichte. Das Experiment der modernen Zivilisation (Würzburg, 1990), 87–90. 4. Following the distinction made here between “beginning” and “start,” Hegel’s discussion of “beginning” in The Science of Logic (in the context of the question “With what should the beginning of science be made?”) would have to be taken to refer to our concept of “start.” Accordingly, what he says about the “beginning” (Anfang) would have to be understood as pertaining to the “start”: “Thus the beginning must be an absolute one or, what is the same here, an abstract beginning; and so it may not suppose anything, cannot be mediated by anything, nor have a ground; rather, it is to be itself the ground of science.” G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1 (Nürnberg, 1812), reprint Philosophische Bibliothek Meiner (1967), 54. 5. “The story begins in the middle,” declared Eric Voegelin in The Beginning of the Beginning, in Order and History, vol. 5: In Search of Order, CW, vol. 18, ed. E. Sandoz (Columbia, MO-London, 2000), 41. 6. Several writers give testimony of this, as the following examples show. When Thomas Mann was writing his first novel, Buddenbrooks, he had the experience, as he later related, that his book had developed a “will of its own” vis-à- vis himself, its author. “There is something peculiar,” he writes, “about a book— which is in the process of being composed, which exists already in its idea, and in the realization of which the author experiences the greatest surprises— having a will of its own. A first work— what a school of experience for a young artist, a school of objective and subjective experience! I first experienced what the epic element truly is when I was carried along in its wave. I learned what I myself am, what I want and what I do not want— namely, not southern loquacity about beauty, but rather the North, ethics, music, humor— and how I related to life and death; all of this I learned through the activity of writing. And, at the same time, I learned that a human being does not get to know himself except through action. Thus my respect grew for an undertaking which, as it created itself, was in no way undertaken by me.” Th. Mann, Lübeck als geistige Lebensform (Lübeck, 1926), 17–18. In Briefe aus dem Jahre 1993 Dževad Karahasan wrote: “I tried . . . to show that a serious literary work demonstrates how the material determines, through its peculiarities, the process of fashioning it and thereby the form that arises out of this fashioning. I wanted to show . . . through the example of great works, that a true master follows these immanent directions given by the material and creates a form that is already present, potentially, in the material itself, instead of capriciously imposing his will upon the latter.” Lettre International 32 (Spring 1996): 13. Paul Valéry noted in his Cahiers: “How many people who write are unaware of all that which the act of writing itself forbids to write! . . . I choose, therefore I govern. . . . To write is to come on the scene.” Vol. 2, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1974), 1218. Paul Claudel wrote in his Journal (1911) the following entry: “L’oeuvre n’est pas le produit de l’artiste, l’artiste est l’instrument de l’oeuvre.” (His work is not the creation of the artist, but the artist is the tool of the work.) From the excerpts published in La Nouvelle Revue Française 15, no. 178 (October 1, 1967): 758.

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Cf. further the 68th issue of Marbacher Magazin on the topic “Das weiße Blatt oder Wie anfangen?” (“The White Sheet, or How to Start?”) (Marbach, 1994), a booklet for the exhibit devoted to this topic at the Schiller Museum between April and June 1994. Also F. Gantheret, “Du nécessaire naufrage du moi. Comment le retour à un état ‘sauvage,’ moment de naissance conjointe du moi et des choses, est une des conditions d’existence d’une écriture de fiction vraiment nouvelle” (On the necessary wreckage of the self. How the return to a ‘savage’ state, when the self and things are jointly born, is one of the conditions for the existence of a really new writing of fiction) in Le Monde des Livres, May 25, 2007, 6. 7. In Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters), Schelling reflected on this connection by means of what is probably the most illuminating example: the relation between creation— especially that of the human being— and it/his creator, God. Particularly remarkable are those concepts used by Schelling that are in general frequent in political speech: power, freedom, coercion-subjugation, representation, independent-dependent. “A distinctly superior point of view,” Schelling writes, “is afforded by the consideration of the divine being itself, the idea of which is absolutely incompatible with any type of consecution other than that of a begetting, i.e., a positing of something independent. God is a God not of the dead, but of the living. It is unintelligible how the most perfect being could take delight in a machine, even the most perfect one possible. However the manner of consecution of beings from God may be conceived, it can never be mechanical, never a mere manufacturing or setting up, where what is manufactured is nothing for itself. Nor can it be an emanation, where what emanates remains the same as that from which it emanated, that is to say, nothing unique, nothing independent. The consecution of things from God is a self-revelation of God. But God can reveal himself only in what is similar to himself, in beings who act freely of themselves, for whom there is no ground other than God, and yet who exist in the same sense that God exists. He speaks and they exist. Even if all worldly beings were merely thoughts in the divine mind, just by virtue of this fact they would have to be living beings. In like manner, thoughts are, to be sure, generated by the mind, and yet the generated thought is an independent power that continues acting on its own, and that even, in the case of the human mind, keeps growing to the point where it overcomes its own mother and subjugates her. But divine imagination, which is the cause of the specification of worldly beings, is not like the human imagination, which imparts to its creation merely an ideal reality. The godhead’s representations can only be independent beings, for what is the limitation of our representations other than precisely the fact that what we see is the nonindependent?” F. W. J. Schelling, Ausgewählte Werke, Schriften von 1805–1813 (Darmstadt 1968), 290–91. 8. Cf. the sovereign, governing-directing speech of the divine world-maker (demiourgos) in Plato’s Timaeus 41a–d. The Latin magistratus corresponds to the Greek demiourgos. 9. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 212. Cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, p. 56: “The progression out of that which makes the beginning is to be considered only a further determination of it, such that what begins continues to exist at the foundation of all that follows from it and does not disappear from it.” 10. Cf. Anaximander’s fragment A15: “Everything is either a beginning (arche) or comes from the beginning (ex arches); there is, however, no beginning of the infinite (apeiron). For otherwise there would also be an end of it.” H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Greek- German, 5th ed. (Berlin, 1934), 1: 85. On this point cf. A. Drozdek, In the Beginning was the Apeiron: Infinity in Greek Philosophy (Stuttgart, 2008), as well as the “abstract beginning” in Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 57.

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11. Phaedrus, 245c–d. Here arche is that “start” which is, before anything arises, the “principle” for its arising, a principle that always already subsists and the “cause” that precedes the arising of anything, and out of which the possibility first exists for its arising through a “beginning.” Cicero, in his book De re publica (6.25), reproduced verbatim the passage from the Phaedrus just quoted and fittingly translated arche as principium: “principii autem nulla est origo; nam ex principio oriuntur omnia, ipsum autem nulla ex re alia nasci potest.” 12. The concept of “chaos” in Hesiod’s Theogony (see lines 116–210)— which is, according to this work, what first appears at the beginning (arche) of the world— comes etymologically from the verb chanein, which means to “yawn,” “open wide.” Hence chaos, as a beginning, is at the beginning of the world an expansionary opening-up through which a space yawns, in which there are neither forms nor outlines, and yet which affords the spatial possibility that a world may arise in it. This is the reason why chaos, as presented in the Theogony, remains also actual “outside” the cosmos; it does not by any means disappear after the order of the world has been established. Cf. “Chaos,” in A. Grafton, G. W. Most, S. Settis, eds., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 190–91. 13. Cf. Augustine’s reflections, reproduced above (p. 13, in the section “In Number”), on the beginning of the human being. 14. Cf. Huainan-zi, Chuzhen (On the Start of the Actual), chap. 2, in Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2, Huainan-zi, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 2003), 55: “There was a beginning at the beginning (Il y eu un commencement au commencement)— this means that the celestial winds began to blow down.” See, on Liu An’s life and work, “Introduction générale,” esp. pp. xivff. 15. “Actual” start because a beginning was made at the start. The boundaries of the beginning were thus drawn, whereas the unlimited holds an absolute validity for the start. Cf. Melissos (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 268–69): “What existed was always and will ever be. . . . It has no beginning (arche) and no end, but exists without boundaries (apeiron estin). Had it come into being, it would have to have had a beginning (for, once come into being, it would have to have begun) and an end (for, had it come into being, it would have to have ended). But since it has neither begun nor ended, . . . it has neither beginning nor end.” (Emphasis added.) 16. In his contribution, “Die Schöpfung der Zeit in portugiesischen Mythen,” in Anfänge, ed. D. Clemens, T. Schabert, series Eranos, vol. 5 (Munich, 1998), Helder Godinho writes: “The beginning has to do with the creation of boundaries” (25); and “At the beginning there is the creation of a boundary” (63). Cf. 24, 38, and 57. Also Wissenschaft der Logik, 60: “But the beginning cannot itself be a First and an Other. Something that is in itself a First and an Other contains already a progression. Hence that which makes a beginning, the beginning itself, is to be understood as unanalyzable in its simple, unfulfilled immediacy, and thus as Being, as the completely empty.” 17. “The boundary as a sign of the Actual” is a topic for every interpretation of world and, as such, also the criterion for distinguishing among different human attitudes to the reality in which these attitudes are found. Among all the known attitudes of this nature, the “modern age” stands out quite sharply by its being commissioned not to accept for itself, as a civilizing project, any boundaries whatsoever, or to want to draw any boundaries at all. The modern age is, considered in this light, a civilization that aims at the complete lifting of all boundaries of human existence. See, for more details, T. Schabert, Gewalt und Humanität. Über philosophische und politische Manifestationen von Modernität (Freiburg-Munich, 1978), esp. 285ff., 294ff. 18. Cf. T. Schabert, Boston Politics: The Creativity of Power (Berlin-New York, 1989), 271ff. 19. For a more detailed discussion cf. above, the section “In Eros,” p. 81ff.

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20. See, on the particular nature of the “moment” in human perception, T. Schabert and M. Riedl, eds., Das Ordnen der Zeit, series Eranos, vol. 10 (Würzburg, 2003), 12–13. In Number 1. Plato, Parmenides 144a. 2. Cf. above, the section “In Creation,” p. 72ff. 3. Dao De Jing 42. 4. “Pythagoreische Schule,” 58 B 12 (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 454). 5. Philolaus, fragment B 11 (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 411). After the sentence just quoted, the fragment continues: “This (number) harmonizes within the soul (psyche) all things (panta = the whole universe) with perception, and makes them thereby recognizable and makes them correspond to one another according to the ‘indicator’ nature, by conferring corporeality upon them and separating each of the relations between things, whether they be boundless or boundary-forming. But you can see the nature of number and its force not only in the demonic and divine things, but also everywhere in all human works and words, in the realm of technical activities and in the realm of music” (411f.). 6. Philolaus, fragment B 23 (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 419). 7. “Therefore, there is also a Being of the One that is not identical to the One, for otherwise Being would not be the Being of the One, nor would the One partake in Being; rather, it would make no difference if one says the One is or the One is One.” Plato, Parmenides 142b–c. The Taoist thinker Zhuang Zi (or Zhuang-Zhou) (circa 369 to circa 286 BC) makes a similar statement in the book named after him: “The One and its being-expressed make two; these two and the One (the Original) make three.” Tschouang-tseu, in Philosophes taoïstes, 99). 8. The expression “worn out” [zergriffen] is used here to signify the idea of the creative process, in which one sets to work [zugegriffen wird] in a manner such that a grasped [gegriffene] creation arises that, however, becomes worn out [zergriffen] by everything that arises from it, such that it is altered into all that which arises with it. 9. Parmenides 144b. 10. Cf. H. Weyl, “Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen,” in EranosJahrbuch 1948, vol. 16 (Zürich, 1949), 375–431, and the chapter, “Zeit des Erinnerns: Die Geschichte der Zukunft in der Geschichte des menschlichen Bewußtseins,” in Schabert, Modernität und Geschichte, 87–109. 11. Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Exodum 2.33. 12. Philebus 30c. 13. Democritus 68 B 5 (H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Nachträge [Berlin, 1912], xii). In this passage, Democritus speaks implicitly of the origin of language. According to him the language of human beings developed, as human beings came closer to each other, into an agreement that was clearly perceived as necessary and into the formation of corresponding social relations. Two recent empirical and empirically based theoretical studies from the field of biology come to the same conclusion. According to them, the first, original function of language in human beings was to shape and regulate the emerging and developing social relations among human beings. See P. F. MacNeilage, The Origin of Speech (Oxford, 2008); J. R. Hurford, The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution (Oxford, 2007). Cf. Fritz Graf, “Zwischen Autochthonie und Immigration. Die Herkunft von Völkern in der Alten Welt,” in Clemens and Schabert, Anfänge, 65–93.

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14. Cf. the discussion of the “game of numbers” by Ilya Prigogines in his article “Ereignis und Gesetz. Das Zusammenspiel von Ordnung und Unordnung im Universum,” in Strukturen des Chaos, ed. T. Schabert, E. Hornung, series Eranos, vol. 2 (Munich, 1994), 131f. 15. The beginning of the third book has not been preserved. In Contra Julianum Pelag. (4.12.60), Augustine reports that this book began with some reflections on the natural existential weakness of human beings, followed by a discussion of the way in which this weakness is overcome by the “divine mind,” which human beings also possess. 16. Cicero, De re publica 2.2. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Cf. Philolaus, fragment B 4: “And indeed everything that can be known has number (panta ta gignōskomena arithmon echonti). For it is impossible to understand or to know anything without this.” Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 408. 21. T. Schabert and R. Brague, Die Macht des Wortes, series Eranos, vol. 4 (Munich, 1996). 22. Augustine, De civitate Dei 12.24. 23. See ibid., 12.22, 23. Or, put less elegantly but more completely, human beings are not human beings if not all human beings (hence their multiplicity) are human (one in and through their being-human). 24. De civitate Dei 12.28. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 12.23. 27. Ibid. 12.28. The Arabic religious thinker Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240), in his book Fuşûş al- Hikam (Bazels of Wisdom; a recent French translation is La sagesse des prophètes [Paris, 1955]), composed around 1229 in Damascus, treated in detail the relationship between the One, which constitutes the plurality, and this Many, which can be grasped only through the One. 28. Augustine’s phrase, in pluribus unitas, is remarkably similar to the national motto of the United States of America, which appears on American one-dollar bills: e pluribus unum. 29. Discussing this point, Philo of Alexandria reasoned as follows: “When I speak here of ‘unity’ (Unum), I mean not the One that precedes the duality numerically, but the unifying power (de virtute unifica) through which the many both are united and (through their concord) imitate the One (imitantur unum), as exemplified by a flock, a herd of cattle, a herd of sheep, a choir, an army, a people, a tribe, a progeny, or a society (civitas).” Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 1.15. In Body 1. Huainan- zi, Chuzhen (On the Start of the Actual), chap. 2, Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2: Huainan-zi, 57. 2. Cf. the section “The Spatial Process of Society,” in Schabert, Boston Politics, 271–76. 3. Cf. the already cited contribution by Fritz Graf, “Zwischen Autochthonie und Immigration,” as well as F. Graf and E. Hornung, eds., Wanderungen, series Eranos, vol. 3 (Munich, 1995); and Schabert, Boston Politics, 320ff. 4. Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.8.30. 5. Publius [Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay], The Federalist Papers, article 51 (Madison).

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6. In its context, the quotation reads: “But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” Ed. C. Rossiter (New York, 1961), 322. 7. Cf. Dante Alighieri, Über das Dichten in der Muttersprache (De vulgari eloquentia), trans. F. Dornseiff, J. Balogh (Darmstadt, 1925, rpt. 1966), 22; and Thomas Aquinas’s remarks on the impenetrability of bodies (Summa theologica 1.107.1): “Saint Gregory emphasized that after the resurrection the souls will no longer be hidden from each other through the veil of the body (in statu resurrectionis uniuscujusque mentem ab alterius oculis membrorum corpulentia non abscondit). It stands to reason to an even higher degree that an angel’s mind is not hidden from another angel. . . . no human being can see the thinking of another, only God can do that (mentem unius nullus alius potest videre nisi solus Deus). . . . A human being’s mind is closed to another human being due to the density of the body (clauditur mens hominis ab alio homine per grossitiem corporis).” 8. His full name is ‘Abd-ar-Rahmân b. Khaldûn Al-Hadramî. 9. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah, introduction. I use the following edition: Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. F. Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood, 5th ed. (1967; Princeton, 1981), 38f. (Preliminary Remarks). For the purpose of complementing and comparing the discussion of Ibn Khaldûn I also used Ibn Khaldûn, Discours sur l’Histoire universelle (al- Muqaddima), trans. V. Monteil, 3 vols. (Beirut, 1967), 1: 52, and Ibn Khaldûn, Le livre des exemples. Autobiographie. Muqaddima, trans. and ed. A. Cheddadi, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 2002), 255. 10. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah 8.3.21. Rosenthal/Dawood edition, 151; Monteil edition, 2: 614. 11. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah 1.1. Rosenthal/Dawood edition, 45; Monteil edition, 1: 85; Cheddadi edition, 261. Cf. Muqaddimah 3.21.50 (Rosenthal/Dawood edition, 151, 256; Monteil edition, 1: 362, 459, 2: 614). 12. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah 1.1. Rosenthal/Dawood edition, 45–47; Monteil edition, 1: 85–87; Cheddadi edition, 261–62. 13. In his Communings with Himself (2.1), Marcus Aurelius interpreted the human body itself as an exemplary instance of the task assigned to human beings of coming together: “For we are made for co-operation (synergeia), like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.” The Communings with Himself of Marcus Aurelius Antonius, Emperor of Rome, ed. and trans. C. R. Haines, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA-London, 1979), 27. 14. Within Arabic political thought, and prior to Ibn Khaldûn, Al-Fārābī had also derived the merger of human beings from the natural physical deficiency that forces an individual to seek the help and support of others. Inasmuch as Al-Fārābī, compared with Ibn Khaldûn, thought more in a spiritual-religious dimension, he saw the need for people to form an association not only in the bodily but also in the spiritual realm. He maintained that true, “perfect” human beings could become human only together. Al-Fārābī, Kitāb Ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al fādila, “On the Model City,” also translated as “On the Perfect State,” chapter 26. In Italian translation: La città virtuosa, ed. M. Campanini (Milan, 1996). 15. Ibn Khaldûn wrote in his preface to the Muqaddima: “This science [which I here present] is, one could say, entirely new and original. I have never encountered an author who discussed the topic in a similar fashion.” (Monteil edition, 1: 76; Cheddadi edition, 256). Concerning the “leading” role of political science, cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: “Inasmuch then as the rest of

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the sciences are employed by this one [the political science], and as it moreover lays down laws as to what people shall do and what things they shall refrain from doing, the end of this science must include the end of all the others.” English translation by H. Rackham (London, 1968), 7. 16. It would be well to remember here the central role assigned by Plato to the paradoxos logos in all things political. Cf. Republic 472a–473e. 17. Democritus, 68 B 5 (Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Nachträge, xii). Cf. Democritus’s statements concerning the origin of language (quoted above in the section “In Number,” p. 10f.), in which he speaks of human beings being “taught.” 18. Anonymous Iamblichi, in H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1912), 2: 332. 19. Republic 369b6. 20. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou de l’éducation (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1964), 259. 21. Jay, Federalist Papers (number 2), 37. 22. For this reason, even the most just political order is in some way “coercive.” “Justice and coercion are not mutually exclusive; in fact, it is not altogether wrong to describe justice as a kind of benevolent coercion.” L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago-London, 1965), 133. 23. Cf. above, p. 17f. 24. Cf. J. Amat, Songes et visions. L’au- delà dans la littérature latine tardive (Paris, 1985); J. Daniélou, “Terre et paradis chez les Pères de l’église,” in Eranos-Jahrbuch 1953, vol. 22 (Zürich, 1954), 433–72; J. Delumeau, Une histoire du paradis, 2 vols. (Paris, 1992–95); J. Delumeau, Que reste- t- il du paradis? (Paris, 2000); A. Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago, 2006); M. Doneili, Le paradis terrestre. Mythes et philosophies (Paris, 2006); P.-A. Bernheim and G. Stavridès, Welt der Paradiese— Paradiese der Welt (Zürich, 1992). 25. A bodily diamorphous, and thus paradisiacal, human existence in mutual openness and compenetration would be equivalent to the interpersonal condition described in Christian trinitarian theology with the concept of perichoresis (from the Greek perichorein, “penetrate,” “embracing”), which designates the compenetration and total mutual embracing of the three divine persons in the one God. Cf. for more details Schabert, Modernität und Geschichte, 87–90. 26. Projects for a “paradise in politics” are found, apart from political texts, mainly in literary texts. Cf. on this general topic T. Schabert, “The Paradise in Politics: A Chapter in the Story of Negative Cosmology,” in The European Legacy 7, no. 3 (June 2002): 293–329. 27. As-siyâsa madaniyya corresponds to the title of a work by Al-Fārābī. 28. Ibn Khaldûn, Muqaddimah 3.50 (Monteil edition, 2: 615; Cheddadi edition, 639). 29. It will not be necessary or desirable to speak of an actual reality of “paradise” if, following Philo of Alexandria’s practice, references to it are taken allegorically, i.e., in a symbolichermeneutical way. As Philo wrote: “There is no need for an elucidation of paradise in a literal sense (Paradisus ad litteram nihil opus habet solutionis expressivae). It was merely an overloaded place full of all kinds of trees. In a symbolic sense (symbolice), however, paradise is wisdom, it is an insight into the Divine and the Human.” And Philo goes on to draw the logical consequence: “Paradise was made after the creation of the world” (siquidem post mundi creationem paradisus factus est) (Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 1.6). 30. Hesiod, Works and Days 109–19, partially following the German translation by W. Marg, Hesiod, Sämtliche Gedichte. Theogonie, Erga, Frauenkataloge, 2nd ed. (1970; Darmstadt, 1984), p. 312; and Hesiod, Erga kai ēmeres, ed. St. Gkirnkenēs (Thessaloniki, 2001). 31. Empedocles B 128, in H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1912), 1: 271. 32. Empedocles B 130, ibid., 1: 272. 33. Plato, Statesman 271d–272a (translation by C. J. Rowe, in Plato, Complete Works [India-

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napolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997). Cf. on the theme of the “(golden) time of Kronos” in Plato’s dialogue and the meaning of the myth told in it: T. Schabert, “Prophecy in Politics: The Voice of Plato,” in Propheten und Prophezeiungen— Prophets and Prophecies, ed. M. Riedl and T. Schabert, series Eranos, n.s., vol. 12 (Würzburg, 2005), 41–51; as well as B. Zehnpfennig, “Der platonische Staatsmann und seine Wiederbelebung im amerikanischen Neokonservartismus,” in Nusser, Riedl, and Ritter, Politikos, 95–112. 34. Huainan-zi, Chuzhen (On the Start of the Actual), chap. 2, in Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2, Huainan-zi, 82–83. 35. Ibid., 59f. 36. J. J. Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse (3.17), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1961), 557f. Cf. “Notre plus douce existence est relative et collective, et notre vrai moi n’est pas tout entier en nous” (Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, Deuxième Dialogue, in Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris, 1959), 813); “Tant que les hommes furent mes frères, je me faisois des projets de félicité terrestre; ces projets étant toujours relatifs au tout, je ne pouvais être heureux que de la félicité publique” (Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Septième Promenade, ibid., 820). 37. J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 3, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1845), 315. 38. Ibid., 316. Cf. 271 and 276f.: “It is the vocation of our race to unite itself into one single body, thoroughly known to itself in all its parts, and formed throughout in exactly the same manner. . . . In this state, which is the only true one, all temptation to evil, nay, even the possibility of rationally resolving upon a bad action, will be entirely taken away. . . . By the unerring administration of such a state, not merely will every privileging or oppression of others, all enlargement at their expense, be rendered futile, and all labor so applied be lost, but such attempts will even recoil upon their author, and assuredly bring home to himself the evil which he would cause to others. . . . The use of liberty for evil purposes is thus eliminated.” 39. J.-P. Sartre, “Ce que je suis,” Le Nouvel Observateur 554 (June 23–29, 1975): 72, 76. 40. J. Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt, 1968), 164. 41. Cf. the section “Die Entfesselung der Phantasie,” in Schabert, Modernität und Geschichte, 75–78. 42. According to Philo of Alexandria, human beings, because of their bodily as well as spiritual nature, had need of an “education” even in paradise. As he puts it in his commentary on the biblical creation story: “[Question:] Why has [God] placed in paradise the created man (homo creatus) and not the man in his image (secundum imaginem)? [Answer:] Some authors say that paradise was a garden (paradisum hortum esse). . . . As for myself, I would say that paradise should be understood as a symbol of wisdom (symbolum . . . sapientiae). And the created man is a mixture, namely, a composite of soul and body, and as such has need of an education (creatus ille mixtura quaedam est, ut compositus ex anima et corpore, opus habens doctrinae ac disciplinae).” Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 1.8. 43. Especially, of course, in the political thought of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 44. Cf. the section “Das symbolische Sehen,” in Schabert, Die Architektur der Welt, 22ff. 45. Huai-nan-zi, Si bu bei yao, zi bu (Taipei, 1966), chap. 14, f. 1. Also Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2: Huainan-zi, Words for a Proof (Quanyan), 665. 46. The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu: A Classic of Chinese Legalism, trans. and ed. W. K. Liao (London, 1939), 200 (book 6, Commentaries on Lao Tzu’s Teachings). Cf. p. 192: “Inasmuch as everything has its unique principle and Tao disciplines the principles of all things, everything has to go through the process of transformation. Inasmuch as everything has to go through the process of transformation, it has no fixed frame. Since everything has no fixed frame, the course

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of life and death depends upon Tao, the wisdom of the myriad kinds conforms to it, and the rise and fall of the myriad affairs is due to it.” Huainanzi remarks with typical irony: “Being stung in the finger by a bee or a scorpion is enough to disturb us; getting pricked by a mosquito or a horsefly is enough to disquiet the body.” Huainan-zi, Chuzhen (On the Start of the Actual), chap. 2, in Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2, Huainan-zi, 79). Cf. the surprisingly similar passage in Pascal: “L’esprit de ce souverain juge du monde n’est pas si indépendant qu’il ne soit sujet à être troublé par le premier tintamarre qui se fait autour de lui. . . . Ne vous étonnez point s’il ne raisonne pas bien à présent, une mouche bourdonne à ses oreilles: c’en est assez pour le rendre incapable de bon conseil. Si vous voulez qu’il puisse trouver la vérité, chassez cet animal qui tient sa raison en échec et trouble cette puissante intelligence qui gouverne les villes et les royaumes. Le plaisant dieu que voilà! O ridicolissime heroe!” Pascal, Pensées, fr. 44, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Michel Le Guern, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 2000), 556. 47. Montesquieu, for example, made constant use of the expression “nature des choses.” Cf. J. J. Rousseau, Émile (manuscrit Favre), in Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1969), 4: 91: “It is part of the natural disposition of man to regard as his everything that lies within his reach. In this sense Hobbes’s system is to a certain extent correct. When we multiply, along with our desires, the means to satisfy them, each one of us believes that he is the master of all things.” 48. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 122. 49. Cf. the following passage from M. Buber’s Ich und Du [I and Thou] (Stuttgart, 1995), 24: “So, you do believe in a paradise in the earliest days of the human race? It may have been a hell— and certainly that time to which I can go back in historical thought was full of wrath, anguish, torment, and cruelty— at any rate it was not unreal. The encounters among the earliest human beings were certainly not characterized by gentle benevolence. But better violence against a really encountered being than ghostly welfare services for faceless numbers! From the former a path leads to God, from the latter only one into nothingness.” In Action 1. The classical books on this topic in ancient and contemporary political theory are Aristotle’s Politics and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, respectively. 2. B. Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 90f. (article 2). 3. Huainan-zi, Chuzhen (On the Start of the Actual), chap. 2, in Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2: Huainan-zi, 57. 4. Statesman 269d. 5. Nicomachean Ethics 1104a5. 6. Ibid., 1113b15ff. The entire passage reads as follows: “To say that ‘no one is voluntarily wicked or involuntarily blessed’ is partly false and partly true, for no one is involuntarily blessed, but wickedness is voluntary. Or else we shall have to . . . deny that man is the origin (arche) or the begetter (genetes) of his actions as he is of his children. But if this is so, and our actions cannot be traced back to origins other than those that are in ourselves and the origins of which, in turn, are also in ourselves, the actions themselves are in us and they are voluntary.” Cf. ibid., 1112b30f. 7. Ibid., 1168a5. 8. Ibid., 1094a1–25. 9. Ibid., 1097a20. 10. Ibid., 1094b5. 11. Ibid., 1094b5–10.

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1. We follow here the distinction between “symbolic” and “literal” made by Philo of Alexandria and used by him throughout his works. Cf. the following typical example: (1) “Haec tibi ad litteram.” And (2) “Verum ad mentem . . .” (Quaestiones et solutiones in Exodum 1.23). (1) “Paradisus ad litteram nihil opus habet solutionis expressivae . . .” And (2) “Symbolice tamen est sapientiae . . .” (Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 1.6; emphasis added). 2. The last sentences are borrowed from chapter 8 of my book Modernität und Geschichte, to which I refer the reader for further details. 3. Regarding the phenomenon of “blinding” in modern political thought, cf. my case study, “Revolutionary Consciousness,” Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 27 (1980): 129– 42, and above pp. 48f. 4. “For just as man, in his perfection, is the most noble of living beings,” Aristotle wrote, “he is also the worst of all when sundered from law and right. For injustice is never more terrible than when it carries weapons; man, however, is born possessing the weapons of wisdom and virtue, which can be used for entirely opposite ends. Hence, when devoid of virtue, man is the most unscrupulous and savage of living beings.” Politics 1253a30–35. 5. Heraclitus B 72 (Diels- Kranz numbering), according to the German translation by J. Mansfeld, Die Vorsokratiker I (Stuttgart, 1983), 245. We have substituted the concept “govern” (regieren) for “administer” (verwalten) in the translation of ta ola dioikounti, given that this fits better with our reading of the fragment. 6. Cf. Eric Voegelin’s study “The Eclipse of Reality,” in Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague, 1970), 185–94, especially the crucial statement: “The conflict with reality turns out to be a disturbance within reality” (186). 7. Or when, after having once seen, they blind themselves or else remain stubbornly and wantonly in a state of blindness. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1114a20: “For the principle lies in the individual himself. At the beginning, also the unjust person as well as the unrestrained person had it in his power not to become unjust or unrestrained. But once they have become unjust or unrestrained, this possibility is no longer in their power.” 8. Republic 352d. Cf. the statement found in Gorgias 500c, according to which “there certainly is nothing more serious for any human being endowed with even a modicum of reason [than the question of] how he ought to live.” 9. Republic 353 d. 10. Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 1097b24–1098a7. 11. Politics 1253a15. 12. Cf. above, pp. 15f., 78f. 13. Cf. above, pp. 12f., 73f. 14. Cf. above, p. 65ff. 15. Heraclitus A 16 (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 147. Heraclitus goes on to say that human beings themselves acquire reason by participation (methoche) in a reason that is common and hence divine. This reason, he says, is the “criterion of truth” (kriterion aletheias), and hence that which is comprehensible and persuasive (pistos) to everyone in common, whereas an individual’s (monos) private thoughts are implausible. Ibid., p. 148. 16. Cf. Schabert, Die Architektur der Welt, chap. 1, “Die Spiegelungen des Seins im Sein.” 17. In the Republic (590e–591a), Plato declared that the education of children should continue “until we have established a constitution (politeia) in them analogous to the politically

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constituted society (polis), such that what is noblest in them is appointed guardian and ruler in a similar way [as occurs in society].” Cf. also E. Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, CW, 16: 41. 18. Cf. the examples used by Plotinus to illustrate the point: “An army does not exist if it is not one in itself, and the same is true of a choir or a herd, if they are not one in themselves. Nor can a house or ship exist, if they are not each one, because a house is one house just as a ship is one ship, and when they are deprived of this oneness, the house is no longer a house and the ship is no longer a ship.” Enneads 6.9.1.4–8). 19. Cf. “Health exists when the body has been brought into a constitution that orders it; beauty exists when the force that is directed to the One keeps the parts together; and the soul is of superior quality when it is unified into the One and is harmonious.” Enneads 6.9.1, 14–17. 20. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1114a5 and 1106a5: “Moreover, we also say that we are set in motion by the passions, but with respect to the virtues and vices we speak not of motion but rather of a particular constitution (exis).” 21. Politics 1253a15. 22. Ibid., 1280b30–35. Cf. 1328a35: “The constituted society (polis) is a community (koinonia) of similarities, having for its goal the best life possible.” In Grace 1. With respect to the concept “morphonoesis,” cf. my book Die Architektur der Welt, chap. 1. I reproduce here the crucial passages: What is a morphonoesis? In almost any city, we will easily find a circular town center. The eyes, wandering over the town center and tracing its outline, register in perception the Gestalt (the Platonic hypodoche) of a circle. Usually, this perception does not involve the certainty that the form (the Platonic paradeigma) of a circle is perfectly realized in this circular Gestalt. Rather, it is likely that the observer, insofar as he pauses in his perception and reflects on it, will be motivated to represent in his consciousness what he sees: the image (the Platonic eikon) of a circle. He will have already perceived circles in many figures and formed an image in his imagination by means of which he recognizes a circle in circular Gestalten. The same happens now: the image of a circle corresponds to this town center. Thus, the observer recognizes the circle in the circular disposition of the town center. The image is represented to him in such a disposition, and in this image he makes out the form, i.e., the circle. We might say that a morphonoesis creates a particular view of the nature of things. It produces that which catches the eye with respect to the plasticity of things. To give an exact formulation: a morphonoesis is that which catches the eye with respect to the trinity of things, at least while it is being enacted. A morphonoesis demonstrates the threefold stratification of things in the form of an intellectual discipline. It releases from its shell the structure of their reality, the architecture of the process of being by which everything is sustained. A thing reported is explained by a thing shown, and the thing shown has its foundation in the thing itself. A thing’s image appears in different Gestalten, and the thing, as form, can be recognized in its image, but in the form itself it can only be thought of. This architecture, which recurs in all things within the process of their being— idea/copy/figure or form/image/ Gestalt— is brought into the consciousness of the observer who enacts it through morphonoesis.

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The chapter “Denkspiegel zur Architektur der Morphonoese” in the same book offers a graphic explanation of this concept (168). 2. We may say of the human mind in the mode of such a paradigmatic understanding: “The spirit is a divine breath—intellectus spiratio est divina.” See Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 1.50. 3. Cf. my book Boston Politics: The Creativity of Power for a further explanation of the concepts of “political creativity” and “process of creativity.” See, for instance, 141f.: “Politics as the quest of people for social creativeness never proceeds from an absolute beginning. A tabula rasa for the creative act of the politician does not exist. The matter of politics are human beings who, by nature, have always been involved in a constitution of their common life. As a creator the politician cannot but concreate, since the matter of his creativeness exists but in the mode of social creation. The quest for social creativeness is a quest for participation; politics begins at the products of politics. . . . Nowhere is utopia where a government might be formed at an absolute beginning in an absolute space. There is no government if a place of governing does not already exist.” Cf. also 281ff. and 319ff. 4. It is for this reason that, always and everywhere, there have been and continue to be creation stories instead of, as it were, an official report of one creation act, which constitutes everything, i.e., the entire creation. All creation is a story, as can be verified both empirically and theoretically. All creation takes place only through itself and brings about what it will be only through itself. Hence, there is no other way to speak of creations except in the literary form of creation stories. Thus, it would be (or rather: it is) completely wrong to approach the process of giving a Gestalt called “creation” by means of the concept of “archetype,” and thereby to want to say that only what speaks archetypically, in one way or another, i.e., that which is already present as ready-made, comes through in a creation. There exists no “depth” out of which creations, as it were, rise. “Creation” manifests itself only in the dimension of the described “in-between,” never in the mode of surfacing as ready-made, but rather always in a flowing-figurative mode. 5. Philebus 16c–d. Adapted from Dorothea Frede’s translation, Complete Works (Hackett). 6. Concerning the concept “chaosmos” and its meaning as a symbol of the world, see my Die Architektur der Welt, chap. 7; further, “A Classical Prince: The Style of François Mitterrand,” in Philosophy, Literature and Politics: Essays Honoring Ellis Sandoz, ed. B. Cooper and Ch. R. Embry (Columbia, MO-London, 2005), 234–57, esp. 235. 7. The great work by Joseph Needham and his collaborators (Science and Civilization in China, 7 vols. [Cambridge, UK, 1954–2008]) was motivated by the question of why the scientific and technological revolution that took place in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not happen in China instead, given that the knowledge attained in China was comparable, if not more advanced; so, for example, the invention of the printing press, the development of the magnetic compass, as well as that of gunpowder first took place in China. 8. Cf. e.g. A. Camus, L’homme révolté, in Essais, ed. R. Quilliot, L. Fancon (Paris, 1965); N. Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Others (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Independent Journal of Philosophy 4 (1983); R. Caillois, L’homme et le sacré (Paris, 1985); J. Gebhardt, “Political Eschatology and Soteriological Nationalism in Nineteenth Century Germany,” in The Promise of History: Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. A. Moulakis (Berlin, 1986), 51–68; H. Klumpjan, “‘Divine Magnetic Lands’: Walt Whitman’s Religious Democracy,” in Politik und Politeia. Formen und Probleme politischer Ordnung. Festgabe für Jürgen Gebhardt zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. W. Leidhold (Würzburg, 2000), 61–81; U. Barth, Religion in der Moderne (Tübingen, 2003); C.- E. Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 2002), and “Die Bedeutung der Mystik in der politischen Religion

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Alfred Rosenbergs,” in Abenteuer des Geistes— Dimensionen des Politischen. Festschrift für Walter Rotholz, ed. P. Huse and I. Dette (Baden-Baden, 2008), 193–212; E. Voegelin, The Political Religions, trans. V. A. Schildhauer, CW, vol. 5, ed. M. Henningsen (Columbia, MO-London, 2000). 9. It is the exemplary case of the pathology of creative power in human action, because modernity was “successful” to a degree never attained by any prior civilization through the application of “modern” means, i.e., scientific knowledge and technological know-how, which truly “overcome the world.” Cf., e.g., the critique expressed by Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias (518e–519a) of Athenian politics and society, namely, of people “of whom it is said that they have elevated the city to its greatness; but no one notices . . . that it is in truth just bloated and rotting at the core. For without taking thought for prudence and justice, they have merely filled the city with their ports, shipyards, city walls, customs, and the like antics.” Cf. F. Dessauer, “Galilei, Newton und die Wendung des abendländischen Denkens,” in Eranos Jahrbuch 1946, vol. 14 (Zürich, 1947), 282– 331; T. Schabert and M. Riedl, eds., Die Menschen im Krieg, im Frieden mit der Natur— Humans at War, at Peace with Nature, series Eranos, vol. 13 (Würzburg, 2006). 10. Schabert, Gewalt und Humanität, chaps. 1 and 4. 11. Cf. W. Dilthey, Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit der Renaissance und Reformation (Leipzig-Berlin, 1914); E. Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance (Leipzig, 1927); A. Dempf, Ethik des Mittelalters (Munich-Vienna, 1931; rpt. 1971); G. de Lagarde, La naissance de l’esprit laïque au declin du moyen âge, 6 vols. (Paris, 1942–46); H. Baker, The Image of Man: A Study of the Idea of Human Dignity in Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 1947); Ch. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Dignity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London, 1970); P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man (New York, 1972); Schabert, Gewalt und Humanität. 12. Cf. G. Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate hominis (1486); Über die Würde des Menschen (Bad Homburg, 1968), esp. 26–29; Carolus Bovillus, Liber de sapiente, chap. 8 (esp. the passage on the alter deus), in Liber de intellectu . . . Liber de sapiente . . . (Paris, 1510; rpt. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1970); N. Cusanus, De ludo globi, II, fol. 157v; H. Blumenberg on Copernicus’s “universal, anthropocentric, teleology,” in Die kopernikanische Wende (Frankfurt, 1965), 86–121. 13. As Buffon announced with respect to the goals and meaning of his natural investigations in a text, La nature, that was both theory and proclamation. The role of human beings in the world, he writes, is “to preside over all creatures” (présider à tous les êtres) and “to command all creatures” (commander à toutes les créatures). See Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, ed. J. Piveteau (Paris, 1954), 33. 14. See G. Galilei, Dialogo sopra I due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632), in Opere, ed. P. Pagnini (Florence, 1964), 2: 239; G. du Vair, De la constance et consolation és calamitez publiques, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1641; rpt. Geneva, 1970), 381f.; F. Bacon, Novum organum 2.52. 15. Cf. Pico della Mirandola, De dignitate hominis, 28–29; Bovillus, Liber de sapiente, chaps. 8 and 24; P. Pomponazzi, Libri quinque de fato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione (1567), ed. R. Lemay (Lucani, 1957), 430; J. Ludovicus Vives, Fabula de homine, in Opera omnia (Valencia, 1783), 4: 3–8. 16. Cf. P. Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae (1516), ed. G. Gentile (Messina-Rome, 1925), 117; Morelly, Gesetzbuch der natürlichen Gesellschaft, ed. W. Kraus (Berlin, 1964), 163; Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2: Das philosophische Werk I, ed. R. Samuel (Stuttgart, 1960), 554; L. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. Jodl (Stuttgart- Bad Cannstatt, 1960), 6: 126f.; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 3, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1928), 19: 255; H. Marcuse, Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft, in Schriften, vol. 5 (Frankfurt, 1979), 115f.

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17. Cf. Corneille, Cinna 5.3; Buffon, La nature, in Oeuvres philosophiques de Buffon, 34; J. J. Rousseau, Emil (Paderborn, 1958), 4: 314; J. J. Rousseau, Die Träumereien des einsamen Spaziergängers (Zürich- Munich, 1985), Fünfter Spaziergang, p. 91; Diderot, “Enzyklopädie,” in D. Diderot, Enzyklopädie. Philosophische und politische Texte aus der ‘Encyclopédie’ (Munich, 1969), 121; Diderot, Réfutation de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé L’Homme, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1963), 473; Novalis, Das philosophische Werk I, 584; L. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums, 48; F. W. J. Schelling, Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts (1795), in Schriften von 1794–1798 (Darmstadt, 1967), 128; G. W. F. Hegel, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg, 1959), 233; J.-P. Sartre, Das Sein und das Nichts (Hamburg, 1962), 770. 18. Cf. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1957), XXX; P. Bayle, Nouvelles lettres critiques générales de l’histoire du Calvinisme, in Oeuvres diverses, ed. E. Labrousse (Hildesheim, 1965), 2: 274; Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1952), 6; Turgot, Oeuvres, ed. G. Schelle (Paris, 1913), 1: 216, 233ff.; Diderot, article ‘Encyclopédie’ in the Encyclopédie; Court de Gébelin, Le monde primitif (Paris, 1773), 8:lxix. 19. Cf. Pascal, Pensées, fr. 122, 139, 185, in Oeuvres complètes, 2: 579–82, 592–97, 608–14; Voltaire, Philosophische Briefe (Frankfurt, 1985), Brief 14, Über Descartes und Newton, pp. 59–63. 20. De civitate Dei 14.1, 13–15, 28; De Genesi ad litteram 11. 21. De civitate Dei 12.1, 23 and 14.1. 22. De civitate Dei 14.1 and 15.1. 23. De civitate Dei 14.1, 15.1, and 12.28. 24. De civitate Dei 12.28, 14.1, and 15.1. 25. De civitate Dei 15.2. 26. De Genesi ad litteram 11.14–15 and De civitate Dei 14.13, 14. 27. De civitate Dei 14.13. 28. De civitate Dei 14.15. 29. De civitate Dei 14.13. 30. De civitate Dei 14.15. 31. De civitate Dei 14.4. 32. De Genesi ad litteram 11. 33. De civitate Dei 14.13 and 28. In the Divine 1. Regarding the difference between “beginnings” and “start,” see above p. 5f. 2. See above, p. xxx. 3. Cf. Schabert, Die Architektur der Welt. 4. Ibid., chap. 1. 5. See above, pp. 86f., 94. 6. Human thought, then, in the strict sense of the word, is never “free,” nor can it be free. Thought in a “pure state” does not exist for human beings. Their thought is always both forming and formed— a task— and hence “ethical” and “political.” 7. “Enchantment,” wrote Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy, “is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment, the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and, as satyr, he in turn beholds the god, that is, in his transformation, he sees a new vision outside him as the Apollonian consummation of his own state.” F. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 1, new edition (Munich, 1999), 61f. Nietzsche writes further: “Dionysian art thus wants to convince us

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of the eternal delight in existence, but we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them; we are to realize how everything that comes into being must be ready for painful destruction; we are forced to look right into the terror of individual existence— and nonetheless are not to become paralyzed: a metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms. For a short time, we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for existence and joy in existence. . . . In spite of fear and pity, we are the happily living ones, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we have become one.” Ibid., 109. 8. Statesman 269a–274e. 9. Ibid., 272c–d. 10. Aristotle speaks of the philomythos, who is also a philosophos, in the Metaphysics (982b20). 11. Statesman 274d. 12. Cf. the first sentence of my Boston Politics—“Human beings are creative beings, and politics is the principal mode of their creativity” (1)— as well as the detailed explanations of the empirical derivation and theoretical demonstration of this sentence in the same place. 13. Cf. James Madison’s observation regarding the revolutionary origin of the American republic: “Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the convention [the constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia] should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination? The real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor to reflect on this circumstance without partaking of the astonishment. It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” Federalist Papers, article 37; emphasis added. 14. De re publica 1.7.12. 15. Cf. my article “Power, Legitimacy, and Truth: Reflections on the Impossibility to Legitimise Legitimations of Political Order,” in Legitimacy / Légitimité, ed. A. Moulakis (Berlin, 1985), 96–104. 16. Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (Harmondsworth, UK, 1962), 188. 17. Voegelin’s lifework, seen from the standpoint of this book, is the scholarly spectacle of this book’s unfolding. 18. E. Voegelin, The Political Religions, CW, 5: 70 (translation quoted with modifications). A similarly classical formulation may be found in Voegelin’s later book, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952): “Political science is suffering from a difficulty that originates in its very nature as a science of man in historical existence. For man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society. Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Although it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization” (27). 19. Leo Strauss, “An Epilogue,” in Essays in the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York, 1962), 369–78. 20. Cf. my study Boston Politics.

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21. John Adams, Thoughts on Government, in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George A. Peek Jr. (New York, 1957), 84. 22. Dispute sur le sel et le fer (Yantie lun), ed. Georges Walter, 2nd ed. (1978; Paris, 1991), 109. 23. Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (New York- London, 1968), 10. 24. Cf. for further details Peter Weber-Schäfer’s fundamental text “Über den paradigmatischen Charakter der klassischen Politik,” in Peter Weber-Schäfer, Einführung in die Antike Politische Theorie. Erster Teil, Die Frühzeit (Darmstadt, 1976), 1–15. In Thought 1. It is appropriate here to refer to the way in which Renaissance architects (e.g., Leon Battista Alberti) conceived of the “beauty” of an object. According to them, the size and form of all the parts of the object must be in such a relation to one another that nothing may be added or subtracted without destroying the harmony of the whole. Cf. R. Wittkower, “The Arts in Western Europe: Italy,” in The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge, UK, 1957), 129. 2. Cf. D. Clemens, T. Schabert, Kulturen des Eros, series Eranos, vol. 8 (Munich, 2001). 3. Theaetetus 189– 190a. Cf. also Sophist 263e: “Thus thought and discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thought is an inner conversation of the soul with itself without a voice.” Likewise, Sophist 264b: “So, since there is true and false discourse, and, of the processes just mentioned, thought appeared to be the soul’s conversation with itself, etc.” 4. Gorgias 506a. 5. Phaedrus 235d. 6. See above, pp. 72ff. 7. “Cartesian connotations,” because, as in Descartes, the point concerns a steadiness or, to put it more pointedly, the “steadiness.” But, while we argue that such a steadiness is possible only through a participatory process, Descartes was searching for an absolute steadiness. Given the human situation, such “steadiness” could logically be found only in the human being himself; the latter is the start for himself, and indeed, again quite logically, he is the start for himself in his strongest conceivable form, i.e., in his self-assertion, the self-assertion of the I, of Descartes’s famous moi. Cf. T. Schabert, ed., Aufbruch zur Moderne. Politisches Denken im Frankreich des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1974), 29–31. 8. “The capacity to think is common to all” (xynon esti pasi to phroneein). Heraclitus, B 113. In Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Nachträge, 99. 9. Republic 369c. 10. E. Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 2: Plato and Aristotle, CW, 16: 150. 11. Republic 369d. 12. For details, see Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 152ff. 13. Republic 420c, 427e, 428b, 433b, 435b. 14. The idea of a “trinity,” hence a trinitarian form or structure, has to be seen in a much larger scope than that with which it is usually associated: Christian theology. It is an elementary idea in politics too, although hardly recognized in this function. And yet the doctrine of a separation of powers has of course been modeled, since Plato and Aristotle, in the way of a trinity: there are the deliberative, the executive, and the judicial power. I should like, therefore, to recall the significant yet rare moment when a Christian political theorist termed the three powers in politics “shadows” of the “Sacred Trinity.” I refer to John Sandler`s Rights of the King-

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dom published in 1649. The relevant quote is: “It may be considered, that many kingdoms, and commonwealths . . . in all ages did consist of three estates; (as of three principles in nature, or bodies natural;) . . . And if any would observe, it might be possible to find the prophets hinting a trinity in diverse kingdoms or estates; . . . And why may not the Sacred Trinity be shadowed out in bodies politic, as well as in natural? And if so, our three estates may be branched as our writs, into original, judicial, and executive; as shadows of the Being, Wisdom, and Activity Divine. If I may not grant, yet I cannot deny original power to the Commons, judicial to the Lords, executive to the King.” Quoted after the London edition of 1682, p. 91. 15. Republic 420b. 16. Cf. with respect to this cosmological problem pp. 76ff. above. 17. Cf. Republic 431d–434c, 443c–e, 494a, 497b, 498d–499d, 546a, as well as Voegelin, Plato and Aristotle, 162ff. 18. Republic 472c. 19. Cf. on this topic the discussion of “morphonoesis” and “paradigm” in note 1 of the chapter “In Grace,” p. 145f. above. 20. Republic 472d. 21. “Until philosophers rule as kings in cities or those who are now called kings and rulers truly and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils, Glaucon, nor, I think, will the human race. And, until this happens, the constitution we have been describing in theory will never be born to the fullest extent possible or see the light of the sun. I hesitated to speak for so long precisely because I saw how very paradoxical this notion would be (poly para doxan rēthēsetai).” Republic 473c–e. 22. Republic 473b. In Creation 1. See esp. Lao Tse, Dao De Jing 25, 42; Koran, 13th and 35th surahs; Bible, 1st Book of Moses (Genesis) 1; Hesiod, Theogony 30– 35, 105– 25; Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Diels- Kranz); Bhagavad Gita 9.17– 19; Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete, trans. and ed. J. Assmann (ZürichMunich, 1975). 2. Anaxagoras B 12– 13. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 5th ed. (Berlin, 1934–35), 2: 38–39. 3. Philosophes taoïstes, vol. 2: Huainan-zi, Worte zum Beweis (Quanyan), 665. 4. Brhadaranyaka Upanisad 1.4.7. 5. Hesiod, Theogony 104–14 (Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library, with modifications). 6. Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete, 293–97. 7. Koran, surah 13. 8. I had already written the chapters “In Thought,” “In Creation,” and “In Eros” when Dolf Sternberger’s article “Schöpfung und Scheidung, Erkenntnis und Scham” (Gut und Böse. Moralische Essais aus drei Zeiten, ed. D. Sternberger, Schriften 9 [Frankfurt, 1988], 172–99) came to my attention. Sternberger had a different purpose in his article. He wanted to establish a link between the human phenomenon of “critique” (most conspicuously exercised in the literary sphere) and the “interconnection between creation and separation” observed in God’s creation according to Genesis. “Creation is itself already separation, . . . the creation of the particular and

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the sundering of the created” (175). This discovery of a similar view of the problem of creation, reached by quite different paths, provided the additional satisfaction of the realization that to speak of questions of cosmology is not completely unusual in the sphere of political science. 9. Genesis 1: 1–25 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 2010) 10. In The Beginning of the Beginning, an essay written late in his life, Eric Voegelin stated: “Reality is a story spoken in the creative language of God.” Cf. my article “Reaching for a Bridge between Consciousness and Reality: The Languages of Eric Voegelin,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 103–11. 11. Parmenides 135d. 12. For the following, see Parmenides 142b–148a. 13. Parmenides 144a. 14. Ibid., 144b–c. 15. Cf. Parmenides 158a. 16. Parmenides 146a–b. 17. Hesiod, Theogony 115–30 (Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library, with modifications). In Eros 1. Cf. M. Ficino, Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore (1484), first discourse, chap. 3, “De origine amoris” (quoted according to the Latin-French edition: M. Ficino, Commentaire sur le banquet de Platon, ed. R. Marcel [Paris, 1956], 140): “En outre, nous disons que cette essence encore privée de formes est le chaos, sa conversion vers Dieu, la naissance de l’Amour, la pénétration du rayon divin, sa nourriture; l’embrasement qui s’ensuit, son accroissement, son rapprochement de Dieu, son élan, sa formation, sa perfection, et pour désigner cet ensemble de toutes les formes et toutes les idées, nous employons en latin le mot mundus et en grec le mot kosmon qui veut dire ornement. Ce qui fait le charme de ce monde et de cet ornement, est la beauté vers laquelle, dès qu`il est né, cet Amour entraîne et conduit l’intelligence. De ce fait, cette intelligence, qui auparavant était laide, devient belle par la suite. C’est d’ailleurs le propre de l’Amour de porter à la beauté et d’unir le laid au beau. Dans ces conditions, qui pourrait douter que l’Amour succède immédiatement au chaos et précède à la fois le monde et tous les dieux auxquels sont attribués les parties de ce monde. . . .” 2. Fragment B 3 (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2: 48). 3. Theaetetus 152e. 4. Cf. Ficino, Commentarium . . . de amore, first discourse, chap.3 (R. Marcel edition, p. 139): “Les Platoniciens appellent chaos, le monde sans forme, et monde, le chaos formé. Pour eux, il y a trois mondes et il doit y avoir également trois chaos. Le premier est Dieu, auteur de l’univers, que nous appelons le Bien en soi. Il crée d’abord l’intelligence angélique, puis, d’après Platon, l’âme du monde et enfin, le corps du monde. On ne donne pas à ce Dieu par excellence le nom de Monde, parce que le mot ‘monde’ désigne un ornement composé de nombreux éléments, alors que ce Dieu doit être absolument simple. Mais nous disons qu’il est le principe et la fin de tout ce qui est ‘monde.’ Ainsi le premier monde créé par Dieu est l’intelligence angélique, le second, l’âme du corps universel, et le troisième toute cette machine que nous avons sous les yeux. Dans ces trois mondes, trois chaos sont aussi à considérer.” 5. Symposium 177 b. 6. Ibid. “Eros is a god,” according to the Phaedrus 242d–e. Cf. Symposium 178a.

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7. Symposium 197d. 8. Ibid., 197c–d (trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, in Plato, Complete Works [Hackett], partly modified). 9. Empedocles, fragment 17, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels (Hamburg, 1957), 60. 10. Empedocles, fragment 20, in ibid., 61. 11. Symposium 189c. 12. Ibid., 189e–190a. 13. See my Modernität und Geschichte, 87ff. 14. Symposium 190c. 15. Ibid., 190d–e. 16. Ibid., 191b–d. 17. Theaetetus 191c–e. 18. Ibid., 194b. 19. Ibid., 194c–195a. 20. Laws 644d ff. 21. Ibid., 644c. 22. Ibid., 644d–645b. 23. Symposium 181a. 24. Ibid. 25. Symposium 183c. 26. Cf. Symposium 180c–e, 185b ff.; Republic 403a; Phaedrus 243d. 27. Symposium 188d. 28. Ibid., 186a–b. Cf. L. Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros, 6th ed. (Bonn, 1963), 55: “Eros is so far from being equal to some condition of indigence that we should rather characterize the impetus of Eros as an impetus to overflow, to radiantly rush forth, to give oneself away without restraint. Eros is not indigence or lack, but rather an exuberance of gushing abundance, a golden radiating flame, and a world-bearing pregnancy. That upon which its rays fall glows in nameless beauty; wherever it sets foot, there springs up a thicket of blooms, and its embrace frees the god who is incarcerated within things and human beings! This is the most general quality of that condition that the symbolic language of the prophetic spirit of a distant past has called Eros Kosmogonos.” And 56f.: “it is called ‘cosmogonic’ because it is a condition of abundance that rushes forth, according to which the inner— giving birth to itself all at once— becomes for a moment the outer, i.e., it becomes world and appearing reality. Far from being a mere feeling, it is the unceasing revelation of that which unceasingly springs forth out of the most hidden soul. Let us recall the truth of Hegel’s principle: ‘Nothing is essential that does not appear.’ If, unconcerned with today’s opinions, we completed this principle and said that ‘the essence comes out of a formless clarity into the splendor of the appearance only when kindled by Eros,’ we would have identified in elemental frenzy that through which Eros is not merely the movement into which it sets the soul, but also the guarantee of the soul’s direct participation in the event of creation.” 29. Symposium 180c–e, 185b–188b. 30. Republic 395d. Cf. Democritus B 172 (Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2: 95): “Those same things from which we get good (tagatha gignetai) can also be for us a source of the bad (ta kaka), or else we can avoid the bad. For instance, deep water is useful for many purposes, and yet again harmful; for there is danger of being drowned. A particular technique has thus been invented: swimming instruction.”

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31. Theaetetus 176a. Cf. Republic 379c: “we must look for other causes of evil, but not in God.” 32. “In no way,” Philo of Alexandria declared, “are we to attribute the cause of evil to the Divine” (nulli malo causam ponere penitus Divinitatem). Quaestiones et solutiones in Exodum 1.23. 33. “Quoniam insipientis anima plus habet de immensa illa damnifica,, quam de potente salutifera, nam misere cohabitatrix (vel congenita) fuit cum terrestribus.” Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Exodum 1.23. 34. Philebus 45c–e. 35. Cf. Lysis 214d: “Evil persons, on the contrary, are . . . never the same, they are not even equal to themselves, but are rather fickle and unpredictable.” 36. Philebus 46c– d (translated by Dorothea Frede, in Plato, Complete Works [Hackett], modified). 37. Ibid., 47a–b. Cf. Republic 610c–e: “But if anyone dares to come to grips with our argument, in order to avoid having to agree that our souls are immortal, and says that a dying man does become more vicious and unjust, we’ll reply that, if what he says is true, then injustice must be as deadly to unjust people as a disease, and those who catch it must die of it because of its own deadly nature, with the worst cases dying quickly and the less serious dying more slowly. As things now stand, however, it isn’t like that at all. Unjust people do indeed die of injustice, but at the hands of others who inflict the death penalty on them. By god, if injustice were actually fatal to those who contracted it, it wouldn’t seem so terrible, for it would be an escape from their troubles. But I rather think that it’s clearly the opposite, something that kills other people if it can, while, on top of making the unjust themselves lively, it even brings them out at night. Hence it’s very far from being deadly to its possessors.” Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve in Plato, Complete Works (Hackett). Cf. Gorgias 509b. 38. Philebus 66a. 39. Cf. Republic 571a–580c. 40. Republic 573b. Cf. 577d–580a and 587a. Cf., in addition, the section on eros tyrannos in St. Graefe, Der gespaltene Eros— Platons Triebe zur ‘Weisheit’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 65–85. 41. Cf. Nietzsche’s statements on lust for power (Also sprach Zarathustra, III, “Von den drei Bösen” [On the Three Evils], 2): Lust for power: the searing scourge of the hardest of the hard-hearted, the horrifying torture reserved for the cruelest person, the dark flame of living funeral pyres. Lust for power: the grim gadfly imposed on the vainest peoples, the mocker of all insecure virtue, which rides on every horse and every pride. Lust for power: the earthquake that shatters and breaks open everything rotten and hollow, the rolling, growling, punishing smasher of whitewashed tombs, the flashing question mark next to premature answers. Lust for power: before whose gaze human beings crawl and cower and drudge and become lower than snake and swine— until at last the great contempt cries out of them— Lust for power: the terrible teacher of the great contempt who preaches “away with you!” to the faces of cities and empires— until they themselves cry out “away with me!” Lust for power: which also ascends seductively to the pure and the solitary and into self- sufficient heights, glowing like a love that seductively paints purple bliss on earth’s skies. Lust for power: but who would call it lust when the high descends in its longing for power! Indeed, there is nothing sick and addicted in such longing and descending!

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(Translated by Adrian del Caro [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006]; with modifications.) 42. Republic 588c–589b. 43. Gorgias 500c. Cf. Republic 578c: “For there is nothing more important than our present discussion, namely the question concerning the good and the bad life.” 44. Cf. Gorgias 501b and 506b; Republic 441e. 45. Gorgias 507a. 46. Cf. Republic 443d–e; Symposium 196d; Laws 631c–d. 47. “For wisdom belongs to what is most beautiful and Eros is love of the beautiful, and hence Eros is necessarily a lover of wisdom” (Symposium 204b). Cf. Lysis 210d: “Once you have acquired understanding, my son, you will be friends with everyone and everyone will feel attached to you.” 48. Gorgias 508a. Cf. Statesman 311c. 49. Symposium 206b–e. Cf. Statesman 309c; Timaeus 90a–d. Also Republic 500d: “The philosopher, therefore, who deals with the Divine and what is regulated, will also be as regulated and divine as humanly possible.” 50. Phaedrus 265d–266b. In Time 1. See above, p. 7ff., 32ff. 2. Bhagavad Gita 9.32. 3. Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.11.41–45. 4. Mo Tzu 40, 81; in Mê Ti, trans. and ed. A. Forke (Berlin, 1922), 421. Mo Ti lived between 479 and 381 BC. 5. Cf. Schabert and Riedl, Das Ordnen der Zeit, 11. 6. Laws 676a–b. 7. Cf. above, p. 5ff. 8. Cf. Laws 677a. 9. In the present context, the word “state” (Staat in German), which translates the Greek polis, and which is Plato’s general concept for a human society that has constituted itself into a community, is to be understood as referring to all forms of political society. 10. Cf. Laws 677e–689a. 11. Laws 677e. 12. Laws 678a. 13. “In the beginning” refers here to the beginning temporally considered, while “from the beginning” refers to the beginning logically considered. 14. According to L. Robin and M.-J. Moreau, translators and editors of the edition of the Laws published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ([Paris, 1950], 1540n710), the “deity” here may refer to either Athene (Minerva) or Hephaestos (Vulcan). Athene gave human beings the art of weaving, and Hephaestos (although he is chiefly a blacksmith) gave them that activity which consists in working on moldable material. Robin and Moreau mention also the following passages in this connection: Protagoras 321d; Symposium 197b; and Critias 109c. 15. The verb gignomai means “to come into being, to be generated, to emerge, to become, and to grow.”

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16. Laws 678e— 680b. Dynasteia means here the hereditary rule of the head or father of a family, in other words, “patriarchy.” 17. Laws 680b. Plato is here quoting Homer, Odyssey 9.112–15. Homer himself speaks of the Cyclops in the past. But Plato says that this hereditary rule is still in existence in several places, among the Greeks as well as among barbarians. 18. Laws 680d. 19. Cf. for this and the following points, Laws 680e–681d. 20. Jean- Jacques Rousseau was not really expressing an original thought when he wrote at the beginning of the second part of his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes: “The first man who fenced in a plot of land and dared to say, this is mine, was the true founder of human society (société civile).” Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1964), 164. 21. Laws 678e. 22. Ibid., 676a. 23. Ibid., 678b. 24. Ibid., 676b. 25. Ibid., 680d. 26. Ibid., 676b. 27. Ibid., 682c. 28. Ibid., 683a. 29. Ibid., 682b. 30. Cf. Schabert and Riedl, Das Ordnen der Zeit. 31. Laws 676a. 32. Laws 682b. “Flood, kataklysmos” should be understood here in the sense of the biblical flood. 33. Laws 688c. 34. In a similar vein, Ibn Khaldûn wrote: “[The exercise of] power is a natural property (tabî iyya).” Ibn Khaldûn, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (al-Muqaddima) 1.1. Monteil edition, 1: 88; Cheddadi edition, 263. In Law 1. Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 5.76. 2. Ibid., 6.218. 3. With respect to Anonymous Iamblichi, especially his legal thought, cf. A. Th. Cole Jr., “The Anonymous Iamblichi and His Place in Greek Political Theory,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65 (1961): 127–63; and M. Hamburger, The Awakening of Western Legal Thought (New York, 1969), in particular sect. 20: “Anonymous Iamblichi: against the Right of the Stronger; Law in the Sense of Order,” 51–55. 4. Anonymous Iamblichi, in Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2: 332. 5. Ibid., p. 331. 6. Aristotle, Politics 1287a30. 7. “Anger,” writes Aristotle in the same passage just quoted, “leads the rulers astray even if they are the best of men.” 8. Marcus Aurelius, 1.14. 9. Aristotle, Politics 1282b 5.

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10. Cf., e.g., the way that John Adams offers and justifies this formulation in his Thoughts on Government (1776), in The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selection, ed. G. A. Peek Jr. (New York, 1954), 83–92 (the formula itself is found on p. 86). The thirtieth and final article of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights of 1780 reads: “In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men” (emphasis added). The formula “empire of laws, and not of men” is found earlier in James Harrington’s Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, UK, 1977), 155–69 (see esp. 161). As a matter of fact, the demand to bind political rule and forms of government to laws is clearly formulated already in Plato’s Statesman (302d–303a). 11. Cf. for this (and what follows) Laws 715c–d. 12. The point could not have been made more emphatically by Plato, in view of the fact that doulos means first and foremost “slave,” “serf,” “subject.” 13. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, ed. H. von Arnim, vol. 3: Chrysippi fragmenta moralia. Fragmenta successorum Chrysippi (Leipzig, 1903), 77. 14. Heraclitus, frag. 114, in Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 99f. 15. Aristotle, Politics 1287a25. 16. In De legibus (1.6.18), Cicero wrote something similar: “Lex est ratio summa insita in natura, quae iubet ea, quae facienda sunt, prohibetque contraria. Eadem ratio cum est in hominis mente confirmata et confecta, lex est.” He took this over from Chrysippus. Cf. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, vol. 3: Chrysippi fragmenta moralia. Fragmenta successorum Chrysippi, 78. 17. Cicero, De re publica 3.22. 18. Cf. Schabert, Gewalt und Humanität, chap. 4: “Das Erbe der Renaissance: Kosmos und Natur.” 19. Th. Hobbes, Leviathan (Introduction). (Harmondsworth, UK, 1951), 81. 20. Ibid. 21. Empedocles, fragment 135, Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1: 274. Manteuō, of course, means not only “to have a presentiment” but also “to convey a pronouncement of the gods,” “to foresee,” “to foretell,” “to prophesy.” These definitions point even more strongly to the Absolute that is here in question. 22. Stoicorum veterum fragmenta, vol. 3: Chrysippi fragmenta moralia. Fragmenta successorum Chrysippi, 81. 23. Philo of Alexandria, Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 6.216. 24. Aristotle, Politics 1287b1. 25. Cicero, De re publica 3.10. 26. Ibid., 2.26. 27. Democritus, fragment 248. On the basis of the German translation by M. Grünwald, Die Anfänge der abendländischen Philosophie. Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Munich, 1991), 182. In the edition by Hermann Diels of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1: 110), the fragment is formulated as follows: “The law wishes to shape well the life of human beings. But this is possible only when they themselves have the desire to be treated well. For it demonstrates its excellence to those who follow it.”

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1. “The soul,” wrote Philo of Alexandria (Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim 6.220) is a “place necessarily filled with contrary forces and brimful of inhabitants.” 2. In the sense of the “community” of a political society (in this case of a society of human beings with human beings). For the concept of a “political society” (politike koinonia), cf. Aristotle, Politics 1260b40, as well as 1278b25 and 1326b5. 3. Republic 544d–e. 4. Ibn Khaldûn, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (al-Muqaddima), Monteil edition, 1: 88; Cheddadi edition, 263. 5. Politics 1253a30. 6. Sallust, Politische Briefe an Caesar (Letter of 46 B.C.), in Werke, Latin with German translation by W. Eisenhut and J. Lindauer (Darmstadt: Sammlung Tusculum, 1994), 319. 7. Th. H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (London, 1961), 3. 8. Les libéraux. Textes choisis et présentés par Pierre Manent, vol. 1 (Paris: Collection Pluriel, 1986), 13. 9. Cf. pp. 16ff. above. 10. Cf. Tilo Schabert, “Das Paradox der Macht. Anmerkungen zur Regierungspraxis in Washington, Paris, und Bonn,” Süddeutsche Zeitung August 17– 18, 1985, 81; Schabert, Boston Politics, esp. 11ff., 232ff.; and Schabert, “Classical Prince.” 11. Schabert, Boston Politics, chap. 1. 12. Cf. Schabert, “Classical Prince.” 13. Pierre Manent speaks rightly of “ingénieuses constructions,” in Les libéraux, 13. 14. Politics 1279a20. 15. Ibid., 1280a5. 16. De re publica 1.25. 17. Ibid., 1.31. Epilogue 1. This text was originally written by the author in English. The text as presented here is a revised version. The revisions made were proposed by the translator, whose generous and precious help the author hereby gratefully acknowledges. An earlier and shorter version of the text was published in Hungarian translation in: Tilo Schabert, A politika méltóságáról és jelentösegéröl (Budapest: Századvég Kiadó, 2013). 2. The members of the Student Parliament were chosen in free and general elections by the students enrolled in the university. For the election, lists of candidates were formed by groups of students, of which most had a political orientation and were associated with political parties. The first task of the Student Parliament was the election of its “President” and then that of the “Allgemeine Studentenausschuß” (ASTA), the “General Student Committee,” which formed the executive in the system of student representation. The ASTA functioned like a government, with its head being the “prime minister,” in directing the whole work of the committee and being responsible for it, and with its members being in charge of particular offices, such as those for legal, social, cultural, or financial affairs. The financial resources of the ASTA were considerable; to approve and to control the budget was the task of the Student Parliament. This system of student representation was part of the self-administration of the university, which, at that time,

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was still legally organized in a way that gave the university much autonomy of “self-government” vis-à-vis the superior political authority, the ministry of cultural affairs and education. 3. The words “he,” “himself ” are used here representatively, standing for both male and female gender. 4. For a discussion of this notion of politics, by a group of scholars from different backgrounds and countries, see John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, eds., The Primacy of Persons in Politics: Empiricism and Political Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). 5. See Schabert, Boston Politics, and idem, How World Politics Is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany (Columbia, MO-London, 2009). 6. See the books referred to in the note above. 7. Cf. my case study, “Reaching for a Bridge between Consciousness and Reality: The Languages of Eric Voegelin,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 103–16.

Index

action, 32–35; Aristotle on, 33, 34, 35, 143n6; beginnings and, 33–34, 36, 40; meaningless, worthless, 38; Plato on beauty and, 89; political, 35. See also motion actuality: of human being among many human beings, 63; number and, 12, 13; paradigm as form of, 71; the start and, 6–7, 137n15, 137n17; of world created by human care, 58 Adams, John, 61, 62, 157n10 Alberti, Leon Battista, 150n1 Al-Fārābī, 140n14 allegory of androgynes, 84–85, 93 allegory of marionettes, 88, 90 allegory of wax, 86–87, 90 Amun-Re, 72, 75 Anaxagoras, 72–73 Anaximander, 136n10 androgynes, 84–85, 93 angels, 17–18, 24, 140n6 Anonymous Iamblichi, 22, 106–7, 108, 109, 110 anthropogonic freedom, 50 anthropogonic logic, 29 anthropogony, political, 2, 19, 51 anthropophanous event, 23, 24 Aquinas, Thomas, 24, 140n7 architecture of human beings’ existence, 54–55 architecture of the world, 54, 55 Arendt, Hannah, 62, 133n3 Aristotle: on action, 33, 34, 35, 143n6; beginning of political communities and, 2, 133n3; classical political theory and, 63; on community of free people, 122; on constitutions of individual human beings, 116, 145n20; on human nature, 133n3; on the law, 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 156n7; on philomythos, 149n10; on the polis, 42, 133n3, 145n22; on politike koinonia, 158n2; on proper

work of the soul, 40; role of political science and, 140n15; separation of powers and, 150n14; on unjust or unrestrained person, 144n4, 144n7 Augustine, 13–14, 50–52, 62, 139n15, 139n23, 139n28 beautiful city (kallipolis), of Plato, 69–71, 98 beauty, Plato on, 45, 89, 95 beginning [Anfang], 5–8; actions and, 33–34, 36, 40; Anaximander on, 136n10; architecture of, 55; Arendt on, 133n3; boundaries of, 6–7, 137nn15–17; of a civilization, 19, 21, 23, 53, 98; creative element in, 44; creative power of, 7–8, 13, 19, 33, 36; Gestalten and, 6, 11–13, 33–34, 44; grace and, 50, 52; human beings existing in mode of, 7, 10, 33, 37; toward law, 111, 112; Maimonides on, 134n1; myth of Kronos and, 57–58; in number, 11–14; of a polis, 68; of political communities, 2; power of, 6, 7–8, 19, 97; of states, 98–104; temporal versus logical, 155n13; in thought, 67, 68, 70 Bhagavad Gita, 72, 97 biblical creation story, 47, 50–52, 72, 76–77, 134nn1–2, 151n8 blindness, 36, 37–38, 52, 114, 144n3, 144n7 bodies, 15–31; change and, 55–56; disposition for politics in, 2; doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings, 22–24; as existential wound, 30; Marcus Aurelius on cooperation and, 140n13; motion associated with, 16, 102; necessity of civilization and, 18, 19–20, 22, 69, 140n14; paradisiacal condition and, 24–25, 26, 29, 142n42; paradox of freedom and, 118–19, 120; Plotinus on health of, 145n19; political nature of, 16; power of, 2, 3, 15–16, 20–21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 113; predicament of human beings and, 1, 21, 55–56, 112. See also first birth

162 Bodin, Jean, 61, 62 Buber, Martin, 143n49 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 147n13 care: divine, 56–60, 64; of freedom, 54, 55; of human beings for themselves, 1, 3, 55, 57–60, 67; of soul for itself, 94 Cartesian connotations, 67, 150n7 change, 32–33; bodily nature and, 55–56; sensitivity of human beings and, 86 chaos: creation and, 79, 93; Eros and, 80, 81–82, 87–88, 89, 94; Hesiod on, 80, 137n12; of perceptions, 87–88; Plato on knowledge and, 45 China, science and technology in, 146n7. See also Dao De Jing; Hanfeizi; Huainanzi; I Ching Chrysippus, 108–9, 111, 157n16 Cicero: beginning and, 137n11; the divine and, 12, 13, 58–59; on freedom for all, 122; on government of the people, 122; on the law, 109–10, 111–12, 157n16; on number, 12–13 civilization: beginning of, 19, 21, 23, 53, 98; different traditions of, 2, 38–39; the divine and thought for initiation of, 53–54; in the form of laws, 111; as Gestalt of power, 2, 18, 71, 98; necessity of, 18, 19–20, 22, 69, 106, 140n14; pathology of modernity in, 47, 147n9; Plato’s poleogony of, 68–71, 151n21; recurrence of, 98, 103; as second birth, 18, 38, 96. See also community; polis; society Claudel, Paul, 135n6 cognition, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44–45, 46, 54, 59, 60. See also consciousness; thought Coke, Edward, 61 community: founded through thought, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70; need for law in, 105–6; political, 1, 2, 99; religious forces of, 61. See also civilization; polis; society consciousness, 36–42; architecture of existence and, 55; direction to a human being’s life and, 44–45, 114; divine, 37; political, 42; soul and, 36, 39–40, 41, 54, 114; the start and, 54; variations in, 32. See also cognition constitution: beginning and, 6; freedom and, 117, 120; of individual human being, 115–17, 145n20; Plotinus on bodily health and, 145n19; political, Plato on, 99 constitutional state: as human artifact, 129; modern, life of citizens in, 61; soul compared to, 41 cosmological myths, 47–48. See also creation stories cosmology, political, 71 creation: through action, 34–35; of civilization, 53, 69, 98; disintegration of, 38; disposition for politics and, 2; Eros and, 81, 83, 89–90; giving of a Gestalt and, 43–44, 73, 77; at the

index in-between, 43, 146n4; the law and, 108, 110, 112; law of the Gestalt and, 30, 31; number and, 9–10; of the political, 3, 31; of second birth, 41; separation and, 72–74, 76–77, 151n8; of the writer’s work by itself, 135n6. See also creative power; falling-apart creation stories, 47–48, 72–80, 146n4; biblical, 47, 50–52, 72, 76–77, 134nn1–2, 151n8; of Plato on creation of the polis, 68–71 creative power: of beginnings, 7–8, 13, 19, 33, 36; consciousness and, 40; destructive exercise of, 37–38, 62; divine, 36, 37; to give form or annihilate, 71; of God, 13–14; pathology of, in modernity, 47, 48, 147n9; as political power, 5, 35, 149n12; of politics, 62; reality and, 43; twofold character of, 38, 129. See also creation; power Crick, Bernard, 61 Dante Alighieri, 18, 24 Dao De Jing, 5, 9, 72, 73, 79 death: Augustine on biblical creation story and, 50–51, 52; human power of, 38, 39; political theory and, 62; power of, over human beings, 96 Democritus: on beginnings of things, 10–11; on human need, 22; on the law, 112, 157n27; on origin of language, 138n13, 141n17; on things both useful and harmful, 153n30 Descartes, René. See Cartesian connotations diamorphous bodies, 25–26, 141n25 divine, the, 53–64; always already what it is, 55–56, 58, 67; circle as, 84, 85; creative power as, 36, 37; Eros and, 95; the law and, 108–10, 112; in political society, 61; second birth of human beings and, 53–54; unbounded knowledge and, 46 divine care, 56–60, 64 divine consciousness, 37 divine mind: Augustine on, 139n15; Cicero on, 12, 13 divine reason, Heraclitus on, 40–41, 144n15 doctrine of human bodies for the welfare of human beings, 22–24 Egypt, ancient, 61, 72, 75 Empedocles, 27, 83–84, 111, 157n21 equality, human, 41–42, 63 Eros, 81–95; abundance and, 153n28; falling-apart and, 79, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 93–94, 114; Hesiod on, 80; motion and, 81, 84; Plato on, 82–83, 84– 95, 152n6; thought and, 65; twofold nature of, 81, 83, 84, 90, 114; wisdom and, 155n47 evil: Aristotle on, 143n6; in civilization constructed by human beings, 117, 129; Philo of Alexandria on, 154n32; Plato on, 90–93, 154n31, 154n37; Sallust on power and, 116

index existence: action and, 34–35, 38; architecture of, 54–55; beginning and, 34; bodily needs and, 106; caring for, 59–60; creative, 37; creatively open, 55; Nietzsche on, 148n7; power of human beings for, 39, 44, 114; as predicament, 7, 67, 106; soul as faculty of, 36; structured by thinking, 46 falling-apart: in creation stories, 76, 78–79; Eros and, 79, 81, 82, 84, 89, 90, 93–94, 114; in Plato’s Republic, 70 feast of thought, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 95, 114 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 28–29, 142n38 Ficino, Marsilio, 152n1, 152n4 first birth, 1, 3, 7, 31, 67, 100, 118, 133n3 flood, 102, 103, 104, 156n32 freedom, 113–22; action and, 34–35; Augustine on, 52; beginnings and, 5, 34; care of, 54, 55; of creative existence, 3, 35, 114, 122; in every form of politics, 117; governmental structure and, 121–22; grace and, 49–50, 51, 52, 54; living in community and, 106; in modern constitutional state, 61, 124; paradox of, 118–20; politics of the soul and, 115–16; power and, 116–22; special status of, 113; terror and, 63; Tocqueville on, 62; in Western civilization, 3 Gestalt: creation and, 30, 31, 43–44, 73, 77; defined, 1–2; individual body as, 7; law of, 30–31; reality as, 43 Gestalten: beginnings and, 6, 11–13, 33–34, 44; destruction of, 38; of power, 2, 18, 19, 44, 53–54, 55, 71, 98; pregiven to human beings, 1–2, 113, 117, 133n3. See also time-Gestalten Gilgamesh, v God: absolute power of, 7–8; American revolution and, 149n13; biblical story of rebellion against, 50–52; as boundary of creation, 76; creation of human beings by, 13–14; divine care of, 57, 58; divine consciousness of, 37; grace of, 48, 51; human beings imagining that they are, 49; the law and, 108–10, 112; limits of human knowledge and, 47; mimesis of, 58, 60; as politician, 5, 136nn7–8 Godinho, Helder, 137n16 Golden Age, 25, 27. See also paradisiacal condition government: of human beings over themselves, 3–4, 33, 41–42, 114, 134n5; Jay on necessity of, 22; work of, 1. See also polis grace, 36, 43–52; freedom and, 49–50, 51, 52, 54; of God, 48, 51; knowledge and, 44–46, 54–55; Socrates’ gift of the gods and, 45 Habermas, Jürgen, 29 Hammurabi’s Code, 61 Han Fei, 29–30 Hanfeizi, 30, 31, 142n46

163 Harrington, James, 157n10 Hegel, G. W. F., 135n4, 153n28 Heraclitus, 38, 40–41, 108–9, 144n15, 150n8 Hesiod, 25, 27, 72, 74, 79–80, 137n12 Hobbes, Thomas, 109, 110, 143n47 Huainanzi, 15, 28, 29, 30, 32, 73, 137n12 human beings: as a beginning, 7, 10, 33, 37; caring for themselves, 1, 3, 55, 57–60, 67; classic questions of political theory about, 63; every one a polis, 40–41, 44, 52, 116; Gestalten pregiven to, 1–2, 113, 117, 133n3; God’s creation of, 13–14; governing themselves, 3–4, 33, 41–42, 114, 134n5; learning to be human beings, 55; power of time and, 96–97. See also first birth; predicament of human beings; second birth human nature: Aristotle on, 133n3; Eros and, 85–86 ibn al-’Arabi, Abu Bakr Muhammad, 139n27 Ibn Khaldûn, 18–20, 26, 116, 128, 140n15, 156n34 I Ching, 61 Israel, ancient, 61 Jay, John, 22 Jefferson, Thomas, 61 justice: Aristotle on the law and, 111; Cicero on the law and, 109, 111–12; coercion and, 141n22; as consequence of human predicament, 106–7; discrimination in the law and, 112; Empedocles on, 111; Gestalten of naked power and, 24; Plato on, 69, 70–71, 94, 95, 147n9; wisdom of, 129. See also law Kant, Immanuel, 61 Karahasan, Dževad, 135n6 King’s two bodies, 63 Klages, Ludwig, 153n28 knowledge: beginnings and, 7–8; care of human existence and, 59–60; consciousness and, 44– 45, 54, 114; grace and, 44–46, 54–55; to sustain the polis, 126 Koran, 72, 75–76 Kronos’s rule, 55–58 language: Cicero on, 12; Democritus on, 10–11, 138n13, 141n17 law, 105–12; absolutely valid, 108–10, 112, 157n21; Aristotle on, 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 156n7; as consequence of human predicament, 106–7, 114; discrimination in, 111–12; existence as form of, 106; freedom rights in, 3; government not of men but of, 107–8, 157n10; Plato on, 102–3, 107–8, 157n10, 157n12; power of, 107–8, 112; transforming bodily relations into juridical relations, 119; as work of imperfect human beings, 117. See also justice law of the Gestalt, 30–31

164 light: consciousness and, 39, 45, 114; grace and, 36, 50; human beings’ turning away from, 52 Liu An, 6, 32 Locke, John, 61, 142n43 love: Augustine on, 52; Empedocles on, 83; Eros and, 81, 82–83, 85, 89 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 63, 128 Madison, James, 17–18, 24, 149n13 Maimonides, Moses, 6, 134n1, 136n9 Manent, Pierre, 118 Mann, Thomas, 135n6 Marcus Aurelius, 107, 140n13 marionettes, allegory of, 88, 90 Melissus, 137n15 modernity, 47–49, 147n9; boundaries for human beings and, 49–50, 137n17; mastery of nature and, 48, 147n13; political, 61; in twentieth century, 129 Montesquieu, 61, 143n47 morphonoesis, 43, 145n1 Mo Ti, 97, 155n4 motion: Eros and, 81, 84; of human bodies, 16, 102; of the polis, 126; of things, 79. See also action Mo Tzu, 97 nakedness as metaphor, 29, 133n1 naked power, 20–21, 24, 25 natural man, 29 natural rights, 118–19 nature: Aristotle on, 133n3; human subjugation of, 48, 147n13; the law and, 108, 109–10, 112 need, 21, 22; paradisiacal condition and, 25, 26, 27. See also civilization: necessity of Needham, Joseph, 146n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 148n7, 154n41 Nitschke, Peter, 133n1 nonmean cause, 10, 12, 13 number, 9–14; Philo of Alexandria on, 10, 139n29; Plato on, 9, 10, 138n7. See also One, the One, the, 9, 13–14; in creation stories, 73, 75, 77, 78–79; Eros and, 83–84; ibn al-’Arabi on, 139n27; Philo of Alexandria on, 139n29; Plato on, 9, 45, 78–79, 88, 94, 138n7; Plotinus on, 145n19; society and, 40, 41, 63, 145n18; Zhuang Zi on, 138n7 Other: beginnings and, 6, 137n16; unbounded knowledge as, 46; in yourself, 66 paradisiacal condition, 24–29, 83, 141n25, 141n29, 142n42, 143n49 Pascal, Blaise, 32, 142n46 patriarchy, 156nn16–17 people of politics, 124 perichoresis, 141n25

index Pherecydes of Syros, 81 Philolaus, 9, 138n5, 139n20 philomyth, 57, 149n10 Philo of Alexandria: on evil, 154n32; hermeneutical method of, xv; on the law, 111; on number, 10, 139n29; on paradise as symbol of wisdom, 141n29, 142n42; on the soul, 105, 158n1; on the start, 134n2; symbolic/literal distinction of, 144n1 philosopher-king, 62, 71, 151n21 Plato: on beauty, 45, 89, 95; on beginning of states, 98–104; on being versus becoming, 81; on change, 32; classical political theory and, 63; creation stories and, 78–79; critique of Athenian politics and society, 62, 147n9; on education of children, 144n17; on Eros, 82–83, 84–95, 152n6; on evil, 90–93, 154n31, 154n37; on gift of the gods, 45–46; on governing by divine world-maker, 136n8; on governing oneself, 41, 134n5; on how we ought to live, 39, 68, 93–94, 144n8, 155n43; on justice, 69, 70–71, 94, 95, 147n9; on Kronos’s rule, 55–58; on laws, 102–3, 107–8, 157n10, 157n12; nonmean cause and, 10, 12, 13; on number, 9, 10, 138n7; on the One, 9, 45, 78–79, 88, 94, 138n7; on a paradisiacal age, 27; on paradoxes of the political, 141n16; on philosopher-king, 62, 71, 151n21; poleogony of, 68–71, 151n21; on the polis, 22, 68, 104, 107–8, 144n17, 155n9; on reason, 10, 88, 90; second birth and, 71, 101; separation of powers and, 41, 150n14; on the soul (see soul, Plato on); on the start, 6, 57–58, 137n11; on thought, 66–67, 69, 87, 150n3; on time, 97; on wisdom, 10, 12, 69, 94, 95, 155n47 Plotinus, 17, 18, 97, 145nn18–19 poleogony, 68–71, 151n21 polis: Anonymous Iamblichi on, 107; Aristotle on, 42, 133n3, 145n22; every human being as, 40–41, 44, 52, 116, 144n17; general concept of, 155n9; as human artifact, 129; need for second birth as, 69; Plato on, 22, 68, 104, 107–8, 144n17, 155n9; political science and, 125–27; the soul and, 115; thought and, 68; translated as state (Staat), 155n9; Voegelin on creation of, 68. See also civilization; community; society political, the: Augustine on creation story and, 50–51; changeable human situation and, 32–33; creation and, 3, 5, 31, 35, 40; myths, teachings, and traditions on, 2, 38–39; spatial existence and, 16–17; between the start and the beginning, 2. See also politics; second birth political science, 62, 125–29; Aristotle on, 140n15; of Ibn Khaldûn, 19–20, 140n15 political theory, 59–64 political thought, 59–60. See also political theory politics: for bodies, 24; border-crossing between

index scholarship and, 128; as care of human beings for themselves, 58; creative potential of, 62; dignity and importance of, 124, 128; as first reality for humans, 129; freedom for work of, 122; freedom in every form of, 117; in the human soul, 41, 115; as mimesis of God, 58–59; never proceeding from an absolute beginning, 146n3; people of, 124; religious motivations in, 61; thought and, 65. See also political, the; second birth power: of beginnings, 6, 7–8, 19, 97; of bodies, 2, 3, 15–16, 20–21, 24, 26, 29, 30, 113; civilization as Gestalt of, 2, 18, 71, 98; as civilizing force, 8; of consciousness, 40; created via second birth, 19; to enumerate the world, 13; freedom and, 116– 22; Gestalten of, 2, 18, 19, 44, 53–54, 55, 71, 98; of God, Augustine on, 13–14; of the law, 107–8, 112; lust for, 52, 154n41; paradisiacal condition and, 26; paradox of, 120–22; placing limits on political forms of, 121–22; in Plato’s Republic, 69; pregiven Gestalten of, 2, 133n3; symbolically assigned, 63; thought and, 65, 68, 69; of time, 96–97. See also creative power predicament of human beings: bodies and, 1, 21, 55–56, 112; existence as, 7, 67, 106; second, political, 106–7, 112, 114; the start and, 54, 57, 67 pre-Socratic thought: creation in, 72; Eros in, 81, 83 Prigogine, Ilya, 139n14 Pythagoreans, 9. See also Philolaus reality: the body and, 30; creation of Gestalten and, 43; destruction of Gestalten and, 38; of human existence, 49–50, 114; reason and, 49; Voegelin on creative God and, 152n10 reason: divine, Heraclitus on, 40–41, 144n15; horrors of the twentieth century and, 129; the law and, 108–10, 112; Plato on, 10, 88, 90; reality and, 49 recurrence of civilization, 98, 103 Robespierre, Maximilien, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22, 28, 142n43, 143n47, 156n20 Sallust, 116 Sandler, John, 150n14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29 Schelling, F. W. J., 136n7 second birth: Arendt on, 133n3; civilization as, 18, 38, 96; creative element in, 44; the divine and, 53–54; equality and, 41–42; grace and, 45, 50; Ibn Khaldûn on, 19; need for, 69; Plato on beginning of states and, 101; Plato’s beautiful city and, 71; as political birth, 1; power and, 19, 38, 71; start of, 53–54, 71; thought and, 53–54, 68; time and, 96; work of society and, 40, 41

165 separation of powers, 41, 150n14 sociability: bodies and, 17, 23; Eros and, 82, 83, 94; thought and, 65, 66, 68 social contract, 23, 24 society: Augustine on two principal kinds of, 52; chosen by human beings, 64; of distinct human beings as One, 63; equality and, 41–42, 63; generated by action, 35; human being as polis and, 40–41; necessity of, 19–20, 40, 69, 140n14; Plato’s general concept of, 155n9; power and, 69; thought and, 65, 66, 69; world as, 79. See also civilization; community; polis Socrates. See Plato soul: anarchy of, 105, 115–16; as community within the self, 41–42, 115–16; consciousness and, 36, 39–40, 41, 54, 114; in evil mode, 91–92; governing work of, 4, 41, 114; Philo of Alexandria on, 105, 158n1; Plotinus on, 145n19 soul, Plato on: allegory of marionettes and, 88, 90; allegory of wax and, 86–87, 90; ordered soul and, 94; politics of the soul and, 115; thought and, 66, 150n3; work of the soul and, 4, 39, 41 start [Beginn]: actual, 6–7, 137n15, 137n17; atemporal meaning of, 5, 134n2, 135n3; beginning distinguished from, 5–6; beginning of political communities and, 2, 99; Cartesian connotations of, 67, 150n7; consciousness and, 54; first birth of human beings and, 67; Hegel’s use of Anfang and, 135n4; of human civilization, 53; Maimonides on, 134n1; Philo of Alexandria on, 134n2; Plato on, 6, 57–58, 137n11; of second birth, 53–54, 71; thought and, 67–68, 70 state of nature, 23, 24 states, 98–104, 155n9 Sternberger, Dolf, 151n8 Strauss, Leo, 31, 62, 64 Tao, 5, 6, 47, 142n46 Taoism, 6, 32, 138n7 thought, 65–71; about caring for human existence, 59–60; always ethical and political, 148n6; community founded through, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70; education of, 54, 55; feast of, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 95, 114; Plato on, 66–67, 69, 87, 150n3; power and, 65, 68, 69; second birth of human beings and, 53–54, 68; society and, 65, 66, 69. See also cognition time, 96–104, 114; beginning of states and, 101–4; creation of, 5, 134nn1–2; slipping into the future, 37 time-Gestalten, 97, 100–101, 103, 114 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 62, 63, 128 traditions of different civilizations, xv–xvi, 2, 38– 39, 40. See also creation stories train station, bodies moving in, 2, 23

166 trinitarian form: in Christian theology, 141n25, 150n14; in politics, 150n14; of society, power, and thought, 69 Upanishads, 74 Valéry, Paul, 135n6 Voegelin, Eric, 61, 62, 68, 128, 135n5, 144n6, 149n18, 152n10

index wax, allegory of, 86–87, 90 White, Theodore H., 116–17 wisdom: Eros and, 155n47; paradise as symbol of, 141n29, 142n42; Plato on, 10, 12, 69, 94, 95, 155n47 Zeus: Eros and, 81, 85–86; the law and, 109 Zhuang Zi (Zhuang-Zhou), 138n7