Politics, Man, and Freedom

VIII. Politics, Man, and Freedom (1967)

Philosophy then, starts a certain line of development (beginning with Socrates) and that line is critical of any kind of metaphysical assumption whether it be scientific, religious, or ideological. It places the burden of proof upon the knower (i.e., "if you know such a truth, then please teach it to me") that is, it is in principle critical of all assumptions that pretend to truth. In our own day this business of criticism in the sense of critical philosophy has been sadly neglected. What is regarded as philosophy today is really only an organized assimilation of knowledge, or what is taken to be knowledge (a kind of general theory) which has nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy as it was conceived in the classical (Greek) sense by Socrates.(3) Rather it is to Plato and Aristotle that we owe the equation of philosophy with system and the presentation of over-I all views of the world. In Plato the real world is the realm of ideas (or forms) of which we are merely the mirror. This method (which is totally logical and trusts the human mind entirely too much) both overvalues and overstates ideas. We can indeed undertake to unite all of the phenomenal world into one system (as long as we can stand it, but eventually the inherent tyranny in any system will show itself.

Today we have become most disturbed. In this century of wars and revolutions we have discovered that most of them have been caused and conducted by precisely those ideologies that have taken the place of philosophy. If we really believe that we are fighting God's war in Vietnam (that it is a commandment of God, a mission that we must undertake in his name, to bring democracy to Asia) then this belief is also an ideology and nothing but an ideology. This very cheap perversion of religion (when we can no longer say as Americans whether or not we have done the right thing, when we can no longer discuss these questions in terms of their political context, but rather, as Cardinal Spellman, use God as an argument for political action) is a measure of the degree to which we have fallen down. In a way we have been forced into this position, because the opposing ideologies also talk about God. They talk about the substitute gods they have invented, the pseudo-scientific gods (nature, history) which are supposed to give us the key to the future (to march with us) if we believe in them. The future belongs to us, nature and history march with us (if only we will believe), and in the name of history and nature Mao Tse Tung is committing his senseless, idiotic crimes for the reorganization of society. Then, there are those idiotic slogans that the Russians constantly use (it is a law of history that an oppressed people must be made free), that they must rise up and displace their masters so that in the next moment it is they who will be cutting the throats rather than the other way around. That this has happened, that it has always been true, especially of those who like Karl Marx claimed access to a higher law and higher help in relation to which they occupy a privileged position, is irrefutable. The future marches with them and they march with the future (and we in our own turn say that we march with God), thus we (as human beings) have become the victims of two kinds of political irreality. History, God, and nature can never play a political role and we can no longer afford to permit them to play such a role, because otherwise they will destroy us. God does not want us to carry on war and we would do better to say to all of those who claim he does that they are blasphemers upon his name, because that is what they are. I thought I had seen the last of this during the first world war when our soldiers were forced to pray that God would be with them.[God was with the Germans, the English, and the French; they were all in the war and God was with all of them. That was the first time that we, of the younger generation, had learned to say to hell with God, when he is used in that way. It is the same with those who claim to have scientific insight into the future; who say that the classless society must come, and we must fight for it and die for it. All of the time they are presenting us with some higher reason why we must die, and I am sick and tired of it. I want to know what I am dying for; not some empty abstraction that happens to be a general belief at the time.

Again, I must go back to Socrates, because he never believed in such things. He did not believe in those high flown words with metaphysical meanings that we can never check. He separated himself from all ideologies of any kind, and he believed this to be the first step that man must take in order to purify his political atmosphere. Now that we have assembled all of mankind before us we can see something of the sorry state that our own politics have brought us to. Three quarters of the world lives in a condition of starvation or near starvation, and we know that no human being should have to endure such misery, because when a man must live under the conditions of an animal then he will behave like an animal, will become an animal, and there is no way out. All questions reduce to the fundamental one of survival (you or I?),and the result is war. We have to try to find ways to avoid war and no ideology can help us with this. On the contrary, the poorer the rest of the world becomes the greater the chances that revolutions will lead it into disaster at any price, or lead us into disaster by mobilizing it against us. If we look at the Moslem countries today we witness the most fantastic spectacle.The howling illiterate masses believing the biggest lies (the United States is attacking Egypt), and they are believed by millions and millions of Arabs, because they can only argue primitively. Whoever is against the Arabs is against Allah, and whoever is against Allah must be destroyed. That was the sense of their religion from the beginning. We have had a very difficult time keeping the holy Rabbis in Israel from retaliating, however their situation is at least a civilized one. In Israel the Rabbis don't have that much to say, but in the Arab world the Moslem priests have a lot to say.

This then, is our situation. It is the very model of a mess, and what is worse we have decided to neglect completely the possibility (first given to us by the Greeks) of establishing a truly human community. Both lines of our traditional metaphysics (theological and ontological) have come to an end. The ontological ends with the insight that we shall never have complete knowledge of nature. The theological comes to the sorry end that many people start to think that we are fighting God's war, that we fight for him, as if he actually needed our help. We would surely need his help but at least one thing is certain: He doesn't need ours.

In this context our situation can only become more and more fanatical. The ideologies of the religious kind (which today rule masses of people) and the ideologies of the other kind (such as those that rule Russia and China) are leading us into disaster. The most consistent and consequential application of the ideas of Marx and the Bolshevists, a dream that is almost inhuman, has now been put into practice by Mao Tse Tung. The dream to change man completely and make a new kind of man. What kind of purpose is that? If we ask from a humanistic point of view the question we have learned to ask every religion and ideology, namely, "will you please tell me how many innocent people have been killed for your God...how many more are you ready to kill"?. We can almost predict their answer. This question must be asked, because we don't want people killed senselessly any more. We ask them this question and they have already given us an answer. Mao has said that China is not afraid of a third world war, is not afraid of the atom bomb or the hydrogen bomb, because in a country of seven hundred million people even if a nuclear war takes place at least two or three hundred million will survive, and that means that five hundred million human beings will be killed in cold blooded murder. That is how they figure it according to strict scientific figuring, and I don't like that kind of scientific figuring any more than I like the kind of religious and theological figuring that we have witnessed. I want to leave God and scientific knowledge out of war. It is very good for creating weapons and we have been very successful in that, but this is not the way out of our situation.

If you want to say (as it is often said in America) that since the natural sciences have developed so fabulously, and the social sciences are retarded by comparison, we must develop the social sciences to be as precise as the natural sciences and then we shall know everything, you may. But we will not gain more knowledge by that. We will only become more confused. We will learn not how people should live together, but rather how they have tried to live together, and failed. We had better go back to the primary task of philosophy. The political and creative task of discovering formations and constellation (groups of people living together) which will guarantee peace and the humanistic development of mankind without any kind of superstition. They have all become superstitious today. Even scientists are superstitious, and I am not talking about practicing scientists, but rather those people who believe in a scientific metaphysics. That means the belief that science is everything, that science can deliver all the goods, and strangely enough most of the people who actually believe this are not themselves scientists. Real scientists could not carry on their work if they weren't more skeptical than that. But the press has duped the masses with the most incredible scientific expectations, and the result is we are faced with charlatans who get hold of these partly scientific, partly nonsensical results, and claim to have the key to all knowledge (what the next theory of history must be, what everybody must fight for, etc), and we see here the creation of a certain danger.

What this course has really tried to do is to raise our understanding in such a way that we can come to see there is no field of creative activity, no human faculty, that can exist and persist all alone in isolation from all of the others. They must be related, must be taken care of, and must help each other. In the time of the Greeks (before the death of Socrates) we see the strange fact that there must have existed the recognition (both in the Polis and in Socrates’ own philosophy) that before anything else man, this incurable relationist, should take should take care to establish decent human relations (even before he establishes his relations to the gods or to nature). This task (the establishment of human relations) in regards to the above three powers, is outside of science and cannot be handled scientifically. It is the task of philosophy in the sense of Socrates, which means the decent and productive relations that man creates with himself. This is what Socrates calls the soul, to create a decent relationship with oneself, to insist that one is a free man, and to care for those higher aims of human life. These are not Platonic ideas. They are ideas that we can never reach, but if we ever lose sight of them and don't act in their direction we will find ourselves lost, along with our freedom, truth, justice, love, and piety.

Socrates was an utterly skeptical man. He did not preach, like Plato a little later, a doctrine of eternal ideas that can be learned from philosophers. Socrates knew he could not teach them, because he could not possibly know what they were. But he asked instead that we practice then together. He said, in effect

Come. Let us practice together. I know that you cannot know the truth, but you can show it to me. Show me how true you can prove the truth.

To pursue and search for truth is not easy. It is a highly dangerous thing. The truth about the state of the Polis of Athens cost Socrates his life. The fact that he might die did not hinder him from following the truth and questing after the truth. It is the same with justice, with freedom, and with what he called those higher divine matters. These things will always be beyond the reach of man, but with their help we can climb higher and higher, because they are our greatest ethical capacities. We can never achieve them in any final sense, but there will always come a next time when for some unexplainable reason there is more justice in the world, and there can never be enough justice in the world; when there is suddenly a bit more freedom in the world, and there can never be enough freedom in the world; when there is a bit more truth in the world, and there can never be enough truth in the world. They are growing entities, not sods; unexplainable powers that help us if we follow them and if we try hard enough.

These three regions, namely, the relation of man to himself, of man to his beloved one (the person he fully recognizes as his eros and his friend), and of man to the possibility of reaching all of mankind (which is the hardest of all) can never be taken care of by science. In the same manner there must be the readiness of every human being to be a friend to man instead of being a wolf. It is an ideal, but the more we follow this ideal the better circumstances will get. In spite of all the promises that only if we change a few economic items, or change the world scientifically, man will finally be happy, we know that on the contrary he will be as miserable as hell. Because we have already proved once in the twentieth century (against the former adherents of socialism), that not only unemployment will drive the masses into blind action, but luxury as well. We have only to look at our situation here in the United States. When human beings have too much wealth they will act in the most anti-philosophical way imaginable by taking drugs and indulging in other escapes. Socrates would have asked every one of them how they could possibly do something like that to themselves. To ruin and destroy your perceptions and then say that you want to pursue truth. Are you crazy? The experiences that you have you will not be able to communicate. They are not in the region of human speech. They are hallucinations, and Socrates was the first philosopher to stand up and say to the gods that we are all suffering from hallucinations and illusions. Mankind is permanently creating illusions. (This one tells me that he knows what justice is, another one that he knows what truth is, and I have to prove to them that it is all an illusion). He understood that the best possible result of a dialogue is always a negative one, namely, that we who think we know what justice is and what truth is, really do not know. This means to be able to liberate oneself from an illusion, from a lie, and then we can proceed to find out precisely what it is that we should call justice.

For Socrates, these goddesses, these metaphysical entities, these divine matters, have a strange life. Any time you pursue them, any time that you really think you have them, they slip out of your hands again. However in the process, they have grown. On each new day they mean more to us than before, as if we had to continually weave the clothes for Athena in Athens, and on every fourth year we bring her the dress we have made for her. In this persistent dressing up of those eternal ideas, those persistent ideas, lies the true meaning of our life. Let anyone come into the situation in a concentration camp where all hope is lost, and he will see that the religious man will still think of God, and the philosophic man will think of freedom, and they will understand a little better then what God means and what freedom means. Those are the hard teachers, and Socrates was the first philosopher who taught us to listen to them.

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