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PARTISAN REVIEW
Different as these rebellions against tradition are in content and
intention, their results have an ominous similarity: Kierkegaard,
jumping from doubt into belief, carried doubt into religion, trans–
formed the attack of modern science on religion into an inner–
religious struggle, so that since then sincere religious experience has
seemed possible only in the tension between doubt and belief, in
torturing one's beliefs with one's doubts and relaxing from this tor–
ment in the violent affirmation of the absurdity of both the human
condition and man's belief. No clearer symptom of this modern re–
ligious situation can be found than the fact that Dostoevsky, perhaps
the most experienced psychologist of modern religious beliefs, por–
trayed pure faith in the character of Myshkin,
The Idiot.
Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the
theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theo–
retical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology,
than it ever had been before. Since, moreover, his springboard was
not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically
Hegel's philosophy of history as Kierkegaard's springboard had been
Descartes' philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the "law of history"
upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action
no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when
he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history.
Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence
o~-"lif;7nd
the
sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and tran–
scendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure,
judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly
called nihilism. Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist, but on the contrary
was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the no–
tions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he dis–
covered in his attempt at "trans-valuation" was that within this
categorical framework the sensuous loses its very
raison d'etre
when
it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent.
This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning–
about operations in which the tradition found its end. "The deposition
of the suprasensuous removes also the mere sensuous and its differ–
entiation.... The deposition ends in senselessness" (Martin Heideg–
ger, "Nietzsches Wort 'Gott is tot' " in
H olzwege) .
