II. Talk on the Common Course (1952)
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5. We are involved in a world process without being able to direct and control it because we lost the power to direct and control ourselves. The steady increase in our performing and executive power has been accompanied by a steady decrease of our creative and legislative powers.
But do we possess such a power of free control which is legislative in that it prescribes laws to the world? -- Are we possible conditioners or are we totally conditioned? -- Are we really active beings, or are we merely reactive? Has our thinking some projective character or is it merely reflective?
The answers to these questions will never be provided by higher learning through which we learn to know what we are talking about. We have to turn to higher education if we want to find out what we are doing. We must inquire how we are doing at all.
Questions to the students about their opinions and experiences in doing, conditioning, inventing. Are we only related and involved in relationships or do we ourselves establish relations, bring them about, and how? In higher learning we ask: What is man and what is the world? Here we ask: Who is man and what meaning has the world? The question: Who are you? can only be asked if man is a personal, and not a merely natural being. Man as a natural being functions in functional processes. As a personal being, he is a beginner and an originator, engaged not in processes, but in creative procedures.
In this class we are all beginners. Here we must find out if we can be beginners in the sense of originators of values, builders of the world, and not mere performers of given tasks.
We ask the two fundamental Socratic questions, which were the questions of free philosophy before the beginning of metaphysics: Who is man? (Know thyself) and Is there meaning to being? (Passages from Plato). Since man is able to ask: Who is man?, he is entitled to freedom and bound to find out that he himself can establish freedom. By this question man distinguishes himself from being and transcends being. In claiming freedom man claims to be the judge of the world and of life. To this he is entitled because in asking: Is there meaning to being?, he doubts that being has meaning at all and yet requires it. Man must know something about meaning in order to be able to make this requirement. He asks of being to have meaning and thus manifests a blind, but free will. This may lead to open rebellion against nature; freedom is manifested by doubting. Man demands of being that it make sense, that it have aims, that it harbor a telos, that it give value. Thus he evaluates being. He doubts its value, he questions being and himself.
In our nihilistic situation this question is usually asked as: Is life worth living at all? In the question: Is there meaning in Being? is implied the threat: If not, I am going to destroy it. Man is liable to threaten Being by availing himself of his last freedom, the freedom of destroying his own being by committing suicide. (References: Ivan Karamasov; Albert Cemus, Sisyphe; L'Homme revolte), or by destroying the universe with atom bombs. In this situation the mass individual, despairing of the world and desperate about the loss of his own personality and meaning, becomes ready to accept any pseudo-scientific ideology, no matter how insane it sounds, if it only seems to give meaning and value to life. (Kierkegaard: "desperately wanting to be oneself, desperately not wanting to be oneself.").
This nihilistic attitude is usually considered as the result of the breakdown of all metaphysical beliefs of the past. True, up to the 19th century the mass of humanity had almost always lived within an imaginary metaphysical system of values which explained the meaning of Being and the value of life. Myth, organized religion and philosophical metaphysics provided the answers in such a way that higher, transcendental aims remained alive, so that the individual person could find a way of life in which he would improve himself and feel himself to be of some value. Only the secularized, naturalistic or positivistic metaphysical systems, with their pseudo-scientific claims, deny personal value to men and abolish freedom completely. We therefore now witness ever renewed calls for a return to the older metaphysical beliefs. But is such a return possible. We had bad experiences with modern conversions. W. Chambers, for instance, is he now a true Christian? The only thing he seems to have accomplished is that he, who formerly believed that Stalin was a kind of God, now has come to believe that God is a kind of super-Stalin. Even if return were possible, is it necessary Is there no possibility of advancing?
Section II
6. Test-discussion. Which beliefs have you held, rejected, corrected? -- Which prejudices did you share and overcome? How? -- What aims did you set for yourself? -- Which aims did you refute or revise? -- How did you do this? -- Did you ever experience the breakdown of things you believed in or cared for? -- If so, how does one regain a hold on oneself afterwards? -- By reasoning? By thinking? By adjusting to a set of experiences or activities? -- Assignment of short paper to describe and analyze such experiences. (It would be good for the teacher to have the first assigned paper before this session and to use it for the discussion. As much as possible, the discussion should be carried on from person to person; its result should always be broken into categories.). We try to evaluate the world and ourselves.
Now the second and more important reason for the present nihilistic situation comes to light. Modern nihilists who reject that world as meaningless and life as valueless usually forget to question the questioner himself as to his own standards of values and his own free attempts at doing. This is why nihilism is not philosophy; it neglects the power of judgment of man himself; it always measures and judges world and life by what they may give or withhold from man; philosophy tries to find out what man can give to world and life. The nihilistic approach is essentially the critical attitude and somehow resembles the way of a beggar who will always complain that he did not receive enough. Nihilism does not evaluate values; it is devaluation without any higher proposition. Evaluation of values is possible only as re-evaluation and creation of new values. If the (nihilistic) judge himself cannot conceive of a better world, he is not entitled to judge the world.
Ultimately there exists only one truly philosophical question which is threefold and indivisible like the unity in trinity: the question about the meaning of being, the value of life and the being of man.
Whenever men asked this one question in its threefold Philosophical sense, they aimed at the absolute and the eternal. And each time man reached an answer which discovered and established one of the definitive creative capabilities of man himself. Each of these answers manifests one of the essential qualities of human freedom, brings forth a creative capability, enlarges freedom to create new values and a new way of life in which life itself becomes more worthwhile living and the world more meaningful because of the meaning bestowed upon it by man. Evaluation engenders value-creating qualities.
There are only [a] few men in history who asked this kind of ultimate question and brought home these value- creating answers. We will consider the nine most significant ones, nine arch-figures of man, nine arch- fathers of the free personality. If it is true that their answers established human creative qualities, then we must all be able to check on them and to find these same qualities within ourselves. In this sense the study of these men, their lives and deeds and thoughts, may turn out to be a way of understanding ourselves better and better. We want to find out whether man can be free (whether he is a being that can be) and whether he can make his own being meaningful.
Most of these arch-figures never wanted to found a religion or establish a metaphysical system, and of the few who seem to have done so, this can be and has been doubted. However, since them, no religion has ever been founded and no metaphysical system has ever been established without the help of one or more of them, and these religions and metaphysical systems are the very essence of the cultural and spiritual history of Asia and Europe. In our time they all seem to have died or fallen down, but the cornerstones on which they were built still stand intact; the founding fathers are more alive than ever, the founding qualities they established are more needed than ever. They have become the builders of men, and that means the builders of builders. They are the only real high educators we need.
Assignment: Texts from Laotse and Buddha for next sessions. Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of Laotse, Modern Library, Aphorisms 8, 78, 77, 43, 38, 21, 17; The Buddhist Bible, ed. D. Goddard, Dutton & Co. 1952. The 118th Discourse, pp. 73-62. Text to be mimeographed, if necessary.