HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
29
philosophy indicates with rare precision the nature of the perplexities
which caused the modern age to shift its emphasis from a theory of
politics, apparently so much more appropriate to its belief in the
superiority of action to contemplation, to an essentially contempla–
tive philosophy of history. For Kant was perhaps the only great
thinker to whom the question: "What shall I do?" was not only as
relevant as the two other questions of metaphysics: "What can I
know?" and "What may I hope?", but formed the very center of
his philosophy. Therefore he was not troubled, as even Marx and
Nietzsche were later troubled, by the traditional hierarchy of contem–
plation over action, the
vita contemplativa
over the
vita activa;
nor was
his
problem the traditional hierarchy within the
vita activa
itself, where the acting of the statesman occupies the highest position,
the making of the craftsman and artist an intermediary, and the
laboring which provides the necessities for the functioning of the
human organism, the lowest. (Marx was later to reverse this hierarchy
too, although he wrote explicitly only about elevating action over
contemplation and changing the world as against interpreting it. In
the course of this reversal he had to upset the traditional hierarchy
within the
vita activa
as well, by putting the lowest of human ac–
tivities, the activity of labor, into the highest place. Action now ap–
peared to be no more than a function of "the productive relation–
ships" of mankind brought about by labor.) Kant's problem instead
coincided with another evaluation which also belongs to the mainstays
of traditional political and metaphysical thought, though it usually
remains hidden and is rarely articulated fully. Traditional philosophy
often pays only lip service to the estimate of action as the highest
activity of man, preferring the so much more reliable activity
of making.
However that may be, Kant could not but become aware of
the fact that action fulfilled neither of the two hopes the modern
age was bound to expect from it.
If
the secularization of our
world implies the revival of the old desire for some kind of earthly
immortality, then human action, especially in its political aspect,
must appear singularly inadequate to meet the demands of the
new age. From the point of view of motivation, action appears to be
the least interesting and most futile of all human pursuits: "Passions,
private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires
1
are ... the most
