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VIII. Politics, Man, and Freedom (1967) Final Lecture Given By Heinrich Blücher POLITICS, MAN, AND FREEDOM We started this course with the observation that man has never been in a situation like the one he is in today. Philosophically, he does not know who he is any more and he knows that he does not know, which makes it even more tragic. Every precondition for the existence of a nihilistic age has been given, so in keeping with our task we have tried in this course to find out a little bit more about this creature called man, a creature that has always defined himself as being either made in the image of God or as being just an animal, but who now as a result of his development has suddenly become unsure as to who he is. We have tried to trace his major doings and when we looked at them we saw that he has created three kinds of instruments which distinguish him from all of the rest of nature, and they distinguish him, because in nature animals do not create instruments.(1) The first instrument we find is tools. The second is weapons (which in our time have outgrown the tools by far). And the third, the most dangerous instrument he creates (and must create in order to express his will) is words. So we began to trace his words, and in the process we discovered that words only represent something much more fundamental in man, namely ideas. For man is an idea maker and, as we found out, a quite reckless idea maker from which he has created for himself the situation he is in today. We discovered that we had to become critical of many of his ideas, and to become critical means first to become conscious of the meaning of words, because it is through this instrument that man has tried to change the world and to change himself. We started with mythical thinking, and as our awareness grew we found out a few more things about this amazing creature. This creature is born with a certain consciousness of the world, himself, and of some possibility in the world called God. World consciousness, man consciousness, and God consciousness seem to be given to him only we can never know where from. This first stage (of mythical thought) lasts for thousands of years and it means that all three of the above conscious substances are intertwined. In mythical thinking no real distinction is made between the world, man, and God. Then we saw the appearance of the idea of freedom and the substances began to separate. We traced this separation, first through the development of speculative metaphysics in Greece and then finally through the development of Buddha's philosophy in India. We saw how each step had been deliberately made (not in an evolutionary sense) but rather in the sense of a kind of self development that man brings about himself. We can check this, because indeed man has brought about this development, and so we can look upon it critically. Lastly, we have seen how all of this was nec4ssary in so far as it enables us to arm ourselves for the age that we are presently living in, an age that has been called the time of wars and revolutions.(2) We have lived through at least two such revolutions and we have found that in our time almost all of our words have become nothing more than lies, and very often conscious lies. With the help of the instrument of words man creates language, which is a precondition for the existence of truth, but he can also use words to create lies, the condition of untruth. The fact that in our age most words have become lies is due in large part to our political situation. If we trace historically this whole development we see that from a scientific point of view it has been absolutely glorious. Science has developed in a way that we never dreamt of and so in our relation to nature (regardless of the aspect we consider) we now find ourselves to be the masters of nature. No longer is nature (metaphysically speaking) the arch enemy of man. Another enemy has turned up, a much more terrible one, namely man himself. Man has proved to be the worst enemy of man, and we have to do something about this for if science is the most splendid success of the human mind in our age then politics is the biggest and most thorough failure. It is fantastic how we have failed in this field. Successively, constantly, and I am not speaking now as a political scientist but rather as a man who is convinced with Socrates that what we most bitterly need is the establishment of human relations amongst all of mankind, and it is the establishment of such relations that is the task of politics. Politics should be a creative activity, not a destructive one, and it must be our intention (from state to state to the betterment of state) to aim at only one thing: to meet humanity in our capacity as political beings. Today, we have met humanity. Historically, this is the first time in the history of the world when all of mankind is present to us. Formally, whenever we spoke of mankind (as humanity) we only had some vague idea of what we meant. It was an abstraction. Today it is the most concrete thing in the world. The most lonely tribe in some isolated corner of the earth is visited and studied by anthropologists and everything is known about them, so in a way we do know the whole bunch that today calls itself mankind and we are frightened to death by it. If we look at it historically we can see that it has been our task to prepare ourselves for just this situation, and we haven't done any preparation whatsoever. We have that last glorious idiotic dream called the United Nations to prove to ourselves how unable we have been to unite anybody. It is the greatest symbol for the actual disunity that exists among nations that has ever been created and this situation has come about, because we have neglected our primary duty, namely, to care for the human (i.e., political) relations (that can only come into existence among men who are free). Ever since the Renaissance when we first established the idea (and finally came to believe it) that politics has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics, or moral activity, we have wavered from that duty and politics has come to be thought of as an activity in itself unrelated to other activities. The result of this is that we have produced men like Marx who basically had the same idea, and who have helped to create the situation that faces us today. The order to see this situation a little better we must go back to the Greeks. It is really tragic how often one has to go back to the Greeks today. It shows our failure most clearly. With Plato and Aristotle we see developing one of the two lines of metaphysical thinking that western man has engaged in. On the one side (given to us by the Hebrews) there is an ever growing God consciousness against which is set an ever growing world consciousness (given to us by the Greeks), and although they develop along side of one another they seem to lead us in different directions. Man is an inbred, and incurable relationist. He is born with the curse that he must relate everything to everything else; it is almost a kind of passion (that lies at the source of all our creative abilities) but there is the danger that this condemned and cursed relationist will at any moment talk himself into believing that he knows an absolute principle, be that God, the world, or nature. He will then proceed to relate everything in the world in such a way as so it must lead to that absolute and in the process create a mess of a world picture. He cannot keep the system open as it should be and so is always tending toward a closed system (Weltanschaunng) in which everything is related (and must operate according to a certain scheme). So we have here a kind of metaphysics of western nature where these two lines (speculative and religious metaphysics) separate and meet, but please note. in a way there really is no difference between science and religion. Both are out for absolute knowledge and both promise absolute knowledge. You might think religion a little weak when compared to science but the guiding idea of religion is that we can gain absolute knowledge either through revelation (as in the case of Jehovah), or through good works (as is the case with the Christian God). This knowledge will either be revealed to us, or we will gain it for ourselves (but as Karl Marx once wrote in an entirely different context) we will have it. In the meantime we have discovered that the world and nature are infinite which means that this task (of gaining knowledge) can never be concluded. There can never be a conclusive and decisive world of science. We shall go on doing scientific work and discover more and more (and it will never be anything but more and more), yet it can never come to an end and can never give us any indication as to how we must conduct our life or what we must do. Neither will religion ever be able to give us that, or the idealistic philosophers, or any other metaphysician who claims to know an absolute principle or an absolute idea. The world of eternal ideas first given to us by Plato are a failure. They cannot help us, and the outcome of this has been tragic. Because as more human beings populate the earth and as they gather into masses it seems as if the degree of intelligence in the world diminishes. It is almost as if Zeus had only a certain amount of intelligence to give each of us, and the more people that are born into the world the smaller each of their portions become. We have insisted on this mass production of humanity, because we feel ourselves to be natural beings. We say to ourselves "the animals do the same, don't they?...(one of the reasons why we shouldn't, if we can possibly help it). Since we have become a mass society we find that our population continues to grow as do those of the Indians and Chinese. We are almost as numerous as they, and of as little quality. In a very systematic way our words are becoming cheaper and cheaper and you cannot even speak of metaphysics any more, or of the things that others once thought were truly sublime. We have created instead a substitute for metaphysics, namely ideologies, where it is really believed that an absolute principle has been found (as in Nazi, Bolshevism, Socialism, Nationalism, or what not). It is all an attempt to organize and explain everything according to some fundamental principle which we are told we must accept but which in fact we should be highly critical of. Again, we must go back to the Greeks. Socrates would have counseled us not to believe in anything which we cannot examine critically and he started philosophy, because philosophy means nothing more then the willingness of man to live in the presence of what he does not know. Man is only too willing to live in the presence of what he does know, or at the very least in what he has just learned. But to live in the presence of what he does not know is an entirely different matter, and according to Socrates what he does not know are the highest possible principles of human action. |
