UNDERSTANDING AND POLITICS
387
deduced in stringent logical consistency. (Here truth becomes indeed
what some logicians pretend it is, namely consistency, except that
this equation actually implies the negation of the existence of truth
insofar as truth is always supposed to reveal something, whereas
consistency is only a mode of fitting statements together, and as
such lacks the power of revelation. The new logical movement in
philosophy, which grew out of pragmatism, has a frightening
af–
finity with the totalitarian transformation of the pragmatic elements,
inherent in all ideologies, into logicality, which severs its ties to
reality and experience altogether. Of course, totalitarianism proceeds
in a cruder fashion, which unfortunately, by the same token, is
also more effective.) The chief political distinction between common
sense and logic is that common sense presupposes a common world
into which we all fit and where we can live together because we
possess one sense which controls and adjusts
all
strictly particular
sense data to those of all others, whereas logic and all self-evidence
from which logical reasoning proceeds can claim a reliability al–
together independent of the world and the existence of other people.
It
has often been observed that the validity of the statement
2+2=4
is independent of the human condition, that it is equally valid for
God and man.
In
other words, wherever common sense, the political
sense par excellence, fails us in our need for understanding, we are all
too likely to accept logicality as its substitute, because the capacity
for logical reasoning itself is also common to us all. But this common
human capacity which functions even under conditions of complete
separation from world and experience and which is strictly "within"
us, without any bond to something "given," is unable to understand
anything and, left to itself, utterly sterile. Only under conditions where
the common realm
between
men is destroyed and the only reliability
left consists in the meaningless tautologies of the self-evident, can this
capacity become "productive," develop its own lines of thought
whose chief political characteristic is that they always carry with
them a compulsory power of persuasion. To equate thought and
understanding with these logical operations means to level down
the capacity for thought, which for thousands of years has been
deemed to be the highest capacity of man, to its lowest common de–
nominator where no differences in actual existence count any longer,
not even the qualitative difference between the essence of God and
men.
