Why and How We Study Philosophy

Summer 1952

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So as to study, philosophy means that by and by—when we have decided to become philosophical men and women (because this is the only thing to do that will bring us into creative freedom)—we will have to look through the main body of philosophical thought. There is no progress in philosophy in the sense that we can ever forget about Plato or Kant, but this does not mean, however, that we have to study philosophy in the sense of history of philosophy (then we would have to undergo real discipline). It means only to get into the matter itself and then to proceed by preference, taking up first the decisive fundamental things (as the early Platonic dialogues). That is the beginning of what we could call “How to Study Philosophy” for people who want to be creative in other fields of life (which means everything that moves metaphysically and according to eternal principles) and who are aware that they can become more so and better so if they become philosophical men. For those people the way of studying is a way of preference—the same way you go about art: by taking to the masters that are nearest to you. And so a few attempts to look at some of the great philosophers should be made by anyone of you who makes that decision. Find out who is the one who tells you the most, going leisurely but constantly about it.

If we move according to the original decision and come to believe and to think it is so, we have to take the responsibility for all those things; and if we don’t go back to religion, we have to take it just as seriously as religious people take their belief and faith. It would perhaps mean—if we could bring ourselves back to the iron rule of Sunday, so to speak—that not a Sunday would pass without a certain lne of philosophical thinking about a certain philosopher (not just reading), and that not a Sunday would pass without a great work of art to meditate upon and take into one’s self. If we dare to make the decision to go this way, it might mean to find God at the end after we have done our task in the world, but it means first to undertake the daring enterprise of thinking we should not pray for help because we want freedom for the Absolute and it means that we should agree to take our decision as seriously as religious people take theirs. It means not to think that by taking a few courses and reading a little we have done enough, but to do it continuously, and though we can do it in leisure, to know that we are not able to live without it any more.

Lecture XIII

After having discovered freedom—this freedom possible when no longer restricted by the assumption of God or the cosmos—after having assumed the responsibility that necessarily must accompany this freedom, after having made the decision for life and for transforming the given into the meaningful, changing chains of occurrences into lines of events, we discover a funny things:--having found freedom to the full by moving away from God, once in full freedom we can and do move towards God—or in other words: it is not God who assures us of freedom but freedom that assures us of God. Having gone through the nihilistic situation, we have to decide to start only with what we have—and we find that what we have is surprisingly more than we thought: the possibility of freedom. If we become aware of and start with the quality of man—with his being a metaphysical being, a being who is becoming, a being who can change into becoming—then we start in a line where in the end God will become absolutely probably out of freedom—not religiously so but with faith, real faith. God as the Creator could finally be the result of philosophy.

First, philosophy was the result of religion, then it criticized and finally abolished religion. After this was done, we found that by creative philosophical thinking, starting from freedom, there follows a philosophical line that moves constantly towards faith. This faith is free faith and is developed out of the life of man himself without taking God in as an argument. As that life, as well as the world that we create, becomes more and more meaningful, as we find more and more that we ourselves have the infinite possibility of creating meaning, of creating world, life becomes more and more marvelous and with the growing of the marvelous, faith grows. As well as science can reject the marvelous by explaining it away, we can put the marvelous character back in things—changing the world into a natural paradise, giving its marvels back to nature by bringing it back into the context of meaning—and finally realizing that dream of man.

Again the marveling of man will deepen, and the more the procedure is going on the more probable God becomes and the more pure faith will go into it—faith that is not there to see or to ask things of God, but the way of pure faith where only thanks is left. We can make possible this way of thanks—this way of giving thanks for something that was given to us that we could only make more and more marvelous—which is the creative way of philosophical thinking (which is related to all the other creative thinking of man). When all the creative abilities of man are related to that source again, then they will all move in that direction and finally change us from receivers to givers, and with that, faith will unavoidably develop without the need of belief, commandments or ritual—growing out of the experience of the marvel of life.

So the world history of the human mind then has been this one great period which ended by destroying and losing religion and coming into the nihilistic situation, changing ourselves first into men absolutely uncreative and casting ourselves into slavery. But as a result of having been able along with this to abolish the fear that we had of nature, we were able to get a grip on nature. We, who started as the children of nature but always afraid of it, have finally lost fear; but we have also lost a great possibility by taking nature as a thing to be used by us recklessly, which is our situation now. We have fallen out of this first period into the darkness of the nihilistic situation, which has brought us into the spoilage of nature and our lives. But if we take the nihilistic formula, “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” and turn it around, does it not mean that if we can say nothing is true, it means that we can say what truth is? We judge it by truth, so what is meaning is the truth—the truth that we are is the criterion, the truth that we are is what we used to say was no meaning, but it only means that we are the ones who have meaning. That is how near the nihilistic position is to the position of absolute freedom—just one turn around and we come out of the nihilistic position. So we accept it and say that it means freedom for man. If everything is permitted, it means that we decide what we permit and what is permitted—which means that we can either make a decision for freedom or a decision against freedom (this is our original arbitrariness).

If we make the decision against freedom, it means we make a decision against life and for death; we make the decision to go on spoiling everything, to take no responsibility, to set ourselves as absolute and with that to relate everything to ourselves and to destroy ourselves. If we make the decision for freedom, it means we make a decision for creativeness and for our ability to make meaning, and—since they are the conditions for creative freedom itself—it means that we also make a decision for that set of principles of human freedom: truth, reason, justice, beauty, love (for all the things that Plato once called eternal ideas). If we decide for freedom, we decide for them—and only by deciding for them can they be established because their existence depends upon us and upon our decision to try to establish them. We the ones who are aware of transcendental truth (and the only ones who can be) and the criterion for our own life is in this free decision for truth—this decision that can make the absolute turning point to where we move towards God out of freedom.

When we supposed—as we did up to Kant—that the cosmos was there, that the eternal ideas were there and that man moved according to those eternal ideas, the task of philosophy could only be to discover how the eternal ideas moved the cosmos and how everything in the cosmos was meaningful—which meant that the basic method of philosophy could only be contemplative. But all that changed the moment we saw with Kant that we could never make such an assumption as the cosmos and that the eternal ideas were only the awareness of the possibility of eternity itself and were only real, only there in the human mind itself and nowhere else. With that philosophy left, and had to leave, the contemplative, becoming instead creative in the active sense—and becoming the only possibility to bring us real freedom and pure faith.

With philosophy—free philosophy, pure philosophy—we can make the decision for freedom and take upon ourselves the responsibility for the creation of a meaningful cosmos; and if we do not make that decision and if we do not succeed in establishing those principles (freedom, truth, reason, justice, love) first more and more in ourselves, then among ourselves, then in a community, if we do not take in chains of occurrences and transform them into lines of events, reorganizing the earth (which in that sense is not given but only given as a possibility) and creating step by step a meaningful cosmos out of all that is given, if we do not do all that, we cannot live in freedom and absolute responsibility (and both are identical)—and we do not gain the possibility of pure faith. Faith would still require a jump, but the jump from knowing and making meaning into faith would become easier and easier because the possibility and finally the probability of God would grow with every step we take away from always moving under conditions we have not made ourselves and with every step we take towards making life more meaningful. The richer life becomes, the more probable becomes the existence of a creator; the more we become aware of our being creative creatures who can use our own creativeness, the more we become aware of the probability of a creator because we know that we are after all only creative creatures and not creators who can create the physical or ourselves.

Jaspers in an existential, psychological way has gotten hold of this a little bit in his insight that man must become aware that he has been given to himself in his freedom. As such, man has been given to himself, and this is the only point where the philosophy of Jaspers is immediately relatable to the point I make—enough so at least to make a contact. Jaspers almost comes into the open here, into freedom itself; otherwise, he goes back and remains within the contemplative—and he goes back to the contemplative with a purpose. Although he is an existentialist and as such took over the nihilistic proposition of false activity, he has avoided the full consequences of this position (and here Jaspers’ position towards God has helped him)—the consequences that come from taking a philosophical proposition out of the mere existence of man and which lead (as in Sartre and the young Heidegger) finally to mere activity for the sake of activity, to activity at any price, to activity not metaphysical or in freedom but merely hysterical, merely psychological—and goes in a way back to Kant and Kant’s position that we must believe in God or our reason will not function reasonably, so to speak.

But in avoiding the one consequence of the nihilistic position, he is brought to a point where he cannot make a distinction between becoming and the physical process of change that can never become a process of becoming if we do not interfere. He does feel that we have the possibility of transcendence, but with Jaspers it is not active, it does not mean to move in freedom and to change change into becoming. He goes rather to the position of bringing men back to religion in order to install human beings better in the cosmos so they can live on as children of the cosmos and God, showing them that they can live that way and can get inner satisfaction from it, showing them that God must be there (though without ever finding out about it or doing anything about it).

Heidegger too—having become critical of this hysterical activism (or as Sartre says “to engage”), of this nihilistic proposition of activity for the sake of activity—tries to overcome nihilism in the same way as Jaspers: by going back to the contemplative. Heidegger supposes that some kind of over-all being is there in a cosmos that contains man, and though in a much more magical way than even before, his position is really in the Greek sense of cosmos with man contained in it. I dare to predict that this way is not possible because it leads back to the old propositions and cannot establish freedom. Heidegger leaves the term freedom out of his new philosophy; Jaspers does not. Jaspers can use freedom because he takes the position that there is the act of a small freedom of choice left to us: we have the inner freedom of transcendence—which here means the same as the Buddhistic proposition of mere psychological freedom. It might be of use to the individual, but it is of no use to the next fellow and it it of no use for the world. Jaspers does develop a theory of communication where the conveyance of inner freedom to a beloved one becomes possible—but here it stops. From this certainly cannot come the communication that creates a human community. But I think that we must have a proposition of freedom that other men can share, that in the end is of use for the world—a really active creative freedom and not Jaspers’ kind of freedom that is only good for the individual.

And now we come to the point where we have to relate this proposition of freedom to the question of death. As long as we believed either in the cosmos (as the Greeks did) or in God (as the Jews and Christians did) we were placed in a position where only the contemplative approach could be made—which meant that the toughest problem to solve was the idea of death. We tried either to overcome it as the Christians did (by the hereafter), or as the Hebrews did (you have the means to overcome the fact you die by being able through your own suffereing and death to provide the happiness of your children and so go on in eternity), or as the Greeks did with their theory (the best of all of them) that life itself is a proposition to teach man how to die. In contemplative thinking the position towards death is always one of learning how to die. Jaspers too—returning to the contemplative line—believes that philosophy is there in order to teach men to learn how to die (as the Greeks and Romans thought too) and to the other existentialists, including Sartre and Camus, the question of death is still the decisive question of philosophy. Camus in fact is quite desperate about it, feeling that it is unjust that we have to die, that it makes us live in absurdity, that it makes everything meaningless, and claims in the Greek way immortality for man. Camus feels that men can only become tragic heroes—living up to the terrible task, strengthening themselves against it.

All this hangs together with contemplative thinking itself. If man has only the contemplative task, then by no means is he able to see why he should die. He could as well be immortal as the Greeks thought of their Gods—living on in the world. But if we look at the question of death and immortality from the point of view of freedom and responsibility—which means among other things from the point of view of a definite task—then they take on an entirely different light. If we start with freedom only) and with the possible creativeness of the human being) and from that look at the images man has created of eternal life, we find that with the exception to a certain degree of the Christian image of the hereafter (which had the intention at least to give the impression of something absolutely different) immortality as mainly wished for has had the immanent connotation of the Greek concept and the Greek gods.

The Greek gods were immorta; they were supposed to be immortal in any sense—immortal within the world not only in spirit but in flesh too. But there is one funny thing about these gods and their immortality—one thing that took Homer himself to make them interesting at all. These so-called eternal beings who are infinite in time lead a strange life: they are supposed to be blessed beings, living in bliss, living in eternity-—ut they cannot change a thing in the world; they cannot change, destroy or create anything; they are entirely non-creative. They can do nothing but enjoy themselves, so to speak. Life amounts to ambrosia and nectar and little quarrels—and is without meaning. True, their love life is very feww, but that too must become a terrible bore because there is nothing creative in it either.

To really understand what this living on forever would mean, to be able to measure this dream of humanity that wanted to live in absolute happiness—and forever—is only possible if we see it from the point of view of creativity. To be able to conceive of God as a creator—as the God-Creator was conceived by Abraham—means that He has to be conceived of at the same time as a person who is timeless, really eternal, not just a being endless in time and immanent. The Abrahamidic God, the God-Creator, is eternal, but not immortal because the question of death does not come up, but the minute we try to relate the so-called immortal soul to God we are back in immortality in time. Human beings can only conceive of living in time, and when we try to conceive of immortality we end up—as in the Christian heaven—not with the eternal but the infinite. The Christian heaven really means that everyone would be a Greek god—and this makes for the boredom of the Christian heaven.

This brings us to the question of whether the creativeness of creative creatures (we are not talking now about the creativeness of the Creator since God Himself is of an entirely different quality) is not perhaps bound to death? That means: could we be creative creatures without dying? could we be free if we did not die? From that point of view it becomes clear that we could not be; it becomes quite clear that we, as immortal human beings on earth, could not be creative because to non-dying beings no transcendental quality could apply and without transcendence there is no possibility of creativity. To be able to think beyond ourselves—which is what transcendence really means—makes us creative. If we were immortal, if we were not limited, we could not transcend ourselves—there would be no need for it. We as immortal beings, being perfect, would have to consider ourselves as perfect and would have no possibility of longing after perfection—and without this there could be no possibility of creativity or transcendence and we would be like the Greek gods: only able to enjoy ourselves (whatever that might be) with no possibility of being able to create meaning (what is perfect cannot ask for meaning).

If in the animal world animals would suddenly become immortal, nothing in their metaphysical quality would be changed by this. Since they are not aware of death anyhow, they would just live on forever in their own circular movement within the larger circular movement of nature much as they live now within the movement of nature. But since we not only die but know it, immortality for us would change our very metaphysical quality as human beings. If we would not die and would go on forever in a circular movement, it would change our very quality into conscious animals—conscious of ourselves as animals, enjoying perhaps how we lived, but without the quality of being human—without creativity or transcendence. Creativity and the quality of transcendence are bound to death. Every possibility of creativity that we have is bound to the fact that we have to die—and know it. This by giving us the possibility to have time and not to be in time means to be able to relate time lived by us to something absolute (to the eternal)—and this makes us creative.

So id we conceive of life to be what we can make out of existence, then the very condition of making a life (living in life and not in existence) is that we die. We have seen—since no change in quality is involved—that there is no metaphysical “must” that animals must die; with us there is. If we could ask God for immortality, for eternal life in time, He could say to us: “So, you want to give up freedom, transcendence, creativeness and life in order to exist forever—because that is the condition or you must be God.” We suppose God to be absolutely different from both the world and us and only in Him can we dimly conceive of a being to whom death is not the precondition for creativeness (which is one of the deepest reasons why we cannot have an image of God).

So death is something we do not have to love or hate; it is something we have merely to accept because we know that without it, we could not live and could not be human beings. Death is not a sorry fact but the luckiest fact because it enables us to be transcendent and to become ourselves. Therefore, the task for philosophy, as far as the individual is concerned, is not to teach him how to die, but for him with the help of philosophy to learn how to live because he dies: that means how to make a life out of an existence, to transform things and beings into meaning and to bring them into life in that sense—which is the root of man’s creativeness and is only possible because he dies.

So for my meaning—thought it is not in the way he meant—Pascal’s saying, “Man is greater than anything else because he knows that he dies,” is true. Pascal, following Greek and Christian thought, had quite a different purpose in mind (he wanted to show that man could not live without God), but even so this saying is true because the condition for man’s greatness is just that he knows he dies. But it is not, as Pascal thought, his misery—on the contrary: it is his glory. His misery is that he is able to willingly make the decision for—or is able unwillingly to fall into—the demonic and to fall prey to it (thought even then he can through metaphysical suffering be made creative again). His suffering—even though he is bound to physical suffering and to the fradual decline of his body and physical powers—is not due to the fact that he dies. Human misery and man’s suffering on this earth are not caused by the fact he dies, but because others—the ones he loves—die. This, however, he can control by becoming aware that the one he loved died because he had to die if he were to live. Death is not the reward for sin or the misery of human beings or the absurd; death is the condition for the greatness of man.

In that sense we see that an entirely different view comes into sight the moment we decide philosophically for freedom, the moment we decide to make freedom. This metaphysical proposition—the only one from which we can start to move creatively—became an inherent part of all philosophy, though never openly so, the moment philosophy tried to distinguish itself from religion and to move not from goodness but from truth first. Eventually, by striving for truth first regardless of what happened to happiness or goodness, philosophy was led to the very border of the proposition of freedom and to the awareness that what it was striving for was the basic proposition of freedom, and from that point philosophy was able finally to free itself entirely from all the old concepts of being and to break through into the concept of freedom itself.

Philosophy was able to find its way by truth to freedom because truth and freedom are identical in the sense that truth can only be established in freedom, along with reason, justice, love, etc. By putting freedom as a main starting concern for human beings we find that all the other creative principles of man—truth, reason, justice, love—come into a new relationship and we find more and more possibilities opening up before us until at last, having established those principles and possibilities more and more in full freedom and responsibility by ourselves, we find still one more possibility: we find that to move in freedom means also to move towards faith—to go a way where we can approach the possibility and finally the probability of the reality of God (God as Creator) by becoming more and more creative ourselves. By enhancing our own possibilities of creation in freedom—and only by this way—we become more and more aware of the probability of God as a Creator of creative creatures.

We can know about God, if He exists, only in one way: we can gain negative knowledge, not in the negative way of negative theology or perhaps not even in a negative way at all but rather in an indirect way—and indirectness that moves by the directness of our own creativeness indicating indirectly the possibility of a Creator. What becomes possible is a kind of free mystical thinking—thinking about the unknown (God). This is gaining real knowledge about God—gaining knowledge how He might exist, if He exists (never certainty that He exists), and at the same time becoming more and more aware of the ever-growing probability of God. We do not know whether God exists or not, but we do know that if God does exist the old believed relation of human metaphysical creative principles (freedom, truth, reason, justice, beauty, goodness, love) to God (when they were supposed to be eternal ideas and were related to God as qualities of God) must be true—for if God exists, those principles must be to fullness and perfection in God because God is the absolute Creator. So this old relation made in philosophy by Plato is again proved to be true in a deeper way than Plato thought.

We see once again that philosophy in all its forms—from the long period of metaphysics, through the time of turning against itself in the nihilistic situation, to now when a new philosophy seems possible which moves in the other direction, starting from freedom—still builds one body of creation of the human mind with everything realting each to the other. The slightest thing in philosophy accomplished anew will lighten up a proposition in Kant, Augustine, or Plato and will show that it was already there as a germ of thought—just as my proposition concerning those human creative principles of man throws light back on what was already true in Plato’s proposition. There is, it seems, an eternal implication to the human mind and its capability to build one body of creative thought with all the endless relations and interrelations possible, as it has done in myth, philosophy or art, and there is one curious fact that becomes apparent about these creations of the human mind that are so closely related to being. The human mind—being transcendent with an original relation to being—can never be entirely wrong as to being (which in science on the contrary is possible).

In philosophy there has not been a single philosophical proposition (so long as it has quality) that has been entirely wrong—any more than any real work of art can help to a certain degree being beautiful. And just as this is true of philosophy and art, so it is true of religious thinking. There is not a single creative thought in religious thinking not worthwhile to be considered again in the light of each new insight and which will not always reveal again the quality of the human being as to thinking. (We suddenly find from the idea of the trinity, for example, what a deep quality is involved there that can still teach us about our own qualities.) Nothing in metaphysical thinking up to Kant can be absolutely lost or even rejected. We have to step on the shoulders of past thinking and know that it belongs to the fundaments of human thinking—which means there is a whole body of thought that has to be kept in mind.

We have seen that from now on it is necessary to make the decision to become philosophical human beings—which does not mean that everyone has to know the whole body of philosophical thought, but each of us has to know one thing: we cannot reject anything. And, as a matter of fact, we will find that the more we become philosophical men (or women), the more we will want to know the old thought—which can be done in the way of preference once we have become acquainted a little bit with the three pillars, so to speak, of philosophical thought: Socrates as rendered by Plato, then Plato himself; St. Augustine (who brought together the concept of reason of the Greeks and the concept of time and will of Hebrew-Christian thought); and Kant (representing pure philosophical thought slowly coming into its own). By starting with those three, reading some of their texts always, we will gain the opportunity to come to others too and will know by and by the main positions and main development of human thought and will be able to philosophize with Plato and Kant. We will be able, each of us, to engage in a dialogue (which is the main thing for people who want to become philosophical human beings to learn—just that ability to engage in dialogues). For this plato is the best beginning. His dialogues, being written as such, give us an opportunity to move in on or to join, so to speak, those dialogues—giving us the opportunity to bring in our own experiences and to check on those propositions and thus making it possible for us also to become creative philosophically.

This is a question we will talk more about in the last session, trying to find a few hints on how each of us can relate our own main creative concern in another field—be it art, science, or the concern of human life itself (the housewife can be creative too)—to that center of all creative human capabilities, philosophy, and how we can learn to get out of philosophy a strength and direction in order to come by and by to a position where we feel again like real human beings. That is what we all have to try to do; we all have to try to keep our minds in a working balance by first gaining an insight into all of our possibilities as human beings—learning to know what those different possibilities and capabilities are—and then through this to regain one most valuable thing we lost along with religion: respect.

With the loss of religion and with is religious respect, we lost respect for everything including human beings and their possibilities and capabilities (and with our loss of respect for human beings we lost, of course, respect for ourselves—and with self-respect, we lost self-confidence)—and just in this question of respect we find the kernel of the nihilistic situation. To regain respect—respect for human beings themselves and their capabilities, respect for ourselves, others and for life itself—is essential for either we regain this respect ourselves by re-establishing it in freedom or we face the other two alternatives: either to go back to religion where we are forced at least to have respect for God or to submit to the nihilistic situation, moving and being moved the way we are supposed to move and be moved—finally by demoniacal movement where we do not need respect (totalitarian powers can makes themselves respected by terror). To regain respect—respect itself first and then self-respect—is not just a matter of wanting to once we have lost entirely respect for others and life. There is only one way: the way of philosophy and freedom by decision and responsibility, finding our for ourselves why and what there really is to respect. (To regain, for example, enough respect for art in order to be able to look at a work of art for half an hour without already having an opinion and wanting to write a criticism means to learn to understand what a work of art really is and what art can or cannot do for human beings—which only philosophy can tell us.)

To make ourselves strong against all the dangers of the nihilistic situation, to become critical enough to avoid falling prey to all the ideologies and demoniacal movements that surround us and to destroy the possibility of creating new ones, to avoid that final and inevitable consequence of the nihilistic situation, totalitarianism (with its murder on principle), means to make the decision to move in freedom and responsibility—to go the way of free philosophy—and that is the only way we can do it. Even religion, since it requires a certain closed system of thinking, encloses an ideology itself and in the end can be of no help against totalitarianism.

So once again we are brought back to this decision that finally has to be made by everyone: the individual decision against nihilism and its automatic performances and the decision for freedom. The more consciously it is made, of course, the better and technically this is possible. If each of you would decide to read Plato, Augustine and Kant each Sunday for two or three years—finding only a little time perhaps but steadily week after week—I think that I could guarantee that you will have found that philosophy is a good ideology killer, that it strengthens you not to fall prey to ideas that claim to be absolute, and that you will be able to criticize any closed system of thought presented to you, criticize it and laugh it off—because once you have made the decision for philosophy, and thus for freedom, and have tried even in such a leisurely way as this one I propose to keep in constant touch with it, by having become considerably more of a free person you will also have become increasingly critical of everything that moves against freedom—learning first how to recognize it and then finally how to fight it.

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