Last Lecture - Page Two

Last Lecture

III

In eighteen forty, eighteen fifty, and eighteen ninety, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and in a way even Marx saw the coming of nihilism long before it was recognized by other men. Today everyone knows it. We all try to find reasons for it; we say that it is all a product of the human mind or will.

Socialism, Communism, was a kind of new hope, and now it has become the greatest blunder, the greatest defeat we have ever suffered. And all of this was accompanied by the greatest scientific age humanity has ever seen. Positivism became the new philosophy and promised to finally deliver all worthwhile truth into our hands.

We have said that man is a speculator, a born questioner, that he is the maker of values, but man is something more. Man is also a dreamer, and he will live and die for his dreams. To have come to where he is man has passed through many stages of dreams. There are in all three stages of speculative metaphysics, and each of them has produced a certain type of man who we have deified. The first, is the ancient stage of the "myth", the stage of eastern metaphysics, in which everything and everybody changes into something else, something other than what it is. The universe is conceived as "the one" and within this all embracing whole everything is interchangeable. Even death is not an absolute. In the stage of the "myth" we see the creation of "the sage" who is deified, and in time will become the philosopher, and then the scientist.

In the next stage we see the opposing creations of the Hebrew and Greek traditions which ultimately merge. The Hebrew sets up the absolute God who develops only after the east has built its metaphysical foundation and man defines himself in relation to this God. The Greek, contributes the dream of Heraclitus and the later philosophers, the dream that the world is a cosmos and is so well ordered that all movement is in accordance to the order of law. In the later Christian tradition the Greek and Hebrew merge, and in this stage we see the creation of the "saint" whose purpose it is to die.

The final and last stage is the stage of the great metaphysical systems such as those of Leibnitz and Hegel who create those great systems of dreams that fall and crumble at their feet. Science, history, all are worshipped, all take the place of the fallen God. With the worship of history, of science, and of civilization, we see the creation of the "hero" the last great metaphysical type to be deified. The fate of the hero, is that he destroys himself and everything else along with him. The history of metaphysics depends upon a few dreams and a few dreamers who have ruled the world. In the beginning, in the ancient world so rich in myth, the fate of man revolved about the deities he created. His very being stood or fell with the absolutes that were a product of his imagination. Only Confucius and Buddha could see the myths for what they were. The mystic sage, who replaces words with a cosmic intuition, who wishes to overcome the tyranny of language, can only do so in a negation of the very qualities that make man human. Confucius realizes that man cannot think without words, even if they have become lies in the mouths of those who use them. "There comes a time in the life of men when the words must be set in order." The words must be set in order, because man is a speaking being. He is therefore responsible for what he says. In Buddha, we see the consciousness of the falsity of all absolutes, the last desperate attempt to overcome the falsity of the universe through an act of will in which the human being becomes lost forever.

With the transition to the Greek world a new orientation comes into being. In the Greek world and only in the Greek world man discovers the "Logos". When Heraclitus says "I looked into myself, and what did I find-I found the Logos" he discovered the instrument that would change the course of history. The logos created science, but the logos only fulfilled one aspect of man's nature. It did not help him in the human dimension. On the contrary, man discovered he was only the plaything of the logos, the next below God. Man set the logos against the myth, and now, centuries later, the logos has destroyed all of the myth. Both Plato and Aristotle could see what results could be achieved by the logos, and with them we see the emergence of the concept of the "great man". In time, the great man will be worshipped as the "hero". But what they did not understand is that the logos can take no responsibility for our well being. The logos could be used against the myths so long as they were only myths, but now the logos has itself become our last tyrannical myth, for we have turned it into a Gods; now it is a myth as well. This transformation could not have come about without the help of "the great men" who have shaped our history.

Leibnitz was the first to believe "that if I knew every movement in the universe I can predict everything that will occur in nature." Leibnitz had believed, as had Heraclitus, as had Plato, as had Aristotle before him, that everything in the universe was in order. This is a Greek ideal. Leibnitz tried to unite the Greek (Platonic) and Christian ideal and considered it possible to believe in them both. He helped to create the dream of science that there existed a calculable universe free of contradictions and antinomies. Leibnitz then transferred this connection of nature and law to history. Every event in nature hangs together with other events, and if I can discover the law that unites them I can predict the future. We shall see that this notion was to have a profound effect upon Hegel who could believe with Leibnitz that nature was absolutely predictable.

It was Hegel who deified history, who carried to its logical conclusions the worship of history and the great men of history. The philosopher Hegel who has influenced generation upon generation, that great phenomenon Hegel, made possible the idea of progress. Historical process and progress thinking start with Hegel. In Hegel we see the most remarkable synthesis of every metaphysical dream that has ever existed. God, Being, the Absolute is in the world and we can see him in the world working through us and through history. All of this Hegel told us, was for the sake of freedom. But it is a freedom that is imposed upon us and is given. We are liberated without knowing it. The course of history aims at our freedom, and this is absolutely guaranteed us. Hegel united two things in philosophy that had never been united before. The concept of freedom and the concept of necessity. In Hegel, freedom and necessity are one, freedom by compulsion so to speak, because history compels us to become free. Man must be free and so must conquer freedom in his own life. The method of synthesis Hegel uses he calls the dialectic and it is the most devilish method ever invented, because with it he promises to unite all opposites. In this he becomes the first cultural philosopher. He thought he knew the world, all of it, and he thought that all of religion, science, philosophy, and history could be united within this one universal system. He was the first to fulfill what all of us want instinctively, that all contradictions, all antinomies, be resolved and united. It was the greatest and most glorious dream, greater than that of Plato who tried to construct a perfect state around a metaphysical absolute. There was not a single cultural phenomena that Hegel left out. I wish I could convey to you, could give you an idea of the utter mastership that had gone into the creation of this one great dream. It is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But unfortunately it was the death of the human mind. For the opposites will not ever be unified, and we have paid the greatest of prices in learning this.

In mathematics since the time of the Greeks men had attempted to solve a similar problem. Men since the time of Euclid had wondered whether or not it would be possible to create a figure that was both a circle and a square. For over twenty centuries our lives have been dominated by both of these figures. The greatest of minds have tried, have nearly come close, but this feat has never been accomplished. Then in the twentieth century, a young engineer began to wonder whether or not if would be possible to create a figure that was "neither" a circle or a square. With the help of a computer he worked for several days and was able to construct such a figure. It was the only original geometric figure created in the twentieth century, and it was created by a man who had the clarity of vision to believe that opposites can never be unified, they can only be mediated.

You can never unify opposites, because they are all creations of the human mind. It is like the idea of squaring the circle. The circle can never be squared since the mind has brought both figures into existence to be eternally contradictory. A problem can be solved if the two objective facts "appear" to be contradictory, but no conflict can be solved. The most simple experiences of human life should have told him that. Martin Luther perhaps was right when he said "logic is a devilish invention, one thing leads to another". Perfectly true. Under the worship of history, of great men, of the logos, we have become the destroyers and robbers of nature. The logos left to itself, proceeds ruthlessly and gloriously. After Hegel, all metaphysics breaks down. He was the last universal philosopher. All of those that follow, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, no longer accept the entire metaphysical dream of Hegel but instead fall under the sway of one aspect of that dream. Marx, embraces the belief long nurtured in Judaism of the chosen people who for him become the proletariat. This class shall be the holy class, and with them truth and justice will come to imminence.

The next break comes with Kierkegaard who says I want neither the God of the logos or the God of metaphysical dreams but the God of Isaiah, Isaac, and Jacob. I want a God with whom I can live, not one with whom I can speculate. Kierkegaard searched for something in which one can place one's faith for he saw the hell coming. He understood that if one must believe in anything then let him believe in God for otherwise he will begin to believe again in great men, in history, or in other metaphysical dreams.

Nietzsche on the other hand wanted to destroy all Gods. Nietzsche all of his life was true to his first proposition; he became the first philosopher who did not give any commands. Nietzsche asked "can anyone teach us a joyful science", not the eternal thou shall or thou shalt not. Up until his time two trends in metaphysics had existed. The metaphysics of theology and the metaphysics of ontology. The decision to turn against everything and anything was made by Nietzsche. He called himself the first nihilist and the first to have prophesied the coming of nihilism. Nietzsche believed God was dead because he had died in the hearts of his contemporary.. He saw that the idea of God stems from the idea that man has of himself, mainly that he is a limited being and that he wants for himself to be an unlimited being. Man wanted what he could not have. This same truth had been discovered by Kierkegaard years before Nietzsche. Kierkegaard said to us that life is absurd, because man will never be free and yet he has the idea of freedom in himself. That he both can deny God and yet he creates within himself the idea of God.

Nietzsche to be sure, does not call himself an atheist. For atheism simply becomes another religion. Kant had shown that you cannot prove the existence of an absolute. What Nietzsche says is "granted I cannot prove that God exists or doesn't exist, but you have missed the point. I don't want him to exist, so get out of my way." "I do not want God to be because I do not want some one above me telling me what to do. I want to know what man can do, not should do."

But no sooner does Nietzsche do away with God than he creates another absolute to replace him. Only this time it is the will to power, the eternal return, and superman. Nietzsche tried to get more power for man. He thought that he was a complete realist. He thought that it was power above all that we are striving for, power at any price, but this power is not power any more but unbridled violence. All morality systems are worthless to Nietzsche. They vanish. And so all that is left is power and the violence of power.

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