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Why and How We Study Philosophy
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Lecture XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture XIV

We have found that once we give up our desire to prove that we are creative by an ultimate cause (which would mean to go the way of God) and decide to start with what is absolute reality, with what has the idea of truth, the possibility of freedom and is creative, that in the end if we want to transcend our reason after having done nothing but rely on our reason, we are not able to take any other ultimate into account except the ultimate of a God who created us. Of course, it is a jump from reason into the unknown, but the direction of the jump is still reasonable—which a jump into the non-creative gods of the Greeks or the half-creative gods of the Indians cannot be considered. A god like Vishnu who creates worlds out of the substance of his body cannot explain man’s creativeness; a God-Creator, who is absolutely different from this world, who has no such substance might.

If we find that we have the quality of creativeness, and in full freedom and responsibility establish it, we still do not know where this quality came from and can never really know—but one thing we can know: where it did not come from (nothing in the world or the given, for instance, can explain the creativeness of man). But as we become more and more creative, establishing more and more freedom, truth, reason, we become more and more aware of the one possibility—and the only one—of one ultimate reason that couldn’t explain man’s creativeness: a God-Creator. This does not mean that philosophy (pure philosophy) leads back to religion, but it does not mean that by the performance of pure reason, by drawing conclusions only from the one thing we know, that we gain the possibility of faith and the jump into the unknown. Philosophy does not and cannot provide the bridge for this, but is rather the jumping board.

But if we build all this on man’s creativity and his ability to establish freedom and truth, what about the nihilist who can come and tell us that we start with belief and not a reasonable truth—because there is the possibility in the nihilistic situation to deny that man has the capability to establish freedom or that he has an idea of truth (though to do so would mean to kill ourselves as human beings). To such a charge we can only say: “Yes, but that can only be maintained when man does not feel alive, when man cannot do any creative work, when man gives himself up entirely and says, ‘I cannot do this.’ –then he cannot. But we maintain and think we can prove that this is a reasonable fact and not belief. It is quite true that if you only consider, as you do, the abstraction of man, the isolated individual, that you can question his possibility to establish creativeness as a reasonable fact—but what about the one thing that you, as a nihilist, do not take into account: man as man and his possibility to live in common, in communication with other men?”

The key to the whole question is one of communication. If I have always lived as an isolated being, then I being unable to get into communication with you, would not be able to establish my creativeness as a reasonable fact—I would have to believe it (which is why the nihilists, who only take into account the isolated individual, can hardly come to anything but a negative conclusion about man’s creative abilities). But this does not prove that I am not creative; it only shows that I cannot do it alone. We are all sketches of man and we all have the same basic qualities of creativity, but we only have them in communication with each other—on the personal level in friendship and love, and with men in general in society and community. By all these possibilities of communication we re-relate to man and know that we all have the same fundamental qualities. Communication establishes for us these qualities by their being communicated to all of us by each of us. We guarantee them to each other by being human beings in common, in community, in communication. It is not a matter of belief (the nihilists are wrong) because we have one absolute truth—or since the nihilists say that truth is only an idea, let’s say for the moment one real fact to go on: the structure of man himself which we can know by each other and by experiences that all of us have that can be communicated to each other and be immediately understood because they are shared in common. This is the fundamental fact of man’s metaphysical existence.

But once again we come to the realization that once having established our ability of creativity without the help of belief, we always find that in the end we have only one possibility of an ultimate reason, one possibility to explain this creativeness of ours—a Creator of creative creatures—a possibility we can never prove but which opens the way for a jump into faith of the unknowable God-Creator. There is no other way for man in truth. We can never know whether God exists or not because by reason no proof of God is possible, but we do have the possibility that the existence of God will seem more and more probable. If we know our task (to transform the given into the meaningful) and live that way, it will become harder and harder not to think that this God must be. It never, of course, can be conclusive, but it is absolutely reasonable. What I want to establish is the fact that it is just philosophy—after rejecting all kinds of belief and moving only from one proposition of established and reasonable truth—that leads to the point where God becomes more and more probable. We can never establish the existence of God (it is not given to reason), but we can make it more and more probable—not because we wanted to but just because we did not want to and went instead into pure philosophy. Just by forgetting God as an argument, we have the first possibility to gain a reasonable direction toward Him and one that would not require any belief. We gain the possibility of a reasonable jump into pure faith.

But just as I want to establish this possibility of philosophy, I also want to make it clear just what this possibility does and does not mean: that is, we have in free philosophy to prove that the man who does not make the jump and stays even without pure faith can be as valuable as any other, that the quality of man can be proved to be equal—proved by man himself who can make it equal by developing himself without belief in the jump. Philosophy cannot and does not require the jump into faith, but only opens the way for anyone who wishes to make it, and anyone who does make this jump can be sure of one thing: he does not need to; he is not compelled to. Belief in God is not required to become a better man or a more powerful one, and it cannot be used in order to try to become a man of different quality than other men who do not make the jump or with the hope of getting something from God. This jump into pure faith is made toward God only out of pure thankfulness without requiring anything, and the man who does not make the jump would be as equal. He just refuses to transcend into the ultimate—which does not take away any human qualities (and this he can prove).

So this jump is entirely voluntary and free. Philosophy only requires that this be a reasonable jump—reasonable in the way thet the man who wants to make it is aware and continues to be aware of the fact that he can never know God; and reasonable in the way that even though he knows he can never know whether God exists or not, he also knows that he has no right to jump into anything but the idea of a God-Creator—this one idea of the God of Abraham that has proved to be the only one that anyone can jump into reasonably if he wants to jump.

Free philosophy, which became possible with Kant (though he himself failed to take the final step toward it—still feeling that belief in God was required in order to establish truth and freedom) means philosophy finally coming into its own—finally coming to the point where it is able to show, as I maintain it is, that without belief in God truth and freedom mutually can be established by starting only with such fundamental truth as man can find in himself and can communicate to others who have also found that truth—or in other words it means philosophy finally coming to the point where it can free itself by establishing a position in reason where no belief is required and where it can finally discover that freedom and truth are identical (in the sense that truth cannot be established in man except in freedom and that freedom cannot be established in man except in truth). And with the coming of philosophy into its own, where philosophy can really find out what it is, is gained the possibility for all the other creative abilities of man to come into their own and to find out what they are—which means to give man the possibility really to come into his own, to come to the point where he not only regains the possibility to feel a whole man, a centered man, but really to become one with the help of the one things only free philosophy can give him: clarity of thought.

Philosophy once free of belief and religion establishes itself as the central capability of man to which he can relate and understand all his other capabilities. The artist can give us art but can never explain what art as a human creative ability is; the scientist can make all sorts of scientific discoveries, but still cannot explain what science is; religion cannot explain what mystical creativeness is; and so it is with politics and erotics too. Only philosophy, once philosophy itself is understood, can make it possible for us to understand all our other creative abilities and to build them into a constellation of related and inter-related capabilities of man that by making us whole men, can also make us creative in the send that we can start to relate things in life to the Absolute—to freedom and truth and where we can start to make a real cosmos by transforming the given into the meaningful where we only dreamed of one before. This is the identity and the part played by that whole system of creative capabilities that through free philosophy gives us the possibility of becoming the whole men we can become, the possibility of becoming the creative men we can become.

Free philosophy—and only free philosophy—gives us the possibility to finally come out of that terrible state of confusion into which we were thrown by the blowing up of the old system of things and the nihilistic situation which followed—a state of confusion so complete we reached a point where we lost all sense of the wholeness of the human person and all sense of relation and inter-relation of our creative abilities. We even forgot what philosophy once was; we could not explain art, religion, or even science. All the human creative abilities of man moved one against the other, blowing each other up until man lost any feeling at all of the wholeness of his mind (let alone the clarity of mind that free philosophy alone can establish). As long as religion prevailed and left us in that conglomerate where everything might have been mixed up but was at least related and centered by religion, we could be approximately whole men—or at least feel to be centered men where everything that happened to us and came into our experience related itself—to religion to be sure, but still it was a relation, though a wrong one, that could five us a wholeness of mind and a relation and inter-relation of our creative abilities that we lost the moment we lost religion.

All this was further complicated by tremendous advances in scientific knowledge—and to such a point that 20 years after Hegel it was literally impossible already to assemble, as he did, in one human mind the whole known knowledge of the world, to be a universal mind as to knowledge. In other words, the age of specialists started—and with it the real danger: the age of experts. Specialists are not our danger—we have to have them—but when men try to be experts, when they try to know better and not to know more, they make of themselves a monster that is only expert in destroying the whole of man’s personality. “I have seen today moving over the bridge the reversed cripples: a great ear, a tremendous ear, and a little bit of a man attached; a huge eye, a tremendous eye with a little bit of a man attached.” (--Nietzsche in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”)—those are the experts.

Specialists we have to have because education no longer can be universal, but the real trouble is not the fact that we no longer can be universal as to knowledge, but the role we have allowed the experts to play in our lives. As to universal knowledge, we can do ever better than that if we see to it that philosophy comes into its own: we can acquire the creative structure of that knowledge as it is acquired by man (making it possible to learn how and where to control the specialists if need be); we can by the help of free philosophy along with a dynamic education make it possible to re-establish our inner mental balance (if it is, as so often these days it is, out of balance) and to become whole human beings in our mental structure (to understand art and always take it into our life; to understand what science is for man and thereby to avoid falling prey to the belief in science while still being able to enjoy its benefits; to understand what mystical creativeness is and what it can do for man and by that not throwing the baby out with the bath when we give up belief in God; to understand what politics is and what creative political action means; to understand what creativeness in our personal lives means); we can learn that it is not a matter of universal knowledge but of being good in our own selected field, of knowing where we start in that field, and by understanding how it is related to everything else, be able to establish our own inner balance in a moment.

So it is not because we have to have or have to become specialists, but because we have allowed ourselves to become and to fall prey to the experts. If we refuse either to become experts or to be told what to do by those who claim to know better, we have the possibility to establish a greater creative activity of man than ever before—and to show just this possibility has been the main purpose of this course. This course was designed not only to show why philosophy is a matter of life and death or why decisions have to be made—the decision for freedom, the decision for truth, and the decision for philosophy (which are the only ones which will bring us out of the nihilistic situation)—but also to show the tremendous possibilities that are open to us once we have made those decisions and to show what we, as men, are really capable of establishing on our own without the help of belief either in God or the cosmos.

It is not so important to go into the more intricate technicalities of why and what happened through all those long millenniums leading up to the situation we now find ourselves in if we gain at least an idea of the development of the human mind through the millenniums it moved and developed on wrong assumptions until at last the wrong assumptions were pulled out from under the human mind and the structures it had built—first by Kant and then by the genuinely creative negative work of sincere nihilist philosopher following Kant. If we gain at least an insight into that, we will also gain the impression that the human mind and the metaphysical being that man is are the most astonishing and marvelous things in the world—which will give some confidence back to man—to man who claimed he wanted to be creative without being told by religion or the metaphysicians what to do, who wanted to refuse the “you shall” and ended up by taking a much worse alternative: the “you must” of modern metaphysics. This in my opinion is the real introduction to philosophy: to show man that once he has made the original decision—the decision for freedom, truth, and philosophy—he has the possibility to refuse not only the “you shall” of the past, but the “you must” of our times and to establish instead the “you can.”

We have tried in this course to try to find out what philosophy as a creative human activity is, what comprehensive thinking is, and how comprehensive thinking brings us into relation to ourselves and to the world and into relation with the Absolute—making it possible for each of us to become more and more of a whole person. We have seen that we cannot consider man to have been born free or equal or good or just, but only with the possibility to become more and more so by establishing more and more freedom, more and more truth, more and more justice. We have always heard a great deal of talk about human nature, about this or that quality that is or is not in the nature of man. The concept of human nature as something given and defined originally derived from the belief in God or from the assumption of a given and meaningful cosmos. Within that framework—though it made a real concept of freedom almost impossible—there was at least a certain restraint and guarantee, but once that framework was gone, it was possible for nihilism to take over the concept of human nature and to try to define it out of mere natural or social terms—which is a most dangerous thing from the point of view of freedom. But there is, and can be, no such thing as “human nature.” Human nature would have to be a defined thing—but it cannot be a defined thing when nothing in the given can ever explain a human being.

Human beings transcend the physical, the given (otherwise freedom would be denied)—and men have always had an inkling of this in spite of the fact they believed in human nature. They always considered it as something that man should try to overcome. Kant too believed in human nature, but he tried to overcome it with his concept of the transcendental I and was very well aware of the fact that a moral deed would only be moral if it were not done for a reward. Plato, as well as Jesus and the original Christians, already believed that we could do acts that required no reward—a concept certainly in disagreement with the philosophy that believes in human nature. Deeds that are done without hope of reward can be done by man and have always been done by man—but it is not in his nature to do it; it is in his capability to do so by decision and will. It is a capability—just as freedom is a capability—not a potentiality that must already be there and can only be brought out. Nothing unexpected can ever come out of a potentiality if we know the potentiality—yet only the most unexpected can come out of human beings, which is the real meaning of capability. Inventiveness, the action of inventing, and capability are what is given to human beings—not a nature given and defined that can be known and predicted.

We have seen that we have three choices open to us: to accept the “you must” of the nihilistic situation, to go back to the “you shall” of religion, or to try to establish what they wanted to find out in the 19th Century during the Enlightenment: if we in full freedom could make human beings out of ourselves, and if we, our of our own free will and by establishing more and more freedom, truth and food, could establish a human community. But do we really have three choices? The first choice—the “you must” of the nihilistic situation—is no real choice at all since it means in the end to make a choice against life for death, and unless we want to admit the failure and inability of man to establish freedom on his own and go back to religion, does it not really mean that we are left with no choice at all, but with the will and can. I have proposed to you: man must philosophize. To go back to religion would mean to go back to father, to go back to restricted freedom and, of course, a certain guarantee against the absolute destruction of man. Certainly it would be better to do this than to live as exponents of so-called higher powers that are not divine but turn out to be a ruling layer of society, but it means a certain resignation and it means to confess that we were not able to establish the human dignity of man and the real respect of men for each other after we left God—and that we think we will never be able to do so. Going back to religion would have to contain that statement of absolute defeat—that we tried to establish freedom only to fall prey to demonical movements, that we tried to leave the “you shall” of religion only to accept the “you must,” and that we think it is impossible for man to do otherwise.

Free philosophy, however, professes not to admit total defeat and proposes not to go back but to go forward—to try once again out of pure reason and out of a real existential decision for freedom and truth to establish freedom and truth. But this does mean, contrary to Jaspers’ opinion, that philosophy requires an absolute commitment of man—a commitment to creative truth and creative freedom and to the purpose of bringing them into existence every minute of one’s life—and it means to understand that one cannot fall prey to all those propositions of the future that sound so easy and prove so fatal (if you do so and so and give up your freedom now, it will be established forever in a hundred years), but has to realize that the relation of time to eternity is always only achieved in the present (a little bit more of justice here and now, a little bit more of love here and noe, a little bit more of truth or freedom here and now—and tomorrow and always).

The relation to eternity is never in the past or the future; it is always here and now, and whatever we wish to establish has to be established here and now and again and again and again. To establish the creative principles of man’s life is always a proposition of the present—and must always remain so. The people following us will have to establish truth and freedom also. We have to realize that we can never establish paradise on earth—and that to do so would mean that human beings could not be human beings any more, that they could not be creative. We, as human beings, establish eternity by carrying on this struggle, by transforming things into what we want to establish by our absolute longings. And we have to realize that in the matter of establishing principles we long for—freedom, truth, justice, reason, love, beauty—the way is also the goal. As soon as we think of justice as an idea to be established once and for all—and one in whose name sacrifices of justice can be made in order to establish final justice someday—it becomes impossible. Justice as an absolute is unattainable, but justice as a principle is capable of infinite growth. Principles—which can be made infinite by man—are not things, but in a way are as we are: something that is becoming, an element of eternity that man can follow and establish according to his ability.

Since we are beings of becoming, since we are not reactive beings only but also active beings, since we are non-determined beings whether we refuse creativeness or not, since we are relating beings who have to relate (and if not to the Absolute and to the world and to other human beings in a meaningful way, relate then to the wrong Absolute, taking the demonic and utterly destructive way of relating everything only to ourselves), we have either the choice to become more and more of a man or woman, a human being—or to become a monster. We have only the choice to become a free man or a demon or monster since man has not the choice to become an animal. If we try to become animals, we become beasts of prey with intelligence, tigers with the will to go after each other—which is not a beast but a monster.

This possibility—the possibility of human beings to become monstrosities—has always existed, of course, but it has been left to our time to prove the possibility of the organization by force, terror and propaganda of whole masses of demonized man, of monstrosities into a whole totalitarian society. And it shows just how great man’s fall has been—because that is man’s fall: to deny his higher creative possibilities and to use them for absolute destruction, relating them only to himself. We are creative because we can relate things in a meaningful way (to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and to the Absolute) and because we can transform by this the given into the meaningful; but if we make a decision against the meaningful, against creativeness, against life, we do not just suddenly stop relating things or being creative; we become something much more dangerous: we become anti-creative, de-creative and by making the wrong relations utterly destructive. So we have either the wonderful possibility before us to become free men or the terrible possibility to become demonic—depending upon the original decision we make: the decision for freedom, truth and philosophy and thus for life, or the decision against freedom, truth and philosophy and thus for death.