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Why and How We Study Philosophy
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Summer, 1952

Lecture I

In philosophy we have no right to throw out one erroneous answer if that answer has quality (human experience), and since in philosophy we are concerned with the idea itself (for example: philosophy is concerned with the idea of God, religion with the existence of God) and how it was possible for man to arrive at that idea or answer at all, we have always to look and to inquire again. So in discussing the situation we now find ourselves in and how it came about and man's changed position in the world, we have to look back at how man lived up to 1800 and have to ask: How was it possible and how did it happen that man believed in God almost up to 1800 and then suddenly stopped--replacing this dropped belief with a merely negative belief that God did not exist.

This we will try to find out, but first lets start with this negative belief--for a belief it is--that God does not exist. Since Kant showed us that we cannot know whether God exists or not, it means that the atheist cannot possibly know that God does not exist--so he is really a believer in nothingness. This brings us immediately to the question of faith and to the distinction between faith and belief. Pure faith (which philosophy can accept as such) means that you believe in God although you know that you cannot pretend to know that He exists. Belief on the other hand implies that you pretend to know that God exists (or, as in the case of the negative belief of the atheist, that God does not exist). In faith you cross the borderline from reason to faith, but so long as you never try to convince anyone else of your faith, it can be a question of pure faith, and as such something that philosophy (free philosophy) can accept; the minute you try to convince anyone else of your faith, it means that you have to try to argue philosophically and to pretend to believe. The medieval mystic could still try to talk of his own experiences because they were so strong and because he still lived in an age of belief, but now the situation is such that a philosopher like Karl Jaspers has said that if a mystic would come to him, he would have to say: "I am sorry, but I cannot talk to you about this. I am not in a state of grace."

The negative belief of the atheist brings up yet another point with his "I believe that I do not believe.", we come into the realm of the demoniacal. Old theologians always said that the denial of God was done by the Devil, but this denial of the atheist is not diabolical. It concerns an inner human experience which has much to do with the principle of the demonic. Thinking in the West (Heidegger, etc.), combining with the thoughts of psychology, has lately found that there is such a thing as being possessed. Scientifically explained, this means that a man is possessed by his own mental processes which he cannot control--like the idee fixe, for example, where the man is not thinking, but is "being thought." Since Nietzsche a branch of psychology has developed in which an analysis has been made of certain motives human beings use--especially of inferiority and the development of the quality of resentment as a negative form of action. Relating this to the atheist, we see that while he claims not to have a mystical experience as the saint does, actually he does. The atheist after being driven into a corner will suddenly pop out with "But I believe that I do not believe in God." A terrible inner action is taking place here: the atheist has experienced his own inner nothingness; he denies God compulsively because he feels himself to be nothing--and the relation with the demonic is clearly there.

In philosophy we would then have to say that with this we have an answer and would have to ask: What makes this reaction possible? and why do most people who have had the inner experience of their own nothingness react so wildly and so especially against God? They react this way because if a man feels himself to be valueless and is penetrated by that feeling (the personal nihilistic experience), then the will to destruction of all values is the immediate reaction. Destruction of all values means to aim at the thing always valued most highly by man: God. It is not the Devil in action but man who has been robbed of all feelings of his own personal quality; man who has been driven into the feeling of no qualities of his own whatsoever along with tremendous resentment against himself. But we are very bad self-destroyers for human beings have also a quality of grandeur--which Pascal put forward as one-half of man's basic condition (the other being misery). The quality that makes for man's grandeur is that he can love somebody else more than himself. This is one of the peaks of the possible creativeness of man, but on the other hand, man can never take anyone else more seriously than himself. This is automatic because man lives with himself, even in dreams, mirroring himself continuously, and he cannot possibly spend the same energy on anyone else. If he is in a state of love, loving someone more than himself, then he is safe. But this borderline man we are talking about has paid for this nothingness with the loss of the capacity to love. So he is only left with the other quality--the inability to take anyone else more seriously than himself--and he must deny the worth and value of everyone else.

These have all been preliminary probings into the question in order to give you an idea of how philosophy proceeds, but before I go on I must say that I have a funny feeling in starting this course. I have always felt that I would never give such a course; in fact I have always made it a condition in taking a job not to give an introductory course in philosophy--for that is impossible, and the man who does is either a fool or a teacher of a science (the history of philosophy). An introductory course in philosophy is doing that which philosophy teaches--teaching life (which is all that philosophy can teach). Then the modern situation forced a thinker, Karl Jaspers, to give a series of lectures on the "Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy." I had supposed that he would take the position I have always taken, but then I saw why he could do it. Jaspers is an existentialist who comes from psychology. His position is that philosophy cannot be taught, but philosophizing can be taught. Since he has a most definite answer to the question of what philosophy is (philosophy is philosophizing) and because he is a very sceptical man, he gives a very different introduction to philosophy. I want you to have this book in order to check on me. This is always good; it makes you feel independent. You will find that Jaspers says that what philosophy is, nobody knows and that for as many philosophers as there are, there are as many definitions. Jaspers feels that the very definition a philosopher gives of what philosophy is shows what he, the philosopher, is. It would seem by this that we would be stuck with an infinity of philosophical systems--and we are. Jaspers in his youth wrote an excellent history of philosophy and made a comparative study of things that they had in common. He was of the opinion that there had been no real development in philosophy and that everyone had to make his own philosophy--some, of course, were more gifted than others in this. This position is of a tremendous educational value, but it also changes philosophy into pedagogy.

With a philosopher, and especially with a modern philosopher, we must always ask: What is he fighting for? Of the modern philosophers, Jaspers and Camus (with the exception of Heidegger, who is different again) are the only ones who make a stand. They are really rebellious humanists and what they are fighting for is a revival of metaphysical humanism. They became aware that the humanism of the 19th Century had an anti-humanistic element and led straight into the nihilistic situation which led again to totalitarianism. They want to fight totalitarianism and by the means of re-establishing certain values of humanism so that we can make a kind of liberal restoration and thereby get into a position where we have a leg to stand on in the nihilistic situation. Metaphysically speaking, we are still lost, and politically, even in democracy we do not have a counter-proposition to totalitarianism. They believe that we have underrated liberalism and that it can be restored. But what they both do is to fall back on a proposition that only holds true for the individual. If we consider the nihilistic situation to be a great flood, they are building walls. But we cannot build walls against a flood; we must build an ark--or to speak modernly, we must learn to fly; we must overcome it. The masses are falling and are being driven into a trap by social circumstances created by nihilism and we cannot stop them by the mere means of educating the individual. Jaspers is a great educator and can have the effect upon an individual of making him really tough against the nihilistic situation, but it takes years to acquire the necessary knowledge—which is a very suspicious fact in itself: it means that he goes back to science. One should not need that much knowledge; it is not really creative philosophical work any more (though it is re-creative). And this is why I differ from him--I think there is something more.

Philosophy also shows where human thinking now stands because every philosophy designed means that man--the philosopher is not a man alone, but representative--in a certain situation has tried to take a new position in the world toward the world and toward himself. A history of philosophy, as Hegel thought, cannot exist as a thing in itself. There is no such continuity or unity, but there is a much deeper unity: the unity of human experience within the world in different situations which shows the basic identity of the will. If we look at philosophy as attempts to regulate the position that man takes in the world at a certain time and in a given situation, then we can talk about a certain history of philosophy: an history of the continuous widening of the range of the human mind and the deeper and higher meanings of life that are gained. In that sense it is worthwhile to teach the history of philosophy, but it is only taught now in Hegel's or Jaspers' way.

But we are interested in the question: What is philosophy? Philosophy cannot be taught. Why not? Because everybody is a philosopher; he just does not know it. There are two kinds of professional human beings who have to argue with every idiot in the world: philosophers and politicians. Everyone feels he knows about politics and about life--who should have a greater life experience than he - that little idiot - and he is right. We are obliged to try to be creative in those fields or we might lose our freedom. That is also the reason why everyone should study philosophy. He is in it anyway and mostly he has no idea of what a bad performer he is. Philosophy now means only free philosophy. Philosophy has not existed yet on its own. It has been driven into its own by the nihilistic situation and science, and forced away from religion and the cosmos. In that most dangerous situation in which we find ourselves philosophy for the first time has to answer the question: What are you? Previously, philosophy was mixed up with every trend of human life, but now it has to account for itself and to show that it is something that human beings need. We are forced to raise the question seriously in our time: What is philosophy? We cannot answer with Jaspers' reply that everyone has to make up his own mind what philosophy is. We must find out what philosophy really is.

Philosophizing does not mean that we all think independent thoughts. We all think thoughts of others and most people cannot get out of this framework of thinking with the thoughts and prejudices of others. We must develop philosophy by developing what creates philosophy: the mind that thinks. A being grows by continuous exhaustion: in love by continuous loving, in thinking by exhausting the mind. This is a funny phenomenon and there is no natural explanation for it. Here we have the first point to go on if we want to find out where man has been entirely enslaved by pseudo-scientific ideologies. All have one thing in common: they tell us that man is entirely explainable out of his circumstances. If we know his circumstances, we can know him more and more. He is a product of the world; a product of things as they are. This would mean that the world including man could be explained physically.

Now I call physical everything that comes into and goes out of being without the help of man. I use it in the Greek sense of physis--the thing that emerges--and add to that: without the help of man. I call them occurrences because we do not know even if things exist. A lot of phenomena come about without our will, including dreams. Thus the physical is everything in being that does not come into being or go out of being with our help. Metaphysical I call everything (an event) that would not have happened if man would not have done it. This is the sphere of man's freedom and creativeness. An event we cause has metaphysical significance; but if the wind blows a book on the floor, it is an occurrence. It happens in a definite line of other occurrences (which we might be able to control by scientific means but which we do not create); they are interrelated chains of occurrences. No metaphysical implication whatsoever is involved; no meaning whatsoever is involved--though consequence and sense might be involved (we could follow the line of the wind or measure the strength of the wind). By no meaning I mean that everything in the realm of the physical has the implication of being merely functional. It can be measured and grasped merely by functional means. Anything that has meaning must have intention. In the case of an idée fixe, for example, the patient's mental processes have lost meaning; they are merely functional now.

Formerly when we believed in God and the cosmos we believed that natural things had meaning because God put meaning into them, but now we cannot believe in this. There are no spirits in the cosmos that set their will against us; we have overcome them. There is absolutely no meaning in the intentional sense in physical occurrences, but if I throw a book on the floor, doing it intentionally, this means it has meaning. This action I caused--intention causes an action; an action causes an event--and now I can really talk of cause and effect (and we all think now in terms of cause and effect). It is also an occurrence because the strength by which I did that--throwing the book on the floor--was coming into my body from an uninterrupted chain of occurrences. I used this to bring about an event so both occurrence and event are therefore involved. The metaphysical action of the human will also manifests itself by butting into a chain of given occurrences, putting it into the service of the human will and bringing it into an event. Now the occurrence has meaning too; intention has been put into the occurrence. What Heidegger calls "the things in hand" is the exact togetherness of an occurrence and an event. Intention has gotten hold of a chain of occurrences and transposed it into another chain of occurrences that now has meaning--which is what we used to call form. But this being that can do that cannot be explained out of all the chains of occurrences in the world--and here lies the first proof for human freedom.

Kant still thought that freedom could not be proved (along with God and immortality) and one shortcoming of Kant was stopping there. (He also had one wrong question: the question was not one of immortality but eternity; immortality is only personal. We are only concerned with immortality because we are concerned basically with eternity.) The other shortcoming of Kant was that he believed those three things--freedom, God, and immortality--must be believed in or the human mind would not function in freedom. And since philosophy is concerned with freedom, and has always been distinguished from religion by caring for freedom first, God next, as religion cared always for God first freedom second--or morally speaking, philosophers have always cared for truth first, goodness second; religious thinkers for goodness first, truth second--we must now raise again the question: What is freedom? and can a human being be free? and how? This is the pivotal question.

We believed up to 1800 that knowledge and understanding were the same, that understanding was a higher kind of knowledge. Even now we do not have the concept that knowledge and understanding are entirely different, but we could believe in the identity of knowledge and truth only so long as we believed in the identity of the physical and the metaphysical as well. And only so long as we believed in cosmical events and not in natural occurrences, could we believe that they revealed meaning, that there was a guidance inherent in what we call natural occurrences. That means we are no longer entitled to say that understanding and knowledge are the same, that knowledge makes for truth. This error had its source in Greek thinking--in Platonic and Aristotelian thinking. If the idea of an object in my mind coincided with the object itself, it used to be called truth; now it is only adequate because truth must have meaning in it, and it must be more than recognition. Jaspers has made a new theory uniting again knowledge and understanding, saying that the scientist is concerned with truth--which is true, but he is only concerned with the pre-conditions of truth. Understanding is applicable only to the metaphysical; knowledge to the physical. Understanding enables us to communicate with other beings; knowledge is always one-sided because knowledge only enables us to handle things--and things know nothing of us (they only answer by changing, which is no answer) and we can never know things in themselves (Kant was right). However, when meaning, which is intentional, has been put into a thing, as with human-produced things, then we can and we must listen to what other human beings have put into a thing. Since this thing was built for a purpose, it has the language of form and it speaks and has intention.

Lecture II

I want to talk now about the difference of my approach and Jaspers' on why and how do we study philosophy so that you can make the differentiations as you read Jaspers' book, but first I want to change the title of this course to: Why and How Must Every Man Study Philosophy--the reason for which I will explain in a minute.

Jaspers' approach is the last and most noble philosophical theory about philosophy that grows out of the most pure of all humanistic and liberalistic thinking in Western Europe. Jaspers and Camus are the only ones (along with Heidegger) who make an attempt to overcome the nihilistic situation, but both fall back into the nihilistic situation. They cannot find a way out because there is only the way up--as long as they work within the framework of it, they must fall back into it. Jaspers and Camus do not see that even the most pure line of humanistic and liberal thought cannot get away from the sorry situation.which leads us to ask: Must there not be in fact something absolutely wrong in the very starting position of that thinking, something that has always been in it--its opposite which leads back into the nihilistic situation?

Jaspers says that basically philosophy cannot claim to be practical--though he claims it to be so, but only so far as the inner experience of man in his individual existence. He claims that by philosophizing we can come into a state where, by purifying our thoughts and ourselves, we can get sure of the fact that man has the possibility of transcendence to God--the forever unknowable God. The individual can get the experience that everything he finds out for truth can be rejected, but he must transcend this. By proving his strength to go on he will find inner assurance of his own transcendence. Inner experience (which is psychological and mystical) can always lead to a certain proposition of mysticism and with Jaspers it becomes the proposition that the individual will get an inner feeling finally that he is really able to transcend and that will give him assurance of his own worthiness against despair. Out of inner subjective experience he wants to lead on to a way that will give each one assurance against the nihilistic situation.

Now in science polemics is necessary, but not in philosophy. The only criticism allowed in philosophy is to do it better. Every new approach must take into account what has gone before. Jaspers' approach I feel is valuable and valid in terms of education and self-education, by which we can make single individuals to a certain degree bullet-proof to the nihilistic approach. This is the positive reason why I chose this book as a parallel study. Unfortunately, the conclusion is that Jaspers cannot speak to man any more; he can only speak to men or only to single human beings. he cannot possibly make any approach which by finding out our common situation can help us to overcome the nihilistic situation. This is why he feels that philosophy is helpless and that philosophy cannot enforce itself. Old philosophy wanted to gain power over the human mind--claiming to be the mediator between God and man or between the meaning of the cosmos and man--but it did not claim, as philosophy did later, to be the ruler of man. As soon as the cosmological and theological approach broke down (with Kant), philosophy had to find out what it really had to claim for itself. This opened up the possibility of pure philosophy, which we are pursuing here, but it also opened up the possibility for the absolute claim to rule--which all 19th Century philosophers made. Jaspers makes yet a third approach--we, as philosophers, can give someone certain guidance but we cannot prove anything to him or claim leadership--that is honorable in a negative way, growing out of Kant (as opposed to Hegel and Nietzsche who claimed the absolute leadership of man).

Jaspers' approach is one of the finest to show scientists that they are really priests when they claim to be absolute experts; that they want to rule the minds of men when they claim to have the truth instead of searching for it. He shows that a philosopher too much knows that truth is infinite and that he should never claim to be in possession of it. But the weakness of Jaspers is that he claims for a philosopher only the role of a man who guides individuals--the philosopher must sit there waiting for the enlightened ones who turn to philosophy, for the ones who have been faced with life problems and have found science wanting in the answering of those problems. His position is a noble one and in a way a Christian one in his relation to goodness and God in order to show the way back to God (not religion.) But I am very suspicious of all those positions because the half-religious or religious thinker always puts goodness first and truth second, God first and freedom second. Pure philosophical thinkers are concerned the other way around--truth first goodness second, freedom first God second--though you will find the reverse is true in certain cases of philosophers and theologians. My position is that we cannot know about God, so let's not aim for God. If we come into a position in the search for truth where we can make an approach to God visible, all right--but otherwise forget it.

And just as I am always a little critical of a philosopher concerned with goodness because it means he places truth second, I am a little bothered by Camus because he is concerned about the happiness of man--which means that he is concerned with feelings first. A philosopher is not entitled to that. When Nietzsche's sister wrote to him about religion, he replied: "If you want to be elevated and feel fine, go on that way. I am ready to take truth first----even if it is the cruel and killing one." He made this decision in order to make sure that into the search could not creep in the uncontrolled human longing for feeling better. He would rather feel worse and know that he had truth. As long as the concept of the whole human personality held fast to provide a certain safeguard, that cruel distinction as to truth and feeling was not so necessary (and in a concept of freedom, which becomes possible with free philosophy, we do not need such a distinction at all), but Nietzsche made his stand when the splitting of the personality had already occurred. All longing for goodness was already sentimental; all longing for truth merciless because truth had become the search of the cold human intellect. The heart had degraded into the cold human soul, the mind into the intellect. Coldness of intellect is necessary for science and scientists, but they do not have to believe it is their mind. When Nietzsche took his stand against his sister, it was in reality a stand for the intellect against the soul (sentimentality).

In physics there is a definition of dirt as matter in the wrong place. But if we sweep that dirt together until we have a pile of it and put it in the garden, when it rains we have top soil. Sentimentality is feeling in the wrong place--displaced feeling not rightly employed--and one proof of this is in the worst situation of displaced feeling (and a situation very much prevailing): the function of self-pity, which is displacement of the strength of human feelings into the reverse. In a case of self-pity a man is mirrored and remirrored on himself until finally he can feel sorry only for himself. That man always wonders why no one feels for him but the answer is simple: he feels so much for himself he has nothing left to give to others--his feelings are all misplaced. It is not a question of morals and we are not accusing such a person of being selfish (in fact it might be better if he really were), but he has become an example of absolute sentimentality and lives always in tears for himself. This misplacing, or the possibility of it, has its roots in the split between the human mind and the human heart which turned the mind into the intellect and the heart into sentimentality which cannot be controlled any more.

If we take the concept of freedom we see that pure philosophy puts its interest in freedom first and in God second; then we see that the concept of freedom is unable to show us even a possibility of a cleavage between the mind and the heart. If someone is interested in freedom, he is interested with his heart as well as with his mind. Freedom is also a necessity for the human heart because it makes us feel fine without our being able to distrust that feeling. We have our own dignity (that is a feeling too) and the possibility of self-respect--the possibility of self-respect as a feeling relating to the human heart. But because it is such an essential feeling, if we do have it, we take it for granted. We do not realize that we have it--and we do the same with political freedom. In America, for instance, we have taken freedom for granted for a long time. We have forgotten that it is there and that it is something. We have forgotten it as we forget air--until we come into a special situation (if we are suddenly faced with the possibility of drowning, for example) and realize that it is a fundamental need of life, or as we suddenly and consciously experience the joy of breathing in the mountains after months in a city. This is comparable to freedom as a metaphysical experience, as a necessity of the mind as well as of the heart. We see suddenly for the first time the whole functioning of the human being in unity, in one. So I say that I care for freedom first (Kant was the greatest and last one in the line) and this divides me from Jaspers' approach.

Now to go ba ck for a moment to why I changed the title of this course. The answer to the new title--"Why Must Everybody Study Philosophy?" or "Why Must Every Human Being Philosophize?"--is quite simple: he cannot avoid it. We have gotten into the habit of calling every theory about something a philosophy (such as a philosophy of gardening!), and it is a kind of muddle-headedness which shows that a sense of philosophy is entirely lost. I had the opportunity not so long ago to talk to a G. I. who had been in Germany during the occupation, and he told me: "If there is one thing I simply cannot stand to hear one more time, it's the word 'culture’!" I also had a chance to talk with a German who told me: "There's one thing I simply cannot stand to hear again --and that is the word 'democracy' !" The American was right about the German who always talks about culture because he is no longer creative. The German was wrong about democracy because the Germans have an entirely different concept of democracy, but he was right about the use of the word. The word "philosophy" has had something of the same fate--"Let's now take the philosophy of Mr. Taft or Mr. Eisenhower." or "What is your philosophy?"--but this is also in a way a very healthy thing. A dim awareness is shown in these primitive people who talk that way that philosophy is something that a human being leads his actions by. They have a feeling, in all its primitiveness and even banality, for the deep fact that free philosophy is really the activity by which human beings make up their minds. We want now to try to go to the heart of this matter, to find the creative thoughts that guide action, and to ask: How is it possible that a human being can design certain plans in life, see that they hold true, and then be able to make them truer by changing them? What gives him this quality--the quality of philosophical thinking--which leads to freedom as I define it?

Freedom is a rubber word; it has been stretched in every direction. The moment in history when man really wanted to be absolutely free—the French Revolution--and designed his own destiny, the real age of revolutions set in. He fought under the flag of freedom and his battles only earned him more slavery. Liberty and freedom mean about the same to the English and American mind except for the use of these two words in their plural form. The word 'liberties' is used in a way that 'freedom' never is and the double-meaning of freedom is just contained in this split. Preliminarily and paradoxically, the fight for freedom that started at the beginning of our modern age might have been lost just because it was always fought under the flag of liberties and we have never gotten the flag of freedom yet. Camus tries to put forward a theory that the real fault is that we have always made revolutions rather than stopping at rebellion. Unfortunately, this is not true. He tries to prove that the revolter manifests the truth of the common dignity of man--but the revolter is really a slave and creates a new master. What would be required would be an absolute transformation of man’s situation in the world.

Why must man work philosophically and live philosophically? That can only be explained by the seeming rigidness of this proposition, which almost brings in a categorical imperative. I condemn Nietzsche and Hegel for bringing in the "you must" (instead of Kant's "you shall") because it means if you do not, you will be a dope. Yet, I too introduce a "you must." What do I mean? I mean only the decision itself. I mean to make man aware that his freedom consists in his being a metaphysical being—a being who can decide. And just in this ability of decision lies the secret of freedom. The first decision by which the power of decision has to be manifested by every man is the decision for freedom itself. When we were after a definition of freedom (even Kant in the noble line which Jaspers closes), we still considered that we were born free (as it was practically manifested in the American Constitution): that is, freedom was given as a quality--and this has been the foundation of the rights of man. Metaphysically speaking, the fight between totalitarianism and what is good in the United States is the fight between the rights of man and, on the other side, the absolute denial of his qualities as man (not just his rights, even his qualities). Unfortunately, this humanistic foundation does not hold water now. The nihilistic situation has been able to show that freedom is not given as a quality of man. Men have not been born free any more than they have been born equal. Here seems to be the danger--the danger that all American freedom has come out of this and if it can be proved that it does not hold, then we are all lost. One of the reasons why American propaganda is ineffective and Russian propaganda is effective in Europe is that every belief has vanished in Europe. This concept of being born free is still based on a religious condition--just as the so-called dignity of man stems from his being made by God. It is a remainder of Christian thought, which philosophically can no longer hold water since religion has lost its central position and we no longer believe these things are given by God. This does not mean that America is politically endangered from this yet, but metaphysically speaking, we must ask: If we do not believe that men are born free, how can they be free?

We have now to find the proof of human freedom in human creativeness itself and since religion has been blown out of the center of the creative activities of human beings, we must show first that the human being is a metaphysical being without the help of religious transcendence. We will take only the fact of the life activity of man himself into consideration--and in his life activity man shows the possibility of a creativity to bring things into the world that have not been there before. If man is creative with the possibility of decision--to go one step deeper and one step back--we find that we come back once again to the position of the Enlightemuent. Man has been born as a metaphysical being who has the possibility to make himself free; he has been given a creativeness that can help him to make himself free, to create freedom, to make it—which means the first decision that man has to make is for freedom itself. So I introduced a “must”: man must make a decision for freedom if he wants to develop himself in freedom, if he wants to live in freedom; and having made that decision, then he must study philosophy because philosophy cares most for freedom and the development of it. Philosophy studies freedom because freedom is the central source of human life itself (as distinguished from existence)--life can only be created in freedom.

And this, of course, brings us to the question of truth and to what its methods might be. By this very example of my own procedure--that the nihilistic arguments against the rights of man are valid--I have tried to find more truth, and we find here something characteristic for philosophy: all human truth is to be found in the same spot. In philosophy truth is always located in the same place. If we want to go deeper into the rights of man, we take up the same question again. Let us assume that truth is the source of life, then the eternal procedure of man can be compared to a well-digger who comes again and again to the same spot. The source got dirtied and dried up after the Enlightenment, but if we go back to the same spot and go deeper, the water will spring up again for awhile, then become dirtied, to be found again by once more going deeper. The procedure of philosophy--of all the procedures we have to design to make human life and the world more meaningful--is the very procedure of human life itself.

Discussion Period:

Now for a word about discussion. Discussion is particularly important in a course of this kind and I want to allow as much time as possible for it, but first I want to say that here the topic in itself is not so important as what can be shown by the discussion: that is, the topic is only used as a model in order to make it clear methodologically how we proceed and to show how philosophy can answer where other things cannot.

Nietzsche was the first one to hit upon a certain contradiction in freedom: "Forget to tell me free from what but rather tell me free for what." Camus brings out that revolution and revolt start with concrete liberation from certain things. We have always been aware of what we wanted to be free from, but as soon as we use the plural form (liberties), we lose the metaphysical meaning of freedom. In China, in trying to free themselves from the white man and imperialism, they ended up taking the road of total imperialism. The foundations that guarantee certain liberties are especially needed now because we want to be free from something. We want to go on with liberties, but we overlook the fact that in the very procedure of giving liberties their very source is taken away. Freedom consists in the open possibility of gaining more and more liberties, that is true; it consists in a procedure of infinite liberation--but it is a procedure of freedom for what, not freedom from what, that gives every citizen the possibility to decide what new liberties should be gained and what old ones defended. In revolution we give that away, which is why all revolutions end in slavery unless they end in a constitution that is really followed by all, guaranteeing the possibility of new liberties.

It has always been accepted in politics and it has always been a principle in politics that the end justifies the means, but this is only true in science where it deals with things; it is absolutely impossible in politics. If the means are not right, the end will not come out; if the means are slavery, no freedom is possible. Abstractions, which are rightly used in science dealing with things, applied to beings kill human life. But science has to go parallel and be related to philosophical procedure and in turn philosophy has to check itself on concrete scientific facts of the historical moment. If a philosopher would say that science is not creative work in its own field and that he will disregard it, he would soon become a fool. He must keep the stream of philosophy clear, but he cannot disregard the other streams.

We cannot concede to everyone boundless freedom because it would lead to anarchy and to the impossibility of building a human community, but a decision for freedom must be made. If we think that by not making a decision for freedom we have just rejected something, we will find out soon enough that we have actually accepted something else: slavery. If we do not fight for freedom, we are ready for slavery--which brings in another facet of the question (there is a dialectic relationship involved in this). In a marriage, for example, where the girl gives herself into voluntary slavery, so to speak, what that girl actually does as a slave in a marriage of this kind--by making her husband a tyrant by her voluntary slavery--is to become a tyrant too; she wants to become a tyrant. It would seem then that tyranny can only be fought by setting limits to indulgence in voluntary slavery. Something entirely inhuman must be involved if someone wants to be a slave--and one of the best examples of an awareness of this is to be found in the ancient Jews. In those hard and meager times it often happened that a man could not pay his debts. The Jewish law provided that if this man could not pay his debts he could be taken into slavery for a certain period of time (seven years) by the creditor until the debt was paid off by labor. But if it happened, as it does happen, that this man after seven years was afraid to go back into the world as a free man, that he hated to leave the security of slavery, the Jewish law made a provision that he must first be nailed through the ear to a door for one day so everyone could see this man who wanted voluntarily to give up his freedom for slavery. Once this was done he could then be a slave for life.

Lecture III

I have said that I differ from Jaspers and his approach to the reasons why we should study philosophy and that it was mainly on the point that I think in our modern situation it should be: Why must modern men philosophize? I will try to give reasons for this out of the very situation in which we are and what we have found up to now about belief and reason.

When we rejected God philosophically, we lost our belief. Now even men of the church have lost their ability to believe. Their historical training and their training in the natural sciences have disabled them to believe in a specific God painted by the Jewish and Christian myth. We are in a situation where we are not free any more to decide if we want to be believers or non-believers. If some of us think of ourselves proudly as men who are independent and strong because we do not believe, we overrate ourselves. Formerly (up to 1800) When science could still try to bring about an alliance between science and religion (and even philosophy), real doubters turned up; not in the masses but in strong individuals and very strong thinkers who had to put in a lot of effort to doubt. With us it is quite different: we are pushed into non-belief. Now it is the man who tries to go into belief who might claim a boldness of spirit and independence of thought because he is not pushed into belief. But we are pushed into non-belief; it is made too easy for us. All of us are involuntarily doubters, including those who go to church, whether we realize it or not. This is why the Catholic Church tries to tell us all dogmas are scientifically proved. What are they trying to do? Is a scientific religion being served to us now?!! The Pope tells us there is now proof for the miracles; it is written down. You are a dope if you do not believe because it is scientifically proven--and don't you believe in science? But as a philosopher I would say, "No, I do not believe in science; I know science." Modern man, however, believes in science; he is a believer. So it is a nice trick to get man back into religion by pseudo-scientific means. He can be gathered in again by superstition (belief in science is superstition), and the worst kind of superstition is used to lead people back into the church. Here are the perplexities of the nihilistic situation. Most people are pushed into disbelief and do not even know what they have lost.

To believe in science is superstition because we believe in the scientific method. We believe that everything can be cleared up and found out by scientific methods--people too. But no proof of that can be given; on the contrary there is counter-proof against handling people by scientific methods--proof that scientific methods applied to people can lead to such things as concentration camps, etc. It has nothing to do with truth or with human beings, and metaphysically speaking, it turns out to be a crime. Engels once said, "Common sense can experience its ‘blue wonders' if it dares to enter the field of science.", and we now unfortunately have had the experience that we do experience"blue wonders" when scientific methods are applied to people. All of which only means that we have to get things straight. What can science do for us and what can it not do? What can religion do for us and what can it not do? What can philosophy do for us and what can it not do? Later we must ask this of politics too. We have to find the original sources of those different phenomena that are brought about by us. So the approach we have to make is to find out what philosophy is and how to use it. We have to get at a clear concept of what philosophy is as a specific human activity and what the other human activities are. We have also to find out how we can know their limits and how we can avoid mixing them up.

Up to 1800, roughly speaking, the intermixture of those different activities of man had not been too dangerous because they were held together by the general religious setting. Goethe could believe in the cosmos as well as in God. Being a scientist, poet and philosopher he could still unite all those things in himself and it would not harm him. But from around 1800 on those mixtures started to be poisonous to man because religion had been dropped out. Then the whole conglomerate drifted apart and we tried to connect different things with the result that we mixed them up instead--which was a very dangerous thing. Roughly speaking, we can find that philosophy is the center of all creative human activities and that they can be brought into coordination not directly but via philosophy--because it is through philosophy that their limits can be checked. As a design (not a proposition) we could really find out what we are doing in those fields--and there is nothing left to the philosopher but that approach.

We have tried every approach in the past. We have made propositions of being which we could not control and started with those propositions of being which we could not control--including that ghost, the self of Kierkegaard, of which we do not even know whether it exists or not. We have found that the self is most unlikely to know something about itself and we must reject this idea of self. If someone loves that self, then the one who loves can have more insight into that self than the self itself. Even Heidegger's proposition to call it abstractly "existence" contains this idea of self when he says it is possible to say that existence is something only human beings have, that human beings have a certain type of being, that being--or "being there" (a more accurate translation from the German)--relates only to human beings. Heidegger then tries to find out what this existence is and again makes an abstraction to try to reach existence in general. But he still has to say: "Existence is always only yours, always individual."--which especially shows that his proposition for being is this self of Kierkegaard's. He wants to get away from it but he cannot because it is based upon it.

Nietzsche said, "Everything is united by being the will to power, so being is the will to power." This is absolutely true--this will to power--and Nietzsche only took the mask away from this hidden will of man. We fought apparently for freedom but it turned out we fought only for power. Nietzsche was right about what we were doing at that time and his proposition--everything that is has in common to act and to act in a way to overwhelm other beings--historically was quite true. But he thought to re-unite the Greek cosmos into a funny, meaningless cosmos and to see meaning in it only insofar as it acts, and he made a mythical illusion of the cosmos out of his proposition. Nietzsche's position that "Everything that is can only be perceived by me by its action; and if that thing is more than its action and what it does to me, I do not know what more it is." is only the old proposition of Kant that we cannot know that things are because we only get their effects. So if we want to put forth a scientific explanation of being (which means it would be meaningless)--taking the nihilistic position that being has no meaning--we could then make the nihilistic proposition into a scientific one: Everything in being is only action. This proposition has no meaning, but it explains; it is adequate and right, but it does not make sense or give meaning to being; it does not answer why, only how. Science and philosophy are already so mixed up that a true scientific proposition such as Nietzsche's can be put forth as a philosophical proposition and the philosopher does not even know it. So metaphysically we cannot take it seriously because it does not tell us anything.

The nihilistic formula, "Nothing is true; everything is permitted.", abstractly means that being has no meaning. We want to overcome this proposition which is the basis of our modern thinking. We lose control in our thinking as soon as we start thinking that being has no meaning, as soon as philosophy declares itself to be bankrupt--and the nihilistic situation is a declaration of bankruptcy made quite sincerely ("We owe our results to a sense of absolute sincerity."--Nietzsche). Coming after Kant, philosophers found out that the only thing they could find out was that there was no truth. But is there not inherent in this the claim that truth is that there is no truth--and did they not claim this? We run now into a circle of contradictions until it comes finally into empty logical procedure and becomes a mere process of thinking with no substance any more. All that is left is bare logic--the sheer mechanics--which becomes a mortal proposition to life. We did try to put forth new propositions of being (as the existentialists did, for example), but we failed. Now the only thing left to us is to do what we failed to do. We tried to take over on our own, yet we failed to ask one question: Who are you? who is man?

"Know Thyself" was the inscription of Apollon on the temple of Delphi--which seems to have been a strange inscription for a place where people came to hear the future! The people who came there really wanted to know metaphysically about being when they wanted to hear the future from Apollon, but if they were to take the inscription "Know Thyself" seriously, it would mean that the visitor coming there to find out what was going to happen, philosophically speaking, could only act consequently by going home--though only Socrates took the inscription that seriously and acted so by not going there in the first place. Someone else (an overzealous pupil) took it upon himself to go and ask for Socrates and in reply to his question, “Who is the wisest man?”, the oracle answered, “Socrates.” When Socrates heard about this he was clever enough to know how terrible the oracle could be when it spoke out directly (because then it wanted to destroy), so he avoided the curse of the Gods (called"the envy of the Gods”) by saying, "I am the wisest only because I know that I know nothing." So perhaps we should go back to the temple of Delphi and read the inscription again--"Know Thyself"--for it is only by finding out who we are that we can begin to find the answer--and this is the hidden and ironical meaning of the Greek oracles. When a king came to the oracle to ask what would happen if he went to war with the Persians, the oracle answered, "If you cross the river, you will destroy a great empire." The empire he destroyed was his own. Could he have known better if he had understood himself? Yes! for then he would have known that he wanted to destroy a great empire; then he would have understood that there were two empires to be destroyed and would have been warned. On the other hand if he had known that he wanted to build an empire (the right proposition) and the oracle had said, "You will destroy one empire.", then it would have been the other empire.

People can only understand others by understanding themselves—it is a two-way street. But if we want to go back to ask the one question we have failed to ask in this our modern situation--Who is man?--then we must understand one thing: --if we start with the individual or humanity or society, we can never come to the question of man or to the question: What do we have in common that all of us have in common?--which also must be answered so we can at least control our mutual thoughts on the subject in order to talk to each other and give essential proofs in freedom. When we ask someone, "Did you have the same experience?", and he answers "Yes!", we know that men have a thing in common, and when we know what it is they have in common, we will know what man might be.

When we rejected the cosmological and theological propositions, we said that we did not want to be in father's lap any more. Metaphysically, this meant to challenge ourselves to show that we are creative; that we are beings not entirely determined by the world, but beings who in a way transcend the world, who cannot be explained in full by the world; that we are beings who out of freedom are able to invent freely and to put things into the world which without us would not be there; that we are beings who have creativeness, but not as rivals of God. We are challenged to find out if we are metaphysical beings and we can only find this out by analyzing our main creative activities. What are we doing to ourselves and to the world when we think metaphysically (philosophically)? What are we doing to the world and to ourselves when we think calculatingly (scientifically)? What are we doing to ourselves and to the world when we think metaphorically (artistically)? What are these creative activities? What do they mean? What do they say about us? This way is the only one left to find something that we are sure that it is.

Now we want to find out how we are (how we act) and to analyze what we are really doing. Let's first look into a position expressed by Heidegger, who found an approximate formula for the situation of man in the world: "Man is thrown into the world and he tries to answer this being thrown into it by a design that he makes to become himself, to assert himself." Only one thing in this position is important for us right now: the situational aspect. This being thrown into the world can be doubted, but one thing is sure: man in a way as never before feels alien in the world. Man always before has found himself in a certain situation with regard to the world--and perhaps not always a comfortable one--but he has never felt so much a stranger as in modern times because he has made himself a stranger voluntarily by a real fall (and one he brought about himself by telling God that he did not need Him any more). We have to realize that we are in a situation where we are perfect strangers to a world that is perfectly strange to us (which I once called in a course "Man Alone"). In this situation we cannot go from outdoors to indoors any more; we can only go indoors out. We have to check what we are really doing, to check our own activities. This gives us a possibility to get a new position toward the world--rather than the position that "man is thrown into the world," which involves the fact that man is lost (the real nihilistic consequence) and means that all he can do is to be concerned with overcoming his inner fears in that terrible situation and to fortify himself against it. In the nihilistic situation he can only take the position of Sisyphos. Sisyphos was a man who defied the Gods like Prometheus, but Prometheus was a Titan and Sisyphos was a plain man who thought that he was wise--wiser than the Gods, and showed them that he was. (The Greeks dared to put this into their myth--a man showing himself to be wiser than the Gods!) His punishment was that he was damned always to roll a rock up to the top of a hill, and at the moment he was almost there, the rock would roll down to the bottom and he would have to start all over again.

Camus' position is that life is absurd, that the situation makes no sense, has no meaning, and we cannot possibly do anything about it.We have, according to Camus, to consider and then to reject suicide (which would seem to be a positive action against the situation); then we have to consider and also reject the possibility of committing murder (since it makes an assertion). That leaves us with one possibility: --to take on the role of Sisyphos--and to take it on if only for one thing: to show human pride against a senseless, meaningless fate (against the Gods who do not exist). This is the last humanistic proposition, and it is also nihilistic because the nihilistic position is the result of humanism.

Heidegger has only inwardness by which we might change our terrible situation--to express ourselves by the making of voluntary designs that can help us develop our own personality. But unfortunately this does not hold true. If we are so lost in the world that we cannot do anything meaningful toward any other human being, it follows then that we cannot do anything meaningful inwardly either. Once my communication with other human beings is broken I become absolutely meaningless within myself—and there is no way out of that conclusion. The trouble with life in general is that if we refuse to face the consequences of one single action, that thing runs after us--usually catching up with us at the most inconvenient moment--and it is much harder because it is always behind us. Schopenhauer once defined the main qualities of man as cowardice and laziness. We all try to put forth certain propositions without thinking of the consequences, but someone always comes along to see to those consequences. The consequences in this proposition of Heidegger's would be that every man would become meaningless in himself also.

Kant once said that philosophy was only concerned with the plainest things that everyone thought he understood but hardly ever did understand; and common, human, daily life occurrences were the start Kant made to approach the questions of freedom, God, and imnortality. We in this inquiry have also to go back to the fundamental questions and life problems of man and take another look at man and at the situation he finds himself in in order to take a position towards it. We not only have to realize how terrible the situation is but also that it is absolutely dissimilar to any other situation man has ever been in and that it means a fundamental transformation of what man has thought up to now. But it might be that man is lost in the world only as he has lost his ground to stand on. He might just be stumbling and not really lost. He might be able to find a position toward the world that he can take in his own situation today—as soon as he realizes what that situation is. And since philosophy has to answer what for and why, we, as philosophical men and women, have to try to answer again: What is the meaning of being? We have to ask such questions as: What is thinking without which man does not exist? And if we try to answer that question, we find that thinking is our inner action already aiming at something and that it can show man to be a very peculiar being: namely, a being itself (all other so-called beings are things).

Lecture IV

Let's start today with a distinction not between the scientific position and the philosophic position, but rather between two things that relate to them: the scientific disposition of a man and the metaphysical disposition of a man--looking at them and at what is implied by taking a scientific position in a certain situation within a certain historical setting and taking a philosophical position. Jaspers' example of this is the difference in position taken by Galileo and Giordano Bruno when both were accused of atheism and heresy. Bruno was burned at the stake; Galileo was not. Jaspers takes the position that Galileo claimed a scientific proposition when he advanced the proposition that the earth was not the center of the world, as thought by Ptolemy, but that it revolved around the sun. The church, when it learned of Galileo's proposition, said this could not be true because it directly opposed the Bible.

This position of the church has been interpreted in just a little too shallow a manner by modern "free" thinkers (who are really slave thinkers). They think the church merely was afraid because something in the Bible was doubted, but this was not quite true--for the church had a metaphysical position too. If religious Jews, as members of the reigning church, had been confronted with Galileo, they too would have opposed Galileo because in both the Jewish and Catholic religions a cosmology is inherent, supposing a cosmos created by God based on iron laws--and as they are set, so they will stand in all eternity. Built on that is the whole theology of Judaism and Christianity, which guarantees man his place in the world and which makes sure that man cannot come to a position which might drive him into nihilistic despair.

This hangs together with the physical proposition of an earth created for man. As soon as an astronomer comes to tell us that the earth is not immovable or the center of the universe, that heaven does not stand fast and that everything is in movement, then any trained theological thinker could see the conclusions which might follow both metaphysically and scientifically. If such a theory were possible scientifically, we would end up seeing everything in continuous movement and change, which would mean that in the case of an established religion it would be gone. The Jewish and Christian religions would be lost when that is true--and that was just what those theologians saw because they were metaphysical thinkers who could think speculatively as well as analytically (as the scientist thinks). They knew what was implied, so it was not just to maintain the church but also because of inner fear that this just cculd not be true.

Jaspers thinks that Galileo put forth a merely scientific proposition when he put forth the proposition that the earth revolves around the sun, and therefore that he was perfectly right to deny the truth he had discovered in order to stay alive because Galileo had made a merely scientific proposition which could be proved objectively about a merely physical matter. The fact that the earth really revolved around the sun could not be abolished by the denial of Galileo, which meant that he might safely stay alive because another could come to rediscover that fact, which was an objective fact. So he would have been a fool to risk his life, being sure that another scientist would come along to find out the fact and to state it again in an age when the church would not be so opposed to it.

Bruno on the other hand put forward a metaphysical proposition. He took the position of pantheism and tried to bring in the Greek cosmos. It was on new scientific terms but metaphysically it meant the Greek cosmos. Spinoza developed this, then from Spinoza, Goethe translated this great pantheistic belief--which was the belief from the time of the Renaissance on to 1800--into poetic terms. Bruno thought that he only put forward a metaphysical proposition without realizing that also contained in this proposition was a belief that this cosmos was really existent--and that inherent in this pantheistic belief was the fact that philosophy was really trying to break away from religion. Although Bruno did not realize this, the church knew very well that it was a claim by philosophy to replace religion by a substitute of religion (philosophy) and that it excluded a personal God. Bruno's concept of the world as a cosmos was a mythical concept and was not clean philosophically because he had in his cosmos divine powers--nature had inherent in it divine powers--though it was in the cosmological sense rather than in the sense of nature. The church knew this meant replacing one God with an infinity of divine powers within a cosmos which was sheer heathen thinking. For that they proposed to burn him--and did.

Jaspers thinks that Bruno also was right. He had to make this decision because he was a philosopher. He had put forward a philosophical proposition, and if he had not stood his ground he might not have been burned at the stake, but his books would have been burned and he would not have written what he had written again. We might never have gotten this philosophical proposition because it depended upon one human mind. I would say for this proposition of Jaspers' that it is true.

Philosophy to a certain degree and in some aspects of its qualities resembles art more than science (which it also resembles in other respects). First, quality counts in philosophy as well as in art. For this let me give a most modern example (which is only an opinion of mine): I think that this attempt (and a brave attempt it is) that Heidegger makes now to overcome the nihilistic situation will only result in putting us deeper into it; nevertheless, I do not feel entitled to reject this work because the quality is so high and the depths of problematical thinking so great, and he puts the discussion on such a profound level that no one can afford to reject it. Heidegger tries now to overcome Nazism as a consequence of his own Nazism. (He was a Nazi for one year, then broke away and took real risks against them.). He makes an attempt now, as a philosopher should, to atone for his sin. The spot on him may always remain, but let's forget about that for now because the quality of Heidegger's thought is necessary.

The second thing that philosophy has in common with art is a difference it shares with art as to science. A discovery in science not made today, will be made tomorrow, but in art a picture Leonardo da Vinci did not paint, will never be there. There is no possibility of replacing art and no possibility to think of such a thing. Art is entirely spontaneous (which science can never be) and philosophy has this much in common with art: if Bruno had not stood up for his system, we might have lost his metaphysical proposition and Spinoza might not have been able to design a system of modern pantheism without Bruno.

So Jaspers discovers when one puts forward a metaphysical proposition, one has to stand up for it even against death. Jaspers does not drew conclusions from this, but I will. A philosopher might make a discovery of scientific value and might save it without risking his life, but Bruno did more: Bruno put forward what Jaspers calls a philosophical proposition and what I call a metaphysical proposition--which would mean that this proposition contained an element of freedom, an element of intention and decision of the human will. The statement of Bruno, that the world was a cosmos with an infinity of divine powers, contained in it a statement of a situational judgment that nature might be that cosmos and that there were indications for that. It also contained a positional statement to man himself to look at it as that so man would be able to develop more freely a deeper and higher meaning of human life.

Bruno was not aware of the fact that a metaphysical proposition always contains these two elements--and up to now no philosopher has ever been aware that this was so. In old theological thought they believed that they merely interpreted God and in old philosophical thought they also believed they interpreted only given things (the laws of the cosmos, for example). No philosopher was ever aware of this and this is why philosophy is not yet in its pure state. This means that with Kant it was not only a matter of finding out about human reason--what it was, what it could do and its limits--but it was also the beginning of the self-criticism of philosophy itself. What has to be done is that philosophers must become aware first what they are really doing when they put forth a proposition. They always thought it was a statement; they never knew and did not want to know that they also put forward a proposition, and that with this proposition a philosopher has to say: "This in my opinion is more and more truth than we have known up to now, but I do not claim that this is the truth; I am not competing with people who claim to have the truth." Philosophers are not entitled to make this claim--the claim to have the truth--yet they always have.

In a metaphysical proposition there is always an element of will. A human being judges the situation of man in the world and as to all things in the world and makes up his mind. He describes it and proposes that this situation makes possible a position we can take out of which to develop a new way of life, and that he, the philosopher, is proposing a new way. A philosopher has to feel responsible for the part of his proposition that is a part of freedom and the will, and to say: "This is what I think we should do, and do you agree?" It is not for the philosopher to say: "This is what it is and how it is and this is what you have to do." The theologian can say, "This is so because this is how God made it.", but if a philosopher does this he shows that he is still a mythical thinker and that he claims a higher power behind him. The last power behind philosophy was claimed as human reason--human reason as a God telling us what to do and philosophy had only to find out what that reason required. But there is no such thing as human reason as a thing we can get hold of; it is only a permanent procedure of the human mind. It is a human thing and we have to say about reason what we say about the New York weather: "It can change in ten minutes." There is no possibility to get hold of the whole of reason and to say it functions such and such, and demands this and this when applied to a certain position. This is either fake or it is belief.

Hegel too believed in reason and then he made an equation between the human spirit and God to get even more authority into his statement. But a philosopher cannot claim authority because by claiming authority he claims that he is an initiated one (told by God, so to speak), that he knows better, and therefore is entitled to raise that claim. Neither can a scientist claim to know better. The theologian can and does because he is supposed to have a higher knowledge to which we cannot claim, but if a scientist claims to know better, it is already a theological claim, and a claim to which only a theologian is entitled for it is only within religion that such a claim can be made. The scientist is a faker if he raises such a claim; he denies that he is aware that science is a human performance. If we raise absolute claims on that, we are betrayers, almost criminals. Philosophers up to now (and that includes all of them in a way) have also raised the claim of knowing better: either in the old way of being initiated to the cosmos (the whole) and of knowing what being was and from this followed what you had to do; or in the new way of the rationalists--of the men who believed in human reason and said to us, "We know about it and can tell you about it and about what you have to do."

This is why we cannot study philosophy; we can only work philosophically and study philosophers. Philosophers thought they had human reason; now we find it is very changeable too and we cannot make that claim. Pure philosophy is a kind of metaphysical thinking in which man makes up his mind about a certain situation in the world, tells his fellow men he has made up his mind about this situation, and leaves it up to them to see whether their experiences also show if the situation is really there; then he puts forward a proposition: "Let’s take a position of our will and our doing which seems to me, as I have made up my mind, to be the most pertinent one and the one which I think I can prove to you will help you to get at a higher and deeper meaning of life. If you agree, then let's proceed along these lines. This philosophy of mine pretends only to help you to make up your own mind." Philosophy is helping man to make up his mind and in that sense philosophy teaches life; not with authority but only by proposing new possibilities and other ways of life. If people feel that these propositions are the most valuable ones for them, then they will go this way and be in the same stream of creativity that this philosopher started.

So a philosopher can never be a leader--one who claims authority. Philosophy is the only creative human activity that has to reject any authority whatsoever. If we take politics as a creative activity (which may seem a strange idea at first), we will see, of course, that in politics we have to grant a certain authority to statesmen in a case of emergency. We have to control it and have to ask later for an accounting, but still we have to grant that authority. In science, certainly, authority to a degree is unavoidable and also has to be granted. To be a scientist may mean to have a certain career where the community has a responsibility to decide what that science is to be used for, but it also means to have a career--take an atom physicist for example--where the community (through sheer lack of knowledge--if nothing else) cannot claim to be able to control what the scientist does--though he certainly does not have the authority some of them claim. So in science it is impossible to avoid a certain authority, but it has to be controlled as much as possible. In art an absolute authority is granted. If it is a great work of art, it does not ask you whether it is or not; the artist, as to form, is an absolute monarch.

But in pure philosophy--after self-criticism would be complete and accepted--I think we would find out that pure metaphysical, speculative thinking is the freest kind of human activity and the most decisive because it can influence all others, and therefore it has to be the only one not entitled to raise any claim of authority--it has to be entirely a matter of proposition. This seems to bring in the question of arrogance and modesty and we have to look into this for a moment. All philosophers in the past have been very arrogant because of this claim of authority behind them--the claim to know the truth, the claim of being initiated ones, the claim of knowing better--but since a philosopher is not the chosen one, as they thought, but the cursed one, it would seem perhaps that modesty of claims would be the indicated approach. One notable exception to the group of arrogant philosophers might give us a clue to this: Karl Jaspers--who has such modesty as never before seen in a philosopher. He has the extreme modesty not to claim that he has a special way to the truth (in fact he hates philosophers who claim absolute truth), but unfortunately, he also makes truth so relative that it would seem that modesty cannot be the right approach either,

So if a philosopher is no longer entitled to be arrogant because of the claim of higher authority behind him and if modesty does not seem to be the answer, what can be the position of the pure philosopher who has to see that he never claims to be backed by a higher power, whatever it might be--which means that his task is much harder--so that he might help man to make up his mind by making up his own. Putting it in a popular form, a philosopher is not the leader of the Mormons into the new land, he is not even a pioneer--he is the scout always in new country to discover new paths, who comes back to the settlers to tell them about the country ahead and to propose to them paths and a way through the new country. He might even go along a way with them to show them, but not as a leader and he should reject all authority people try to give him (even titles or certain assignments, which of course sometimes the philosopher may have to accept because he too has to eat). That is not his business--though he could seduce them into believing that he is an initiated one. Pure philosophy, as well as politics, has to be done by everyone, and everyone has to be told in such a way so that he can understand. Everyone is entitled to butt in and to ask, "What do you mean?", because it also means, "What do you want me to do because you are about to propose something."

Bruno,when faced with the decision of denying his proposition or being burned at the stake, was not aware of all these things, but he felt that if he would deny what he had said, he would be denying philosophy--whether it was in the way Jaspers thinks he might have felt, or whether it was in the way I think he might have meant it: I have made this proposition to go this way of life; now I may die for it; but if I thought it so important then that I proposed to others to go this way, surely it is no less important now that I may have to go this way to death.

Socrates too was faced with a decision when he was asked to stop--to stop, as his accusers put it, "seducing the youngsters of Athens." But he did not want to stop because he thought he had a way of philosophy--a way, as I see it, of a pure philosopher who did not raise a claim but showed that he knew as little as the others. Socrates claimed to be a midwife (here we find the irony of Socrates and also--because it was Greek thought--an erotical element) and said that he helped bring forth the child (the thought). What he really meant (and did not say) was that he engendered the thought. He felt that it took two people to bring forth a thought, that without communication thought was not possible, and that in making up his mind he could help make up the minds of others. He was not a midwife when you see that he had this impression. This was the first attempt at pure philosophy without the claim of a higher power (which Plato tried very hard to hide). Socrates knew that all the established values of justice did not hold water; he knew that we had to look for justice every day and that we could only know more and more justice--never all of it. He knew that at least in ethical philosophy it was a living procedure—so he too had to die.

Now is Jaspers also right when he tells us that Galileo also made the right decision? Galileo had put forth a mere scientific discovery. He could be sure that it would be rediscovered (In fact, he did not even make the discovery; he only rediscovered it. It was first discovered by an old Greek when the Greeks did not want such a fact, and later again by Leonardo da Vinci.) because the fact existed, and so Jaspers thinks—since Galileo could be sure it would not be lost--that he was right. If it could have been only a scientific statement, Galileo would have been right; but since the statement was made by not just a scientist but also a man and since a whole man is a metaphysical being with all that implies, could it be just a scientific statement? Galileo made the statement at a certain time when it was clear that science was trying to get out from under the tutelage of the church and to come into its own: that means that involved in this was the position of a scientist fighting for the independence of science against the church--which would mean that he was also faced with a metaphysical, political decision. If Galileo had not denied his proposition, he could have been sure that a whole generation of scientists would have followed in his footsteps in order to vindicate him. But he did deny his proposition and while scientifically he may have been right, I doubt very much if he did not do wrong for science as a creative human capability. On the other hand there is the possibility that Galileo may have thought in another way: I will save my life so that I can go on with the other discoveries I am about to make--and I can fight again for the position of science. And Galileo's further life did show that in spite of his denial he never ceased to fight for the position of science, and he did make further discoveries.

Now I have passed judgment on a procedure of philosophy that has always been used--namely, the raising of that claim of authority, whatever it might be--and it may seem that I too am one of those philosophers who claims all the other philosophers are wrong; but what I want to say (and the distinction I want to make) is quite another thing. We have advanced far enough to doubt all those philosophers and pseudo-scientists of the 19th Century and their claims--the claim of evolution, for example, or the claim that history has in itself certain laws according to which it proceeds and that we can only move according to those laws--and we have become very sceptical of any proposition based on those claims. We have become most sceptical about any historical proposition since we have seen the claim of history fail and we have become equally sceptical about any hypothesis of evolution since we have seen that it turned out to be a ghastly hypothesis. Real scientists do not talk about evolution any more or about development--it was all very useful for research but now it has to be rejected. Nevertheless, I think we can still talk about development--though not in the sense of progress--when speaking of one phenomenon: namely, that phenomenon which produces metaphysical thinking and realizes it--which we will call preliminarily the human mind. This is not a natural or a physical phenomenon; this is not a brain that grows, but a human mind that develops. And it is a phenomenon that can only develop because it has the magical ability to be self-developing--an ability not caused by any physical or outside interference, but brought about by its own activity in the physical as well as in the metaphysical realm.

So in this sense I think there becomes possible a certain history--but not a history of philosophy as Hegel made of it where he tried to show that all Western thinking was one continuous becoming (with matters proceeding on their own laws) until it got to Hegel as its goal. Man now finally had the truth; he had only to apply it--which meant that those thinkers to come afterwards could not be original thinkers any more. Philosophers were now what most Germans have always loved so much (and the only thing they have in common with the Jews): schoolmasters. The truth had now only to be taught (and here the comparison with the Jewish love of schoolmasters must stop for their love was theological which was quite different). So the pure schoolmaster was Hegel--and it was the greatest schoolmaster idea developed since Aristotle (who also had a schoolmaster mind)--who had finished everything for man. Everything was all done now and topped by Hegel's system. And man had only to learn that system and how to behave according to it. So this history I speak of is not a history of philosophy, but rather of the countless attempts of the human mind to cope with the different situations in which man has found himself in the world and the capabilities of the mind shown in such attempts (In the development of the human mind we find the real battles of life.). A kind of historical, metaphysical approach becomes possible to show why it was so hard and took so long to become aware of the fact that in the procedure of thinking, acting, and realizing going on in the human mind many capabilities have been involved, and it also becomes possible to show why those capabilities were always mixed up and mistaken each for the other, developing together originally in a conglomerate, as in myth.

As Kant once said, "I am in a discipline in metaphysics where we have to say only a few steps have been made--and they are only half-steps in millenniums. We do not even know in metaphysics what we know by metaphysics." He was aware how slow those steps are. If you will take from me a mere figure (not meant to prove enyting) and think of the whole world of the human mind as a great organ fugue, then you will hear those very slow steps which are only a few but which will decide the whole fugue: the organ bass. And the reason why those steps are so slow is because they are going on at the profoundest level the human mind can reach at that time. Anyone who has made an earnest training attempt to really study theology or ontology will know how difficult it is to put one thing of metaphysical concern into clear terms and into clear conceptions--it causes our brain its greatest pain--but that does not mean (as it was believed up to 1800, and in a way now also because we think scientifically) that if a metaphysical statement contains a contradiction, it is wrong. It can only be maintained that the statement has not been adequately stated, that it has a verbal fault but is not necessarily wrong. In philosophy there are no errors--only more or less truth--and every previous step is necessary before the next step can be made. That is the reason why it is only possible now for philosophy to go in for self-criticism to the full in order to find out what it really is in its pure content.

Socrates knew--and he was the first to discover this--that we have to take philosophy into everyday life (which is another reason why philosophy cannot claim authority). He knew when he asked the shoemaker his point of view on life, taking him as a man and not merely as a shoemaker, that everyone has a point of view and it may be valuable philosophically. Only a lie has to be rejected. If a statement is made sincerely and shows genuine life experience, it may contain a deeper insight and starting point than most philosophical systems. And if a man becomes a philosophical man (as I maintain that everyone has to become) it means that he has to take everyone else just that seriously as soon as a sincere statement is made relating to a genuine life experience--as a philosopher has to do also. Now if we only can put forward a proposition like this--asking of everyone that he become a philosophical man (or woman). I say this because I think that I can prove we are obliged to philosophize or we will fall prey to all the cheap and ever-cheapening beliefs put forward to us by science or any ideology that happens to come along. Our situation is a question of life and death for everyone, and so also for philosophy. A philosopher has to get into direct communication with everyone he can reach, with everyone who philosophizes--not as a priest but as a worker who can show a model on how to work.

I want to show methodologically how all those creative capabilities that once were one in the myth have developed into the crisis of the nihilistic situation--into a death crisis where the human mind can break apart and where the whole of all the creative activities of man by flying apart can break up each single individual into all its parts. We have never been farther away from a whole--either as human beings or as to our situation in the world. We are being driven into a state of more and more confusion where we answer with more and more cynicism, letting ourselves be driven on because the mind is tired and confused. In this crisis we are now in there is the possibility that the whole human mind will go to pieces--torn asunder not only by the breaking up of that whole of the mind's creative activities but also by the very creations of that mind. The machines we have created have become our very masters--and this is a symptom for the whole situation. There is so much confusion resulting from such an infinite multitude materially of creations and realizations of the human mind and such confusion in our social organization that the way is opening into more and more possibilities for tyranny again. So we cannot be too serious about this situation if we really want to take the responsibility for the human race--and if we do not want to take that responsibility then we are really already on the declining side. We have to be concerned with the wholeness of human life and of the human race.

We are in a special situation because these capabilities are driving more and more apart, and we want to try to find out how they might be brought back together again. Even politically we are growing apart; the faster we can fly to Paris, the greater seems to be the misunderstanding between the French and the American people. We do not have a center of understanding any more because we have rejected philosophy--because we have rejected philosophy for practicality. "The devaluation of values" (as Nietzsche said) was not enough; we had to turn lower values into higher values and higher ones into the lower values--and now we are standing on our heads. So because of that crisis, a course in how and why do we study philosophy becomes a basic course in philosophy and it becomes, as I have said, a question of: Why must modern man philosophize and learn to philosophize? and why must modern man become a philosophical man? Philosophy in the system of human capabilities is the center, the orientation point and if that is lost or not established, then any orientation is lost. Philosophy is not a leader but an orientation point. But since it is only lately, so to speak, through free philosophy that we have been able to try to establish this central position of philosophy, we must first ask: What was it that centered those creative human activities up to the time they began to blow apart into this situation we now find ourselves in? and how was it possible for man to live so long before he found himself in this situation?

Formerly a center had been developed instinctively because men felt their unity by thinking that they were centered about an unmoving center: religion. And up to 1800 religion was still the center. There was also, of course, science and philosophy, but instinctively ciirection was always given by religion and even the so-called freest thinkers always kept in touch with that. This center was blown out with Kant when he destroyed the cosmological and theological approach. So what happened? Let's imagine what would happen to a planetary system if the center blew out into outer space--which is just what happened to all those creative human activities that for so long had been united into a conglomerate. Already when the first moment of mythical thought came about that conglomerate was there with all powers acting together indiscriminately. That means that for all that time man had a safeguard against the nihilistic situation first in the conglomerate that was already there in myth, and after myth, then in either God or the cosmos--until Kant showed us that we can never assume the existence of an ordered cosmos with meaning or the existence of God because just there human reason finds its limit.

We find in myth a creation into which went about everything at once and all together; a creation that knew no distinctions--between Zeus and the sun, between Zeus and the soul and a tree. Everything went all together into one conception--in a metaphor, which is an artistic conception, that can be interpreted indefinitely. That is why we can interpret a myth by so many approaches--psychologically, philosophically, symbolically—and can always find elements to serve us. That is why we can always use myths in philosophy as examples, in art for symbols, and why they always bring in a new aspect of meaning--so dense has been their original meaning.

This makes one look with quite another opinion at the so-called primitive mind--which was as much of a miracle as the so-called developed mind. The quality and intensity of thought were always the same. There may be no distinctions in a figure of myth, where everything was put to work at once to make it, but all distinctions can be found if we break it up because all the distinctions are there. Plato was the first to have a feeling of this. He tried to destroy myth, but still he used it. Instinctively he knew that if you change a mythical proposition around you will have an example of metaphysical thought. We can see this also in Jewish theology where distinctions have been made to the point of even taking letters apart (to where in cabalism it becomes almost mechanical). If you even change one letter in the so-called mythical words (words put into a mythical context), the most amazing thing happens: a new aspect of meaning of the thing can be gained even in the seemingly mechanical aspects of it.

In art along comes Kafka who writes certain parablas (which I have edited)--parables about topics of Greek, Jewish, and Chinese myths—and always out of the mythical content he gets the most modern meaning possible. It is possible to open up the most modern aspects of the human soul out of the very oldest myths. The content is so penetrating, as to the essential elements of human life, that myths lend themselves to countless interpretations. And this is not arbitrary--it is like a work of art. If you have a hundred people, you have a hundred interpretations of it, and if you analyze them you find that not a single one was able to get away from the essence found in the work of art; all relate to it—even the most shallow ones cannot get away from a real relation to the essential content of a work of art. (Even a study of "Moby Dick" that was made from a psycho-analytical approach and interpreted entirely from the point of view of Melville's relationship to his father--even such foolishness as this could not help but relate to the essential content of the book.) And so it is with myth. You cannot get away from the essence; you can only get around it. It is always possible to open up new aspects of the center of creation that myth really is. Myths--the most concentrated form of thought possible--are concepts of the people put into one context, which will always live and always give life.

Lecture V

Now let's go back for a moment to our old distinction between chains of occurrences and lines of events. We have found that we can butt in on certain chains of occurrences and by that transform them into events; we can bring them into certain contact with a metaphysical subjugation, putting them to the use of a metaphysical purpose and proposition. Let's take a modern phenomenon for an example: the atom.

Pseudo-scientifically, the atom is described as certain particles that move within a certain framework of two concepts--matter and energy--but we have to tell the scientist now that he no longer is entitled to use the terms "matter" and "energy". Since they were designed out of an old metaphysical distinction between matter and spirit by philosophy that we do not follow any more, we have to tell the scientist he cannot be allowed to use the terms "matter" and “energy” because he cannot prove that this is matter or that is energy. According to new metaphysical thinking, in order to be metaphysically exact we would have to consider or describe the atom as a complex of occurrences (and by saying that we put a meaning into it). In order to be scientifically exact (in the pure form of science), the scientist would have to consider or describe the atom in a series of mathematical formulas made up of symbols. (Every letter, sign, and figure is a symbol, which means nothing in itself but stands for something else. Symbols are inventions of the mind to cope with finding certain relationships between occurrences.)

But for our purpose here, in order to make things easier, let's call the atom a "thing" in the old sense: that means that while this thing, an atom (which is approached in the sciences as a thing in itself) may be something, as Kant discovered, that we can never find out, it can be found out that it is a thing for us. We can, by gaining knowledge about it, turn it into a thing for us that we can handle and use. All that we can do by means of symbols--finally gathering together the whole of science to its center of symbolic logic. So this whole inquiry makes the atom a thing for us--leaving out for the moment what it might be in itself.

Now in art the modern artist approaches the atom too. Modern artists are very fascinated by all the new discoveries of science for the mere formal possibilities of new formal movements, curves, etc., and the relating of forms that now seem to be possible here. But this is not, as many say, scientific art--even though one of our modern architects will say in speaking about his work: "Well, I am making this according to the laws of nuclear physics." Actually, he knows nothing about it--though he is quite convinced that he does--but one thing is sure: he is fascinated by the possibilities it offers for new visual relations. The artist is able to paint possible new form relations similar to and related to the atom. Artists do here to the atom what is always done in art: art changes a thing into a thing of us; art changes a thing into a being--this is the secret of art. Whatever art it is, it shows us a world in which meaning and being are identical and undistinguishable. The forms in a work of art are form itself--and being form it means that meaning and being are absolutely identical. What it really means is the complete identification of essence and existence, of being and meaning. This can only occur in a dream world, the dream world of art--a dream world of transcendental dreams (not day dreams or nightmares) which contain (and this is the essence of beauty) in them the absolute fulfillment of man's deepest metaphysical longing: the longing that all contradictions between appearance and essence and being and meaning might be resolved; that the essence and appearance might be identical. Our dream of beauty is exactly that and art does that. Metaphysically speaking, art changes the things of the world into things of us, into a part of our innermost life; things--if they are representational (and all art is representational; even in so-called non-representational art, things are represented)--have been changed by art into things of us with the very essence and substance of our life.

But let's go back to our example of the atom to see what the position of philosophy is as to things--and what the distinction between philosophy and science is as to what is meant by handling things in the right way or the wrong way. When the physicist handles an atom, he makes it a thing for us--which can also become a thing against us if we handle it in the wrong way. But the great distinction between philosophy and science in this particular matter is this: according to science and scientific distinctions, we would have to consider that the atom has been handled in the right way if it is successfully used in an atomic bomb—because that means that it works correctly and therefore the atom has been used rightly. But from a philosophical point of view it suddenly turns out that what was a thing for us becomes a thing against us. Now if we want to ask: What do we want to handle the atom for? and if we want to make a decision as to what to handle it for--which is a philosophical concern--we have to realize that it is a decision and as such involves metaphysical thinking. If we are afraid that we might blow up the world, we have to consider: Is this the way we really want things to be? And with this immediately another consideration enters in. If we decide not to handle the atom for destruction, it is a free decision--but not so free as it seems because we are at the same moment presented with the problem of putting our decision through--and to put our decision through would involve at once politics. (To use a most immediate example: if war becomes necessary, it is almost sure that if we can control atomic warfare, we will use it. The only reason chemical warfare has not been really used up to now is because it has not been practical.)

Now it is within our power of decision not to fall into the mere physical, but it certainly is necessary in order not to do so--and to be masters rather than exponents--that we make a metaphysical decision of what to use the physical for. But then we have to draw the conclusion that in order to realize our decision we have to change the present social organization of humanity--because now with this metaphysical decision we come back into a chain of occurrences that originally were metaphysical decisions but in the meantime have become patterns that we are not able to master. We are coping with things that are semi-physical, with many elements of the physical already implied. It becomes very apparent that we would have a hard time to carry this decision through--and to be able to do so at all, we would have to proceed on metaphysically political lines, inquiring of politics: What is political life? is politics metaphysical creativity too? The nihilistic philosophers (with their so-called laws of development along historical lines) said there was no such thing. But if free philosophy could find a point to prove that there is a possibility to go about political events metaphysically, to design political actions and aims according to principles (and metaphysical principles--not ideas or what Plato called eternal ideas), we could redesign whole patterns of political behavior that might already have become historical (physical) by redesigning them according to these metaphysical procedures. If this were possible then we would have the possibility to really decide the question of what to handle the atom for--but not before.

So this decision is bound up with a whole field where the physical has its hand in it and we are in for a long procedure of creative efforts in order to make a decision about the atom--not only according to our will, but also to be able to realize it. But if we do not even know the way, if we never know how and when to interconnect certain procedures in the sciences with philosophical procedures and political procedures and artistic procedures, then the way is not only long, but it runs in circles and we can never get in a straight line or get results. Even with the best will, if we move in circles and do not know about the interrelations, the circle will always reproduce the power of the physical. It will always produce patterns and it will enhance rather than diminish the process we are in instead of deciding the question of what to handle the physical for.

This now brings us to another point: What is the responsibility of the single human being--the atom physicist or the conscientious objector, for example--in a situation involving everyone else? The objections of the conscientious objector against killing even in war might be a very fine thing, but it is terribly hard to find out if that is what it really is--it could also be cowardice, foolishness or almost anything. How do we find out? Suppose they are all sincere--even then they might still have a hard time to convince us. Let's assume next that they are Christians. Now if you are a Christian, you can only do one thing: you can refuse to do it, but you cannot refuse to take it. If you refuse to do it and you want to be a Christian, you still must turn the other cheek. First, to convince us you have to show us that you really want to follow up your decision--and there has been an example of those who followed it to the very end. There was a group of English conscientious objectors in World War II who parachuted into battle to care for the wounded--Germans and English alike. They proved their point and they followed their decision through to the bitter end, showing by their actions that they were entitled to take so much consideration of their inner feelings. The same implications are involved for an atom physicist who decides he no longer wants to be involved in what he believes is only to be a means of destruction. He too has to prove that he is entitled to take so much consideration of his feelings.

A truth is never achieved; one can only go deeper into truth. One little piece of truth exacts the next and the next. Truth is never established once and for all. I can only act good (I am not good), and as soon as I cease to act the truth I am out of it. Truth is really an eternal procedure--a wheel that should not stop going; it is not an infinite process in infinity that is just an infinite going on. Also, to be true to myself is really not possible; being true to myself is a psychological mistake. It means an infinite reflection --I am after myself and I will never find myself trying to find myself. If I can never know myself, how can I be true to myself? It is rather a matter of establishing more and more truth in each and every situation, a matter of being able to keep promises. It is really that I am being true to what I thought to be true and what I promised to be true.

This being, the human being (which is really a tautology because no other beings are beings since they are not free), has a strange habit: it questions. Now preliminarily let me invent for the sake of the matter an ironical myth. (Myth, being a conglomerate containing all the human creative capabilities in one block, can be used again and again: we can approach it from a scientific point of view, finding natural forces; we can approach it from an artistic point of view, finding fundamental aesthetical and artistic values; and we can approach it from a philosophical point of view, finding original metaphysical thought that still holds true and is still applicable--even to modern situations. Socrates, in trying to get man's thinking rid of myth, used as one of his means the opportunity of mythical procedure to prove points he wished to make and to prove the metaphysical implications that are always contained in myth.) When man was made by Zeus--to make it a Greek myth--Zeus made a little joke with him and asked, "What do you want to be?", and man answered, "Who are you?" Then Zeus replied: "Oh! you want to be a questioning being." When this man was dismissed, Apollon came in and said to Zeus; "What have you done! You have given him the power to question everything--even the Gods." And then Zeus told him: "You don't understand. If he wants to be a questioning being, and if he isn't a God, he will find out that he will always be the only absolutely questioning being on earth--and he will then find out that he got that ability only because he is more and more questionable himself. If he wants to be a questioning being, he will also have to run the risk of being more and more questionable." The basis of the human condition, to put it in popular American form, is that one cannot have his cake and eat it too. Everything we have and gain has to be accounted and paid for by a certain lack of another ability.

When I asked you to read Pascal, I haci in mind not only to show you the first example of a man whose abilities were so mired up (in the modern sense) and in such a way so it could become clear, but also because of his discussion of the contradiction of man--who is in a position of both grandeur and misery. Pascal started the first inquiry into this line about this being who has grandeur and misery. His analysis of grandeur is faulty and of misery shallow, but his value consists in the fact of having put this dialectical relation of grandeur and misery forward. By this ironic myth I have tried to show that grandeur and misery condition each other. If one of them (misery) were not there or if the other (grandeur) were not there, we would not be beings. We would be a physical phenomenon instead of a metaphysical being. The essence of being metaphysical means that our grandeur is paid for by our misery and our misery is repaid by our grandeur. If we have the right interchange, we can become--not be--for we are beings of becoming. This is a contradiction in itself seemingly. How can something that is become? How are we related to being, becoming, and not being? This we will go into later, but now we take man only as a questioning being, paying for it by being the most questionable being in existence.

Questioning means always to be after something and it supposes that man is never satisfied. This very ability of always being after something is paid for by never being satisfied (grandeur and misery on a more shallow line). Thus this ability of man to question means always being able to be after something, but never being fully satisfied. But how can one be after something? This supposes putting one's self in distinction to other things and being aware of this distinction; this supposes self-consciousness--not consciousness of our “self,” but just being aware that we are and nothing more, and that we are in ourselves divided from everything else. We are a center--out of which we often draw the conclusion that we are the center of the world, which we are not, but we are a centered being and being aware of being centered, we get an idea of being a whole, of being a thing contained in itself. We get the idea that all our dependencies in nature are only our dependencies upon communication, that they are not absolute, and that we are free to handle those things. By that we are able to become questioning beings, taking everything in to question including ourselves.

So we have to ask: What kind of questions do we ask? and are there distinctions? And we have found there might be distinctions. If a child (and all children prove that the human being is a questioning being!) asks a question, he can ask: How is that? what is that? or why is that (which implies also what for is that)? And then there is a question so hidden that it has not yet been discovered because it is never asked directly but is put in the form of an answer. That we find in the one child who seems never to ask questions but always has an answer ready--and an answer of a peculiar kind: a story, an absolutely free invention. This child will never ask why, what or how, but will start to explain to the parent what happens there and will tell a fairy tale or something close to it. Here a question is also put forward; a question is put et once with the ready-made answer that follows immediately. If we analyze the answer, we might find the question.

The answer is an artistic answer, an answer making--not giving—an explanation, abolishing the problem and refusing to recognize the problem at all. This means to be hit by the problem in such a shocking way that the usual reaction (which is really a counter-action) cannot be gotten at, but instead an immediate reaction takes place as a kind of short-circuit. This child cannot bear the problem, so he tries to abolish it by saying, as the philistine says (only the philistine does it consciously and lyingly so): "There is no real problem." The child and the artist react in the same manner, though not in the same way, by unifying at once the thing and its essence, its appearance and its meaning; and by the means of this free invention, they put the problem out of business. In creative activity this can only be a work of art. The artis t is a being who is more deeply wounded and more deeply hit than any other being, but at the same time, he is at once healed. His life experience goes deeper, but is never realized and taken to the full. This strange dialectics of artistic creativeness reveals also a question and it is the same question which to a philosopher would be Why?--because it is only that question which makes the event a real problem by facing the possibility of a non-solution. The question of what and how do not take that risk; we think one must be able to find out what is this and how is it.

Most children (who are questioning and not reluctant) start with why, but are usually satisfied with the how and the what. Daddy only has a terrible time with that cursed child who will never stop asking why, the child who questions after the meaning, who asks the philosophical question at the center of all questions: Why? This means to pursue a philosophical purpose. Children also can be educated to do this; and it should be (and is) a very necessary means of education if a father has answered how and what and the child for too long has been satisfied, for the father to tell him: "Are you not aware that the question of why has never been answered?" To answer how and what is only a means that might lead us to answer the question of why better. How and what do not pertain to the meaning (they pertain only to the sense; they give explanations), but if by trying to get at the how and the what we are led on to ask after the why (which means to ask after telos again), then they can give us a better approach for finding out why things are and we might get better results. So again, even in educational matters, the same need applies that we find in our over-all situation. All these things are related to the different capabilities of the human mind--which all require the same method of being placed into a functional context where they can really cooperate and can be able to build bridges to each other and to other fields.

This leads us once again to ask: How can man who thinks of himself as a whole become a whole?--because he is only the possibility of one. He gets this feeling of being a whole from being a center; he knows himself to be centered and experiences in his own activities that he can permanently relate things to himself--but that means only the sketch of a whole, that means only that he can become a whole. To become more and more of a whole he must first find out about his real creative possibilities--and then design that kind of a system of order of those possibilities that I am after (and which in my opinion is the philosophical task of our time). The nihilistic situation is just a situation where for the first time man is absolutely confused, where all his capabilities seem to fly apart.

Man was under the delusion up to 1600 that he was a whole--and to a certain degree he wasfin that things here connected (though in the wrong way of a conglomerate rather than a system)--and that feeling of being a whole was given to him by religion. Now we would not suppose that a peasant of the Middle Ages was more of a whole, and as to capabilities had more than we have, but he was not problematical. He did not have much to account for, and religion could always put him back into the center of his existence, giving him the feeling that he was a whole. He had his place as a whole human being, or at least he lived and felt that way--which was one great essential thing that religion always did for human beings. As soon as that was gone, we no longer had that happy feeling of ourselves as a whole and we were in for the problematics of the "self." Today, people in religion, if they are truly religious (though it must be said that it is almost impossible to be so today), still have that feeling of being a whole--which means they feel better and in that sense they are in a state of grace.

As soon as we wanted to find out the truth about that good feeling, it fell apart. We asked one question too many--we asked Zeus: "Who are You?" For the first time we asked that one question too many and as soon as we did, we not only dropped that question instead of insisting upon it, but we dropped with it the question that we should always have put first, and never did--the question: And who are we? It seems strange that as soon as we put forth the question to God: Who are you? (which Kant did), that in the same breath we put forward the question: Who is man? And this means, of course, that when we dropped the question: Who are you? in the same breath we also dropped the question: Who are we? We did not take the consequences of being a questioning being--trying to decide, as we should have, all questions out of this central question: Who are we? and to relate all questions to it. Instead we asked everything else in the world--all the ghosts possible in the world--if they could explain who we are.

This relationship between these two questions shows, metaphysically speaking, a most intimate relationship between the essence of the human being and the essence of a supposed God. If we look at it historically, we will see that almost all the answers we have gotten about ourselves up to 1800 came from questions about God. Never really having been able up to then to put the absolute question to ourselves and to God, we were always putting questions to God about His possibilities and His qualities, trying to find out what He might be like; and almost all the answers we gave ourselves were answers that said nothing about God, but a lot about ourselves. If we take those answers into aocount as a mirroring of our own experiences, we will find out that almost always the valuable part of those answers that could help us get to what we were came from questIons about God. After we dropped the question of Who are you? to God and with it the question to ourselves: Who are we? we found that in not questioning after God any more, we were unable to question after ourselves any more--not even as to the what we were. We only got answers then as to what we might not be and we tried to find out about ourselves by identifying ourselves with the most different things from being.

Here are strange connections and they prove one thing at least: we got part of the answers we wanted philosophically out of religious thinking, which has always been so nearly connected with philosophical thinking, and after we broke the connection between religious and philosophical thinking, we got no answers about this one question at all. Does this mean that philosophy is not possible without religion? Here many possibilities open up. After the idea of God as a person was destroyed by hegel with that we lost any sense of being a personality ourselves. That again should only be an accident?!! Isn't there a very close connection? When this original question (the original mythical question) is applied to God, there is a continuous line of experiences of answers on which religious thinking proceeds. It runs parallel (though it is absolutely different) to philosophical thinking, and the correspondence between the two is overwhelming. It is one of the great wonders of the human mind (and where it can best start to wonder about itself) that those wonderful correspondences happen in our very creative activity. So we will try to locate them again in other lines of thinking and try to find out how each line of thinking might be related to the other and what they might be able or not able to do.

Lecture VI

We have seen that on very different levels the same phenomenon we have been talking about makes itself felt in the state of science, philosophy, religion, art, erotical life and political life. In all the main fields of human endeavor we see a confusion, a mixing up of all those fields, and the same phenomenon that happens in the higher fields when the central position of religion is lost takes place in the human individual himself after the meaning of personality is lost. So now in the field of personal occupations--with all of us belonging one way or another to one of the creative interests of man-those same symptoms prevail--which explains why among modern intellectuals arises the trend to go back to religion. Having been raised only scientifically, so to speak, in this age of belief in science, they have found one by one there was no meaning given by science that could apply meaning to their own lives. Artists too--being attacked for being artists, in this age where society does not understand any more the necessity for the creation of art—find their way back to religion.

This going back to religion shows an instinctive awareness that religion has been thrown out of the center and that since then life has lost meaning, but it is really a deceiving experience all these people undergo because they think~ they can go back to religion and get all the benefits. The question, unfortunately, is not so simple because it is a question of who goes back and how he goes back and whether there is real religious intent. The position that if man needs God, he should go back to religion must be questioned because if he does go back to religion, he brings with him all his scientific training and he will never find what he is looking for or what it means. We must first go back to philosophy to find out what going back to religion means. In the mythical form the ideas of religion were related to all the other metaphysical implications of man, so if one was born into religion he could get out of it metaphysical values. But if one has once doubted, the situation becomes quite different. He must then take the full responsibility upon himself for what he is doing when he goes back to religion. If one has been born into a religion, his parents have taken that responsibility, but if one decides to go back to religion, he must realize that as a personal decision, to go beck to religion means to take the responsibility of giving up a certain part of one's freedom—and not an unimportant part.

When we talked about religion and about Kant's break with religion, we saw that with Kant we refused to make the sacrifice of reason that religion always demands. The religious man must say: “Certain dogmas I agree to believe and I will not reason about.” And from these dogmas are derived certain propositions he is supposed to believe in--propositions he cannot decide about but has just to follow without question. If he has been born into religion and his parents have, so to speak, taken that responsibility for him of the sacrifice of a certain amount of reason and a certain amount of freedom, then he is still in a creative line. But deciding to go back means that he has to know exactly what sacrifices of reason he has to make--he has to decide now.

Religions have become very loosely built societies and make it easy to go back to them, but if we look at a few examples--and the more responsible ones--of those who have gone back, we see that it is not quite such a simple proposition. If we look for instance at W.H. Auden's article in "Partisan Review" of a few years back, we see that although he tells us it is easy to go back to religion and that there are only a few abstract points easy to agree to, it really turns out that there are many more things he had to agree to. Auden accepted and had to accept certain propositions derived from dogma--and I wonder how he did it. One can become a joiner of such a thing, but to believe it makes one religious, is quite a different matter.

Religious feeling is believing in one specific God. The Christian God, Jehovah, and the Moslem God are three definite conceptions of God and to believe in any one of them means to take all the dogmas that have accumulated around them. If rabbis, priests and others come together to agree on certain points in order to try to make some kind of religion, then it can only be based on a vague idea of God, not a living God--and if one is religious, one believes in a living God for otherwise it is a pseudo-philosophical proposition. A philosopher can say "I believe God exists.”, but he does not say what this God wants from humanity. This God presents no obligations to man, He makes no aemands and thot is why we say the philosophers' God is not a living God and is not religion. Religion is to believe in a living God in the ways of the church and the priests (or in mystical experience as the Medieval mystics), and it means believing in all the dogmas. That can be called the phenomenon of a living God, but not the way of those people who want to get together to build a new religion because so many beliefs have become bothersome. Too many theologians are willing to get together with theologians of different beliefs to see on what points they can agree. This is fine as a political performance, but it has nothing to do with religion or with a theological proposition.

Just how hard a theological proposition really can be is shown in the story of a Catholic priest who comes to a rabbi in a small American town that is half Jewish and half Catholic. He tells the rabbi: "I want to talk to you about a very serious business. The custom has come about, as you know, that the people here celebrate each other's holidays, and there are just too many. The people never get any work done, and they are poor and need to work. Now what I propose is this: Let's see if we cannot combine some of our holidays so the people will have more time to work. You have Chanucka and we have Christmas. Couldn't we fix one day for both?" The rabbi thought it over and said, "Chanucka has to stay!" "Well," said the priest, "we have Easter and you have Pesach. how about combining them?" The rabbi answered, "Pesach has to stay!” "Well," the priest tried again, "You have a certain fall festival and we have a certain fall festival. How about combining them?" The rabbi answered, "Sukkoth has to stay!" "Well," said the priest, "I see that you are a very difficult man to compromise with. What would you suggest?" "Jesus Christ has to go!" replied the rabbi.

This is not merely a joke. It shows that to be a religious man means to stay within the framework of a certain set of dogmas; otherwise, the God believed in can only be the God of the philosophers, merely theistic, an idea of God. Being religious means really to live with a living God and to be in the service of this God and to abide by what that service has been made to be by tradition. All the rest is merely idle talk. What this man who wants to go back to religion really wants to do is to go back to religion to get a few metaphysical ideas that he has misseci so much in his scientific life. He finds the mythical stories have a much deeper content than he ever supposed. He finds the scriptures are much more than just stories. Then he comes to the philosophers of the church. He finds proofs of God that cannot be refuted (since he has not come to Kant yet)--and it is no wonder, for these positions of the theologians were the result of deep and profound thinkers like Aquinas, not to mention all the other theological thinkers of the Middle Ages.

But the trouble is that it just is not that easy. If one wants to go back, one must first ask: What is religion and religious belief? and what does it mean really to convert?--and these answers can be found out only by philosophy. Philosophy can tell him that it means a kind of intellectual martyrdom for years to convince one's self of dogmatic propositions if one has not taken then for granted since childhood. Conversion or reconversion in the Christian tradition means going through the same experiences that the Bible tells us Saul went through to become Paul--and that is exactly what it means. If one does not take it so seriously, he only makes a psychological experiment with himself and cannot be taken seriously by anyone who is aware philosophically of what such a metaphysical decision can mean. This man is playing with the danger of death: namely, of his mind. If one takes religion slightly, he will take everything else slightly and will become just a shallow mind. Modern man just does not have that way. The other way is hard enough--to study philosophy and to try to find out first what capabilities man has and what he can do with them and how to relate experiences of life to them--but at least no danger of a lie is involved in that way. In going bock to religion there is the danger of someone talking himself into something which can come after him and break his neck.

We have to find out philosophically what religion is for man and how it is possible for him to make religions--and here for the purpose of this course we can only suppose that man is the one who makes religions. Revelation we consider here only and can consider only as a product of the human mind itself that in thinking about God suddenly gets an enlightenment about God. This is metaphysically possible, but the possibility of revelation as it is usually thought of we must cut out here; we must deny the possibility of God’s talking to man. That does not mean that we do--or can--rule out the possibility that this might still be the way God communicates with man's free working mind once man is in full freedom and in full consciousness of responsibility and freedom, but we have to say that while we cannot rule out that possibility, neither can we ever say we know. As long as man works self-determinatingly--making decisions and avoiding telling us philosophers that God tells him how to think--we can only say that we cannot know. But the minute man takes for granted in his thinking that he is led by God, we can know one thing: he will make errors. It just seems not to be given to man to know where his thinking and ideas come from or who enables him to think: that means faith we would leave open and ready for discussion but as philosophers we cannot accept thst God came and gave man the ten commandments, for instance, and that everything is just to be taken for granted.

Following laws that this God has given would have nothing to do with the human mind except that it be intelligent enough to hear God when He speaks. Religion in this sense is not creative--all the creation has already been done. It is merely a matter of adjusting to new situations of life, which means that it cannot be called creative but can only be considered to be a matter of reflective intefligence. To be creative means to produce something that would not be there if man had not made it--a new work of art or a new solution found to a life problem by the sheer invention of that solution. A new work of art certainly would not be there if the artist had not made it--and how could a new solution to a life problem be proposed without man's taking a new position out of his own mind and out of free decision?

This means something quite different from making a proposition based on a given theological proposition for then it becomes merely a matter of adjusting this new proposition to the given one--and though it can be a highly intelligent activity, it cannot be considered to be a creative one. (In science too we go from certain sets of given propositions to conclusions and creation is only involved when an entirely new methodological approach is made.) So we see that creation is never brought into theology when it is merely interpretive, but on the other hand, this is also why logical thinking can never be achieved to such a high degree as in theology. In fact, one is so bound to an iron set of laws that to find possible adjustments and transitions is almost creative of the human being itself--helping the human mind to grow--and it can almost be said that an element of creation is involved insofar as intelligence goes. After all, these things are all related to each other and distinguished from each other by degrees and there is meaning contained in all of it.

Now the original mythical conception of religion was as well a specific kind of creation as art, philosophy and science (which also is a creative activity of man--though Heidegger in his bitterness has denied any creativity to science at all)--along with two others which have never been considered creative fields: erotics and politics (which we really cannot go into here because it would make too large a scope). All of these human creative abilities together form system (and though it is not known as a system the phenomenon is always there) where all the creative activities are related and interrelated in such a way that in each specific field of creativity there takes place an interchange with all the other creative activities of man; all of them are interrelated in that definite sense that while every creative activity has its own central method of creativity, all the others come in--but as minor factors only, as helps only, and they must remain so.

What can happen if this balance is not kept we can see, for example, in the religious field: if religion tries also to be the backbone of science, then the burning of a Galileo is the conclusion. Metaphysically speaking, this means that science, as a specific creative ability of man, has been subjected as a secondary affair to the primary method of another field, religion. Kepler on the other hand in proceeding to discover the curves of astral bodies in a strictly scientific way used as his main method the scientific method, but he also took a certain religious proposition into his work--the religious idea of the harmony of the astral spheres--which helped him to stimulate his scientific research. This was possible because he was careful enough not to make this religious theory his proof for his own theory (which he proved mathematically). So here the consideration of a religious proposition did no harm to him. The harmful way is the way of Galileo where the church claimed it knew best and superseded the scientific method with its own method, the scientific way with its way. This might have meant that scientific thought could have been hindered for the next hundred years--and the fact that the times were such that the church could only propose to burn Galileo does not change the basic harmfulness of such an overstepping of limits by one field of creative human activity into another.

This question of a system of human creative activities is a most important one for us. Not only must we keep in mind the permanent interrelation of all these creative activities--trying to find out the limits of each and what each one can and cannot do--but we must also be sure when we look back at those millenniums of the conglomerate of creative possibilities (which is going apart more and more now) that we do not approach it in the modern scientific and "progressive" way (the pseudo-scientific way and the pseudo-metaphysical positivistic way) of just saying how dumb the human mind has been. We must realize that if we had not had that conglomerate brought about by religion, we would never have been aware of the interrelation of the human creative activities because in a way the interrelation came about within religion. It is sheer nonsense to say we would have been better off without religion in the past--and all scientific approaches to this end with one proposition: to exclude freedom. That is the reason why we have to take myth so seriously (considering myth—the beginning of all human creativity--as a block of creativity) and why we have to go back to wonder at all that has been involved in myth.

All this has been an experiment to show how thlncs are related and can be related rightly or wrongly. Now let's start with the means of the different lines of thinking, the tools we use, and account for how we can build them. We have in art, metaphorical thinking; in philosophy, comprehensive thinking; in science, analytical and symbolic thinking; and then we have two fields, politics and erotica, where we handle human beings--and there we have the tool of understanding. This is why I first agreed to distinguish between understanding and knowledge. In science I said that we are after knowledge; then I said that all metaphysical things are better approached by understanding. Now this is not entirely true since metaphysical things must not always be living, but in politics and in erotics—never before considered as creative fields (and it has to be found out how creative and absolutely equal they are to other creative activities)--they are, of course. In life understanding takes place and from there we have to translate that into philosophy and to find out how philosophy uses understanding. No creative act can be achieved either in politics or in erotics without the agreement of other free persons. As soon as they are raped in any way or tyrannized or terrorized, no real creative act is possible. If either politics or erotics are approached in a scientific way, they end in a terroristic way--and there is no going away from that consequence. So to be able to bring about politics or erotics in freedom requires the tool of understanding, by which we can come to agreement.

Politics as a concerted action in agreement end mutual identification can bring about a creative action and to do this we need the ability of understanding. One method of thinking is understanding, as far as thinking is a creative activity--and by thinking I do not mean merely the reflective activity of the human intellect. Man also thinks with his mind--and by mind I mean to include also what Pascal calls the heart: not feeling, but the moral and ethical capacity which checks upon the mere intellectual capability. Originally just as all the creative capabilities were taken as a conglomerate all united, so was thinking considered in that sense, but now we distinguish different kinds of thinking: thinking bound to knowledge which can be established, used by science; thinking bound to understanding needed in politics and erotics; the thinking required in art, which works by the tool of the metaphor; and the thinking required in philosophy, comprehensive, speculative thinking which not only needs all the other kinds of thinking but creates out of its very kernel all the other kinds of thinking. By comprehensive thinking (not to be confused with Jaspers' term, given in the English text as "the Comprehensive." Jaspers' real term cannot be translated. It actually means that which grasps around; it is also a psychological term and, as Jaspers intends it, a new term for being itself.) I mean thinking that includes everything and is always concerned about the whole; thinking that is out for meaning and is concerned with meaning; thinking that is the real kernel, the real center, of our creative abilities.

Even in the new sense this thinking, which I call comprehensive thinking, is related to philosophy in the old sense where philosophy asked only one question--the question as to the meaning of being--and was conconcerned with being as a whole. This was the old concept of philosophy up to Kant and it was not taken up again--or only in the wrong way. Within the old concept--with its concept of a comprehensive whole--man too was considered to be contained within that whole, to be a comprehensive being. that was supposed to be knowable from the outside. We could know about him from the whole--either from God or from a known cosmos which contained in every part meaning in itself--though neither the whole nor man were ever supposed to be completely knowable in the sense modern metaphysics assumed. My question starts from the middle--not supposing that we know the whole, but only supposing that the human being feels himself to be a whole, that he has had an experience with a thing that he could describe as a whole: namely, he himself. Being used to this feeling of being a whole by the inner experience of being a being that has a center and the ability to relate everything to himself.and having the feeling of being an integrating being with the capacity of integrating everything that could be integrated into himself, he transferred his idea of the whole to the outside and mirrored the experience he had inside to the outside.

All mythical thinking up to Kant relied upon the one fact of human beings being able to reflect upon the whole world their inner experience of what a whole might be and their capability of being a whole and to think of everything as being a whole, a one. And as long as man lived within the old concept of thinking, either cosmological or theological, he had this feeling of the world being a whole, but today we see masses of occurrences and there is not even proof of their being interrelated. This idea of the whole has never been accounted for. I have tried to give an account for it and to answer the question: Where did we get the idea of the whole from? We see that there is a certain metaphysical reality which makes it possible and that we ourselves are that reality which acts under the presumption that man is a whole, that everything belongs to him and is centered about him and can make a whole.

Now there is a basic symbol and a secret truth that comes out of this idea of the whole and this all being one. Out of that idea man made his fundamental tool for all scientific research: the number one—which is the main symbol. Without the idea of the number one it would never have been possible for scientific development to start at all. The number one supposes a unity, one thing. Now thinds in themselves are not one--they can be split into an infinity of ones. We can always again make one more and one more and one more out of it (though there might really be last atoms--not as we see them capable of being divided again, but last particles of matter that no human being could split). But proving the infinity of the small--by always adding the number one (the smaller one) has only proved to set the number one in infinity; it does not prove infinity itself. Our ability to infinitely calculate does not prove infinity either. We have only the ability to create the symbol for all the possible relationships of things in different situations. We can only invent a symbol which seem t o apply because the relation seems to be infinite. The symbol is directly derived from the metaphysical idea of the whole for which we have to give an account. Man's idea of the whole comes from this feeling of his that he is a possible whole, a one. Now from the middle inward (as from the middle outward we can account for the idea of the whole) we have to go on to another possibility: the possibility of finding out what being is.

Now as to art: here we have built a tool which is very hard to get at--which I call the metaphor. I do not mean by this what is usually meant: a symbol. The metaphor anci the symbol are equalized today and used for the same meaning. What I mean by the metaphor would be something that stands also in itself--which a symbol (as a picture, for example, of something which stands for something but has no meaning in itself) does not do. This, of course, happens sometimes in art too when art becomes allegorical, or in modern art where in surrealism metaphors are really symbols, which in themselves mean nothing. If a natural watch is used, as Dali does, with the watch bent over a table, this as a metaphor means nothing but a symbol. It is there to induce a thought of time bending, breaking, being lost and it is a non-artistic means because a symbol is used. As soon as art needs an interpretation or needs translation for its understanding, it means that symbols have been used--though this can be done if otherwise it is a work of art. Dürer had a perfect right to use certain allegories in his graphic art and to require us to interpret them, but only under the condition that the symbol used was also a metaohor that in itself was form--form essential to the picture--so if someone did not care to rind out the symbolic meaning it still would have meaning in itself. Form is such a wonder that we have many fetishes of long-forgotten religions that originally had symbolic meaning also, probably of a deity, but we do not even care what it might have been because those symbols are also metaphors. They are inherent form and as such convey meaning to everyone. Knowledge is not a necessity of art; it depends only upon this kind of metaphorical creation.

Human beings have not only experience but they have also the experience of their experience. They are able to relate experiences, and experiences of different kinds, to each other by a means usually called feeling: that is, they can relate different experiences when they have had the same inner experience--or to put it psychologically, when they have had the same set of feeling reactions. If that has taken place--and the human being most able to do so is the artist--it is not going on subconsciously, though it is not going on consciously either. The artist is half conscious of it; he reacts to a certain experience the same way as to another experience and in association those experiences relate themselves to his mentality and suddenly there is the same feeling and with it shoots in all remembrances of other experiences and he suddenly finds what we call an art phenomenon: a form thst gives the inherent feeling of all those experiences he had in that set of experiences, and it is so concentrated--this basic form--that it can assemble around it other forms that relate to it. Everything becomes interrelated and becomes one whole and crystalized around one basic form: the metaphor, which stands in itself building all these things into one basic human experience. The metaphorical thinking used in art is also the source of myth. After ceasing to believe in myth, the only mythical activity we have left is art. We now take art as a specific metaphorical reality related to man, but we do not take it as specific reality as myth was taken.