Doubtless Kant did not exaggerate Hume’s merits when he wrote in his Prolegomena that since the beginning of philosophy no one had ever discovered a truth equal in importance to that which Hume discovered. As if scales had suddenly dropped from his eyes, Hume saw that the “necessary” bonds established by men between phenomena are only relationships of fact, that there is no “necessity” in the world, and that those who speak of necessity only “dream of being” but cannot see it in waking reality. Hume was too balanced a man—and one, moreover, who valued his equilibrium more than anything else in the world—to be able to appreciate and utilize the great discovery that he had made. One may, if one wishes, say as much of all those men whose eyes have been opened and who have been permitted to see extraordinary things; the sun of truth blinds the inhabitants of the kingdom of darkness with its brilliance. Hume ended up by restoring to Necessity almost all its sovereign rights; but Kant, not being able to bear the “almost” that no one had noticed, accomplished his Copernican task and directed our thought anew into that “sure and royal way” which mathematics had followed for centuries.
Hume’s sudden discovery had awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. But is it given to men to be awake on earth? And is “nature that does not sleep,”6 to use Plotinus’ term, man’s natural state? On the other hand, does not “to dream in sleep or while awake mean to take that which resembles (reality) not for something that resembles (reality) but for the reality that it resembles?”7 Necessity resembles what really exists like two drops of water resemble each other, but it is not what really exists; it only seems really to exist for him who dreams. Hume’s barely perceptible “almost” would have been able to render immense services to thinking and searching humanity if it had been preserved under the form in which it first appeared to the Scottish philosopher. But Hume himself was afraid of what he had seen and hastened to throw away everything that had fallen to his hand so as to have it no longer under his eyes. As for Kant, he found that this was still not enough and he transferred Hume’s “almost” outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori into the transcendental and noumenal—i.e., completely inaccessible, without relationship to us and without usefulness for us—world of things in themselves (Ding an sich). The shock that he had received from Hume awakened the great philosopher of Königsberg from his sleep. But Kant understood his mission and destiny to mean that he must at all costs defend himself and others against the eventuality of sudden and brutal shocks that interrupt the peace of our somnolent waking, and he proceeded to create his “critical philosophy.” At the same time as Hume’s “almost,” all metaphysics was transferred outside the limits of synthetic judgments a priori which, since Kant, have inherited all the rights of the old Necessity and have, for a century and a half, guaranteed to European humanity undisturbed sleep and faith in itself.
It is obvious that for Aristotle the most intolerable and distressing of thoughts was that our earthly life is not the last, definitive, truly real life and that an awakening, be it only in a certain measure, is possible—an awakening similar to that which we know in coming out of sleep. When he attacked Plato’s “ideas” he was trying above all to rid himself of this eventuality which was, to him, worse than a nightmare. And his distress was, in a certain sense, completely justified, as was Kant’s distress when Hume, with his “almost,” so brutally awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Plato’s “they dream,” quite like Hume’s denial of any necessary bonds between phenomena, undermines the very foundations of human thought. Nothing is impossible. Anything that one wishes can flow from anything that one wishes and the principle of contradiction, which Aristotle wished to consider as “the most unshakable of principles,” begins to totter, discovering to the frightened human mind the kingdom of the absolutely arbitrary which threatens to destroy the world and the thought which seeks to know the world; einai kai noein (being and thought) become phantoms. How could Plato have permitted himself to speak of his cave? How could he have imagined it? How could Hume have dared to deny the rights of Necessity? And does not humanity owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Aristotle and to Kant, to the first for having put an end, by his severe criticism and indignant cries, to the fantastic tendencies of his teacher, and to the second for having led our thought back into its natural groove by his doctrine of synthetic judgments a priori?
There cannot be two answers to these questions. Aristotle is the founder not only of the positive sciences but also of the positive philosophy. It is not for nothing that the Middle Ages saw in him the only guide through the labyrinth of life and did not dare to open the books, written without him (and perhaps also not for him), of the Old and New Testaments. The new philosophy has always followed, and still continues to follow, the paths that he marked out. One can say the same thing of Kant: he subdued the disquieting spirit of doubt and “forced it to bow its rebellious head before the angelic visage of the universal and the necessary.
Necessity has obtained its justification—a justification of which it had no need at all. The celebrities of science, like all the ordinary scientists, glorify Necessity, even though it be as indifferent to blame as to praise. Only the wicked or the foolish can doubt its sovereign rights. But has this human defense rendered it stronger and more vigorous? Or should we not, perhaps, put the question differently: does not its force come from the fact that men have taken it under their protection and have surrounded it with an insurmountable wall made of formulas of incantation forged through the centuries?
III
Although Seneca may not have been an original philosopher, he succeeded quite well at times, as is known, in expressing the thought of others. Everything discussed in our preceding chapters was formulated by him in a few words that have become famous: Ipse omnium conditor et rector . . . semper paret, semel jussit (The founder and guide of all things . . . always obeys, but has commanded only once). So thought Seneca, so thought the ancients, so all of us think. God commanded only once and, thereafter, He and all men after Him no longer command but obey. He commanded a long time ago, an infinitely long time ago, so that He Himself has forgotten when and under what circumstances there occurred this absurd, unique of its kind, and consequently unnatural, event. Perhaps, having taken on this habit of passive and submissive existence, God has even forgotten how to command; perhaps, like us ordinary mortals, He can only obey. In other words, the will to act that He once manifested forever exhausted His creative energy, and now He is condemned, like the world that He created, to fulfill His own prescriptions, prescriptions that He Himself can no longer violate. To put it still differently, the Creator of the world has Himself become subordinate to Necessity which He created and which, without at all seeking or desiring it, has become the sovereign of the universe.
I repeat: Seneca’s formula belongs unquestionably to him, but the thought that he expresses is not his own. So thought and so continue to think all the learned men of all countries. Why do they think so? Were they witnesses of the world’s creation, or did the Creator reveal his secret to any of them? No one was present at the creation of the world, no one can any longer boast of any special intimacy with the Creator. The thought expressed by Seneca allured men because the mysterious and inconceivable moment of command (jubere) as pushed back into the eternity of the past and declared unique (semel jussit), while for ordinary usage men chose obedience, the parere, which seems to be the comprehensible, natural, and normal fate not only of the creature but also of the Creator Himself. And, indeed, Seneca was right: in the parere everything is comprehensible, clear to all, and—consequently—natural, while in the jubere everything is mysterious, arbitrary and—consequently—fantastic, eternally inconceivable and puzzling.
Had it been possible, Seneca and those from whom Seneca learned to “think” would have preferred not to remember the mysterious jubere at all. No one has ever commanded anything, all have always done nothing but obey; for there has never been anything supernatural or mysterious, either in the remotest times or in our own day. Everything has always been dear and natural. And the task of philosophy is then to strengthen and sustain Necessity by all the means at its disposal. But what are these means? It is not given mortals to change anything whatsoever of the nature of Necessity, to enhance or
