Why Philosophize? To Recapture Reality!
The motivations of my work, which culminates in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies. Hence, the community of language that he himself wants to use in order to criticize the users of ideological language must first be discovered and, if necessary, established.
The peculiar situation just characterized is not the fate of the philosopher for the first time in history. More than once in history, language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it no longer can be used for expressing the truth of existence. This was the situation, for instance, of Sir Francis Bacon when he wrote his Novum Organum. Bacon classified the unanalyzed topics current in his time as “idols”: the idols of the cave, the idols of the marketplace, the idols of pseudo-theoretical speculation. In resistance to the dominance of idols—i.e., of language symbols that have lost their contact with reality—one has to rediscover the experiences of reality as well as the language that will adequately express them. The situation today is not very different. One has only to remember Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s chapter on “Idols of the Marketplace” in Cancer Ward [chapter 31] in order to recognize the continuity of the problem. Solzhenitsyn had to fall back on Bacon and his conception of idols in order to defend the reality of Reason in his own existence against the impact of Communist dogma. I like to refer to the case of Solzhenitsyn because his awareness of the problem, as well as his competence as a philosopher in his reference to Bacon, is certainly a model that would, if followed, fundamentally change the intellectual climate of our universities and colleges. In relation to the dominant climate of the social sciences, the philosopher in America finds himself very much in the situation of Solzhenitsyn in relation to the Soviet Writer’s Union—the important difference, of course, being that our Soviet Writer’s Union cannot enlist governmental power for the purpose of suppressing scholars. Hence, there are always enclaves in the West in which science can continue, and even flourish, in spite of the intellectual terrorism of institutions such as the mass media, university departments, foundations, and commercial publishing houses.
A situation comparable to the present one occurred at the time when Plato started his work. In the conventional interpretation of Plato, it is practically forgotten that the central Platonic concepts are dichotomic. The term philosophy does not stand alone but gains its meaning from its opposition to the predominant philodoxy. Problems of justice are not developed in the abstract but in opposition to wrong conceptions of justice, which in fact reflect the injustice current in the environment. The character of the Philosopher himself gains its specific meaning through its opposition to that of the Sophist, who engages in misconstructions of reality for the purpose of gaining social ascendance and material profits.
This is the situation in which the philosopher has to find the men of his own kind in a community that comprehends both the present and the past. Although there is always a dominant climate of ideological opinion, there is also present, even in our society, a large community of scholars who have not lost contact with reality and of thinkers who try to regain the contact that they are in danger of losing. One of the typical phenomena of the twentieth century is the event of spiritually energetic people breaking out of the dominant intellectual group in order to find the reality that has been lost. Famous cases have been, for England, the breakout of George Orwell from his intellectual surroundings; in France, the breakout of Albert Camus from the Parisian intellectual environment; in Germany, the gigantic work of Thomas Mann in his effort to break out of the ideologies of the Wilhelminean period and the Weimar Republic, culminating in his great philosophy of history in the introduction to the Joseph novels.
The most important means of regaining contact with reality is the recourse to thinkers of the past who had not yet lost reality, or who were engaged in the effort of regaining it. The question of where to start is frequently one of biographical accident. A man like Camus had recourse to the myth that was biographically closest to him through his education and upbringing in North Africa. A similar recourse to myth, as well as to Israelite revelation, is found in the work of Thomas Mann. In this last case, one can also discern where contemporary support for the effort originates, as in the relation between Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi. Generally speaking, the reservoirs of reality in our society are to be found in the sciences that deal with intact experiences and symbolizations of reality, even if the sciences themselves have been badly damaged by the influence of the ideological climate.
So far as my own experience is concerned, such areas are Classic philosophy and the works of students of Classic philosophy, such as Paul Friedländer, Werner Jäger, E. R. Dodds, or Bruno Snell. Another such area is Patristic and Scholastic philosophy, as well as the works of contemporary representatives such as Étienne Gilson and Henri de Lubac. A third area is the history of the ancient Near East. I have pointed to the influence I received from the Chicago Oriental Institute and from the vast advance of the study of ancient history during the last thirty years. A further area is comparative religion; I have mentioned the influences I received from students of Gnosticism, and generally of early comparative religion, like Mircea Eliade, Puech, and Quispel. More recently, there has been the study of early symbolisms, extending back to the Paleolithicum.
On occasion I have remarked on the odd social phenomenon that our universities are sprinkled with scholars for whom the exploration of Stone Age symbolisms, neolithic civilizations, ancient civilizations, or the Classic Chinese or Hindu civilization, is the means of regaining a spiritual ground that they do not find on the dominant level of our universities and churches. The social problem just adumbrated is still far too little explored, but for its importance I can testify from my personal experience. As a student I was surrounded by the intellectual climate of neo-Kantian methodology. In the circle of the Pure Theory of Law in Vienna, a philosopher was a person who based his methodology on Kant; a historian was a person who read any books written before Kant. Hence, my interest in Classic philosophy, which was already marked at that time, was interpreted by my colleagues as historical interest and as an attempt to escape from the true philosophy represented by the neo-Kantian thinkers. This problem of reconstructing a society that includes as its members the great thinkers of the past inevitably brings to mind Machiavelli’s famous letter in which he describes to his friend Francesco Vettori [December 10, 1513] the course of his days in lowly occupations in the dubious rural society of San Casciano, then how, when evening comes, he dons festival garb, goes to his study, and joins the company of the ancients for urbane intercourse and conversation.
Recapturing reality in opposition to its contemporary deformation requires a considerable amount of work. One has to reconstruct the fundamental categories of existence, experience, consciousness, and reality. One has at the same time to explore the technique and structure of the deformations that clutter up the daily routine; and one has to develop the concepts by which existential deformation and its symbolic expression can be categorized. This work, then, must be conducted not only in opposition to the deformed ideologies but also to deformations of reality by thinkers who ought to be its preservers, such as theologians.
In the concrete effort to find one’s way through a maze of corrupt language toward reality and its adequate linguistic expression, certain rules emerge that are not always to the liking of our contemporary intellectuals. The methodologically first, and perhaps most important, rule of my work is to go back to the experiences that engender symbols. No language symbol today can be simply accepted as a bona fide symbol, because corruption has proceeded so far that everything is suspect. In the course of this effort, I found that I had to explore the meaning of philosophy as a symbol created by the Classic philosophers, its meaning to be determined on the basis of the text. Such changes of meaning as this symbol has suffered in the course of time then have to be determined with care by relating them to the original meaning, because only on the basis of such comparative studies can one judge whether the change of meaning is justified (because it takes into account aspects of reality that were not included in the original meaning) or whether the change of meaning is unjustified (because elements of reality have been excluded in order to construct a new, defective concept).
This rule of analytical inquiry frequently arouses the opposition of intellectuals, as I have experienced in discussions, because they insist on the right to give to words whatever meanings they want. The existence of a standard based on the historical fact that words do not lie around in a language, but are created by thinkers for the expression of experiences when they have them, is fervently rejected. They prefer what I call the Humpty-Dumpty philosophy of language: Determining the meanings of words is an exercise of the intellectual’s power that must not be submitted to criticism.
Considerable help in understanding the processes of deformation has come to me from the observation of these processes by the great Austrian novelists, especially Albert Paris Gütersloh, Robert Musil, and Heimito von Doderer. They coined the term second reality in order to signify the image of reality created by human beings when they exist in a state of alienation. The principal characteristic of this state of alienation, which is supported by the imaginative construction of second realities in opposition to the reality of experience, is what Doderer has called the “refusal to apperceive” (Apperzeptionsverweigerung). The concept appears in his novel Die Dämonen, and I always enjoy the fact that he developed it while discussing certain sexual aberrations. The concept of Apperzeptionsverweigerung is formally developed in the introductory remarks to the chapter on “Die dicken Damen”—fat ladies—who are preferred by one of his heroes.
The refusal to apperceive has become for me the central concept for the understanding of ideological aberrations and deformations. It appears in a variety of phenomena, of which the historically most interesting is the formal interdict on questioning demanded by Comte and Marx. If anybody should question their ideological doctrine by raising the question of the divine ground of reality, he will be informed by Comte that he should not ask idle questions (“questions oiseuses”), and by Marx that he should shut up and become a “socialist man”: (“Denke nicht, frage mich nicht,” Don’t think, don’t ask me).
This attitude of not permitting questions regarding their premises—questions that would immediately explode the system—is the general tactic employed by ideologists in discussion. In numerous conversations with Hegelians, for instance, I have always come to the point where I had to question the premises of alienated existence that lie at the basis of Hegel’s speculation. Whenever this question comes up, I am informed by the respective Hegelian that I don’t understand Hegel and that one can understand Hegel only if one accepts his premises without questioning them. If the interdict on questions is understood as the central tactic of all ideological debate, one has gained at least one important criterion for diagnosing an ideology: The purpose of the diagnosis is to determine which part of reality has been excluded in order to make the construction of a fake system possible. The realities excluded can vary widely, but the one item that always has to be excluded is the experience of man’s tension toward the divine ground of his existence.
Once the consciousness of existential tension is recognized as the critical experience that an ideologist must exclude if he wants to make his own state of alienation compulsory for everybody, the problem of consciousness of this tension moves into the center of philosophical thought. The understanding of both Classic and Christian philosophy, as well as of ideological deformations of existence, presupposes the understanding of consciousness in the fullness of its dimensions. The characteristic of what may be called the “modern conception of consciousness” is the construction of consciousness by the model of sense perceptions of objects in external reality. This restriction of the model of consciousness to objects of external reality becomes the more or less hidden trick in the construction of systems in the nineteenth century. Even in the core of Hegel one can observe, in his Phenomenology, that he begins with sense perception and from this basis develops all higher structures of consciousness. The case is remarkable because Hegel was one of the greatest connoisseurs of the history of philosophy; he knew, of course, that the primary experiences of consciousness as they appear in the work of the Classic philosophers are not concerned with sense perceptions but with the experience of structures (as, for instance, mathematical structures) and the experience of the turning toward the divine ground of existence motivated by the pull exerted by this ground. I have not the slightest doubt that a man with Hegel’s historical knowledge deliberately ignored the immediate experiences of consciousness and replaced them with the highly abstract, and historically very late, models of perception of objects in the external world, in order to put over a system that expressed his state of alienation. I do not know of any passage in Hegel where he reflects on his technique of intellectual fraud, but the technique has become explicit in the work of Marx, in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844.
If the experience of objects in the external world is absolutized as the structure of consciousness at large, all spiritual and intellectual phenomena connected with experiences of divine reality are automatically eclipsed. However, since they cannot be totally excluded—because after all they are the history of humanity—they must be deformed into propositions about a transcendental reality. This propositional deformation of the philosophers’ and prophets’ symbols is one of the important phenomena in the history of mankind. It is already highly developed in Scholastic philosophy, further hardened in the transition to modern metaphysics in Descartes, and then continued as a sort of secondary orthodoxy by the ideological thinkers. That propositional metaphysics is a deformation of philosophy, consistently continued in doctrinal ideology, I consider one of my more important findings.
Once this problem is recognized, the question arises of why human beings engage in games of propositional metaphysics, as well as in the successor orthodoxies of propositional ideologies. What is the experiential motive of the great modern dogmatomachies from the sixteenth century onward, now going on for more than four hundred years without a return to the predogmatic reality of experienced insight?
This question leads to the problem of alienation—i.e., the state of existence that expresses itself in the deformation of symbols into doctrines. The problem is, of course, not new. The deformations began in Classic antiquity as soon as the myth of the polis became an empty shell through the destruction by the empires of the society that had engendered the symbolism. With the Stoics and their observation of existential disorder in the wake of imperial conquest begins the understanding of alienation, expressing itself in the creation of the term allotriosis. The Stoics, being well-trained philosophers themselves, understood the phenomenon of alienation quite well. If philosophical existence is existence in awareness of man’s humanity as constituted by his tension toward the divine ground, and if this awareness is in the practice of existence realized by the Platonic periagoge—the turning toward the ground—then alienation is the turning away from the ground toward a self that is imagined to be human without being constituted by its relation to the divine presence. The turning toward the divine ground—the Classic epistrophe—is therefore to be supplemented in the description of states of human existence by the Stoic conception of apostrophe—the turning away from the ground. Turning toward, and turning away from, the ground become the fundamental categories descriptive of the states of order and disorder in human existence.
These fundamental observations of the Stoics concerning the structure of existence tie in with the previously mentioned modern observations on the refusal to apperceive. Turning away means to refuse to apperceive the experience of the divine ground as constitutive of man’s reality. This willful turning away from the fundamental experience of reality was diagnosed by the Stoics as a disease of the mind. The science of existential deformation through turning away from the ground, and thereby withdrawing from one’s own self, became the core of psychopathology and remained the core well into the Renaissance.
The issue has come to the fore again in the twentieth century, because the mass phenomena of spiritual and intellectual disorientation in our time have attracted attention again to the fundamental act of apostrophe. After finding the causes of disorder in a variety of secondary symptoms, like an undisciplined indulgence of the passions, one discovers now again, in existential psychology, that behind the secondary symptoms lies the fundamental problem of the apostrophe—the withdrawal of man from his own humanity.
The phenomenon of the rediscovery just described is not peculiar to the modern period. We can observe it in the Classic Greek period, when the observation of social pathology, couched by Thucydides in the medical terms of the Hippocratic school, became the basis for the discovery of existential order by Plato and Aristotle. In a very similar manner today, having gone through two centuries of severe distortion of existence, the phenomenon is beginning to be understood as pathological; and as it is being discovered as pathological, the question of sane, well-ordered existence again attracts attention.