The failure of standards in the modern world – the impossibility of judging anew what has happened and daily happens, on the basis of firm standards recognized by everyone, and of subsuming those events as cases of some well-known general principle, as well as the closely linked difficulty of providing principles of action for what should now happen – has often been described as a nihilism inherent in our age, as a devaluation of values, a sort of twilight of the gods, a catastrophe in the world’s moral order. All such interpretations tacitly assume that human beings can be expected to render judgements only if they possess standards, that the faculty of judgement is thus nothing more than the ability to assign individual cases to their correct and proper places within the general principles which are applicable to them and about which everyone is in agreement…standards are based on the same limited evidence inherent in a judgement upon which we all have agreed and no longer need to dispute or argue about. The only compulsory proof comes as the result of our categorizing, of our measuring and applying standards, of our method of ordering the individual and concrete, which, by the very nature of the enterprise, presumes the validity of our standard…The loss of standards, which does indeed define the modern world in its facticity and cannot be reversed by any sort of return to the good old days or by some arbitrary promulgation of new standards and values, is therefore a catastrophe in the moral world only if one assumes that people are actually incapable of judging things per se, that their faculty of judgement is inadequate for making original judgements, and that the most we can demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already established standards. If this were so, if human thinking were of such a nature that it could judge only if it had cut-and-dried standards in hand, then indeed it would be correct to say, as seems to be generally assumed , that in the crisis of the modern world it is not so much the world as it is man himself who has come unhinged…Even more significant than this argument…is a similar shift of interest away from the world and toward man…there is not a moment’s doubt that it is man who has lost his bearings or is in danger of doing so, or who, at any rate, is what we need to change. Regardless of how people respond to the question of whether it is man or the world that is in jeopardy in the present crisis, one thing is certain: any response that places man in the center of our current worries and suggests he must be changed before any relief is to be found is profoundly unpolitical. For at the center of politics lies concern for the world, not for man – a concern, in fact, for a world, however constituted, without which those who are both concerned and political wold not find life worth living. And we can no more change a world by changing the people in it – quite apart from the practical impossibility of such an enterprise – than we can change an organization or a club by attempting to influence its members in one way or another… This is so because, wherever human beings come together – be it in private or socially, be it in public or politically – a space is generated that simultaneously gathers them into it and separates them from one another. Every such space has its own structure that changes over time and reveals itself in a private context as custom, in a social context as convention, and in a public context as laws, constitutions, statutes, and the like. Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted. The space between men, which is the world, cannot, of course, exist without them, and a world without human beings, as over against a universe without human beings or nature without human beings, would be a contradiction in terms. But this does not mean that the world and the catastrophes that occur in it should be regarded as a purely human occurrence, much less that they should be reduced to something that happens to man or to the nature of man. For the world and the things of this world, in the midst of which human affairs take place, are not the expression of human nature, that is, the imprint of human nature turned outward, but, on the contrary, are the result of the fact that human beings produce what they themselves are not – that is, things – and that even the so-called psychological or intellectual realms become permanent realities in which people can live and move only to the extent that these realms are present as things, as a world of things. It is within this world of things that human beings act and are themselves conditioned, and because they are conditioned by it, every catastrophe that occurs within it strikes back at them, affects them. We can conceive of a catastrophe so monstrous, so world-destroying, that it would likewise affect man’s ability to produce his world and its things, and leave him as worldless as any animal. We can even conceive that such catastrophes have occurred in the prehistoric past, and that certain so-called primitive peoples are their residue, their worldless vestiges. We can also imagine that nuclear war, if it leaves any human life at all in its wake, could precipitate such a catastrophe by destroying the entire world. The reason human beings will then perish, however, is not themselves, but, as always, the world, or better, the course of the world over which they no longer have mastery, from which they are so alienated that the automatic forces inherent in every process can proceed unchecked. And the aforementioned modern concern about man does not even address such possibilities. The awful and frightening thing about that concern, rather, that it is not the least worried about such ‘externalities’ and this about ultimate real dangers, but escapes into an interior where at best reflection is possible, but not action or change.
