TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
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not be upheld under the conditions of science becoming active and
doing
in order to know. When the trust that things appear as they
really are was gone, the concept of truth as revelation had become
doubtful and with it the unquestioning faith in a revealed God. The
notion of theory changed its meaning. It no longer meant a system
of reasonably connected truths which as such had not been made but
given to reason and the senses. Rather it became the modern scientific
theory which is a working hypothesis, changing in accordance with
the results it produces and depending for its validity not on what
it "reveals" but on whether it "works." By the same process, Plato's
ideas lost their autonomous power to illuminate the world and the
universe. First they became what they had been for Plato only in
their relationship to the political realm, standards and measure–
ments-the regulating, limiting forces of man's own reasoning mind,
as they appear in Kant. Then, after the priority of reason over doing,
of the mind prescribing its rules to the actions of men, had been
lost in the transformation of the whole world by the Industrial Revo–
lution-a transformation the success of which seemed to prove that
man's doings and fabrications prescribe their rules to reason-these
ideas finally became mere values whose validity is determined not
by one or many men but by society as a whole in its everchanging
functional needs.
These values in their ex- and inter-changeability are the only
"ideas" left to (and understood by) "socialized men." These are men
who have decided never to leave what to Plato was "the cave" of
everyday human affairs, and never to venture on their own into a
world and a life which, perhaps, the ubiquitous functionalization
of modern society has deprived of one of its most elementary charac–
teristics--the instilling of wonder at that which is as it is. This very
real development is reflected and foreshadowed in Marx's political
thought. Turning the tradition upside down within its own frame–
work, he did not actually get rid of Plato's ideas, though he did
record the darkening of the clear sky where those ideas, as well as
many other presences, had once become visible to the eyes of men.
