Page 58 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 31

itself, these tendencies do not mean any turning away from the
lived concrete. The disposition of life and the choice of life-
elements to be affirmed has changed here. But this change is
not in the direction of slackening the relation to the moment,
which one is rather seeking to intensify. One desires to rescue
the relation to the moment by means of asceticism because one
despairs of being able to subjugate the non- ascetic elements, and
hence the fullness of life, to the religious. The meaning no longer
appears to him as open and attainable in the fullness of life.
The ascetic “elevation” is something entirely different from
the philosophical. It is also a form of concretion, though one
which is attained through reduction.

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Philosophizing and philosophy, in contrast, begin ever anew
with one’s definitely looking away from his concrete situation,
hence with the primary act of abstraction.
What is meant here by abstraction is simple, anthropological
matter of fact and not the “radical abstraction” with which Hegel
demands that the philosopher begin. Hegel can call the creation
of the world an abstraction from nothing, while for us it involves
precisely the establishment of that concrete reality from which
the philosophizing man does and must look away. Hegel can
describe “the highest being” as “pure abstraction” while the reli-
gious man, on the contrary, is certain that in the course of this
his mortality he can meet God in God’s very giving and in his,
man’s, receiving of the concrete situation. By primary abstraction
we mean the inner action in which man lifts himself above the
concrete situation into the sphere of precise conceptualization.
In this sphere the concepts no longer serve as a means of appre-
hending reality, but instead represent as the object of thought
being freed from the limitations of the actual.