IN just the same sense, historical contemplation is happiness, or “beatitude.” All of us have sometimes felt the deepest grief because of the misfortunes of ourselves, our country, or the world; or we have had moments of bitter remorse when we have utterly despised ourselves. And at such times we find comfort and peace again as we study all that has happened and consider objectively just how and why it happened (and—since it happened—had to happen). In so doing we place ourselves and our private trials and sorrows—and with ourselves, our family, our city, our country, the world—in a definite location and in a definite time in the whole chain of historical progression; and in the harmony that results in our own minds, we find the harmony of all things, the harmony of the universe.

But this contemplation, and the calm and joy it brings, is itself nothing but a phase of changing, developing, progressing reality. Our sorrows have suddenly shaken our faith in the rationality of life. Can such things be? We stop and look about us. We retrace our steps along the path we have just traversed. We understand, and we are happy again: our faith is restored.

However, if we enjoy the present, it is only because of what it is: a bond of connection between past and future, between the ground we have covered and the road that still lies before us. An epilogue, but also a preface—an epilogue of conflict and struggle, a preface to new struggle and new conflict! The rationality that has given us the sense of peace we feel compels us straightway to relinquish it; for in the harmony of the universe we become aware of our own place and function, what we are and what we ought to be. We are bidden to resume our work, our searching, our struggling, our travail, perhaps even to accept new sorrows, to fall into new error, experience new repentance, feel the pangs of new remorse.

To do otherwise, to try to perpetuate the “beatitude” enjoyed, to transform what is a respite from tumult into a demeanour of comfortable repose, to fix what is a mobile dialectic into a mode and manner of living, would be to evince the possession of scant moral and mental energy. The effort to make gods out of ourselves would result in our becoming something less than men.

It is true that an ability to withdraw from the impassioned scramble of the world (especially when such ability is a matter of discipline) is among the faculties that explain the special talents of the philosopher, the historian, the scientist, the man of essentially intellectual pursuits. Specialisations of this kind, with the scorn for “the strenuous life” which they imply, are wholly legitimate because they lead to socially valuable or socially necessary work. Besides, the repose thus earned is paid for in cash—with a corresponding sacrifice, I mean, of experience and the capacity for succeeding in practical spheres. But when the enjoyment of quiet and repose is exaggerated beyond the point where it is useful to society, it is and has always been properly condemned.

Exaggerations of this kind are not required by any rational necessity, and they betray accordingly some defect in character—laziness, perhaps, or coldness, or selfishness, or love of ease. At times they reflect real cynicism and cruelty—as though the self-indulgent hermit looked out upon the world of busy industrious men and complacently enjoyed their nervous, restless struggling with their problems. It is this state of mind that the Italian language (among others) has chastised in giving far from respectful meanings to the word “philosopher”: a “taciturn,” “churlish,” “unsympathetic” man, and then again a “futile” or “harmless” individual. Certain chronicles of the early Middle Ages (the Antapodosis of Liutprand, for instance) relate that when kings or ministers were overthrown in those days, it was often the custom to shave their heads, put out their eyes, and send them to some monastery “to philosophise” (to live out their days, that is, far from the world in a contemplation that would disturb no one). “Stephen and Constantine,” says Liutprand, “laid a plot against their father; and without the knowledge of the public they removed him from the Royal Palace and sent him to a nearby island, in qua cenobitarum multitudo philosaphabatur; and having shaved his head, as the custom is, ad philosophandum transmittunt.” But the true philosopher, the modern philosopher, would consider the old-fashioned “beatitude” of the monks disgraceful. His meditations are not ends in themselves. Even while adhering scrupulously to the field of his special competence, the true philosopher is ever returning from thought to life, with which he remains in contact and in sympathy; and from life he is ever returning to thought again, to fulfil his task—the upbuilding of the historical consciousness of his own society and his own time. Abuse of contemplative retirement from the world is not permitted him by the very nature of his thought.

If the exaggeration in question finds its real motives in a selfish longing for comfort and ease, it was also at one time supported by a philosophical idea, itself a mask for the same selfish motives: in fact, the idea I refer to was patterned on the familiar eudaemonistic vision of religious transcendence. Philosophy was regarded, in this connection, as knowledge of the Eternal, the Unchanging, the Immortal, a knowledge that brought true “redemption” to those who attained it. Continuing to live among other men, these fortunate beings had nevertheless found in the depths of their souls a hiding-place, a retreat, an asylum—a monastery, indeed—whither they could flee and where they could seek and find beatitude. It matters little that such philosophers often denied the existence of the other world with its paradise. They were simply replacing a rather crude mythology with a more refined one; for after all, this Eternal, Unchanging, Immortal something which they located in the heart of man was there as an abstraction and therefore as a myth, more or less corporealised and personified. Had it been conceived concretely, the Eternal would have appeared as identical with the Transitory, the Unchanging as one with the Changing, the Immortal as equivalent to the Mortal. So this place of refuge, this place of rest, this “World Beyond,” this “Spirit Absolute” (as the greatest of these philosophers, still shackled by theological preconceptions, called it) would have turned out to be a world and a Spirit as relative as all the rest. Not refuge and not rest, but dialectical synthesis and progression; not a monastery of ascetics, but an active, struggling society of men; not redemption from human toil, but a form of human effort.

And not “beatitude,” save in the limited sense we first described—a limitation that makes of “beatitude” an aspect of progression and thus deprives it of all advantage over action, movement, progression itself!