PANT/SAN liEYI EW
viction on the other, that I know only what I have myself made,
bas
led
to
the complete
meaninglessness inevitably resulting
from
the insight that I can choose to do whatever I want and some
kind of "meaning" will always be the consequence. In both instances,
the perplexity is that the particular incident, the observable fact or
single occurrence of nature, or the reported deed and event of
history, have ceased to make sense without a universal process in
which they are supposedly embedded; yet, the moment man ap–
proaches this process in order to escape the haphazard character of
the particular, in order to find meaning-order and necessity-his
effort is rebutted by the answer from all sides: any order, any
necessity, any meaning you wish to impose will do. This is the clearest
possible demonstration that under these conditions there is neither
necessity nor meaning. It is as though the "melancholy haphazard–
ness" of the particular had now caught up with us and were pur–
suing us into the very region where the generations before us had
fled in order to escape it. The decisive factor in this experience, both
in nature and history, is not the patterns with which we tried to
"explain," and which in the social and historical sciences cancel each
other out more quickly, because they can all be consistently proved,
than they do in the natural sciences where matters are more complex
and for this technical reason less open to the irrelevant arbitrariness
of irresponsible opinions. These opinions, to be sure, have an alto–
gether different source, but are liable to becloud the very relevant
issue of contingency, with which we are everywhere confronted today.
What is decisive is that our technology, which nobody can accuse of
not functioning, is based on these principles and that our social
techniques, whose real field of experimentation lies in the totalitarian
countries, have only to overcome a certain time-lag to be able to
do for the world of human relations and human affairs as much as
has already been done for the world of human artifacts.
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to
a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.
All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed them–
selves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These pro–
cesses, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the
given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which
originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to
