-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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Comprehensive thinking (out of which all thinking comes), as you see now, has certain things in common with the number one. You can see how the idea of the whole was made by our possibility to think comprehensively and how out of that we made and created the symbol and the metaphor also--which has the possibility to take into its own meaning a set of different meanings and to unite them. This procedure of integrating has also developed out of the tool of comprehensive thinking. Philosophy thinks in speculative concepts that have tried to integrate for so long that the meaning of being and the integration of being seem to be one. Comprehensive thinking builds the tools of thought of all the other creative capabilities of man with only parts of each of the others parallel to it, nourishing and nourished by the parts. This is why Plato could use myth ironically. He used the metaphor consciously in order to help the concept in question, relating metaphorical thinking to the concept in order to make it clearer. He also used symbols in pure philosophy, and although he was quite mistaken about science (believing that numbers were original ideas, mythical entities, the very essence of ideas), he used numbers in order to make the concepts clearer as he also used metaphors.

We now have to drop politics and erotics here because they would enlarge the inquiry too much. We will use art and science mainly and take in religion occasionally in order to see if religious thinking is something in itself that can be brought into its pure form. But mainly we will try to see how speculative thinking is related to metaphorical thinking.

If philosophy should be the only possibility of our time to get the balance of the human mind back, and if philosophy should also be a necessity for everybody to set himself straight in order to get the possibility to relate all capabilities in him personally in the right way so that he has a chance to get on the way of being a whole human being--if all that is so and should be so, then everybody in tbis course should try to think over what he himself has always felt to be his main capability in a creative way and then go on to ask first merely a psychological question by the means of inner questioning? How did I personally become interested in philosophy at all--let alone in the question of how and why should man philosophize? what originally caused my own interest in philosophy? where did I get an interest to look into it at all? This objective question is very important (whether you might be ready to tell me about it or not) and I ask and insist that you think about it because it might mean that you would be able to get your personal approach and find the point where you might best get into philosophy--because we also have to raise the question of how to study philosophy best. We have to find out where everybody can start best; we have to find out who would be his philosopher to start with in order to get the best results for what he is looking for in his own particular field. For those engaged in a definite creative line this answer would not be too painful, but it would be general; so they must also ask: When was the specific moment when I was most interested in a philosophical answer? For those not engaged in a particular activity it will be more difficult, but they should ask:--When has there been an experience which caused me to raise the question I asked when I was a child? why? when wasn't I satisfied with how and what? when did I ask: why did that have to happen to me? I put this in a most primitive way, but even so it is already a philosophical question. Now when I speak of your telling me about your answers--and certainly everyone is entitled to refuse to give an answer--please do not think that I am interested in psychological revelations of your personality. A philosopher is not a confessor. I only ask that everyone thinks about the answer to this question, and if he does, I am perfectly satisfied. But if the answers are such that they can be given, please do this by all means.

Lecture VII

We hear a great deal these days about peace of mind and when it reaches the point where an American rabbi--and not even a second or third-rate one at that--writes a shallow book on peace of mind that becomes a best seller, it would seem that it is time to ask a few questions—both of the real religious thinker and the philosopher. But if we assume for the moment that peace of mind might now be the answer of religion, don't we then have to ask: Doesn't the peace of mind of religion preclude the mind of peace of philosophy? In peace of mind it is something to be given; in a mind of peace it is something to be achieved: to set the mind on a creative line of thinking where it is in a state for peace. This is not the satisfaction of making one's peace with God, but it may possibly be a better way of serving God--if God exists. So these are two absolutely different points of view.

The religious approach proceeds by statements with nothing else in their content but tyrannical means--means which can be tyrannical to achieve our goodness. If for a moment we do not consider them to be revelation, then it means that the statements of religious thinking, put forth as statements to tell us how to be good, contain the pretension that they know and know better than we how to act good. This is the character of a statement and a religious statement, as a statement, has a quality in common with a scientific statement. The scientific statement states a so-called objective truth: this is so and so, and if ycu will repeat the experiment, it will show you that it is so. If some character or part of the scientific statement is applied to human affairs and pretends to know what is necessary, then we can only draw the conclusion that we have to do so and so--as the religious statement also implies. But there is a difference. The scientific statement when applied to human affairs, where it cannot be applied, is absolutely tyrannical--more than tyrannical: it is totalitarian. In it is involved a categorical imperative which runs: You must do that because this is an objective truth; in such and such a historical situation (to use one example) you can only do this; therefore, you must because if you don't, you are just a dope. This "you must" is a totalitarian imperative.

The religious imperative also seems to have a "you must." It makes a statement that God has revealed that you shall act such and such—Here are the ten commandments (and they are commands)! But is a categorical imperative that is a "you must" really involved here? Is it a proposition of the absolute destruction of the freedom of the human mind as a scientific statement is? It is a categorical imperative of "you shall." And what is implied by "you shall"? For one thing, it contains a certain amount of freedom: you can be a sinner--which is a very different proposition from being stupid. Human beings are only afraid of one thing: being a dope--and it is the most frightening thing in the world. To be a sinner may mean eventually to go to hell, but for one thing hell is far away and for another a certain pride is involved in being a sinner. A sinner is defying God--the highest power in the world (as long as He is a personal God with justice)--and to take the part of the Devil makes a man interesting. The figure of Satan in "Paradise Lost" is the most interesting of all the characters; "Paradise Regained" is boring. The characters there are not as interesting as Lucifer, who out of his own strength of will defies God. Your soul may be lost in eternity, but if you are ready to suffer that, it is still a big chance. To be a dope just means to be abolished from the memory of man. So the statement of the scientist is totalitarian. It means that if you do not do what you must do, you will just be out for good. You will be forgotten and nothing--and they have shown us just how well a man can be forgotten in the concentration camps or when a man disappears in a totalitarian country. The usual answer to any inquiry about him is: "Whom are you talking about? Such a man never existed." This is what Hannah Arendt calls "the hole of oblivion.”

How terrible the threat of oblivion is was once shown in the hebrew religion. They tried once to make such a threat--that a man could be blotted out of the book of the living--and this was a much more terrible proposition than the Christian hell--eternal pain or not. The soul must be able to endure the pain or it would die--it might even get used to it or even enjoy it. But to be blotted out of the book of the living!--that was a much bigger threat. Even so, this threat of the Hebrews was not a totalitarian threat; it was still not the misapplied threat of science of "the hole of oblivion," of being a dope, of being nothing. In the Hebrew sense it meant only to be blotted out in the living performance of theological history. It meant that you had not done anything for carrying out the great task of humanity that had been given to man by God? to unite humanity under one divine faith and one law. You had refused to carry on that one great task and therefore you had no right to be included with those who lived on through their children. You just did not belong. This was also the same threat the Greeks had. It was better for Achilles to accept the proposition to become a hero and to die young--though the Greeks loved life dearly. (They loved it more than the Hebrews loved life, and the Hebrews loved life more than the Christians. There was a saying during the war, "Let's hope he's a Jewish doctor."--which meant: Let's not take a Christian doctor who believes in the immortality of the soul.) The Greeks loved life because they did not believe in going on in eternity in this unfolding book of the living. The Greeks clung to life much harder because they all had to go to Hades--which was a most terrifying proposition. Achilles knew he would say later in Hades, "I would rather be a poor man’s servant, and alive, than be a hero and in Hades." But still he made the decision to die young as a hero because to the Greeks glory was their life. To go into tradition, to be sung about--that was their hope and idea of eternity. The Greek threat would have been: you will not go into glory. The drunken companion of Odysseus who fell off a roof was condemned not to live on in glory but only to go to Hades.

But while religious thinking is only tyrannical and not totalitarian, leaving a small spot of freedom, and while it only puts forth a proposition of "you shall" rather than "you must", you do not have the creative decision in religion to say: "I think that this is still more good and this I will try to make." This decision is only possible in philosophy--which goes on an entirely non-tyrannical proposition. Philosophy--free philosophy--makes propositions, not statements and looks for agreement and cooperation in bringing about this specific good or avoiding that specific bad without pretending to know what is good or bad. It only asks, What is more meaningful? and then says: "I think I propose the more meaningful, and if you agree that it is more meaningful and if you agree with the part of the proposition that is a statement (that the situation seems to be thus and thus), then let's proceed to try to establish what I propose and you agree to." Philosophy asks: Do you agree? In a philosophical proposition one must be able to discern the two parts: the part that is a statement, which must be checked objectively (the part that says: These are the elements of the situation speaking for that evaluation of the situation.) and the part that is the proposition. This means that philosophy has never existed in this sense because no philosopher has ever put forth propositions in this sense--including the nihilistic ones, and they last of all because they tried to handle scientific statements philosophically (like Hegel) saying in effect: "I am in possession of the absolute truth without the revelation of God." But revelation only claimed to be the essential truth--there was still space left where people could act creatively. The pseudo-philosophers and pseudo-scientists have excluded that entirely. Everything is known and must now only be learned. There is the "you must."

Philosophy started with the Greeks and developed by trying to establish an independent line of thinking. But if it became possible, as it did during the Middle Ages, for example, to call philosophy the handmaiden of theology, we have to ask: how has that even been possible? Old philosophy had to take in other methods of thinking: metaphorical thinking (art), symbolic thinking (science), and religious thinking (which proceeds according to revealed truth). And though independent philosophy (which is not the sane as free or pure philosophy) tried to remain apart from theological thinking, it never really made distinctions between philosophical thinking and religious thinking. Philosophy asks for the meaning of being; it asks: What is being? The religious man asks about being insofar as he asks: What is good? Beginning with the Greeks, philosophers tried to establish what the meaning of being was, but they never could because of the term "being" which was also a mythical term. They never could make out what they meant because they thought that they knew--and how? By revelation, by a belief with which they started: a belief in the cosmos. The cosmos was what they thought of when they asked: What is being? They had, so to speak, a prejudiced mind. They took over a religious proposition--though it was not a theological proposition because the Greeks did not have a theology. They did not have such a God as the Jews and Christians. With such a God-Creator one could try to find out what being was by realizing God's will--and it was possible to base the whole science of theology on that presumption. Men had only with the Hebrews to study the texts, or with the Christians to study the development of the church, and they were on the way to discovering the meaning of being because God had made it. The Greek way could never become theological because there was no God-Creator, but it was cosmological. There was a cosmos with the divinities and Gods contained within it, and possible transcendence was made within the world. To man, who was also within the cosmos, the Gods were beings to whom man could transcend, to whom he could go to increase his abilities (the Gods were immortal, for example), but the original proposition was that the original being of everything was in this cosmos and this cosmos had always been there. This was the assumption of all philosophy, and all philosophy up to 1800 developed along the lines of this cosmological concept. When philosophers were talking about being, they were sure they knew what they were talking about. They thought that they had to be scientists in the way of observing the cosmos (as the religious men had to observe God, so to speak), that they had to observe the goings on in the cosmos and from that to relate each event to every other event, making a system, and to say with that system: "The full truth is here. We must have the truth here because we have analyzed being--a thing that is known since the cosmos can be studied by observation."

With Kant (and the breakdown of the cosmological and theological approach) the possibility of free philosophy started, but what we got instead was totalitarian philosophy. Not that Marx was a Bolshevist or Nietzsche or Hegel were Nazis, but metaphysically they took the idea that they knew being was the universe--and now a universe not including God or transcendent powers. That meant there was no longer a difference between philosophy and science, and the consequence was that this pseudo-philosophy had to dissolve into science because it used the same procedures as science used. Hegel created logic as a science. He thought it was metaphysics but it was a pseudo-metaphysics that made it possible to make logic a science. Symbolic logic is the science of scientific methods--but the people who do that do not call themselves scientists; they call themselves philosophers (which started with Dewey). They forget that they have nothing to do with metaphysics. But that they could call themselves philosophers, and did, was because philosophers like Hegel were only pretenders. So the scientists could take over philosophy and could claim it for themselves, and rightly so.

This is why philosophy has ceased to be--except for the existential philosophy, which seems to be concerned with the metaphysical. But it has one great weakness: it proceeds on scientific methods along psychological lines and the existentialists' real results have been taken over by the psychologists, checked scientifically, and have fallen under that field of science. Freud was able to take over Nietzsche's concept of sublimation which with Nietzsche was still metaphysical, but since it was existential (relating to inner human experience), psychology could take it over, check it, and use it--and rightly so, because philosophy had narrowed itself down to one part of the physical (here the inner process of man's inner experience which is really physical). As soon as something physical is taken to be metaphysical, it will fall prey to science because science can rightly say: "We can do that better." The services philosophy has rendered to science are tremendous, but it is being sucked up by science. On the one side there is psychology (there only remain certain existential propositions not gotten by psychology--and very few propositions at that) and on the other side, symbolic logic. It seems that we have finished this development of science out of the very body of philosophy, that philosophy has done what it could do, and has given up its task to the sciences. But this is not true. Philosophy has only abandoned its task and it is a task that cannot be replaced. The moment after Kant, when the pseudo-philosophers started to think in pseudo-scientific lines, the back of philosophy was broken and philosophy started to fall prey to the scientist. Philosophy had its moment to come into its own with Kant and lost it.

Once before philosophy had made a try to come into its very own--and that was with Socrates. Though we do not know enough about it, as far as we can find out historically and from seeing the contradictions in Plato where the thought of Socrates does not seem to fit the thought of Plato, we find out that Socrates seemed not to be concerned with the cosmos or being. He seemed to be concerned only with the phenomenon of the human being, with the philosophy of men only, and he did not pretend to have a possibility to say anything about what being might be. He was a thinker who tried to proceed from the thing he knew best--and that was Socrates himself insofar as he was a human being. He then tried to proceed to other human beings and to find other asserted proofs that way. But the way of Socrates was left entirely until Kant made the same approach--though in a different way. Kant was critical about God and the cosmos, and tried to find out how a philosopher could go on without making an assumption of the cosmos. Kant showed how we run into antinomies permanently as soon as we start with a concept of the whole, and that we also run into contradictions as soon as we start with God, so he tried for the first time to return to the small platform of Socrates:--Let's first ask and try to find out: how is the human mind? what can man do? what is reason? what are the limits of reason? how does man reason? He tried there to find a line for free philosophy apart from the cosmos and theology. Then immediately after Kant the cosmological approach and the theological approach were secularized and synthesized by Hegel and we proceeded in the nihilistic way. With that philosophy went down to the bottom and ceased to be.

Now we make a new approach again to philosophy, not only to show that philosophy is a human creative ability with its own source, methods, and tasks which cannot be replaced by any other human capability of thinking, but that it is also the center of all other creative abilities of thinking. We want to show that religious, artistic, scientific and political thinking all derive from philosophical thinking and that without it they will not be able to come into their own; that without this capability of philosophy to become pure philosophy, they cannot become pure art, pure science, or pure politics, and that even religion will never become pure religion--whatever that might be (It might be that religion will be able to do without mythical thinking and get a living idea of God.)--or can never come into its own without philosophy. But right now we are only concerned with getting certain fundamental indications of all these different capabilities of man's thinking (and thinking is doing--not only the beginning, but the very procedure of doing itself) on all these different lines. We are concerned with distinguishing these lines in order to answer our question, which in this course is: What is philosophy? can pure philosophy exist? and if so, how and why? and if it does exist, why must man philosophize?

Jaspers in his book ("Way to Wisdom") tries to show that philosophy still has a genuine right of existence and tries to show this in the inner existence of man--that philosophy should be and can be something that formerly religion has been: something to live by. But replacing God (who is the only possible being man could live by) by a sleight-of-hand with philosophy is something that can only be done in a situation of despair. Philosophically, we have to reject it, and have to say: "This is one of the greatest documents in our situation of human need and despair and that you want to help us (which he does by distinguishing what science is--and this is the most valuable part of the book) we fully acknowledge, but other than the contribution about science we have to say: 'We cannot take it--because isn't it consolation?' If we want consolation in our despair, let's go back to religion, but don't give us a substitute. We cannot take the God of philosophy as a living God because this would be a substitute. Our souls can only be satisfied with butter; do not give us oleomargerine."

Camus tries the same thing in the atheistic way. He tries to show us that we can get out of the nihilistic situation by replacing religion with a kind of brotherhood of man. He sells a new thing, so to speak: pure ethics developed out of a state of rebellion. But then we have to say: "If you want to offer Christian brotherhood again, please offer it; but don't give it another name." If it is true, however, that we can only get out of this situation of human despair, this meaninglessness, this nothingness, this explosion of our very capabilities by pretending to believe in God and a religious proposition, then let's take the God of our fathers. Let the Jew go back to his God and the Christian back to his God. Let's all go back, but let's not take propositions of philosophers who are in despair and who say, "Here is another thing as good as Christian brotherhood.", and when we look, we see it is the same; or propositions that try to replace a living God with an idea of God.

Jaspers says that philosophy has the task now to save us, but we do not want to be saved--and if we do, we will trust God to do it. The philosopher should not try--even as softly and gently as Jaspers does by saying that philosophy can only give us assurance of our own inner being. Such humility as this we cannot accept--because the philosopher can say, and can show that it is so, that we have to philosophize because it is the only way of freedom. Philosophy itself is committed to its very performance and everyone has also to commit himself to it to get the strength of his mind together. If philosophy is only a kind of consolation tolerated by science, it still is not out of the role of a hand-maiden--though it might have advanced into the nursery as a nurse-maid. Pure philosophy puts forward a very committing proposition; it says: "Without me you can never be free and can never really transcend yourself. You will fall prey to any scientific statement put forward. You will lose your freedom entirely or you will go back to religion and get a little part of freedom. I, philosophy, am the only capability of yourself that can make you free." That is the claim that free philosophy puts forward and it says along with it that everybody has to work and to live philosophically if he wants to live the life of a free human being--in fact, if he wants to become a human being at all because only a free being is a human being. So we have the possibility of mere existence, ruled by inhuman forces, or existence with a certain possibibty of inner life in religion, or we have the possibility of changing our existence constantly toward and finally into a full, free human life by philosophy. That is the choice that philosophy, when it comes into its own, puts to man.

Jaspers' book helps very much. It shows all the elements of confusion in the situation that the human mind finds itself, and it tries to find a solution in the most noble way; and if Jaspers has not come to my position, it might well be because he is such a sweet human being. Being a liberal to the bone, he would never think there could be such a thing as an absolute necessity of commitment to freedom--that as to freedom there is no choice, that as to freedom there is no freedom. We have the freedom to reject freedom, but the price is that we lose ourselves completely in the nihilistic situation and no one aware of the price would be willing to pay it. So even this choice is not really there. We are forced into freedom by the very situation of our life and it is a question of life or death. The only choice so far as man is concerned is that he can choose death--and in that sense, he is free as well in regard to freedom--but he has to be aware of it. But such a choice as between good and evil (as in religion) or betheen beauty and ugliness (as in art) is not left to man here because the choice between life and death is not a real choice as soon as he becomes aware of it. He can give an absolute protest against freedom, but he must know that with this he condemns himself to mental death and all humanity to death. If he does know this and makes that choice, he is a demon; he is someone who acts compulsively without it having any meaning and more than that: he is acting consciously against meaning.

In the nihilistic situation in totalitarianism we have acted more or less consciously against meaning because totalitarianism has to do with the will to meaninglessness and that means the will to death. Metaphysical death means absolute meaninglessness. We can decide for absolute meaninglessness but that means to decide against life and this choice cannot be given to everyone to the full. Why? Suppose you choose the nihilistic trend. Can I now give that choice to you really? NoJ because you are in that same moment intent upon becoming a murderer and will become a murderer, and I, knowing that I have made the other choice (the choice for life by my own choice for freedom), can never accept murder; I cannot by my very acceptance of freedom in essence--because by the choice for life, I have excluded myself from ever being able to choose murder. This decision made without God is quite different from the religious proposition, which makes no assumption of my own creative choice, because as soon as I consciously make that choice I have to exclude every opposite of freedom--and that means murder. So I can only give you that choice theoretically because if I know that you have made the other choice (a real conscious choice in freedom against freedom and by that a choice against life and for murder), then I must be absolutely opposed to you. And with this comes the possibility of an absolute division between human beings--a division between those who decide for the line of meaningfulness and the others who have decided to follow the falling curve of given accidents into absolute meaninglessness. Between man and demon no understanding is possible. Here are the races of Cain and Abel and we can see here what thet myth might really mean and how deep it might really go--having reached in free human thought this very possibility of human life. Man, having smelled by the power of myth, unclearly but very deeply, that such a possibility is within man, has now established it.

If we know how to think on pure, critical philosophic lines, we will find out that the myths are even deeper than we thought before, and this is what binds them to philosophy. Philosophy has a very curious ability: it always binds the past to the future because quality counts. This living development is never found in science--where we reject as unimportant steps that have outlived their usefulness, so to speak (the discovery of Galileo, for example, is only interesting historically now)--but a new philosophical discovery makes a certain element of mythical philosophical thinking even deeper and more valuable. It adds new qualities and shows us that the past too becomes deeper--as the myth of Cain and Abel has a deeper meaning for us now or as it seemed when Kant got his idea of transcendence, making it appear that the ideas of Plato had been misinterpreted up to then. This is true of art too. If Cezanne had not painted, we would never have been able to enjoy El Greco so much. He was enhanced in value by Cezanne because there were elements in El Greco that could only be discovered after they had grown in Cezanne and taken on a new shape—then they suddenly blossomed out before our eyes. But Cezanne had to invent a higher state of that embryo all by himself before we saw the same embryonic element that was already there in El Greco. There seems to be a strange continuity of development of the human mind. All those propositions seem to have been there in a mythical state, but not in a way we could consciously develop. Everything seems to have always been there in myth and grasped--though not in a clear way. But this also means that the man who lived in the time of early myth was able to grasp the same essence we are able to grasp--which is very good because he need not then regret that he lived a thousand or so years ago instead of now.

Lecture VIII

Now we have to find out what the difference between philosophy and religion really is. Philosophy seems to have destroyed religion absolutely after the performance of Kant. It has been proved, it seems, that man can either be a philosopher or a religious man--and so eternal enmity seens to have been set between the two. But this was not Kant's intention--on the contrary, Kant wanted to prepare the jump. he wanted us to become aware that we cannot know anything about God, that we cannot even know whether He exists or not (though we hove to always keep the possibility of the existence of God in mind as a limitation of human reason), but he also thought there might be another realm which. transcends reason: we might be transcendent being's and might be able in full consciousness to transcend our reason, to transgress, so to speak, into the unknown. Kant meant that we can only do this by belief: "I want to find out what can be known and what cannot be known by man in order to make place for belief." Fe wanted to make place for belief, for the unknown realm (which means there would be an opportunity for us to start believing because it is an unknown realm) and in order to do this, he wanted to teach the limits of reason.

But this is a very humiliating thing--this limit of man's reason. Besides, we do not have to just take this limitation--we can try the other possible thing and transcend our own reason and believe against our reason. Men have the power to do this and it is a very seducing proposition. This proposition was made already when the first church fathers were still very uneducated men and up against the Greek philosophers who, of course, were very educated men. They could only help themselves by saying reason was a whore (as Luther later said: "Reason is a whore who condemns you to hell."). Tertullian thought that belief could only be gained against reason and said: "Christ has been born into the world, has been crucified and has been resurrected. I believe because it is silly." This is a strange formulation of belief against reason--"because it is silly"—and Tertullian meant: I believe because it is silly because reason is a very little thing of man that can never lead him to faith and it can never make him happy.

The philosopher's quest after truth contains one risk: he might become unhappy. The quest of religion after bliss, goodness and happiness means that the religious man runs the risk of being a liar. This is the antinomy of the two approaches. The philosopher runs the risk of unhappiness, caring for truth and relying on his own freedom if he can realize it by reason (which can now be done after Kant). But in this quest for freedom of the philosopher the religious man sees the hellish pride of man--man who thinks he can do it by himself by the means of his reason as his highest force--and the religious man says, "If you do it, you will be condemned to hell--or if not that, at least you will run the risk of unhappiness. You will never have peace of mind." The philosopher replies, "As for hell, I don't even believe in it, and to hell with peace of mind. If I can only achieve out of freedom and by acting in free decision to bring out a mind that achieves peace, I can die having been unhappy all my life." The religious man then tells him, "Then you want to be a hero.", and the philosopher answers, "Maybe, but I don't want to be a saint as you do." And so the argument stands. Religion can make the one man happy but without self-confidence perhaps, and philosophy gives the other self-confidence but makes him unhappy perhaps.

With two such different positions there must be two different starting points and two different methods for these two kinds of thinking--religious end philosophical thinking. It has been doubted by philosophers after Kant that there was such a thing as genuine religious thinking and it was thought that it was merely a misunderstanding of philosophical thinking, that it was only to take something for granted and to go on deducing from that. That much is true (this proceeding from a basic assumption), but there is also a different starting point, a certain creativeness of its own to religious thinking--which could well mean that if man misses it entirely and throws it out, it might be a reason to make him unnecessarily unhappy. Philosophy has to be concerned about this because it involves an act of freedom. If I do something against myself I have to account for it. If I take the risk of unhappiness, that's fine; but if I, as a philosopher, neglect one of the genuine approaches of human thinking, that could mean that I dismember myself of a very necessary creative capability. We could say to the philosopher here: "Don't talk too much about your right to be unhappy without religion because without religious thinking you might cripple yourself." So we must ask: Is there such a genuine approach to God that is necessary for man and that he should pursue? We have seen that since Kant proved we cannot know whether God exists or whether He does not exist that we must keep the question of the possibility of the existence of God always in mind and account for it; otherwise the philosophic work will be marred for it means we then make an unspoken statement of the non-existence of God. Most philosophical thinkers do not take the question into account and this is a very big fault in philosophical thinking. The philosopher who tries to keep out of the question does not say, as the atheist does, "I do not believe that God exists.", but if in his philosophical work he does not take the question into account it means that he takes the position of the atheist whether he wants to or not (he might even believe in God). And here the riddle of religious thinking lies.

In philosophical thinking, if we want to proceed really philosophically, we have to take into account all the other lines of thinking—religious as well as scientific thinking, artistic thinking, etc. --and by the same token, if we want to find out about the other lines of thinking, we have to find out what philosophical thinking is too. Now if we proceed with the negative statement of Kant that we cannot know whether God exists or not, we arrive at a positive statement that has never been made in philosophy: the statement that God is always possible and remains possible and therefore we have always to keep that possibility in mind. And if the existence of God remains possible--and that is the irrefutable conclusion from this position of Kant--then this positive statement implied in the negative statement of Kant means (and we are speaking metaphysically now) that the deepest reason for man's believing in God for so many thousands of years is that even if man had tried consciously to get rid of the idea of God (which, of course, he did not) and had proceeded then as far as we have now since Kant, he still could not have gotten the idea of God out of his mind. If man cannot--and we know that now (we know that there is the eternal possibility of the existence of God)--then philosophy is bound to look constantly into this line of thinking that has tried to find (and then discovered) one concept of God after another until it finally boiled down to one being who created the world. This concept of the God-Creator is one concept we cannot overcome.

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