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Why and How We Study Philosophy <<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 Lecture XIV We have found that once we give up our desire to prove that we are creative by an ultimate cause (which would mean to go the way of God) and decide to start with what is absolute reality, with what has the idea of truth, the possibility of freedom and is creative, that in the end if we want to transcend our reason after having done nothing but rely on our reason, we are not able to take any other ultimate into account except the ultimate of a God who created us. Of course, it is a jump from reason into the unknown, but the direction of the jump is still reasonable—which a jump into the non-creative gods of the Greeks or the half-creative gods of the Indians cannot be considered. A god like Vishnu who creates worlds out of the substance of his body cannot explain man’s creativeness; a God-Creator, who is absolutely different from this world, who has no such substance might. If we find that we have the quality of creativeness, and in full freedom and responsibility establish it, we still do not know where this quality came from and can never really know—but one thing we can know: where it did not come from (nothing in the world or the given, for instance, can explain the creativeness of man). But as we become more and more creative, establishing more and more freedom, truth, reason, we become more and more aware of the one possibility—and the only one—of one ultimate reason that couldn’t explain man’s creativeness: a God-Creator. This does not mean that philosophy (pure philosophy) leads back to religion, but it does not mean that by the performance of pure reason, by drawing conclusions only from the one thing we know, that we gain the possibility of faith and the jump into the unknown. Philosophy does not and cannot provide the bridge for this, but is rather the jumping board. But if we build all this on man’s creativity and his ability to establish freedom and truth, what about the nihilist who can come and tell us that we start with belief and not a reasonable truth—because there is the possibility in the nihilistic situation to deny that man has the capability to establish freedom or that he has an idea of truth (though to do so would mean to kill ourselves as human beings). To such a charge we can only say: “Yes, but that can only be maintained when man does not feel alive, when man cannot do any creative work, when man gives himself up entirely and says, ‘I cannot do this.’ –then he cannot. But we maintain and think we can prove that this is a reasonable fact and not belief. It is quite true that if you only consider, as you do, the abstraction of man, the isolated individual, that you can question his possibility to establish creativeness as a reasonable fact—but what about the one thing that you, as a nihilist, do not take into account: man as man and his possibility to live in common, in communication with other men?” The key to the whole question is one of communication. If I have always lived as an isolated being, then I being unable to get into communication with you, would not be able to establish my creativeness as a reasonable fact—I would have to believe it (which is why the nihilists, who only take into account the isolated individual, can hardly come to anything but a negative conclusion about man’s creative abilities). But this does not prove that I am not creative; it only shows that I cannot do it alone. We are all sketches of man and we all have the same basic qualities of creativity, but we only have them in communication with each other—on the personal level in friendship and love, and with men in general in society and community. By all these possibilities of communication we re-relate to man and know that we all have the same fundamental qualities. Communication establishes for us these qualities by their being communicated to all of us by each of us. We guarantee them to each other by being human beings in common, in community, in communication. It is not a matter of belief (the nihilists are wrong) because we have one absolute truth—or since the nihilists say that truth is only an idea, let’s say for the moment one real fact to go on: the structure of man himself which we can know by each other and by experiences that all of us have that can be communicated to each other and be immediately understood because they are shared in common. This is the fundamental fact of man’s metaphysical existence. But once again we come to the realization that once having established our ability of creativity without the help of belief, we always find that in the end we have only one possibility of an ultimate reason, one possibility to explain this creativeness of ours—a Creator of creative creatures—a possibility we can never prove but which opens the way for a jump into faith of the unknowable God-Creator. There is no other way for man in truth. We can never know whether God exists or not because by reason no proof of God is possible, but we do have the possibility that the existence of God will seem more and more probable. If we know our task (to transform the given into the meaningful) and live that way, it will become harder and harder not to think that this God must be. It never, of course, can be conclusive, but it is absolutely reasonable. What I want to establish is the fact that it is just philosophy—after rejecting all kinds of belief and moving only from one proposition of established and reasonable truth—that leads to the point where God becomes more and more probable. We can never establish the existence of God (it is not given to reason), but we can make it more and more probable—not because we wanted to but just because we did not want to and went instead into pure philosophy. Just by forgetting God as an argument, we have the first possibility to gain a reasonable direction toward Him and one that would not require any belief. We gain the possibility of a reasonable jump into pure faith. But just as I want to establish this possibility of philosophy, I also want to make it clear just what this possibility does and does not mean: that is, we have in free philosophy to prove that the man who does not make the jump and stays even without pure faith can be as valuable as any other, that the quality of man can be proved to be equal—proved by man himself who can make it equal by developing himself without belief in the jump. Philosophy cannot and does not require the jump into faith, but only opens the way for anyone who wishes to make it, and anyone who does make this jump can be sure of one thing: he does not need to; he is not compelled to. Belief in God is not required to become a better man or a more powerful one, and it cannot be used in order to try to become a man of different quality than other men who do not make the jump or with the hope of getting something from God. This jump into pure faith is made toward God only out of pure thankfulness without requiring anything, and the man who does not make the jump would be as equal. He just refuses to transcend into the ultimate—which does not take away any human qualities (and this he can prove). So this jump is entirely voluntary and free. Philosophy only requires that this be a reasonable jump—reasonable in the way thet the man who wants to make it is aware and continues to be aware of the fact that he can never know God; and reasonable in the way that even though he knows he can never know whether God exists or not, he also knows that he has no right to jump into anything but the idea of a God-Creator—this one idea of the God of Abraham that has proved to be the only one that anyone can jump into reasonably if he wants to jump. Free philosophy, which became possible with Kant (though he himself failed to take the final step toward it—still feeling that belief in God was required in order to establish truth and freedom) means philosophy finally coming into its own—finally coming to the point where it is able to show, as I maintain it is, that without belief in God truth and freedom mutually can be established by starting only with such fundamental truth as man can find in himself and can communicate to others who have also found that truth—or in other words it means philosophy finally coming to the point where it can free itself by establishing a position in reason where no belief is required and where it can finally discover that freedom and truth are identical (in the sense that truth cannot be established in man except in freedom and that freedom cannot be established in man except in truth). And with the coming of philosophy into its own, where philosophy can really find out what it is, is gained the possibility for all the other creative abilities of man to come into their own and to find out what they are—which means to give man the possibility really to come into his own, to come to the point where he not only regains the possibility to feel a whole man, a centered man, but really to become one with the help of the one things only free philosophy can give him: clarity of thought. Philosophy once free of belief and religion establishes itself as the central capability of man to which he can relate and understand all his other capabilities. The artist can give us art but can never explain what art as a human creative ability is; the scientist can make all sorts of scientific discoveries, but still cannot explain what science is; religion cannot explain what mystical creativeness is; and so it is with politics and erotics too. Only philosophy, once philosophy itself is understood, can make it possible for us to understand all our other creative abilities and to build them into a constellation of related and inter-related capabilities of man that by making us whole men, can also make us creative in the send that we can start to relate things in life to the Absolute—to freedom and truth and where we can start to make a real cosmos by transforming the given into the meaningful where we only dreamed of one before. This is the identity and the part played by that whole system of creative capabilities that through free philosophy gives us the possibility of becoming the whole men we can become, the possibility of becoming the creative men we can become. Free philosophy—and only free philosophy—gives us the possibility to finally come out of that terrible state of confusion into which we were thrown by the blowing up of the old system of things and the nihilistic situation which followed—a state of confusion so complete we reached a point where we lost all sense of the wholeness of the human person and all sense of relation and inter-relation of our creative abilities. We even forgot what philosophy once was; we could not explain art, religion, or even science. All the human creative abilities of man moved one against the other, blowing each other up until man lost any feeling at all of the wholeness of his mind (let alone the clarity of mind that free philosophy alone can establish). As long as religion prevailed and left us in that conglomerate where everything might have been mixed up but was at least related and centered by religion, we could be approximately whole men—or at least feel to be centered men where everything that happened to us and came into our experience related itself—to religion to be sure, but still it was a relation, though a wrong one, that could five us a wholeness of mind and a relation and inter-relation of our creative abilities that we lost the moment we lost religion. All this was further complicated by tremendous advances in scientific knowledge—and to such a point that 20 years after Hegel it was literally impossible already to assemble, as he did, in one human mind the whole known knowledge of the world, to be a universal mind as to knowledge. In other words, the age of specialists started—and with it the real danger: the age of experts. Specialists are not our danger—we have to have them—but when men try to be experts, when they try to know better and not to know more, they make of themselves a monster that is only expert in destroying the whole of man’s personality. “I have seen today moving over the bridge the reversed cripples: a great ear, a tremendous ear, and a little bit of a man attached; a huge eye, a tremendous eye with a little bit of a man attached.” (--Nietzsche in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”)—those are the experts. Specialists we have to have because education no longer can be universal, but the real trouble is not the fact that we no longer can be universal as to knowledge, but the role we have allowed the experts to play in our lives. As to universal knowledge, we can do ever better than that if we see to it that philosophy comes into its own: we can acquire the creative structure of that knowledge as it is acquired by man (making it possible to learn how and where to control the specialists if need be); we can by the help of free philosophy along with a dynamic education make it possible to re-establish our inner mental balance (if it is, as so often these days it is, out of balance) and to become whole human beings in our mental structure (to understand art and always take it into our life; to understand what science is for man and thereby to avoid falling prey to the belief in science while still being able to enjoy its benefits; to understand what mystical creativeness is and what it can do for man and by that not throwing the baby out with the bath when we give up belief in God; to understand what politics is and what creative political action means; to understand what creativeness in our personal lives means); we can learn that it is not a matter of universal knowledge but of being good in our own selected field, of knowing where we start in that field, and by understanding how it is related to everything else, be able to establish our own inner balance in a moment. So it is not because we have to have or have to become specialists, but because we have allowed ourselves to become and to fall prey to the experts. If we refuse either to become experts or to be told what to do by those who claim to know better, we have the possibility to establish a greater creative activity of man than ever before—and to show just this possibility has been the main purpose of this course. This course was designed not only to show why philosophy is a matter of life and death or why decisions have to be made—the decision for freedom, the decision for truth, and the decision for philosophy (which are the only ones which will bring us out of the nihilistic situation)—but also to show the tremendous possibilities that are open to us once we have made those decisions and to show what we, as men, are really capable of establishing on our own without the help of belief either in God or the cosmos. It is not so important to go into the more intricate technicalities of why and what happened through all those long millenniums leading up to the situation we now find ourselves in if we gain at least an idea of the development of the human mind through the millenniums it moved and developed on wrong assumptions until at last the wrong assumptions were pulled out from under the human mind and the structures it had built—first by Kant and then by the genuinely creative negative work of sincere nihilist philosopher following Kant. If we gain at least an insight into that, we will also gain the impression that the human mind and the metaphysical being that man is are the most astonishing and marvelous things in the world—which will give some confidence back to man—to man who claimed he wanted to be creative without being told by religion or the metaphysicians what to do, who wanted to refuse the “you shall” and ended up by taking a much worse alternative: the “you must” of modern metaphysics. This in my opinion is the real introduction to philosophy: to show man that once he has made the original decision—the decision for freedom, truth, and philosophy—he has the possibility to refuse not only the “you shall” of the past, but the “you must” of our times and to establish instead the “you can.” We have tried in this course to try to find out what philosophy as a creative human activity is, what comprehensive thinking is, and how comprehensive thinking brings us into relation to ourselves and to the world and into relation with the Absolute—making it possible for each of us to become more and more of a whole person. We have seen that we cannot consider man to have been born free or equal or good or just, but only with the possibility to become more and more so by establishing more and more freedom, more and more truth, more and more justice. We have always heard a great deal of talk about human nature, about this or that quality that is or is not in the nature of man. The concept of human nature as something given and defined originally derived from the belief in God or from the assumption of a given and meaningful cosmos. Within that framework—though it made a real concept of freedom almost impossible—there was at least a certain restraint and guarantee, but once that framework was gone, it was possible for nihilism to take over the concept of human nature and to try to define it out of mere natural or social terms—which is a most dangerous thing from the point of view of freedom. But there is, and can be, no such thing as “human nature.” Human nature would have to be a defined thing—but it cannot be a defined thing when nothing in the given can ever explain a human being. Human beings transcend the physical, the given (otherwise freedom would be denied)—and men have always had an inkling of this in spite of the fact they believed in human nature. They always considered it as something that man should try to overcome. Kant too believed in human nature, but he tried to overcome it with his concept of the transcendental I and was very well aware of the fact that a moral deed would only be moral if it were not done for a reward. Plato, as well as Jesus and the original Christians, already believed that we could do acts that required no reward—a concept certainly in disagreement with the philosophy that believes in human nature. Deeds that are done without hope of reward can be done by man and have always been done by man—but it is not in his nature to do it; it is in his capability to do so by decision and will. It is a capability—just as freedom is a capability—not a potentiality that must already be there and can only be brought out. Nothing unexpected can ever come out of a potentiality if we know the potentiality—yet only the most unexpected can come out of human beings, which is the real meaning of capability. Inventiveness, the action of inventing, and capability are what is given to human beings—not a nature given and defined that can be known and predicted. We have seen that we have three choices open to us: to accept the “you must” of the nihilistic situation, to go back to the “you shall” of religion, or to try to establish what they wanted to find out in the 19th Century during the Enlightenment: if we in full freedom could make human beings out of ourselves, and if we, our of our own free will and by establishing more and more freedom, truth and food, could establish a human community. But do we really have three choices? The first choice—the “you must” of the nihilistic situation—is no real choice at all since it means in the end to make a choice against life for death, and unless we want to admit the failure and inability of man to establish freedom on his own and go back to religion, does it not really mean that we are left with no choice at all, but with the will and can. I have proposed to you: man must philosophize. To go back to religion would mean to go back to father, to go back to restricted freedom and, of course, a certain guarantee against the absolute destruction of man. Certainly it would be better to do this than to live as exponents of so-called higher powers that are not divine but turn out to be a ruling layer of society, but it means a certain resignation and it means to confess that we were not able to establish the human dignity of man and the real respect of men for each other after we left God—and that we think we will never be able to do so. Going back to religion would have to contain that statement of absolute defeat—that we tried to establish freedom only to fall prey to demonical movements, that we tried to leave the “you shall” of religion only to accept the “you must,” and that we think it is impossible for man to do otherwise. Free philosophy, however, professes not to admit total defeat and proposes not to go back but to go forward—to try once again out of pure reason and out of a real existential decision for freedom and truth to establish freedom and truth. But this does mean, contrary to Jaspers’ opinion, that philosophy requires an absolute commitment of man—a commitment to creative truth and creative freedom and to the purpose of bringing them into existence every minute of one’s life—and it means to understand that one cannot fall prey to all those propositions of the future that sound so easy and prove so fatal (if you do so and so and give up your freedom now, it will be established forever in a hundred years), but has to realize that the relation of time to eternity is always only achieved in the present (a little bit more of justice here and now, a little bit more of love here and noe, a little bit more of truth or freedom here and now—and tomorrow and always). The relation to eternity is never in the past or the future; it is always here and now, and whatever we wish to establish has to be established here and now and again and again and again. To establish the creative principles of man’s life is always a proposition of the present—and must always remain so. The people following us will have to establish truth and freedom also. We have to realize that we can never establish paradise on earth—and that to do so would mean that human beings could not be human beings any more, that they could not be creative. We, as human beings, establish eternity by carrying on this struggle, by transforming things into what we want to establish by our absolute longings. And we have to realize that in the matter of establishing principles we long for—freedom, truth, justice, reason, love, beauty—the way is also the goal. As soon as we think of justice as an idea to be established once and for all—and one in whose name sacrifices of justice can be made in order to establish final justice someday—it becomes impossible. Justice as an absolute is unattainable, but justice as a principle is capable of infinite growth. Principles—which can be made infinite by man—are not things, but in a way are as we are: something that is becoming, an element of eternity that man can follow and establish according to his ability. Since we are beings of becoming, since we are not reactive beings only but also active beings, since we are non-determined beings whether we refuse creativeness or not, since we are relating beings who have to relate (and if not to the Absolute and to the world and to other human beings in a meaningful way, relate then to the wrong Absolute, taking the demonic and utterly destructive way of relating everything only to ourselves), we have either the choice to become more and more of a man or woman, a human being—or to become a monster. We have only the choice to become a free man or a demon or monster since man has not the choice to become an animal. If we try to become animals, we become beasts of prey with intelligence, tigers with the will to go after each other—which is not a beast but a monster. This possibility—the possibility of human beings to become monstrosities—has always existed, of course, but it has been left to our time to prove the possibility of the organization by force, terror and propaganda of whole masses of demonized man, of monstrosities into a whole totalitarian society. And it shows just how great man’s fall has been—because that is man’s fall: to deny his higher creative possibilities and to use them for absolute destruction, relating them only to himself. We are creative because we can relate things in a meaningful way (to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and to the Absolute) and because we can transform by this the given into the meaningful; but if we make a decision against the meaningful, against creativeness, against life, we do not just suddenly stop relating things or being creative; we become something much more dangerous: we become anti-creative, de-creative and by making the wrong relations utterly destructive. So we have either the wonderful possibility before us to become free men or the terrible possibility to become demonic—depending upon the original decision we make: the decision for freedom, truth and philosophy and thus for life, or the decision against freedom, truth and philosophy and thus for death. |
