Fear and Trembling

Our age is putting on ein wirklicher Ausverkauf — a genuine clearance sale — and not only in trade: in the realm of ideas too. Everything can be had at such a rock-bottom price that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will still want to bid. Every speculative billiard-marker who conscientiously keeps score of the momentous progress of modern philosophy, every private lecturer, tutor and student, every smallholder and lodger in philosophy, does not stop at doubting everything but goes further. It would perhaps be untimely and inopportune to ask them where they actually get to. But it is surely polite and modest to take it as settled that they have doubted everything; otherwise it would be a strange thing to say, that they went further. This preliminary movement, then, they have all made — and presumably so easily that they do not find it necessary to let fall a single word about how. For not even the person who anxiously and with concern looked for a little enlightenment found any: not a guiding hint, not a small dietary prescription for how one is to conduct oneself under this enormous task. “But surely Descartes did it?” Descartes, a venerable, humble and upright thinker whose writings no one, surely, can read without the deepest emotion, did as he said and said as he did. Alas! Alas! Alas! In our time that is a great rarity! Descartes, as he himself repeats often enough, did not doubt with regard to faith. (“Memores tamen, ut jam dictum est, huic lumini naturali tamdiu tantum esse credendum, quamdiu nihil contrarium a Deo ipso revelatur ..... Præter cætera autem, memoriæ nostræ pro summa regula est infigendum, ea quæ nobis a Deo revelata sunt, ut omnium certissima esse credenda; et quamvis forte lumen rationis, quam maxime clarum et evidens, aliud quid nobis suggerere videretur, soli tamen auctoritati divinæ potius quam proprio nostro judicio fidem esse adhibendam.” [Remembering, however, as has already been said, that this natural light is to be trusted only so long as nothing to the contrary is revealed by God himself ..... Above all, though, we must fix in our memory as the supreme rule that what God has revealed to us is to be believed as the most certain of all things; and even if perhaps the light of reason, however clear and evident, should seem to suggest something else to us, we must still put our faith in divine authority alone rather than in our own judgment.] Cf. Principia philosophiæ, part one, § 28 and § 76.) He did not cry “Fire!” and make it everyone’s duty to doubt; for Descartes was a quiet, solitary thinker, not a bellowing night watchman in the street. He modestly admitted that his method had significance only for himself, and that it arose in part from the muddle his earlier learning had been in. (“Ne quis igitur putet, me hic traditurum aliquam methodum, quam unusquisque sequi debeat ad recte regendam rationem; illam enim tantum, quam ipsemet secutus sum, exponere decrevi... Sed simul ac illud studiorum curriculum absolvi (sc. juventutis, quo decurso mos est in eruditorum numerum cooptari, plane aliud coepi cogitare. Tot enim me dubiis totque erroribus implicatum esse animadverti, ut omnes discendi conatus nihil aliud mihi profuisse judicarem, quam quod ignorantiam meam magis magisque detexissem.” [So let no one suppose that I mean to hand down here some method that everyone ought to follow in order to guide his reason rightly; for I have resolved to set out only the one I myself have followed... But as soon as I had finished that course of study (namely, of my youth), at the end of which it is the custom to be admitted to the ranks of the learned, I began to think something quite different. For I found myself entangled in so many doubts and so many errors that I judged that all...