PYRRHUS AND CYNEAS
333
Messiah says the same; who is to distinguish between them? They can
be recognized only by their works, but how shall we decide whether
these works are good or evil? We will decide in the name of a human
good. Thus every ethic proceeds, which attempts to justify itself by divine
transcendence; it postulates a human good and affirms that it is desired
by God because he is good. Claude! affirms that it is needful to prefer
order to disorder because order is, while disorder is the negation of
being; because order is intrinsically superior
to
disorder, we proclaim it
as in conformity with the design of God. But Claude! forgets that, as
Spinoza and Bergson showed, it is only man's viewpoint which makes
order appear so;
is
Claude!'s order that of God? There is bourgeois
order, socialist order, democratic order, fascist order, and each is disorder
in the eyes of its opponent. Every society claims always to have God on
its side, it thus recreates him in its own likeness; it is the society which
speaks and not God.
H
I turn to myself for interrogation I hear only
the beating of my own heart. The Catholic church and the Protestant
individualist can rightly reproach each other with taking for divine in–
spiration the echo of their personal convictions. Neither outside myself
nor within me shall I meet God himself; never shall I see any celestial
sign traced upon the earth; if it is so traced, it is terrestrial. Man cannot
be illumined by God, it is by man that one would try to illumine God.
It
is through man that the call of God will always be heard, and it is
through human enterprise that man will answer to that call. So God if
be existed would be powerless to guide human transcendence. Man never
stands but before men, and that presence or absence at the back of the
sky does not concern him.
ACTION
This then is my position in regard to other men; men are free, and
I am flung into the world amid these alien liberties. I have need of others
for once I have passed my own goal my actions would recoil on them–
selves inert, useless, were they not carried by new projects towards a
new future. A man who would survive a universal cataclysm alone upon
the earth, would have to try, like Ezekiel, to revive humanity, or he
would have no recourse but to die. The movement of my transcendence
appears to me vain as soon as I have gone beyond it, but if my trans–
cendence continually prolongs itself through others, beyond the
aim
which
I am at present formulating, I shall never be able to transcend it.
In order to enable my transcendence to be transcended, it would be
necessary for all humanity to extend my aims towards ends which were
my own; who then would transcend it? Outside of this there would
be
none, all humanity would be my accomplice and none might judge me.
But this hope must be foregone; men are separate and opposed. I must
be resolved for the fight.
