Last Lecture - Page Three

Last Lecture

The writer, Franz Kafka, once said that "every revolution evaporates, and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy." This, the most pessimistic formulation of a revolution, in opposition to Karl Marx, has become a precondition of our times.

All German philosophers and poets who had supported and understood the French Revolution eventually turned their backs on it and became reactionaries. Only two did not. Only two remained faithful to those principles which had created the democratic ideals. One was Kant, the old Kant, senile, awaiting death who upon being told of the Reign of Terror, of the senseless slaughters and deaths, awoke from his bed and said "the revolution has backfired, we have spoiled it, than let us try it again." The other was Holderlin who wrote "with all of my heart I hate the damn breed of priests and tyrants, but above all I hate the geniuses who keep them company." Of the whole crowd, these were the only two who had the courage to wish to see the ideals tried again. Not even Hegel, the great Hegel, who knew everything, had this courage.

Revolution is a very serious business. I know. I have been in five of them. That is enough, even to teach a dumb guy like me something. Since the time of Plato, all political philosophy has revolved around one problem. To try to find an organization in which human beings could live and work productively together. In nineteenth century France when defining what it was to be a citizen, it was only an answer to what was a bourgeoisie. All systems up until now have not realized Plato's dream. Any society by definition is not great. Even in America, the greatest of all experiments, we have rejected our inherent greatness.

The word "republic" by definition means the common thing. That which we have in common. Friedrich Shiller once wrote "that the greatest work of art the Greeks ever created was the erection of the polis." But even they were prisoners. Politicians are prisoners of metaphysical ideologies. They act not upon reason but upon belief. These ideologies lead to a denial of freedom. Every government power has the inner tendency to keep silent those with another opinion. Our biggest fault is that we have placed such governments in power and have not held them accountable for their power.

The last and perhaps greatest political ideology, or metaphysical belief was the dominance of history and the state. What we have witnessed instead is a reversal of history and a defamation of the state, whose foundation rests not upon democratic principles, but upon warfare and nationalism. We have built the state into as perfect a war machine as possible. And now with the threat of world annihilation we cannot use this machine.

There is at the core of every human being a metaphysical assumption. This is because men act upon belief. We all believe. Belief is easy. Hegel believed in history. He believed that God could be found in history and in the state. Marx believed in the proletariat. Kierkegaard believed in the one unknowable God who will some day judge me; who can ever know what or who this God is. Nietzsche believed in the will to power. And how many have paid with their lives for such beliefs?

No Mr. Hegel. God cannot be found in history. History consists of a series of attempts to build communities. There is no straight path. It can reverse Itself at any time. Nothing is predictable in history. An event is brought into existence by human beings. It moves in strange curves which defy our understanding. History is not the work of saints. It is the work of bloody dilettantes. Only until we understand this can we survive the catastrophe of history. Hegel claimed to have had the final answers and how dearly we have paid for that dream. He left for his students only forever to interpret his ideas. Marx's reversal of Hegel did not prevent him from using Hegel's methods. He could destroy the God of Hegel only to invent new Gods. Economics and matter. History has been of our own making and can only tell us our mistakes. Do you still want to worship that? There are no monsters except those set into the world by men.

It is the same way with nature. Nature has become unreliable from a human point of view. The ancient security of a divine relationship with nature we can no longer have. Men have trusted history, have trusted nature for too long. Ideas are dangerous. There must have been some principle in Hegel, some principle in Marx and Nietzsche that went wrong. Toward the end of his life Nietzsche was becoming too "naturalistic" in his thinking. His belief in "energy", "growth", all of these terms he got from biology. He had become biological in his thinking and was no more philosophical. He tore apart all of the old beliefs. God, justice, he could only mock those who were just. His biologism became a kind of religion. He created as a last act of desperation the will to power and the superman; all of this at a time when the preconditions for these phenomena had died. But you cannot have the superman. The superman presupposes that you have man, and this you have never had. Humanism has shared the same fate. Nietzsche was the greatest humanist. He wanted to make out of man a God, that is he wanted to make man into an absolute.

And yet despite all of this Nietzsche knew the futility of these metaphysical dreams. He did not want to publish the work he had finished toward the end of his life. They were published by his sister after his insanity. Toward the end of his life he wrote a letter to the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt. He said "I am sitting here in the mountains alone. No one listens to me any more. I am thinking back upon all I have done and all I have written, and I am wondering if my words have not fooled me."

No, we have to learn to despise the will to power. The will to power is only for those who are powerless. Talleyrand, Napoleon, were not great men. Because they had not been "men" first. In the nineteenth century we lost all of our dreams. In his book Reason And Existenz Karl Jasper's traces this process through the lives and works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. With the death of the Greek belief in a cosmos of law in which all events are regulated and are destined for a preconceived end, came the death of mens' dreams. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche replaced this faith with a nihilistic faith, a faith born of desperation.

Our last attempts to get a command from somewhere is lost to us. On the contrary we have to resist for we can no longer be commanded. We must now make up our own minds, we must now choose for ourselves and for each other, because we are alone. So we have every reason to turn back to the only man who ever understood and shared our experience, and that was Socrates. He was the only man who ever said that "you will never be able to tell me what to do." Because no one single human being, or nation, or state, has the truth, and should ever have the truth. Our only possibility is to pursue the truth and therefore to enlarge it.

When early man looked out into nature he actually saw and spoke to the Gods in which he placed his trust. He believed in the existence of his myths. In the nineteenth century, when Hegel, and Marx, and Freud create their myths, they no longer see or hear the Gods any more but they believe in them anyway, and each of them call their myths scientific. We on the contrary have seen that there are no more metaphysical dreams. To those who still believe them we must ask how many will have to die for your damn dreams.

A great scientist of Logic, Hans Reichenbach, once wrote "we are on such a sure way with science. Everything is so precise and logical. Science gives us so much. We find out more and more. If only those damn philosophers would stop asking those unanswerable questions."

The discovery of the scientific capability could never have been made without philosophy. We have said that once you stop asking unanswerable questions you lose the capacity to put answerable questions to yourself. Science can put power into our hands but it can never give us an aim or a goal. It can never answer the eternal philosophic question, "why" and "what for". The trouble with what science has been and is, is that it can never give us an ultimate account of itself. It can never stop. It is a process that never comes to an end. Isaac Newton, toward the end of his life, compared himself to a small boy kneeling on the sea shore who all of his life had been diverting himself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. Nature we can never completely know, because nature is infinite and is an infinite task. When science rejected philosophy it created out of man a monster, and then cried to philosophy for help. They cry for philosophy to give us man, after man has nearly destroyed himself by his own selfish worship of his mind.

Since the nineteenth century man through science has progressed beyond his most imagined dreams but he has developed none of his inherent powers of mental growth. Science can help man's mind to imitate nature but that is all. Man is an outgrowth of nature; his very human activities presuppose that there will only be men on this globe. This planet may be the only planet where man is possible. Heidegger was right when he called the twentieth century the second promethian age, because through physics man had stolen the fire from the Gods. And yet the true scientist as the true philosopher have something in common, because he is a being in love. The scientist in his work as the philosopher must believe in the possibilities and the changeability of man. We must never ask of science what it cannot give us. We must realize as did Nietzsche "that man lives between two question marks." That a human being is a vessel of infinite possibilities and potentialities of value. One can never have understood such a being. Categorized or conceptualized him. One can never possess such a being, because if you succeed you have abolished that being. You have destroyed it, have eaten it up.

There is a grain of truth in science just as there is a grain of truth in theology and ontology. If the world is not a cosmos then we should try to make it one. Religion can become of use to us, we might want God to be if for no other reason than so man might not think of himself as a God. Kant believed that God might still be a possibility if only his voice could appeal to our conscience. Just as the circle and square do not exist in nature but only in the minds of men, yet to us they have represented value, so perhaps an infinite being might still exist for us. Jesus had believed that man could behave as if he were a child of God, even if this were not so.

Man is greater than all of the universes together, because he knows that he dies, while the universe knows nothing" thus wrote Pascal. This is the price we pay for knowing that we live. To be given our life. Any other creature lives his life, but does not "have it". Pascal had believed that might not this observation be the foundation for the possible glory of man? Might we not be able to do something with our life and by this faculty transcend ourselves?

Humanity has never existed before. Humanity is only a task of man, a task not yet completed. The task of humanity, this, the dream of Socrates and Kant, or Zarathrustra and Jesus. Man is given his life. All I have wanted to do is to put in a few things that might give a meaning to that life. Yet the philosopher can never give you this. He can never give you absolute answers. He can never tell you to love. He can only recommend enmity and friendship. He can only tell you of the questions he has asked, and help you to ask these questions of yourself. That is all that he can do for you. The task of philosophizing is then your own. To philosophy as philosophizing there will never be an end. It is an infinite process, and there has never been nor will there ever be a man who cannot do this. Every man is born to philosophize, and the supreme task of philosophy is to give to the human being his own life, his own humanness when the time has come. Philosophy has only the right to appeal to those experiences which everyone can experience. I have said that no man can live without asking himself the questions "why" and "what for". What I have meant is not that you can't live, but that you should not want to live unless you have asked yourself these questions.

Man is world conscious, God conscious, and man conscious. Man has consciousness of the whole of existence, the whole of Being. The longing of man to find an absolute will never stop. There are periods in history of extreme God consciousness. Perhaps ours is such a period. Man is a carrier, and a lousy carrier at that, of grace. The only progress he knows of is that which he can immediately do, the progress of humanness. There is only one value in the world and that is man himself. Man is the highest value in the world and we must stand by him, even where most men say nothing of him. The question of "who" is man has only bothered a few people in history. Socrates, Buddha, Nietzsche, Zarathrustra.

We cannot become saints any more, or geniuses, or heroes. We can only become more human. We can never become wise. We can only become more and more wise. The hero, the genius, the saint; these are all gone and they can no longer help us. There is only one task left. Do you want to become human. Do you want to become a human being. Prove it, for it is this for which you must strive. To exist means to have one's life, and to have the feeling of that life as being absolutely personalized. I am convinced that everything in this universe is very much alive. Those phenomena that are alive do not live. They are lived. Only upon this acceptance can you say "yes" to yourself, only then can you unite a cool head and a firm heart.

My friends. I hope that someday you will forgive me for having tortured you this way. This will probably be the last time I will be able to teach you. I am getting older, and will not be with you much longer, and so why shouldn't I tell you what I have seen, and thought, and felt?

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