Page 60 - Eclipse of God

Religion and Philosophy 33

genuine intercourse with a Thou can the I of the living person
be experienced as existing. The concrete, from which all philos-
ophizing starts, cannot again be reached by way of philosoph-
ical abstraction; it is irrecoverable.
Philosophy is entitled, however, to proclaim and to promise
as the highest reward of this necessary abstraction a looking
upward— no longer a looking here— at the objects of true vi-
sion, the “ideas.” This conception, prepared for by the Indian
teaching of the freeing of the knower from the world of expe-
rience, is first fully developed by the Greeks. The Greeks estab-
lished the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses,
thus making the optical world into the world, into which the
data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspond-
ingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian
was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an
optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of
particular objects. The history of Greek philosophy is that of an
opticizing of thought, fully clarified in Plato and perfected in
Plotinus. The object of this visual thought is the universal exist-
ence or as a reality higher than existence. Philosophy is grounded
on the presupposition that one sees the absolute in universals.
In opposition to this, religion, when it has to define itself
philosophically, says that it means the covenant of the abso-
lute with the particular, with the concrete. For this reason, the
central event of Christian philosophy, the scholastic dispute
over the reality or unreality of universals, was in essence a phil-
osophical struggle between religion and philosophy and that is
its lasting significance. In religious- sounding formulas such as
Malebranche’s “we see things in God” it is also philosophical
abstraction that speaks; for these “things” are not those of the
concrete situation but are as general as Platonic ideas (“les idées
intelligibles”). When, on the contrary, the religious man (or
Malebranche no longer as philosophical systematizer but as the