mihai gheorghiu, cogito

Libertatea ca ieşire din subterană




Raţiune, nihilism şi servitute voluntară

Comunismul a însemnat pentru fiecare din noi existenţa în subterană, existenţa în servitute şi în falsitate ca raportare la noi înşine. Libertatea captivă a subteranei a putut lăsa impresia unei existenţe, a fost însă numai o pseudo-existenţă, surogatul unei existenţe, existenţa sclavului supus. Bineînţeles că am putut trăi, am putut fi actorii unor libertăţi minimale, a unei existenţe cotidiene aflate în puterea mecanismului obişnuinţei şi supravieţuirii. Paradoxul substanţial şi totodată condiţia de existenţă a oricărei societăţi alienate prin teroare este producerea simulacrului a ceea ce anihilează. Originalul, existenţa ca atare, sucombă în simulacru. Viaţa subzistă biologic şi convenţional în simulacrul libertăţii care este esenţa unei existenţe personale. Simulacrul este impersonalul, este chipul fără chip al unei existenţe posedate de servitute şi falsitate, deposedate de libertate, adică de proiect. Pentru că cel ce subzistă în servitute este un acelaşi mereu, un cerc vicios al propriei sale existenţe umane, o imposibilitate continuă de a deveni. Servitutea voluntară şi personală e un act al neputinţei sau al rătăcirii, servitutea generală impusă prin teroare este un act politic, o instaurare perversă a puterii. Această putere aplatizează fiinţa umană, propria mea fiinţă, până la gramajul unei urme; omul devine aici propria sa urmă, urma debilă a unei forţe prezenţe, fie ea o prezenţă a slăbiciunii, a rătăcirii sau a rectitudinii, dar oricum o prezenţă umană. În această instaurare a unei puteri perverse pentru că nu mai este umană, adică nu mai este responsabilă de şi pentru umanitate, omul dispare, este suprimat şi pus ca absenţă, el nu mai răspunde, sinele său e dizolvat. Numele său devine numele unei absenţe. Ceea ce îl goleşte de sine însuşi nu este aici banul, capitalul sau cnutul unei violenţe primare şi conjecturale, ci “totul”, adică imensitatea concretă şi abstractă a unei instituiri totale a unui mecanism de reproducere a tot ceea ce există, o producere continuă şi completă a falsului, a erorii. O maşină a minciunii, o maşină de produs simulacre, care va produce inclusiv simulacrul, dublul perfectat ca obiect. De aici, din această condiţie totul e posibil împotriva existenţei sale ca persoană, împotriva libertăţii sale. Aici, plasat în lumea obiectelor de instanţa puterii prin teroare, nu-i rămâne decât să fie pur şi simplu, fără a mai exista, este cu puterea de a fi un lucru şi atât. Această luare în posesie a fiinţei sale, a oricărei fiinţe, este modul acţiunii mai mult decât politice a puterii. Comunismul lasă de-o parte politica prin recurgere la teroarea esenţială. Ceea ce simţi în faţa acestui mecanism dezlănţuit şi implacabil este nu frica, pe care o laşi în urmă, ci sentimentul de groază în faţa unei demonii atotcuprinzătoare, în faţa unei perfecţiuni a strivirii. O dezlănţuire care anulează inclusiv timpul, pentru că timpul este uman, aparţine omului şi este speranţă şi posibilitate care totuşi subzistă. Or, această dezlănţuire suprimă în primă instanţă, prin masivitatea prezenţei ei, tocmai speranţa, lăsând în loc o uimire îngrozită, pietrificată, în faţa prezenţei şi eficienţei răului care se mecanizează, devine mecanism şi fundament al existenţei sociale. Ceea ce a fost înspăimântător în comunism a fost eficienţa şi capacitatea de a-şi apropria viaţa. O maşină care devine vie. Prin comunism am făcut cu toţii experienţa unei morţi colective. Teroarea istoriei ca destin alienant s-a relevat în comunism cu pregnanţă, cu evidenţa ultimă a extremei puteri devoratoare a omului dezrădacinat, livrat abisului unei raţiuni autodevoratoare. Dacă hybrisul raţiunii este transformarea lumii în obiect, instrumentalizarea lumii pentru subiectul om care nu mai descifrează nimic, ci doar utilizează şi supune într-un proiect din ce în ce mai refuzat interogaţiei, atunci comunismul este raţiune deplină, exacerbare a tuturor presupoziţiilor metafizicii europene angrenată în proiectul unei eliberări umane care îşi uită subiectul pentru a-l suprima. Atunci, 1789 este expresia deplină a raţionalităţii, iar revoluţia bolşevică umanismul instaurat. Robespierre şi dublul său sinistru, Lenin, sunt astfel aversul şi reversul omului care instaurează epoca libertăţii absolute, deci paradisiace, punând capăt istoriei ca rătăcire sau progres, pentru că timpul şi istoria există numai ca rătăcire şi război, iar omul împlinit în libertate este în afara istoriei, este eliberat de istorie. Numai astfel omul se regăseşte, se împlineşte pe sine abolind istoria şi propria sa conştiinţă nefericită. Dacă raţiunea este cea care descoperă sau produce adevărul, atunci raţiunea trebuie să re-producă omul, adică eliberarea sa de nefericire şi de luptă, eliberarea de păcatul adamic şi de stăpânul absolut care l-a împins în istorie ca substanţă a păcatului. Raţiunea care re-produce omul trebuie să-i producă scopurile şi societatea trebuie să devină paradisul terestru al istoriei împlinite. Omul devine uman de abia acum ca produs exigent şi ultim al raţiunii. Dar omul devine uman ca stăpân al lumii, ca instanţă ultimă abolind misterul, neputinţa, nefericirea şi finitudinea. Numai astfel omul este pe deplin raţional, pe deplin liber, fără trecut şi fără viitor, într-un prezent pur al exerciţiului împlinit şi purificator al raţiunii care a devenit raţiunea lumii, lege a universului, concept transformat în substanţă. Acum transcendenţa îşi arată pe deplin inutilitatea, dincolo nu este nimic, nu e decât vidul raţiunii, progresie a răului ca ignoranţă. Astfel raţiunea sfârşeşte cu « nihilismul » creştin care face din lumea aceasta nimic şi din lumea cealaltă tot. Omul iese din neantul pus de această transcendenţă goală spre imanenţa paradisiacă a prezenţei sale împlinite în şi prin raţiune. Lumea încetează să mai fie spaţiu al prezenţei transcendente şi devine literă forte a raţiunii, discurs împlinit, realizat. Lunea nu mai este prezenţă şi cutremurare, ci text al raţiunii care o produce neîncetat. Dacă imperiul raţiunii este imperiul adevărului, atunci omul trebuie să lupte pentru el, adevărul trebuie lăsat să fie, trebuie dezlănţuit în revoluţie. Revoluţia este ultimul prag al istoriei ultima ordalie a raţiunii, purgatoriu terestru. În revoluţie trebuie să moară atât stăpânul, cât şi sclavul, atât burghezul, cât şi proletarul, şi va trebui să se nască cetăţeanul, omul uman, omul ieşirii din deşertul rătăcirii şi al luptei. Acesta este stăpânul lumii, conştiinţa universală nescindată, care a sfârşit istoria, transcendenţa şi misterul. Dar, stupoare, în locul omului uman apare fantoşa lui, iar lumea fantoşei va deveni maşina lumii, un sistem care funcţionează. Şi ce funcţionează cel mai bine aici? Raţiunea însăşi şi omul produs de ea.
Revoluţia, la 1789 şi 1917, este livrată discursului şi prin aceasta istoriei ca împlinire şi desăvârşire a raţiunii, ca proiectare a omului. Revoluţia este în sfârşit proiectul realizat al raţiunii, raţiune care se oferă ca împlinire şi fiind împlinire este sfârşit, abolire a timpului şi a istoriei văzute ca posibilitate intrinsecă a rătăcirii. Raţiunea care proiectează şi calculează omul, care îl lasă să fie numai ca proiect desfăşurat al ei şi numai atât, preia istoria abolind-o. Omul care pune în joc raţiunea sfârşeşte numai prin a fi pus în joc prin raţiune. Raţiunea însăşi e jocul. Omul devine dublul său raţional şi maşinal întrucât decide că libertatea a fost găsită, regăsită sau creată. Dublul său raţional şi logic nu este decât dublul său fantastic,aşa cum însăşi raţiunea gândise omul creştin ca nefiind altceva decât dublul fantastic al omului care astfel nu era liber pentru a-şi desfăşura forţa raţiunii. Forţă a raţiunii care se dovedeşte forţă fantasmei de a re-trimite omul în paradis, ca loc privilegiat al raţiunii care caută ce găseşte. Dar ce caută şi ce găseşte raţiunea? De fapt mereu pe sine însăşi. Eterna reîntoarcere a aceluiaşi. Proiectul esenţial al raţiunii este umanizarea lumii conform măsurii subiectului uman care îşi aboleşte obiectul. Umanizarea lumii este totodată suprimarea ei, suprimare ca alteritate, ca mister, ca creaţie ex nihilo. Lumea devine astfel lucru şi instrument. În acest sens revoluţia politică şi revoluţia tehnică a omului raţiunii dominante sunt unul şi acelaşi lucru. Libertatea este înţeleasă aici ca eliberare de tirania lui Dumnezeu, a stăpânului şi a naturii. Subiectul raţional care se va elibera de aceste servituţi istorice şi ontologice va primi în schimb jugul servituţii proiectului raţiunii suficiente ca instanţă supremă non-personală. Dar omul se cucereşte pe sine tot ca obiect în epoca raţiunii şi nu ca subiect autonom al libertăţii. Mitul raţiunii sfârşeşte în revoluţie, adică se autodistruge ca mit al eliberării, pentru că revoluţia se dovedeşte abolirea oricărei construcţii, iar teroarea – o maşină logică riguroasă, dar autodistructivă. Astfel, raţiunea face din nou loc istoriei, deci rătăcirii.
Comunismul este raţional când se defineşte ca revoluţie şi revoluţionar când se defineşte ca raţiune. Astfel, în această dialectică totalizatoare, care trebuie să fie chiar producerea lumii şi a omului, orice sens se epuizează, pentru că libertatea, ca raţiune împlinită, survine ca sens esenţial şi pune capăt discursurilor şi sensurilor particulare care rămân definite ca singulare, interesate şi factice. Orice altă mişcare a gândirii, orice altă situare a fiinţei umane este şi trebuie să fie eroare, rătăcire vinovată sau, în cel mai bun caz, ignoranţă. Pornind de aici, raţiunea devine gardianul gândirii, al spiritului, al oricărei întemeieri al unui alt raport al omului cu sine însuşi, raport care ar întemeia un alt proiect, o altă libertate umană, deci un alt adevăr. Raţiunea nu poate fi slabă, friabilă, nu poate fi o determinaţie printre altele, ea se poate concepe numai ca non – împlinire temporală şi temporară, dar ea rămâne drum al perfecţiunii întemeierii, ea se afirmă pe sine ca întemeiere deplină şi unică, ca livrare a esenţei, ca esenţă care se oferă pe sine fiinţei ca reîntoarcere a aceluiaşi şi regăsire a identicului. În acest fel, raţiunea umană, ca sondă aruncată în abisul existenţei şi al fiinţării suprimă diferenţa ontică şi aduce sensul fiinţării descoperind misterul abisului explorat. Raţiunea umană se găseşte pe sine ca raţiune a lumii, ca logos dezvăluit al fiinţei. Lumea devine exclusiv umană. În mod paradoxal, rămâne aici numai cunoaşterii ştiinţifice de a sesiza infinitudinea, alteritatea şi manifestarea cosmosului ca mister insondabil, ca abis al raţiunii. Cu toate acestea, ştiinţa continuă să producă în termeni raţionali o situare umană suficientă sieşi, eliminând orice raportare a omului la infinitul unei manifestări a trascendenţei care se revelează în imensitatea unei prezenţe, în prezenţa lui “ceva” ca absenţă a nimicului. « Gândirea calculatoare » ca raţiune este în esenţa ei revelată ateism, negare şi abolire a transcendenţei, ea nu poate dori numai lucrurile, fiinţările fragmentare ale lumii, ci însăşi fiinţa fiinţării pe care o gândeşte ca producere a propriei sale prezenţe ca logos, ca identitate a propriei sale manifestări, ca raţiune în sine. Raţiunea nu vrea să ştie că “fiinţa” nu poate fi obiect al calculului şi că nici identitate regăsită nu este, ci pură transcendenţă care se revelează în prezenţă, în misterul acestei prezenţe care “face” ca lumea să fie. Omul acestei gândiri este omul care eşuează în revoluţie, progres şi tehnologie. Pentru el, libertatea raţiunii devine libertatea de a explora tenebrele, lumea subteranei. Comunismul este această libertate captivă a subteranei, explorare liberă, adică descentrată a tenebrelor. În acest punct, raţiunea devine nihilism, adică raţiune a lipsei de temei, gândire care proiectează totul şi nimic. “Ce înseamnă nihilismul?” Faptul că valorile cele mai înalte se devalorizează. Lipseşte scopul. Lipseşte răspunsul la întrebarea “De ce?”. (Nietszsche – « Voinţa de putere ») Nietzsche enunţă sfârşitul proiectului iluminist şi a oricărei formule subsecvente, precum şi pe acela al creştinismului şi a oricărei forme de teism, a oricărei întemeieri în transcendenţă. În ceea ce priveşte omul, Nietzsche are dreptate, omul epocii actuale sfârşeşte în nihilism, în oboseala oricărei întemeieri şi pare că nimic nu-l mai poate aduce la centru. Omul şi lumea se des-centrează, pierd orice întemeiere şi devin un joc de oglinzi care se reflectă reciproc la infinit, un şir de imagini fără sens şi fără vreo “poveste”. Lumea se pierde în reflectarea acestor imagini multiple şi divergente.
Textul comunismului s-a opus formal oricărui nihilism, dar practica comunismului împlineşte destinul nihilist al omului contemporan. Subterana comunistă este explorarea deplină a cercului vicios nihilist. Lipsa de temei produce lipsa scopului şi sensului existenţei umane care, la rândul ei, trimite la lipsa de temei a existenţei. În acest mod omul este prins, captiv al maşinii logice puse în mişcare de raţiune. În această situaţie, omul nu mai are acces nici măcar la disperare şi angoasă ca suferinţă provocată de presimţirea că totuşi există sens şi întemeiere, dar nu pot fi recâştigate. Această repliere în sclavie şi în prelungirea mecanică a duratei sale este consecinţa existenţei istorice concrete a comunismului. În afara replierii în servitutea interior acceptată, există pentru omul subteranei comuniste acceptarea provocării şi anume sfidarea ameninţării cu moartea care este de fapt esenţa ameninţării oricărei terori organizate ca regim politic. În această presimţire a morţii şi întâmpinare a ei, sensul unei supravieţuiri poate fi găsit. Să supravieţuieşti nonsensului, umilinţei servituţii şi a victimei predestinate, să supravieţuieşti pentru a te salva, nu pentru a prelungi o simplă experienţă carcerală. În această ameninţare extremă poate apărea sarcina unei regăsiri a sensului şi a demnităţii existenţei umane. Moartea nu ameninţă numai sfârşitul absolut, ci şi cu lipsa de sens, cu gratuitatea absolută a unei existenţe care începe şi se sfârşeşte într-o totală lipsă a sensului, într-o imposibilitate a răspunsului la o interogaţie asupra temeiului şi scopului unei existenţe. Ceea ce comunismul a revărsat ca ameninţare, ca de altfel orice nihilism, este nu numai ameninţarea existenţei mele particulare, ci ameninţarea existenţei umane ca umanitate, ca istorie a descoperirii temeiului uman însuşi. Comunismul pune în joc circularitatea carcerală a unei lipse de temei, a exercitării umanului ca simplă existenţă dezaxată în producerea circulară a unei dominaţii prin tehnologia puterii politice. Comunismul anihilează omul în abolirea oricărei interogaţii şi a oricărui răspuns, pentru că producându-se pe sine ca răspuns şi cunoaştere absolută elimină posibilitatea oricărui răspuns. Ceea ce stă ca temei aici este voinţa de putere ca practică totalitară.
Comunismul ca organizare politică este exacerbarea acestei raţiuni tehnologice, organizare care vrea să construiască o lume fără rest, fără “inconsistenţa” unei libertăţi a ireconciliabilului, a slăbiciunii raţionalităţii şi a confuziei. Ceea ce este înspăimântător în comunism este reuşita sa, faptul că utopia a fost realizată, că experimentul a reuşit, iar istoria sa e de acum parte a istoriei omului. Comunismul este un fenomen al absurdului, iar ca absurd este feroce în mişcarea sa, în faptul că se acţionează cu o imensă forţă materială într-un imens parcurs al negaţiei, al destrucţiei. Ceea ce epoca modernă şi contemporană aduc descentrării fiinţei umane este imensa forţă a negativităţii, a destrucţiei de sine ca proces istoric care transcende simpla rătăcire a gândirii şi aduce cu sine procesul radical al posibilităţii destrucţiei generalizate şi totale a omului, a umanităţii. Ivirea acestei posibilităţi nu este doar simpla consecinţă a procesului tehnologic, ducerea până la capăt a unei erori, ci este împlinirea ontologică a puterii de a nega şi de a se autonega a omului. Această posibilitate este un eveniment metafizic, în sensul în care şi păcatul adamic a fost/este un eveniment metafizic, bineînţeles că nu în sensul că ar putea fi un eveniment al vreunei metafizici. Iar acest eveniment nu izvorăşte nici din comunism şi nici din capitalism, ci din raţiunea tehnologică care le pune pe amândouă în joc. Omul însuşi se împlineşte pe sine în procesul acestei destrucţii de sine. Este adevărat că se împlineşte pe sine ca negaţie, ca spirit al negării, ca raţiune a dominării în perfecta circularitate a captivităţii. În fond acest om spune că lumea este o apariţie şi o aparenţă a nimicului. Fără iluzii teiste, abhorând creştinismul ca pe un cancer al gândirii şi al fiinţei, acest om se eliberează pe sine în simulacrul propriei abstracţii. Omul, nu-i aşa, devine în sfârşit “uman”. Paradoxul este că devine “uman” tocmai în momentul în care întreaga sa putere de negaţie şi de autonegaţie devine act, realitate a propriei sale puteri. Acest om este tehnocratul apocaliptic care devine în sfârşit “uman”, puternic şi singur, eliberat de alienarea transcendenţei, a exploatării, a naturii, dar care rămâne stăpân într-un univers abstract şi gol, care ar putea fi însăşi formula infernului. Astfel, aventura conştiinţei de sine a omului occidental se blochează în repetiţia circulară a lui “Dumnezeu a murit” arhetip al gândirii iluministe, al filozofiei idealismului german şi al revoluţiei franceze. Secolul XX nu pare a fi decât experimentarea acestei gândiri “fondatoare”, realizarea ei ca istorie, producerea ei ca sens “revelat” al lumii. Comunismul sec. XX nu este decât o etapă a acestei re-produceri a lumii, în acest sens comunismul nu este o surpriză, ci împlinirea unei aşteptări.
Trăind comunismul ştiu deja că el nu este libertate şi nici sens, ci experienţă carcerală şi atotputernicie a lipsei de sens. Este subterană a existenţei. Or, a reveni la suprafaţa existenţei, la puterea şi demnitatea de a exista liber nu este de loc o sarcină uşoară, dimpotrivă. Nu există o fatalitate a libertăţii, după cum nu există nici una a damnării în servitute, substanţa noastră este libertatea noastră interioară, capacitatea de a sesiza propria robie sau ignoranţă şi de a alege. Simplitatea indestructibilă a propriei noastre prezenţe ne pune deja pe calea unei judecăţi şi a unei alegeri. Indiferent cum suntem aruncaţi în timp, în istorie, indiferent de cum şi unde naufragiem, putem împărtăşi experienţa lui Robinson Crusoe, refăcând nu lumea, ci pe noi înşine sau lumea în noi înşine. Nimic nu mai vine să ne robească din exterior ca libertatea să însemne opunere, luptă cu celălalt, ci suntem noi înşine prin confuzie şi ignoranţă propriile noastre ameninţări la adresa sinelui nostru. Suntem liberi atât cât putem noi înşine fi, dacă putem părăsi subterana cu adevărat, dacă nu cumva o perpetuăm în noi ca pe o otravă deja asimilată.

Russell Kirk

RENEWING A SHAKEN CULTURE
By Russell Kirk
The Heritage Foundation
Lecture #434
December 11, 1992
(published at 7 pages)

A few days past, my wife fell into casual conversation with three medical men. All three of the doctors were dismayed at the present situation and future prospects of the American people, and, unsolicited, expressed at some length their vaticinations. A surgeon, after remarking that on the imminent breadlines people would be armed and fighting, claiming rights but denying duties, then groaned. "It's all over! I thought we had more time! We lasted only two hundred years!"

This mood of despondency is widespread today. "Shine, perishing Republic!" in the line of Robinson Jeffers. The parallel with Roman decay is sufficiently obvious. As the American economy staggers under a burden of taxation that soon, we are promised -- under Clinton Caesar -- will be increased, the federal government sends the Marines to Somalia to take two million Somalis under our spread-eagle wings. It was thus the Romans occupied Greece, for the sake of the wayward Greeks -- and never left Greece until the Greek cities were ruined in the collapse of the whole Empire. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.

Yesteryear's great expectations are blasted. For the first time, a great many Americans suspect that America's culture is decadent. Some of them seem well content with the sickness of our old culture. "What do you mean by 'culture?' the Governor of New York exclaimed four months ago. "That's a word they used in Nazi Germany." This uncultured and unscrupulous demagogue is mentioned by President- elect Clinton as a praiseworthy future associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. When such persons are elevated to great power in the Republic, indeed there exists reason to raise the question of social decadence.

Defining Culture. There has appeared a spate of books about the present "Culture War." And much obloquy is cast upon the so-called "cultural elite" of the United States. Succinctly, how may we define this "culture" that has grown controversial? In my newest book, America's British Culture, published this week by the sociological firm of Transaction, I examine at length such definitions; but for the present, let us take a definition by Christopher Dawson, the great historian of culture, whose works, in twenty-two volumes, I have begun to edit in a uniform edition, at the request of the Homeland Foundation. Here, extracted from Dawson's first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), is that definition:

A culture is a common way of life -- a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs.... And just as every natural region tends to possess its characteristic forms of animal and vegetable life, so too will it possess its own type of human society.... The higher culture will express itself through its material circumstance, as masterfully and triumphantly as the artist through the medium of his material.

Just so. Our American culture, derived in large part from centuries of British culture, has grown in this continent to a tremendous civilization; President Bush takes pride in the fact that America is now the only superpower. Pride goeth before a fall. That is why I am conversing with you on the subject of whether this civilization of ours may endure during the twenty-first century of the Christian era. What, if anything, may you and I do to renew this shaken culture of ours?

In my preceding three lectures, I dealt with three menaces to the survival of our civilization: first, the fraud called multiculturalism, which is a device to pull down the inherited culture of these United States; second, the endeavor of militant secular humanists to undermine the religious heritage of the American people; third, the ideology called democratism, the heresy of democracy, which proclaims that one man is as good as another (or perhaps a little better), and that the voice of the abstract People is the voice of God. Of course these movements or attitudes are not the only reasons why our civilization appears to be in the sere and yellow leaf, but they are of fairly recent origin and constitute a clear and present danger. How may you and I contend with a tolerable hope against these forces, thus shoring up the footing of the edifice of the American common way of life?

Well, before we endeavor to prescribe remedies, we need to ascertain the causes of our difficulties. We must remind ourselves, to begin, that culture arises from the cult: out of the religious bond and the sense of the sacred grow any civilization's agriculture, its common defense, its orderly towns, its ingenious architecture, its literature, its music, its visual arts, its law, its political structure, its educational apparatus, and its mores. Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and other historians of this century have made this historical truth clear.

Decay of the Cult. Modern society's gravest afflictions, conversely, are caused by the decay of the cult upon which a society has been founded, or by the sharp separation of the trappings of a sophisticated civilization from the nurturing cult, with its glimpse of the transcendent. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Templeton Address at London, put this plainly enough:

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest of worthy spiritual growth.

Our entire earthly existence is but a transition stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble or fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder.... The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which The Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. In the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit moves with no less force; this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.

Thus it should be understood that the ideology of secular humanism, the ideology of democratism, and the ideology of negritude that lies behind professed "multiculturalism," all are assaults upon a common way of life that has developed out of Christian insights -- or, if you will, Judeo-Christian insights -- into the human condition. Ideology always is the enemy of religion, and endeavors to supplant its adversary among humankind. But ideology has been unable to produce a counter-culture that endures long -- witness the collapse of the Soviet Union after seven decades of power.

The relationship between religious faith and a high culture, described here by Solzhenitsyn, has been denied or ignored by the intellectuals, although not forgotten by the humble. At the beginning of his Templeton Address, Solzhenitsyn made that point. "Over half a century ago, while I was still a child," Solzhenitsyn said, "I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia. ' Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'" They were right, and so are their counterparts in the United States today.

About eight years ago, the Brookings Institution published a careful study by James Reichley, entitled Religion in American Public Life. In a chapter entitled "Religion, Politics, and Human Values," Mr. Reichley examined eight value-systems, and found only one of those sufficient to balance individual rights against social authority, so bringing about harmony in a culture. That one value- system he called "theist-humanism": most people recognize it as Christianity, in Reichley's description. It is only a renewed sense of the sacred, I am suggesting -- by a return to Christian understanding of the human condition and its limitations, I am suggesting, that the American nation may withstand the designs of ideology and restore those common ways of life that we call America's culture.

The governor of Mississippi has been reproached for declaring that America is a Christian nation. Despite objections, he was quite right; his opponents seem not to understand the meaning of the word "nation," except as it is incorrectly employed by the daily journalist. True, the United States of America is not a Christian state, for the country's Constitution forbids the establishment of a national church by Congress, and stands tolerant of all religions. But the words state and nation signify different concepts. "State" means the governmental organization of a country, political society with sovereign power; while "nation" means the people of the land, with their culture -- and not merely the people who are living just now, but also their ancestors and those who will descend from them: that is, a nation is extended in time and shares a culture: those participants in a common culture who are living today, and the participants in that culture who have preceded them in time, and those participants in the common culture who are yet to be born. One might call a nation a community of souls.

In that proper understanding of what a nation amounts to, the American nation is Christian, although more Christian formerly, perhaps, than it is just now. For Christianity, if sometimes in a diluted form, is the religion of the majority of Americans nowadays; and beyond church communicants, there are millions of Americans who do not attend churches, but nevertheless are strongly influenced by Christian morals; moreover nearly else who has lived long in the United States, though he be Jew or Moslem or agnostic, conforms in large degree to American folkways and customs and conventions that are Christian in origin: in short, the American culture, with its Christian roots, is everywhere dominant in these United States, among the larger "minorities" of the population as well as among Americans of European descent; that is, the Christian ethos is no less strong among blacks and persons of Latin-American descent than among Americans who can trace their descent in this country back to the seventeenth century.

So the Governor of Mississippi is quite right: America is a Christian nation; this is a matter of fact, not of opinion. Whether America will remain a Christian nation is matter for argument, perhaps: the creation of special rights for pathics, for instance, indicates that Christian morals are going by the board; and the prevalence of abortion, the deliberate destruction of one's offspring, is another suggestion that both Christian belief and Christian morals have begun to succumb to total religious indifference, if not yet to atheism. But if Christian faith and morals will be generally rejected by the coming of the twenty-first century, then probably the whole culture will disintegrate, the material culture as well as the intellectual and moral culture; and human existence here will become poor, nasty, brutish, and short: unless some quite new culture, which as yet nobody can imagine, should rise up. Any such unnameable innovative culture, to endure, would require some transcendent sanction, perhaps some theophanic event -- something more enduring than mere Marxist ideology, which was a violent attempt at a new faith and a new culture.

Why have an increasing number of Americans endeavored to break with our inherited culture and its religious roots? The reasons are diverse; but the fundamental impulse to reject a religious patrimony is expressed by T. S. Eliot in his choruses for "The Rock," especially in the following lines:

Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Religion restrains the passions and the appetites: and sensate natures flout restraints. The more perverse the pleasure, the more it is sought by some. So it is that public funds have been employed recently to subsidize obscene representations of Jesus of Nazareth; this seems to some titillatingly smart. I find it odd that, so far as I know, nobody has compared these "works of art" to the obscene representations of Jews in which Joseph Goebbels and his colleagues rejoiced during the regime of Hitler.

Religious Renewal. I have been suggesting, ladies and gentlemen, that for our culture -- our inherited ways of life that have nurtured our American society in the past -- to be reinvigorated, a renewal of religious faith is required. So long as many of us deny the dignity of man and indulge what T. S. Eliot called "the diabolic imagination," our culture limps downward. Our public schools, almost totally secularized, starve the religious imagination; federal and state courts often tend to frown upon Christian morals and churches' claims to independence. Will a time arrive when religion is indulged by public authorities only on sufferance?

What can be done to restore the religious imagination within our common culture? One cannot look to many seminaries for such a vigorous work of renewal: most of those institutions are pursuing theological or quasi-theological novelties, and are caught up in the humanitarian spirit of the age. No one can sincerely embrace a religious creed merely because it might be socially beneficial to do so. Conceivably some great preacher or great novelist or great poet may move minds and hearts toward the transcendent again, opening eyes that had been sealed; there come to mind the examples of John Wesley in eighteenth-century England, Chateaubriand in France at the end of the French Revolution, T. S. Eliot in this century. Or possibly men of the natural sciences may come to perceive design in the universe, purpose in mutations. Or, as in ages past, we may be given a Sign.

Some people, after the fashion of T. S. Eliot, may turn toward Christianity once they have discovered how unendurable a place the twentieth-century world would become were that faith altogether lacking. Others, myself among them, may come from much reading and meditation to conclude that Augustine of Hippo and Sir Thomas Browne and Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Henry Newman, professed Christians and apologists too, were no fools. Whether enough such persons may take up the cause of Christian teaching to alter the spirit of the age -- why, who can tell? C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge succeeded in moving intellects and consciences, and a half-dozen American writers continue to do so among us today. By the way, I particularly commend to you, ladies and gentlemen, a new book by William Kirk Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education. Say not the struggle naught availeth: this earnest book very effectively exposes the mischief being done by those educators who in Britain are called "the crazies." At one American gathering of that educationist clan, hard haters of old moral principles, all the major religions of the world were dismissed as "male chauvinist murder cults."

Short of a mighty reinvigoration of the religious imagination, what may you and I do to redeem the time?

Confining ourselves to the three causes of cultural decadence that I discussed in my three previous lectures, I declare that we can do much, in a practical way.

With respect to multiculturalism, it is entirely possible to resist this silly, malign movement, despite its temporary successes, and to begin to restore a decent curriculum to schools, colleges, and universities; if we succeed, nine-tenths of the students will bless us. At the University of Texas, recently, the multicultural program was opposed by a majority of the faculty in a secret ballot; and the university's president resigned in consequence, praise be. A little more courage on the part of college administrators and professors would undo this anti-cultural tyranny. And yet the advantages still lies with the aggressors. At one Michigan college, this year, black militant students engaged in wild demonstrations. Far from disciplining the student offenders, the woman president of the college ordered two or three members of the faculty to undergo sensitivity training, so that they would learn to be sufficiently servile to militant students. A mad world, my masters! Let us prod some university presidents and trustees into defense of true academic freedom.

With respect to the assaults upon religious belief, which has been the source of all high culture over the ages, it is high time for us to oppose most strenuously those governmental policies which discriminate against religion and received morality. In New York City, very recently, Dr. Russell Hittinger, a redoubtable learned champion of the doctrines of natural law, issued from the platform a virtual call to arms against the enemies of moral order -- some of them entrenched behind the federal bench. Let us remember that not even the Supreme Court of the United States is endowed with arbitrary and absolute power: Congress, if it so chooses may remove from the Court's appellate jurisdiction certain categories of cases, and in other ways may remind the judiciary that it is not a constitutional archonocracy. But I leave to your ingenuity, ladies and gentlemen, the devising of ways to resist and even to intimidate those zealots for the abolition of all restraint upon sensual impulse.

In connection with this possible restoration of the religious imagination, it is of the first importance to bring about more choice in education at every level -- so that those parents and others who would have their children obtain religious knowledge may be enabled to do so. The national administration of President Bush gave at least lip-service to this cause: and more than ever before, there exists a possibility of persuading state legislators to pass such measures.

Third, I urge you friends, to resist manfully and womanfully the thoughtless centralization of political and economic power. Not content with having reduced the several American states, nominally sovereign, to impotent provinces, America's centralizers, with their dream of a New World Order, have commenced to acquire provinces overseas -- Somalia the first in this decade, perhaps. "Take up the white man's burden," certain liberal voices exhort us. One can imagine the nightmare of a universal domination of egalitarian "democratic capitalism" directed by the Washington bureaucracy -- unimaginative, arrogant, everywhere resented in the twenty-first century -- draining America's resources and energies as Rome was drained by her empire. The more centralization, the less freedom and the less energy.

Is this the manifest destiny of the United States to become the New Rome? Have you and I no choice about that? Nay, not so. In 1795, a dread year for Britain, old Edmund Burke, in his first Letter on a Regicide Peace, denied that great states have to obey some irresistible law of progress or decay; Burke set his face against the attitude now called "determinism." Permit me to quote a key passage:

It is often impossible, in these political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent causes we may assign, and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that operation to mere chance; or, more piously (perhaps more rationally), to the occasional interposition and the irresistible hand of the Great Disposer. We have seen states of considerable duration, for which ages have remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebb or flow. The meridian of some has been most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them seem plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have begun a new course, and opened a new reckoning, and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his retreat, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.

In those two sentences, Burke may refer to the reverses of Pericles, to the death of the Constable of Bourbon and other startling historical instances of a country's fate hanging upon a single life. His common soldier is Arnold of Winkelreid, who flung himself upon the Austrian lances at Sempach; his child is Hannibal, taking at the age of twelve his oath to make undying war upon Rome; his girl at the inn is Joan of Arc. Providence, chance, or strong wills, Burke declares, abruptly may alter the whole apparent direction of "that armed ghost, the meaning of history" (Gabriel Marcel's phrase).

Even such as you and I, my friends, if we are resolute enough and sufficiently imaginative, may alter the present course of events. God, we have been told, helps those who help themselves. In the face of increasing tribulations, sometimes conservatives and liberals are making common cause in the defense of America's culture. Both Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and your servant have written books in repudiation of multiculturalism. Once more, say not the struggle naught availeth. A great number of the American people already have taken alarm at the drift of policy and morality in this land. Reactions may be salutary: as the poet Roy Campbell used to say, a human body that cannot react is a corpse; and so it is with society. Up the reactionaries against decadence!

Permit me, in conclusion, to quote a heartening passage from a book, Our Present Discontents, published in 1919, a year in some respects like the year 1992. The author was William Ralph Inge, then Dean of St. Paul's in London, commonly described by journalists as "the Gloomy Dean." The passage I offer you, however, is one of hope:

There may be in progress a store of beneficent forces which we cannot see, There are ages of sowing and ages of reaping; the brilliant epochs may be those in which spiritual wealth is squandered; the epochs of apparent decline may be those in which the race is recuperating after an exhausting effort. To all appearances, man still has a great part of his long lease before him, and there is no reason to suppose that the future will be less productive of moral and spiritual triumphs than the past. The source of all good is like an inexhaustible river; the Creator pours forth new treasures of goodness, truth, and beauty for all who will love them and take them, "Nothing that truly is can ever perish," as Plotinus says; whatever has value in God's sight is for evermore. Our half-real world is the factory of souls in which we are tried as in a furnace. We are not to set our hopes upon it, but learn such wisdom as it can teach us while we pass through it.

America has overcome the ideological culture of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In the decade of this victory, are Americans to forswear the beneficent culture that they have inherited? For a civilization to arise and flower, centuries are required; but the indifference or the hostility of a single generation may suffice to work that civilization's ruin. We must confront the folk whom Arnold Toynbee called "the internal proletariat" as contrasted with the "external proletariat" from alien lands. Otherwise we may end, all of us, as fellow-proletarians, culturally deprived, in a nation that will permit no one to rise above mediocrity.

© 1995 Persimmon IT, Inc.

Leibniz, Monadologia, lectura pentru prieteni

LEIBNIZ

THE MONADOLOGY

Translation © George MacDonald Ross, 1999

1. Monads, which I am going to talk about here, are nothing other than simple substances which make up compounds. By ‘simple’ I mean ‘without parts’.

2. There must be simple substances, since there are compounds; and compounds are nothing other than heaps or aggregates of simples.

3. Extension, shape, and divisibility are possible only where there are parts. So these monads are the genuine atoms of Nature, and (in a word) the elements of things.

4. Furthermore, there is no question of their being broken up, and there is no conceivable way in which a simple substance could naturally cease to exist.

5. For the same reason, there is no conceivable way in which any simple substance could naturally come into being, since it could not be put together out of parts.

6. So you can say that monads can only come in or out of being all at once. In other words, they can come into being only by creation, and go out of being only by annihilation. By contrast, compounds come in our out of being through their parts.

7. In addition, there is no way of explaining how a monad could be internally altered or changed by some other created being. The reason is that there is nothing which can be moved from one position to another, and it is impossible to conceive of any internal motion, which could be set up, redirected, increased, or diminished inside it. By contrast, this is possible in compounds, since they have parts which can change position. Monads have no windows to let anything in or out by. Accidents cannot detach themselves from substances, or travel around independently of them, as the ‘sensible species’ of the scholastics used to do. Consequently, neither substances nor accidents can get into a monad from outside.

8. On the other hand, monads must have some qualities, otherwise they wouldn’t be beings at all. And if simple substances didn’t have different qualities, there would be no way in which we could become conscious of any change in things. This is because whatever there is in compounds can only come from their simple ingredients. But if monads were without qualities, it would be impossible to distinguish one from another, since they are not quantitatively different either. Given that there is no empty space, this has the consequence that, whenever there was any motion, it would always be the case that each part of space only received a motion which was equivalent to the motion it had before. So it follows that the one state of things would be indiscernible from the other.

9. It is even necessary for every monad to be different from every other monad. For in Nature there are never two beings which are perfectly similar to each other, and where it is impossible to find any internal difference — that is, a difference grounded in an intrinsic denomination.

10. I also take it as agreed that every created being is subject to change. Consequently, this is also true of every created monad, and even that this change is continuous in each of them.

11. It follows from what I have just said, that the natural changes to which monads are subject come from an internal principle, since no external cause could influence the inside of a monad.

12. But in addition to the principle of change, there must also be a precise specification of that which changes; and this precise specification, so to speak, individualises simple substances, and makes them different from each other.

13. This precise specification must include a multiplicity within a unity (or something simple). For since every natural change happens gradually, something changes and something remains. Consequently, a simple substance must contain a multiplicity of affections and relations, even though it does not contain any parts.

14. The transitory state which includes and represents a multiplicity within a unity (or simple substance) is nothing other than what is called perception. However, this must be clearly distinguished from apperception or consciousness, as will appear later. The Cartesians went seriously wrong here, since they did not recognise the existence of unconscious perceptions. It is also what led them to believe that only rational beings were monads, and that there were no animal souls or other entelechies. Again, it made them confuse a long state of unconsciousness with death in the strict sense (like ordinary folk); which also led them into the scholastic prejudice of souls entirely separate from bodies, and even reinforced the opinion of some people with twisted minds that souls are mortal.

15. The action of the internal principle which brings about change (i.e. the transition from one perception to another) can be called appetition. It is true that appetite cannot always completely attain the whole perception it is aiming for, but it always obtains something of it, and arrives at new perceptions.

16. We ourselves experience a multiplicity in a simple substance, when we find that the least thought of which we are conscious includes a variegation within its object. So anyone who accepts that the soul is a simple substance must accept this multiplicity within the monad. Bayle should not find any difficulty over this, as he does in his Dictionary, in the article on Rorarius.

17. Besides, it must be admitted that perception, and anything that depends on it, cannot be explained in terms of mechanistic causation — that is, in terms of shapes and motions. Let us pretend that there was a machine, which was constructed in such a way as to give rise to thinking, sensing, and having perceptions. You could imagine it expanded in size (while retaining the same proportions), so that you could go inside it, like going into a mill. On this assumption, your tour inside it would show you the working parts pushing each other, but never anything which would explain a perception. So perception is to be sought, not in compounds (or machines), but in simple substances. Furthermore, there is nothing to be found in simple substances, apart from perceptions and their changes. Again, all the internal actions of simple substances can consist in nothing other than perceptions and their changes.

18. You could call all simple substances, or created monads, entelechies, since they have within themselves a certain perfection (echousi to enteles [in Greek]). There is a certain self-sufficiency (autarkeia), which makes them the source of their internal actions, and (so to speak) incorporeal automata.

19. If we are willing to give the name ‘soul’ to everything which has perceptions and appetites (in the general sense I have just explained), then all created simple substances (monads) could be called ‘souls’. But since sensation is something more than simple perception, I am prepared to accept that the general name ‘monad’ or ‘entelechy’ is sufficient for simple substances which only have simple perceptions, and that we should reserve the name ‘soul’ for those which have more distinct perceptions accompanied by memory.

20. We experience within ourselves a state in which we remember nothing, and have no distinct perceptions — for example, when we fall into a faint, or are overcome by a deep sleep without any dreams. In this state, the soul is not discernibly different from a simple monad. But the soul is something more than a simple substance, since this state does not persist, and the soul can emerge from it.

21. It certainly does not follow that simple substances are without any perceptions. This is not even possible, for the reasons I have already given. Simple substances cannot cease to exist; but it is also the case that they cannot continue to exist without some affections, which are nothing other than their perceptions. However, when there is a large number of little perceptions, with nothing distinguished from anything else, we are in a state of unconsciousness. For example, if we keep on spinning round in the same direction many times without stopping, we suffer from a dizziness which can make us faint, and prevent us from distinguishing anything. Death can temporarily put animals into this state.

22. In the natural course of events, every present state of a simple substance is the consequence of its preceding state; and similarly its present state is pregnant with the future.

23. When you wake out of a period of unconsciousness, you become conscious of your perceptions. Consequently, you must have been perceiving before (even though you were not conscious of the fact), since, in the natural course of events, a perception can only arise from a previous perception — just as, in the natural course of events, a motion can only arise from a previous motion.

24. From this, you can see that we would be in a perpetual state of unconsciousness, if our perceptions contained nothing distinct, or (so to speak) highlighted, or spicier. And this is the state which completely bare monads are in.

25. We also see that Nature has given heightened perceptions to animals, through the care it has taken to supply them with sense organs, which bring together many rays of light or waves in the air, to make them more effective by being united. There is something similar in the senses of smell, taste, and touch, and perhaps also many other senses which are unknown to us. I shall shortly explain how what happens in the soul represents what occurs in the sense organs.

26. Memory supplies souls with a sort of following of one thing from another, which imitates reasoning, but which must be distinguished from it. It is like this. We see that, if animals have had a previous perception of something which struck them forcibly, when they later have a similar perception, the representation of it in their memory leads them to expect whatever was associated with it in the earlier perception, and to have feelings similar to the ones they had before. For example, when you show dogs the stick, they remember the pain it has caused them, and they bark or run away.

27. Imagery powerful enough to strike them forcibly and rouse them to activity, is the result either of the strength or of the number of the preceding perceptions. Often a single powerful impression has the same effect immediately, as the effect of a long habituation, that is, the repetition of many weaker perceptions.

28. People behave in the same way as animals in so far as the following of one perception from another occurs only in accordance with the principle of memory. They are like the doctors of the empirical school of medicine, who rely on practical experience alone, without any theorising. Three-quarters of the time, our behaviour is purely like that of the empiricists. For example, when we expect the sun to rise tomorrow, we are behaving as empiricists, since that is what has always happened up till now. It is only astronomers who come to this judgment on the basis of reasoning.

29. But it is knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which distinguishes us from mere animals, and which gives us reason and the sciences, by elevating us to knowledge of ourselves and of God. This is what in us is called the ‘rational soul’, or spirit.

30. It is also through the knowledge of necessary truths and what can be abstracted from them that we are raised to acts of reflection, which make us think of what is called the self, and to consider that this or that is in us. It is thus that, in thinking of ourselves, we think of being, of substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial, and even of God, by forming a conception of what is limited within us, and without limits in him. These acts of reflection provide us with the primary objects of our reasonings.

31. Our reasonings are grounded on two great principles. One is the principle of contradiction, by virtue of which we judge false anything which involves a contradiction, and true anything which is the opposite or contradictory of the false.

32. The other is the principle of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we consider that no fact could be found to be genuine or existent, and no assertion true, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise — even though we usually cannot know what these reasons are.

33. There are also two sorts of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary, and their opposite is impossible; and those of fact are contingent, and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, you can find the reason by analysis, breaking it down into simpler ideas and truths, until you reach primary ones.

34. This is how mathematicians use analysis to reduce theorems about what is true, and rules for constructions, to definitions, axioms, and postulates.

35. Finally, there are simple ideas which cannot be defined; and there are also axioms and postulates — in a word, primary principles — which cannot be proved, and also do not need to be proved, since they are assertions of identity, of which the opposite contains an explicit contradiction.

36. But the sufficient reason must also be found in contingent truths, or truths of fact — that is to say, in the series of the things spread over the created universe. Here, because of the immense variety of things in Nature, and because of the infinite division of body, the analysis into particular reasons could get more and more detailed without limit. An infinity of shapes and motions, present and past, come into the efficient cause of my present writing, and an infinity of tiny inclinations and dispositions of my soul, present and past, come into its final cause.

37. And since all this detail only includes other contingent things (whether previous or even more detailed), and since each of these still needs a similar analysis to find the reason for it, no progress has been made. So the sufficient or ultimate reason must lie outside the sequence or series of these more and more detailed contingent things, however infinite it could be.

38. This is why the ultimate reason for things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the detail of changes exists only eminently, as in their source — and this is what we call ‘God’.

39. Now since this substance is a sufficient reason for all this detail, which is also completely interconnected, there is only one God, and this God is sufficient.

40. It can also be concluded that, since this Supreme Substance (which is unique, universal, and necessary) has nothing outside itself which could be independent of it, and since it is the simple consequence of possible being, then it must be incapable of having any limits, and must contain absolutely as much reality as is possible

41. From which it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing other than magnitude of positive reality, taken in the precise sense of setting aside the limits or restrictions of things which are limited. And where there are no limits (i.e. in God), perfection is absolutely infinite.

42. It also follows that created things have their perfections infused into them by God, but that they owe their imperfections to their own nature, which is incapable of being unlimited. For this is what makes them distinct from God. This original imperfection of created things is evidenced by the natural inertia of bodies.

43. It is also true that God is not only the source of existences, but also of essences in so far as they are real — that is, he is the source of what reality there is in possibility. This is because God’s understanding is where eternal truths are located, or where the ideas on which they depend are. Without him, there would be no reality in possibilities, and not only would nothing exist, but nothing would even be possible.

44. For if there is any reality in essences or possibilities, or even in eternal truths, this reality must be grounded in something existent and actual, and consequently in the existence of the necessary being, in which essence includes existence, or which is such that its being possible is sufficient for its being actual.

45. Thus only God (or the necessary being) has this privilege, that he must exist if he is possible. And since nothing can prevent the possibility of that which includes no limits, no negation, and hence no contradiction, this alone is enough for us to know apriori that God exists. We have also proved his existence from the reality of eternal truths. But we have also just proved it aposteriori, since contingent beings exist, and they could only have their ultimate or sufficient reason in the necessary being, who has the reason for their existence in himself.

46. Meanwhile, one must not imagine (as some have) that, since eternal truths depend on God, they are arbitrary, and depend on his will. This is how Descartes seems to have taken it, and subsequently Mr Poiret. It is only true of contingent truths, which depend on the principle of harmony, or the choice of the best; whereas necessary truths depend solely on his understanding, of which they are the internal object.

47. This God alone is the primary unity, or the original simple substance, which produces all created or derivative monads. To speak figuratively, they are born from one moment to the next by continual flashes of lightening from the divinity; and they are limited by the receptivity of that which is created, which is essentially bounded.

48. In God there is power, which is the source of everything; then there is knowledge, which contains the detailed system of ideas; and finally will, which changes or produces things in accordance with the principle of the best. These correspond to what there is in created monads: the subject or basis, the faculty of perception, and the faculty of appetition. But in God these attributes are absolutely infinite, or perfect; whereas in created monads or entelechies (or ‘perfection-havers’, as Ermolao Barbaro translated this word) they are only imitations, which are closer the more perfection they have.

49. Created beings are said to act externally in so far as they have perfection, and to be acted upon by another in so far as they are imperfect. Thus activity is attributed to monads in so far as their perceptions are distinct, and passivity in so far as their perceptions are confused.

50. One created being is more perfect than another in that it contains what is used to explain apriori what happens in the other; and this is why it is said to act on the other.

51. But among simple substances there is only an ideal influence of one monad on another. It can have its effect only by the intervention of God. What happens is that, right from the beginning of things, among God’s ideas, one monad has reason to demand that he pays attention to it when organising the others. For since one created monad could not have any physical influence on the interior of another, this is the only means by which the one can have any dependence on the other.

52. This is how activity and passivity is mutual between created beings. For when God compares two simple substances, he finds reasons in each of them which oblige him to accommodate the one to the other. Consequently, what is active in certain respects is passive from a different point of view. A created being is active in so far as what is known distinctly in it provides the reason for what happens in another created substance; and it is passive in so far as the reason for what happens in it is found in what is known distinctly in another.

53. Now, since there is an infinity of possible universes among God’s ideas, and only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God’s choice, which determines him to the one rather than to the other.

54. This reason can be found only in harmony, or the degrees of perfection which these worlds contain, since each possible world has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it includes. Thus nothing is entirely arbitrary.

55. This is the cause of the existence of the best, which his wisdom makes him know, which is goodness makes him choose, and which his power makes him produce.

56. Now this interconnectedness, or this accommodation of all created things to each, and of each to all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations to all the others, which it expresses. Consequently, it is a permanent living mirror of the universe.

57. The same town looked at from different angles appears completely different, and is, as it were, multiplied perspectively. In the same way, it emerges that, because of the infinite number of simple substances, there seem to be as many different universes as there are substances. However, these are only different perspectives on a single universe, according to the different points of view of each monad.

58. This is the means for obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order as possible. In other words, it is the means for obtaining as much perfection as possible.

59. This is the only hypothesis (although I think I have demonstrated its truth) which gives proper recognition to the greatness of God. Mr Bayle recognises the fact when he criticises it in the article on Rorarius in his Dictionary. He even says he is tempted to believe that I attribute too much to God, and more than is possible. But he cannot cite any reason for the impossibility of this universal harmony, which brings it about that every substance precisely expresses all other substances through the relations it has to them.

60. Besides, what I have just said provides the apriori reasons why things could not happen in any other way. In organising the whole, God paid attention to each part, and in particular to each monad. Since the nature of monads is to represent things, nothing could restrict them to representing only a selection from things. It is true that this representation is merely a confused representation as far as the details of the universe as a whole is concerned, and that it can be distinct only over a very limited range of things. In other words, monads have distinct representations only of the things which are closest to them, or relatively large. If this were not the case, each monad would be a divinity. Monads are not limited with respect to the objects of their knowledge, but with respect to the modes of their knowledge of their objects. All of them penetrate to infinity, or to the whole — but confusedly. What makes them finite, and distinguishes one from another, is the variation in their distinct perceptions.

61. In this respect, compounds are analogous to simples. The fact that there is no vacuum means that the whole of matter is interconnected. Each body is affected by its neighbours, and in one way or another it registers everything which happens to them. But in a plenum, every motion has some effect on distant bodies in proportion to its distance. So each body also registers what happens to its neighbours’ neighbours, through their mediation. It follows that this communication extends to any distance whatever. Consequently, all bodies register everything which happens in the universe — so much so, that someone who could see everything could read off from any individual what is happening everywhere, and even what happened in the past, and what will happen in the future. What is distant in time and place is observable in the here and now. As Hippocrates said, ‘Everything breathes together.’ But a soul can read in itself only what is represented there distinctly. It cannot suddenly unfold all that is folded within it, since it extends to infinity.

62. So although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which is especially involved with it, and of which it constitutes the entelechy. And just as this body expresses the whole universe by virtue of the interconnectedness of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe, by virtue of representing this body which belongs to it in a special way.

63. The monad to which a body belongs is either an entelechy or a soul. If it belongs to an entelechy, the combination can be called a living being; and if it belongs to a soul, the combination can be called an animal. Now this body of a living being or of an animal is always organic. The reason is that, since each monad is a mirror of the universe in its own unique way, and since the universe is arranged with a perfect orderliness, there must be the same orderliness in that which represents it — in other words, in the perceptions of the soul, and consequently in the body, since the representation of the universe in the soul follows that which is in the body.

64. Thus the organic body of each living being is a sort of divine machine, or a natural automaton, which is infinitely superior to any manufactured automaton. This is because a machine made by human technology is not a machine in each of its parts. For example, the tooth of a brass cog wheel has parts or smaller bits; but as far as we are concerned, these are no longer something manufactured, and no longer have any anything which characterises them as a machine in relation to the intended function of the wheel. But machines of nature, that is to say living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts right down to infinity. This is what makes the difference between nature and technology — that is to say, between divine and human technology.

65. The Author of Nature was able to apply this divine and infinitely wonderful technology because each portion of matter is not only divisible to infinity (as the ancients recognised) but also actually sub-divided without end — each part divided into parts, of which each has some motion of its own. If this were not so, it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe.

66. From this you can see that there is a world of created things — living beings, animals, entelechies, souls — in the smallest part of matter.

67. Each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond.

68. And although the earth and the air separating the plants in the garden, or the water separating the fish in the pond, are neither plant nor fish, yet they still contain them — though they are usually far too small for us to be able to perceive them.

69. Thus there is nothing uncultivated, sterile, or dead in the universe. If anywhere seems empty or confused, this is mere appearance. It is rather like how a pond might appear from a distance: you see a confused motion, and, so to speak, a threshing around of fish in the pond, without being able to make out the fish themselves.

70. You can see from this that each living body has a dominant entelechy, which is the soul in the case of an animal. But the parts of this living body are full of other living beings, plants, animals, of which each in its turn has its own dominant entelechy or soul.

71. But you mustn’t suppose (along with some who have misunderstood my thoughts) that each soul has a hunk or portion of matter, which is peculiar to it and assigned to it for ever, and consequently that it possesses other, inferior living beings which are permanently devoted to its service. All bodies are perpetually changing, like rivers; and particles join and leave them all the time.

72. Thus the soul changes its body only gradually and by degrees, so that it is never deprived of all its organs at one go. Animals often undergo metamorphosis, but never metempsychosis; nor is there any transmigration of souls. No more are there any completely separate souls, or superhuman beings without bodies. Only God is entirely detached from body.

73. This is also why there is never any generation from absolutely nothing, or complete death, taken in the strict sense of separation of the soul from the body. What we call ‘generation’ is unfolding and growth; just as what we call ‘death’ is infolding and shrinkage.

74. Scientists have had great difficulties over the origin of forms, entelechies or souls. But now that meticulous research has been carried out on plants, insects, and animals, it has been recognised that naturally organic bodies are never the product of gas or rotting, but always of seeds, which undoubtedly contain some sort of preformation. The conclusion has been drawn that, not only does the organic body already exist before conception, but also a soul in this body — in a word, the animal itself. The only function of conception is to precipitate a major transformation, so that the animal becomes an animal of a different species. Even outside the process of generation, something similar is observed when maggots become flies, or caterpillars become butterflies.

75. We can give the name ‘seminal animals’ to the animals of which some are elevated to the status of macroscopic animals by means of conception. Nevertheless, the majority of them remain within their species, and are born, reproduce, and die, just like macroscopic animals. It is only the chosen few who pass through to a larger theatre.

76. But this is only half the truth. My conclusion is that, if the laws of nature mean that animals can never come into being out of nothing, they can no more return to nothing. Not only is there no coming into being, but there is no complete going out of being, or death in the strict sense. These aposteriori arguments drawn from observations are in perfect agreement with the principles I deduced a priori, above.

77. So it can be said that, not only is the soul indestructible, as the mirror of an indestructible universe, but even the animal itself — although its machine often partially dies, and loses or acquires organic coverings.

78. These principles have given me a way of providing a natural explanation of the union (or rather the mutual correspondence) of the soul and the organic body. The soul and the body each follow their own laws, and they coincide by virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.

79. Souls act in accordance with the laws of final causes, through appetitions, ends, and means. Bodies act in accordance with the laws of efficient causes, or motions. And the two realms — that of efficient causes, and that of final causes — are in harmony with each other.

80. Descartes recognised that souls could not transfer any energy to bodies, since there is always the same quantity of energy in matter. Nevertheless, he believed that the soul could change the direction of motion of bodies. But this is only because, in his day, no-one had yet discovered the law of nature, according to which, not only the total quantity of motion in matter is constant, but also the total quantity in a given direction. If he had noticed this, he would have stumbled upon my system of pre-established harmony.

81. This system means that bodies act as if there were no souls (even though this impossible); and that souls act as if there were no bodies; and that the two act as if there were an influence of the one upon the other.

82. As for spirits or rational souls, I find that, fundamentally, the same is true of all living beings and animals. As I have just said, the animal and the soul come into being at the beginning of the world, and no more go out of being than the world itself. Nevertheless, rational souls do have a special status. As long as their tiny seminal animals continue in their lower status, they have merely ordinary or sensitive souls. But as soon as those which are (so to speak) chosen attain human nature through an act of conception, their sensitive souls are elevated to the rank of reason, and to the privileges of spirits.

83. Among the other differences which there are between ordinary souls and spirits (of which I have already given a partial account), there is also this difference, that souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of created things, but that spirits are also images of the divinity itself, or of the Author of Nature himself. They are capable of knowing the system of the universe, and can imitate it to a certain extent through their own small-scale constructions, since each spirit is like a minor deity in its own sphere of authority.

84. This is what makes spirits capable of entering into a kind of social relationship with God. God’s relation to spirits is not merely that of an engineer to his machine (as is God’s relation to other created beings), but also that of a king to his subjects, and even that of a father to his children.

85. From this it is easy to conclude that the congregation of all spirits must constitute the City of God — that is to say, the most perfect state possible under the most perfect of monarchs.

86. This City of God, this truly universal monarchy, is a moral world within the natural world. It is the most sublime and divine of God’s creations, and it is what God’s glory truly consists in, since there would be no glory if his greatness and his goodness were not known and admired by spirits. Furthermore, it is only in relation to this divine city that God has any goodness, strictly speaking, whereas his wisdom and his power are manifest everywhere.

87. I have already established that there is a perfect harmony between two natural realms: the realm of efficient causes, and the realm of final causes. Here I must note yet another harmony between the physical realm of nature, and the moral realm of grace — that is to say, between God considered as the designer of the machine of the universe, and God considered as the monarch of the divine city of spirits.

88. This harmony means that things lead to grace by means of nature itself. For example, the Earth must be destroyed and restored by natural means, as and when it is required by the government of spirits, in order to punish some, and reward others.

89. It can also be said that God as creator includes God as legislator in every respect. Consequently, sins must carry their punishment with them in accordance with the order of nature, and even by virtue of the mechanical structure of things. Similarly, good actions will attract their rewards mechanistically and in the bodily realm, even though this cannot, and does not always have to happen immediately.

90. Finally, under this perfect government there will be no good deed without its reward, and no evil one without its punishment. Everything must come out right for those who are good — that is to say, for those who are not rebels against this great state; who trust in providence after doing their duty; and who love and imitate the Author of all good as they ought to. This means deriving pleasure from contemplating his perfections, in accordance with the nature of genuine pure love, which derives pleasure from the happiness of the loved one. It is this which makes wise and virtuous people work at everything which seems to conform to the presumptive or antecedent divine will, and yet to be content with what God actually makes happen by his secret will, which is consequent and decisive. We recognise that, if we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest people, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is — not merely in respect of the whole in general, but also in respect of ourselves in particular. However this is so only if we have a proper relationship to the Author of everything — not merely as the engineer and efficient cause of our being, but also as our master, and the final cause which must constitute the whole aim of our will, and which alone can constitute our happiness.

de ieri

XIV




De ieri pruncii nu mai coboară din femei
îi vezi ţîşnind din pămînt
sau plutind de-asupra casei uşor
zîmbind ştiutor în vecerniile veacului
te anunţă atingîndu-te cu mîna străvezie
că eşti de astăzi părinte
îţi cer un zîmbet
şi o roată aurie pe care s-o rotogolească
de-a latul pămîntului jucăuş
nu vor nimic
nu se hrănesc cu lapte
beau doar mierea luminii
soarelui de dimineaţă.

funeraliile lui lenin, marele atlet al crimei

petre tutea, o amintire pentru viitor