TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
71
to the surface of the earth. But this reversal of Homer did not actually
tum Homer upside down or downside up, since the dichotomy within
which such an operation alone can take place is of Platonic origin
and quite alien to the Homeric world. No turning about of the tra–
dition can therefore ever land us in the original Homeric "position."
It is true that Plato set forth his doctrine of ideas solely for political
purposes in the form of a reversal of Homer; but thereby he estab–
lished the framework within which such turning operations are not
far-fetched possibilities but predetermined by the conceptual struc–
ture itself. The development of philosophy in late antiquity in the
various schools, which fought each other with a fanaticism unequaled
in the pre-Christian world, consists of turnings-about and shifting
emphases on one of two opposite terms, made possible by Plato's
separation of a world of mere shadowy appearance and the world of
eternally true ideas. He himself had given the first example in the
periagoge
from the cave to the sky. When Hegel finally, in a last
gigantic effort, had gathered together into one consistent self-develop–
ing whole the various strands of traditional philosophy as they had
developed from Plato's original concept, the same splitting up into two
conflicting schools of thought, though on a much lower level, took
place, and right-wing and left-wing, idealistic and materialistic, Hegel–
ians could for a short while dominate philosophical thought.
The significance of Kierkegaard's, Marx's, and Nietzsche's chal–
lenges to the tradition- though none of them would have been pos–
sible without the synthesizing achievement of Hegel and his concept
of history-is that they constitute a much more radical turning-about
than the mere upside-down operations with their weird oppositions be–
tween sensualism and idealism, materialism and spiritualism, and even
immanentism and transcendentalism imply.
If
Marx had been merely
a "materialist" who brought Hegel's "idealism" down to earth, his
influence would have been as short-lived and limited to scholarly
quarrels as that of his contemporaries. .Hegel's basic a5.'!umption was
that the dialectical movement of thought is identical with the dialec–
tical movement of matter itself. Thus he hoped to bridge the abyss
which Descartes had opened between man, defined as
res cogitans
J
and the world, defined as
res extensa
J
between cognition and reality,
thinking and being. The spiritual homelessness of modern man finds
its first expressions in this Cartesian perplexity and the Pascalian
