-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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Man has always tried to make conceptions of God and since philosophy cannot refute the abstract idea of God, this binds us to look at this trend of research, so to speak, which has gone on (to the philosopher's way of thinking) merely in the imagination by building up one concept of God after another in free space without anything to go on. What kind of thinking of man makes possible such an absolute imagination? Even the artistic imagination is not absolute. Although it transforms things by being given images and making them into things of ourselves--which is one of the highest abilities of man--we cannot call that absolute imagination. Absolute imagination is the ability to imagine something without any hint--and there seems to be such an ability of man, such a quality of thinking in empty space, in very nothingness for otherwise there could be no religious thinking. This is the hardest thing to crack--to come to this hidden ability of man. We have either to prove that it is self-deception and merely reflective thinking--in which case we then could say that religious thinking does not concern us and we have nothing to learn from religious thinking so long as we still keep the idea of God in mind--or we have to take it into account and have to try to find out if it has a certain creativeness of its own. If religious thinking is a genuine creative ability of man, then we have to find out whether religious thinking is like all other thinking--a derivate of comprehensive thinking (which means we would then have the perfect idea of a system of human creative thinking--a system where all the creative abilities of the human mind always relate back to the center of all those trends of creative thinking? comprehensive thinking)--or whether religious thinking might not be the real center (as it was until 1800) and comprehensive thinking an impossibility without religious thinking.

Philosophically, we e.oubt that religious thinking is the center; we think that philosophy has always been the center and religious thinking was mistaken for that, but we must ask: How could that be? There must be a quality in religious thinking so important for man that until 1800 he always placed it in the center. We think that philosophical thinking really is the root, that out of it all the other kinds of thinking develop, that it checks, and enriches end in turn is checked and enriched by the other kinds of thinking, but there is a strange thing about religious thinking: it is not only the most refined kind of human thinking but the most daring one--the one that takes the risk almost always to transcend, trying to perceive and penetrate into the very unknown itself. It has a certain power of its own that shows the will of the human being and the very courage of the human mind itself at its highest. So while religious thinking may not be the center of human thought (as it was considered for so long), it still might be the mast strange, daring and risky adventure of human thinking--and this it certainly is.

We still, however, have to find out if religious thinking delivers any results to the human mind and have to ask? 1ihat does it do for freedom and truth? what does it do for philosophy? But first of all, perhaps, even without wanting to, it does something for human courage. This would be a most welcome performance for human beings who have to establish freedom, who have to prove it existentially by establishing freedom for themselves and by themselves and who can only prove freedom by becoming free, by acting free and by establishing it. Comprehensive thinking is in part a proposition: namely, free. If the proposition is agreed to, if it is accepted by many men who decide to take and to establish those mores of freedom really in human life, then freedom has again been proved and not before. We give subjective (not objective) proof by doing: that means we create freedom. It is given to us to create it and to make it (and then freedom is there creatively) or to reject it and not to make it (and then freedom will not be there). Scientifically it can only be proved both ways afterwards. If we would organize the whole world into a totalitarian state where no one could try himself to establish the fact of freedom, then the scientist could say, "Freedom does not exist." If we have established it to a certain degree, science would have to say, "There is freedom." But it cannot be proved as existing or not existing because it is done by us; it is a metaphysical thing: if it is not done by us it does not exist; it is a transcendent being created by us--not a given thing.

In order to try to find the answers to some of our questions, let’s now look into the question of the comprehensive--which I do not take in Jaspers' way. In the old way, without knowing it, human beings always started with a conception of the whole (the cosmos); this whole could be an organic living being, a unity, called being itself. This meant that this whole contained in itself being organically, transcendent beings that trancended human beings (Gods were also contained in the cosmos) and human beings, of course. So in a way the highest forces of the cosmos were the Gods, then man, then other living beings; they all formed a whole—the whole of being (this was the Greek idea). The same whole was conceived of in theology, but God was outside the whole--He created it. God was the highest being to whom man transcended, which led him out of the world. He either transcended to just outside the world (the Hebraic idea) or he transcended out of the world into another higher world which was the Christian hereafter. (The concept of a hereafter, which is really a Christian concept, only became a part of Jewish thinking later and is not recognised as completely valid for Jewish thought.) But both the cosmological and the theological approach have the same concept of the whole that can be known. This whole would be comprehensive and this is the meaning of comprehensive. Philosophy, which was mythical up to 1800, was concerned with the concept of the whole--until Kant proved that we live in the world, never outside of it. He showed us that we cannot say that we know anything essential about it and we try in vein if we try to deduce ideas, laws, etc., from a concept we cannot know. The same is true of God: we cannot draw any conclusions from that concept either. We cannot take the whole (either as God or the cosmos) as a philosophical argument any more.

I make a different approach and ask: It-ow could we get the idea of the comprehensive and the whole at all? Kant showed us that we cannot get a point of view outside of the world--which means we are condemned to look at the world (and ourselves too) from within and to go from point to point and to forget about the whole (which we know now might not even be a whole)--and since then we have been in a sense, as heidegger says, "thrown into the world." But in philosophy if a statement has been made, even though it now seems to be erroneous, we have to go back to ask: What made the statement possible? So we must consider: What made it possible to have an abstract idea of the whole? was it imagination or did it relate to a reality? It relates to a reality because man is that whole. Man conceives of himself per'manently by inner experience as a whole and he always has this in mind. He has consciousness of being in time but he is always conscious too of being the same in time. He never loses his consciousness of being himself. The little boy he was, he knows he still is; he knows that little boy is still the man he is. Man feels himself to be more of an entity in time the longer he lives, lIe adds the time that he lives through to his very existence in time. He is a continuous being. Human beings are also, or can be, what they are or lesser than what they have been designed to be because human beings are beings of becoming, but they are also in their becoming, beings of this continuity in time. They get the feeling of being an entity, a whole, closed-in itself to which everything can be related. And in space also they are beings that are consistent. Even as to man's bodily appearance in space there remains a certain consistency in spite of the fact that science has discovered that every seven years all the cells in his body have been replaced. In spite of this fact the form of his body, aging or not, is always consistent--and he is well aware of this consistency. This consistency in space can be even enlarged. Man can assemble things in his consciousness--and this is made possible only by his being a whole, a certain centered being with spirit as well as corporeal circumference in time and space which makes a whole, a being who can die but one who also when alive cannot help thinking of himself as a whole or being a whole. Man got the idea of conceiving of The All to be a whole by thinking of The All after his own likeness (and he was entitled to think of a whole because of that strange entity he is) and he did the utmost in imagination by having the freshness to conceive of The All in that way.

So man thought there was a comprehensive whole in which he was comprehended. We see now that this is not true, but we must ask: What is the common denominator that made this possible? In philosophy if we want to go to the root of the question, we have to ask not for the substance but for the verb, so we must ask what it means to comprehend--that is our question. We comprehend of ourselves as being comprehensive, being a whole, and we proceed in a way of comprehending. We know that in a certain way we are a whole--and we are because we are becoming a whole. We are builders of wholes--and not only in imagination. Thinking ourselves to be a whole we try to cake all our experiences, deeds, and knowledge, etc., and to relate them into one comprehensive whole, always enlarging and always trying to make ourselves this whole--where every experience we have had by being related to ourselves, to others, and to the center becomes more and more meaningful. This is our possibility: to be after the meaning of being and to find it not just by speculating about it but also by adding to the meaning by making axeaning, by designing those relationships in the whole that make it more meaningful. We are the conditioned-conditioners, the created-creators; we are dependent and independent, transforming the things we depend upon into things that depend upon us; we are builders of wholes and entities; and we are capable both of finding out the possible meaning in given events and of adding meaning wished for to the meaning that we perceive. We attempt to transform given meaning into meaning wished for by the very center of our creativeness. This ability of being comprehensive and becoming more and more comprehensive is the pure philosophical activity of man--the center and the source of the very freedom of his life and his activities. From this center out we have to develop other lines and activities of creative thinking and to see how they can relate to and derive from the center of comprehensive thinking and how we can use them for the very enrichment of this center.

We will look first into scientific thinking, symbolic thinking as to objective matter, the given, the physical. What are we doing to the physical by scientific thinking? We create symbols and by means of the symbols, we get hold of chains of occurrences. We butt into them and transform things given into things for us, into things we use. Things that have been merely in and for themselves we transform into things for us.

In art there are occurrences and experiences--which for the sake of convenience we will call here things. In art we transform all those things into beings, into things of us, as if we had made them, as if we had made them out of the very substance of our soul. A stone or tree of Cezanne's means that he has transformed things into the substance of human inwardness. The experience of the artist has created that stone and it is a part of him now, transformed into a thing of him; it is entirely humanized--not in the anthropormorphic sense, but really humanized. It has the very essence of inner human experience in it and that is why all those things, transformed into things of the artist as a human being, are also transformed into things of us as human beings. As beholders, participation, not communication, takes place; nothing is communicated--much more than that is done. We are taken into the participation of a human experience of metaphysical significance; we participate in it in an artistic way--which means that since this is an experience in participation in a very deep and entirely humanized experience, as such an artistic experience (of the beholder too) cannot be an aesthetic experience (which means merely to enjoy certain relations of forms and falls into the field of art appreciation--it certainly is not understanding of art) that can be grasped scientifically.

An artistic experience can only be grasped metaphysically-arousing associations and carrying back by those associations into experiences of our own that we have had, enriching by this our experiences of the past, making that former love experience of ours richer, making our own experiences backwardly deeper and therefore enriching our readiness for our next experience in that particular field. We will find that we will be better lovers, our free activities will have grown, and--to give a specific example--if it is a picture of Cezanne's, we will find (whether we realize it or not) that even our view of the world will have changed. This is artistic experience--all things being transformed into things of the artist, then into things of us by participation and thereby becoming the means of inter-human understanding and inter-human enriching of man's experience. This is what is really going on and what is really done by art which proceeds with the tool of the metaphor.

We also want to look briefly into two fields of creative thinking that rely on understanding, though differently so: politics and erotics. In politics it is a matter of common agreement; understanding is formulated in the political field. In erotics it is an understanding of a more immediate kind--as in love where you can understand this other person in his essence. This is the most immediate performance. Less immediate is in the case of friends where you slowly come to understanding. Then there is the relationship with comrades, as in war, with trust. Then there are casual acquaintances. And then in the political field it is in the form of common agreement but moving also by creating those things by understanding.

Now in these two fields, erotica and politics, things are involved too in the sense that we have to call human beings here things, but only abstractly so--which does not mean that we take people as things (as we have done in reality--which is something quite different). Here we take them only as objects. We change them into things or beings with us—or against us, as can happen in polities, which is the negative form of transforming them into things with us. Understanding is necessary but transformation also takes place.

Comprehensive thinking relates to things, matters and ourselves and it wants to set the possibility of the whole, of creating the whole. All those relations can only be set by transcending ourselves--first by including ourselves in the comprehensive whole. There is not just myself, there is the world and I am transforming everything, including myself, and taking the responsibility for transforming all those things, including myself, into things with possible meaning, into beings. It is possible to give up myself for a purpose or to disconsider myself, to make myself out of my own freedom a means for a higher purpose: that means I transcend myself. But I cannot make anyone else do the same. I am only entitled to propose to anyone else that he transcend himself for the same purpose because it aims at life itself, at a deeper and higher, better and richer meaning. I can propose to other people what I myself am ready to do. That a philosopher can and must do. As soon as that transcendence has taken place and everyone has come to a certain set of definite principles as to what life would be to be more life, and as soon as I have a nucleus of such in myself, then I can Imow what for I change things: that in science I change things into things for me; that in politics and love I change things into things with me; and that in art I change things into things of me. All are related to the same principle and purpose that enters my mind: the possibility of creation itself, to enrich life by making it more life. Having rejected the demonical possibility of man, I have come then by and by through all my other possibilities--and by relating them until I find that the very source has been my possibility and my wish to give something to life after receiving existence (though from where I do not know)--to the point where my inner creativeness is the ability to design those lines of richer, deeper and higher meaning to which I want to strive and which I want to transmit to others to strive for, or to be shown a better proposition, and then we all come to an agreement as to what is best. This is the way we proceed in acting out philosophical thinking and this is the outcome of the comprehensive in acting out thinking.

There is only one inner command--a command that Kant misformulated. Kant's categorical imperative was still conceived out of an imagined whole, but since we do not have that, the "you shall" can never be accepted. What we do have in us is a constant possibility of the highest kind, not given in an imperative, but as a "you can": you can do that; you can create life. The fact that the "you can" is there in full freedom gives us the possibility of going into that source of the creative performance of man and it gives us the possibility of human greatness. If you know that "you can," then the more you will have to become aware of how"you can." And if you are aware that "you can," you will know why to study philosophy--which shows you that "you can." If you are aware of that, then you become curious about how "you can"; you will have to try how. Then you will become aware how to study philosophy because it is the same thing. Now we are within the kernel itself. This is called an introductory course in philosophy and it is in the sense that it throws you into the very thing itself and is identical with the thing itself: why you have to work philosophically because of this "you can," which gives you the possibility to go into the very center of man's creativeness, and how to philosophize by finding out how you can go about this creative action in life, being concerned about life itself. So how could one not philosophize!

When we philosophize we become concerned with giving. Before this we are always prepared for receiving. We are born with the idea that we have something coming to us and what happens to this idea depends upon how we are reared--especially if we are not reared in religion. Although even religion does not mean to give, but to give up, it provides at least a guarantee against falling into the vulgarity we are all born with instinctively--getting used to asking for more and more, taking life for granted. Only if we have eiven birth to ourselves, so to speak (which is why philosophy is there--if only for this insight), will we get any real life except the experience of an instant in time that we are using up. We cannot feel life until we know that we can give it--and then, and only then, will we have it. This rebirth is not mystical but a performance of straight thinking: that means thinking about our very possibilities and the possibilities and capabilities of everyone, thinking about being itself; thinking about all this with an understanding of the human being as a specific being, as the only whole we know of, and taking this whole that we can best know of into account, trying to find out how we can make it a real whole.

To find what our different capabilities are and what different methods we have to handle those capabilities in order to make them work is our way to really get into life itself. We have been inquiring into all these different capabilities and methods and have gained some idea of what philosophical, artistic and scientific thinking might be and what kind of thinking is used in politics and erotics--but we still do not know what religious thinking might be. We have found that seemingly our highest possibility is to transcend ourselves for the sake of the world we would think better, the life we would think richer, which we would want to give. This is our central ability. Nietzsche, unable to overcome the nihilistic situation because he could not make a new approach to being, dived into the deepest despair. Finding that perhaps there was no possible approach and having lost the idea of the comprehensive whole (knowing that it could not exist), he sale. the most noble worlds of man: "At least we can do one thing: that which life had seemed to have promised to us--let's give that promise to life." never before has there been such a man—a man who so entirely renounced everything he could ask for and yet who could still gather the courage to say: Let us be true ourselves to our own promises. This is the last refuge when man is lost and this is the only noble answer given to the nihilistic situation. This answer granted to me the way to line. that metaphysical reality out of which we had grown the whole in which we lived for thousands of years. We know that we cannot live in the real sense if we do not come to the very source of creativity and get more ready to transcend ourselves and to make the world transcendent by trying to infuse the meaning into the world that we find to be meaning in ourselves and among ourselved. That is real life—but once again, we still have to ask: What is religious thinking?

Religious thinking--or what we will call for the moment religious thinking but is really a kind of thinking that helped to bring religious thinking about--prevails in Nietzsche for instance: If it is so that life has nothing to give to us in spite of all the promises made to us by life, we can still try to give something to life; it can still be good. To be able to say that means to be in possession of an unbelievable inner courage and it is the same courage that Jaspers has in his book when he talks about the idea of God--not knowing--that he is in the same position that Nietzsche was in. Jaspers loves the example of Jeremiah (which he interprets wrongly) where Jeremiah comes to the vision that God might not save Israel, that God might destroy the world and man with it, and yet he still can say, “Praise be to God because God is.” Jeremiah was a believer and he could renounce every hope for himself and humanity and still say, “Let us serve God.” Jeremiah’s courage was great, and Nietzsche’s even greater because he did not even have God, but both--Nietzsche as well as Jeremiah--were religious thinkers; both went back to the source in man of a possibility of absolute trust in spite of everything that might speak against it, to that source that is the very core of the indestructible strength of' this metaphysical transcendent being who seems to have been there only to live in hope (because religion was built on hope) and then lost it. But with the possibilities given to us by free philosophy we will not have to live in hope now--or in despair because we have lost hope--because our inner surety can be established by this "you can" which gives us the possibility to know what we can do. We won't need higher help or have to ask for more things to be given. We won't have to ask for more or to live in hope--which is what religion has meant.

We have to realize what unbelievable courage it took for those few prophets and Jesus of Nazareth (Jesus--who cried out, "Father! why have you forsaken me?" and yet knowing that he was forsaken, went ahead and did what he felt he had to do) who dared to live without hope--and yet what about the courage of non-believers, men tortured to death in concentration camps who did not confess. They were forgotten men; they could not be heroes; they could not go into any traditions because no one could know about them; they were not believers so they did not even have God--yet they stood fast. How? Where did that tremendous courage come from? They gained their force of resistence by the sudden realization of this "you can”-- you can for what you think can be true; you--man--can be true; you can say, "This is how I think life should be--without this denial, if I should confess, to be used by others to break other backbones." They did it without any possibility of reward, absolutely alone and without anything except what they could do and wanted to do because they thought it was the true. This courage we see in them, in Nietzsche, in Jeremiah. Only in utter despair when all religion is lost is there a possibility of pure transcendence, transcendence based upon transcendence for the sake of transcendence itself and for no other purpose--Jeremiah, for example, to the God he could understand no longer but still having the possibility of pure and absolute trust and transcendence in spite of everything.

This is not religious thinking but mystical thinking--and not mystical thinking in the form we have seen in the Jews or the medieval mystics. As long as any hope is left (end there was always the hope to reunite their souls with God--a reward was expected) a psychological performance can be shown to be at the basis of it. The thing is done to be happy, to gain peace of mind--even to feel marvelous. This can all be a psychological performance and can be doubted as to its real creative energy. But here with this thinking (Jeremiah, Nietzsche, the unknown non-believers who stood fast) there is no hope, no reward is expected; it is done with despair, utter despair. It is real mystical thinking: that means man can do this because there is an unknown--end because it is mystical thinking, it is only unknown. That the unknown is God would be religious thinking, but we are talking for the moment now about a pure phenomenon that helped bring about religious thinking: the pure mystical experience of man and his inner strength to transcend completely, to disregard any satisfaction for himself for the sake of transcendence. That there is an unknown spot, an unknown part of the world, with man transcending to this unknown and putting his trust into that and doing so absolutely, means philosophically speaking to recognize, to realize, and to live to the full and utter depths the fact that man is a limited being and might not know the last things and that because of this he is able in the last moment to transcend into what is not known and by that regain the creative courage of his life. This is mystical thinking and experience and it is very rare.

We have said that the religious thinker is concerned with goodness first, truth second, but philosophically speaking what goodness might be we would have to find out by trying to find out what it really is—which means truth first. So the approach to goodness first cannot be accepted by free men because it implies a certain sacrifice of freedom. A philosopher cannot accept this, but this phenomenon of religious thinking must lead us to what helped to bring it about. A Catholic priest, if driven into a corner, will agree to everything about the church, but then he will finally say: "But the church is only that as it is a worldly being. It is nothing but a symbol--the symbol of the inner church." And the inner church is only the saints--no Pope really counts. By and by more and more of the church is rejuvenated by the saints who live on. In talking about this idea of the saints we see that it is the very idea we find in the Abrahamidic story of Sodom and Gomorrah--if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city could not be destroyed. There was an old Hebrew belief that everyone might be fakers, the greatest people might be imposters, and all might be lost but for the thirty-six quiet ones in the country, the hidden righteous men whom no one knew and this was why God did not destroy Israel. This is also the same idea as the saints in the church and has come out of having seen men like Jeremiah, people who can set against absolute despair, absolute transcendence. There is a dim awareness in all religions of one overwhelming power given to certain men in extreme situations--which in India is where the belief of Buddha came from. Out of a long tradition of Hindu sayings that certain men become so wise that they might be able to make the Gods do something, Buddha came to the idea of abolishing the Gods altogether for holiness itself, for absolute purity.

All of these things are realities of the human mind and are indications not only of the strength of the human mind that can trust when everything is against it--which is a sign given for a seemingly indestructible quality of the human being (and this indestructible quality is one of the reasons why the idea of the immortality of man could have been conceived of at all)--but also of the indestructibility of the human will to transcend. That trust, when everything speaks against it, and that will to transcend are the core of mystical creativeness and we have to take this into account as a very hidden but absolutely creative possibility of man because while we may not be able to account for it, we can prove it to be there and while it may be hidden, it is not obscure--it is quite clear and can be observed. (For example: if one has had the misfortune to think he is dying, he will certainly experience that flash; he will suddenly feel that strength coming up in him.) So while modern scientists want to disallow this possibility of man because it is a hot iron for any scientist who wants to know everything (or for any philosopher too who wants to pretend to know), nevertheless we have it, we are it (even though we do not know what it is), and we have to take it into account; otherwise we would be fakers by taking it for granted that this is an illusion--and this we cannot do. We, as philosophers or as philosophical men and women, have to keep in contact with genuine religious people and their experiences have to be considered by us; otherwise we cut out one of our abilities--and this we do not want to do, not only because it might needlessly cripple us, but also because we pretend to be after truth.

Lecture IX

We have talked about the possible relationship between the different creative possibilities of man--not only as we think that relationship to be possible now (as a system of creative activities of man built around the center of free philosophical thinking) but also as it existed up to 1800 held together as a conglomerate around the center of a mythical concept. We have talked about the position of man in the world as long as that mythical concept in whatever form (religious, philosophical, or scientific) held, giving him the feeling of being a comprehensive being contained within a comprehensive whale and leaving him a certain small space of freedom (the choice between good and evil) --but never really giving him the chance to be concerned with the fact that he might not be determined at all.

Now I want to talk about what happened to man's position in the world when all this was gone, and want to make you aware of the tremendous change that really took place with Kant--because it takes a long time (sometimes as long as a hundred years) to realize the implications of such a thing. That man's position in the world has been changed cannot be doubted--giving him for the first time the possibility to discover just how free he might be able to make himself and to see just to what extent he might or might not be determined. But along with this also there is the fear that comes from man's realizing that he is no longer in the womb of myth, religion or whatever it might have been, and that there is no guarantee of sureness any more. Kierkegaard expressed this new situation of man in the world by saying that man is in a situation where he faces nothingness. Actually this is not the basic fear of man, as Kierkegaard supposed--though the effect seems to be that. It is rather that man faces an infinity of possibilities where he does not know what to choose. But even he in the very beginning is still given to a certain degree that fundamental assurance that has always been given to man on awakening (either by religion, or the cosmos, or his parents): the assurance of his being rightly there in the world. The real difference is that this assurance does not hold--as it did in the past before Kant. As soon as he grows up (if he is one of the best of them--with a mind to work with), he becomes aware of having before him a confused infinity of possibilities—which amounts to the staring into nothingness of Kierkegaard. So it is small wonder that things have taken such a way.

This course and the criticism of the nihilistic situation is not done in order to make people feel doomed, but it does have to be done in order to make people aware of the situation and also aware of all the implications of the deed of Kant. After Kant, men tried to establish themselves as free men--and in America a certain freedom was established and guaranteed by the Constitution, but in all other countries in the West the battles of freedom were in vain. But it must also be said that even what has been done here in America, while due to the formal fact that this freedom has been anchored in the Constitution, still is not guaranteed against being overcame by the nihilistic movement (and this is a danger which certainly does exist since American society, as well as European society, is nihilistic). Up to now a watch has been kept over our freedom by the American republic (rather than by American democracy, as is often supposed), but if that republic is broken, then democracy will turn out here as in other places: a mass movement by majority vote that will finally abolish our freedom. There is no "ism" or movement that does not finally in the end lead into slavery because in the nihilistic situation we are driven in our very search for another womb to believe in one overall comprehensive being after another that has become merely a deification and mystification of super-human forces--forces that are not transhuman (as God was) but inhuman and which by this very inhuman quality make man anti-human and demonic. In the very process of conforming to them, he loses his qualities as a human being--which means first of all freedom.

So there is no way back into over-all comprehensive being where we can be assured of ourselves. If religion seems to be the answer--and then I would recommend that we go back to the Abrahamidic religion, because that is the highest concept--it must be remembered that if we would have to do that, it would mean to confess that full freedom is not possible for man. It would mean also that we would have to give up philosophy altogether because in that case philosophy taken in its purity would not be possible for man and it would only lead to one substitute concept of God after another, one worse and more dangerous and demoniacal than the last. We have the choice either to prove that freedom is possible and under what conditions and with what responsibilities or to confess that philosophy has failed and that philosophy could only be effective before it made the claim with Kant that it could show that man could live in freedom and for truth without a higher power. We have either to show that man can live in freedom like that or we have to confess that philosophy had to fail and that we have to go back to religion. But unfortunately, if that is the case, we woule. not even know how to do that because religion now is mainly a psychological performance. Once the belief of youth is severed, to go back to belief is almost impossible. There is still the possibility to go back to faith, but we do not know if man can live by faith.

Is there a way to prevent the pseudo-metaphysical approach that claims to know an over-all being that determines us completely? Is there a means to destroy this? Is philosophy, as pure philosophy, an absolute ideology killer? If not, it would be better to confess that it relies on religion. But that would mean that philosophy could not be free or independent and if philosophy cannot be free or independent, man cannot be so. Thus a negative or a positive conclusion has to be made because our age has shown that what has been called philosophy since 1800 is actually pseudo- or anti-philosophical, its very opposite, moving according to theories (theories of nature, history, etc.) we already took for granted and lived by. Two great totalitarian states have arisen from those theories in the guise of philosophy--which in turn brought those theories down to their most vulgar level: to certain race or class fetishes.

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