-Select a Lecture- I. Introduction to the Common Course (1952) II. Talk on the Common Course (1952) III. Homer (3 Lectures)(1954) IV. Homer (1967) V. Socrates (2 Lectures)(1954) VI. Heraclitus (1967) VII. Buddha (1967) VIII. Jesus (2 Lectures)(1954) IX. Zarathustra (1954) X. India and the Mythopoetic Mind of Man (1967) XI. Academic Freedom (1967) XII. Politics, Man, and Freedom (1967) XIII. A Dialogue with Students (1968) XIV. A Fragment on Kierkegaard (1952) Last Lecture Fundamentals Of A Philosophy Of Art (1951)Why & How We Study Philosophy (1952)

VIII. Politics, Man, and Freedom (1967)

This unity of approach is what we have attempted here. These three creative capacities of this incurable relationist called man can never be attended too enough. Nan can go on and on. He can rule nature by polluting the air, by creating problems and finding scientific solutions to them, but for all of that he can never build for himself the one thing he is not, the one thing that nobody is, but what he can become, because man is a becoming being. He is the only becoming being in in the world. There is no scientific solution then for the problem of philosophy; the problem of mans freedom and that he can develop from a simple man into a human person, into a moral person, into an ethical person, and that he can do this ~ himself. That is the task of philosophy Everything else is just a general theory about what all metaphysicians can engage in. Socrates didn't have time for any of that. We shouldn't have so much time for it either. We should rather concentrate on the one thing that we cannot afford to lose, namely, our contact with the qualities required for the activity of philosophy: erotics, (friendship), and politics. If they are not related, as in our own time (and we have parted with them entirely), then we must integrate them again into some kind of human ethical responsibility, because otherwise they will tear us down. They will develop their own devices like those modern ideologies that try to fool us, and death will be our penalty for fooling ourselves and letting ourselves be fooled.

The break which we are witnessing (which is already present in the Middle Ages) has started us searching for more certain scientific laws that govern politics. Each time we have thought we discovered a new one we found that in reality it only drove us deeper into misery. Socrates wanted us to face our immediate human tasks first. That is why he said that he was not interested in nature or natural science. He could not afford it, he had no time for it, because all else to the contrary he was at least very very sure of one thing: Even if we knew the whole of nature and all of its laws we still would not know the answer to the question of what we should do. The answer to that question is not written down in nature. The answer to the question of what I must do is written down for plants and animals but not for man. We have to eat but no more then that.

the question of freedom, has been answered by all kinds of metaphysics and morality systems, and up to the time of Immanuel Kant they all had one thing to say:

Commandments, philosophic moralities, ontologies based on nature, religious moralities, theological moralities all appeal to higher powers because higher powers are necessary for giving commandments. If we can imagine a higher power we can only draw from him commandments. Even the most abstract moral and ethical thinker of our modern time, Immanuel Kant, expressed his final solution to the basis of morals in the form of a thou shalt, and thou shalt not. He gives this to us as ~ - kind of an inner command so to speak. The only exception to all of this systematic and scientific moralizing is Socrates. He does not say such things. He just tries to find out by observing himself and others. He had a passion for man. He stuck by him. He wanted to find out who is this strange being, and what are his capacities? In the process he found out some very strange things. He found that man really can do either evil or good. He doesn't know what evil is, or what good is, but he can make little distinctions (as Zarathrustra once said), and so Socrates took this up.

What is the better (action) and what is the worse? The notion of an absolute good is an idea of Plato’s.Socrates never mentions it. His idea of virtue is to be good for truth, not, "what is the good?", but rather: be good for truth, or in the American sense, be good for something. He means to be good for truth, to be good for justice, to be good for love, and to be good for beauty. He never really uses the term good, because he does not know what it means. The language cannot express what it represents. Plato talked about the idea of the good (whatever that might be), but Socrates talked about something else. He might very well have said:

It is this dream of perfection that exists in all of our arts. We cannot stop to dream of perfection, and if perfection exists it cannot exist for mortals. It can only exist, according to Socrates, for the immortal gods. He said:

It is wisdom that Socrates is out for and wisdom does not mean knowledge. He is always translated as saying that virtue is knowledge, but no, wisdom is virtue and virtue is wisdom. With wisdom grows virtue, and with virtue grows wisdom. They really hang together. It is the only proposition I have ever heard that is made to free man under the condition that he can take it or leave it. No commandment whatsoever. It does not say thou shalt and thou shalt not. It says instead, you can, you might, you may, but only if you are intelligent enough to make up your mind. If you pursue this way you will become convinced. There is no commandment whatsoever, because Socrates is not the philosopher king. Socrates is just the philosopher citizen for man, and in so far as he considers the question of what a man should be, he believes that every man should be a philosophizing being. He should be engaged in ethical action, because ethics and philosophy for Socrates, are one in the same.

What he recommends is a philosophic life, and he believes that this might help us, because it appeals directly to the person, to the individual, and we live in an age that destroys individuals. Look at it yourself. You are represented by locked cards in some registry and people will look at the cards and say "yes, this is the guy". Nobody looks at you any more, nobody has the time. In a system of mass education it gets worse and worse. We become more and more like numbers and all individuality is threatened. A true individuality depends entirely upon the meaning it has in Socrates. Mankind can only change when man changes; we can only be changed if the citizen can be changed. It seems like such a long way to go, and we are in a hurry, I agree, but we could have learned something from this mess of a political situation that we are in. Namely, we should never have given up the idea that politics and political action should be judged by our ethical human interests. We were always so ready to give this up. The ideologies came and said that none of this business matters. We don't need free man, we need socialized ~ We need little cogs in the wheel, we need people who cannot think for themselves. It was exactly this way in the Nazi system, They could not bear the truth and that means that they could not bear the carriers of truth. They wanted to destroy all human values, and today the ideologies are destroying them. They are quite determined to destroy them, and that means that they must first destroy the evaluator, the only being that can bring values into the world, the only being who can conduct himself according to values, that can quarrel about values. And this quarrel about values...is this not the better justice?

To let us discuss it again. To let us get at it again. To let us become critical again. This activity should never cease, and that is what Socrates wanted from us.

Professor [William]Lensing, recently asked me what I thought was the greatest honor that could ever be given to a man. He talked about many possible honors (the congressional medal and so on), and people made up lists, and I said that the greatest honor that a man could ever receive would be first, to have been sung about by Homer, and second, to never have been forgotten. We have passed the first opportunity unfortunately. Homer can never sing about us, but we have modern poets, and to be sung about by a poet is always a very impressive honor. Because those devils are impressed by a kind of genuine human experience, but you can never present that to them if they are singing about you. As for the second, we must look back to Socrates, because Socrates was a man nobody could ever forget. We are talking about him again here, and are trying to give a new interpretation of him in this century. We are trying to get everything out of him that we possibly can, because he is so far above our human errors, and this desire (to never be forgotten) is something that he shares with us.

If we take him up, he might even live longer.

He always stimulates out thinking afresh, and any new philosophy in the beginning must start with a reevaluation of our fundamental relations in order that we may be able to establish decent and productive human relations. We have to work for a new kind of humanism and to forget about everything else. To forget about the world and how it is explained, to leave the scientist to his work, and to concentrate only on this, our fundamental task. The scientists will never reach their end, but they are reliable, they will do at least that. What God wants of us we will never know. Let new theologians come and explain that to us. I think that today if we need a new idea of God, then it must be a much higher idea than the one we have been living with. It must be the idea of a kind of God that would never want to mingle in a human war, or want us to carry on war (missionary or otherwise) to make people Moslems, Christians, or Jews. We don't want that kind of a God any more and what we are crying for is a more human God, a more humanized God, a God who truly cares for us.

I am not interested in propositions for a new religion. What I am interested in is the pursuit, the eternal pursuit, of this thing called philosophizing. That means the pursuit of wisdom, and to get that you have to fight like hell to be able to live in a state that leaves you free. This political freedom is a precondition for every other kind of higher freedom, for every other kind of higher life of human beings, and it is this that makes us all politicians and philosophers. We need political freedom, and we should know why we need it, and what we need it for. Nietzsche once said, in a very ironical remark:

All right, we have the answer. Nietzsche wanted to be free for the will to power, which he proposed as a high metaphysical answer, and unfortunately he was right, because that is the easiest one. If we imitate nature, and nature is full of the will to power, then it is a law that every thing wants to eat away at every other thing. But we thought we were human beings and that we could behave exceptionally. Nietzsche and Socrates have taught us that we can behave exceptionally. That is, that there are values that we must bring into the world that are not in the world, values that do not follow from nature, that we must invent, improve upon, and try to better.

Let us merely take the simple example of love. What can't we improve upon in our own loves, in our own love affairs? Love is inexhaustible as a richness of experience, as something that is absolutely unnatural. It is as unnatural as our politics, as unnatural as it would be to create a republic in which every human being was free, a republic that would guarantee his freedom, his life, and his pursuit of happiness. Nobody can figure out what happiness is (does what makes you happy make me happy?, and so on).

But one thing is certain. These highly divine matters, as Socrates calls them, which make us wiser and wiser and wiser without ever making us wise, without ever reaching the end, symbolize a real process of permanent growth. It is a process of permanent growth which made itself manifest long before the advent of our modern age. It is a real possibility we have in hand, a possibility of developing a better and better humanism, and of establishing the absolute inviolability of the evaluator which is man himself. It is starting from things like this that will be our task, and if we neglect it we will never get out of this mess we have brought ourselves too. In that sense, Socrates is a guide for our time. It is funny, but it is so. He is the only guide we can trust, because he does not promise too much. He only promises what every man can at least partly do, and that is to point the way, not to happiness, but to final self satisfaction. To a full life, and to a meaningful life. It is a philosophy of life that he presents to us. We have forgotten it, because we have always been ready to sacrifice life for some so called higher ideal, and we should stop that, as the first step out of this damn situation.

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