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could be. Yet Kierkegaard's attempt to save faith from the onslaught
of modernity made even religion modern, that is, subject to doubt
and distrust. Traditional beliefs disintegrated into absurdity when
Kierkegaard tried to reassert them on the assumption that man can–
not trust the truth-receiving capacity of his reason or his senses.
Marx knew that the incompatibility between classical political
thought and modern political conditions lay in the accomplished fact
of the French and Industrial Revolutions, which together had raised
labor, traditionally the most despised of all human activities, to the
highest rank of productivity and pretended to be able to assert the
time-honored ideal of freedom under unheard-of conditions of uni–
versal equality. He knew that the question was only superficially posed
in the idealistic assertions of the equality of man, the inborn dignity
of every human being, and only superficially answered by giving
laborers the right to vote. This was not a problem of justice that
could be solved by giving the new class of workers its due, after which
the old order of
suum cuique
would be restored and function as in
the past. There is the fact of the basic incompatibility between the
traditional concepts making labor itself the very symbol of man's sub–
jection to necessity and the modern age which saw labor elevated
to express man's positive freedom, the freedom of productivity.
It
is
from the impact of labor, that is to say, of necessity in the traditional
sense, that Marx endeavored to save philosophical thought, deemed
by the tradition to be the freest of all human activities. Yet when he
proclaimed that "you cannot abolish philosophy without realizing it,"
he thus began subjecting thought .also to the inexorable tyranny of
necessity, to the "iron law" of productive forces in society.
Nietzsche's devaluation of values, like Marx's labor theory of
value, arises from the incompatibility between the traditional "ideas,"
which, as transcendent units, had been used to recognize and measure
human thoughts and actions, and modern society, which had dis–
solved all such standards into relationships between its members, es–
tablishing them as functional "values." Values are social commodi–
ties that have no significance of their own but, like other commodi–
ties, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkages .and
commerce. Through this relativization both the things which man
produces for his use and the standards according to which he lives
