the only instrument of existential optimism, of self-assertion of life and self-assertion in life, and, thus, the only instrument which helps to obtain inner freedom; for, as Spinoza rightly thought, man’s freedom lies in overcoming thoughts of death. The conventionally assumed structure of pathos is, we repeat, whole-oneness of thought and feeling. The existentially optimistic impulse provided by pathos is testified to, to say the least, by those historical epochs in whose culture thought and feeling were comparatively close together. Such are Antiquity and the Renaissance, eternal in their enlightening significance.
To sum it up, we can say — it is creativity that effects man’s unrealized «comeback to himself», i.e. to the state of organic oneness with the world, the comeback of man to Adam, and of Adam himself — to Paradise.
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The Holy One — blessed be He — endows with wisdom only him who has wisdom.
Gemara
Now, concerning the connection of our observations with contemporaneity. To begin with, let us ask a question: if all the above is true, why is it that the above ideas have become so vital today? Why is it that just our time has seen the emergence of the tremendously important problem of the unconscious, a problem that could not have turned out to be a cardinal one if it were not closely bound with the cardinal aspect of existence? Why is it that Freud appeared in our day and why is it not yesterday, but today?
What happened, and happened today, is something most significant.
The steady and uncontrolled escalation of rationalism in all its manifestations, in all directions and at all levels, has become today that «quantitative leap» which changes the structure of existence rapidly. All the complex of such well-known processes as the «massification» of the world, as all-encompassing and all-penetrating peculiarization, the parcelling of the «separate» forces within man, his alienation from the Universe, the alienation of men from one another (moral and spiritual, political, economic and practical alienation), the rationalistic and hideously absurd, in its final results, formalization of human instincts which became an uncontrolled process of perfecting and accumulating means of self-destruction, — all this ponderous and redoubtable conglomerate of phenomena rooted in idolized rationalism hangs like a deadweight on the cogwheel of the very mechanism that serves to balance man’s existence with his consciousness. This mechanism seems to be worn out, and the signs of it are multiple. They are, on the one hand, social depression and man’s loss of initiative in expectation of the Apocalypse; on the other hand — the turmoil of chaotic spurts in desperate and unceasing efforts to find an outcome by means of all kinds of revolutions (economic, political, moral revolutions, «revolutions of consciousness», racial and class battles, confrontation of the sexes, of age groups, etc.). All this is, maybe, nothing new; but it is clear that the extreme intensification of even the most traditional processes cannot but provoke certain shifts in the generalized structure of existence. Homo-centrism, an old «infantile disease» of society, has taken on most hideously hypertrophic forms; it is expressed now in an all-round disintegration and decomposition of the whole, a falling apart that began from the very moment when man set himself apart not only from the world that was not man-made, but also from the entirely human world, from the world «authorized» by him. In a word, the mighty acceleration and boosting of habitual processes and changes have led to what contemporary «naturalists» term «the strong non-reversibility of time». The notion expresses difference between «after» and «before», a difference which has penetrated into now and has become the inner definition of now, thus doing away with the fundamental a p o r i a of existence: the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, the present is the zero border-line between both, — nil between nil and nil.
The contemporary tendencies of science include more and more clear demonstration of the strong non-reversibility of time even in its local elements: now reflects a macroscopic difference between «before» and «after».
In this sense, the present day is «nil between nil and nil»; from this angle, the idea of the essential peculiarity, the essentially contradictory nature of our epoch becomes understandable; it also becomes obvious that it is necessary to seek new and powerful impulses capable of ensuring the further functioning of those balancing systems which are the only things that permit man to overcome the tragedy of non-existence by means of a life-giving creative impulse. There is only one alternative to this quest — universal despondency, and, as a result, an end to all and everything through self destruction since our cogito offers us an abundance of means for that.
At the same time, it is just as clear that these impulses are to be sought, again, just in the sphere of creativity which can alone withstand the cancerous metastases of rationalism, in the sphere of the single stream of thought and feeling. The pressing nature of these quests was already felt yesterday, when the young Marx repeated with conviction the axiomatic idea of our ancestors — alas, mocked at by the cogito-centric history of human society: man affirms himself in the world not only through his thoughts, but also through all his senses.
… And through all the senses. The comeback of man to himself in our epoch of «nil between nil and nil» may be effected only on condition that all these forms of perceiving the world, the reaction to it and man’s self-assertion in it which have throughout the centuries been suppressed by rationalism and devoured by the deified calf of consciousness, are cultivated. The power of reason should be applied today just to evolve and introduce an organized and ramified system cultivating pathos, confirming the whole-oneness of man’s thought with all his senses. All the noble experience of reason, all the undying achievements of the rationalistic cultural tradition must, at the same time, control the rotation of this newly-organized system of «synthetic» Apollo-Dionisian institutes around the ancient axis of immutable and initial ethical norms, for the complete «comeback» of man to these norms, in a certain measure, constitutes the re-integration of man. It is only the triumph of a «pathos» attitude to existence, discernible in the synthesis of the diverse forms of consciousness that is capable of converting the Homo Apatheticus of today into Homo Sympatheticus, of Homo Sapiens into Homo Aestheticus, if the aeasthetical is understood as it should be: «the highest act of reason, encompassing all ideas, is an aesthetic act» (Hegel).
In the light of what has been said, it is hardly necessary to state more exactly that speaking of the synthesis of forms of consciousness, we mean by «consciousness», precisely all the wholeness and oneness of human psychics as it is, i.e., so to say, also «non-consciousness» which has generated and is able to generate no less majestic and stable forms of culture than consciousness. In the light of the meta-principle mentioned above, it should likewise be clear that the synthesis of the forms of consciousness presupposes further unification, a maximum inter-penetration of essentially indivisible principles — consciousness and reality, the spiritual and the material. The age-old but paradoxical and destructive tradition of differentiating these principles that have no separate existence, a tradition set up by the mind that always seeks convenience, was manifested, as is known, in a hideous dismemberment of the whole, indivisible Universe into two sectors. This dismemberment of the Universe took place, of course, only in the human head; but the initial conventionalities of thought could not but appear as undoubted non-conventional reality in our persistently homo-centristic world, a world where «all things serve man». During the whole course of his history as Homo Sapiens, man has scrupulously and indefatigably been remaking the world in the light of his rational conventionality which had acquired an actual effect of being absolute (un-conventional), in the light of the principle «the spirit and life», «consciousness and reality». During the ages of its activity, this principle generated a particular, independently functioning cultural system (in all its multi-component wholeness), that contradicted the natural order of things; however, this system took such firm root in reality that it even acquired the paradoxical ability to determine, to condition this reality. The word gave birth to the thing. However, the synthesis that we imply and consider desirable rests, first and foremost, on the wholeness and oneness of artificially (forcibly) separated principles, — consciousness and reality, the word and the thing, the spiritual and the material. This tendency towards unity can be detected today in various and, in many cases, quite obvious processes in contemporaneity.
It is in building up this tendency that modern society may find optimism; it is just in this tendency that society has the right to see a force which can withstand the corruption proclaimed by the all-disuniting «imperialism of reason». «Thinking! — exclaimed Paul Valery — This means losing the thread!» Today society is seeking for this lost thread, and the purpose of this thread is to reunite the dismembered parts of the world that was whole in the past and can be whole again in the future. And the essence of this thread is a «pathos» attitude to reality; creativity is the «highest thinking», and the «highest thinking» means recovering the thread.
Cogito alone is, in principle, incapable of holding man back at the edge of the precipice; still less it is capable of bringing his afterwards to «the promised land» of immortality. It is only in the life-giving atmosphere of a creative attitude to the world, only in the realm of «the highest thinking», of
