In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all-around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journeys across the meadows has indeed followed a regular path, that one can no longer go this way or that, but that the direction is set, the limits defined.
Each step once taken so thoughtlessly now becomes fraught with tremendous portent, each advance to be made appears unalterable. Looking back across the path we are struck by the inexorability of the road, how every step both limited and served as a condition for the next and viewing the plain we feel with a certainty approaching knowledge that many roads were possible, that many incidents shaped our wandering, that we are here because it was we who journeyed and we could be in a different spot had we wished. And we know further that whatever road we had chosen, we could not have remained stationary. We were unable to avoid in any manner our being now in fact somewhere and in some position. We have come up against the problem of Necessity and Freedom, of the irrevocability of our actions, of the directedness of our life.
What is the meaning of necessity and where does it arise? Necessity is an attribute of the past. Events viewed in retrospect appear inevitable, the fact of occurrence testifies to irrevocability. Causality expresses the pattern which the mind imposes on a sequence of events in order to make their appearance comprehensible. It is formulated as a law, which reveals a trend of recurrence and an assertion of comparability. Law over fights against the unique, against the personal experience, the inward bliss. Necessity recognizes only quantitative differences, and conceives of survival as its sole test of historical fitness. Necessity discovers the typical in man, the inexorable in events, the inevitable in existence.
Yet every event is not only an effect but also an inward experience. As an effect it is ruled by necessity, as an experience it reveals the unique in the personality. The desire to reconcile an experience of freedom with a determined environment is the lament of poetry and the dilemma of philosophy.
Is meaning, in short, an attribute of reality or a metaphysical construction attendant on our recognition of significance?
The logical positivists accept the former alternative. Meaning results from verifying statements with empirical facts. The researches of anthropologist have, however, dispelled the hope that the meaning of assertions could be given a firmer basis by making the physical world their criterion. It has been demonstrated that each culture and to a certain extent each individual constructs his own image of “reality,” and that “facts” are in no manner as absolute and unshakeable as assumed.
Thus meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context. Just as every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world, just as the scientist can find in nature only what he puts in it in the formulation of his hypothesis, just as every question determines at least the range of answers, so history does not exhibit the same portent to everybody but yields only the meaning inherent in the nature of our query. Therefore, too, the philosophy of history is inseparable from metaphysics, and involves a deep awareness of the mysteries and possibilities not only of nature but of human nature. In the reaction of the various thinkers to the problems of human necessity and human freedom, in their capacity to experience depths inaccessible to reason alone, lies the answer to the meaning of history. Therefore Popper’s statement that history presents merely a chronicle of crime and murder, with no awareness of the heartbreak of humanity, reveals his normative concepts but does not represent a necessary attribute of events. That other levels of meaning exist is shown by Dostojevski and Sweitzer, Homer and Shakespeare to whom history was a deeply felt experience of transcendent import.
Though the questions delimit the range of answers, we can require the answers to be relevant to the problems. Though each culture, and perhaps each individual interprets his data in an intensely personal way, we can insist that the data be adhered to. We can analyse internal consistency. On another level we can judge the adequacy of the thinker’s philosophical assumptions by their scope, by their grasp of the totality of life, instead of just its appearances. Newton sitting under the apple tree might have correctly concluded that apples fall when ripe. It is not a question of right or wrong, therefore, but of depth and shallowness. It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcend phenomenal reality. For though men is a thinking being, it does not follow that his being exhausts itself in thinking. The ultimate mysteries of life are perhaps not approachable by dissection, but may require the poet’s view who grasps the unity of life, which is greater than any, however painstaking analysis of its manifestations.
The Philosophy of History exhibits therefore in its metaphysical assumptions an attitude towards the basic problems of existence. They reveal whether life is approached with reverence and humility or with the assertive tool of a reason that admits no reality outside itself. The resolution of the dilemma of historical events serving as the condition for a transcendental experience or reality exhausting itself in phenomenal appearances discloses the ethical predispositions of a personality, not a property of historical data.
Birth is the beginning of death, life the process of mortality. Everything existing is modified by time, history exhibits the unfolding of growth, fulfillment and outward decay. Men strives for knowledge and having attained it can not bear it. All of literature contains an expression of this dilemma and of mankind’s lament at the shortness of their lot. Hamlet becomes paralyzed by knowledge, Achilles purchases it at the price of his death. Thus is the appearance of life but not necessarily its meaning.
Life contains the problem of motion, which results from the irrevocability of our actions and prevents us in the eternal flux of things to ever observe that which is in the act of observing itself, to ever causally determine the inner connectedness of events. This directedness of life is the source of the dual qualities of world-longing and world-dread that arises from our consciousness of mortality and our loneliness in a world in which we can never grasp the total inner meaning of others. The riddle of time opens up for Man, not to be classified as a category of Reason as Kant attempted. Space is a conception, but time represents a denotation for sometime inconceivable. It expresses itself in the eternal becoming that is the essence of Man and that attains pure being — pure space — only at the moment of his death. Causality applies to the stiff-forms of beings; Destiny, fate dominate becoming. Destiny answers the question of when causality of how. All of life is permeated by an inner destiny that can never be defined, history discloses a majestic unfolding that one can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify.
Over this surface there suddenly emerge the forms of the great cultures, organic beings with their own inner necessity and their deep logic of becoming. They go through all the stages of organic life, youth, maturity, decline and old age. Their youth is a period of infinite yearning in which every action is an augury of things to come and in which art, philosophy and politics unconsciously embody the cosmic best. In the gradual maturity of growth the mystery of life is dissipated, its problems answered, the questions thought through, the great form lost.