-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)

Why and How We Study Philosophy

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Discussion Period:

Now for a word about discussion. Discussion is particularly important in a course of this kind and I want to allow as much time as possible for it, but first I want to say that here the topic in itself is not so important as what can be shown by the discussion: that is, the topic is only used as a model in order to make it clear methodologically how we proceed and to show how philosophy can answer where other things cannot.

Nietzsche was the first one to hit upon a certain contradiction in freedom: "Forget to tell me free from what but rather tell me free for what." Camus brings out that revolution and revolt start with concrete liberation from certain things. We have always been aware of what we wanted to be free from, but as soon as we use the plural form (liberties), we lose the metaphysical meaning of freedom. In China, in trying to free themselves from the white man and imperialism, they ended up taking the road of total imperialism. The foundations that guarantee certain liberties are especially needed now because we want to be free from something. We want to go on with liberties, but we overlook the fact that in the very procedure of giving liberties their very source is taken away. Freedom consists in the open possibility of gaining more and more liberties, that is true; it consists in a procedure of infinite liberation--but it is a procedure of freedom for what, not freedom from what, that gives every citizen the possibility to decide what new liberties should be gained and what old ones defended. In revolution we give that away, which is why all revolutions end in slavery unless they end in a constitution that is really followed by all, guaranteeing the possibility of new liberties.

It has always been accepted in politics and it has always been a principle in politics that the end justifies the means, but this is only true in science where it deals with things; it is absolutely impossible in politics. If the means are not right, the end will not come out; if the means are slavery, no freedom is possible. Abstractions, which are rightly used in science dealing with things, applied to beings kill human life. But science has to go parallel and be related to philosophical procedure and in turn philosophy has to check itself on concrete scientific facts of the historical moment. If a philosopher would say that science is not creative work in its own field and that he will disregard it, he would soon become a fool. He must keep the stream of philosophy clear, but he cannot disregard the other streams.

We cannot concede to everyone boundless freedom because it would lead to anarchy and to the impossibility of building a human community, but a decision for freedom must be made. If we think that by not making a decision for freedom we have just rejected something, we will find out soon enough that we have actually accepted something else: slavery. If we do not fight for freedom, we are ready for slavery--which brings in another facet of the question (there is a dialectic relationship involved in this). In a marriage, for example, where the girl gives herself into voluntary slavery, so to speak, what that girl actually does as a slave in a marriage of this kind--by making her husband a tyrant by her voluntary slavery--is to become a tyrant too; she wants to become a tyrant. It would seem then that tyranny can only be fought by setting limits to indulgence in voluntary slavery. Something entirely inhuman must be involved if someone wants to be a slave--and one of the best examples of an awareness of this is to be found in the ancient Jews. In those hard and meager times it often happened that a man could not pay his debts. The Jewish law provided that if this man could not pay his debts he could be taken into slavery for a certain period of time (seven years) by the creditor until the debt was paid off by labor. But if it happened, as it does happen, that this man after seven years was afraid to go back into the world as a free man, that he hated to leave the security of slavery, the Jewish law made a provision that he must first be nailed through the ear to a door for one day so everyone could see this man who wanted voluntarily to give up his freedom for slavery. Once this was done he could then be a slave for life.

Lecture III

I have said that I differ from Jaspers and his approach to the reasons why we should study philosophy and that it was mainly on the point that I think in our modern situation it should be: Why must modern men philosophize? I will try to give reasons for this out of the very situation in which we are and what we have found up to now about belief and reason.

When we rejected God philosophically, we lost our belief. Now even men of the church have lost their ability to believe. Their historical training and their training in the natural sciences have disabled them to believe in a specific God painted by the Jewish and Christian myth. We are in a situation where we are not free any more to decide if we want to be believers or non-believers. If some of us think of ourselves proudly as men who are independent and strong because we do not believe, we overrate ourselves. Formerly (up to 1800) When science could still try to bring about an alliance between science and religion (and even philosophy), real doubters turned up; not in the masses but in strong individuals and very strong thinkers who had to put in a lot of effort to doubt. With us it is quite different: we are pushed into non-belief. Now it is the man who tries to go into belief who might claim a boldness of spirit and independence of thought because he is not pushed into belief. But we are pushed into non-belief; it is made too easy for us. All of us are involuntarily doubters, including those who go to church, whether we realize it or not. This is why the Catholic Church tries to tell us all dogmas are scientifically proved. What are they trying to do? Is a scientific religion being served to us now?!! The Pope tells us there is now proof for the miracles; it is written down. You are a dope if you do not believe because it is scientifically proven--and don't you believe in science? But as a philosopher I would say, "No, I do not believe in science; I know science." Modern man, however, believes in science; he is a believer. So it is a nice trick to get man back into religion by pseudo-scientific means. He can be gathered in again by superstition (belief in science is superstition), and the worst kind of superstition is used to lead people back into the church. Here are the perplexities of the nihilistic situation. Most people are pushed into disbelief and do not even know what they have lost.

To believe in science is superstition because we believe in the scientific method. We believe that everything can be cleared up and found out by scientific methods--people too. But no proof of that can be given; on the contrary there is counter-proof against handling people by scientific methods--proof that scientific methods applied to people can lead to such things as concentration camps, etc. It has nothing to do with truth or with human beings, and metaphysically speaking, it turns out to be a crime. Engels once said, "Common sense can experience its ‘blue wonders' if it dares to enter the field of science.", and we now unfortunately have had the experience that we do experience"blue wonders" when scientific methods are applied to people. All of which only means that we have to get things straight. What can science do for us and what can it not do? What can religion do for us and what can it not do? What can philosophy do for us and what can it not do? Later we must ask this of politics too. We have to find the original sources of those different phenomena that are brought about by us. So the approach we have to make is to find out what philosophy is and how to use it. We have to get at a clear concept of what philosophy is as a specific human activity and what the other human activities are. We have also to find out how we can know their limits and how we can avoid mixing them up.

Up to 1800, roughly speaking, the intermixture of those different activities of man had not been too dangerous because they were held together by the general religious setting. Goethe could believe in the cosmos as well as in God. Being a scientist, poet and philosopher he could still unite all those things in himself and it would not harm him. But from around 1800 on those mixtures started to be poisonous to man because religion had been dropped out. Then the whole conglomerate drifted apart and we tried to connect different things with the result that we mixed them up instead--which was a very dangerous thing. Roughly speaking, we can find that philosophy is the center of all creative human activities and that they can be brought into coordination not directly but via philosophy--because it is through philosophy that their limits can be checked. As a design (not a proposition) we could really find out what we are doing in those fields--and there is nothing left to the philosopher but that approach.

We have tried every approach in the past. We have made propositions of being which we could not control and started with those propositions of being which we could not control--including that ghost, the self of Kierkegaard, of which we do not even know whether it exists or not. We have found that the self is most unlikely to know something about itself and we must reject this idea of self. If someone loves that self, then the one who loves can have more insight into that self than the self itself. Even Heidegger's proposition to call it abstractly "existence" contains this idea of self when he says it is possible to say that existence is something only human beings have, that human beings have a certain type of being, that being--or "being there" (a more accurate translation from the German)--relates only to human beings. Heidegger then tries to find out what this existence is and again makes an abstraction to try to reach existence in general. But he still has to say: "Existence is always only yours, always individual."--which especially shows that his proposition for being is this self of Kierkegaard's. He wants to get away from it but he cannot because it is based upon it.

Nietzsche said, "Everything is united by being the will to power, so being is the will to power." This is absolutely true--this will to power--and Nietzsche only took the mask away from this hidden will of man. We fought apparently for freedom but it turned out we fought only for power. Nietzsche was right about what we were doing at that time and his proposition--everything that is has in common to act and to act in a way to overwhelm other beings--historically was quite true. But he thought to re-unite the Greek cosmos into a funny, meaningless cosmos and to see meaning in it only insofar as it acts, and he made a mythical illusion of the cosmos out of his proposition. Nietzsche's position that "Everything that is can only be perceived by me by its action; and if that thing is more than its action and what it does to me, I do not know what more it is." is only the old proposition of Kant that we cannot know that things are because we only get their effects. So if we want to put forth a scientific explanation of being (which means it would be meaningless)--taking the nihilistic position that being has no meaning--we could then make the nihilistic proposition into a scientific one: Everything in being is only action. This proposition has no meaning, but it explains; it is adequate and right, but it does not make sense or give meaning to being; it does not answer why, only how. Science and philosophy are already so mixed up that a true scientific proposition such as Nietzsche's can be put forth as a philosophical proposition and the philosopher does not even know it. So metaphysically we cannot take it seriously because it does not tell us anything.

The nihilistic formula, "Nothing is true; everything is permitted.", abstractly means that being has no meaning. We want to overcome this proposition which is the basis of our modern thinking. We lose control in our thinking as soon as we start thinking that being has no meaning, as soon as philosophy declares itself to be bankrupt--and the nihilistic situation is a declaration of bankruptcy made quite sincerely ("We owe our results to a sense of absolute sincerity."--Nietzsche). Coming after Kant, philosophers found out that the only thing they could find out was that there was no truth. But is there not inherent in this the claim that truth is that there is no truth--and did they not claim this? We run now into a circle of contradictions until it comes finally into empty logical procedure and becomes a mere process of thinking with no substance any more. All that is left is bare logic--the sheer mechanics--which becomes a mortal proposition to life. We did try to put forth new propositions of being (as the existentialists did, for example), but we failed. Now the only thing left to us is to do what we failed to do. We tried to take over on our own, yet we failed to ask one question: Who are you? who is man?

"Know Thyself" was the inscription of Apollon on the temple of Delphi--which seems to have been a strange inscription for a place where people came to hear the future! The people who came there really wanted to know metaphysically about being when they wanted to hear the future from Apollon, but if they were to take the inscription "Know Thyself" seriously, it would mean that the visitor coming there to find out what was going to happen, philosophically speaking, could only act consequently by going home--though only Socrates took the inscription that seriously and acted so by not going there in the first place. Someone else (an overzealous pupil) took it upon himself to go and ask for Socrates and in reply to his question, “Who is the wisest man?”, the oracle answered, “Socrates.” When Socrates heard about this he was clever enough to know how terrible the oracle could be when it spoke out directly (because then it wanted to destroy), so he avoided the curse of the Gods (called"the envy of the Gods”) by saying, "I am the wisest only because I know that I know nothing." So perhaps we should go back to the temple of Delphi and read the inscription again--"Know Thyself"--for it is only by finding out who we are that we can begin to find the answer--and this is the hidden and ironical meaning of the Greek oracles. When a king came to the oracle to ask what would happen if he went to war with the Persians, the oracle answered, "If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire." The empire he destroyed was his own. Could he have known better if he had understood himself? Yes! for then he would have known that he wanted to destroy a great empire; then he would have understood that there were two empires to be destroyed and would have been warned. On the other hand if he had known that he wanted to build an empire (the right proposition) and the oracle had said, "You will destroy one empire.", then it would have been the other empire.

People can only understand others by understanding themselves—it is a two-way street. But if we want to go back to ask the one question we have failed to ask in this our modern situation--Who is man?--then we must understand one thing: --if we start with the individual or humanity or society, we can never come to the question of man or to the question: What do we have in common that all of us have in common?--which also must be answered so we can at least control our mutual thoughts on the subject in order to talk to each other and give essential proofs in freedom. When we ask someone, "Did you have the same experience?", and he answers "Yes!", we know that men have a thing in common, and when we know what it is they have in common, we will know what man might be.

When we rejected the cosmological and theological propositions, we said that we did not want to be in father's lap any more. Metaphysically, this meant to challenge ourselves to show that we are creative; that we are beings not entirely determined by the world, but beings who in a way transcend the world, who cannot be explained in full by the world; that we are beings who out of freedom are able to invent freely and to put things into the world which without us would not be there; that we are beings who have creativeness, but not as rivals of God. We are challenged to find out if we are metaphysical beings and we can only find this out by analyzing our main creative activities. What are we doing to ourselves and to the world when we think metaphysically (philosophically)? What are we doing to the world and to ourselves when we think calculatingly (scientifically)? What are we doing to ourselves and to the world when we think metaphorically (artistically)? What are these creative activities? What do they mean? What do they say about us? This way is the only one left to find something that we are sure that it is.

Now we want to find out how we are (how we act) and to analyze what we are really doing. Let's first look into a position expressed by Heidegger, who found an approximate formula for the situation of man in the world: "Man is thrown into the world and he tries to answer this being thrown into it by a design that he makes to become himself, to assert himself." Only one thing in this position is important for us right now: the situational aspect. This being thrown into the world can be doubted, but one thing is sure: man in a way as never before feels alien in the world. Man always before has found himself in a certain situation with regard to the world--and perhaps not always a comfortable one--but he has never felt so much a stranger as in modern times because he has made himself a stranger voluntarily by a real fall (and one he brought about himself by telling God that he did not need Him any more). We have to realize that we are in a situation where we are perfect strangers to a world that is perfectly strange to us (which I once called in a course "Man Alone"). In this situation we cannot go from outdoors to indoors any more; we can only go indoors out. We have to check what we are really doing, to check our own activities. This gives us a possibility to get a new position toward the world--rather than the position that "man is thrown into the world," which involves the fact that man is lost (the real nihilistic consequence) and means that all he can do is to be concerned with overcoming his inner fears in that terrible situation and to fortify himself against it. In the nihilistic situation he can only take the position of Sisyphos. Sisyphos was a man who defied the Gods like Prometheus, but Prometheus was a Titan and Sisyphos was a plain man who thought that he was wise--wiser than the Gods, and showed them that he was. (The Greeks dared to put this into their myth--a man showing himself to be wiser than the Gods!) His punishment was that he was damned always to roll a rock up to the top of a hill, and at the moment he was almost there, the rock would roll down to the bottom and he would have to start all over again.

Camus' position is that life is absurd, that the situation makes no sense, has no meaning, and we cannot possibly do anything about it.We have, according to Camus, to consider and then to reject suicide (which would seem to be a positive action against the situation); then we have to consider and also reject the possibility of committing murder (since it makes an assertion). That leaves us with one possibility: --to take on the role of Sisyphos--and to take it on if only for one thing: to show human pride against a senseless, meaningless fate (against the Gods who do not exist). This is the last humanistic proposition, and it is also nihilistic because the nihilistic position is the result of humanism.

Heidegger has only inwardness by which we might change our terrible situation--to express ourselves by the making of voluntary designs that can help us develop our own personality. But unfortunately this does not hold true. If we are so lost in the world that we cannot do anything meaningful toward any other human being, it follows then that we cannot do anything meaningful inwardly either. Once my communication with other human beings is broken I become absolutely meaningless within myself—and there is no way out of that conclusion. The trouble with life in general is that if we refuse to face the consequences of one single action, that thing runs after us--usually catching up with us at the most inconvenient moment--and it is much harder because it is always behind us. Schopenhauer once defined the main qualities of man as cowardice and laziness. We all try to put forth certain propositions without thinking of the consequences, but someone always comes along to see to those consequences. The consequences in this proposition of Heidegger's would be that every man would become meaningless in himself also.

Kant once said that philosophy was only concerned with the plainest things that everyone thought he understood but hardly ever did understand; and common, human, daily life occurrences were the start Kant made to approach the questions of freedom, God, and imnortality. We in this inquiry have also to go back to the fundamental questions and life problems of man and take another look at man and at the situation he finds himself in in order to take a position towards it. We not only have to realize how terrible the situation is but also that it is absolutely dissimilar to any other situation man has ever been in and that it means a fundamental transformation of what man has thought up to now. But it might be that man is lost in the world only as he has lost his ground to stand on. He might just be stumbling and not really lost. He might be able to find a position toward the world that he can take in his own situation today—as soon as he realizes what that situation is. And since philosophy has to answer what for and why, we, as philosophical men and women, have to try to answer again: What is the meaning of being? We have to ask such questions as: What is thinking without which man does not exist? And if we try to answer that question, we find that thinking is our inner action already aiming at something and that it can show man to be a very peculiar being: namely, a being itself (all other so-called beings are things).

Lecture IV

Let's start today with a distinction not between the scientific position and the philosophic position, but rather between two things that relate to them: the scientific disposition of a man and the metaphysical disposition of a man--looking at them and at what is implied by taking a scientific position in a certain situation within a certain historical setting and taking a philosophical position. Jaspers' example of this is the difference in position taken by Galileo and Giordano Bruno when both were accused of atheism and heresy. Bruno was burned at the stake; Galileo was not. Jaspers takes the position that Galileo claimed a scientific proposition when he advanced the proposition that the earth was not the center of the world, as thought by Ptolemy, but that it revolved around the sun. The church, when it learned of Galileo's proposition, said this could not be true because it directly opposed the Bible.

This position of the church has been interpreted in just a little too shallow a manner by modern "free" thinkers (who are really slave thinkers). They think the church merely was afraid because something in the Bible was doubted, but this was not quite true--for the church had a metaphysical position too. If religious Jews, as members of the reigning church, had been confronted with Galileo, they too would have opposed Galileo because in both the Jewish and Catholic religions a cosmology is inherent, supposing a cosmos created by God based on iron laws--and as they are set, so they will stand in all eternity. Built on that is the whole theology of Judaism and Christianity, which guarantees man his place in the world and which makes sure that man cannot come to a position which might drive him into nihilistic despair.

This hangs together with the physical proposition of an earth created for man. As soon as an astronomer comes to tell us that the earth is not immovable or the center of the universe, that heaven does not stand fast and that everything is in movement, then any trained theological thinker could see the conclusions which might follow both metaphysically and scientifically. If such a theory were possible scientifically, we would end up seeing everything in continuous movement and change, which would mean that in the case of an established religion it would be gone. The Jewish and Christian religions would be lost when that is true--and that was just what those theologians saw because they were metaphysical thinkers who could think speculatively as well as analytically (as the scientist thinks). They knew what was implied, so it was not just to maintain the church but also because of inner fear that this just cculd not be true.

Jaspers thinks that Galileo put forth a merely scientific proposition when he put forth the proposition that the earth revolves around the sun, and therefore that he was perfectly right to deny the truth he had discovered in order to stay alive because Galileo had made a merely scientific proposition which could be proved objectively about a merely physical matter. The fact that the earth really revolved around the sun could not be abolished by the denial of Galileo, which meant that he might safely stay alive because another could come to rediscover that fact, which was an objective fact. So he would have been a fool to risk his life, being sure that another scientist would come along to find out the fact and to state it again in an age when the church would not be so opposed to it.

Bruno on the other hand put forward a metaphysical proposition. He took the position of pantheism and tried to bring in the Greek cosmos. It was on new scientific terms but metaphysically it meant the Greek cosmos. Spinoza developed this, then from Spinoza, Goethe translated this great pantheistic belief--which was the belief from the time of the Renaissance on to 1800--into poetic terms. Bruno thought that he only put forward a metaphysical proposition without realizing that also contained in this proposition was a belief that this cosmos was really existent--and that inherent in this pantheistic belief was the fact that philosophy was really trying to break away from religion. Although Bruno did not realize this, the church knew very well that it was a claim by philosophy to replace religion by a substitute of religion (philosophy) and that it excluded a personal God. Bruno's concept of the world as a cosmos was a mythical concept and was not clean philosophically because he had in his cosmos divine powers--nature had inherent in it divine powers--though it was in the cosmological sense rather than in the sense of nature. The church knew this meant replacing one God with an infinity of divine powers within a cosmos which was sheer heathen thinking. For that they proposed to burn him--and did.

Jaspers thinks that Bruno also was right. He had to make this decision because he was a philosopher. He had put forward a philosophical proposition, and if he had not stood his ground he might not have been burned at the stake, but his books would have been burned and he would not have written what he had written again. We might never have gotten this philosophical proposition because it depended upon one human mind. I would say for this proposition of Jaspers' that it is true.

Philosophy to a certain degree and in some aspects of its qualities resembles art more than science (which it also resembles in other respects). First, quality counts in philosophy as well as in art. For this let me give a most modern example (which is only an opinion of mine): I think that this attempt (and a brave attempt it is) that Heidegger makes now to overcome the nihilistic situation will only result in putting us deeper into it; nevertheless, I do not feel entitled to reject this work because the quality is so high and the depths of problematical thinking so great, and he puts the discussion on such a profound level that no one can afford to reject it. Heidegger tries now to overcome Nazism as a consequence of his own Nazism. (He was a Nazi for one year, then broke away and took real risks against them.). He makes an attempt now, as a philosopher should, to atone for his sin. The spot on him may always remain, but let's forget about that for now because the quality of Heidegger's thought is necessary.

The second thing that philosophy has in common with art is a difference it shares with art as to science. A discovery in science not made today, will be made tomorrow, but in art a picture Leonardo da Vinci did not paint, will never be there. There is no possibility of replacing art and no possibility to think of such a thing. Art is entirely spontaneous (which science can never be) and philosophy has this much in common with art: if Bruno had not stood up for his system, we might have lost his metaphysical proposition and Spinoza might not have been able to design a system of modern pantheism without Bruno.

So Jaspers discovers when one puts forward a metaphysical proposition, one has to stand up for it even against death. Jaspers does not drew conclusions from this, but I will. A philosopher might make a discovery of scientific value and might save it without risking his life, but Bruno did more: Bruno put forward what Jaspers calls a philosophical proposition and what I call a metaphysical proposition--which would mean that this proposition contained an element of freedom, an element of intention and decision of the human will. The statement of Bruno, that the world was a cosmos with an infinity of divine powers, contained in it a statement of a situational judgment that nature might be that cosmos and that there were indications for that. It also contained a positional statement to man himself to look at it as that so man would be able to develop more freely a deeper and higher meaning of human life.

Bruno was not aware of the fact that a metaphysical proposition always contains these two elements--and up to now no philosopher has ever been aware that this was so. In old theological thought they believed that they merely interpreted God and in old philosophical thought they also believed they interpreted only given things (the laws of the cosmos, for example). No philosopher was ever aware of this and this is why philosophy is not yet in its pure state. This means that with Kant it was not only a matter of finding out about human reason--what it was, what it could do and its limits--but it was also the beginning of the self-criticism of philosophy itself. What has to be done is that philosophers must become aware first what they are really doing when they put forth a proposition. They always thought it was a statement; they never knew and did not want to know that they also put forward a proposition, and that with this proposition a philosopher has to say: "This in my opinion is more and more truth than we have known up to now, but I do not claim that this is the truth; I am not competing with people who claim to have the truth." Philosophers are not entitled to make this claim--the claim to have the truth--yet they always have.

In a metaphysical proposition there is always an element of will. A human being judges the situation of man in the world and as to all things in the world and makes up his mind. He describes it and proposes that this situation makes possible a position we can take out of which to develop a new way of life, and that he, the philosopher, is proposing a new way. A philosopher has to feel responsible for the part of his proposition that is a part of freedom and the will, and to say: "This is what I think we should do, and do you agree?" It is not for the philosopher to say: "This is what it is and how it is and this is what you have to do." The theologian can say, "This is so because this is how God made it.", but if a philosopher does this he shows that he is still a mythical thinker and that he claims a higher power behind him. The last power behind philosophy was claimed as human reason--human reason as a God telling us what to do and philosophy had only to find out what that reason required. But there is no such thing as human reason as a thing we can get hold of; it is only a permanent procedure of the human mind. It is a human thing and we have to say about reason what we say about the New York weather: "It can change in ten minutes." There is no possibility to get hold of the whole of reason and to say it functions such and such, and demands this and this when applied to a certain position. This is either fake or it is belief.

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