TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
69
IV
Self-defeat, the result of all three challenges to tradition
in the nineteenth century, is only one and perhaps the most super–
ficial thing Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche have in common. More
important is the fact that each of their rebellions seems to be con–
centrated on the same, ever-repeated subject: Against the alleged
abstractions of philosophy and its concept of man as an
animal ra–
tionale,
Kierkegaard wants to assert concrete and suffering men; Marx
confirms that man's humanity consists of his productive and active
force which in its most elementary aspect he calls labor-power; and
Nietzsche insists on creation and power. In complete independence
of one another-none of them ever knew of the others' existence–
they arrive at the conclusion that this enterprise in terms of the tra–
dition can be achieved only through a mental operation best described
in the images and similes of leaps, inversions and turning concepts
upside down. (Kierkegaard speaks of his leap from doubt into be–
lief; Marx turns H egel, or rather "Plato and the whole Platonic tra–
dition" (Sidney Hook), "right side up again," leaping "from the
realm of necessity into the realm of freedom"; and Nietzsche under–
stands his philosophy as "inverted Platonism" and "transformation of
all values.")
The turning operations with which the tradition ends bring the
beginning to light in a twofold sense : the very assertion of one side of
the
opposites-fides
against
intellectus, praxis
against
thearia,
sensuous
perishable life against permanent unchanging suprasensuous truth–
necessarily brings to light the repudiated opposite and shows that
both have meaning and significance only
in
this opposition. Further–
more, to think in terms of such opposites is not a matter of course,
but is grounded in a first great turning operation on which all others
ultimately are based because it established the opposites in whose
tension the tradition moves. This first turning-about is Plato's
peri–
agage hazes tes p:fyches,
the turning-about of the whole human being,
which he tells-as though it were a story with beginning and end
and not merely a mental operation-in the parable of the cave in
the
R epublic.
The story of the cave unfolds in three stages: the first turning–
about takes place in the cave itself when one of the inhabitants frees
