Autor: Strauss, Leo

Buch: Natural Right and History

Titel: Natural Right and History

Stichwort: Hobbes; Konstruktion - Geschichte; Weisheit als Konstruktion

Kurzinhalt: ... "History" limits our vision in exactly the same way in which the conscious constructs limited the vision of Hobbes: ...

Textausschnitt: 175b It is hard for us to understand how Hobbes could be so hopeful where there was so much cause for despair. Somehow the experience, as well as the legitimate anticipation, of unheard-of progress within the sphere which is subject to human control must have made him insensitive to "the eternal silence of those infinite spaces" or to the crackings of the moenia mundi. In fairness to him, one must add that the long series of disappointments which subsequent generations experienced have not yet succeeded in extinguishing the hope which he, together with his most illustrious contemporaries, kindled. Still less have they succeeded in breaking down the walls which he erected as if in order to limit his vision. The conscious constructs have indeed been replaced by the unplanned workings of "History." But "History" limits our vision in exactly the same way in which the conscious constructs limited the vision of Hobbes: "History," too, fulfils the function of enhancing the status of man and of his "world" by making him oblivious of the whole or of eternity.1 In its final stage the typically modern limitation expresses itself in the suggestion that the highest principle, which, as such, has no relation to any possible cause or causes of the whole, is the mysterious ground of "History" and, being wedded to man and to man alone, is so far from being eternal that it is coeval with human history. (Fs)