THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXISTENTIALISM
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to the "cosmic law," and Plato touches in the
Parmenides
on the al–
ternative of building up the realm of ideas from the general concept–
which also embraces the anti-valuable-or of receiving into the ideal
world only the valuable, thus already presupposing a normative cri–
terion. Again, with Aristotle the concept of the "natural," the model
of human purposive action, fails when it comes to giving ethical
directions for actual decisions. What is to pass in the ethical sense
as "truly according to nature" is determined not by recourse to any
sort of "nature," but by positive morality. In Stoic speculation all
those personalizing analogies lead to empty tautological word-play
like the familiar equation Telos=Physis- Nomos= Logos=Kosmos,
i.e., the Ideal=the Natural Natural Law- Divine Law=Cosmos.
Since values could not be founded on this basis, the irrationality
and irrelevance to value of the cosmic process had to be noted. As
early as in classical tragedy the belief in a rational, value-bearing
world order was linked with belief in the political order; and this
is the archetype of the cosmos-metaphysics. The road from Aeschylus
to Euripides is the road from the victorious height of the city-state
culture of Athens after the Persian wars to its collapse, and at the
same time from the confident trust in a hard but just providence to
resignation before the capricious play of Fortune. The Stoics worked
out most clearly the basic contradiction involved here, not however
recognizing it as such, and without drawing its consequences : their
metaphysics viewed reality "as a well-ordered city" under the inviol–
able world law of Logos, their ethic demanded the steadfastness of the
sage in the struggle against the whims of irrational Fortune.
"
The fact that these fallacies and contradictions were not
recognized as such even by important thinkers, arises principally
from causes outside the area of theory and logic.
In the first place, the distinction between knowledge and value
is entirely foreign to the naive world-view from which philosophy
too springs. Everyday consciousness and everyday language, into
which the human being grows from childhood on, do not distinguish
any purified, objective knowledge worked out by critical methods,
but, so to speak, a ready-to-use total orientation, which already unites
