1. The Problem.

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 one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains becoming all-around, but it becomes apparent that one's journey 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, taken so thoughtlessly now becomes fraught with tremendous effort, 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 could not have chosen a road we had not intended, in no manner have we avoided our being now in fact somewhere and in some position. We have come up against the problems of Necessity and Freedom of the irreversibility of our actions, of the directedness of our life.

Much of human history, most of philosophy is an expression of these dilemmas. Sin as a consequence of man's freedom, in relation to the pervasiveness of an all-good and all-wise God constitutes the problem of theology.

Conscience, implying the possibility of alternatives, opposed to pervasiveness of inherited character and the statistical predictability of behaviour is the problem of ethics.

Humanity and the dilemma of its conception as the totality of the free or determined action of its constituent members, represents the problem of history. The Philosophy of history attempts to answer the question of how we got to where we are, where the road leads from here and the most oppressive the most enigmatic of them all. Why? What is the meaning of the journey?

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A number of incidents COMPRISING THE DATA, each seemingly accidental, each apparently willed and yet permeated with a sense of inevitability. And just as we can consider either the path we have followed or the plain we might have traversed, so the philosopher of history can consider either the determined part of life or the free aspect of willing.

What is the meaning of necessity and where does it arise? Tockstoy defines necessity as an event that occurs out of a totality of possibilities. But this merely states the problem and does not answer it. Kant considers causality an a priori category of reason, the very condition for the possibility of knowledge. Causality is the pattern imposed by reason for its cognitive action. It expresses demand of rationality that will let no event occur unless it can be classified, that strives to discover a pattern of law that seeks to determine a trend of recurrence. Since law implies comparability, history in this view becomes a series of events, causally connected, unalterable by such transient, uncertain and above all unpredictable concepts as volition. Because all causal connections fulfill themselves in the effect and an endless similar series of fulfillments is required to establish a law, the dominant, the final discovery, according to Kant, is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, of which the devil tells Ivan Karamazoff: "- But our present earth may have been repeated a thousand times. Why it's become extinct, been frozen, cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again the water above the firmament, then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth, and on earth the same sequence may have been repeated endlesly, and exactly the same to every detail......" And this because a philosophical doctrine in Nietzsche.

Yet reason is not absolute and the patterns for knowledge it opens are not our only form of certitude. The sceptics realized the limits of reason, but saw no other road to knowledge and the very existence of reason was an affirmation of its supremacy and did not see any other road to knowledge. Kant on the other hand recognized these other possibilities. He "limited knowledge to make room for belief". The reality that conforms to the structure of our mind is given

① Immateriality of Responsibility
② Realism - view of life - Epistemology - ③ Subjective of "eternal recurrence"

by sensuous experience, and exhausted in the phenomenal world. The phenomena,
the things-in-themselves, can never be apprehended by pure reason. They may
be revealed to man, however, in his ethical, theological or moral experiences
and become the object of his practical reason. Kant postulates a sense of
freedom (from it he derives his whole moral philosophy).

Hume was quite wrong when he said that since of any thought, the
opposite can be imagined we can really know nothing except a certain regularity
in either juxtaposition or occurrence. To begin with, we can not really imagine our man of existence, or the existence of the world without us. We may
be able to think of the negation of an existence, which is as different from
non-existence as a logical construction from an intangible reality, and which
in any case depends on our prior affirmation, of being. With this certainty,
of being is bound up an inner conviction of freedom of choice. Each individual
in the innumerable decisions of his life acts out of an inner certainty of freedom that has been the object of every religion, the substance of most literature.
"To conceive a man having no freedom is impossible except as a man
deprived of life" says Tolstoy.

What is the meaning of this? What is the solution to the paradox of
irreversible action accomplished under the notion of freedom? How can we recon-
cile this concept of freedom with our knowledge that our intentions so
frequently issue forth into totally incommensurate consequences? What in the
first analysis is the meaning of causality that accomplishes itself under the
mode of freedom?

The philosophy of history has addressed itself to these problems. Its
task becomes not the mere classification of historical data, or the definitional
prediction of exact events. It results from humanity yearning to understand
the incomprehensible, from mystic drives for an absolute, from an effort to give
meaning and answer to the basic questions of existence. For this reason the
philosophy of history is indissolubly connected with metaphysics, and indeed
metaphysics of a very high order. Whether history can in fact give an answer

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2. Is there a Meaning to History?

1.

History, according to Popper, has no meaning. It is the chronicle of international crime and mass murder and takes no account of the tears and suffering of mankind. It is up to us, however, he says at a later point, to give meaning to history by assisting the eternal conflict between the open society to triumph in its eternal struggle with the closed society.

Aside from the inner contradiction of this argument, - for if history has no meaning, the eternal conflict between freedom and rationality against mysticism, historicism and tyranny can not be its motif - the passage illustrates well the difficulty, and confusion, inherent in the word "meaning".

It implies:

1. History has no meaning.

2. History has a meaning, but that meaning is unacceptable to Popper.

3. History has no meaning, but if freedom and rationality triumph, it will suddenly acquire content.

These implications contain the dilemma of the problem of the meaning of history. Is history an open book, a set of theorems that contains in itself all the aspirations of mankind, as well as the key to the world's purpose? Or is history a series of meaningless incidents, a challenge for our normative concepts, only through conformity to which it can obtain significance? Is meaning, in short, an attribute of objects or a psychological quality attendant on our recognition of their significance?

The logical positivists accept the former alternative. Meaning is Results obtained by verifying statements with empirical facts. The hope that a greater universality is thereby achieved as well as a wider basis for the possibility of meaningful statements, has been dispelled by the researches of modern sociology and anthropology which have attempted to demonstrate 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 unshakable as assumed. The history

1. Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies Vol.2 p.

2. Popper - ap.cit. Vol.2 p.

3. FOR FULL DISCUSSION OF THE CONCEPT OF "MEANING" SEE POST "APPENDIX CONCEPT OF MEANING"

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of modern physics has been one continuous process of dissolving external reality and laying bare such mysterious and incompatible prime data as energy that works under the aspect of mass, as light that is demonstrably a wave, but equally certainly contains all its physical properties in an elementary particle, the photon.

Moreover, on this theory, a classical logic has well realized, not only all value judgements, but all quality judgements are meaningless. The difference between affirming an object's worth, or its color, is a difference in achieving a consensus, but not empirical verifiability.

TRADITIONAL
Classical logic, at any rate, was better aware of this problem. In its concepts each proposition had as its subject ultimate reality. A judgement, of which the proposition is an expression in words, is the act of distinguishing a particular element, the predicate, in the being of a subject that could not be thought of unless it contained some other than the predicated character. The distinguishing characteristic of a judgement is its truth or falsity. However, and this is the cardinal point, only true judgements matter, for unless a man says what he does not really think he is affirming the truth of his judgement. All propositions, therefore, besides affirming or denying the predicate of a subject imply existence. Reality is then implied by, not the condition for other judgements.

E THEORY
This existential import of propositions presented many difficulties however. Though logicians could always argue that statements about square circles did not imply existence since they involved mutually exclusive terms, or contrast logical construction which only have a mode of being with real existence, the reconciliation of a definitive reality and all possible judgements proved impossible.

3. Sentential logic abandoned the concept of existential import of propositions. Its logical primitive is a sentence, which is merely a grouping

together of symbols and words, which in their general characteristics are
no different from other physical objects. Only by being brought into re-
lation with other physical objects-facts, do these sentences acquire meaning.
Yet this meaning is not only based on a determination of truth and falsity
but also on another predicate of proposition-weight. This is a determination
however is a purely psychological relation. Since a determination
of truth and falsity, and a determination of proposition-weight, obviously do not suffice every
statement, a conditional logic was forced to be made another predicate of
proposition, such as truth, which is a pure conditional relation.
But even this theory stumbled on the problem of just what consti-
tuted a fact and on the difficulty of reconciling truth-value and weight.
Russell, in his later writings, and Prof. Saheffer, have achieved a formulation which attempts to give the greatest possibility of determining
the essence of meaning. Statements become replies to pure hypotheses posed
by man and thus setting the limits for the answers which, moreover have to be
endorsed by the proper criterion. Thus the statement "Scott is the author
of Waverly" is the affirmative answer, empirically endorsed, to the questions:
1. Did at least one man write Waverly?

2. Did only one Man write Waverly?

3. Was this man Scott?

The range of meaningful propositions is, however, not exhausted by
the empirical realm. Proper criteria can be obtained for value theorems or
esthetic judgements. The distinguishing feature of this pre-assertional
DISTINGUISHES IT FROM OTHER CONSTITUTORS, i.e., METAPHYSICAL
logic, is the recognition that meaning is the psychological context of ob-
jects, which derive their significance from the consensus which this meaning
enjoys, but which do not depend in the first instance or exclusively on their
empirical verifiability.

Thus meaning constitutes metaphysical context and therein is to
be found the answer to the problem of whether history has a meaning. Just as
every man, in a certain sense, constructs his picture of the world, just as the
scientist can find in nature only what he puts in it; just as in the last
analysis every question in a sense determins at least the range of answers,
so history does not exhibit the same potential to everybody but yields only

meanings 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 transcendental depths inaccessible~~ to reason alone, lies the answer to the meaning of history. Therefore Peppera's statement that history presents merely a chronicle of crime and murder, with no awareness of the heartbreak of humanity, constitutes merely a function of a certain normative concept and a shirking of responsibility. That deeper levels of meaning exist, is shown by Dostojevski and Schweitzer, Homer on Shakespeare to whom history was a deeply felt experience of transcendental import. ①

This learning for meaning embodies itself in the early stages of all cultures in an epic poetry which has invariably a historical context. This epic tradition is more than the mere description of legendary deeds of heroism, ~~more than the chronicle of the historical content, but the barest of the tradition, the embodiment of moral aspirations, the only way in which man can know the past.~~ It is the first antimation of an emerging transcendence. ②

Who is right then? Is history the self-realization of the spirit of freedom as Hegel held? Or does it represent the growth and decline of organic cultures, their essence a mystery, their moving force longing and their manifestation power as Spengler argued? Is there a deeper purpose in all this ~~growing emergence~~ blooming and decaying of civilizations, a realization of salvation by faith as Toynbee implies? Does history amount to no more than eternal recurrence, the stage for the Man who surpasses himself, of Nietzsche or is the drama for a divine plan, gradually unfolding itself and culminating in universal peace, as Kant states? ③

If meaning is the metaphysical context that ascribes significance does this preclude differentia by which to judge validity? These criteria exist, but they are not as obvious as the logical positivists assumed.

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 cultural consistency. Above all we
can judge the adequacy of the thinker's concepts by their scope, by their grasp
of the totality of life, instead of just its manifestations. Newton sitting
under the apple tree might have correctly concluded that apples fall when ripe.
And perhaps the answer to the problem of gravity merely awaits the formulation
of the correct question. It is not a question of right or wrong, therefore, but
of depth and shallowness. It is not sufficient to show logically deduced theo-
rem(s) that there must also be a relation of existence to the pervasiveness of experience. For
though man is a thinking being, it does not follow that his being exhausts it-
self in thinking. The ultimate mysteries of life are perhaps not the approach-
able by dissection, but may require the poet's view who grasps the unity of life,
which is greater than any, however painstaking collection of its component
parts.

There are then criteria, by which to approach the philosophy of history.
It is not enough to discuss these philosophies merely in light of their adequacy
to explain history, but of their ability to grasp life. Metaphysics and epi-
stemeology are the frame-work which make the philosophy of history possible.

Each thinker is not only a symbol of his culture but a child of his
age. Yet though it is easy to set a philosopher in his time there is no
warranty for the assumption that only the period shaped the thought. "What
we know we conceive as necessity, what we do not know is the secret of freedom",
it would have been better to say is the mystery of creativity.

Necessity and freedom recur as the coordinates which set the frame-
work for the philosophy of history. Irrelevance and inevitability serve
as its translation.

The solutions attempted reflect not only the relative stress on the
determined or the willed past, but also the attitude with which the problem
was approached. The attitude towards life comes to expression in the philoso-
phies, whether humble or dominating, magical or prayerful, whether life is

1. See post : APPENDIX A
CHAPTER II : THE POSSIBILITY OF MEANING

2. Tolstoy: War & Peace : Epilogue

© This will

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Solutions as a Reflection of Basic Attitudes.

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. Man strives for knowledge and having attained it can not bear it. All of our literature contains an expression of the dilemma 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. There is something deeply symbolic in the act of naming an object. Naming constitutes an act of mastery, an assertion of man's will-to-endure, it is a demarcation, and therefore gives power over a nameless fear. Philosophy contains the positive side of this dread produced by the enigma of life. Yet Spengler failed to see that the symbolic nature of naming does not exhaust itself in the act but in the content we ascribe to it.

The magic attitude merely masters. It seems the mystery of life, but merely as a datum to be classified; its mystery exhausted itself in the riddle of the first cause. Death becomes the result of fulfillment, life implies merely mortality, history is a machine that eternally reproduces new manifestations of power, and values are at best a mode of causality.

The prayerful attitude sees life as a vision or reconciliation, as one views a vast plain from a mountain-top when the haze obscures the lines of the countryside and all merges in a total impression of peace and harmony. Everything now obtains a deeper meaning. Mysteries are to be treated with reverence, birth is not death, any more than summer is the cause of autumn. Life is not mastered by formula or doctrine but given meaning through an inner experience that sees the datum of fulfillment and death but knows that the real fulfillment transcends death. It sees the collapse of Rome but knows that in its collapse values were given to the barbarian successors, that they could never escape, that the rule of law and the comparability of man as an intrinsic worth reached a final meaning only long after Rome was dead. For centuries after the sack by the

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Vandals, Rome was a dream and a norm in the hearts of a new culture, the reason for which Spengler never adequately explains.

1.

Hegel is a representative of the organic concept of the philosophy of history. History to Hegel is the march of the spirit through the world, the self-realization of the idea of freedom. Freedom is the sole truth of the human spirit, its attainment accomplished by inward necessity. Everything that occurs as an emanation of the human spirit, for only the spirit is its own purpose, and therefore the real is the rational.

History, progressing through the stages of oriental, classical and modern, is a gradual widening of the concept of freedom. Freedom is expressed by conformity to law and law can only exist in the modern European, later epistemized by the Prussian state.

This freedom is attained by a series of inevitable stages, each embodying some level of reality. But since the human mind can only conceive this freedom imperfectly, it harbors in every conception its antithesis, namely the perfect idea of freedom, which will modify the original conception into a higher level of freedom. This higher idea will again be modified until the apex of freedom is reached in the 19th century Prussia, says.

No P. This Hegelian dialectic works itself out through an inward causal necessity. Each state represents the possibility of one level of self-realization which it accomplishes and by this fulfillment loses the reason for its existence.

Though Hegel conceived his dialectic as the highest condition of reverence, the Spirit as the manifestation of the Divine plan for the universe, its implications were calculated to make reason the pilot of the universe. The Spirit was not regarded with a feeling of humility, was not apprehended as an inner experience, but became a subject to an intellectual operation.

1. Based on Hegel - The Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Right?

2. These implications were not necessary in Hegel's mind,

3. but the implications? This results from operating Hegel's inherent reason with human rationality and leads to an attempt to end the utilize

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History had to conform to a pattern of reasonableness that led Hegel to reject all data as unhistorical that did not fit his dialectical development.

Spengler asserted that PROGRESS was not a category of meaning for history. Life contains the problem of motion, that results from the irreversibility 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 inner total 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 something inconceivable. It expresses itself in the eternal becoming that is the essence of Man and that attains ~~ ultimate pure being - pure space - only at the moment of his death. Causality applies only to the stiff-forms of being; Destiny, fate dominate becoming. Destiny answers the question of when, causality of how. All of life is permeated by this inner destiny that can never be defined, history is a majesté unfolding that one can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify. EXISTENCE constitutes all of life in a mystic relationship to the extended especially accessible to the artist, the great statesman, and the great小说man, the essence of which each culture perceives in a different fashion.

And what does Spengler see with this intuitive vision? "A boundless mass of human Beings, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally insolvable riddle, downstream a future even so dark and timeless - such is Spengler's view of human history. Over this surface there suddenly emerge the forms of the great cultures, organic beings with their own inner necessity and their Spengler - The Decline of the West - Volume 1. p. 105

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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 beat. In the gradual maturity of growth the mystery of life is dissipated, its problems answered, the questions thought through, the great form lost. Irrevocably over the bodies of a humanity that can no longer but accept, Caesarism approaches embodying itself in all the traditional trappings of life. Humanity flows into cities and amid bread and circuses, amidst a repetition of cataclysmic wars the civilization petrifies and dies.

Therewith disappears not only its outward power, but its inner meaning, of which each culture constructs its own life-symbol. Thus the Greeks' Gods died with the classical soul and so the Western World has started on its slow but certain decline.

Spengler grasped the essential mystery of life that Kant found in the problems of freedom. He realized that every event is not only an effect, but also an inner experience, the key to results incommensurate with our intentions. He affirmed that there are certain ultimate goals, which no hypothesis can prove, and no sophistry ever deny expressed in such words as hope, love, beauty, luck, fear. These are the symbols that are veiled in mystery and no definition can get to in touch with what feel when we utter these words. He knew that intuitive perception (the German erfuhlen) contains the key to some mysteries, just as causality is the solution to others.

And yet what does Spengler experience in history? An endless unfolding of a cosmic beat that expresses itself in the only alternatives of subjectivity, a vast succession of catastrophic upheavals of which power is not only the manifestation but the source, a stimulus of blood that not only pulses through veins but must be shed and will be shed. He feels in short only what history also demonstrates phenomenally; he has not experienced the mysteries and thereby derived a level of transcendence, he has solved them and will see in that solution history's and purpose's only meaning.

"...Everything is determined," the devil tells Ivan Karamazoff.

J. Dostojevski - The Brothers Karamazoff - The Modern Library Ed. P. 789

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The answer is found in the doctrine of challenge and response. All
concurrent PRESENTS, SERIES,
of life is a succession of problems and each problem posed a challenge to
the initial successful result constitutes the civilization's birth, and is determined
undergo an ordeal. The growth of civilizations is not given by an organic,
inner necessity but accomplished itself through the response to successive
challenges, the solution of which does not lead to an equilibrium but creates
an overbalance which in turn becomes a new challenge. Only when societies
societies fail to react to this new situation,
no longer feel the existence of a challenge, has the process of growth ended.
Only then stagnation and decay begin.

Growth is achieved through the agency of a creative minority with a
leader as the apprehension of creativity which leads the uncreative majority,
by mimesis, a social drill, depending on a pattern of confidence in leadership.
Yet in every civilization mimesis eventually breaks down and the creative
minority becomes a dominated minority depending for its continuance on the
effective exercise of force. The progressive differentiation of society into
a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, which is in, but not of, a
given society, with creativity and making stunted, diverts energies into other
worldly pursuits, into mysticism and culminates in a transcendent knowledge
of the unity of mankind through a universal church. Through this act of faith the
internal proletariat secures the values of the collapsing civilization, which
it embodies in the new culture erected by the victorious external proletariat
on the ruins of the old civilization. The decay of civilizations has as its
outward manifestations a universal state, in which the internal schism occurs,
a period of contending states and a final apocalyptic emergence of a Universal
Church. Higher RELIGION the embodiment of the meaning of
HISTORY, this dialectic is not dissimilar to Hegel's and the description of
the decay of society is very similar to the description of
growth as not really a negation of determinism but a description of its operation.
No differentiation is made between the type of challenge and the nature of the
response with the strong implication that success is the only criterion. It is
difficult to reconcile the challenge and response theory with the statement that
Civilizations never collapse from external cause but commit suicide. The dis-
tinguishing feature of an external proletariat seems to be its conception of

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Only in so far as man is a being is he free. Only in so far as history is approached as a thin-in-itself, can an attempt be made to the experience of its deepest meaning. As long as we look for causal proofs, or attempt to impose patterns on the mere manifestations of transcendence its deepest import can never be grasped.

It may be asked, just what is the nature of this approach? Alfred Weber offers no better solution than the necessity of discovering these depths within ourselves. Then the great episodes in history, the great shapers of epochs become more than just fashioners of trends. Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Napoleon emerge as meaningful symbols of levels depth, "of layerdness", as experiences of the deep unity of the universe.

2. Dostojevski has been called by Thomas Mann, "the great criminal". But Dostojevski's insight into the depths, his very ability to do so without flinching, rested on a saintly recognition of this transcendence, of the unity of mankind of which nobody can be so self-righteous to judge, the sin of each serving as a challenge for that love, which constitutes the embodiment of this realization.

3. "If you have everything" says Father Zosima, "you will perceive the divine mystery of things" and "What grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling is lost, the heavenly growth will die away in you."

And "the Idiot" expresses the longing for a final culmination of all destinies: "What difference can it make if the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?"

Does this mean that mysticism contains the only key to history, reason merely an obstacle to the ultimate determination of the meaning of life?

1. Alfred Weber - A Farewell to European History.

2. Introduction to Short Novels of Dostojevski.

3. Dostojevski - The Brothers Karamazoff - p. 383

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Kant has already answered the question. Though reason in the first instance is merely a poser of alternatives and not a guide to action, man's experience of morality enables it to establish rules of universal validity to give effect to that experience. Plus Kant's categorical imperative is not a law but a guide to an action postulated by our experience of freedom. Thus his philosophy of history is an emanation of this transcendence, a necessary corollary to demonstrate the possibility of the kingdom of ends, where each man is both subject and legislator, the highest concept achieved by the Western mind of the dignity of the individual.

This raises the problem of the relation of morality to the philosophy of history. The magic attitude can find no such relation and can have recourse only in the "man-god". Viewing the succession of growth and decay, the wars, the destruction of values, one is tempted to agree with Hegel "only by con- soling ourselves that it could not be otherwise can we except these enormities". Life does seem just a process of dying, power does seem the criterion of values, Transcendence question does appear unanswerable.

Let out of this unfolding of seeming inevitability, there appears to emerge a feeling of humility, a recognition by man of his limits. "Know thyself"- was the motto of the oracle of Delphi. This was not meant psycho-analytically but implied: "Know that you are a man and not God." From this acceptance of limits comes the feeling of reverence which sees history not merely as an ordeal, or mankind as a tool but a deep fulfillment. This feeling of humility, this acknowledgement that one is Man and not God, has as its full implication the concept of tolerance, the very basis for the dignity of the moral personality of the individual. How this feeling of tolerance can be an absolute value in a cosmology of values each of which is conceived as of equal potential, if not of equivalent merit, will be developed fully under the heading "The Sense of Responsibility".

1. Hegel The Philosophy of History. p. 35

2. For this view see Friedrich Nietzsche. Place p. by discussion see part ch. "History and Man's Experience of History".

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Several Spaces

And yet a last dilemma emerges. Even though our contemplation of history may yield as its deepest meaning a feeling of the ultimate moral personality of man, we are still faced with the fact that no civilization has yet been permanent, no longing completely fulfilled, no answer ever gone un-TRANSITORS MAY BE THE FATE OF EVEN THIS INWARD STATE? challenged. It is a difficult question and one must not reply dogmatically.

The mistake thinkers like Northrop make is to assume that all values must be demonstrable and having been demonstrated will of necessity IMPLY at least an acceptance.

It is not easy to define what degree of permanence, what hope of apocalyptic fulfillment a value or an attitude requires. Perhaps the experience of living offers a clue. We know we must die and yet LIVE with a sense of eternity. We can never prove that our action even a second ago, was really freely willed and yet enteR with no doubt of our freedom as each new situation arises. Despite the limits of our life, we know that our actions are irrevocable and that even inactivity posits an absolute relation. We can live this dilemma only by a measure of acceptance and (by defining our values to the best of our conscience, just as we generally) despite the knowledge of the transitoriness of our lot, with a mode of permanence.

This acceptance is not a kismetic resignation but an active recognition of limits, which dissolve in a picture of the majesty of the flow of history. OF HISTORY AND THE DIRECTEDNESS OF LIFE. AND the directedness of life. This is the profounder meaning of Goethe's poem that Spengler chose as the theme of his philosophy:

In the Endless, self-repeating
flows for evermore the same.
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
hold at rest the mighty frame.
Streams from all things love of living
grandest star and humblest clad.
All the straining, all the striving
is in eternal peace in God.

For full development see post "The sense of
Responsibility."

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the border~~across~~s, forming the internal and external proletariat. The
rift in the body social parallels a schism in the soul from the tension~~of~~
which a universal state appears the immediate solution. But an unsuccessful
series of responses has doomed the civilization whose ever greater reliance
on force spells the collapse~~ brings about the collapse~~ of the universal state. Only the internal
proletariat, which gives expression to the longing in its soul by the gentle
response of a universal church salvages the inner meaning of the Civilization.
after a violent interregnum the universal church becomes the schism from
which a new society may spring by the process of appellation-and-affiliation.

Thus Toynbee denied the organic necessity of a Civilization's develop-
ment, the uniformity of its time-span and the independence of its birth and
development. He recognizes manifold possibilities of creation and a causal
pattern, necessitated by the emphasis on free will, for both growth as well
as a breakdown. His classification of Civilizations has a wide scope, integrating civiliza-
tions, and individual lives.

Yet the approach of the study which bases itself on "the well-
beloved method of making an empirical survey" leads Toynbee into the inner
contradictions. An empiricist will always be faced with the validation of
those normative concepts, for which history offers no necessary proof, and
ethics~~ no universal rule.~~ 82
The formulation of historical laws implies a
conception of necessity, not to be evaded by a mere postulation of pur-
posiveness. Against a background of twenty-one civilizations that either
have collapsed or exhibit all the symptoms of decay, challenge-and-response,
with its accompanying doctrines of withdrawal-and-return becomes not a nega-
tion of inevitability, but its mechanistic description. Moreover, an
empirical survey has a tendency to consider mere surface phenomena as equi-
valent, since the inner interpretative meaning must always constitute a meta-
physical resolution.

by normative pattern

Toynbee compounds this imposing a metaphysical doctrine expressed
in a hierarchy of values on a comparative study of civilizations, all of which
are conceived as philosophically contemporary and functionally equivalent.
A Platonic identification of political action with appropriate types of souls
results and an affirmation of a supermundane plane of history that embodies
the true fulfillment of existence.

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I It will be our task to determine the possibility of finding
solutions to problems of inner experience in the causal manifestations of
life. We must analyze the degree of validity that can be ascribed to analogies
from dramatic literature or the New Testament. And this will bring us face
to face with our old enigma: Does history or life exhibit a master-plan the
understanding of which offers a key to the dilemmas in our souls or does the
solution reside in an inner reconciliation? Must we look outside or inside
ourselves for a motive force to apprehend the essence of history? Can a
metaphysical pattern be utilized in a study that professes to find its proof
in the least instance in empirical data? And this will lead to a reexamination
of the essence of purposiveness, of the meaning of organic experience, of the
possibility of giving content to history?

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1.
Metaphysics.

Toynbee attempted to develop a normative pattern for the evaluation of historical phenomena and for the determination of the enigma posed by the eternal recurrence of growth and decay that seems the lot of physical existence. All philosophy of history must sooner or later face the problem of what constitutes the motive-force of directed life. Spengler had opted for an organic immanence of inexorable determinism. Toynbee could not face the dilemma in this form. Life constitutes a series of challenges, the response to which represents a function of a personality and whose solution is in the first instance unpredictable. Yet no mere assertion of freedom can invalidate the force of empirical data that indicates almost certain decay for each civilization that has heretofore existed in the relatively short span of historical time.

Toynbee tried to solve this paradox by considering history as the
realization of a divine plan, in which"the seeds sown are separate seeds, each
with its own destiny, but all of one kind, and wown by the same Sower in
the hope of attaining one harvest". The divergent manifestations of growth
and decay merely hide an underlying unity through which God reveals Himself
to mankind. Life presents an eternal alteration of activity and decay, of
to integration and differentiation, which while superficially ETERNALLY
 integration and differentiation, which while superficially always recurrent,

HISTORically operates in the fashion of a wheel, the circular motion of which
serves as the condition for progress. Through all existence winds a
thread of inertia. Yin represents a level of integration that is galvanized
into activity through the dynamic process of creativity which constitutes a
challenge to the resistance of Matter and which through suffering a process

3.

1. Toynbee's metaphysical doctrine is nowhere explicitly stated. In order to give it the most complete presentation I have utilized Dante's philosophy, which seems closest to the implied concept of Toynbee and utilized it for the concept of Transfiguration which is the key of Toynbee's cosmology.

2.Toynbee op.cit. Vol. 3. p. 385

3.Toynbee op.cit. Vol. 4. p. 34

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perversity of human nature which makes it reject the obvious lesson implied
by a sense of sin and leads to a determination to action by a series of challenges-
and-response, which represent growth criteria through a process of etherialization,
representing the increase of self-determination. And at the end of this development stands
the City of Destruction, a testimony to Man's present inadequacy but also a
token through its creation of a universal church of potential fulfillment.

Toynbee, however, did not merely attempt to probe deeper layers of
meaning than Spengler, but conceived himself in the tradition of the British
Empiricists. No conclusions about historical processes can be drawn except
on the basis of a journey through data, which is intended to reveal its immanence
through a patient cataloguing of facts. Such an approach however, is totally
inconsistent with Toynbee's philosophical basis. Moreover, a mere empirical
analysis of history is impossible, the regularity observed in phenomena con-
stituting a metaphysical assumption of order. An empiricist can never find
purposiveness in history, since all regularity implies at least the
necessity of constant conjunction. A "historical" law "always denies the
unique experience or the creative act, reducing both to agents of an inexorabi-
lity that constantly produces new surface manifestations of success and power.

For success constitutes the final lesson that historical phenomena
teach Man. Each accomplished fact, each surviving political organization
testifies to a method of prevailing, represents an answer to the pragmatic
query: "What works?" A mere collection of historical data - though it can
never be constructed free from the metaphysical postulation inherent in
slectivity - will always represent a negation of freedom and an assertion
of determinism. The alternatives that accompanied the willed performance
are forgotten and only the deed remains a testimony to its fatedness. Failure
constitutes the only sin known to history in an empirical and pragmatic approach.

1. Toynbee, Vol. 5, p. 488

2. Dante's freeing of the Will

3. See - anti-matter "The Possibility of Making"

4. Humanism - "An Evolution underpinning"

5. See Ante - "The Possibility of Meaning" and post "The
Sense of Responsibility"

zation has yet succeeded in this endeavor and decay has marked their advance,
even in Toynbee's terms. And so the very conception of virgin ground con-
stitutes the longing of a soul, the hope of a fulfillment, for the attainment
of which we must look into ourselves and not attempt to coax it out of
history by a juxtaposition of its phenomena.

equates the influence of a civilization in its growth phase with the total
meaning of history. The conception of the "Unchanging East" represents
the reflection of an attitude which considers its point of observation as
normative instead of accidental, a method discarded by the physical sciences
since the Coperative revolution. The stagnation observed by Western observers
in other civilizations, particularly the East, is the uniformity imposed by
an unchanging environment which severely limits the possible modes of adaptation.
Moreover, the integration of the world into a pattern is confined to the
economic and perhaps the political plane, with the cultural influence relatively
weak. The contribution of the Syriac civilization to Western ideation, the
depiction of Chinese philosophy, the profundity of Emeric astronomy all
testify to levels of achievement which make the attribution of ultimacy to
any one civilization meaningless.

The periodization of history into ancient, medieval and modern thus
can not serve as a matrix for its study. Civilizations do not represent STAGES
UNIFORM
unilateral progression but the emanation of a common effort, the success of
which will only be judged by the attainment of a new level of integration.
All civilizations are consequently philosophically contemporary. Compared
to the life of the earth, the difference in age between civilizations becomes
negligible, the youth of the species in term of its own time-scale pronounced.

The uncertainty about the outcome of the evolutionary process prevents
an evaluation of the intrinsic merit of civilizations. This is compounded by
the insignificance of any achievement compared to the common goal. Toynbee
utilizes the analogy of a one-way street to illustrate the philosophical equi-
valence of civilizations. The direction of the street forces dynamic activity

1. Toynbee, op. cit. Vol. 1. p. 160 See obvious reliance on Kant and even more pro-
nounced on Spengler.

2.Toynbee op.cit. Vol 1. p. 17 (see Toynbee's assumptions as to the age span of the
3.This statement from Toynbee op.cit. Vol 1. p. 175 is in flat contradiction of
with the whole tendency of Vol 5 and Vol 6. See conclusion for discussion

4. This assumes that Toynbee is aware of the goal and presents another inconsistency in an empirical scheme.