Transcript

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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

(Philosophy 9, December 9th, 1953.)

...and man has to be produced by the family, and not being a person without it. If you take man without his family relations, you get what you have today as boy and girl, and men and women. That's man taken by himself. And you know, ladies of 70 like to be called girls, and men of 80 are satisfied if you call hi- -- them boys. There is -- something has happened. That could not have been done a hundred years ago, that man is addressed as sexless. Boys and girls, gentlemen, and men and women are treated as entities in themselves. "Human beings," as we say today. And the headline, "human beings" is an attempt of the 19th century rationalism or liberalism to figure that every man and every woman have a vote, for example. Take the suffragette question. And we are all boys and we are all girls, and therefore we must be -- allowed to play. And so for everything in democracy has to be made palatable and agreeable to the public. We are all treated by the government in this country as children, because no issue that is unpopular must be put in its truth before us, but always sugar-coated. You are all treated as boys and girls by the politicians. You can just see the -- the idea that -- that the letters and telegraphs sent into the White House should make policy, is one of these aberrations of the human brain.

Now gentlemen, if you take this whole list -- where is your? -- human being, as the -- and girls, boys, women, and man, something peculiar happens. First of all, every one of these people is given a -- status, as though he consisted -- his mind consisted of, as you know perhaps, thinking -- that's his intelligence; feeling; and what's the third?

(Willing.)

Wie?

(Willing.)

Willing. Now this is the famous pagan homosexual, Aristotelian definition of man, or the individual. Sexless being, there from the birth to the grave as he is thinking, feeling, and willing. If you then ask these people where do they put love, they say, "Oh, that's just a case of will." And so you get this disease today of the will to love, which always leads to divorce and to onanism, because nobody can will to love because they are opposites. We pray not "my will be done," by -- "Thy will," because God is divine love, and we can't buy this for money. And we can't buy it by willpower. To love is a -- power which we call "potency," which

you either have or have not. It has nothing to do with your will. Any woman or any man who tries to will to love makes himself and his partner terribly unhappy. And the most -- first engagements break down because it is only the will to learn how to love that makes you think you love already. But it is only the kind of boyish attempt to love. This is -- we'll see is very important.

At this moment it must be enough to say this, gentlemen. Thinking, feeling, and willing do not constitute any healthy or weal- -- -or man's or woman's endowment. The race would have died out long ago if it consisted of these three things. In every moment, obviously gentlemen, the thing is quite different, you see, that we are spoken to, and we speak. So thinking goes in these three parts. And this is of course done with energy; that is, with emotion. And that we either love or hate. We are unwilling, or we are drawn beyond our will. To love means to go beyond our will, and to hate means to fall below our will. And you -- we are tried to -- tried to make believe that by ethical codes, and by lectures on moral- -- morality, one can improve the world. This is all ridiculous. Nobody does anything, except from love and hate, and except -- because he's spoken to or he can speak to somebody else. In a youth camp, when you are counselor, you speak to the boys, and you forget yourself. It's obvious you have to tell them something when they do it, and that fills your whole consciousness. And if you are very busy, you haven't even time to think, because quite obvious what you have to tell these brats, just to obey orders.

So gentlemen, nothing doing. I can only at this moment throw this out. It is not the main problem today. The main problem is today to make you see that if you look at human beings, and you look at the future persons, you subdivide in quite a different way. If you look at a human person, you have the high point of this man, his calling, his made decision, his power or her power to get married, be it to a cause, be it to a wife, be it to a religion. You are able to join a church. You are able to found a nation. You are able to -- to start a business. You are able to go to a war. All these great powers, gentlemen, come to a head, and your behavior of your life, and Mr. Truman will always {bend} -- always be the man of the Truman Doctrine, which in the midst of his -- great office he finally d- -- certainly decided. And that is Mr. Truman. That is, all his former life has been climaxed by this. And all his later mistakes cannot be anticlimaxed, quite, by this fact that he has saved America from Communism.

The same with the girl. The woman that marries is determined in her biography by this one ele- -- moment in which she changes from a bride to a wife. And everything else is prehistory. And everything else is development. So you see, the term of a person alive is evolution, of your {made} decision, or development after the event. And before, prehistory, or as you may call it, "growth."

The middle event, the great event which makes a person, constitutes the fact that you listen to them in -- as important people, to Moses after -- when he led -- lead the people Israel out of Egypt, or to Jesus, because He goes to the Cross, is a tragedy, or is an explosion, or is a revolution -- is something revolutionary. And so the first thing we learn from simple personal observation, gentlemen, in your lives, too: when you get engaged and get married, that is -- makes epoch in your life. So we have two expressions for this climactic high point in life, in your personal life, something {made}. And in the story -- history of nations, we speak of a revolution. Something different as before.

Now the terrible heresy in which you have fallen is that you think you can either have -- base everything as a good liberal American on evolution, or you -- as a Communist, you think you have to base everything on revolution. But gentlemen, a decent man who says to his girl that he is willing to marry her, is of course a man who stands by his revolutionary act. That is, all revolution is followed by evolution. You can't have a revolution even in Russia, if not since 1917 all the Communists in Russia had stood by the event and said, "This is it. Now we follow it out. Now we develop, we evolve what the revolution has made possible." And everything you see -- from 1917 to 1953 in Russia obviously is the evolution of the revolution.

So the first thing, gentlemen, I want you to do is to enrich your stupidly limit- -- vocabulary that you today all run for cover from Mr. McCarthy and say, "I'm an evolutionist." And before, in this country, the fellow traveler said, "Revolution would be a wonderful thing."

You may have heard the famous -- the famous questionnaire in Harvard -- of the Harvard Crimson, in 1934, "How about revolution?" And they all voted for it, because it would be a little bit exciting, and life was so boring in college. These good children, and very poor thinkers, you see, thought they could have just revolution for its own sake as fun, just as people think they can marry for fun. But 40 years afterwards, it isn't fun at all. It's just the evolving of one great decision to found a house, and to have children and grandchildren, and to build everything -- your life insurance, and your mortgages, and -- your friendships around the fact that this, your good wife, just tells you, "I shall not move -- live in an apartment, you have to buy me a house." And she'll tell you, "I don't wish to see this man anymore in my home. He's a swine," and you can't invite him anymore. So that everything -- your whole environment evolves around this revolutionary decision, that this good woman has something to say.

So will you s- -- finally -- make this first? From now on, you must begin to believe, which is not so simple, that any man who really lives by passion, and has something to do in this world, cannot leave the world as it has been before. And

this change, by which he decides that in some small measure he must not leave the world as he found it, we call "revolution," because the law for his life changes at that moment. A man who doesn't know what he should do in life has to comply with the existing order. A man who has decided to marry a -- person of a different race suddenly, for example, has to set up new standards of neighborhood, new standards of behavior. In this country, that's a very topical question, as you well know. And it creates many difficulties and conflicts. Why do people do this, we have to ask. Wouldn't it be nice to remain in this realm of psychology of Aristotle -- Aristotle and willing, feeling, and thinking, and arrange the world so that there is no such event here in the middle, before girls become women and boys become men? In fact, gentlemen, the human being theory on which you live is: man impotent and sick, schizophrenic an ripe for Concord, New Hampshire. The farmers in Concord, Massachusetts, they were still persons. But the people gathered in -- in mental asylum in Concord, New Hampshire, are people who have been made to believe that they must break down when they are -- cannot stay human beings.

Look at this girl-boy-woman-man question. Nobody in this country is likely -- likes to be called a woman or a man. He wants to be called a girl and boy. That is, the first division, this side of life and this side of sex, is made the better part. It is better to be called a "girl" today in this country as you well know, and a "boy," than to be called a "woman" and a "man." But there is more to it. Girls and boys are children this side of sex, this side if potency, this side of passion, this side of Venus, of Aphrodite, of the greatest goddess there is in the life of the individual. And women and men, gentlemen, are just polite avoidances of the fact that they are old people. We have no word in this language for what the Greeks and the Romans had very -- elaborate terms for, for the old man, and the old woman. The senex. "Senility" we have, you see. But we hardly have senectitude. Instead, we have Schenectady.

Senectude -- -titude is a term for all people over 60. That is, for people who are beyond the passions of renewing and rejuvenating the {world}. And therefore girl and boy correspond, gentlemen, to the hoary head. I have to use this very strange expression, because I have to remind you that this lies beyond here a middle-aged, unfortunately. When we speak of a middle-aged woman, we all shrug our shoulders and say, "She'd better -- uses lipstick." "Middle-aged" is not a compliment. And by the word "middle," we already admit that they are already squeezed in between two real situations, the young and the old.

And -- now gentlemen, a man over 60 and a woman over 60 and a girl and a boy this side of 15 are obviously one, decaying, the other increasing. One growing up, the other going backward. We call this in medicine, as you know, "involution." And they are therefore beyond this quadrangle. It is not fair to say

what I did first, that you can either speak of girl, boy, woman, and man, and here speak of -- and I call this the human fear of fiction, and here the -- the person, divided in a prehistory, an epoch-making event, and the evolution of this event, of the life story. I call this "prehistory" for good reason. I called it also, however, "growth." And this would be the revolutionary event. And this would be the -- well, I put here "biography."

Nobody -- is worthwhile to be written about in -- biography who hasn't made epoch. I mean, the -- if you take the courses in biography of Mr. Bartlett, or Mr. Wilson, obviously these people aren't given you as examples of living, because they were just girls and boys, and women and men, but because something happened in their lives which marks them out, you see, at one point, and now we have to consider them as having changed the trend of events.

(When you were marking the thing on the board, you said this is biography, and this is growth. Exactly what were you referring to you?)

Well, growth, that's anti-biographical. A boy goes to -- school, and has the second teeth. That wouldn't lead to biography, would it?

But after he has made a great decision, you see -- Carl Schurz came to this country -- the greatest German who ever came to this country, you may have heard of his name. There is still a Carl Schurz Foundation. And there is a Carl Schurz park in New York. He -- he had already at 23 rescued his teacher from -- for political -- who was in prison for political reasons. He freed him in a very -- adventurous enterprise in 1950, and so he was a celebrated hero when he came to this country. And therefore at 39 -- he was 23 when he came. At 39 he was already a Senator of the United States Senate, in 1869. And why? Because he had this rare fortune that already at the ripe age of 23, he had made a mark. He had done something unique, you see. He had frustrated the powers of reaction in Prussia at that time, and taken his -- his teacher, Professor Kinkel, Gottfried Kinkel, who was a poet, too, to England in this fantastic flight.

Everybody here, you see, at that time celebrated the con- -- the combatants of freedom. He -- they con- -- here had celebrated -- great celebration for Kossuth, the Hungarian. You may have heard his name. Kossuth. And Carl Schurz was one of a similar character. But he happened to be very young. And so he got from that moment on a biography.

So you -- I -- I have -- who asked me the question? You understand. I just tried to show you that growth is still without a special denomination, you see. It has no -- he has no name, the man who grows. But the man who has a biography is a man who has made a name, and now there is attached to this name every-

thing that follows. He may decline in power, but it's still his biography.

(Is it possible for { } biography? { })

Oh, most Americans just try very hard. They want to be the Who's Who, but they don't want to live. They want to have a standard of living, and that's the opposite of life. The standard of living, you have just the installment plan, but no decision.

Now gentlemen, this -- more important here -- look at this. This is -- much more important inside. You must -- such a man leaves a name behind himself, as Lincoln, when he belongs to the ages. Obviously girl and boy, woman and man belong to their own age. They are the ages.

Now this is the important thing. If you put here the hoary head, for women and men, the people from 60 to 90. And here you put the children from 1 to 15, and you see how today the girl and boy approach is enlarged, more and more encroaching on this middle-aged group. And then suddenly people are definitely old and are sent to the old age asylum, or they can -- aren't even allowed to die at home, as you know.

My neighbor told me it was very indecent for another neighbor to die at home. I ma- -- still think it is the only place to die, i his own dead. But no. Not at all. You see, it must not be mentioned in the community that a man die. Therefore he has to prove it -- man has to go to the hospital. And ruin his finances and his soul.

But -- this is all very cruel today. And you -- you will have to change this, gentlemen, because old age is the problem of this country. And it hasn't been solved as you well know by a long shot. So girl, boy, and hoary head, really nowhere meet with this other table of values, as we may call it, because, as we now shall see, this is a polite omission of the st- -- two things with which you are really concerned in your life. You want to get engaged and marry, and you -- most of you want to have children. Or if you become a priest, or a monk, you just want to do better even than to get married to an earthly woman. You want to get married to a great cause, to the cause of Christ. And you -- if you become -- even stay a bachelor, you will have to throw your weight in some direction. You will have to get attached to some establishment, because men cannot live without attachment.

So gentlemen, this is the period of attachment. And unfortunately as you know, everybody preaches you detachment. That's only valid for growing girls and boys. -- Go -- you have to be -- get detached from your home, from your

prejudices, from your routines, from all your stupidity, from your boredom. But woe to you if don't learn how to attach yourself.

And so, gentlemen, the real problem of the family is not only to give you an experience of how to detach yourself from your parents, but obviously when your parents do a good job, they have only done it if they have given you so much heat, and so much energy that you have gotten the power to attach yourself. In the process, you have to detach yourself, as we shall see. That's very important. But gentlemen, detachment stands under attachment. Will you kindly see -- put this down? Detachment is only relative to attachment. The potency of a person, your vigor, depends on your power to attach yourself. In the process of attaching yourself, obviously you have to detach yourself of your nonselective attachments, which you find just ready-made for you, as for example your own family. This is obvious that you cannot be in love with your mother if you are in love with your girl. Your mother, as a commandment in the Bible says, has to be honored. If you try to love her, you go wrong. You have love for your mother, but it must be transformed into honor and dignity. We'll see more about this.

Now if -- since the whole fiction in which you have grown up in this country in a strange manner, this is a -- a country -- puritan country with an effect against sex. When I came to this country, an old man said to me, "We of course can never be innocent because of this damn sex. The women pay for it by bearing children. But we remain impure."

Now gentlemen, this is horrid. But it is still reflected in the average secular teachings which you receive. That is, this blight on the greatest power of the human being, the sex -- the power -- his to fall in love, has been degraded by this monkish tradition called "puritanical" in such a way that I have to begin from scratch in order to make myself understood. Why -- when we omit the powers of attachment, we get this pagan, and as I said, homosexual psychology, which the Greeks had who had slaves, who had no wives, but just broodhouses, brooders, mares, and who had, as you know, in their platonic academy pederastic orgies every day. Every philosophy had his sweethearts among the masculine sex. That's of course a world of sterility. And the whole -- everything that the world feels about America is that it is the most wealthy, the richest, and the most sterile country. That the -- soul here is exploited and thrown away like a parchment.

That's a famous story. A farmer once said, when he was asked what he had done with his former farms, he said "I have sucked them dry like a parchment." And the man wasn't sent to prison. He wasn't despised. He was just clever. Sterility versus fecundity. That is the sterile description of the human race. And that is the fe- -- fecund description of humanity. Now obviously both are true. To a certain extent, the sterile is true. And to a -- the -- extent, the fruitful is

true.

We just heard yesterday in class a report on Cotton Mather, this alleged Puritan, who said when he was asked by a friend, what was his greatest -- his greatest gospel, his greatest message he wanted to leave to Massachusetts, what did he say? You were present yesterday, weren't you? Yesterday in -- in 57?

(No, Sir.)

I thought you were. Well, he said -- he was already very sick. So he could only say one word: "fruitful." Fruitful. So he was a very great man. And he's -- today ridiculed, this Cotton Mather, who lived from 16- -- I think 1663 to 1728 in Massachusetts. Cotton Mather. Bless his memory, because he gave you the key word to all the world's problems: fruitful.

Now why is it -- however, right to look at the sterile, too, as having the right to live? A boy and girl do not procreate, but they grow. A ma- -- a hoary head doesn't procreate, doesn't fall in love, probably, although I have had a -- found a friend of 91 who fell in love and made really -- proposed friendship to me. I have never been touched so deeply in my life. The man was blind and deaf, nearly. He still could see me when I came, but a few months later, he had lost this. And he offered us -- my wife and myself his friendship so warmly, as though he was quite a young person, and I -- we just didn't know how to respond, because he didn't read letters and we didn't live in the same community. And it still rankles in my mind. He's still alive. He's the oldest alumnus of Harvard University. And I cannot -- I haven't found a way of responding to this tremendous, youthful passion in this old man, who of course lives still because he has still his heart in this youthful stage.

So if I speak of a hoary head, don't think that they cannot fall in love. But we speak of that aspect of the hoary head in which he is no longer preponderantly concerned with establishing new attachments. But all these things are not valid without exceptions. And you understand that a man of 65 still can fall in love, very much so.

Still it is important to ask you, "What does a hoary head?" Well, children grow. Is this not understandable? They grow. And you will understand that a child that has too much sex interest at 5 or 7 is imperiled in its growth. It's very bad. All the sexual passions in a 10-year-old child are just destructive. You look at this. They look pale. They don't grow. They are nervous. They have the jitters, you see. And therefore, for -- without any morality, you can see that from 1 to 15, a child must be left alone. And the -- mustn't be raped. When a girl -- a little child is -- is -- as I happened to -- one of my next of kin, a worker in an old house, made

advances to this little girl of 4 years, that's very bad. It's terribly upsetting, and you are very much afraid that the child may be hurt for the rest of her life.

So will you understand, gentlemen, what we call "sterile" means really in the deep sense of innocent, the state in which sex is of no interest, and no concern. It is the -- portion of life, gentlemen, in which you are loved without yet being to answer. This is the definition of the first phase of the sterile life, the girl and boy state. Girls and boys are loved, but they are quite unable to render love. So with -- they are on the receiving end. You all have been on this, as you well know. Most of you still are. That is, you -- you are so sure that you deserve to be loved, a child rests within her mother's womb and her father's mantel still to a certain extent. And that's as it should be. That's -- is very important.

So we will replace, gentlemen, the term "sterile" by "innocence," if you don't mind. And it will lose its sting. This is -- "sterile" I only have to say when I have to say this is the whole man. Human beings aren't sterile. They are fecund. They must be fruitful. But this is in defending the full human nature. But on the other hand, the starting point of the human being theory of Aristotle and Plato is correct. There is a time in the history of every man in which sex must not play a prominent part, in which he must be left alone. And innocence therefore has this -- perhaps double meaning. Perhaps you find a better word for "innocence." It isn't that I am innocuous, you see, but it is that the world does not yet damage me by hurting me. What is this? What's the -- the passive of innocent? Yes, you understand, ja? The not being hurt, the being protected. Is that right, you see? It's the age in which we need protection. We need protection because there is somebody who holds his arms over us and around us.

In antiquity, gentlemen, you may -- this may help you to understand it. The gods were never facing the mortals. The oldest gods were always standing behind the -- human beings, which is a much profounder insight. We cannot see God. It's one of the idiotic ideas of modern mystics that they want to have the beat- -- beat- -- be- -- the beatific vision of God. It's -- forbidden in the Bible. God cannot be seen. It's a fall of man when you try to be -- to see God. This is all nonsense. Then there is no God. But everybody knows that there's protection, while the God putting you -- His arms on -- your shoulders. There are very great -- the greatest pieces of art in antiquity are those that -- which do not assume that we see God, but that He sees us. And I think that's still true today. God sees us, but we don't see God.

And all -- every -- parents see their children play before them. And if they can, they make the children quite unaware of their presence. You see, that's the art of parents. But they are always within sight. But who it sees, the parents, the children don't. And this is one of the wrongest things in your modern upbring-

ing, gentlemen, that you have never understood that half of life can only be led if you cannot see what is protecting you, what is holding you. You -- all live in this pipe dream that you want to see everything. Heavens! Don't try. It's a very poor idea. All the great powers of law and order, the police, et cetera -- they see you, and what's happening to you. Don't try to see them. You see, if you go to see the police, it's usually for a fine.

But that's a -- complete deprivation today, all from this human being business, where a man is considered to be all around, and having eyes really in his back. I have no ideas in my posterior. And the funny thing is, I don't want to. But that's what modern man would like to have. He wants to be so independent of his environment, he can see everything. Well, then you cannot grow.

Anybody -- now take this as the first lessen then of this -- if we transform to the sterile age, girl and boy, into the growing age of innocence, in which you are protected, the protected age group, boy and girl, then we see protection we are not aware of is the condition of growth, just like a leaf around the bud. A bird can only -- or the egg around the chicken. Growth is dependent on two things: protection; and that you are not demanded to see all the obstacles, to see all the dangers yourself. You must remain unconscious to a certain extent. Think of all the children, if they knew all the dangers falling down staircases, burning their fingers with matches, and so on. They couldn't live. They would have the jitters every moment. Every -- the parents have to be -- have the nerve to stand the dangers of their children, as you well know. And that's -- gives the child this quiet calmness of growth. You cannot have any plant, any animal, or any child which is not de- -- degraded or depra- -- deprived of its growing capacity when it is not, you see, allowed not to see everything which might endanger it. That is called "protection." Protection is a shield.

So in the direction of war, or of criminals, or -- you see, wicked people, downfalls, and dangers, there is your protection, and you are allowed to concentrate on growth. It's still an -- introvert or intuitive process in which you can concentrate on your own growth. In this sense, growth is always, although it's expanding in a way, it's always concentrated on your own being, because you aren't yet full-fledged. You can understand this. Anybody who has to use half of his powers for his self defense is hardened before his time. You get a hardened brat, a youth, who is in a reformatory, he loses half of his energy, which he should use for his mental and psychic growth, in this constant fight with the environment.

In this country, that's even glorified, as you know. The boy who sells shoelaces at 4, and sells his customer- -- cheats his customer at 5. But this makes him hard and fast, and in New York, on the curbstones of New York, they think

that's very witty, such a boy. But he's very unhappy, because he already fights at an age where he should not be a fighter. He gets what we say, hard-boiled, before time. And that means a curtailment of his possible growth.

And you go to college, gentlemen, beyond the normal age of boyhood, because you are four more years protected. What is protection? -- to intensify the question. Protection is the possibility, gentlemen, given to a human being, that his acts are not of final commitment. They allow him to play. We have studied this problem of play long enough that you understand now, and just drawing on your memory, that play is a non-conclusive, a non-final commit- -- situation in which you are not yet committed. Now in college, you can write papers of the greatest stupidity, and it isn't final. You flunk the course, but what does it mean, you see? You don't lose your livelihood because of this. And you aren't despised in the community for this. And your girl doesn't -- isn't divorced, because you -- you flunk. But if you lose your honor in a -- in a real political situation, she may run away from you and say you are a rascal. Or commit a crime in reality, you see.

Now college is still a protected situation, because we want a certain number of people in the community to grow even longer beyond the ordinary measure of the ordinary citizen who, when he leaves high school already, is committed to finality. Everything counts against him there, you see. But here you have these wet-nurses called deans of the -- of -- of freshman and deans of sophomores, and they -- they -- they bring you a handkerchief when you have a cold and so on.

I -- was once said to me, "Well, you aren't a good professor, because you do not -- do not jump to -- up, when a student sneezes and bring him -- borrow him -- lend him your handkerchief." That's what's expected at Dartmouth College of the professors: act as a wet-nurse. I cannot bring myself to think of you in those terms of you, gentlemen. To me, you are not boys anymore.

And we now enter the problem of the fecundity stage. What I tried to show you is this. That here is room, which at this moment is just not covered by any doctrine, or any psychology. You remember that we talked on shame, and that we found -- or I found -- our friend Keep looked it up, that in this college, there are only four or five books on shame. And they're all connected with guilt, or with sex. We found that it had just nothing to do with this. It had to do with a secret not yet ripe to be revealed. It had to be -- to do with this leaf around growing buds. It had to do with your power to decide on something that the whole world shall not be able to destroy. And for this you need time. And we said shame is the great mantel around your own lifetime.

Therefore no man can have a biography without shame, because he cannot gain time enough to make any epoch-making decision in his life. If you tell -- the first thing you see a girl, that she is the wife which you wish to marry, you cannot marry her anymore. You have lost the power of establishing with her a relation of which nobody else knows. And that's the condition of getting married. If anybody knows before her that you're going to marry her, if she has any intelligence, and any heart, she will not marry you. You must be the first person. She must be the first person to whom you speak. If you tell anybody else before, you mar- -- better this other person. -- You -- show her you are absolutely promiscuous. You cannot marry her. You are impotent, because to marry means to propose to one person first. And let the others in due course hear about it. But you cannot make -- buy an attachment to anything in the world without attachment. And if you attach so much importance to your telling somebody else, then this is more important than the attachment of which you are telling this other person. Most of you are so loquacious that it is much more important for you that you can brag about { }.

I just come from a very sad experience. I don't know if I told it in class. I have a friend who was quite important. And his career seemed absolutely excellent, and first-rate, and he was in the state department. And developed there, unfortunately it seems, homosexual bents. And he was dismissed.

I met him after many years for the first time a fortnight ago. He was telling me about his plans. He goes to Oxford, where there is still some room for homosexuals, it seems. And he also said that he was very anxious to marry. And he listed two people in our friendship. Number 1, he said, "Well, she's too old. I must have children, after all, if I get married." And then he married another girl whose address he didn't even have, and is very close to us. And he said, "Tell her I want to marry her."

Well, I came out of this conversation really in cold sweat. And I said to my { }, "Why must he put up a front? This man only talks in this nonsensical manner about marriage, because he'll never get married. But he feels that he must excuse himself. He feels that we may suspect him."

It was never talked or mentioned between him and us, you see, that he was a homosexual. I only know, you see, -- in circuitous ways. And therefore you can imagine, the poor man feels that he must talk marriage in order to impress us with his normalcy. But the very fact that he listed two women -- one after the other as -- he wanted to marry both of them, so to speak, one which was available, shows that he isn't serious. He hasn't the power to do it. That's why he's talking about it.

When the swines tell you stories in the fraternities, laugh at them. They are all impotent. They cannot attach a person to themselves, just as little as -- as Miss -- Mrs. Tearsheet, in yesterday's reading of Henry IV.

Gentlemen, therefore I feel you will understand the real issue between the 19th-century liberal psychology in which you have been nursed and bred, and my problem of introducing you into your predicament as a man who must be then -- become a man in a higher sense, a person. You will understand this if I show you that they are really coping with different periods of life, that this is an attempt to look away from the tremendous stones and tempests -- often in a teapot -- of attachment, which depicted your real life, obviously, that they have tried to write a story of the detached person. The -- girl and boy, you can tell them, "Detach yourself more and more from your home. Learn the AB- -- ABC. Look objectively at the world," you see. And then finally end up as editor of the literary Times.

In-intellectual. The outcome of all this has been -- have been these fellow travelers, Mr. Hiss, and the -- Mr. -- Mr. Harry Dexter White. The prou- -- pride of this country in the '30s. When I came to this country, they said to me, I must become a Communist, because that was the wave of the future. No attachment anymore to America, to love, to anything. Just the bright idea, you see. The {worst} reason. Seems so logical.

This is then the philosophy of detachment. And this is our faith in attachment. The opposition is not a philosophy of attachment at all. But it is our faith in attachment, our power still to believe that you and I just cannot live without attachment, which, as I say, do -- doesn't preclude that there aren't many things from which we have to get very detached, and -- which we have to consider very objectively, including our own family relations. No harm done, that you ob- -- should objectify everything that you want, but it is second-rate.

Would you kindly say, gentlemen, once more -- I said it already to you -- if you write it just in a kind of arithmetical manner, you see, that always the detachment must rate below the attachment, that detachment is a means for remaining powerful enough to detach yourself.

So we have this rhythm, gentlemen, that we wake up as attached to others, that we have to get detached, and that we do this in order to have our own attachment. Now we also see what the hoary head does, gentlemen. The hoary head, the great old man, he protects.

When this wonderful man Stimson became secretary of war, or Mr. Hull became secretary of state, we had a protecting force in the cabinet, whereas

when you look at Mr. Morgenthau, he certainly needed protection himself. He was a boy who was taken in, in the poorest possible manner. He'll never grow up. He should never have been secretary of the treasury. It's a scandal. I know a little bit about him. He's just an obstinate, stupid boy.

But these other people -- Mr. Stimson was 78 when he came -- became president -- president of wa- -- secretary of war. I don't know how Mr. -- old Mr. Hull was when he was made secretary of state, but he certainly served until he was 79, I think, or 80. And on these people, like George Washington, such hoary heads, this country has rested its case all the time. Some protecting elements. The hoary head is the person who can love even there where he isn't loved. And a child is a person which is loved, although it cannot yet love.

Therefore you have here two groups out of balance. A child always receives more than it can give. A hoary head always should give more than he receives. And therefore we have universalized the title of the hoary head. Those of you who have taken Philosophy 10 know it already. The word in Greek for the hoary head is presbuter, and the English word which has been composed, or forged, or welded out of presbuter has been "priest." "Priest" means the older, the elder in a community. Therefore it has nothing to do with the sacrament of a Church. It has nothing to do with Roman Catholicism, or with Greek Catholicism, or with Protestantism, you see. It is something universal in the history of the race that has rested its case on the protection giving a group of people by their elders. And elders equals "priest," and equals "hoary heads." And the loss of the two terms "elder" and "priest" is -- only shows you that we have completely forgotten that an old man is not a man who is just now no longer a boy. But it is the man who has left over so many powers of attachment that he can forego response. You are protected by the powers of wisdom, of those people, you see, who can love you without your even knowing it.

And that is, in the {patrinian} church, the tradition of Christ that you must love thine enemies. The young always hate the old in practice -- they run away from them. How many 80 -- 80 and 90-year-old people do you see per annum? They are out of sight. They go to Florida. Play bridge. It's all very abnormal in this country. Wherever you have grandparents whom you worship, you know what a blessing it is to be -- to have the -- sympathy of such an old person. Who has still his grandparents living? Well, then you know what I'm talking about.

So gentlemen, here is a minus in the attached, children's age. They are attached by powers of those who love them. Like the small college of Dartmouth, as you know. That wasn't powerful enough to stand on its own legs, but there are those who love it. And here is -- a superabundance, and that is what the

Catholic Church has kept faithfully alive in its priesthood, people who at the age of 24 already behave as though they were 70. That's the whole meaning of the priesthood.

And we find -- feel that bitterly now in a Protestant -- atheistic playworld today, that everybody is meant to be young. The 80 -- -5 -year-old ladies still want to play golf, and therefore there's -- nobody protects nobody. And you get all the laws instead -- you see, because security must now be -- not done by people, but by nurseries, and schools, and all these -- you see, school luncheons, and school buses, and what- -- and what-not.

So we have here attached -- and I put the minus sign in. And here I find -- put here in the plus sign, because here is the minus that has to be replaced by the older generations, and the child is -- has yet to be protected. And these people can protect you and you don't even know it. You don't even know how many harm is just diverted, because Bernard Baruch goes and see the president. Well, that's how it is. And that's called wisdom, gentlemen. Wisdom is a surplus which cannot be b- -- bought over the counter for a counter service. It's free, you see, completely free-given. That is the great -- grandeur. You can only pray for it, that there might be some wisdom. That's what we do in church, by the way. You have to pray for wisdom, because that's the one thing you cannot buy in the bookstore, in the library.

Now if we replace these -- this picture, gentlemen, of the philosophy -- how did we call it? -- of innocence, or of detached -- of detachment, that's what it is, you find it everywhere in all the books of today, the philosophy of detachment, which says it is better to be detached than to be attached. If you replace it by the faith in attachment, that despite all the hurts, all the disappointments, all the terrible things that follow when you get married, or when you fall in love, or when you have a friend, it is still better to be married unhappily than to have no wife. Ja, that's a decision, you see. That's the risk you take.

If you see this, then you see that there is room for as much of this in your mind {than} brains, I think, as of this. If you want to decide on issues in nature, or in the atom, you'd better get detached, have no preference for one atom or the other. It must make no difference which of the 72 atoms is the right one to use in a -- in a hydrogen bomb. Obviously that's detachment, you see. There's no prejudices there. Is gold better than water? No. Hydrogen seems to be better, you see, than -- than helion today. Or 30 years ago, people thought helion was the most important thing, because you could fly, get up in the air, with the helion, you see, atom. Today it's forgotten. We -- I don't know -- what use it -- do we still have helion? You know? Is it used at all in industry? Wie? You see how fast it goes with these preferences in nature. Therefore there is objectivity.

Gentlemen, towards not living things not objectivity. But towards your fellow man, objectivity can only be sparingly administered in proportion to your attachment. Detachment is ruled by attachments. Tell me to whom you are attached, and I know that you aren't a pig. But tell me that you are objective and detached, I'll have nothing to do with you. That's good for -- for the chemical factory, for -- where you make commodities, where you do things. Therefore, there I have to have no preference. If there's a better power process, it is a better process of production, let me have it. I must be perfectly unbiased if there is a new invention. But you and I, gentlemen, we cannot live on the new invention of the next wife. The old wife must be good enough. And she must think so, too, about you.

I have a friend -- a very dear friend. A girl she was when she got married; however, she thought it was just all fun. They had -- obviously sex orgies and caused this marriage. Well, the boy had to go twice to war, one in -- in Europe as a flier, and the second time as a jet flier in Korea. The second time he came back, he just spat it all out. He vomited his -- this intercourse which he had -- and they had called it "marriage," and said, "I have never been married."

They have two children. These -- this girl lives now as an artificial widow with the two boys. And what's come just back to her that she tried to be a girl who had fun. And she never has now the comfort that at least at one time the man still recognizes that they were married. You can have a divorce by a tragedy. But this is much worse, you see, because he now says, "We never have been married." And they have -- they lived together for seven years. It's a very -- or more. No, wait a minute. Seven years.

Why? Because -- he was a boy, and she was a girl, and they just followed their bodies -- their bodies' desires. And they didn't know that no marriage can help -- floundering on the rocks, that is based on individuals and their urges, their will. They thought it was just enough to will to be m- -- happy. It doesn't happen that way, gentlemen. Happening and happiness are accidental. As the word says. If you analyze the word "happiness," it comes from "happening." And if it is happy, it means just that no- -- nothing has occurred of an epoch-making event. It has just -- has been nice. You didn't swerve off the -- off the road in a curve. You have been happy in the very na‹ve sense of "accident." No accident occurred; everything however still was hazardous. It was just accidental.

Let us now leave this. You understand why, in this case, where attachment is not demanded, where the way into detachment is the whole problem, thinking, willing, and feeling will do. Because the willing, feeling, and thinking individual is on his way to detach himself. The lie about this -- doctrine is not that it doesn't cover a certain reality. The lie is that this is an objective descrip-

tion. It's a description of a tendency in you and me. We have this tendency to detach ourselves, to criticize the world, to stand by and look it all over in detachment, objectively.

But gentlemen, it is a difference when I describe a man walking from here to here and say, while detaching himself, while taking distance, while stepping back from some involvement, he must use his thought, his will, and his feelings. It is a difference, I say, from saying that is man. That is man in a certain direction. It is man in the direction of detaching himself that is analyzed by Aristotle. The -- this famous philosopher who wants to see the whole world before his eyes as a spectacle. For the producer, for the conductor, it is very necessary to step back and thereby think hard, you see, and repress his feelings, and not get emotional as you see -- you see, because the feelings are always treated there as a hindrance, and to will the best performance, the excellency what he can in his brain imagine.

Now gentlemen, going these three steps I have indeed to use will, suppressing my feelings, or control my feelings, and understand the situation. Think. And therefore the intellectual of today, this unhappiest creature of our times who has made all this ruling of Europe and Russia, and our own civilization so very near, so very -- I nearly had said "certain." Who is written up in Mr. Spengler, and Mr. Toynbee and all these prophets of doom is a man who has ascertained that every human being is a being that detaches itself constantly. And therefore his analysis of the -- of this -- three beats are in order. I conceive of an idea to conduct this orchestra, for example, as an individual. I therefore have to control my emotions, which conductors rarely do, you know. And I have to have the fir- -- firm will of achievement -- in which field ever -- in whatever field I conduct, a business or an orchestra. It makes no difference.

But gentlemen, when I see this same man being loved by his orchestra, like Toscanini, being worshiped, I see that he must have quite opposite faculties. And that makes the man. The man whom I mentioned, the man of an -- who has a name. The man who deserves to be recorded. That is not the man who steps with these three steps into detachment. But that is a man who holds his orchestra in the palm of his hand. And what is such a man? A man who is loved. A man who knows how to speak to these people. The two things I should -- showed you to be the important things about persons.

Now how do we learn this gentlemen. Let me have a break here.

[tape interruption]

...beginning of this course, man in the minus stage, in the insufficient

stage is what you call "the individual." And I have given you now chapter and verse on his qualifications. It is the man who relies on the going world of which he takes stock. Anybody who steps back, detaches -- be it objectively, takes it for granted that the world has time enough for him to take out time to perform this -- this, you may say service, or this action. That is, to be detached always presupposes that you are delegated into a position of leisure, into a position of relative freedom, and that you are not in immediate danger. Then you have time to detach yourself.

Obviously where there is a fire, and you have all these onlookers at the night of too -- are only curious about the fire. The fire department is very angry. They have to allot -- allocate a number of people just to -- frighten off these -- these curiosity-seekers who do not want to help. And would not want to man the pump. But they just want to see how nice it is that something burns. And these detached people are a nuisance in such a case of danger, obviously, everybody knows this.

(Did -- did you say that the girl-boy stage is the detached stage? Is that -- is that...)

Oh yes. The -- a girl will say to her grandmother. She'll say, "Oh grandmother. Why don't you die? It's high time."

[tape interruption]

And I find these giggling girlhood eternities very widely spread among nurses. They giggle. They have their boyfriend. They -- you are all there at their disposal, it seems. And they -- that's why they are {here}. And we patients pay them a high salary so that their {know us}.

I got an injection years ago here in this hospital. There was such a -- such a girl. Probably she had three girl- -- boyfriends. I don't doubt it. She was quite pretty. But it's infamous that I had to undergo her treatment. She'd give me the injection. I said, "I won't have this injection before you tell me what it is. I'm not just here a -- a parcel, a commodity to be treated by a -- by a prescription. I'm a person in my own right. I decide whether I want to get this injection, or not." It could have been morphine or something.

Well, I don't feel -- I have to know this. She doesn't know any -- so she said -- she giggled and she said, "You make me laugh."

You call this a nurse.

She had never -- it had never occurred to her that we were -- not even human beings were we, let alone persons.

No, no. These -- these ladies have sex appeal, but we have no appeal to them.

No, if you are either ill, try to get a Catholic nun to take care of it all. They know how to nurse. Oh yes, very dif- -- big difference.

(Well, wouldn't you have to admit that certainly has to be a certain amount of detachment in the field of medicine. I mean, people can't fuss over patients like long-lost brothers. There has to be a certain amount of detachment.)

Well, I am only complaining about all the attachments they incur. They have no chastity. And a sick person can require a certain amount of chastity around him. It's a part of his process of healing. You don't understand this, Sir. But you cannot be surrounded by people for whom the sexual passion is the uppermost in their mind. You cannot be nursed by such people. It's impossible. Your mother must -- you cannot think of your mother as the mistress of your father when she's around your sickbed. It's impossible. Or your sister. It's just swinish. It -- it's -- this is putrefaction.

I -- you know that I'm not prudish. That's a different story. And -- you see. She's -- this girl has certainly every right to her private life, you see. But she has no right to make this private life being -- felt to be her most important life.

But I think I can open you -- up to your own experience in a very simple way, gentlemen. In as far as you grow into your own reality, into your own selfrealization, you don't want to be reminded that you are a boy or a girl. But you want to be reminded that you're on your way to becoming a man.

Now the very strange story -- if you leave this here then, is -- that by becoming a man and passing through this state of objectivation, of criticism, of doubt, of rebellion against your father, of saying "No, no, no," you are all the way -- on the way to saying "yes" to somebody. You are already trying to be a man. That is the time of anticipated manhood in which we all are, as far as we are young. We mean by being young, that we still anticipate perfection, completion, miracle, con- -- constellation, where we meet somebody, you see, whom we should meet, and who fills our heart's desire. I still have this feeling. I still go with some expectation -- wherever I go. I hope you will all your life. But obviously your expectation is -- much more indefinite, and much more comprehensive. You have still to find everything. I have found much fulfillment.

So there is in us, gentlemen, anticipated manhood. And there is in us, from the very day where we make our first great decision, fulfilled manhood. Now these very artificial terms I have to -- I have to elucidate, gentlemen. The two people in you and me, who are anticipating, and who are fulfilling, are very different -- even physically. And they are both men. That is, in you and me, there is a -- strange, crucial situation of that part of us for which the language also has in this last century exterminated the term, and yet without which you are at this moment made impotent in this country.

A very great lover in this country, an artist, said to me, "Unfortunately, more and more the coat of arms of this country's manhood is becoming the ox, because the bull, the aggressive suitor is not there. The women have taken over what the suitor has to do -- the minstrel, the man who can -- know something about courtship, about wooing a woman, or wooing anybody for that matter. Like Al Smith wooed the vote of the United States people. He was in my recollection the last man who could embark on courtship when he spoke to the people over the radio in such a way that you felt this was a declaration of love. That he wanted to win you. And that he waited anxiously for your response. Not too cunningly, but really with his whole heart, he wanted to be accepted. He wanted to propose, and he waited for somebody to say, `Yes.'"

Gentlemen, we'll put for this problem then the word "suitor." It's not a very good one, I know. It's nearly obsolete. But it is something that covers your life from 15 to 45. And the second reciprocal term is "husband" or "father." And it covers the -- your life from 30 to 60. Now in all of us, there are these two elements and they overlap. You understand this well. But if you dig into your own being. If you are, as I said, teaching somebody -- anything, a little child -- if you are babysitting, you have a paternal quality. And if you have hopes, expectations, you are in this state of a suitor. Therefore, how to be one and the other, and how to go over from one into the other is the problem. And at this moment, since the time is running short, I can only say that immediately you will understand that the Don Juan, the man who can only chase after women one after the other, is missing in both respects. His suitorship breaks down, because it doesn't lead to this climax of fulfillment in which it turns around and becomes fatherhood.

And so gentlemen, you see immediately that the suitor is a man who can transcend his mere growth, and can do something to this growth of his instinct, his sex urge, his potency as an animal, and can transform it. This doesn't mean that we do not remain suitors all our lives, that we aren't yet still expecting great things in the future. But the Don Juan is out.

That is, I want to -- today only to end this lesson on the discovery, gen-

tlemen, that in this process of attachment, from detachment, the Don Juan, is an eternal playboy who remains detached, despite all his conquests. He belongs to this boyishness which today is praised to you as the only decent sate of humanity, and which of course, you see, makes it at this moment necessary that every country in the world is governed by dictators. Benevolent dictators like President Eisenhower, but some kind of dictatorship it has to be. This is very serious, gentlemen.

People who remain boys and girls, and Don Juans, hunting for pleasure from one after another, who have not this polarity of trans- -- going over, or commuting, so to speak, between the state of suitor and the state of fatherhood, who say, "That's all nonsense. We'll remain young. We'll remain boyish," make it necessary that somebody take over the function of fatherhood in grand style. And dictatorship is simply monopolized manhood, of fulfillment, fatherhood. If you aren't fathers, somebody else has to be.

So my appeal in all these classes, you may now understand, has always been to you as people who have to outgrow your childishness. I therefore cannot act as your wet-nurse. I -- I'm not interested when you have a cold. Have 10 colds. Suffer! Because it will make you able, if you really suffer, to grow up. And if you -- I should pity you in all your difficulties and hardships, you see, I would forestall this process. I would tell you that you are still protected. I am not here to protect you against anything. I'm here to expose you. And this is what the world can expect from anybody who has this tremendous retardation of his growth granted to him in a college. You and I -- I, too, and -- you give it to me, gentlemen, that's your present to me -- we are allowed to live in a noncommittal, in a free -- in a growing, in a protected situation. But we abuse this protection, if we become not aware of these special circumstances, you see, and if we do not now try to allocate to every man in great justice, this amount of protection, and his amount of responsibility, and his amount of fatherhood and -- of suitor, of attachment, which alone can make the whole thing function in -- with a certain amount of personal freedom. In this moment, the educated group -- just listen to Mr. McCarthy, and listen to the truck driver, and listen to the man who gives you a ride. They hate us. They despise us. Why? Because we have played with our freedom in an infamous manner. We have thought that this was the business of an intellectual to detach himself. This is incredible.

And that's why this whole Greek business of psychology, sociology, Platonism has to go out, or you will have Mr. McCarthy as dictator. Do you want this? It's your personal decision. Any one young man, gentlemen, has now to take sides, and has to consciously step into his own experienced thinking, instead of just this silly thinking of textbooks -- from textbooks, and Kinsey reports, and all this nonsense, which is all detached, and which has --. They

have sold you by saying, "It's better to be detached than to be attached." Now along comes McKenzie -- McCarthy and says, "Well, if all these men of the intellectual brand are detached, I shall be attached to 100 percent red Americanism. And we'll show these people. We'll expel them." Isn't he right? Well he is not right in as far as we are better than he thinks.

But gentlemen, this time must be over in which you come to college to get something out of it. You must begin to see that this college is only given you because the country must get something out of you.

Thank you.