Exaltation, 1955. Celije

I.

 THE AGONY OF HUMANISM

The Focus of Tragedy

Every man is a prisoner of mysteries, for everyone is besieged by mysteries. From all sides they gather around him and pile on him. Each phenomenon radiates a mystery, and each mystery radiates an innumerable number of mysteries. There is not a single creature that does not carry a mystery in itself. Mystery next to mystery, mystery on mystery – this is how the world was formed. Man contains a certain primordial centripetal force that attracts to everything mysterious. And he attracts all the mysteries, and they rush to him, surround him on all sides.

Every human feeling is surrounded by endless physical mysteries. From every creature into every atom of the human being there gaze wondrous mysteries. And the smallest mystery develops into a universal mystery, into an infinite mystery. Faced with one of them, a person faces everything at once that has no end. The ultimate mystery of every manifestation and every creature is entwined with infinity. The mystery of a single tiny drop of water is so huge that the whole person will drown in it: his feelings, mind, and thought. If you analyze the droplet completely, you will find that it is made up of invisible and intangible particles called atoms, electrons, and proto-electrons. This is what modern chemistry teaches. The visible drop is based on invisible particles; a tangible drop – on intangible atoms; The finite drop with its essence goes to infinity. This is chemical infinity.

But there is also physical infinity. Modern physics has its own infinity, for it bases all its constructions on the hypothesis of the ether, "which is intangible, and motionless, and in itself imperceptible."

Thus, modern physics and modern chemistry reduce every phenomenon and every thing to something invisible, to something supersensible, to something infinite. And indeed, infinity is the end of all, at first glance, finite matter. Everything physical is basically metaphysical. And in the tiniest creature is rooted infinity, which man cannot grasp either by feelings or thoughts. Everything finite is based on the infinite. There is a certain inexplicably mysterious transition of the finite into the infinite, a transition that is not subject to any sensual or logical analysis. Everything that appears sensible is in reality supersensible; everything that is conceivable is in reality above the conceivable. The ability to comprehend the world is incomparably narrower and smaller than the reality of the world. Therefore, this possibility is infinite in every aspect of its existence. If a person does not intentionally shorten his thoughts and deliberately narrow his spirit, then in this world he should feel like a thinking shell in the stormy sea of infinity.

The mystery of the world is infinite, it must be felt by anyone who has ever impartially looked into the mystery of the world. But the mystery of the human being is neither less nor shorter. If a person turns his gaze to himself, he will encounter an unspeakable mystery. Think about it, man is unable to explain to himself how the transition from the sensible to the supersensible, from the body to the spirit, from the unconscious to the conscious takes place in himself. The nature of his consciousness and thought is incomprehensible to him. The possibilities of comprehending thought are much smaller and narrower than the nature of thought itself. In the same way, the possibility of comprehending feelings and their activity. All this is buried in a kind of inner infinity. Infinity both from outside and from within, and the poor man is in between. Solomon's sad wisdom weeps and drowns in weeping for the souls of the gloomy inhabitants of our planet: "Everything is so painful that a man cannot even express it, neither eye can look enough, nor ear can hear enough." And I would add from my grief: a thought cannot be thought of, nor a feeling can be felt; Everything in man is eternally hungry and eternally thirsty.

It is dangerous to be human, it is dangerous to be squeezed between two infinities competing with each other in mystery and enigma. A person is captivated by both. Irresistible and implacable, they tirelessly and jealously fight for the unfortunate person. Two clot worlds attack man with all their endless horrors. And he, exhausted and wounded, wants to be freed from both worlds, but he cannot do without them and outside of them. Such is his fate.

It is tragic to be a man, for man has become the center of tragedy, the center of everything that is tragic both in the upper and lower worlds, in the external and in the inner infinity. Through man saw all pain, every creature in him became sick, through his eye the grief of every creature wept. He is a sick man who carries the disease of universal existence on his shoulders. In him, as in a lens, all the tragedy of the world is collected, and he helplessly shrinks and rushes about on the bed of his weakness.

It is terrible to be a human being, for in his little body he carries two infinities. He is the womb to which all the swarms of all kinds of horrors of the upper and lower world flock. Wherever he goes, he is followed by vast swarms of horrors. His thought, if he plunges into the mystery of the worlds, will always encounter something terrible and terrible. Life in such a world instills boundless terror in human feelings, and in the human soul, and in the human body. And he desperately struggles with the monstrous mystery of the worlds.

This danger, this tragedy, this horror awakened man's attention to all problems, all mysteries, and he was completely dissipated in them. There is no thing and no phenomenon before which a person does not bend in a sign of question or before which he does not stretch out in surprise. In the same way, there is no question that would not draw a person into its infinity. For every question takes man beyond the boundaries of the human, makes him transhuman, transsubjective, uniting him with the nature of the object under study and drowning him in infinity. Question follows question, and there is no end to questions and no end to answers. In what, in what, but in his questions, in his problems, man is infinite. But are not both the inquiring consciousness and the investigating spirit infinite, if they can give rise to infinite questions?

If man were finite, then his problems and aspirations would be finite. The final is easily recorded, classified and formulated. But who can compile an exhaustive register of human aspirations? Who can classify them? Who can find the final, all-embracing, absolute striving? Who can fit a person into a formula, or into boundaries, or into words? And can anyone describe a circle around human aspirations, human problems, human achievements?