Why and How We Study Philosophy

Summer 1952

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Lecture XII

We have within the nihilistic situation only a choice of three possible positions: to accept the nihilistic situation, and thus decide against freedom; to go back to religion, and thus accept a restricted freedom; or to become philosophical men and women, and thus make a decision for freedom. If we accept the nihilistic situation (and we accept it consciously or not if we do not take a stand against it by making a decision for the full freedom we think is possible through pure philosophy on at least the restricted freedom of religion) then either we must submit to the categorical imperative of the positivistic nihilist (the “you must") or to the authority of the negative nihilist (which moves according to the pleasure principle and the "do as you please").

In either case we forfeit freedom absolutely, give up the idea of creativity at all, and submit to movements which require of us not to act but to react: that means we give in to the given, we give in to the idea of having our actions decided by the situation, the environment, the laws of nature, the laws of history, the laws of society or what you will, according to the situation we are in; we give in to the idea of forfeiting any chance to change the situation in any way which would transcend the mere movement of the physical (the given); and we give in to the idea of becoming absolutely functional, of losing all possibility of acting freely, of acting intentionally, of acting at all—reacting merely, becoming a function to function along with the function of the movement.

The categorical imperative of the positivistic nihilist (the "you must") adds to this one thing more: not only must we submit to the process but we are asked to believe that our freedom comes from speeding up the process, whatever it might be, by gaining insight into it so that we can serve it even better. This is made quite plain by the "freedom" offered to us in Marx's words: "Freedom is insight into necessity.” This is not freedom at all, but an agreement to slavery. We are called upon to function with the functional perfectly, to move with something we have no possibility at all to change but can only speed up by our insight—and we are asked to enjoy that as the situation of our very freedom! What kind of a funny substitute for freedom is this! What we are really offered is the mechanization of the human mind to formal intellect—to an intellect whose functions can be pleased by a so-called growing insight into processed that are going on anyway.

With the other half of the nihilistic imperative (the “do as you please”) we have a bad assumption unaccounted for: the assumption that we know what pleases us—which means, of course, that we would have to know ourselves. But unfortunately—as Socrates could have very well told us—this turns out to be the toughest proposition that anyone can make to himself and one that he can only carry through by trying to make himself not into himself, but into a man or woman. For the one who tries only to find himself no continuity or consistency is possible, and he most certainly would not be able to know what he wanted. The trap in the negative nihilistic imperative lies just in the fact that to be able to “do as you please” means that we would have to know what would please us, what our pleasure might be, and since we can never know ourselves—and thus our pleasure—that way, we can only act functionally, reacting to outside stimulants given to us. So the freedom that seemed to be there in the “do as you please” (and Stirner is a good example of this) turns out to be as full of slavery as the “you must.”

The first nihilistic, but noble, rebellion against the position of Hegel (which made all this possible) was that of Schopenhauer who saw the implications of Hegel’s position and what it would mean. Schopenahuer felt that in that case—in that sorry and terrible situation of man that stripped him of every dignity he had known—that man still had one way open, one freedom and one possibility left: the freedom to go into solitude and to deny to help the situation, and the possibility of the one kind of real creativeness left to man—art. So Schopenhauer took the position: All right, so we will do wha the processes require of us, but certainly we do not have to admire them and to throw ourselves entirely into processes that are not according to the dignity of human beings; we do not have to speed them up and perform better and better for them. We can at least deny them to the point of going into solitude and we can at least get pity and art out of the whole terrible situation. We can be good to other human beings and help them to bear it and we can be interested in art, which is the only thing that can still give us a feeling of human dignity. But the positivistic nihilists prevailed and Schopenhauer’s position was overthrown by the one to speed up the movement.

After Kant, having lost the concept of the personality, and with it transcendence and the possibility of creative freedom, the human being has been split into a private being and a public being, into the individual and into the social being of society. Both the individual and society claim sovereignty, both are after power, and since it is a seculatized sovereignty (without even the restraint given by God) it means a claim for absolute power, inherent in which is the threat of destruction to every other sovereignty: that means inherent in every claim of secularized sovereignty is the threat of murder—it leads to murder and has to lead to murder because sovereignty can finally only be established by breaking all other claims of sovereignty.

The negative nihilistic imperative (the “do as you please”) is nothing but the claim of sovereignty of the individual which involves the destruction of every other sovereignty. It leads to murder and can only lead to murder out of its very pleasure principle. The positive nihilistic imperative (the “you must”), which is nothing but the claim of society, is set absolutely against the claim of sovereignty of the individual with society claiming to be the representative of those iron laws according to which the individual has to function. This is society’s claim for absolute sovereignty (which can most clearly be seen in the form of the socialistic proposition of Marx) and the fact that this claim can eventually lead to a state built upon murder on principle, we unfortunately have had most terrible proof of in our time. So this is the choice we have: to submit to either of the categorical imperatives of the nihilistic situation—the “you must” or the “do as you please”—both of which end up with the same result of slavery—and eventually murder.

Bound up with the splitting up of the human personality into the individual and society is the destruction of one great possibility of man: the possibility of the human community. The moment society—made up of individuals—is established as an absolute with absolute unity by absolute slavery it means that at that same moment a community—made up of personalities capable of coming to agreement—becomes impossible. A community, even though it might have been brought about under authoritarian laws, always meant that there was an element of freedom guaranteed since it was based partly on the agreement of personalities, and as long as the state, absolute or not, was supposed to get its sovereignty from God (which meant that it was at least restricted) there was a certain sense of community. But the moment society took over with its claim of secularized sovereignty this sense of community, along with its guarantee of a certain freedom, was gone.

America was built out of the very principle of community—a genuine creative principle according to which men could create a community of free citizens, based on a common aim (justice and freedom for everybody)—and it still prevails here to a certain extent. That is why I said that even though the nihilistic proposition exists here now also, we have to set the situation in America apart to a certain degree and concentrate on Europe where the nihilistic situation has developed to the full (as we have seen in Germany and Russia) showing the final victory of the “you must” over the “do as you please,” the victory of society over the individual, and the victory of the ruling class (which rules absolutely) over the human being and the personality—as well as over the community which is absolutely destroyed in a totalitarian state.

The United States in a way is an island still above the waters of the nihilistic situation that has flooded over all the countries of Europe—protected up to now by the dyke of the American Constitution which contains the concept of the person and community. It is not a question of dumbness, for example, that the German people, having once realized that the consequences of the nihilistic proposition to the full, have not been able by and by to find another way even though that state was destroyed. It was the inevitable consequence of those principles of person and community having been destroyed to the full. To fight against the nihilistic situation when caught within it is almost impossible—since the reality of the situation is related to the philosophical thinking in that situation and to the kind of a fight one can make against it—so the German people can only fight as Heidegger tries to fight: the I against the One. His very formula of the I (man) against the One (which is nothing but society) shows that this dualism is the very nihilistic proposition within man himself. Heidegger tries to criticize all this and Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” as nihilistic propositions, but being caught within the German situation himself, he has up to now been unsuccessful. We on the other hand are a little better off—we still have three choices.

The second choice open to use is to go back to religion (which is a certain trend now in the United States). For our purpose here we will use only the most sincere people as examples rather than the kind we can criticize—which unfortunately would be most to the point here. As a reaction to the blind idealistic generation of the thirties—the generation that went in for the “you must”—we now have a generation that goes in for the other half of the nihilistic imperative: the “do as you please.” This reaction can very well be shown in the story of a medical student who was the brightest and most promising pupil in his class. When he was asked why he went into medicine, he replied, “Because it promises to be lucrative.” And when he was asked, “Doesn’t a doctor have any meaning at all for the community?”, he said, “I don’t think so. I went into medicine because I am like everyone else: I just try to get the best out of it for myself.” This cynical attitude (the “do as you please”) is the reaction and the answer to the “you must” of the “lost generation.” We are thrown from the one extreme claim (I for myself) to the other extreme (you must go in and work for Moscow even if you are in the State Department of the United States; you must sacrifice yourself for the idea painted on the wall of the future which gives you the possibility to lose yourself and to think of yourself as a kind of hero—but a fake hero), and back again with both extremes ending in tremendous boredom—the heroism of the rugged individualist as much so as the so-called heroism of the absolutely committed. So whatever movements call themselves or however social trends look, they can always be judged by the criterion of those two categorical imperatives of nihilism.

In that situation the trend back to religion is very understandable, but most of the people who go back can be criticized with the argument that it is just another trick. I have always tried to ridicule atheists as believers, but nowadays I am almost tempted to defend them. No one nowadays, it seems, dares to say, “I don’t believe,” because it is nicer to believe in God and it promises more—by being a conformist perhaps he will get a better job. There is already a trend toward a belief that if one is not religious, one is a communist. We have Mr. Chambers now who wants to fight for God—and it becomes an idea that is put on the same level of communism and is a misuse of a religious purpose for a very dirty purpose. Religion in such a case is not distinguished as to its ethical content. Now God shall be the one who says, “You must.”—You must fight against communism. But God never said, “You must.”; He only said, “You shall.” There is no “must” in the Christian religion.

But what about the example of creative and good intellectuals who have gone back to religion. W.H. Auden, for example, went in for many of these movements and got his fill of them. He finally came to the conclusion, along with many other intellectuals—because all the battles of freedom in the nihilistic situation have ended finally as victories of more and more slavery, and because man has not seemed to be able to get hold of any real principle of freedom—that man should not and could not claim absolute freedom; that since philosophers from the time of Kant have not been able to find full freedom or to establish it, it must not be given to man at all. Auden and other intellectuals have felt, therefore, that only restricted freedom is given to man and have said to us: “Since we have nothing to show for man’s trying to live without God except the nihilistic situation and all its consequences, we had better go back to religion.” They want to accept the restrictive freedom of religion in order to survive the nihilistic situation, and they think by that they can erect a wall of real human resistance to those movements that are sucking us deeper and deeper into the nihilistic predicament. But they do not know what a hard proposition this really is, or what it really means to try in all sincerity to go back once belief is lost.

We have among the existentialist philosophers both those who believe in God and those who do not—Jaspers, for example, believes in God, Camus and Sartre are atheists, and Heidegger (if we still count him as an existentialist, though he disclaims it, or include him to the extent that he has been an existentialist) has tried to behave absolutely philosophically in the sense of neither believing in God nor believing in the non-existence of God, leaving God out entirely. Jaspers takes the position that every philosopher has to account for his position towards God; Heidegger says not. I too do not think that such an accounting is necessary so long as a philosopher does not claim to know whether God does or does not exist and does not use God as an argument, but Jaspers has good reason to take in again the theistic God of Kant. He wants to keep up man’s ability of transcendence to God and he also wants to create a wall against the big flood of nihilism—but he does it by non-philosophical means. Philosophically, this position of Jaspers’ does not hold water because belief must be added to it in order for it to be taken as a means for our behavior. Jaspers takes an in-between position between the second choice of going back to religion and the third choice made possible to us by starting afresh from Kant to find the possibility of establishing human freedom.

With Kant, philosophy got the possibility to become pure philosophy within that system of human creative abilities and once it is established as such, we can then make the third decision open to us: to try again. As a starting point we have only the position Kant left to us—except for one additional advantage (embodied in the Constitution) that we have here in the United States: the very dim awareness of both a metaphysical concept of the free human person and a metaphysical concept of a possible free community of men. More we do not have, so if we decide that we want to try to live as free men—not going back to the half-security of religion or not falling prey to the nihilistic situation—do we not then have to ask: If philosophy is the only free creative human activity of man that is able to help man to discover his own free creative activities, if philosophy is the only creative human activity that can still try to strive for the establishment of freedom, if philosophy has become identical with the very proposition of man’s freedom itself (which it has), does it not mean then that if we want to be free men we have to make a decision for philosophy and (turning the proposition of Plato around) that we have to hold everyone responsible to become a philosophical man, a co-philosopher?

Of all the three decision open to us, in the beginning the first one, the decision for escape from freedom, seems to be the easiest—though in the end it will prove to be a mortal decision. In making this decision—or even in just sliding into it without consciously making it (which amounts to the same thing)—one does not see that it is a process that starts with absolute conformism and eventually ends in totalitarianism, that by making such a decision one forsakes any possibility for freedom and creativity at all, and that one will be made a mere function to be disposed of in the general process—a process that moves by conscious murder until in the end the very security of life itself is given up.

The second decision, to go back to religion, is already harder and it means to revise nihilistic philosophy in the light of theology—for the Catholic to study Aquinas, for the Jew to study Maimonides or Philo, and for the Protestant to study Kierkegaard and Luther. To go back to religion in all sincerity--and not just as a psychological performance that makes one feel better--is exactly as tough a proposition as that--demanding study, hard study, and for a long time.

The third decision, the philosophical decision, is the hardest one of all. It means to forfeit the possibility of being able to pretend to know (and the resultant feeling of security it gives) and the possibility of making one’s self or society the absolute judge, and to live instead by preliminary answers in the Socratic way—only being able to be sure that one is moving in the right direction. Even though we can and have to criticize the nihilistic situation and its consequences, we also have to take into account the valid, negative criticism of sincere nihilistic philosophers—criticism that has shown us that every claim of the “you shall” is related to belief in God (even if it is just a theistic God) and that if we do not want to take God in as an argument, then we cannot recognize the categorical imperative as being inherent in man and as being the source of free ethical creativity of man. We must also see that without God such an assumption as the one that man is born free does not hold true, that philosophically speaking such an assumption can hold true only if the assumption is also made (as it was in the American Constitution) that God is there who created men free and equal—we have no other proof.

To find proof philosophically for man’s being able to be free is just our task. We have to find a source in man, a possibility of man to become free—under the condition that everyone else becomes free too—and we think that man has that ability and that possibility to decide whether or not he wants to accept freedom as a principle of his life because otherwise he could never have made the assumption that God made man free—or, as a matter of fact, could never have conceived of the idea of God at all. If we suppose for the sake of philosophical argument that we cannot know whether God exists or not, that we only know that we have had an idea of God, then it follows that we would have been able to have an idea of God only if we had had the ability to make a decision—the original decision required in philosophy: the decision for the idea of freedom. Once that decision was made, we could then proceed to invent mythical forms to enclose our inner knowledge.

The only source we really have to prove that an original decision is given to man—an original decision of man for freedom (which is also the original decision for reason, justice and finally, metaphysially speaking, life itself)—is the ability of man to transform a given existence into a life that has meaning and indication because it transcends mere existence, and this ability of man to be able to establish truth by searching for it and also living it, wanting it, deciding for it. That means that man is an originator, that he is able to be free and to originate, that he is able to also act, not merely being condemned to react only, that he is able to meet a challenge not merely by a response (as the scientist thinks) but by an answer—and answer which contains a creative counter-proposition to the situation and contains the possibility of taking a position in order to change it, to make it meaningful, to put something new into it that was not there before; and answer that is something created by the mind of man which gives him the ability to transform those chains of occurrences, which move in a circular way always (and circular movement is the way the nihilistic movement moves) into straight lines of human events that get to be meaningful and get somewhere because of action.

To change the functional into the intentional, taking the functional into the service of the intentional, is the metaphysical realm in which man moves and is the real meaning of the metaphysical, but since man remains a metaphysical being whether he wants to or not, he can also if he does not make the original decision for freedom (and thus also for life) transform himself into a mere given thing absolutely directed, moving along with the physical in chains of occurrences: that measn that he can decide for the demoniacal—that he can decided against freedom, which also entails a decision against reason, justice, truth, and eventually against life itself. Thus a decision for the demoniacal, which inevitably carries with it an eventual decision against life, means a decision for original crime—the crime against origin (which is the same decision made by any murderer)—and leads to murder, to murder on principle which can be used as a political means. And this brings us to a most curious implication of nihilistic thinking: just as nihilistic thinking always leads to murder, the decision for murder leads inevitably to nihilistic thinking and its characteristic circular movement—which means that both decisions are alike and demonic.

But since it is by the decision of man himself that he can turn himself into anti-man (which is what the decision for the demoniacal means) and not some outside force that brings this about, this in itself contains a striking proof, though negatively so, of man’s ability to be self-determinating, free, and creative by the decision to be so. Man has the capacity by making the original decision for freedom (and thus for life) to set limits to himself—setting limits to himself on principle (for example: if man decides for freedom and life, he at once with this sets the limit to himself to take no action against freedom and against life—restricting himself at once as to murder). This ability of man to set limits means that he gains with this the first possibility of self-determination—which is the first act of real creative freedom, making out of the I, a he or she, a person who acts creatively in a creative world he has put meaning into.

We have seen that the nihilistic imperatives, the "you must" and the "do as you please" do not hold, philosophically speaking—along with the “you shall” once the belief in God is gone (which does not mean that this can be used as an argument either to prove or disprove the existence of God)—but nihilistic philosophy by inadvertently finding the source of anti-creativeness, the source of human crime, has done us a very great service. Not only has it put us into a situation of life or death where we are forced to ask questions and to take position, but by its critical and negative work, it has enabled us to move on to ask questions that could never have been asked until certain assumptions that had always been taken for granted were exposed. By showing us, for example, that all the “you shalls” of the past, including Kant’s, could not hold once the belief in God was gone, nihilistic philosophy gave us the opportunity then to ask: If that is so, then where did we ever get those ideas from? where did we ever get the idea that God made man free? where did we ever get the idea that freedom, truth, justice, and reason were given to man, that we had them? We were able to get the idea that all those things were given to us because we have always had the possibility to make an original decision for freedom (and thus for truth, justice, reaons and life itself). We only invented a means of masking our inner certainty of this first by myth and then by God and the cosmos.

Now (thanks to Kant and the nihilistic philosophers who followed him) we know that freedom, truth, reason and justice are not given to us, that we do not have them--we can gain more and more of them; we know that we are not born free, born just, born reasonable, that there is nothing in us that we have only to bring out--we can only act more and more free, more and more just, more and more reasonable. That means we first have to make an original decision--a decision for freedom, and thus truth, reason, justice--and by this decision we then have the possibility to find by and by a way of handling freedom, truth, justice and reason as principles, as criteria of living action--giving us the possibility to act more and more so (more and more free, more and more just, more and more reasonable) without ever being so. We are only given a possibility and the idea of a task end we have to make a decision for or against it.

We have instead of a categorical imperative an original impulse--an impulse that is not an unconditioned one but an original one which is an impulse for originating coming out of our awareness of being possible originators. We definitely have the awareness of this possibility of ours which can be formulated as a “you can” (and is not a voice of higher power as the “you shall”). “You can” is what we are aware of—this original impulse of “you can” which can become creative by our making the decision for the Absolute and for what we conceive of as those principles for which we decide.

By deciding for the Absolute not only does the “you can” become creative—giving us the ability to relate everything in the world to the Absolute and thereby transforming the mere given, the physical, into the meaningful—but since this Absolute is also our idea of eternal being, we gain another possibility: to make out of this eternity. We are in the ontological predicament (and of knowing it) that we are not contained entirely in time or in space—for as to time, we have it and as to space we are location points that set space. And if our ontological predicament is just this—to be able to have another relation to time and spcae—the ontological decision necessary in order to be able to make this other dimension, so to speak, which we call eternity, is the decision to relate everything to the Absolute—which means the ontological decision for freedom and for eternity.

This question of our having to make an original decision--and the fact that it really is a decision--becomes most clear in relation to murder.We—being aware in our very existence of this metaphysical fact of the “you can,” of this original impulse, having it, being it—can make the decision for freedom, truth, justice, reason, and thus for life—which means to make a decision for the Absolute and for the possibility we have to relate everything to the Absolute. But we can also decided against the Absolute, against this possible life built out of the existence of man—and we can decide against this either by original crime, by the crime against origin (which also means a decision against freedom, justice, truth, and reason) or by the decision against freedom, justice, truth, and reason which in turn inevitably leads to murder.

But there is one very funny thing about this decision against the Absolute. We have the possibility either to be creative or anti-creative, de-creative, but since we are relating beings—the most relating things in the world—and cannot help relating things, even in the act of being anti-creative, or denying the Absolute, even in the demoniacal there is the same indication of the action of relating, still an indication, though negatively so, of relation to the Absolute—of a negatice relation to the Absolute, denying it but still relating to it. How can this be possible?—to deny the Absolute in one decision and yet still relate to the Absolute. Quite simply by the individual making himself the substitute of the Absolute, by the individual deciding to relate everything in the world to himself and by this making himself the Absolute—which is the root of the demoniacal decision for original crime. When the human individual makes himself into the Absolute, by that action negative creation is induced—which means chaos, where everything is related in a one-way street. Since there is no possibility of relating things in a meaningful way or to other human beings, everything becomes related only to the individual—which means that everything becomes related against meaning, destroying meaning and by that inducing a process of chaos. We are beings capable of the transformation of the physical, but if we try by the wrong way to change a chain of occurrences into a line of events the only change in the circular movement of the given is into a circular movement out of which the center is gone, which goes into the circular movement of the maelstrom, creating more and more destruction—which means we become beings who engage in chaotic movement. If on the other hand we make the other decision, we become creators of world, creators of systems of meanings in things, which can be changed into more and more meaningful systems and meaning.

We can relate to the Absolute (to God or the Absolute of the creative principles of the mind of man (only because we are aware of freedom—which means that if we decide against freedom and against the Absolute we still act upon this supposition. This is why this negation is not merely negative, why in fact metaphysically it means the opposite. Nothingness in this case is something: the action of the development of creativeness turned to the destruction of meaning and truth. This is what nothingness really means, metaphysically speaking—and it is created by man. We are makes of both because we have the possibility of the “you can,” of the original impulse.

This “you can” is also the reason why we could think of ourselves as immortal souls, trying to give some concreteness to this metaphysical fact; but while we can never find that out, any more than we can find out if God exists since our reason does not reach so far, we can find the root of all those creative thoughts that we have had about ourselves—and that is the “you can” and the possibility of the fundamental ontological decision, the decision about freedom itself. We are not born free, or true or reasonable—we are only born arbitrary—but we are born non-determinated (and the only beings in the world who are born so) with the possibility of being self-determinating and becoming more and more free, true, or reasonable; and since we are born so, we can only live by determinating ourselves and only by relating ourselves and everything else to the Absolute and so being able to bring about a creative life.

Jaspers in his book talks about the unconditional imperative and we must ask if there is not something which makes such a proposition possible. Jaspers wants to show that if we are in a border situation, according to the unconditioned imperative we can throw our life away without any conditions—but a criminal or nihilist might do this also. Jaspers thinks that here our true being (that “authentic self”) comes through, that original goodness is in us, that we are good, are born good; but this cannot be proved. For the philosophical mind, man can only do good; goodness is not a quality of man but only a possibility to be more and more acquired. We are neither good nor bad but rather conditioned-conditioners capable of making a decision for one thing or another—which means that with the “you can,” the original impulse, we have the possibility, once the decision for freedom on principle is made, to put forth propositions to being, to the world, which amounts to an imperative—but a conditional imperative where the conditions, so to speak, are conditional. That is, we have to know when we risk our life or sacrifice our existence for the sake of freedom, justice, truth, or reason that we do so because we want that life to be so or we don’t want o be—that is the conditional imperative. It is a matter not of sacrifice but of original human passion—the passion of origin which just cannot bear it any more and which has to move because of hatred (hatred founded on decision and principle) against a meaningless event. When a man jumps into the water to save a life, he moves out of hatred against a meaningless event that is going to take place. He has made an original decision for life and the meaningful and he does not need to love or to even know the other man—he just acts. This is the perfect solidarity of human beings who have become aware of their creativeness. In most border situations we as human beings act upon impulse, but if we become aware of it, we find that we have acted upon a deep truth: the original decision that we have made and which by and by we have put into ourselves.

We have brought about a deadly situation, the nihilistic situation, and to overcome it we have to bring the very proof of the possibility of human freedom: that means a real concept, a metaphysical reality by which we can move and act always--becoming aware of a fundament in the being of human beings themselves, a fundament that can enable us to resist and overcome the nihilistic situation without the help of religion, postponing the question of God until we have been able to prove whether we are able to meet the situation we have created, until we can see whether the human mind can overcome it out of its own creativeness. I am not historically minded, but I cannot help thinking that the reason why in philosophy we have not found this foundation before has been because the human mind is so lazy that it only finds the means to solve essential issues when it is frightened to death. Kant, having made many preliminary steps to this position, had only to make two steps farther to reject the "you shall"--and yet the whole nihilistic period lies in between. That is because we are never that unconditioned--even as conditioners. If we think one-sidedly as conditioners, it is because we are not able to abstract enough from the conditions and so depend to a certain degree upon conditons that we have created before. The mind moves forward, yet is always taken back by its own creations. So even half a step forward is very optimistic progress.

But if we have brought about with the nihilistic situation a deadly situation, we have also brought about the possibility of the one thing that is our only help to overcome this situation and which we come to now: the possibility of a system of human creative abilities, a system of coopeartion between the creative possibilities of the mind, which can be made out of the confusion that has come about with the blowing up of the conglomerate—a confusion that has come to the point where we do not know any more what art, philosophy, religion, or science might be. We have been held back up to now by the counter-critical thinking that was necessary first (for example: we could not have asked where the real source of the “you shall” was if the position of Kant had not been destroyed by the nihilistic situation). The movement of the human mind is the slowest—and a movement of back and forth with past steps making further steps possible and new steps throwing light back on past ones. If we look back to the old philosophers when a creative step has been made to find a new position, we find they suddenly seem deeper than before—because it is one mind, the human mind, as to its metaphysical creations which always hang and move together.

That is one of the great differences between science and philosophy and a common bond between philosophy and art. In science if we reject a proposition, we can forget it; it is not related but becomes a mere historical fact. In art and philosophy on the other hand it is quite different. In art, for example, it is only since Cezanne, and since we have started to understand him, that we suddenly have understood how great El Greco really was. This, of course, is not quite true, but what is really means is that there were implications in the form-giving of El Greco that were there as germs only, not realized to the full until someone else came along who could develop them in their full significance (which does not mean, however, that Cezanne did not create them all by himself). This was not an occurrence in mere history, but a line of events that always closes together again. If we look at the interpretations of Plato up to Kant and then at the interpretations of Plato after Kant, we find two sets of interpretations that differ in quality. After Kant, Plato was conceived of as a much deeper thinker. It is a backward reflection to things that have been there but have been overlooked—the germs that have always been there but that only came into more fullness of meaning after a Kant or a Cezanne had done their own creative work.

The body of philosophical thought—in mythical form, in the anti-philosophical form of nihilistic thinking, even in the beginning of free philosophy (philosophy freed from bondage to other human capabilities)—remains one body of metaphysical thought of man. And modern art has shown us the same thing. We have become aware of deeper indications of style in the older styles—and whether we know the icons or not, or the meaning of anamistic art, the works of art are still speaking to us because of an eternal quality of man in everyone of them. This is one of our guarantees for an eternal transcendence of man in the creations of man where he can become sure of his very ability. The other guarantee is philosophy where only quality is decisive, where even an erroneous statement has to be looked at for its quality.

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