No More Learning

This thesis of Aristotle's has had incalculable consequences for the history of philosophy. If it can be said of Hegel (as was also mentioned earlier)4
that his philosophy is at the same time dynamic 'as a dialectic and ontological as a theory of being - is at the same time static and dynamic - that is, if you like, a continuation or sublimation of one
? ? LECTURE TWELVE
87
? of the basic theses of western metaphysics, which you find prefigured in Aristotle. But that is not all: in our own time this doctrine of the eternal character of the relationship of matter and form, and thus the doctrine of the eternity of movement, has cropped up again in Heidegger's theory which seeks to grasp historicity or temporality as an invariant, an Existenzial, that is, a basic condition of exist- ence. 5 It is clearly always the case, when the dynamic of society, which is reflected in thought, causes the assumption of invariants to become problematic, that philosophy shows a tendency to make that variability, and thus change itself, into an invariant. In this way even change is assimilated into the doctrine of a static ontology, and is thus rescued. And that is precisely what also happens in Aristotle, who was on the one hand a teleological philosopher of development, and on the other a philosopher of being, an ontologist. He extricated himself from the difficulty by ontologizing change itself, as we would put it today. And this in turn had the consequence that, through his conceptual sleight of hand, through his reducing movement to its concept and thereby immobilizing it, change is in reality conjured out of his thought. By being reinterpreted as a condition of being, change is concretely neutralized, in the sense that, in face of this uni- versal mutability, concrete changes no longer carry any weight. This idea is also fully consonant with the other basic thesis of Aristotle's that I expounded to you: the one which endows the universal, as
against the particular, with both metaphysical and moral priority. Now, the reason given by Aristotle for this eternal quality of
the relationship between the two basic categories, and thus for the eternal nature of movement itself - which, incidentally, was also conceived ontologically by Heraclitus - is none other than that both the genesis and the disappearance of this movement, and thus of the relationship between the two, can in turn only be caused by a move- ment. Under all conceivable circumstances, therefore, movement must be eternal. Hence the doctrine that movement can never have begun and can never cease. In this way the dynamic itself is made an invari- ant, is made static. And Goethe's dictum that all striving and struggle amount to everlasting peace in the Lord6 also has its model in this theory of Aristotle - just to demonstrate that these Aristotelian con- cepts have indeed become common property of the western mind.
Or, to put it differently, it shows how much that which is taken for granted by unreflective consciousness within our culture is dependent on a highly specific philosophy, and - far more important - how much its truth, its validity, itself depends on the validity of the philosophy from which such theses are derived. ? I repeat yet again that even here, where we are concerned with the concepts of that which moves, with
?
? ?
? 88 LECTURE TWELVE
? motion, change, the eternity of movement, they are dealt with by deduction from pure concepts, without regard to their sensible content. And in this procedure of drawing conclusions from pure concepts, more than in the explicit content of the doctrine of the precedence of the universal over the particular, Aristotle's conceptual-realistic or
anti-nominalist moment is expressed, although up to now we have had much occasion to talk about precisely the opposite, nominalist moment. Now, according to this kind of deduction, the ultimate reason for eternal movement must be something immobile, otherwise we should arrive at a regressus ad infinitum. I have mentioned antiquity's dislike of the concept of infinity,8 which should really be seen as an aversion rather than a result of mathematical ignorance. It is very characteristic of this outlook that, for Aristotle, the fact that failure
to assume such an immobile entity at the outset would have led to an infinite regression was sufficient grounds for assuming the existence of an 'unmoved mover', or, as he calls it, a a. K{V7jTOV KLVOVV, that is, something which, unmoved itself, moves all things. And with this concept we have made the transition from Aristotelian metaphysics to what might perhaps be called Aristotelian theology.
Perhaps I might remind you here that I said to you earlier9 that metaphysics in the precise sense I have set out here is both a critique and a reprise, a resumption, of theology. It is a peculiarity of meta- physical thinking - it is, I might almost say, one of the invariants of metaphysical thinking, which are repeated over and over again in its history - that the conceptual operations it performs, which aim initially at something like a critique of mythological beings, repeatedly end in reinstating these mythical beings, or the divinity; but it no longer does so in a belief in the direct experience or the sensible perceptibility or the substantial existence of the divinities or divinity, but on the basis of conceptual thought. What I said earlier about the rescuing intention which accompanies the critical aim of all meta- physics now takes on its precise meaning, which is quite simply that metaphysics attempts to rescue through concepts what it simultane- ously calls into question through its critique. That is a moment which can be traced through the entire history of western metaphysics. Now, in Aristotle this first and unmoved thing, or this first and unmoved being, this a. K{V7jTOV KLVOVV, is immaterial; it is form without matter, it is pure actuality. The later medieval concept of the actus purus is a direct translation of this notion of the prime mover as the purely immaterial being. Aristotle harks back here to a doctrine I have also described to you,10 and which only now, so to speak, bears fruit in the economy of his thought - and, in general, the theorems of thinkers
are apt to have their origins very far from the terminus ad quem;
? ? LECTURE TWELVE 89
? that is to say that they are conceived in such a way that they only yield a profit at the end, if I may express it so vulgarly. I am saying, therefore, that only here does the doctrine that matter, as something fortuitous, could always equally well be other than it is, come to fruition, only here does it come into its own. Only the incorporeal,
according to Aristotle, is immutable and absolutely immobile: you have here, therefore, in this doctrine of the ultimate being as some- thing at the same time immobile, immutable and incorporeal, the basic thesis of objective idealism - although, and I repeat this too/1 the reflection on the subject which this idealism later carries through is not performed in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here, practically every- thing which in Hegel, whose thought can be seen as running closely parallel to Aristotle's, is developed by transcendental analysis, that is, from absolute and pure subjectivity, is attributed, in intentione recta, to principles or concepts existing in themselves. Form is the perfect
being and matter the imperfect - and from that Aristotle concludes that the prime mover, as pure form, and on account of its very purity, is the absolutely perfect.
You find here two moments which became very important in the later history of western thought and to which I should like to draw your special attention. First there is the affirmative and optimistic
moment possessed by almost all great metaphysical systems. It holds that just because form is the perfect and matter the imperfect, and because form is in every sense given priority over reality, reality is thereby itself made into something positive which, if not perfect, at least tends towards perfection. This affirmative trait which has accompanied philosophy for so long is already present in Plato and, as you see here, in Aristotle too. That is to say, that by reducing the
world to its concept and making the concept the supreme and perfect entity, this thinking already has the tendency to justify the world itself in its current state of being so and not otherwise. The second of these moments that I want to point out to you is that the conclusion that the prime mover must be the absolutely perfect entity is an ancient precursor of the ontological proof of God. Absolute perfection and
absolute reality are equated, since reality for Aristotle is precisely EVEpYELa, that which has become form and to that extent is the higher. However - unlike 5t Anselm of Canterbury later - Aristotle does not draw conclusions about existence from the concept of perfection, but concludes from the structure of existence - the structure of the preced- ence of form over matter - that the being of God must arise virtually out of pure thought. Furthermore - and this, too, is in agreement with motifs of the later Plato which date back in the history of philosophy to Pythagoreanism - the prime mover must necessarily be only One.
?
?
90 LECTURE TWELVE
? That is to say that it is itself the ultimate purpose - and apart from this ultimate purpose, this 00 EVEKa or TEAo? , no other purpose is conceivable. This is where you find the idealistic motif most strongly, as the antithesis between unity, as the unity of subjectivity, and the diversity of diffuse and divergent nature, is the real theme of any idealist philosophy. What is astonishing is that the whole instru- mentarium, if you like, of later idealism is to be found in Aristotle,
although that which was later to constitute its conceptual foundation, the reference to the thinking subject, is not yet explicitly present. But he nowhere comes closer to what in the later terminology can
be called the principle of identity than here, where he deals with the oneness of the prime mover. This proposition is arrived at by Aristotle, however, more or less from the empirical side, just as, indeed, it is one of the basic endeavours of his metaphysics to present metaphysical propositions as if they not only agreed with the observa- tions of natural science but were necessarily generated by them. To this extent, one might say anachronistically, Aristotle is really much like a philosopher of the seventeenth century. From the oneness of the world and the oneness of movement as he conceives it, he deduces cosmologically the absolute oneness of the prime mover.
What I said about the transition of Aristotle's metaphysics to theology can be seen most clearly here, for in this notion of the abso- lutely single prime mover, which for purely logical reasons - that is,
by virtue of the theory of movement - can tolerate no other beside it, you already find Christian monotheism speculatively prefigured in Greek philosophy. And it is undoubtedly no accident that Plato, who certainly did not want to be guilty of impiety towards Greek poly-
theism, speaks very often, at least through the mouth of Socrates, of a {h6? , the god, and not of Ot {hoL, the gods. In this, the doctrine of the absolutely unitary prime mover is in complete agreement with the
immanently monotheistic tendency of speculative philosophy, which is already hinted at in the principle of the oneness of synthesis as opposed to the multiplicity of the material of experience - or, as it is called here, of matter or mere potentiality. The decisive breakthrough of what I have called Aristotle's objective, but not yet self-aware, idealism occurs in the proposition - and this is indeed an openly idealist proposition - that the prime mover as absolutely incorporeal spirit is, to use Aristotle's term, VOV? ;12 the expression vov? is derived from the word VOELV, which in Greek means much the same as 'to think', in the sense of the subjective activity of thinking. This goes back to the famous proposition of Parmenides, that being - which Parmenides understands as nothing other than absolute and abstract oneness - is the same as thinking. 13 I am well aware that in modern
? LECTURE TWELVE 91
? philological criticism the meaning of this proposition of Parmenides is a subject of controversy. 14 And there will no doubt be not a few classical philologists who will refuse to reduce this vav,) and the VOELV associated with it to the subjective human mind. In this they will undoubtedly be in accord with Aristotle's explicit intention; without question, Aristotle would have said precisely the same thing. Never- theless, it might reasonably be wondered whether, without such a VOELV, without the model derived from the human activity of think- ing, this notion of pure, self-sufficient thought would have been con- ceivable at all. Consequently, although this reflection on subjectivity does not take place in Aristotle, it is palpably close - if anything as
insubstantial as pure thought can be referred to as palpable. That is to say, that a different model for this pure and disembodied actuality of the divinity as the pure act of thought simply cannot be found. It is the point at which the project for an objective ontology clashes with the concept and violently absorbs it, and this in turn implies the recourse to subjectivity on which all idealist metaphysics is founded.
The ultimate ground of all movement, therefore - to state the matter in Aristotelian terms - is the divinity itself as pure and perfect mind or spirit (Geist). Its activity - so Aristotle's argumentation runs - can only consist in thought. This is the working out of the idea of
vav,) as the truly absolute entity; I would remind you in passing that the concept of vov') in this strong, metaphysical sense has a long prehistory going back to Anaxagoras. The activity of the pure, divine spirit can only consist in thought because, according to this philosophy, any other activity - that is, what is understood by praxis both in the
moral sense, 7TpaTTEtV, and in the sense of making things, 7TOtELv - has its purpose outside itself, whereas that is inconceivable in the case of the first, pure, self-sufficient being. This can have its purpose only in itself; it is purpose to itself alone. 15 That is the justification for the proposition that god is pure actuality and is not determined by a purpose lying outside himself; that is the argumentation underlying Aristotle's doctrine of the actus purus. Now, this argument has a further, extraordinarily far-reaching consequence in Aristotle's Meta- physics. This pure activity of the mind, which has no purpose outside
itself, is equated by Aristotle with &Ewp{a - pure, purposeless thinking related to no real praxis. And the apotheosis of pure thought, pure contemplation regarded as an end in itself without any relation to anything existing outside it - that is, the absolute status granted to pure mental activity, which is the foundation of everything which has later in a precise sense been called western culture, and against which the fiercest criticism of idealism has been directed - that apotheosis
had its
origin in this theoretical concept of Aristotle's. 16
?
? 92 LECTURE TWELVE
? This apotheosis also leaves its imprint on his ethics, in that the latter gives precedence to the so-called dianoetic virtues - the virtues residing in pure contemplation and self-reflection without regard to action - over all other virtues. Thinking, unlike praxis, is sufficient unto itself. It is as if the separation of physical and mental work, which
is connected to the process of the division of labour and in which mental work has gained preponderance over physical labour, has now been reflected ideologically (one would have to say) by meta- physics. That which has now proved the dominant principle, namely AOYOS, and with it the people who are dispensed from physical work, is justified as the higher entity in and for itself, while no consideration is given to the necessary dependence of mind on that over which it rules and from which it has severed itself. That this marks a crucial historical turning point in ancient philosophy has often been pointed out, and you do not need me to present it to you as a great discovery. It means, however, that the glorification of pure theory as against praxis in the polis - a praxis which had been regarded as the highest category by the Pythagoreans and still played a decisive role in Plato - originated at a time (and Aristotle was, after all, the teacher and contemporary of Alexander the Great) when the possibility of auto-
nomous political activity by the individual had been reduced to a minimum, and when the individual was thus thrown back willy-nilly on reflection. Political praxis, as it had been carried on in accordance with traditional Greek - that is, Athenian or Attic - democracy, was no longer possible. And out of this necessity, this deprivation, the metaphysicizing of theory, which was taken to be the principle of the divinity itself, made not only a virtue, but the highest virtue. Accord? ingly, the object of divine thought could only be divine thought itself, because, as pure thought, it abided within itself. ! 7 You will be reminded here of the later Hegel's definition of logic as a game the world spirit plays with itself8 - and I would remind you that for Hegel, very much as for Aristotle, metaphysics and logic were really the same thing. 19 But I can only indicate this idea here, and must save its more detailed elaboration for the next lecture.
. ;
? ? ? ? LECTURE THIRTEEN
13 July 1965
? ? Today I should like to bring to an end my exposition of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the reflections on it that we have been pursuing together. I would remind you that the object of divine thought, ac- cording to Aristotle, can only be divine thought itself. What is quite remarkable about this thesis is that - despite the fact that I have told you ad nauseam that subjective reflection, reference to the subject of knowledge, does not play any part in his philosophy, at least as a theme - this thesis in fact represents the extreme point reached by subjective idealism through subjective reflection. For in idealism it is the case that if everything is finally reducible to mind, then the con- tent of mind, that which itself is not mind, the not-I, nevertheless is mind; and that consequently the absolute, which corresponds in Aris- totle to the divine principle, can have nothing other than itself as its
content. The argumentation used by Aristotle to reach this conclusion is significantly different from that which I have indicated to you here. It is - how shall I say? - statically, hierarchically ontological, and not dialectical. It maintains that the value or validity of thinking depends on its content; but since the highest content which thought could have is the divine mind itself, then the content of the divine mind is - the divine mind! Accordingly, in the highest thoughts, subject and object coincide, just as they do later in absolute idealism; that is to say, the thought and the thinking are held to be the same. I would point out in passing that in this thesis, put forward with a certain innocence by Aristotle, there is manifested a paradox or an absurdity which disap-
pears in the more sophisticated presentation of these ideas at the height
?
?
94 LECTURE THIRTEEN
? ? of German idealism. We should not be persuaded, however, that it has ceased to exist; and we come across it, indeed we positively collide with it, when we meet these infinitely complex and difficult speculat- ive ideas in their elementary form in Aristotle. For in his case we are obliged to ask the question which must be addressed to all idealism: what does mind, or thinking, or knowledge really amount to, if it oilly thinks itself? Does this not make thought itself, and thus the absolute
which thought is supposed to be, one single, immense tautology? This moment recurs later, as I said, in idealism; but in Aristotle it is open to view in all its crassness. And the god who actually thinks
nothing but himself is not wholly unlike the navel-gazer we can see . downstairs in this building, in the form of the statue of the so-called sage,l who gives us the feeling that he represents being and reflects on being; and that what being says to him is only: being, being, being. I should say in fairness that this joke is not my own, but goes back to an admittedly somewhat different formulation of Hegel's. In a polemic
against Jacobi he remarked that the thought which immersed itself in the concept of being reminded him of the Tibetan rite of the prayer- wheel, in which the worshippers constantly say nothing but 'om', 'om', 'om'. 2 I don't wish to be disrespectful towards Aristotle, but if for a moment one steps outside the intellectual edifice - I almost said, the cathedral - which is his thought, such ideas do enter one's mind. In his work this notion is expressed in the absolutely idealist formulation that the thinking of god - Hegel would say: the thinking of the world
spirit - is a thinking of thinking or, to use the supreme formulation
of this principle in Aristotle: the v6'Y)at? VO? at:w? , the thinking of
thinking. 3 Now the scientist in Aristotle was clearly not too comfort-
able on this summit of his thought, and he justified the idea of the
v6'Y)at? vo? at:w? by saying that the beatitude of god lay in his self-
contemplation - a motif which became crucial to the whole of medi-
eval theology. Ideas such as that human beings are created as finite
and sinful creatures because God wants to be loved in freedom, for his
own sake as the absolute, by finite and fallible beings, are trans-
parently related to this motif. But this interpretation of divine thought
as v6'Y)at? vo? aEw? is so extraordinarily fertile because - and this is
perhaps still more important than the conception of the absolute it
contains - it amounts to something like a guide to the beatific life or
a guide to reason, since, in keeping with the Aristotelian principles of
analogy and teleology, the human mind should approximate itself to
the divine spirit as closely as it possibly can. Now, this idea already
contains the whole programme of philosophy as self-reflection. One
might almost say that since Aristotle philosophy in general has been the implementation of just this v6YJat? vo? aEw? that he ascribes to the
? ? ? ? '
LECTURE THIRTEEN 95
,
? divine principle as the primal image of all philosophy. One might embark here, incidentally, on some reflections along the lines of Feuerbachian enlightenment, to the effect that the idea that the divin- ity derives happiness from self-contemplation contains a quite imper- missible anthropomorphism - moreover, a narcissistic and thus a psychological anthropomorphism. Following up Feuerbach's motif, one might argue that the force of egoism, the stunting of human beings which prevents them from loving and makes them capable of loving only themselves - one might argue that this narcissistic tendency, this diversion of the capacity of love onto the self, is here projected onto the divinity in order to endow it with absolute metaphysical justifica- tion, whereas one might ask what sort of a divinity it is which, instead of loving its creatures, loves only itself. But great minds have not been much troubled by this for the past few thousand years.
All the same, this idea does contain a moment which is very im- portant for the concept of philosophy - the model of self-reflection. If divine thought is regarded as the thinking of thinking, then precisely the intentio obliqua which does not appear as such in Aristotle's thought - that the essential principle of philosophy does not lie in its thinking about objects or about what is different from itself, but in reflecting on itself - is anticipated as a metaphysical principle. 4 To that extent one might say that this intentio obliqua, which is
only carried out much later in the history of philosophy, is already prefigured dialectically, in intentione recta, in this definition of the absolute as the thinking of its own thought. Moreover, for the pro- fessor of physics which Aristotle also was, this metaphysics also yielded an immediate profit - if you will once more permit me such a slovenly manner of speech. The remarkable thing is that this im- mense sublimation of the divine spirit, which really amounts to nothing
other than its self-reflection, represents a kind of unburdening of the empirical world. In my Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, using the example of Husserl's philosophy, which takes up many motifs from antiquity, I tried to characterize this phenomenon as the sacrifice of the empirical. 5 That is to say that through this very contentment with
his own self-contemplation, God abandons the world. In Aristotle's Metaphysics this abandonment is expressed in the doctrine that al- though all creation, all matter, all finitude moves towards the absolute principle, that principle does not act directly on the world, does not go outside itself. God does not turn the world towards himself; rather, teleology is brought about by the mere existence of god, as a kind of
structurally logical hierarchy. This marks a clear boundary between Aristotle's thought and theology, in that the former is turned towards the world, towards existence. If I might give you a further perspective
?
?
96 LECTURE THIRTEEN
? on the history of metaphysics: you will not find it hard to recognize this motif, that the unmoved mover remains outside movement, in the much later theory of deism, which amounted to an attempt to reconcile the old theological heritage with the scientific Enlightenment. However, although, for Aristotle, the highest good is also the highest purpose, towards which everything strives and everything moves, this
is only the case within the context of his hierarchical thinking, which distinguishes various gradations of purpose - and not in the sense of a divine intervention or influence.
I would remark in passing that the whole of philosophy abounds with formulations such as that the highest good is at the same time the highest purpose. If you open any book on any metaphysical philosopher you will always - especially when you get towards the conclusion - hear such things as: the highest purpose is also the highest good, or: perfect beauty is also perfect truth, or: in the absolute,
existence and essence prove to be the same; and so forth. For the moment I would only urge you, when you come across such general metaphysical equations in your studies of the history of philosophy, to be slightly on guard, and to derive from them a certain mistrust of metaphysics. For if philosophy really is the capacity for differentiation, the ability to distinguish in thought, instead of reducing everything to an abstract formula, then, to be sure, one would expect philosophy to relate its highest categories to one another and not leave them isolated;
but if they are all to be one, that would give rise to something like the night for which Hegel took Schelling to task - the night in which all cats are grey. 6 It is a kind of evidence against the substantiality of ontology - against the claim that ontology really does have access to the essences it purports to isolate - that it is never able to sustain these essences separately, but in the end posits them all as one, with- out being able to maintain their separateness within this oneness.
One of the few thinkers of the rationalist or metaphysical type who noticed this, incidentally, was Lessing, who, as far as I know, was the
first representative of that tradition to oppose, and polemically attack, this notion of oneness, this undifferentiated identity of the highest principles. ? Traditional philosophy gives us serious grounds to mistrust it, I believe, whenever it resolves everything into one, into identity, in a kind of grand finale, since it thereby forgoes the very concreteness which its results ought to have.
And, unless I am mistaken, it was not the least of Hegel's motives in developing his dialectic that he attempted both to retain an onto- logical basic structure and to do justic to differences - although, in the end, everything turns out to be the same in his philosophy too. In my opinion it is very difficult to distinguish the postulation of absolute
? ? LECTURE THIRTEEN 97
? identity from actual uniformity, indeed monotony, in which nothing differs from anything else - an all-ness of thought which actually says nothing at all. At any rate, the physicist Aristotle can credit himself with the fact that there is no creative activity of God, no intervention in the world's course in his Metaphysics. In this, through the extra- ordinary tension and sublimation of the metaphysical concept in his thought, he is entirely a philosopher of the Hellenist enlightenment. And one almost finds oneself entertaining the blasphemous idea that the Epicurean theory of the absolute detachment of the gods, who let human existence pass before them as a kind of spectacleS - a theory which appeared not long after Aristotle - is itself a Peripatetic legacy not very far removed from this conception of Aristotle's. I would point out, incidentally, that the systematic division that was made,
even in antiquity, and precisely in the Hellenistic period, between the four great schools - the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Peripatetics, Stoics and Epicureans - was itself a kind of administrative com- partmentalization. In reality, the transitions within such an epoch in which, for social reasons, certain ideas necessarily impressed them- selves on thinkers of all shades, were incomparably more fluid than this schoolroomish division might lead us to expect. Later, too, in patristic philosophy and, above all, in the transitions between ancient
and Christian philosophy, these schools were not distinguished nearly as sharply as schoolroom usage suggests. I believe that if one were to elaborate systematically the elements in Aristotle that I have just described, perhaps slightly anachronistically, as Hellenistic, the differ- ences between the two specifically Hellenistic schools, Stoicism and
: Epicureanism, would diminish.
Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, with this historical reflection - no, reflection is too presumptuous a term - . with this historical note I will bring to an end what I wanted to say to
. you about Aristotle.
One could, fully in keeping with what I have sketched for you, write a history of the whole of metaphysics on the basis of Aristotle. The task would be to analyse what became of his categories - and for what reasons, whether immanent philosophical ones or others imposed from outside. Here, of course, one needs to be aware that it would be a crude and primitive approach to assume that there are, on the one hand, social modifications to thought and, on the other, something like an internal development of its categories. This brings us to a proposition relating to the history of philosophy, or a theory of intel- lectual history, that I should like to develop somewhat, although I
cannot pursue it too far. It is that social motifs - in this case the powerlessness of the individual, the retreat into private life, all the
?
?
98
LECTURE THIRTEEN
? moments we call Hellenistic - do not influence thought from outside, but that, in a way which is difficult to pin down and which has not been analysed in principle up to now, they impinge on the immanent
coherence of thought itself, making themselves felt in the internal argumentation of the individual philosopher. If a theoretician of intel- lectual history were to attempt to understand this highly remarkable connection, which establishes within a philosophy a logic which is in curious harmony with social experiences imposed from outside, without that philosophy having to adapt itself externally to them, that would be an extremely important task. Perhaps there is someone among you who will seriously take up this question. Using the ex- ample of a number of Aristotelian categories, I have set out for you in
paradigmatic or exemplary form (as one says today) what became of those categories. But as I have promised to hold a series of lectures on the concept and problems of metaphysics, and have neither the intention nor the time to give you an entire history of metaphysics, I cannot pursue this question further. Instead I think I should use the last lectures to express some reflections on metaphysics which are located at the opposite historical extreme: that is, reflections on meta-
physics which seem to me timely and unavoidable today. You will understand that in doing so I shall have to adopt a more hypothetical and sometimes indicative approach than in the account I have given you up to now. However, I think I can promise that you will find the ideas I shall present to you in the next lectures fully developed in my
book, of which I am beginning to get an overview. 9 But before I pass on to those questions, I should like to consider one further matter of
general principle.
Please cast your minds back to what I said earlierlO about the history
of metaphysics, a history prefigured in Aristotle, which I presented as an attempt to rescue categories which were originally theological, but to do so by means of a rational critique, that is, by reason. It could therefore be said that metaphysics is a translation of theological con- ceptions into categories of reason, that it is a conceptualization of those conceptions. This could perhaps be more fully demonstrated using Plato's doctrine of Ideas, since he was closer to theology than the much more empirical and scientific Aristotle. And if it were demonstrated that, through these mechanisms of conceptualization, conceptual thought was installed as the authority responsible for metaphysics and the absolute, that would imply that conceptual thought and the con- cept itself had become, as it were, the legal basis of metaphysics. That conclusion, that metaphysics had been turned into thinking, could also
be drawn from the thesis of the thinking of thinking, of metaphysics as the concept which had become aware of itself. Now, that is indeed
i
? ? LECTURE THIRTEEN
99
? the case, and has been the case in almost all ontologies, and is espe-
cially so in what are called rationalist philosophies, in which you can , observe over and over again that the structure of being is declared to
, be identical to the structure of thought. Ontology as the doctrine of the basic constitutive concepts of being really means only that the " basic structures of thought are elevated to categories of being. This, : too, is a principle that was first expressed by Hegel, with a trenchancy , and radicalism that I can indicate by citing his proposition that logic , is at the same time metaphysics. ll But what I should like you to see is that this hypostasis of the pure forms of thinking as the forms of being
is already implied in the transition from theological thinking to metaphysical speculation. For by attaching metaphysics firmly to the categories of thought, thought sets itself up as the justification of metaphysics and, by claiming jurisdiction over it, implicitly asserts that it is itself metaphysics - even if it does not yet overtly admit as much. So if the question of metaphysics is raised today, I would say - and this may prepare you for the matters which are going to oc- cupy us - that the basic question in discussing metaphysics is the one concerning the legitimacy of this equation. If one thinks about meta- physics today - and we have no choice, we have lost our innocence: metaphysics can no longer be anything other than a thinking about metaphysics - this presupposes a kind of critical self-reflection of
thought, in the sense that, through such self-reflection of thought and of the pure forms of thought, one asks oneself whether thought and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute. For, overtly or latently, that is really the thesis of the whole metaphysical tradition. Per- haps it would not be immodest of me to refer in this context to the first chapter of Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, entitled 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus' (Critique of logical absolutism). 12 In it I attempt to do what I have just sketched for you, but in the oppos-
' ite direction, by posing the question of the absolute validity of the logical forms themselves, and calling that validity into question in an immanent analysis carried out from a dialectical standpoint. And if the pure forms of thought, which are manifested most consummately in pure logic, are not the absolute they understand themselves to be, the conclusion to be drawn would be that thought itself, as some- thing conditioned and enmeshed in conditionality, cannot be made into the absolute it has always claimed to be in traditional metaphys- ics. In my book I did not draw this conclusion as explicitly as I am doing now, and that is why I am bringing that text to your attention,
as a kind of transition to the matters we are about to consider.
The method I shall adopt in the ideas I am about to develop is, however, quite different. I told you that in these last lectures I would
? ? ? ? ?
?
? 100 LECTURE THIRTEEN
? like to start from extreme positions. And so I shall now consider - as far as can be done with any claim to general validity - the possible status of what might be called metaphysical experience today. What is meant by metaphysical experience you will, of course, only gather more precisely from what I am about to explain in some detail. I will not be giving away a big secret - and will perhaps just provoke a laugh - if I tell you that, for me, there seems to be no possible treatment of the question of metaphysics other than the dialectical one. Now, a
dialectical treatment cannot suppose - and I come here to the specific nature of the experience I wish to talk about - that the immutable is true and substantial while the transient is inferior and despicable, a mere mode or deception of the senses, as which it has been tirelessly denounced by philosophers since Plato. If we start from an aware-
ness that, for us, the equation of the immutable with the good, the true and the beautiful has been simply refuted, then the content of metaphysics is changed. And what I want to explain to you first is the historical compassion which prevents one from presupposing such an immutability, and thus changes the contents of metaphysics. In the light of what we have experienced in our time - and I am aware that, in the face of these experiences, the form of a lecture, and the attempt even to touch on such things in the language of philosophy and from the vantage point of a lectern, has something unseemly, ridiculous, even shameless about it (yet one cannot get away from it) - these experiences, I say, change the content of metaphysics. The mutual indifference of the temporal world and ideas, which has been asserted throughout metaphysics, can no longer be maintained. There are isolated motifs scattered in the history of ideas which hint at this. And, curiously enough, they are to be found less in the history of philo-
sophy, if you leave aside certain elements in Hegel, than in heretical theology - that is to say, in mystical speculation, which has always been essentially heretical and has always occupied a precarious posi- tion within institutional religions. I am thinking here of the mystical doctrine - which is common to the Cabbala and to Christian mysti- cism such as that of Angelus Silesius - of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence. The supposition of a radical
separation, xwpwf-t6? , between the intra-mundane realm and the transcendental, which is one of the keystones of the metaphysical tradition, is highly problematic, since it is constantly confronted with evidence showing that it has picked out its eternal values, its immutabilities, from the mutable and from experience, and has then abstracted them. And if a metaphysics were consistent, it would re-
frain from using apologetics to keep such evidence at bay. A thinking
? LECTURE THIRTEEN 101
? which is defensive, which attempts to cling to something in the face of compelling objections, is always doomed. The only way a fruitful thinking can save itself is by following the injunction: 'Cast away, that you may gain. '
I mean by this that a metaphysics which fulfilled its own concept, a concept which (even though this may not be admitted) always consists of constellations of forms and contents, concepts and what they comprise, would have radically to assimilate the relevance ofthe
temporal to its own concept. It would have to realize that it has been separated only apparently and arbitrarily from its instrument, con- cepts, and is constantly brought back to them. I should like to say that in our time the primacy which Sartre accords to existence over being and its concept reveals an extraordinarily uncompromising awareness of this state of affairs. The only fault lies in the fact that, precisely from this precedence of existence over essence, Sartre has created a new kind of ontology, a doctrine of essences. To express it crudely in terms of the history of philosophy, he has sought to be at the same time
an extreme nominalist and a Heideggerian, two things which cannot be made to agree. But I can only indicate this briefly here. This assimila- tion of the element of content means that metaphysical experience, or the concept of metaphysics - both in one - present themselves quite differently today. And as a sign of this - the word symbol would be wretchedly inadequate, since we are concerned with the most symbolic thing of all - I will take Auschwitz. Through Auschwitz - and by that I mean not only Auschwitz but the world of torture which has con- tinued to exist after Auschwitz and of which we are receiving the
most horrifying reports from Vietnam - through all this the concept of metaphysics has been changed to its innermost core. Those who continue to engage in old-style metaphysics, without concerning themselves with what has happened, keeping it at arm's length and regarding it as beneath metaphysics, like everything merely earthly and human, thereby prove themselves inhuman. And the inhumanity which is necessarily present in such an attitude must also infect the concept
of a metaphysics which proceeds in this way. It is therefore impos- sible, I would say, to insist after Auschwitz on the presence of a posit- ive meaning or purpose in being. Here, too, though from a totally different context, I would like to say quite candidly that I am entirely
of one mind with Sartre, from whose outlook I am otherwise worlds apart. The affirmative character which metaphysics has in Aristotle, and which it first took on in Plato's teaching, has become impossible. To assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted
. within itself and orientated towards the divine principle (if one is to put it like that), would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and
?
? 102 LECTURE THIRTEEN
? goodness which philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the victims and the infinitude of their torment. And. taking this as my reference point, I would like to reflect with you on what I would describe as the completely changed status of metaphysics.
? . .
. ?
: . ?
?
?
At the end of the last lecture I attempted to explain why temporal elements decisively affect our thinking about metaphysics, and have a bearing on metaphysical experience itself. And I should like to say to you straight away that it would be mistaken to take these comments in a purely subjective sense - as meaning that it is more difficult to have metaphysical experiences under present conditions. That would
be a complete misunderstanding of what I wish to communicate to you in words which inevitably are far too insipid. Naturally, the subjective difficulty also exists, but given the intertwinement between subjective experience and the objective in this sphere, the two cannot be separated as neatly as it might appear to a naive, unreflecting consciousness, which says that all this just depends on how one hap- pens to feel towards metaphysics today, but changes nothing at all in its objective contents. My thesis is directed against precisely this atti- tude, and you will only understand me correctly if you take what I have to say in the strong and far from innocuous sense in which it is
meant. You will have noticed from my analyses and expositions of Aristotle's Metaphysics how far this whole metaphysics is filled by the affirmative side - forgive me, something can hardly be filled by a 'side' - how fundamental the affirmative moment is to this whole conception of metaphysics. You will therefore have seen how far the
theory that, even without a divine influence, being is teleologically orientated towards the divine by its own nature - how far that implies that what is meaningful. From this Aristotle draws the conclusion - I mention this to make fully clear the metaphysical problem which
LECTURE FOURTEEN
15July 1965
? ? ?
?
104 LECTURE FOURTEEN
? ? concerns me here - that matter, VA1], as that which is represented by possibility, must be endowed with some kind of purposiveness; and he argues this even despite the fact that it is in some contradiction to his own doctrine of possibility as wholly abstract and indeterminate.
In face of the experiences we have had, not only through Auschwitz but through the introduction of torture as a permanent institution and through the atomic bomb - all these things form a kind of coher- ence, a hellish unity - in face of these experiences the assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character which has been attributed to metaphysics almost without exception, become a mock- ery; and in face of the victims it becomes downright immoral. For anyone who allows himself to be fobbed off with such meaning mod- erates in some way the unspeakable and irreparable things which have happened by conceding that somehow, in a secret order of being, all this will have had some kind of purpose. In other words, it might be said that in view of what we have experienced - and let me say that it is also experienced by those on whom it was not directly perpetrated - there can be no one, whose organ of experience has not entirely atrophied, for whom the world after Auschwitz, that is, the world in which Auschwitz was possible, is the same world as it was before. And I believe that if one observes and analyses oneself closely, one will find that the awareness of living in a world in which that is possible - is possible again and is possible for the first time - plays a quite crucial role even in one's most secret reactions.
I would say, therefore, that these experiences have a compelling universality, and that one would indeed have to be blind to the world's course if one were to wish not to have these experiences. In view of them, the assertion of a purpose or meaning which is formally em- bedded in metaphysics is transformed into ideology, that is to say, into an empty solace which at the same time fulfils a very precise function in the world as it is: that of keeping people in line. No doubt meta- physics has always had its ideological aspects, and it is not difficult to demonstrate in detail in what ways the great metaphysical systems have functioned ideologically. But unless I am mistaken something like a qualitative leap has taken place at this point. That is to say that although the old metaphysical systems transfigured the existing order
by insisting on this moment of meaning, they always had the moment of truth at the same time; they tried to understand that which is, and to gain certainty about the enigmatic and chaotic. And one could always demonstrate in the older metaphysics, no less than in their ideological character, this moment of truth, this increasing power of reason to understand what is opposed to it, and not to be content with mere irrationality. This can be seen most splendidly in the metaphysics
? ? ? LECTURE FOURTEEN
105
? of St Thomas Aquinas, which is an attempt to bring Christian doc- trine into agreement with speculative thought, and therein has the potential to transform what is merely posited and inculcated dog- matically into a kind of critique - however positive this critique may have been in the Thomist philosophy. That is now finished. Such an interpretation of meaning is no longer possible. And I believe I have already said! that it seems to me an achievement of Jean-Paul Sartre's that should not be overlooked - although I regard his philosophy as very incoherent and not really adequate as a philosophical structure - that he was the first to formulate this realization without any em- bellishment. In this he went far beyond Schopenhauer who, of course, was a pessimist in the usual sense and vehemently opposed the affirmative character of metaphysics (as you probably know), espe- cially in its Hegelian form. Nevertheless, in his work he turned even this negativity into a metaphysical principle, the principle of the blind Will which, because it is a metaphysical principle and therefore a category of reflection, contains the possibility of its own negation by human beings. Thus, he also posits the idea of the denial of the Will
to Live,2 a denial which, in view of what has been and continues to
be perpetrated on the living and can increase to an unimaginable . degree, is an almost comforting idea. I mean that in a world which knows of things far worse than death and denies people the shot in the neck in order to torture them slowly to death, the doctrine of the . denial of the Will to Live itself has something of the innocence for
which Schopenhauer criticized the theodicies of philosophers.
After the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire, who had been a follower of Leibniz, abandoned Leibniz's interpretation of the world as the best of all possible worlds, and went over to the empiricism of the most
progressive figure of that time, Locke. 3 Admittedly, Leibniz's dictum is not so optimistic as it seems, but refers only to the optimum, the minimum optimum. But what, in the end, is such a limited natural catastrophe compared to the natural catastrophe of society, spread- ing towards totality, the actuality and potentiality of which we face today - when socially produced evil has engendered something like
a real hell? And that situation affects not only metaphysical thought, but, as I showed you in relation to the moment of meaning, the content of metaphysics itself. And perhaps I may add at this point that there seems to me to be hardly anything more contemptible, hardly anything more unworthy of the concept of philosophy, of what philosophy once wanted to be, than the mood, especially widespread in Germany, which amounts to a belief that, just because the absence of meaning is unbearable, those who point out that absence are to be blamed. This mood leads people to draw from the postulate that life in a world
? ?
106 LECTURE FOURTEEN
? without meaning cannot be endured, the conclusion that (because what should not be cannot be) a meaning must be constructed: because, after all, there is a meaning. If I may reveal to you what I
really meant by the 'Jargon of Authenticity',4 I was not just criticizing this or that linguistic cliche - I should not have taken those quite so tragically. What I was really attacking - and if you pick up that little book I would ask you to be quite clear on this point - is precisely the supposition of a meaning on the sole grounds that there must be one since otherwise one could not live: this supposition of a meaning as a lie. And in Germany this supposition seems to me to have slipped into the language to a worrying degree, so that it is no longer made ex- plicitly in thought. That is the reason why I attacked a certain linguistic
form so energetically in that book.
Briefly, therefore: the traditional compatibility between metaphys-
ical thought and intra-mundane experience has been shattered. As I indicated by the comparison between Voltaire's situation and our own, there has been a kind of switch from quantity to quality. The millionfold death has acquired a form never feared before, and has taken on a very different nuance. Nuance - the word alone is a disgrace in face of what one would like to say and for which lang- uage truly lacks words; it actually cannot be said. And that is the strongest proof of how much these things can now be understood only in material terms. Today something worse than death is to be feared. Perhaps I might draw your attention in this context to an essay on torture by Jean Amery, an author otherwise entirely unknown to me, in the latest issue of Merkur. 5 The philosophical backbone of the essay, existentialism, does not accord with my own views, but the
author does quite admirably express the changes in the rock strata of experience which have been brought about by these things. The change I have in mind can also be expressed, perhaps most simply, by saying that death, in the form it has taken on, no longer accords with the life of any individual. For it is a lie to say that death is an invariant at all times; death, too, is a quite abstract entity; death itself can be a different thing in very different times. Or one might say, if you will not take my literary references amiss, that there is no longer an epic or a biblical death; no longer is a person able to die weary, old and sated with life. Another aspect of the situation I am trying to indicate to you is that old age, with categories such as wisdom and all that goes with it, no longer exists, and that old people, in so far as they are condemned to become aged and too weak to preserve their own lives, are turned into objects of science - the science of gerontology, as it is called. In this way age is seen as a kind of second minority, so that something like a programme of euthanasia carried out by some
? .
LECTURE FOURTEEN 107
? future form of inhumanity, of no matter what provenance, becomes foreseeable. Thus, the reconciliation of life, as something rounded and closed in itself, with death, a reconciliation which was always questionable and precarious and, if it existed at all, was probably a happy exception - that reconciliation is out of the question today.
I would say that the approach adopted in Being and Time - and here I'd like to make a few more comments on the 'jargon of authen- ticity' - is perhaps nowhere more ideological than when its author tries to understand death on the basis of 'Dasein's possibility of Being-a- Whole',6 in which attempt he suppresses the absolute irreconcilabil- ity of living experience with death which has become apparent with the definitive decline of positive religions. He seeks, in this way, to rescue structures of the experience of death as structures of Dasein, of human existence itself. But these structures, as he describes them, only existed within the world of positive theology, by virtue of the positive hope of resurrection; and Heidegger fails to see that through the secularization of this structure, which he at least tacitly assumes in his work, not only have these theological contents disintegrated, but without them this experience itself is no longer possible. What I really
hold against this form of metaphysics is the surreptitious attempt to appropriate theologically posited possibilities of experience without theology. I hasten to add, to avoid misunderstandings, however un- likely, that in view of the historical state of consciousness my remarks should not, of course, be construed as a recommendation of theology, simply on the grounds that, under the protection of religion, it was
'. allegedly easier to die. Now, if one is speaking of the form of death
. : which exists under the absolute controllability of people, including
their mass annihilation, one will have to say that from an intra-
mundane standpoint the change signifies that the process of adaptation
. : to which people are subject is posited as absolute - j ust as torture is : an extreme form of adaptation. Words such as ' brainwashing' already , indicate that by these horrifying means, which include the electric shock treatment of the mentally ill, human beings are to be standard- , ized by force. Any slight difference, any deviation they still possessed
? in relation to the dominant tendency - that too must be eradicated. In other words, the change that we are experiencing in meta- . physics is on the most fundamental level a change in the self and its so-called substance. It is the liquidation of what the old metaphysics
.
". sought to encompass by a rational doctrine of the soul as something
) existing in itself. Brecht has characterized this experience, though in a very,uncertain and ambiguous way, with his formula: 'A man's a man . 7 I would just point out (but will not be able to go into this in
detail in these lectures) that it is here, in the question of the liquidation
?
? ?
108 LECTURE FOURTEEN
of the self or the ego, in the question of depersonalization, that the
most unfathomable problems of metaphysics are concealed; for this ego itself, as the incarnated principle of self-preservation, is involved in the context of social guilt right to its innermost core. And in its social liquidation today the self is only paying the price for what it once did by positing itself; repaying the debt of its guilt. This is a horizon of metaphysical speculation that I can only touch on here,
since one cannot speak at all seriously about these things without knowing at least whether the concept of the person itself, into which,
for so many - for example, Martin Buber, who died recently - the metaphysical substance has withdrawn and concentrated itself, is not precisely the node which needs to be removed in order to liberate that which might be different in human beings. One should not, therefore regard the liquidation of the ego that we are witnessing today as absolutely evil and negative, since to do so would probably be to make into the principle of good and bad something which itself is entangled in evil, and which bears within it an historical dynamic which prevents it from being hypostatized. For people chained to the blind principle of self-preservation under the prevailing social condi- tions of production, however, this liquidation of the ego is what is most to be feared. And in the present situation, in order to recognize
the dialectic between the ego and its disintegration that I have just touched upon, or to gain any insight into present conditions, what is called for is precisely that unyielding and unerring strength of the ego in face of the predominant tendency which is obstructed by the historical tendency and which is realized in fewer and fewer people now. What meets its end in the camps, therefore, is really no longer the ego or the self, but - as Horkheimer and I called it almost a generation ago in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment8 - only the specimen; it is, almost as in vivisection, only the individual entity reducible to the body or, as Brecht put it/ the torturable entity, which can be happy if it has time to escape that fate by suicide. One might say, therefore,
that genocide, the eradication of humanity, and the concentration of people in a totality in which everything is subsumed under the prin- ciple of self-preservation, are the same thing; indeed, that genocide is absolute integration. One might say that the pure identity of all people with their concept is nothing other than their death - an idea which, most surprisingly and remarkably, though with a quite differ- ent, reactionary accent, is anticipated in the theory in the Phenom- enology of Spirit by which Hegel equates absolute freedom with death. 1O I do not need to engage polemically with the denunciation of the French Revolution which Hegel had in mind at that point; but it is the case that the early Hegel, with his unparalleled speculative
? ? ? LECTURE FOURTEEN
109
? power, had an inkling of the fact that absolute self-assertion and the absolute negation of all that lives, and thus, finally, genocide, are the same thing, at a time - more than one hundred and fifty years ago - when nothing of that kind was foreseeable within the actual his- torical perspective.