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PARTISAN REVIEW
tion of those anthropomorphic-normative systems, with the help of
which, since the pre-Socratics, the metaphysical tradition has kept the
explanation and the evaluation of the world entangled together at
the cost of insoluble contradictions. True, the conceptual world of
Greek objectivism, especially its amalgamation with the Christian doc–
trine of salvation which is still effective today, meant a great step
beyond the naive personalization of nature in the myth; but for
it
too the human agent, the citizen and artist, w.as the measure of all
things. The military array and political law of the Greek citizen–
soldier are archetype and measure for Cosmos and Nomos, world–
order and world-law.
As
punishment follows guilt, so effect follows
cause: man understands causality on the basis of inviolable law. The
skillful artisan produces utensils according to a well-considered plan,
and the: archetypal plans lie ready in the same way in the realm of
the ideas. Physis, Nature, the great birth-giver, creates her living
forms out of resisting matter. And over Cosmos and Nomos, over
Aitia and Telos, over Eidos and Morphe, rules Logos, value-bearing
order, meaning.
Thus there arose a world view whose fascinating power lay pre–
cisely in its objective weakness: it was an
interpretation ot the cosmos
after
the measure of man and society, but it seemed to permit a
reversal of the relation, an interpretation of man and society after
the measure of the cosmos.
1
And with the pathos of the absolute it
fought the simple relativistic
homo-mensura
(man the measure of all
things) principle of the sophists, which did not permit this reversal.
But the fundamental inadequacies of this anthropomorphic-normative
world-picture remained for a long time unnoticed, since it seemed
to harmonize with indubitable matters of fact: with the invariability
of the course of nature, with the independence of mathematics and
logic from experience, with the inexplicable but undeniable regular–
ities of biological morphogenesis and the permanence of species. The
world of nature remained undiscriminated from the world of values–
as is still shown by the fact that the word "law" is ambiguous even
today.
To be sure, the flaws in this conception appeared as soon as the
relation of reality and value was conceived with greater conceptual
precision or became a pressing vital problem for human beings. Hera–
clitus complains-as do the Stoics later--of the disobedience of people
