In Search of a Better World

Emancipation through Knowledge

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and with it his philosophy of history, is often looked upon in Germany as antiquated, and as superseded by Hegel and his followers. This may well be due to the surpassing intellectual and moral stature of Kant, Germany’s greatest philosopher; for the very greatness of his achievement was a thorn in the flesh of his lesser successors, so that Fichte, and later Hegel, tried to solve this irritating problem by persuading the world that Kant had been merely one of their forerunners. But Kant was nothing of the sort. On the contrary he was a determined opponent of the whole Romantic Movement and especially of Fichte: Kant was in fact the last great exponent of that much reviled movement, the Enlightenment. In an important essay entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1785) Kant wrote:

Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutelage. This state is due to his incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance. Such a state of tutelage I call ‘self-imposed’ [or ‘culpable’] if it is due not to lack of intelligence but to lack of courage or determination to use one’s own intelligence without the help of a leader. Sapere aude! Dare to use your own intelligence! This is the battle-cry of the Enlightenment.

This passage from Kant’s essay explains what was for him the central idea of the Enlightenment. It was the idea of self-liberation through knowledge.

This idea of self-liberation or self-emancipation through knowledge remained for Kant a task as well as a guide throughout his life; and although he was convinced that this idea might serve as an inspiration for every man possessed of the necessary intelligence, Kant did not make the mistake of proposing that we adopt self-emancipation through knowledge, or any other mainly intellectual exercise, as the whole meaning or purpose of human life. Indeed, Kant did not need the assistance of the Romantics for criticizing pure reason, nor did he need their reminders to realize that man is not purely rational; and he knew that mere intellectual knowledge is neither the best thing in human life, nor the most sublime. He was a pluralist who believed in the variety of human experience and in the diversity of human aims; and being a pluralist, he believed in an open society – a pluralist society that would live up to his own maxim: ‘Dare to be free, and respect the freedom and the autonomy of others; for the dignity of man lies in his freedom, and in his respect for other people’s autonomous and responsible beliefs, especially if these differ widely from his own.’ Yet in spite of his pluralism he saw in intellectual self-education, or self-emancipation through knowledge, a task which is indispensable from a philosophical point of view; a task demanding of every man immediate action here and now and always. For only through the growth of knowledge can the mind be liberated from its spiritual enslavement: enslavement by prejudices, idols and avoidable errors. Thus the task of self-education, though certainly not exhausting the meaning of life, could, he thought, make a decisive contribution towards it.

The analogy between the expressions ‘the meaning of life’ and ‘the meaning of history’ is worthy of examination; but I shall first examine the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’ in the expression ‘the meaning of life’. This expression is sometimes used in the sense of a deeper, a hidden meaning – something like the hidden meaning of an epigram, or of a poem, or of the Chorus Mysticus in Goethe’s Faust. But the wisdom of some poets and perhaps also of some philosophers has taught us that the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ can be understood in a different way; that the meaning of life may not be so much something hidden and perhaps discoverable but, rather, something with which we ourselves can endow our lives. We can bestow a meaning upon our lives through our work, through our active conduct, through our whole way of life, and through the attitude we adopt towards our friends and our fellow men and towards the world. (Of course, that we can endow our lives in this way may strike us as an important discovery.)

In this way the quest for the meaning of life turns into an ethical question – the question ‘What tasks can I set myself in order to make my life meaningful?’ Or as Kant puts it: ‘What should I do?’ A partial answer to this question is given in Kant’s ideas of freedom and autonomy, and of a pluralism which is limited only by the idea of equality before the law and of mutual respect for the freedom of others; ideas which, like the idea of self-emancipation through knowledge, can contribute meaning to our lives.

We can understand the expression ‘the meaning of history’ in a similar way. This, too, has been often interpreted in the sense of a secret or hidden meaning, underlying the course of world history; or perhaps of a hidden direction or evolutionary tendency which is inherent in history; or of a goal towards which the world is striving. Yet I believe that the quest for the hidden ‘meaning of history’ is misconceived, as is the quest for the hidden meaning of life: instead of searching for a hidden meaning of history, we can make it our task to give it a meaning. We can try to give an aim to political history – and thereby to ourselves. Instead of looking for a deeper, a hidden meaning in political history, we can ask ourselves what could be worthy and humane aims of political history: aims both feasible and beneficial to mankind.

My first thesis is, therefore, that we should refuse to speak of the meaning of history in the sense of something concealed in it, or of a moral lesson hidden in the divine tragedy of history, or in the sense of some evolutionary tendencies or laws of history, or of some other meaning which might perhaps be discovered by some great historian or philosopher or religious leader.

Thus my first thesis is negative. I contend that there is no hidden meaning in history, and that those historians and philosophers who believe they have discovered one are deceiving themselves (and others).

My second thesis, however, is very positive. I believe that we ourselves can try to give a meaning to political history- or rather a plurality of meanings; meanings that are feasible for, and worthy of, human beings.

But I go even further than that. For my third thesis is that we can learn from history that the attempt to give history an ethical meaning, or to set ourselves up as modest ethical reformers, need not be vain. On the contrary, we shall never understand history if we underrate the historical power of ethical aims. No doubt they often have led to terrible results, unforeseen by those who first conceived them. Yet in some respects we have approached more closely than any previous generation to the aims and ideals of the Enlightenment, as represented by the American Revolution, or by Kant. More especially the idea of self-emancipation or self-liberation through knowledge, the idea of a pluralist or open society, and the idea of ending the frightful history of wars by the establishment of eternal peace, though perhaps still far distant ideals, have become the aim and the hope of almost all of us.

By saying that we have got nearer to these aims I am not, of course, venturing to prophesy that we shall soon, or ever, attain them. Certainly we may fail. But I think that at least the idea of peace which Erasmus of Rotterdam, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Bentham, the Mills and Spencer, and in Germany Berta von Suttner and Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, have fought for, is nowadays openly acknowledged by the diplomats and politicians of all civilized states as the aim of international politics. This is more than those great fighters for the idea of peace expected, and it is more than we could have expected even twenty-five years ago.

Admittedly, this great success is only a very partial one, and it has been brought about not so much by the ideas of Erasmus or of Kant as by the realization that a nuclear war would put an end to mankind. But that does not alter the fact that peace is now generally and openly recognized as our political aim, and that our difficulties are mainly due to the failure, so far, of diplomats and politicians to find the means to its realization. I cannot discuss those difficulties here; yet a more detailed explanation and discussion of my three theses might make it possible to understand the difficulties and to see them in perspective.

My first thesis, the negative assertion that there is no hidden meaning in political history – no meaning that we might look for and discover – nor anything like a hidden tendency, contradicts the various theories of progress of the nineteenth century – for example the theories of Comte, Hegel and Marx. But it also contradicts Oswald Spengler’s twentieth-century theory of the Decline of the West as well as the classical theories of cycles propounded for example by Plato, Giovanni Battista Vico, Nietzsche, and others.

I regard all these theories as wrong-headed, and even, in a way, pointless. For they answer a question that is wrongly put. Ideas such as ‘progress’, ‘retrogression’, ‘decline’, etc., imply judgements of value; and thus all these theories, whether they predict historical progress or retrogression, or a cycle consisting of progress and retrogression, must necessarily refer to some scale of values. Such a scale of values can be moral, or economic, or perhaps aesthetic or artistic; and within the realm of the latter values it can refer to music or painting or architecture or literature. It may also refer to the realms of science, or of technology. Another scale of values may be based upon the statistics of our health or mortality, and another on our morality. Obviously, we can progress in one or several of these fields and, at the same time, retrogress and reach rock-bottom in others. (Thus we find in Germany at the time of the greatest works of Bach, 1720–50, no very outstanding works in literature or in painting.) And progress in some fields – say in the fields of economics or of education – must often be paid forwith retrogression in others; just as progress in the speed, spread and frequency of motor traffic is paid for at the expense of safety.

Now what is true of the realization of technological or economic values also holds, of course, for the realization of certain moral values and especially for the fundamental postulates of freedom and human dignity. Thus many citizens of the United States felt that the continuation of slavery in the Southern States was intolerable, and incompatible with the demands of their conscience; but they had to pay for the freeing of the slaves with a most terrible civil war, and with the destruction of a flourishing and unique civilization.

Similarly, the progress of science – itself partly a consequence of the ideal of self-emancipation through knowledge – is contributing to the lengthening and to the enrichment of our lives; yet it has led us to spend those lives under the threat of an atomic war, and it is doubtful whether it has on balance contributed to the happiness and contentment of man.

The fact that we can progress and simultaneously retrogress shows that the historical theories of progress, the theories of retrogression, the theories of cycles, and even the prophecies of doom, are all equally untenable, since they are clearly wrong in the way they pose their questions. They all are in the grip of pseudo-scientific theories (as I have tried to show elsewhere).¹ These pseudo-scientific theories of history, which I have called ‘historicist’ theories, have a rather interesting history of their own.

Homer’s theory of history – like that in Genesis – interprets historical events as the immediate expression of the erratic will of some highly capricious man-like deities. This type of theory was incompatible with the conception of God prevailing in later Judaism and Christianity. And indeed, to view political history -the history of robbery, war, plunder, pillage and of ever-increasing means of destruction – as the direct work of God is nothing short of blasphemy. If history is the work of a merciful God, it can be so only if His will is for us inscrutable, incomprehensible and unfathomable. This makes it impossible for us to understand the meaning of history, if we try to see in history the direct action of a merciful God. Thus a religion that tries to make the meaning of history really comprehensible to us (rather than leave it inscrutable) must try to understand it not as a direct revelation of the divine will of an omnipotent God but as a struggle between some good and some evil powers – powers that act in us and through us. This is what St Augustine tried to do in his book De Civitate Dei. He was influenced not only by the Old Testament but also by Plato, who interpreted political history as the history of the fall from grace of an originally divine, perfect, harmonious and communist city state, whose moral decline was caused by racial degeneration and its consequences: the worldly ambition and selfishness of the leading aristocracy. Another important influence on the work of St Augustine derives from his own Manichean period: from the Persian-Manichean heresy which interpreted this world as an arena for the struggle between the good and the evil principles, personified by Ormuzd and Ahriman.

These influences led St Augustine to describe the political history of mankind as the struggle between the good principle of the civitas dei, and the evil principle of the civitas diaboli – that is, between heaven and hell. And almost all later theories of history – possibly with the exception of some of the more naive theories of progress – can be traced back to this almost Manichean theory of St Augustine. Most of the modern historicist theories simply translate his metaphysical and religious categories into the language of natural or social science. Thus they may merely replace God and the Devil by morally or biologically good races, or races fit to rule, and morally or biologically bad, or unfit, races; or by good classes and bad classes – proletarians and capitalists. (‘We Communists believe’, writes Khrushchev in about 1970, ‘that Capitalism is a hell in which labouring people are condemned to slavery.’²). This hardly alters the character of Augustine’s theory.

The little that may be allowed to be correct in these theories is their inherent assumption that our own ideas and ideals are powers that influence our history. But it is important to realize that good and noble ideas may sometimes have a disastrous influence on history; and that, conversely, we can sometimes find an idea, a historical power, which wills the Bad and works the Good (as Bernard de Mandeville was perhaps the first to see); just as we can often find that an error leads to the discovery of truth.

So we must guard carefully against viewing our highly pluralist history as a drawing in black and white, or as a picture painted in a few contrasting colours. And we must be even more careful not to read into it historical laws that can be used for the prediction of progress, cycles, or doom, or for any similar historical prediction.

Yet unfortunately the general public expects and demands, especially since Hegel, and still more since Spengler, that a real scholar – a sage or a philosopher or a historian – should be able to play the role of an augur or soothsayer: that he should be able to predict the future. And what is even worse, this demand creates its own supply. In fact, the insistent demand has produced quite a glut of prophets. Without much exaggeration one could say that nowadays every intellectual of repute feels an irresistible obligation to become an expert in the art of historical prophecy. And the abysmal depth of his pessimism (for not to be a pessimist would be almost a breach of professional etiquette) is matched by the abysmal profundity and the general impressiveness of his oracular revelations.

I think it is high time to make an attempt to keep soothsaying where it belongs – in the fairground. I do not of course mean to say that soothsayers never predict the truth: if their predictions are sufficiently vague, the number of their true predictions will even exceed that of their false ones. All I assert is that there does not exist a scientific or historical or philosophical method which might help us to produce anything like those ambitious historical predictions for which Spengler created so great a demand.

Whether a historical prediction will come true or not is neither a matter of method, nor of wisdom or intuition: it is purely a matter of chance. These predictions are arbitrary, accidental, and unscientific. But any of them may well achieve a powerful propagandist effect. Provided a sufficient number of people believe in the decline of the West, the West will decline; even if, without that propaganda for its decline, it would have continued to flourish. Prophets, even false prophets, can move mountains; and so can ideas, even wrong ones. Fortunately there may be occasions when it is possible to fight wrong ideas with right ones.

In what follows I shall express some rather optimistic ideas; but they are, most emphatically, not to be taken as predictions of the future, for I do not know what the future holds, and I do not believe in those who believe they do. I am optimistic only about our ability to learn from the past and the present; we can learn that many things, both good and bad, have been and still are possible, and that we have no reason to give up hoping, striving and working for a better world.

My second thesis was that we can give a meaning and set an aim to political history; a meaning and an aim or several meanings and aims, which are beneficent and humane.

Giving a meaning to history can be understood in two different ways: the more important and fundamental one is proposing an aim based on our ethical ideas. In another and less fundamental sense of the expression ‘giving a meaning’, a Kantian philosopher, Theodor Lessing, has described the writing of history as ‘The Giving of Meaning to the Meaningless’ (Geschkhte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen). Theodor Lessing’s thesis (with which I am inclined to agree even though it differs from mine) is this: we may read a meaning into the written, traditional books of history, even though history is meaningless in itself; for example, by asking how our ideas – say, the idea of freedom and the idea of self-emancipation through knowledge – have fared throughout history’s tortuous course. If we are careful not to use the word ‘progress’ in the sense of a ‘law of progress’, we may even give a meaning to traditional history by asking what ‘progress’ we have made, or what setbacks we have suffered, and especially what price we had to pay for making progress in certain directions. Part of the price we have paid is revealed by the history of our many tragic errors – errors in our aims and errors in our choice of means.

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern … I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize … the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Here Fisher states that there are no intrinsic developmental tendencies. Yet he continues as follows:

This is not a doctrine of cynicism and despair. The fact of progress is written plain and large on the pages of history; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.

Thus some progress – by progress Fisher means here social betterment in the fields of freedom and justice, and also economic progress – may occur in spite of the senseless and cruel emergencies of war or power-political strife. But since there are no historical laws that might ensure the continuation of this progress, the future fate of progress – and with it our own fate – will largely depend on ourselves.

I have quoted Fisher not only because I believe that he is right, but also because I want to show how his idea that history depends, in part, on ourselves, is much more ‘meaningful’ and ‘noble’ than the idea that history has its inherent, and inexorable, laws – whether mechanical, dialectical, or organic; or that we are puppets in a historical puppet-show; or victims of superhuman historical powers, such as the powers of Good and Evil; or perhaps victims of the collective forces of proletarians and capitalists.

Thus in writing and reading history, or books of history, we can give a meaning to it. But now I turn to the other and more important sense of ‘giving a meaning to history’: I mean the idea that we can set ourselves tasks; not only as individuals living personal lives, but also as citizens and, particularly, as citizens of the world, who regard the senseless tragedy of history as intolerable and see in it a challenge to do our best to make future history meaningful. The task is immensely difficult, mainly because good intentions and good faith can lead us tragically astray. And because I support the ideas of the Enlightenment, of self-emancipation through knowledge, and of a critical rationalism, I feel it all the more necessary to emphasize the point that even the ideas of the Enlightenment and of rationalism have led to the most terrible consequences.

It was Robespierre’s rule of terror that taught Kant, who had welcomed the French Revolution, that the most heinous crimes can be committed in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity: crimes just as heinous as those committed in the name of Christianity during the Crusades, in various epochs of witch hunting, and during the Thirty Years’ War. And with Kant we may learn a lesson from the terror of the French Revolution, a lesson which cannot be repeated too often: that fanaticism is always evil and incompatible with the aim of a pluralist society, and that it is our duty to oppose it in any form – even when its aims, though fanatically pursued, are in themselves ethically unobjectionable, and still more so when its aims coincide with our own personal aims. The dangers of fanaticism, and our duty to oppose it under all circumstances, are two of the most important lessons we can learn from history.

But is it possible to avoid fanaticism and its excesses? Does not history teach us that all attempts to be guided by ethical aims must be futile, just because those aims can play a historical role only when they are believed in and upheld fanatically? And does not the history of all religions and all revolutions show that the fanatical belief in an ethical idea will not only pervert it, but again and again transform it into its very opposite? That it will make us open all prison doors in the name of liberty, only to close them almost at once behind the new enemies of our new liberty? That it makes us teach the equality of all men, but also, that ‘some are more equal than others’? And is not this equality a jealous god who commands us to visit the inequity of some of the less equal fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation? Does it not make us proclaim the brotherhood of all men; and also, that we are the keepers of our brethren – as if to remind us that our wish to rule over them may be fratricidal? Does not history teach us that all ethical ideas are pernicious, and the best of them often the most pernicious? Can we not learn from the French and Russian and more recently from some African revolutions that the ideas of the Enlightenment and the dreams of a better world are not merely nonsense, but criminal nonsense?

My answer to these questions is contained in my third thesis: we can learn from the history of Western Europe and the United States that the attempt to give to our history an ethical meaning or aim need not always be futile. That is not to say that we ever have realized, or ever will fully realize, our ethical aims. My assertion is very modest. All I say is that an ethically inspired social criticism has been successful in some places, and that it has been able to eliminate, at least for the time being, some of the worst shortcomings of social and public life.

This then is my third thesis. It is optimistic in that it is a denial of all pessimistic views of history. For all theories of cyclical evolution, and of decline, are clearly refuted if it is possible that we ourselves impose successfully an ethical aim, an ethical meaning, upon history.

But there are certain very definite prerequisites for the imposition of ethical aims, for the successful betterment of social relations. Social ideals and social criticism were crowned by success only where people had learnt to respect opinions that differ from their own, and to be sober and realistic in their political aims: where they had learnt that the attempt to create the Kingdom of Heaven on earth may easily succeed in turning our earth into a hell for our fellow men.

The first countries to learn this lesson were Switzerland and England, where some Utopian attempts to create a Kingdom of Heaven on earth soon led to disenchantment.

The English Revolution, the first of the great modern revolutions, did not bring about the Kingdom of Heaven but the execution of Charles I and the dictatorship of Cromwell. Thoroughly disenchanted, England learnt its lesson: it was converted to believe in the need for a rule of law. The attempt of James II to re-introduce Roman Catholicism in England by force foundered on the rock of that attitude. Tired of religious and civil strife, England was ready to listen to the arguments for religious tolerance of John Locke and other pioneers of the Enlightenment, and to accept the principle that an enforced religion can have no value; that one may guide people into church, but must not try to force them into it against their convictions (as Pope Innocent XI expressed it).

The American Revolution managed to avoid the trap of fanaticism and intolerance.

It can hardly be accidental that Switzerland, England and America, -which all had to go through some disenchanting political experiences, are the countries which have succeeded in achieving, by democratic reforms, ethical-political aims which would have been unattainable by means of revolution, fanaticism, dictatorship and the use of force.

At any rate we can learn not only from the history of the English-speaking democracies but also from the history of Switzerland and Scandinavia that we can set ourselves aims, and that we can sometimes achieve them – provided that these aims are neither too wide, nor too narrow, but conceived in a pluralist spirit – that is, that they embody respect for the freedom and convictions of all sorts of people with widely differing ideas and beliefs. This shows that it is not impossible to give meaning to our political history; which is, precisely, my third thesis.

In my view it is the Romantic School and its criticism of the Enlightenment that were superficial, and not the Enlightenment, even though its name has become a synonym for superficiality. Kant and the Enlightenment were ridiculed as superficial and naive for taking seriously the ideals of liberty, and for believing that the idea of democracy was more than a transient historical phenomenon. And nowadays we can hear again a lot about the necessary transience of these ideas. But instead of explaining their necessary transience and prophesying their impending decline, it would be better to fight for their survival. For these ideas have not only shown their vitality, and their power to survive terrible attacks: they also have turned out to provide, as Kant thought they would, the necessary framework for a pluralist society; and vice versa: the pluralist society is the necessary framework for the working out of political meanings and aims; for any policy which transcends the immediate present; for any policy which reads a meaning into our past history, and tries to give our present and future history a meaning.

Enlightenment and Romanticism have one important point in common: both see the history of mankind mainly as a history of contending ideas and beliefs; as a history of ideological struggles. In this respect they agree. But it is in their attitude towards these ideas that Enlightenment and Romanticism diverge so widely. Romanticism values the power of faith as such: it values its vigour and depth, independently of the question of its truth. This it seems is the real reason why the Romantic School is so contemptuous of the Enlightenment. For the Enlightenment views faith and the power of faith with a measure of distrust. Although it teaches tolerance and even respect for other people’s faith, its greatest value is not faith, but truth. And it teaches that there is something like absolute truth, even though it may be unknown to us; and that we can get nearer to it through correcting our errors. This, in fact, is the fundamental thesis of the philosophy of the Enlightenment; and in this lies its greatest contrast with the historical relativism of the Romantics.

But the approach to truth is not easy. There is only one way towards it, the way through error. Only through our errors can we learn; and only he will learn who is ready to appreciate and even to cherish the errors of others as stepping stones towards truth, and who searches for his own errors: who tries to find them, since only when he has become aware of them can he free himself from them.

The idea of our self-emancipation through knowledge is therefore not the same as the idea of our mastery over nature. The former is, rather, the idea of a spiritual self-liberation from error, from superstition and from false idols. It is the idea of one’s own spiritual self-emancipation and growth, through one’s own criticism of one’s own ideas – though the help of others will always be needed.

Thus we see that the Enlightenment does not reject fanaticism and fanatical forms of belief for purely utilitarian reasons, nor because it has found that better things can be achieved in politics and in practical affairs by a more sober attitude. Its rejection of fanatical belief is, rather, the natural corollary of the idea that we should search for truth by criticizing our errors. This self-criticism and this self-emancipation are possible only in a pluralist society, that is, in an open society which tolerates our errors as well as the errors of others.

The idea of self-emancipation through knowledge, which was the basic idea of the Enlightenment, is in itself a powerful enemy of fanaticism; for it makes us try hard to detach ourselves or even to dissociate ourselves from our own ideas (in order to look at them critically) instead of identifying ourselves with them. And the recognition of the sometimes overwhelming historical power of ideas should teach us how important it is to free ourselves from the overpowering influence of false or wrong ideas. In the interests of the quest for truth and of our liberation from errors we have to train ourselves to view our own favourite ideas just as critically as those we oppose.

This is not a concession to relativism. In fact, the very idea of error presupposes the idea of truth. Admitting that the other man may be right and that I may be wrong obviously does not and cannot mean that each man’s personal point of view is equally true or equally tenable and that, as the relativists say, everybody is right within his own frame of reference, though he may be wrong within that of somebody else. In the western democracies many of us have learned that at times we are wrong and our opponents are right; but too many who have digested this important truth have slipped into relativism. In our great historical task of creating a free pluralist society, and with it a social framework for the growth of knowledge and for self-emancipation through knowledge, nothing is more vital than to be able to view our own ideas critically; without however becoming relativists or sceptics, and without losing the courage and the determination to fight for our convictions, even though we realize that these convictions should always be open to correction, and that only through correcting them may we free ourselves from error, thus making it possible for us to grow in knowledge.

Notes

1 See The Open Society and Its Enemies, 9th reprint of the 5th edition, vol. I, 1991, vol. II, 1992, Routledge, London; also The Poverty of Historicism, 14th impression, Routledge, London, 1991.

2 See Khrushchev Remembers, with an Introduction, Commentary and Notes by Edward Crankshaw. Translated and Edited by Strobe Talbott. Book Club Associates, London, 1971. Copyright 1971 by Little, Brown and Com pany (Inc.); see especially pp. 521–2.

3 H. A. L. Fisher, History of Europe, 1936, vol. I, p. vii.

A broadcast delivered in German on the Bavarian Broadcasting Network in February 1961, in a series of broadcasts ‘On the Meaning of History’. English text by the author.