The Reality of the Divine Command
§4
THE REVELATION OF THE COMMAND
The truth of God is not a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. It reveals itself in the concrete event of our own conduct as our decision for or against the command of the good that is given to us.
1
If according to Pythagoras it is true that in a right triangle the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides equals the square of the longest side, this is a general and theoretical and consequently a conditioned truth. If it is true that the earth is a sphere slightly flattened at the two poles, or that the German Empire was founded in 1871, or that there has been an intermediate biological stage between man and a superior chimpanzee, or that we may shortly expect a revolutionary change in the whole surface of the earth which will necessarily have the most serious consequences for all of us, or that our life is determined at its most important points by the conjunction of the planets on our birthday, or that the whole cosmos is evolving from matter to spirit and God has achieved self-awareness in this process, then all these empirically demonstrable facts of nature and history, all these scientific hypotheses, all these speculative, metaphysical constructions, no matter how strict might be the differentiation between them, are both corporately and individually general and theoretical and consequently conditioned truths, like all other acknowledged or alleged truths on this level. They are general truths to the extent that I can assert them as such without the fact of my being this specific person having any significance; to the extent that in asserting them I must consciously ignore as far as possible my own subjectivity, which could only disrupt the objectivity of my knowledge. They are theoretical truths to the extent that I can best assert them with the participation of one who is as far as possible a nonparticipant, an onlooker, a spectator, a spectator even of my own life if they affect my own life; to the extent that in asserting them no act of my own is needed but that of calculation, observation, and syllogistic combination along with a bit of experience and intuition; to the extent that my own action consists only in contemplation and the actual assertion itself. They are consequently conditioned truths to the extent that their assertion is reached on the presupposition that I am “born to observe and ordained to see,”1 that the criteria of truth that I use in this act are true criteria of truth, that the significance of my assertion of these truths will not be hurt if it is conditioned by myself, by the ineradicable remnant of subjectivity without which there can be no objectivity, conditioned by my practice (as which even the purest and most passive theōrein must finally be claimed), conditioned by the question of truth which is obviously put to me and which challenges my knowledge of truth as such. There is no doubt that even in the shadow of this last question of truth which we ourselves link with its being conditioned, we can to a large extent be glad about our knowledge of general and theoretical truths, so glad that it might seem to be unprofitably scrupulous of us even to think of the shadow. But no matter what our view of it may be, all these truths are in fact challenged as such by the question of truth, the question of ourselves and what we do, the question which we would like to exclude as much as possible when we think generally and theoretically but which itself includes within itself our general and theoretical thinking. Whether we pay attention to it or not, this question is posed and it is the ethical question. |
The superior truth in question here, the truth of my conduct (including my theōrein and therefore the condition on which my assertions are assertions of truth), the truth of my life and existence is the truth of the good. All general or theoretical truth, from the truth that two and two make four to the boldest achievable knowledge of higher worlds,2 and no matter how clear and certain they may be in themselves, stand in the brackets of the question whether my life and therefore my action and therefore my theōrein has a part in the truth of a basically different and higher order, in the truth of the good. They thus stand in the brackets of the ethical question. It is so much a matter of the truth of another order that the inquiry which it implies in relation to the bracketed general and theoretical truths does not relate to their content (how two and two make four or how it stands with the final question that is directed to me as the one who asserts this truth). It is so much a matter of another order that a removal of the brackets in the sense of a general and theoretical answer to the question, in the sense of an extension of our general and theoretical knowledge by knowledge of this supreme truth is ruled out in advance. From the very outset those who deal with it with this in view deal with it in vain. With what right, however, do we refer here to the truth of a higher order? Because at best all general and theoretical truth cannot be more than clearly and certainly asserted being. But all being—no clear and certain assertion can evade this condition, as is most evident in the case of mathematics as perhaps the clearest and most certain of all the sciences—all being, as true being, as ontos einai,3 if we are not content merely to assert it, is not grounded in itself but in a hypothesis or presupposition of being which itself, if the same question is not to repeat itself ad infinitum, cannot be thought of as being but only as not being, cannot be thought of as the beginning or source or mother-ground of being but only as its negation and position, as the pure origin of its being which as that of Creator to creature stands in no continuity with it and which cannot possibly be sought on the level of general and theoretical, mathematical and physical, historical and psychological, or metaphysical and metapsychological truths, on the empirical or the speculative way. If it is sought there, no matter how sublimely, something other will always be found, perhaps another theoretical and general truth, but another truth which, significant though it may be, and absolute though it may be in our own thinking, is still a truth of being which stands in the same need of regress, of validation by another criterion, as all other truths of being, all other truths sought and found at this point. |
The question of origin shows itself to be such, to be the question of truth in truth, of superior, unconditional truth, not by the fact that we ascribe to its object this character of general and theoretical absoluteness—for in so doing we should admit that we do not know what we are about and show how unattainable this superiority is—but by the fact that it is understood as the question that is primarily put by the object to us, to our action, and undoubtedly to our theōrein, though not to a theōrein abstracted from our existence as contemplation, but to our existential theōrein, and beyond that to the fact of our existence in general, to our life-act. We are asking about the unconditional when we ask unconditionally as we do not do in general and theoretical asking, i.e., when our asking expresses the basic acknowledgment that we are asked. We see it as the question of the origin that precedes all being when we see it as being prior in order to the questions of our general and theoretical thinking. But we see it as being genuinely prior in order to these questions when we do not see it as our question—as such it could only be general and theoretical
