-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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Questioning means always to be after something and it supposes that man is never satisfied. This very ability of always being after something is paid for by never being satisfied (grandeur and misery on a more shallow line). Thus this ability of man to question means always being able to be after something, but never being fully satisfied. But how can one be after something? This supposes putting one's self in distinction to other things and being aware of this distinction; this supposes self-consciousness--not consciousness of our “self,” but just being aware that we are and nothing more, and that we are in ourselves divided from everything else. We are a center--out of which we often draw the conclusion that we are the center of the world, which we are not, but we are a centered being and being aware of being centered, we get an idea of being a whole, of being a thing contained in itself. We get the idea that all our dependencies in nature are only our dependencies upon communication, that they are not absolute, and that we are free to handle those things. By that we are able to become questioning beings, taking everything in to question including ourselves.

So we have to ask: What kind of questions do we ask? and are there distinctions? And we have found there might be distinctions. If a child (and all children prove that the human being is a questioning being!) asks a question, he can ask: How is that? what is that? or why is that (which implies also what for is that)? And then there is a question so hidden that it has not yet been discovered because it is never asked directly but is put in the form of an answer. That we find in the one child who seems never to ask questions but always has an answer ready--and an answer of a peculiar kind: a story, an absolutely free invention. This child will never ask why, what or how, but will start to explain to the parent what happens there and will tell a fairy tale or something close to it. Here a question is also put forward; a question is put et once with the ready-made answer that follows immediately. If we analyze the answer, we might find the question.

The answer is an artistic answer, an answer making--not giving—an explanation, abolishing the problem and refusing to recognize the problem at all. This means to be hit by the problem in such a shocking way that the usual reaction (which is really a counter-action) cannot be gotten at, but instead an immediate reaction takes place as a kind of short-circuit. This child cannot bear the problem, so he tries to abolish it by saying, as the philistine says (only the philistine does it consciously and lyingly so): "There is no real problem." The child and the artist react in the same manner, though not in the same way, by unifying at once the thing and its essence, its appearance and its meaning; and by the means of this free invention, they put the problem out of business. In creative activity this can only be a work of art. The artis t is a being who is more deeply wounded and more deeply hit than any other being, but at the same time, he is at once healed. His life experience goes deeper, but is never realized and taken to the full. This strange dialectics of artistic creativeness reveals also a question and it is the same question which to a philosopher would be Why?--because it is only that question which makes the event a real problem by facing the possibility of a non-solution. The question of what and how do not take that risk; we think one must be able to find out what is this and how is it.

Most children (who are questioning and not reluctant) start with why, but are usually satisfied with the how and the what. Daddy only has a terrible time with that cursed child who will never stop asking why, the child who questions after the meaning, who asks the philosophical question at the center of all questions: Why? This means to pursue a philosophical purpose. Children also can be educated to do this; and it should be (and is) a very necessary means of education if a father has answered how and what and the child for too long has been satisfied, for the father to tell him: "Are you not aware that the question of why has never been answered?" To answer how and what is only a means that might lead us to answer the question of why better. How and what do not pertain to the meaning (they pertain only to the sense; they give explanations), but if by trying to get at the how and the what we are led on to ask after the why (which means to ask after telos again), then they can give us a better approach for finding out why things are and we might get better results. So again, even in educational matters, the same need applies that we find in our over-all situation. All these things are related to the different capabilities of the human mind--which all require the same method of being placed into a functional context where they can really cooperate and can be able to build bridges to each other and to other fields.

This leads us once again to ask: How can man who thinks of himself as a whole become a whole?--because he is only the possibility of one. He gets this feeling of being a whole from being a center; he knows himself to be centered and experiences in his own activities that he can permanently relate things to himself--but that means only the sketch of a whole, that means only that he can become a whole. To become more and more of a whole he must first find out about his real creative possibilities--and then design that kind of a system of order of those possibilities that I am after (and which in my opinion is the philosophical task of our time). The nihilistic situation is just a situation where for the first time man is absolutely confused, where all his capabilities seem to fly apart.

Man was under the delusion up to 1600 that he was a whole--and to a certain degree he wasfin that things here connected (though in the wrong way of a conglomerate rather than a system)--and that feeling of being a whole was given to him by religion. Now we would not suppose that a peasant of the Middle Ages was more of a whole, and as to capabilities had more than we have, but he was not problematical. He did not have much to account for, and religion could always put him back into the center of his existence, giving him the feeling that he was a whole. He had his place as a whole human being, or at least he lived and felt that way--which was one great essential thing that religion always did for human beings. As soon as that was gone, we no longer had that happy feeling of ourselves as a whole and we were in for the problematics of the "self." Today, people in religion, if they are truly religious (though it must be said that it is almost impossible to be so today), still have that feeling of being a whole--which means they feel better and in that sense they are in a state of grace.

As soon as we wanted to find out the truth about that good feeling, it fell apart. We asked one question too many--we asked Zeus: "Who are You?" For the first time we asked that one question too many and as soon as we did, we not only dropped that question instead of insisting upon it, but we dropped with it the question that we should always have put first, and never did--the question: And who are we? It seems strange that as soon as we put forth the question to God: Who are you? (which Kant did), that in the same breath we put forward the question: Who is man? And this means, of course, that when we dropped the question: Who are you? in the same breath we also dropped the question: Who are we? We did not take the consequences of being a questioning being--trying to decide, as we should have, all questions out of this central question: Who are we? and to relate all questions to it. Instead we asked everything else in the world--all the ghosts possible in the world--if they could explain who we are.

This relationship between these two questions shows, metaphysically speaking, a most intimate relationship between the essence of the human being and the essence of a supposed God. If we look at it historically, we will see that almost all the answers we have gotten about ourselves up to 1800 came from questions about God. Never really having been able up to then to put the absolute question to ourselves and to God, we were always putting questions to God about His possibilities and His qualities, trying to find out what He might be like; and almost all the answers we gave ourselves were answers that said nothing about God, but a lot about ourselves. If we take those answers into aocount as a mirroring of our own experiences, we will find out that almost always the valuable part of those answers that could help us get to what we were came from questIons about God. After we dropped the question of Who are you? to God and with it the question to ourselves: Who are we? we found that in not questioning after God any more, we were unable to question after ourselves any more--not even as to the what we were. We only got answers then as to what we might not be and we tried to find out about ourselves by identifying ourselves with the most different things from being.

Here are strange connections and they prove one thing at least: we got part of the answers we wanted philosophically out of religious thinking, which has always been so nearly connected with philosophical thinking, and after we broke the connection between religious and philosophical thinking, we got no answers about this one question at all. Does this mean that philosophy is not possible without religion? Here many possibilities open up. After the idea of God as a person was destroyed by hegel with that we lost any sense of being a personality ourselves. That again should only be an accident?!! Isn't there a very close connection? When this original question (the original mythical question) is applied to God, there is a continuous line of experiences of answers on which religious thinking proceeds. It runs parallel (though it is absolutely different) to philosophical thinking, and the correspondence between the two is overwhelming. It is one of the great wonders of the human mind (and where it can best start to wonder about itself) that those wonderful correspondences happen in our very creative activity. So we will try to locate them again in other lines of thinking and try to find out how each line of thinking might be related to the other and what they might be able or not able to do.

Lecture VI

We have seen that on very different levels the same phenomenon we have been talking about makes itself felt in the state of science, philosophy, religion, art, erotical life and political life. In all the main fields of human endeavor we see a confusion, a mixing up of all those fields, and the same phenomenon that happens in the higher fields when the central position of religion is lost takes place in the human individual himself after the meaning of personality is lost. So now in the field of personal occupations--with all of us belonging one way or another to one of the creative interests of man-those same symptoms prevail--which explains why among modern intellectuals arises the trend to go back to religion. Having been raised only scientifically, so to speak, in this age of belief in science, they have found one by one there was no meaning given by science that could apply meaning to their own lives. Artists too--being attacked for being artists, in this age where society does not understand any more the necessity for the creation of art—find their way back to religion.

This going back to religion shows an instinctive awareness that religion has been thrown out of the center and that since then life has lost meaning, but it is really a deceiving experience all these people undergo because they think~ they can go back to religion and get all the benefits. The question, unfortunately, is not so simple because it is a question of who goes back and how he goes back and whether there is real religious intent. The position that if man needs God, he should go back to religion must be questioned because if he does go back to religion, he brings with him all his scientific training and he will never find what he is looking for or what it means. We must first go back to philosophy to find out what going back to religion means. In the mythical form the ideas of religion were related to all the other metaphysical implications of man, so if one was born into religion he could get out of it metaphysical values. But if one has once doubted, the situation becomes quite different. He must then take the full responsibility upon himself for what he is doing when he goes back to religion. If one has been born into a religion, his parents have taken that responsibility, but if one decides to go back to religion, he must realize that as a personal decision, to go beck to religion means to take the responsibility of giving up a certain part of one's freedom—and not an unimportant part.

When we talked about religion and about Kant's break with religion, we saw that with Kant we refused to make the sacrifice of reason that religion always demands. The religious man must say: “Certain dogmas I agree to believe and I will not reason about.” And from these dogmas are derived certain propositions he is supposed to believe in--propositions he cannot decide about but has just to follow without question. If he has been born into religion and his parents have, so to speak, taken that responsibility for him of the sacrifice of a certain amount of reason and a certain amount of freedom, then he is still in a creative line. But deciding to go back means that he has to know exactly what sacrifices of reason he has to make--he has to decide now.

Religions have become very loosely built societies and make it easy to go back to them, but if we look at a few examples--and the more responsible ones--of those who have gone back, we see that it is not quite such a simple proposition. If we look for instance at W.H. Auden's article in "Partisan Review" of a few years back, we see that although he tells us it is easy to go back to religion and that there are only a few abstract points easy to agree to, it really turns out that there are many more things he had to agree to. Auden accepted and had to accept certain propositions derived from dogma--and I wonder how he did it. One can become a joiner of such a thing, but to believe it makes one religious, is quite a different matter.

Religious feeling is believing in one specific God. The Christian God, Jehovah, and the Moslem God are three definite conceptions of God and to believe in any one of them means to take all the dogmas that have accumulated around them. If rabbis, priests and others come together to agree on certain points in order to try to make some kind of religion, then it can only be based on a vague idea of God, not a living God--and if one is religious, one believes in a living God for otherwise it is a pseudo-philosophical proposition. A philosopher can say "I believe God exists.”, but he does not say what this God wants from humanity. This God presents no obligations to man, He makes no aemands and thot is why we say the philosophers' God is not a living God and is not religion. Religion is to believe in a living God in the ways of the church and the priests (or in mystical experience as the Medieval mystics), and it means believing in all the dogmas. That can be called the phenomenon of a living God, but not the way of those people who want to get together to build a new religion because so many beliefs have become bothersome. Too many theologians are willing to get together with theologians of different beliefs to see on what points they can agree. This is fine as a political performance, but it has nothing to do with religion or with a theological proposition.

Just how hard a theological proposition really can be is shown in the story of a Catholic priest who comes to a rabbi in a small American town that is half Jewish and half Catholic. He tells the rabbi: "I want to talk to you about a very serious business. The custom has come about, as you know, that the people here celebrate each other's holidays, and there are just too many. The people never get any work done, and they are poor and need to work. Now what I propose is this: Let's see if we cannot combine some of our holidays so the people will have more time to work. You have Chanucka and we have Christmas. Couldn't we fix one day for both?" The rabbi thought it over and said, "Chanucka has to stay!" "Well," said the priest, "we have Easter and you have Pesach. how about combining them?" The rabbi answered, "Pesach has to stay!” "Well," the priest tried again, "You have a certain fall festival and we have a certain fall festival. How about combining them?" The rabbi answered, "Sukkoth has to stay!" "Well," said the priest, "I see that you are a very difficult man to compromise with. What would you suggest?" "Jesus Christ has to go!" replied the rabbi.

This is not merely a joke. It shows that to be a religious man means to stay within the framework of a certain set of dogmas; otherwise, the God believed in can only be the God of the philosophers, merely theistic, an idea of God. Being religious means really to live with a living God and to be in the service of this God and to abide by what that service has been made to be by tradition. All the rest is merely idle talk. What this man who wants to go back to religion really wants to do is to go back to religion to get a few metaphysical ideas that he has misseci so much in his scientific life. He finds the mythical stories have a much deeper content than he ever supposed. He finds the scriptures are much more than just stories. Then he comes to the philosophers of the church. He finds proofs of God that cannot be refuted (since he has not come to Kant yet)--and it is no wonder, for these positions of the theologians were the result of deep and profound thinkers like Aquinas, not to mention all the other theological thinkers of the Middle Ages.

But the trouble is that it just is not that easy. If one wants to go back, one must first ask: What is religion and religious belief? and what does it mean really to convert?--and these answers can be found out only by philosophy. Philosophy can tell him that it means a kind of intellectual martyrdom for years to convince one's self of dogmatic propositions if one has not taken then for granted since childhood. Conversion or reconversion in the Christian tradition means going through the same experiences that the Bible tells us Saul went through to become Paul--and that is exactly what it means. If one does not take it so seriously, he only makes a psychological experiment with himself and cannot be taken seriously by anyone who is aware philosophically of what such a metaphysical decision can mean. This man is playing with the danger of death: namely, of his mind. If one takes religion slightly, he will take everything else slightly and will become just a shallow mind. Modern man just does not have that way. The other way is hard enough--to study philosophy and to try to find out first what capabilities man has and what he can do with them and how to relate experiences of life to them--but at least no danger of a lie is involved in that way. In going bock to religion there is the danger of someone talking himself into something which can come after him and break his neck.

We have to find out philosophically what religion is for man and how it is possible for him to make religions--and here for the purpose of this course we can only suppose that man is the one who makes religions. Revelation we consider here only and can consider only as a product of the human mind itself that in thinking about God suddenly gets an enlightenment about God. This is metaphysically possible, but the possibility of revelation as it is usually thought of we must cut out here; we must deny the possibility of God’s talking to man. That does not mean that we do--or can--rule out the possibility that this might still be the way God communicates with man's free working mind once man is in full freedom and in full consciousness of responsibility and freedom, but we have to say that while we cannot rule out that possibility, neither can we ever say we know. As long as man works self-determinatingly--making decisions and avoiding telling us philosophers that God tells him how to think--we can only say that we cannot know. But the minute man takes for granted in his thinking that he is led by God, we can know one thing: he will make errors. It just seems not to be given to man to know where his thinking and ideas come from or who enables him to think: that means faith we would leave open and ready for discussion but as philosophers we cannot accept thst God came and gave man the ten commandments, for instance, and that everything is just to be taken for granted.

Following laws that this God has given would have nothing to do with the human mind except that it be intelligent enough to hear God when He speaks. Religion in this sense is not creative--all the creation has already been done. It is merely a matter of adjusting to new situations of life, which means that it cannot be called creative but can only be considered to be a matter of reflective intefligence. To be creative means to produce something that would not be there if man had not made it--a new work of art or a new solution found to a life problem by the sheer invention of that solution. A new work of art certainly would not be there if the artist had not made it--and how could a new solution to a life problem be proposed without man's taking a new position out of his own mind and out of free decision?

This means something quite different from making a proposition based on a given theological proposition for then it becomes merely a matter of adjusting this new proposition to the given one--and though it can be a highly intelligent activity, it cannot be considered to be a creative one. (In science too we go from certain sets of given propositions to conclusions and creation is only involved when an entirely new methodological approach is made.) So we see that creation is never brought into theology when it is merely interpretive, but on the other hand, this is also why logical thinking can never be achieved to such a high degree as in theology. In fact, one is so bound to an iron set of laws that to find possible adjustments and transitions is almost creative of the human being itself--helping the human mind to grow--and it can almost be said that an element of creation is involved insofar as intelligence goes. After all, these things are all related to each other and distinguished from each other by degrees and there is meaning contained in all of it.

Now the original mythical conception of religion was as well a specific kind of creation as art, philosophy and science (which also is a creative activity of man--though Heidegger in his bitterness has denied any creativity to science at all)--along with two others which have never been considered creative fields: erotics and politics (which we really cannot go into here because it would make too large a scope). All of these human creative abilities together form system (and though it is not known as a system the phenomenon is always there) where all the creative activities are related and interrelated in such a way that in each specific field of creativity there takes place an interchange with all the other creative activities of man; all of them are interrelated in that definite sense that while every creative activity has its own central method of creativity, all the others come in--but as minor factors only, as helps only, and they must remain so.

What can happen if this balance is not kept we can see, for example, in the religious field: if religion tries also to be the backbone of science, then the burning of a Galileo is the conclusion. Metaphysically speaking, this means that science, as a specific creative ability of man, has been subjected as a secondary affair to the primary method of another field, religion. Kepler on the other hand in proceeding to discover the curves of astral bodies in a strictly scientific way used as his main method the scientific method, but he also took a certain religious proposition into his work--the religious idea of the harmony of the astral spheres--which helped him to stimulate his scientific research. This was possible because he was careful enough not to make this religious theory his proof for his own theory (which he proved mathematically). So here the consideration of a religious proposition did no harm to him. The harmful way is the way of Galileo where the church claimed it knew best and superseded the scientific method with its own method, the scientific way with its way. This might have meant that scientific thought could have been hindered for the next hundred years--and the fact that the times were such that the church could only propose to burn Galileo does not change the basic harmfulness of such an overstepping of limits by one field of creative human activity into another.

This question of a system of human creative activities is a most important one for us. Not only must we keep in mind the permanent interrelation of all these creative activities--trying to find out the limits of each and what each one can and cannot do--but we must also be sure when we look back at those millenniums of the conglomerate of creative possibilities (which is going apart more and more now) that we do not approach it in the modern scientific and "progressive" way (the pseudo-scientific way and the pseudo-metaphysical positivistic way) of just saying how dumb the human mind has been. We must realize that if we had not had that conglomerate brought about by religion, we would never have been aware of the interrelation of the human creative activities because in a way the interrelation came about within religion. It is sheer nonsense to say we would have been better off without religion in the past--and all scientific approaches to this end with one proposition: to exclude freedom. That is the reason why we have to take myth so seriously (considering myth—the beginning of all human creativity--as a block of creativity) and why we have to go back to wonder at all that has been involved in myth.

All this has been an experiment to show how thlncs are related and can be related rightly or wrongly. Now let's start with the means of the different lines of thinking, the tools we use, and account for how we can build them. We have in art, metaphorical thinking; in philosophy, comprehensive thinking; in science, analytical and symbolic thinking; and then we have two fields, politics and erotica, where we handle human beings--and there we have the tool of understanding. This is why I first agreed to distinguish between understanding and knowledge. In science I said that we are after knowledge; then I said that all metaphysical things are better approached by understanding. Now this is not entirely true since metaphysical things must not always be living, but in politics and in erotics—never before considered as creative fields (and it has to be found out how creative and absolutely equal they are to other creative activities)--they are, of course. In life understanding takes place and from there we have to translate that into philosophy and to find out how philosophy uses understanding. No creative act can be achieved either in politics or in erotics without the agreement of other free persons. As soon as they are raped in any way or tyrannized or terrorized, no real creative act is possible. If either politics or erotics are approached in a scientific way, they end in a terroristic way--and there is no going away from that consequence. So to be able to bring about politics or erotics in freedom requires the tool of understanding, by which we can come to agreement.

Politics as a concerted action in agreement end mutual identification can bring about a creative action and to do this we need the ability of understanding. One method of thinking is understanding, as far as thinking is a creative activity--and by thinking I do not mean merely the reflective activity of the human intellect. Man also thinks with his mind--and by mind I mean to include also what Pascal calls the heart: not feeling, but the moral and ethical capacity which checks upon the mere intellectual capability. Originally just as all the creative capabilities were taken as a conglomerate all united, so was thinking considered in that sense, but now we distinguish different kinds of thinking: thinking bound to knowledge which can be established, used by science; thinking bound to understanding needed in politics and erotics; the thinking required in art, which works by the tool of the metaphor; and the thinking required in philosophy, comprehensive, speculative thinking which not only needs all the other kinds of thinking but creates out of its very kernel all the other kinds of thinking. By comprehensive thinking (not to be confused with Jaspers' term, given in the English text as "the Comprehensive." Jaspers' real term cannot be translated. It actually means that which grasps around; it is also a psychological term and, as Jaspers intends it, a new term for being itself.) I mean thinking that includes everything and is always concerned about the whole; thinking that is out for meaning and is concerned with meaning; thinking that is the real kernel, the real center, of our creative abilities.

Even in the new sense this thinking, which I call comprehensive thinking, is related to philosophy in the old sense where philosophy asked only one question--the question as to the meaning of being--and was conconcerned with being as a whole. This was the old concept of philosophy up to Kant and it was not taken up again--or only in the wrong way. Within the old concept--with its concept of a comprehensive whole--man too was considered to be contained within that whole, to be a comprehensive being. that was supposed to be knowable from the outside. We could know about him from the whole--either from God or from a known cosmos which contained in every part meaning in itself--though neither the whole nor man were ever supposed to be completely knowable in the sense modern metaphysics assumed. My question starts from the middle--not supposing that we know the whole, but only supposing that the human being feels himself to be a whole, that he has had an experience with a thing that he could describe as a whole: namely, he himself. Being used to this feeling of being a whole by the inner experience of being a being that has a center and the ability to relate everything to himself.and having the feeling of being an integrating being with the capacity of integrating everything that could be integrated into himself, he transferred his idea of the whole to the outside and mirrored the experience he had inside to the outside.

All mythical thinking up to Kant relied upon the one fact of human beings being able to reflect upon the whole world their inner experience of what a whole might be and their capability of being a whole and to think of everything as being a whole, a one. And as long as man lived within the old concept of thinking, either cosmological or theological, he had this feeling of the world being a whole, but today we see masses of occurrences and there is not even proof of their being interrelated. This idea of the whole has never been accounted for. I have tried to give an account for it and to answer the question: Where did we get the idea of the whole from? We see that there is a certain metaphysical reality which makes it possible and that we ourselves are that reality which acts under the presumption that man is a whole, that everything belongs to him and is centered about him and can make a whole.

Now there is a basic symbol and a secret truth that comes out of this idea of the whole and this all being one. Out of that idea man made his fundamental tool for all scientific research: the number one—which is the main symbol. Without the idea of the number one it would never have been possible for scientific development to start at all. The number one supposes a unity, one thing. Now thinds in themselves are not one--they can be split into an infinity of ones. We can always again make one more and one more and one more out of it (though there might really be last atoms--not as we see them capable of being divided again, but last particles of matter that no human being could split). But proving the infinity of the small--by always adding the number one (the smaller one) has only proved to set the number one in infinity; it does not prove infinity itself. Our ability to infinitely calculate does not prove infinity either. We have only the ability to create the symbol for all the possible relationships of things in different situations. We can only invent a symbol which seem t o apply because the relation seems to be infinite. The symbol is directly derived from the metaphysical idea of the whole for which we have to give an account. Man's idea of the whole comes from this feeling of his that he is a possible whole, a one. Now from the middle inward (as from the middle outward we can account for the idea of the whole) we have to go on to another possibility: the possibility of finding out what being is.

Now as to art: here we have built a tool which is very hard to get at--which I call the metaphor. I do not mean by this what is usually meant: a symbol. The metaphor anci the symbol are equalized today and used for the same meaning. What I mean by the metaphor would be something that stands also in itself--which a symbol (as a picture, for example, of something which stands for something but has no meaning in itself) does not do. This, of course, happens sometimes in art too when art becomes allegorical, or in modern art where in surrealism metaphors are really symbols, which in themselves mean nothing. If a natural watch is used, as Dali does, with the watch bent over a table, this as a metaphor means nothing but a symbol. It is there to induce a thought of time bending, breaking, being lost and it is a non-artistic means because a symbol is used. As soon as art needs an interpretation or needs translation for its understanding, it means that symbols have been used--though this can be done if otherwise it is a work of art. Dürer had a perfect right to use certain allegories in his graphic art and to require us to interpret them, but only under the condition that the symbol used was also a metaohor that in itself was form--form essential to the picture--so if someone did not care to rind out the symbolic meaning it still would have meaning in itself. Form is such a wonder that we have many fetishes of long-forgotten religions that originally had symbolic meaning also, probably of a deity, but we do not even care what it might have been because those symbols are also metaphors. They are inherent form and as such convey meaning to everyone. Knowledge is not a necessity of art; it depends only upon this kind of metaphorical creation.

Human beings have not only experience but they have also the experience of their experience. They are able to relate experiences, and experiences of different kinds, to each other by a means usually called feeling: that is, they can relate different experiences when they have had the same inner experience--or to put it psychologically, when they have had the same set of feeling reactions. If that has taken place--and the human being most able to do so is the artist--it is not going on subconsciously, though it is not going on consciously either. The artist is half conscious of it; he reacts to a certain experience the same way as to another experience and in association those experiences relate themselves to his mentality and suddenly there is the same feeling and with it shoots in all remembrances of other experiences and he suddenly finds what we call an art phenomenon: a form thst gives the inherent feeling of all those experiences he had in that set of experiences, and it is so concentrated--this basic form--that it can assemble around it other forms that relate to it. Everything becomes interrelated and becomes one whole and crystalized around one basic form: the metaphor, which stands in itself building all these things into one basic human experience. The metaphorical thinking used in art is also the source of myth. After ceasing to believe in myth, the only mythical activity we have left is art. We now take art as a specific metaphorical reality related to man, but we do not take it as specific reality as myth was taken.

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