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Last Lecture Heinrich Blücher's Last Lecture [See also the Letter from Bazelow to Blücher] I Life has become a burden to men. Everywhere and everyway the young tell us that life, that existence has no meaning. To their elders they say this, and their elders do not know how to answer them, do not know what to tell them. And yet the young, in their despair, have overlooked one question, a question to which one's elders do have an answer. For even if one does not know if there is a meaning to life he might still be able to say "yes my son, I may not know the meaning to life, because you are the only meaning I know. You are my meaning. Don't ask me about my life. Mine might be meaningless. Yet through you I have tried to become more meaningful than I ever was. You are my meaning." There is a reason for respecting those who have brought you into the world regardless of what you might think of the world. This is a very hard lesson to learn. There are other such lessons. I cannot teach you these lessons. I can only share them with you. I can show them to you, I can help you on the way to find your own solutions, but more I cannot do. We can search for the truth together. For these little opinions that I have here now I have struggled for over fifty years. The problems with which we are here confronted are as old as philosophy itself. How can a man transform the life he is given into a meaningful existence. Philosophy is concerned with the transformation of life. The word transformation has a great meaning. It means to transform old forms into new forms and these new forms must be invented. Man has the possibility to become a transformer, to bring about the transformation of his own life into one of which he is the master. To be able to exist in the sense of giving a meaning to one's life; this is the possibility of man and only man has this possibility. Mostly, human beings live by the ideas of others. Living at such a price, if you are not skeptical, you feel much safer. Yet there is another side to the coin. When man does this man stops thinking. In paying this price man's purpose is lost. It is in such times, when men have stopped thinking, in the midst of the storm when we are running about trying to find a tree to cling too, that the task of philosophy comes in. When all opinions have become arbitrary opinions; such a time can be a great curse or it can be the greatest chance that humanity can have. To be able to do away with old beliefs and become transformers, to be able to fight for peace instead of war, to be able to change the history of mankind up to now. Formerly I could escape these challenges. I could lean on history, or on nature, or on God. Every time, I fell down. I must now learn to walk on my own. Before we can learn to walk we must learn to stand erect. It is a long process in a human being's development to learn this. To learn not to lean on something. Not to walk on crutches. Any idea accepted for too long becomes superstition. Man is a born maker of ideas. In himself, he is invisible. His person is not discoverable; it shows only in his actions. Man is foremost a doer, and in doing he discovers that to think and act consciously is a very heavy task. Our problem then is this. Man is in the world. What can he do with it? The ancient Persian prophet Zarathrustra once had a very curious idea. He said that man has the strange capability of striving for the better and rejecting the worse. He believed that we are given a life filled with the most beautiful and the most just possibilities and that it is up to us to realize them. If we have missed them, then it is we who are the ultimate losers. To be free for these possibilities is to be free to pursue wisdom for it is only wisdom that can free us. Freedom is presupposed in wisdom, for freedom means to be free for the search of wisdom. Wisdom and freedom are inseparable. And between them is man, the only "intentional" being. This means that only man can be free. On the other hand arbitrariness is the opposite of freedom. Arbitrariness will destroy any kind of freedom visible. It is arbitrariness which is destroying the society we now live in. It is now that we must ask how we have come to this place, how did we get here. For the question of the meaning of man and of his task is tied to the question of freedom, and the question of freedom is tied to history. Perhaps in order to see man and freedom clearly we must start by analyzing the forces that have worked against man and against freedom. This means that we must investigate the process of dehumanization, because it is the precondition of our times. If the riddle of the world and of all things is man, than let us look into the riddle. II It is said that ours is a time of no belief, for man has lost all of the things he can believe in. This is not so. Man still has at least one belief, an absolute negative one. This belief is called nihilism. Nihilism means nothingness, the devaluation of all values, and the devaluation of all values begins with man because he is the creator of values. This phenomenon of nihilism first given voice by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard has become the condition of our times. They were the first thinkers to have lived nihilism through to its conclusions. They begin by asking a simple question. How can we out of our experience get the idea of nothingness? The answer is that the idea of nothingness represents our supreme experience of the idea of death. We are afraid to become nothing. We do not speak of this idea because we take it for granted. There are other ideas of which one does not speak and which one takes for granted. I am told that in Greek culture no one ever mentioned the word freedom. Not even Socrates or Plato speaks of freedom. Socrates has no theory of freedom. He has only a fact, and this fact is so self-evident that he does not have to talk about it. One never talks about possessing what one has. Now any philosopher, any true philosopher, must look at things and ideas that are silently presupposed. Freedom cannot be proved, and yet the greatest minds that have ever lived have acted as if it must be proved and always they have failed. Such freedom as they have sought degenerates into commandments. Even when one speaks of "free will" one introduces only another commander for if only my will is free than I am not free. Philosophers have looked everywhere for freedom. Some have said that only the mind can be free but I say that I am not interested in your thinkable freedom. That has already been done for me by others. We can speculate in thought into eternity, we can go on for a whole lifetime, and what we would have lost is our life. Such freedom becomes empty when it becomes eternal. We prove everything, and we prove nothing. Historically, freedom has been a metaphysical question. And then with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche the question of "nothingness" is raised, the "anti-metaphysical" question. And yet neither those who raised the question of freedom, or the question of nothingness knew that they were attempting to answer a futile question, because both questions are "absolute" questions. Kant has said that as soon as you attempt to prove the existence of an absolute you come upon one contradiction after another. To attempt to answer "what is freedom", to give it a theoretical definition, is as futile as asking the question "what is nothingness" for both questions are metaphysical and therefore unanswerable. Unless as Kant realized, one ties these questions to concrete facts they become meaningless. It is for this reason that Socrates refused to answer such questions for he realized that they could not be experienced. Once, when he is asked what he thinks of death he answers that he knows nothing of death, because no one will ever die and then return to tell us about it. Yet these are still questions that must be asked for they are existential questions despite their unanswerability. If you stop at some point in your life asking unanswerable questions then you find that you are no longer able to ask answerable ones. If you do not ask them you lose your very existence. The very meaning and task of human life is at stake. Kant had said that no man can live without making three assumptions he cannot prove. God, immortality, and freedom. Freedom came into the world with the idea of wisdom. It was a Greek idea. There is one unique idea of freedom and this idea is shared by only two people. Zarathrustra and Socrates. When Socrates died the Greek Republic died. This is what Plato realized. In killing one man they killed the very instrument that makes freedom possible. It is Socrates who first makes the observation that every man is the sum of all men, every man is a singularity. He is here in the world only once and he is absolutely irreplaceable. It is Socrates who first asks the fatal question "who is man"? Who is man, what is he capable of, what are his possibilities? I want neither religious or natural explanations, for these will go on for ever. I want an answer "now", and only philosophy can give us this. The capacity slumbering within man is tremendous. There is something like "might" in man which makes him even more of a riddle. Man is a speculative being if he is anything. Man is the only being who can develop, on only one condition, that he begins with himself. Man is the giver of meaning for no one else thinks of the meaning of things. Man puts meaning into things and when he forfeits this he becomes worthless. Man is a speaking being, he is accountable for the words he speaks. All of this was first realized by Socrates for in relation to everything in the world only I can ask the question "who is man", "what are his possibilities"? Today, we have forgotten how to ask these questions. Hundreds of years after Socrates had been put to death Nietzsche wrote "I am alone and rightly so, because of all men I am the only one left who asks who is man and what are his possibilities?" Nietzsche had believed he was the last philosopher, the last man. He had seen that everyone by his birth is a philosophic person. He is cursed, condemned, to ask questions forever. He is the only being who asks questions, because he is the inventor of questions. And yet today there is no one as little respected as man. Men show other men how to die for them, but not how to live for them. Man has indeed become the forgotten man. What we must now develop is a metaphysics of man. |
