TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
63
radicalized this new essence in the only way it could still be further
developed, namely in leaps and reversals.
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to
a past which has lost its authority. They were the first who dared
to think without the guidance of any authority whatsoever; yet, for
better and worse, they were stilI held by the categorical framework
of the great tradition.
In
some respects we are better off. We need
no longer be concerned with their scorn for the "educated philis–
tines," who all through the nineteenth century tried to make up
for the loss of authentic authority with a spurious glorification of cul–
ture. To most people today, this culture looks like a field of ruins
which, far from being able to claim any authority, can hardly com–
mand their interest. This fact may be deplorable, but implicit in it
is
the great chance to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by
any tradition, with a directness which has disappeared from occi–
dental reading and hearing ever since the Romans submitted to
Greek civilization.
III
The leaps and inversions of the rebels against tradition were
all caused by some new experience which they tried almost instan–
taneously to overcome and resolve into something old. Kierkegaard's
leap from doubt into belief was a reversal and a distortion of the
traditional relationship between reason and faith .
It
was the answer
to the modern loss of faith, not only in God but in reason as well,
which was inherent in Descartes'
De omnibus dubitandum est,
with
its underlying suspicion that things may not
be
as they appear and
that an evil spirit may willfully and forever hide truth from the minds
of man. Marx's leap from theory into action, and from contemplation
into labor, came after Hegel had transformed metaphysics
into
a
philosophy of history and changed the philosopher into the historian
to whose backward glance eventually, at the end of time, the mean–
ing of becoming and motion, not of being and truth, would reveal
itself. Nietzsche's leap from the non-sensuous transcendent realm of
ideas and measurements into the sensuousness of life, his "inverted
Platonism" or "trans-valuation of values," as he himself would call
it, was the last attempt to turn away from the tradition, an attempt
which succeeded only
in
turning tradition upside down.
