In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

284 CODES
limit of this experiment by identifying total knowledge of the laws of
nature with the status of divinity. But even such divine wisdom could not
guarantee perfect happiness among living beings: "Such a man came
close to being God; and if God himself was unable to make his creatures
happy, there is reason to believe that this was impossible" (185). Although
Maeterlinck coins the particularly appropriate expression "absorption
in God" (185) for the constitution of transcendental concepts
from the observation of nature, he himself practices the absorption of
God into popular science-a practice that now pervades the intellectual
scene. Henri de Montherlant pursues a similar strategy of oscillation
between Immanence and Transcendence: "The more intimate our relations
with nature become, the closer we get to the supernatural" (Album
Montherlant, 107). Starting out quite conventionally by comparing bees
and wasps to different types of human social life, the philosopher Theodor
Lessing ends up discovering in nature what used to be defined as
Transcendence: "But when autumn comes, with the cold wind sweeping
over the fields and food becoming scarcer and scarcer, at last something
mystical happens, so strange that it truly touches on ultimate mysteries
of redemption. A whole population is extinguished. Only a single fertile
wasp creeps around the roots and dwelling places of the earth, preserving
for the new year the memory of a vanished world of forms. Might
Buddha have discovered the secret of Nirvana in the solitary life of these
wild wasps?" (Lessing, 256-257). Lessing is not the only intellectual who
tries to connect theology and the observation of nature with Asian
thought. In its fourth year, the influential Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur
Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (German Quarterly for Literary
Studies and Intellectual History) publishes an essay that tries to
legitimize the growing affiliation between transcendental speculation and
empirical science in the West by likening it to a similar relationship in
the Indian intellectual tradition: "In this sense, the character of the
spiritual world of India is determined by the close relationship between
yoga and empirical science ... The sciences mediate practical knowledge
about the types and effects of the various metamorphoses, in which the
divine presents itself in the world of appearances. Yoga, however, is the
only means by which one may grasp the absolute essence of this 'being'
beyond the veil of its metamorphoses" (Zimmer, 56-57). [see Uncertainty
vs. Reality]
The most rhetorically complex way of absorbing Transcendence into