I think we should try and pick up the thread just where we left off last time. You will recall that we had moved on to some rather more general reflections regarding the problem of the ontological need. Perhaps it would be better to speak of the need which has led to the philosophies which are still current under the names of ontology, philosophy of being, existential ontology, and so on. It is indeed rather difficult to bring any of these things under a unified name, for it is one of the controlling techniques (if I may put it this way) of these philosophies that, whenever we try and grasp one of them under some such collective name, it immediately protests and declares: Well, what we do is not the same thing at all, but something quite different. This is one of the most popular defensive strategies adopted in the cultural and intellectual field, for it helps us to escape criticism by insisting on the nuances of the definitions under which things are subsumed precisely in order to avoid the material and substantive considerations by concentrating on these formal considerations which pertain to definition. But I mention this point only in passing. I have already said to you – and this is something we need to say much more about – that the far-reaching effect (and I emphasize far-reaching in this context) of this movement of thought, as represented in Germany above all by the name of Heidegger and also that of Jaspers, would be quite inconceivable if a relevant need had not actually existed. The success of these ontological movements is itself an index of something felt to be lacking. As I mentioned last time, philosophy since Hegel has left us wanting, has actually failed to provide what is expected of it by those who come to it untrained and unprepared as it were. In this respect all of us have also been somewhat damaged by our philosophical education. This is a strange situation, for without any background knowledge in philosophy – if we are unfamiliar with the basic concepts or the relevant literature and have not yet been initiated into the tradition, so to speak – there can be no real understanding of philosophical questions. At the same time, this initiation also has a certain tendency to wean us off the very things that led us to seek initiation in the first place. Sometimes I can never entirely shake off the suspicion that the much prized maturity we claim for human beings and which is supposed to be such a positive achievement – though I certainly have no wish to deny its genuinely positive features – also smacks of the way some things are discouraged and drummed out of people precisely because they do not readily fit in with the ruling mechanisms of power. And this recognition of maturity always involves a kind of commendation: Now, you are a real fellow, properly house-trained, one who knows how to behave, and there is nothing to fear from you. And all our education certainly also has something of this fateful house-training about it. I am not trying to encourage you to violate it; rather, I would like you to reflect upon it, and not to take this condition to which our education has brought us in a simple and naive way as some higher condition. I would just encourage you to think seriously about how far our education brings us to sacrifice and renounce what makes us desire education in the first place. If we choose a particular field of study in the human sciences, and actually pursue it, we will probably feel some such sense of disappointment very keenly; we will realize that where we had perhaps hoped to be introduced to great works of art or to the world of language – all this is actually missing, and that such hopes are rather looked down upon as insufficiently rigorous or scientific. But then once we have been immersed in the subject for a few years, and still have so much to study and to learn, we no longer look beyond this. And then we act like the carpenter Valentin in Raimund, and ‘find it's just like home’.1 Finally, when we are let out into the world as people who have now completed their studies, that is all we have become. Now I believe it is not the least task that falls to those who genuinely study that they cease to be infantile while still preserving that aspect of childhood that refuses to be cheated.2 This has certainly not been accomplished by philosophy in the post-Hegelian period, which has left us wanting in this respect. And when we read the great critics of Hegel, such as Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer, we soon have the sense, remarkably enough, that our own philosophy is like this too, and experience the similar feeling that the best has been denied to us here. It is all too easy to imagine that the responsibility for this lies solely with a philosophy that has really become one academic branch of study amongst others. Now there is no doubt about what critics such as Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer in particular have so insistently and emphatically pointed out – that the loss of interest on the part of philosophy in regard to what ultimately interests or concerns me, of what is actually at stake for me here, is indeed bound up with the departmentalization of philosophy, and thus with the fact that the very form of thought which really needs to think expressly about and reflect critically upon the division of labour as such has been integrated into that very process and become a specific profession in its own right. We see here how a specific sociological moment actually enters into the innermost core of the history of philosophy. And it may be interesting to note that these are not simply the reflections of certain ill-willed modern sociologists who wish to contest the ground of philosophy in a merely external way (as Heidegger seems to think that we do).3 For it was precisely thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, about whose purely philosophical credentials there could be no doubt whatsoever, who specifically drew attention to this social moment of philosophy, who emphasized, in other words, that philosophy has forgotten about the best it had to offer once it had to integrate itself and earn a professional living, once it had to find secure employment in an academic business effectively sworn to defend the forms of society as they actually are.
Now I would just like to indicate at least a few of the aspects through which philosophy in the period in question – namely the period between Hegel and the revived forms of contemporary metaphysics – forfeited the best it was able to offer. I have just talked about a certain social motivation behind this development. Now I believe that it is characteristic, at least for the German philosophy of the period after Hegel, that the specific relation to the social world which was formerly constitutive for philosophy was effectively abandoned. I am assuming, ladies and gentlemen, that your own education, whether it is specifically philosophical or pre-philosophical in character, has already predisposed you to regard this aspect I am talking to you about as something that is almost self-evident – in other words, to believe that philosophy, of course, is the systematic study of ultimate things and is thus too good, as it were, to concern itself with social questions at all. Now here I should like to remind you of something quite elementary from the perspective of the history of philosophy, and that is that this conception – which has become so widespread precisely in the wake of the ontological school of philosophy – was entirely alien to the history of philosophy until more recent times.
If one had expected ontological philosophers of the past, such as Plato or indeed Aristotle, to concern themselves essentially with the being of beings without regard to the society in which they themselves were living, this demand would have appeared quite unintelligible to them, and they would have despised the very thought of separating these concerns. And it is surely remarkable that Heidegger in particular, who would otherwise gladly revoke the tendency to dichotomize or separate reflection in the history of Western philosophy, in this particular context is quite prepared to abandon himself entirely to such a form of reflection. In other words, he is ready to banish any consideration of social circumstances and attitudes from the threshold of philosophy itself – whereas, to mention only the most obvious example, in Plato the highest metaphysical idea of all, namely the idea of justice, cannot simply be separated in terms of content from the kind of community or society, marked as it was by a specific division of labour, within which it is actually developed. And if we then attempted to say that the doctrine of Ideas was merely demonstrated by reference to the polis, we would surely fall victim precisely to a kind of idealistic stylization that is entirely inappropriate to the atmosphere of Plato's thought, where the life of this polis itself is indeed experienced so strongly as the life of truth that any such distinction between eternal truth and social substance is quite inconceivable. Yet in the history of modern philosophy in Germany there eventually came a point – and Hegel's Philosophy of Right, already highly retrospective in character as you know, stands at the threshold in this regard – after which philosophy revealed little but a kind of almost embittered disinterest in social questions. I cannot go into the reasons for this development here since that would immediately involve us in some very specific sociological questions, whereas I wish to stay with our principal philosophical thematic for now. But I can at least point out that one essential aspect in this regard is certainly the fact that, for the first half of the nineteenth century, Germany remained so backward in terms of social development that the enormous power of social dynamics did not extend its influence into the very heart of thought. And thought was therefore able to flourish in the rather private and limited sphere which corresponded to the German social and cultural climate in the period around 1800. There is also of course another phenomenon in play here, the full cultural and intellectual significance of which has not yet perhaps been considered as closely as it should have been. I am talking about the emergence of Marxian materialism, and especially of the claim which this philosophy has sometimes raised in an admittedly crass form, namely its claim to liquidate philosophy as such and replace it with praxis. I do not wish to say much more at the moment about the whole set of problems involved in this extremely questionable claim.4 But I certainly believe that in Germany, and in the general consciousness of the German middle classes, which have effectively monopolized the realm of philosophy, the fact of Marxism itself has acted as an enormously powerful means of diverting philosophical attention from such questions. In other words, almost everything of philosophical relevance that was advanced during this period was itself, whether openly or covertly, already apologetically directed in one way or another against this materialist claim. And part of this apologetic trend is precisely the idea that the truth of philosophy should be distanced as far as possible from existing society and its various arrangements and institutions. And if you glance at any of the textbooks on ethics produced in the heyday of neo-Kantianism and the entire world associated with it, you will soon discover how astonishingly remote such ethics is from what is ultimately, for God's sake, the most relevant ethical question there is, namely the question concerning the state of society and its rational structure and character. Now this is not merely a matter that springs from the distance involved in any division of labour but something which also possesses the most far-reaching consequences for the shape of philosophy itself, for its loss of interest in these matters. I shall simply offer one example in this regard and point out one or two particular problems that arise here, although it would be quite possible to identify countless other problems in this connection. Thus in the wake of Kantian philosophy we see how the concept of autonomy, the idea of the self-determining individual, which has no meaning without the establishment of a free society and which was still conceived by Kant and also Hegel in the context of human beings acquiring their freedom as citizens within a free society – how this concept of autonomy was indeed retained, but now without the remotest connection with a society of free individuals, and thus a free society itself, without that implication which it still enjoyed in Kant and the German Idealist thinkers, and in Fichte the younger, to such a pre-eminent degree. But this also means that a concept such as that of ‘personality’ in the now quite traditional and epigonal philosophy that succeeded them has survived in a highly spiritualized form and led to a certain revival of metaphysics, even though there was no longer really any corresponding substance to the concept in question. In other words, people still continue to talk about an assumed autonomy on the part of self-determining beings in a world where nothing of the kind exists any longer as a social reality. Thus when Heidegger or Jaspers, or, as I would say, when any human being who thinks with nervous sensibility, as it were, and not just with a more or less formal or undeveloped faculty of intelligence, actually avoid the concept of personality6 – and it is to Heidegger's credit that he does not I believe employ this concept at all – then this reflects the very inadequacy I have been talking about. In other words, we find that a category still appears as central to philosophy when our experience no longer even approaches it, or is exposed to ridicule, if we do ever encounter it, like those fully bearded plaster busts which adorn many a hall of fame but which we expect to be hidden away in some corner the next time they get knocked over.7
Another problem of a similar kind concerns the increasing divorce between philosophy and the natural sciences. For this means that, specifically for those who have been engaged where the pulse of society beats most strongly today – namely for those engaged in developing the productive forces of technology – philosophy has also come to appear strangely obsolete. In other words, philosophy, where it has not simply transformed itself into the logic of the natural sciences, has largely lost touch with the results of natural science and now hardly finds it possible to do so at all. And here I am merely raising the point that it would be of tremendous importance both for the history of the natural sciences and for the history of philosophy itself, it seems to me, if proper consideration could be given to the process through which this seemingly irrevocable breach between philosophy and the natural sciences has actually been produced. It is possible to date it with some precision: the connection between them survived to some extent until Kant, but from the time of Schelling's philosophy of nature onwards the breach had already become established. And that part of Hegel's system which was concerned with the philosophy of nature has indeed never really been taken up or examined by the natural sciences themselves in the form in which he presented it. From this point of view we could say that the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School represents a kind of defensive or retreat manoeuvre, which was basically an attempt to reunite a further development of Kantian philosophy with an increasingly functional conception of natural science – that is, one in which the concepts of substance were essentially replaced by concepts of function. But here too we can see the crisis which afflicted the involved and, I am tempted to say, even desperate attempt on the part of Ernst Cassirer to incorporate even the theory of relativity within the framework of such Kantianism8 – a conception which is already controversial within the natural sciences since so many scientists now regard even the theory of relativity as something that belongs more to classical than to really modern physics. But again it is not possible to explore this here. The new ontologies also react emphatically to this situation (rather like the way philosophy reacted to Marxism, as I mentioned earlier) insofar as they no longer claim – and this is extremely important, I believe, for understanding the entire ontological approach – that they themselves can resolve the so-called constitutive problems of the natural sciences, or that they can still demonstrate, as Kant tried to do, how natural science is possible in the first place. For the conclusion they now draw from this situation is that they do not need to concern themselves with the natural sciences at all, that they can relegate the natural sciences, in both logical and substantive terms, to the realm of mere beings, and that they can place properly philosophical thought in a sphere which is then vaguely alleged to precede the natural sciences, although it does not itself establish any relation to the latter. And let me just say here that the attempts on the part of certain scientists to establish some such connection from the point of view of natural science by appropriating aspects of ontology for themselves seem to me to be just as questionable and unreliable as the efforts of certain superficial would-be philosophers of culture who help themselves to misunderstood theorems from the natural sciences in order to produce an unappetizing soup of modern painting, quantum physics, Heidegger, and whatever else.9 These are all tendencies about which you cannot really be warned too often. Both in philosophy – and we must indeed recognize it as a merit of Heidegger's philosophy that he has never attempted to conceal this – and in the natural sciences we now find ourselves in a situation where no such direct transition from one to the other has as yet proved possible. And I believe it is much more important, and much more appropriate and intellectually honest, to acknowledge this state of affairs for what it is, and attempt to comprehend it, than it is to appeal to incantatory words such as ‘being’ in pursuit of those hasty restitutions of unity which are generally sure to follow. But at least we can say that this complete retreat in the face of the natural sciences on the part of philosophy – of a philosophy which cannot even summon the civil courage to admit that it doesn't really understand them but continues to act as if, like the Kantian philosophy, it constituted the foundation of science itself and thus of the natural science as well – has further contributed to that discredit into which philosophy has fallen, and indeed upon which this whole reorientation of metaphysics rested. And it is then also clear – if I may just mention another aspect of this process through which philosophy forfeited its own relevance in advance of the new ontological movement – indeed flagrantly evident, that philosophy had become entirely alienated from the most advanced art that related to its own period. The relationship between art and philosophy was still more or less intact in Hegel and Schelling, whose contributions to philosophical aesthetics correspond to the most advanced stage of the consciousness of the time, and which for that reason can still prove as extraordinarily productive as they once were even in the context of the most advanced artistic production of today. Everything that was subsequently written in the way of aesthetics – whether we are talking about the work of Carrière10 or Volkelt11 or almost anyone else (although I make exception for the phenomenon of Benedetto Croce, who still basically belongs within a broadly Hegelian context)12 – remains hopelessly provincial and outmoded with respect to the art actually being produced at the time. And if those who enjoyed any living connection with the artistic movement of their own time did turn to the aesthetics which philosophy had to offer them, they would only be utterly disappointed and would inevitably have the feeling that it was just provincial philistines without any real legitimacy who were the ones now talking about art. Thus one of the most essential dimensions of the Kantian system, treated at length in the Critique of Judgement, had simply fallen out the world of philosophy.
But now, lastly – and this is the really decisive thing I believe – we must recognize how philosophy has principally failed to provide what it ultimately promises. In other words, the questions which led us to philosophy in the first place have fallen by the wayside. And it was precisely after the great speculative systems, including that of Hegel, had effectively disintegrated, after their claim to construe the universe out of their own resources could no longer be sustained, that philosophy now hopelessly abandoned the task of answering why we should genuinely engage with philosophy at all. I believe that, if we really want to understand why the ontological movements of philosophy have exercised the enormous attraction that they have, we must take very seriously this fact, which is not just accidental but springs from a fatal necessity of its own. For at this point anyway something crucial appears to have changed in those earlier philosophies. We should not make things too easy for ourselves in this regard. And indeed you should not believe that what we are dealing with here is something that can simply be accounted for in terms of the cultural-historical schema of epigonism. For it is not as if the great and really productive philosophies once engaged with the essential questions, whereas the little thinkers who came afterwards simply forgot what had interested the former and now concerned themselves solely with what is directly or indirectly given in experience. Now I do not deny that this was the case, that these thinkers did indeed largely occupy themselves with elaborate details, namely with epistemological questions of supposedly enormous relevance which failed to demonstrate their worth and actually proved irrelevant as far as genuine knowledge is concerned. But I think you must really understand – if we are to get beyond a purely general cultural-historical perspective and consider these things with the seriousness that they deserve – that what I have just described as the necessity of this process is also somehow implicit in the Kantian philosophy itself. So I shall try and show you, at least in a very summary way, how far Kant's philosophy already represents a kind of concentrated disappointment in philosophy that has been inflated and transformed into a mighty system, as it were, and why that abdication of philosophy has already assumed an objective form in the Kantian system, and one which eventually led to a reawakening of a tenacious claim on the part of philosophy. In the first place of course we have the essentially negative result of the Critique of Pure Reason – which was indeed a critique: a critique of the capacity of reason to acquire any genuine knowledge of its own truly crucial objects – namely the result that it is impossible for us to make any claims about what is of most importance to us, claims in other words about the existence of God, about our own freedom, and above all about the question of immortality. And in the course of this great cleansing process the concept of being itself also fell away, along with many other concepts, because it now represents simply a synthesis which consciousness performs on what is immediately given, rather than something absolute as such. And on account of our respect for Kant's enormous achievement, and for what is generally called the Copernican Turn13 – namely the turn to the subject, to the knowing subject itself, on the part of philosophy – I believe that it is very easy for us to miss just what is lost through this turn14 as far as the need of philosophy is concerned. For we are not even told that there is no God, that there is no freedom, that there is no immortality – even this negative sustenance is withheld from us in our philosophical need. Instead we find a threatening armed guard posted at the gate who tells us: You are not even permitted to ask about this. Now it is very difficult for consciousness to bear this prohibition, and I should point out right away that there is also a question regarding the rightful authority which allows such a prohibition to be announced in the first place. For we may well ask why and in what way reason, if it is no more than reason, feels empowered to decide this. Whence does it derive the power to prescribe this to itself as reason: So far and so far only you may extend your reach. And is the very act of assuming this standpoint not the same as assuming a standpoint that is already beyond reason itself? Would this not already refute the standpoint that reason alone and nothing else is at work here? Now I do not wish to present a list of theses, and this is not the place to unfold the dialectic which is involved. And the argument which I have just expressed is not actually my own but derives from Hegel's critique of Kant which is developed in his own System of Philosophy.15
But I would merely like to draw your attention to something very remarkable about this Kantian commandment which forbids us even to ask after these things, something so problematic that it is entirely understandable that consciousness cannot rest content with a resigned decision of this kind. For it still betrays something of the oppressively bourgeois and provincial mentality which insists: Just stay in the country where you belong and earn an honest living there, and be sure to avoid all foolish and useless thoughts about things that do not really concern a small and insignificant person like you. And what is objectively implicit in Kant, framed in truly impressive form with such tremendous gravity, eventually gave rise in the history of philosophy to that intellectual indifference towards those very questions that thought is ultimately called upon to address. And when we later heard talk about a certain ‘resurrection of metaphysics’ – as we did in a rather dull and superficial book by Peter Wust that still proved extremely successful at the time16 – this at least gave expression to the feeling that, in this respect, philosophy was once more at last selling the kind of things which had once provided its sole raison d’être.
But there is another disappointing aspect here which can also be traced back to Kant's philosophy, and which has proved equally, or perhaps even more, fateful than this. And this is the aspect – if I may put this rather crudely – through which philosophy in its Kantian form, namely in the form of a scientifically motivated critique of the possibility of knowledge, actually helps to leave our image of the world untouched. You will all be familiar with Kant's celebrated claim that his philosophy is at once a transcendental idealism and an empirical realism.17 This means that naive realism is indeed excluded in specifically epistemological terms, so that the whole of reality now appears as something which is composed of the chaotic givens of sensory experience together with the categories and the subjective forms of intuition. At the same time, however, once this process of constitution has been accomplished, the world as we have it, or our normal, empirical and everyday world, remains exactly the same as it was before. Now this very aspect, namely the impotence of philosophy before the totality of the mundus sensibilis, which simply remains exactly as it presents itself, has persisted throughout the history of philosophy, right up to an immediate forerunner of existential ontology such as Husserl. For once he has performed what he calls the phenomenological reduction, Husserl receives back the whole world as it is, albeit reduced in the sense that we no longer affirm its spatio-temporal existence, its individual facticity. Yet surely one of the most essential demands of philosophy, to put it simply, is precisely not to remain with appearance but to discover the essence. In a world where there is such a difference between the essence, between the regularity which in truth prevails within it, and the appearance, or the façade which it presents to us, we may surely legitimately speak of a need to discover the essence – the need to discover what is genuinely essential: to uncover the essence in the sense of what is concealed behind this façade, rather than in the sense of the purely general concept that subsumes what it grasps.
Philosophy has promised, as it were, to pronounce the magic word, or at least, once it became less naive, to provide the language, and the insights, which might dissolve the semblance that the world is indeed what it presents itself to be. It is this claim, or this hope, to discover the essence which philosophy has still failed to fulfil. We could say that philosophy has turned itself into a merely methodological arrangement that enables the reflective and informed consciousness simply to reproduce what the scientifically educated person, or I would say even the ordinary person with a modicum of common sense, already knows. But since we actually have every reason to have our doubts about this normal consciousness of the world and its reliability, then at this crucial point the result of the Kantian philosophy, which subsequently unfolded in the philosophies of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, has proved problematic and unsatisfactory. And this unsatisfactory state of affairs, for which I have mentioned a number of reasons, and in particular some specifically philosophical reasons which are rooted in the form that thought has come to assume, has effectively led, if not exactly to the new ontologies themselves, then at least to the need with which you are now familiar. But I would not want you to imagine that the dissatisfaction with these things that I have been talking about is something completely new that has simply fallen straight from the sky. For you will already discover such dissatisfaction at the time when philosophy itself had reached its peak. Thus you could take a look at Schelling's Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, which I had intended to discuss in a seminar during this semester – although I did not actually get round to it this time for a variety of reasons, it is something to which I hope to return. If you read this text of Schelling's, which I can warmly recommend that you do, you will basically find the very same dissatisfaction with the prevailing business of academic life which eventually led to the ontological need.18 Again, when you read what Schopenhauer wrote on the subject of ‘university philosophy’,19 you will find the same thing, albeit expressed in a particularly crude form. And here I hardly need to mention Nietzsche, who renounced the official world of established philosophy and chose a kind of voluntary emigration instead – though I would almost say that he seems too important to me simply to be introduced directly in this connection. In the next session I shall try above all to show you what has basically changed in comparison with the state of critical consciousness that was still characteristic of the leading representatives of philosophy and science in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and thus bring out for you what is historically and qualitatively new about the modern ontological movements in philosophy.