-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

<<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | Next>>

Philosophy up to 1800 was unconsciously uncritical--bolstered up by religious belief or belief in the cosmos and its assumptions were always taken for granted--but this new so-called philosophy was consciously uncritical. With Kant no philosophy could be unconsciously uncritical any more as soon as he showed that neither God nor the cosmos could be used as an argument and that every assumption must be accounted for--which meant that no philosopher was ever entitled any more to take the assumption of God or the cosmos in any form for granted, and that to do so (or to say that he knew) was betrayal. Yet Hegel and Marx pretended to know the cosmos and what the laws of history and nature were, how we absolutely determined by them, and how and why we must do what was determined by them--giving us a substitute for freedom. When they tried to tell us that the more insight we had into necessity, the freer we would be (which is a most ridiculous proposition) it was not freedom they offered but slavery called freedom--the absolute lie. They did not even account for how they could bring freedom and necessity together.

Now when the religious Jew speaks of obedience (and obedience to God is the mainstay of the Hebrew religion), he means that a religious man must be obedient to God for the simple reason that the only way to righteousness and the only way to live human life so that it can be understood is through obedience because only God knows what is just. If you would say to him, "But you are a slave.", he would answer: "Yes! a slave of God--or rather a conscious servant of God and I am glad to be one because I do not see how man can keep his humanity without it." But no religious Jew has ever said that the joy of living was just that obedience--the joy was given by Jehovah for a righteous life. Obedience was not supposed to be joy but labor, pain and suffering, as Job was ready to suffer, and no one was ever crazy enough to say that obedience was the joyful thing. But the pseudo-theologian, pseudo-metaphysician, and pseudo-scientist all rolled into one in the ideologist ready asks that we—being slaves and consciously so (doing only what necessity requires), being absolute automatons--should enjoy this absolute obedience. He tells us that this is the joy of life and if we do not conform, we cannot enjoy ourselves. This is how they--the ideologist, the modern expert, the pseudo-metaphysician, the pseudo-scientist (all made possible by the claims of nihilistic philosophers who claimed to be positivistic philosophers)--have succeeded to make conformism (which is demonic as well as anti-conformism is) almost a fanatical performance--just by the proposition that the more the intellect works us into slavery, the more our joy should be--and this is how they have succeeded to make the human mind crazy enough to believe it.

Kant already conceived of man as having more freedom than the philosophers before him and already thought that freedom might be deeper and broader than only the choice between good and evil (it might be the choice of making good or evil), but he was still of the opinion that man could not do that without a higher command. This he expressed first by saying that man could not move reasonably in freedom if he did not believe deistically in the existence of a higher being because if he did not, he would have no possibility to exert the freedom he had. Man could exercise his freedom by command from a higher power--but now Kant wanted to make a compromise. He did not think it could be a direct command, so he established his categorical imperative: man has a so-called inner voice, an inner command (which Kant really made out of conscience), which implanted in the most abstract form is the "you shall.” The commandments of all religion were taken into one general commandment--the general idea of the command in man himself that keeps in touch with God.

Kant's prophecy about reason and belief seems to have been a wise one because as soon as the pseudo-philosophers of the 19th Century (who were nevertheless still great thinkers, though they betrayed philosophy) came along, they tried--they skipped belief, as it had been known up to then, and as soon as they did, what Kant said seemed to become true. Freedom could not be practiced at all and it seemed almost the fulfillment of Kant's prophecy. But must it have been so? Was there not perhaps another reason other than the one of losing belief? Was that really the motive for the fact that we failed to grasp freedom? Was it not perhaps that philosophy having gained the possibility of coming into its own, of becoming pure philosophy (up to 1800 philosophy lived in an impure state mixed up with other capabilities and capacities of man--although with the Greeks it claimed--without saying so--to be concerned first with freedom, which meant to be concerned with truth first and goodness second) turned instead into its very opposite by not discarding belief at all but rather substituting the old belief in God, which after all gave man the guarantee of a certain restricted freedom, with its own anti-philosophical claim of belief under the mask of science, which gave man no guarantee at all. If we want to try to establish philosophy on its own and thus man on his own--for philosophy coming into its own means nothing but man coming into his own--we have to destroy belief. We can make no use of belief at all; we must proceed on pure reason. And if we cannot establish freedom on the ground of pure reason, then it means we have confessed that we cannot establish it at all.

So what I have to say about philosophy up to Kant also includes Kant in that sense and the later philosophers even more so. They have always been the interpreters and the experts of higher powers and in this respect no real difference between the philosopher or the priest or the theologian or the pseudo-scientist can be found. They have all ruled men by pretending to be only translators to man of higher commands received--which means that the question of authority, taken in its very fundament is involved here. They have all moved according to the principle of authority; they have all tried to establish their authority first as authoritarian persons--either as the ones chosen by God to transmit God's commandments or as the initiated ones who by their inherent nature, by birth or genius or certain special talents, have to know and do know better. This means in modern terms the experts who can tell us what to do, who can claim that in any situation they are the ones who can make up our minds. We ourselves are not able to make up our minds without the chosen or initiated ones who have secret knowledge in quality different from ours--either by being the chosen ones or because they are geniuses of some kind, etc. The claim of authority is always there.

The only ones in all the history of human beings who can be discharged of that accusation are the artists--but only up to the 19th Century and then they too claimed to be geniuses, initiated beings different in quality from other human beings. This was the first attempt of artists to think of themselves as authorities and until then, they had never done so. They might have claimed--but in humility--that the muses themselves had taught them to see (as Homer did), but they did not say that Apollon had taught them or that they were initiated by a higher power. The artists gave what they created for the free use of human beings and there was no claim of mastership except within the work itself. No commitment was attached and men could take it or leave it. In the 19th Century the artist also became an expert and became conscious of himself--wanting to inherit from the priest absolute authority and to arrogate it to himself. The modern nihilistic ideologist was the example for the artist to raise similar claims for himself, but with one difference: he never raised them with force; he just expressed them in arrogant behavior. The artist has never said, "If you don't look at my pictures, you will just be a dope over whom history will move." or "If you don't look at my pictures you will just be a failure." They have not said a "you must"; they have only said, “You will miss a great experience." But the delusion of grandeur was one of the sicknesses that moved into the artists too.

Let's now consider experts--experts of all kinds past and present. Plato said that the model state, "the republic" (and thus humanity itself), would never become perfect until kings would be philosophers or philosophers would be kings. Not all philosophers have raised that claim, but all have moved along that line. Only Plato had the courage to say what they all meant: to be the wise men. Authority was crystallized in types: the wise man, the hero, the saint and the genius. In all history that we know those types were the ideal types of humanity--not arch-types but ideal types in the sense of Max Weber: types which were points of directions in the development of man and every man. Every man had an idea of most perfect accomplishment when he became either a sage, saint, hero or genius. These ideal types--and all are types of experts--exclude only the ideal that a free man can set for himself: to conceive of the truth that there is no proposition man can set to himself that is a tough as the proposition for everyone to become a man or woman--and for this he needs no expert. Man is a being of becoming, a being that can become human, a being that is only a sketch at first of a person. Man is a being that by inner transcendence can set the aim to become a person, to become a personality. This possibility that every man has of self-transcendence (a transcendence of the very self he is enclosed in in order to become a man) is a very tough proposition--but the proposition to become a man is still tougher yet. Bound up with this is also the fact that he cannot became a person unless he tries--exerting all his forces of creativeness--to transform the world given into a world made more and more meaningful. At that price-- and only at that price--can he become a man.

But to think that man has to become something more than himself, that he has to transcend his very quality as man (becoming a hero, a saint, a sage or a genius--becoming an expert) means to have a wrong and very dangerous concept of transcendence. "To transcend one's self" in this sense--which is quite a different proposition from the self-transcendence I have been proposing (to become more and more of a man or woman, more and more of a human being with more and more qualities of man)--means the destruction, or the beginning of it, of human qualities themselves. Such a concept of transcendence has always had this threat of the destruction of human qualities because it means to objectify one's self--which is the first step to demonization--but as long as the framework and brake held that had always been put on those wise men, heroes, saints, and geniuses by the belief in the existence of God, this threat never really came through. As long as there was that brake (the belief in God), they could not become entirely objectified, and thus entirely demonical, because there was always God to be responsible to--He set a limit. But the moment that God was gone, it meant that at the same moment the process of objectification could become (and did become) unlimited and thus demonical. To abolish in one's self every quality of a human being for the sake of being something more than man seems to be a very high price to pay--but no price seems to be too high to achieve those ideals that have become ideas.

An ideal, though it might never be reached, gives direction to a recognized over-all concept of goodness, but an ideal changes into an idea (which is an unlimited ideal of performance) the moment it is approached by a process of de-humanization in order to reach or come near that ideal--becoming with this an idea for which a man, in order to become identical with it, can be ready to sacrifice everything to become an expert. This is why we have to do away with these ideal types once and for all. Whatever directional value they had became immediately with the loss of religion and its center an infinite proposition of ideas, taking out of men every kind of humanity. And along with these ideal types, we have also to abolish the authority (the expert) altogether now because he has became a mortal danger for man's freedom and existence as man. Even the old guarantee of the authority holding himself responsible to a higher authority no longer is enough--for the simple reason that the higher authority itself has became a mortal danger.

Formerly, when an authority recognized a higher authority above him to which he held himself accountable it meant that a certain remainder of humanity was always guaranteed in that authority because the higher authority was God--and God as a personal concept. But the moment the concept of God is gone, it means that even if the authority is conscientious (and let's assume for the moment that he is conscientious) and tries to hold himself accountable, he holds himself accountable to a higher authority that is a non-human, a-human force (history, society, nature); he holds himself accountable to a higher force that is an idea--society taken as a higher force or history taken merely as an idea. Now while there is a certain reality to an idea, it can always be interpreted differently every day: that means the authority cannot be considered to be strictly accountable to his higher authority in the sense one was accountable to God because he is an interpreter of a higher force--which God never was--and whatever its realities might be. Vurtherrnore, when the authority was accountable to God, whatever he did (and there were times when same of them tried very hard indeed) he could never get an inhuman proposition; but our new authority, even if he wanted to, could not get advice back from a non-human, a-human force that would contain a human proposition. It is always an inhuman answer that can only take a matter of fact into account--an answer that is supposed to be for the human being who on the other hand is a matter of intention. So we have to say to the authority? "If you want to rule us as an authority, then go back to religion—where at least, if you become a tyrant and a master, you are restricted. Otherwise we will have to abolish you as an authority and show you that we can do without authorities."

But what do we replace the authorities with?--for man has not shown himself to be particularly able to get along without them. For example: we have claimed to do everything for the sake of production, but unfortunately, this just is not true. We have only done things for the sake of consumption and have only the aim of consumption. Production for production's sake--like the Gothic cathedrals, for example--has always been done in the past by its having been enforced by the ruling class and at the cost of our blood sometimes. The moment there was no authority to enforce that highest human performance upon us, we did not do it. So the argument of the opposition--that you haven't shown very much what you could do with your freedom--is true, but on the other hand, the length of time since 1600 has not been very long either and there is no reason to despair if we have failed a few times. We might try again to establish freedom by the only capability that can (because it is the only one that understands what freedom is): philosophy--free philosophy and not pseudo-philosophy. But first we must criticize what has been done in the meantime and we must tell these experts: "Either you hold yourselves accountable to God or we must abolish you because you intend to be our absolute masters and we know it."

Authority seems to have been needed for the most part of our history--and the one time we tried to do without it, we seem to have failed. We have only shown that we can create absolute authority instead--totalitarians who cannot even be held responsible to given texts. We cannot hold Stalin responsible to the given text of Marx or the pseudo-scientist completely responsible to his text, whatever it is, but the authority who is accountable to God can be held responsible to his text. And no matter how hard he might try, he will never get around the fact of justice, righteousness or goodness in a religious text; he can never abolish them. If he tries to find arguments against the eternal principles of mankind, he will find that he cannot--and that is how the brake works if the expert holds himself accountable to God. But the expert who deals with pseudo-scientific texts (though they have pure scientific values too) will always be able to squirm out of them and to exclude those principles absolutely for the simple reason those texts are not based on those principles. You will say that Marx wanted freedom and justice--which he most certainly did. So what do I mean when I say that he did not establish those things as principles? and if not, what did he establish then? He established ideas--claiming to know what freedom was, what justice was--which means that we can then make the proposition that we are entitled to handle our enemies or our friends with absolute injustice because we are striving for the realization of the absolute ideal of justice, which will come out of that in the end.

If we conceive of justice as a principle, we do not claim that. Justice claimed as a principle in the Jewish and Christian religions (mostly in the Jewish) meant that only God knew what justice really was. Men, as much as they were able, had to act justly, but they could never claim to know what justice was and they were never able to say: "Let's cut out justice for a while to bring it about later." Justice taken as a principle--though without religion--in free philosaphy also means that we know that we cannot know the whole of justice, that we do not know what it is absolutely. We only know that we can move according to that principle in all our actions. While justice is something we do not know, it is also something we can establish; we can claim partial action: we can act today in a way that seems to be more just than our action yesterday--and this is creative. This eternal thing, justice, is not an idea we can grasp to the full and for its sake do injustice; we rather have to try to establish more of it in every single situation put before us, in every decision we have to make. Justice cannot be postponed; we have to try to establish more and more of it here and now--and this means to conceive of justice as a principle and not an idea.

There can never be such a thing as full justice, only fuller justice; it is comparative only, not absolute. Full justice could only be spoken of in the Jewish and Christian religions--and then it meant that it was only by God Himself, the only one who knew what it was, that full justice could be established. Marx secularized this and applied it without God--without God being the living center--and this is the greatest harm that can be done to human beings: to say that freedom and justice can be known to the full and can be established once and for all, that an absolute state of freedom and justice can be established. If that is possible and people believe that it is so, they will be ready to kill almost everyone who dares to doubt it. They won't count the corpses in order to reach that goal. This is a craziness of human bein~s to think themselves able to establish the absolute on earth, and if they are driven by such an idea, they become entirely demonized, not shrinking back from anything to achieve that goal, that utopia--ane. that is just the meaning of utopia. There are only scientific utopias and when pseudo-science becomes pseudo-metaphysics, it too becomes utopian.

In religion there are no utopias. We do not claim to know when God will establish heaven on earth; this will be brought about by God and we can do nothing for it. But utopia is a dream to establish absolute goodness, justice, freedom on earth--an absolute unmovable by the decision of human beings. The very meaninglessness of this claim is contained in the positivistic form of the nihilistic movement--with no one ever asking the question: What would life be if we had that? Does it not really mean that at that moment the very system of principles (beauty, justice, truth, freedom) woula fall down and with it freedom itself would fall down? The very fact that freedom exists for man at all depends upon the fact that justice, freedom, truth, beauty can never exist as such--for if they did, we would become automatons of realized ideals that had ceased to be principles and no freedom at all would be possible. lean would no longer be able to claim that he establishes freedom or that he establishes justice--and among other things it would be the most boring life one could conceive of.

What they managed to do when they conceived of the idea of utopia was to take the Christian heaven down to earth. In the Mohammedan heaven, at least, errors can be committed, but the Christian heaven is always the most boring proposition--as we see in Dante. Dante's "Inferno" is interesting, but what about his "Paradiso"? That eternal singing of the angels must really get on one's nerves. Dante, of course, was not trying to make the concept ridiculous, but to make a preliminary concept of an entirely other world so different that it could not really be described and he tried to the utmost to make in that sense a meaningless description of heaven. But utopians have succeeded to invent a world that looks like the Christian heaven with beauty, justice, goodness known to their fullest qualities. It would mean that we could only sing, but could not even invent songs any more. We would have left life behind us.

There seems to be one essential pre-condition for the man who conceives of a utopia and for the man who accepts the idea: both must have lost their common sense--certainly the man who makes a utopia must get rid of his common sense for it is only by doing so that he can make a utopia at all. When the nihilistic philosophers rejected entirely the critical and comprehensive ability of man, they succeeded in abolishing it so completely that even its common root, common sense, was abolished--making it easier and easier for man to fall prey to the most ridiculous propositions. And when the pseudo-philosopher succeeded in making common sense suspect, he also succeeded in making it just that much easier for man to fall into the trap of accepting authority unquestioningly.

Now certainly there are areas where man has to delegate authority in greater or lesser degrees and one area that demands the most authority is science. But that does not mean that the scientific expert, as he seems to think, should be given absolute authority. It is quite true that I must trust my doctor to a certain degree, but I still have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for these things--and the more responsibility the greater the danger of absolute authority seems to be. A doctor might tell me that I have to lose a leg or I might die without ever hitting upon the idea that I might rather die, but so long as I have that choice at least, I have a safeguard. But the time might come if a state gets hold of medicine and socializes it (I don't want to argue here against socialized medicine, but only to point out certain dangers that are possible.) that an expert can tell me that I have to be operated on. If a situation should come about where I am no longer able to argue (as I can here in the United States), where I am not even supposed to know how a medicine works, then I must protest that I am supposed to know how it works. For if one does not accept responsibility for these things, the time can or might come when a man can find himself in a totalitarian hospital systematically being poisoned to death without being able to help himself.

In Germany there was a system of files kept as part of their program of socialized medicine. The patient had to tell the doctor, who was no longer required to keep this information confidential, the family history in regard to tuberculosis, and this information then went into the state file. In the Nuremburg trials it was discovered that there was an order of Hitler's specifying that after all the Jews and the Poles had been exterminated and Germany was back to peace, the next thing to be done would be to sterilize or exterminate all the people who had parents or grandparents with a history of tuberculosis --and the files were already there waiting. Here we see what could have been the result of socialized medicine in this crazy utopia where the experts could exchange via files and without restrictions their information and their opinions about you, the patient. Here the rule of the expert could have become in the end the rule of annihilation because every point of restraint where the expert could have been checked was gone.

Now, once again, please do not misunderstand me. My attempt to show what can happen to socialized medicine in a totalitarian state certainly does not mean that I am against socialized medicine in itself, but in an age and situation of man marked by the ghost of paper, where the filing system becomes independent of man, in an age and situation where the demonic is very much alive before us and where it might change any day into our death sentence through those movements we have engaged in with the experts, we must also be aware of certain dangers that can be involved and make all possible checks against them. To put the expert back into his framework where he can be useful again without such danger to us means not only to distinguish every creative human ability each from the other but also to distinguish what the possible limits of each creative human ability might be--putting them into working order so that no short-circuit can happen, so that no absolute expert (like Hitler) can use all the knowledge of the experts against us.

So philosophy in its pure form is a life and death matter for human beings today. It is the only thing to help us not to fall prey to those utopian performances in which we are already involved; and since philosophy is the only central human ability to which all the others are related, and the only one which can explain all the others in their essence as well as their limits, it is also the only creative human ability that can put limits to them and thereby avoid the nihilistic utopian movements. This means first (since we are already in them and since the mechanics of those utopias are ideologies) a philosophical criticism of politics because that is our only means to stop their immediacy--end it is only with philosophy that a criticism of politics can be done. Politics has never been considered a creative possibility of man, but it is most essential that an inquiry be made into this--not only because a criticism of politics must be our starting point of restraint against those nihilistic movements but also because we need criticisms of all those creative abilities of man in order to bring them into their own and into a certain order so that they cannot mix us up. Only the fullness and orderliness of our capabilities can make the fullness and orderliness of man himself. So once again, from the aspect of world history this time, we seem to see that philosophy must be worked at by man because this is the condition for man to become a free man. If philosophy is done by everybody, with everybody trying to become a philosophical man able to criticize everything that happens, and if everything is done according to man's main purpose of freedom and wholeness, then he can at least protect himself and come to self-determination.

Lecture X

To mark the absolute turn-about in the philosophical thinking of man and to bring out the difference between our raving been ruled by experts up to 1800 (and even more so and in a worse manner since then) and the possibility to come to pure philosophy, which is the life-and-death matter of free men, we want to first look into the statement of Plato that the philosopher has to be king and his position that a real human community could not be created or would not be possible without philosophers being kings or kings being philosophers. He tried to make a utopia (which was the first and most harmless form of a utopia) where philosophers would be the ruling class and all other classes subdued to them and he thought that by this he could bring about a community of iron stability. This "republic" of his is a caricature of all striving for the absolute power of the mind over the mind of men. And if we want to go along with Jefferson ("We are enemies of any tyranny over the mind of man."), then we have to consider the worst tyranny that con be established to be the tyranny established by the mind of man itself when that mind pretends to be absolute, when it pretends to know itself and to know that the eternal ideas (justice, freedom, beauty, wisdom, the good and love) to their full are. If we pretend to knew that, then we will feel entitled to enforce those absolute truths upon ourselves and upon other men and out of that idea such a caricatur'e as Plato's becomes possible.

Kant by showing; the limits of human reason opened up the possibility to reject higher authority--God or the cosmos--but he tried to place two guarantees, which he hoped would be iron-clad, to help man from going over the borderline: his categorical imperative (where he put the command of authority always uttered by God or philosophy into a more abstract "you shall" which was a concept of absolute duty and was designed to be a guarantee for men who were trying to establish themselves as absolutely free so they would not go over the line) and his position that in order for man to be able to function reasonably he had to make place for belief in God, immortality and freedom. When we rejected authority absolutely, as we apparently did in the French and American Revolutions, we established certain truths as undoubtable, but upon a closer inquiry into especially the American Revolution we see that these so-called self-evident truths and inalienable rights were founded very much upon the same thing as the guarantees that Kant tried to provide--and we see also that these guarantees are not very iron-clad. If we do not believe in God--or at least in a theistic concept of God--we will find that we do not have such a "you shall" and we will also find ourselves in doubt as to how men can be born free and equal. Men can be considered to be born free only because they are the children of god (which holds true even if it is just a theistic concept of God), but once the belief in God is gone, the supposition falls down and without it we enter into the nihilistic age where everyone tries to find out for himself.

We started out to abolish authority--to abolish the principle of authority that made Plato's statement (which is the essence of the authority principle) possible that philosophers should be kings and kings should be philosophers, and the authority that would have made it possible to make the same statement about priests (religious thinkers could also have established such a "republic"--and did after Moses). But this principle of authority that we abolished by our so-called democracies was replaced immediately with another authority--and one which turned out to be much worse and certainly much more lethal than the former one. We brought ourselves under authority or authorities which were no longer transcendent but within the world, authorities which were ideas; we brought ourselves under the authority of ideas.

The United States was conceived of as a free republic, but it contains also that absolute thing of a mass democracy (we are that too), which the Constitution calls "the rule of the people." The authority there is the people within certain boundaries given by the Constitution and, as it is conceived of, is not absolute authority, but if it ever really comes through it can lead to totalitarianism. What can happen if the people have absolute authority we can see in the Weimar Fepublic. Hitler in the last election almost got the majority of the German people (his swindle amounted only to about 3 to 5 per cent). If we assume he had that majority, it would mean that the abolishing of freedom was done by the authority of a majority of the Gernian people. So democracy as a political idea is not at all what the American Constitution means in guaranteeing the rights of the minority. This is a wonderful idea, but it is based upon the principles of a republic, not a democracy. A republic is made up of free constituents and as long as one constituent disagrees, his right to disagree has to be preserved; a democracy, on the other hand, means that as soon as a majority vote is received, the will of the majority has to be carried out because the people's authority has replaced God's authority. This is not a concept but an idea that sta-ted with the idea of a super-human entity--the people--who would receive the authority after the authority of God, the king, nobility and the priests was gone; the people would now be the authority. If this were carried throurh here in the United States, it might lead to such an event as almost happened in gem any where the people by mass democracy can overthrow their freedom.

But the real principle of authority involved here, insofar as the United states is a republic, is a own in just the fact that authority, though we do not know where it is derived from, is not contained in the people but in a voluntary human agreement and declaration of will of free persons: the Constitution. And that means, since authority is not contained in the people but in the Constitution, that if 80 per cent of the people would decide to make Mr. McCarthy the Hitler of America and to abolish the Constitution and establish a totalitarian state, they would be the breakers of the Constitution and the remaining 20 per cent would be entitled to raise mmhine guns against them because the majority would be rebellious against the free republic. So the voice of the people is by no means the new substitute for the voice of God here--but the consequences could become those of a democracy socially with the same trends as in other states in the world without a guarantee such as ours because our guarantee, the Constitution, could become tomorrow only a piece of paper. As a free declaration of human will, the Constitution can hold only so long as that declaration of will is understood--and to make that declaration of will really understood would mean to create an ideal republic (which here is only outlined).

To make an ideal republic we would first have to find out on what authority it is based if not on the authority of the people or of God either, and to ask: What could that authority possibly be? on what could it possibly be based? It would be based on trust--on the trust of human persons always to want to be really and absolutely free--but since this trust might not be justified because it is only- a trust, it would mean that everyone who wanted to live up to it would have to make himself someone who could be trusted in that respect. It would mean that in order to become a reliable constituent of a free republic, he would have to try to become a real, whole free person—if only so he could be trusted and be a man who could really hold up such a daring constitution which put such a trust in him. The American Constitution, metaphysically speaking, (was the moat daring thing politically ever undertaken by men in an attempt to try to establish a community of real free men, and it was undertaken with the knowledge that most men are not free men because they do not know what it is and only with the hope that it might develop.

This courage in the trust of the human will to freedom is the metaphysical basis of the Constitution and it seems almost a foolish trust considering what human beings are moved by politically in our time. The will to freedom that is absolute and arbitrary and which seems to be the basis of America and the other will manifested in the Constitution to build a free republic of free men based upon trust and voluntary agreement have always stood against each other and we are still in that predicament. Here both things come together and this free republic outlined in the Constitution is still alive by a mere chance of history--the chance that this country has not been under the compulsion to build up a foreign policy, the existence of plenty, and of infinite social opportunities. If this once stops, the guarantee might be abolished by a mass movement which does not know what all this means. It was the greatest design we ever made to be politically free--but it was merely a design and to hold it up means to really understand what is involved. It is an ideal set--to accomplish a free republic of free men--and it cannot be entirely accomplished because it is en eternal task.

Once again this brings us back to the question of why every man must become a philosophical man, and here in relation to politics it becomes a reversal of the Platonic formula--instead of philosophers being kings or kings being philosophers, we have the proposition: every man a philosophical man. If he is not and is not always striving for that and to be free and to be trustworthy, the guarantee is otherwise not given. He has to make himself sure against any temptation to fall prey to any authority whatsoever; he has to make himself sure against the authority of a king, nobility, priests or God--and most of all against those substitute authorities in the nihilistic age which are much more dangerous and which try to tell us how to live and what to do by a higher authority that has become inhuman because God is gone. And this he can only do by becoming a philosophical man:--that means to be able to criticize any proposition made to him and to ask: What authority is speaking here? is it an authority or not?--and finally finding the authority in himself.

<<Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | Next>>