Transcript
{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this
(Philosophy 10, May 19th, 1954.)
[Opening remarks missing]
...today, and Friday, and next week, Wednesday and Friday. And I said I wanted to give you the personal sketches of some of the men who helped build up the two cycles of academic and university life and are now -- so we must hope -- able to free us from the curse of the academic cycle by building up another one: that of society, that of the social science, that of the knowledge of how man behaves towards men.
We said that the academic cycle says how all men together view the world of things. And we know it pretty well now. We can even translate mass into energy, or energy into mass. And that was the secret of the gold-makers, which they were after, and we have solved it.
Before now going into the personal situation of the people who in this great enterprise, gentlemen, are our ancestors and are your ancestors not only, but those who -- for whom you must pray, inasfar as they have not existed yet, and have not come to secure your future -- let me first point out: the excess of the scholastic cycle, and the excess of the academic cycle which at this moment makes their super- -- being superseded by a third one indispensable.
What is wrong with your view that you want to be objective and scientific? Well, gentlemen, when it comes to yourself, that's the end of objectivity. You want to be treated personally, with regards. And you want to be forgiven when you flunk a course, or when you have a girl in your room and are to be severed from college. Then you expect that the dean works a miracle and lets you stay. Always when you ex- -- want to be an exception from a rule do you need a social science which can understand that you are an exception from a rule. Every man is, you know. We all are. Otherwise we couldn't { }. You know, it's in Shakespeare: treat everybody according to his merit, and nobody is safe. Now not one of us can be treated according to our merits, otherwise we would have long ceased to exist. We all be -- have to be executed.
I am -- I mean, if you come to think of it, universalism, where according to which -- everybody -- which creed everybody goes to Heaven is really a very strange doctrine, can only be explained by the natural feeling of everybody that if all people are treated equally, they would all go to hell. In the life -- on a course of 70 years, there is so much weakness in every one of us, and so much laziness
of heart, and so much cowardice, and so much forgetfulness, gentlemen -- has already been in your life -- that certainly universalism of universal brimstone and hellfire is much more probable than the opposite doctrine which came in, as you know, for the -- at the time when -- when 100 years ago people thought that nothing could happen to them anymore, that they were on the verge of eternal progress.
In this verge of the eternal progress, we have un- -- invented the cobalt bomb, or the atom bomb. I don't know which to name. But we have also discovered in the academic cycle -- think of Russia -- that it is possible to treat everybody as a thing, objectively. The word "objectively" to you has something harmless. It is much better than you write down, "objectively" means to treat somebody as a thing. That's what it means.
Now you want everybody to be treated -- to treat -- you want to treat everybody objectively, I am sure. But gentlemen, not one of you wants to be treated objectively, really. Not one of you. It is impossible to want this. If you treat your neighbor objectively, he'll go to war against you. That is, the application of the thing principle to humanity, gentlemen, leads to eternal war, leads to suicide. The treatment of oneself as a thing is the principle that is at the base of every act of suicide, because it means that I can do with myself as I please. This you can only do if you are your own thing. If man is one -- his own thing, which really is a complete, schizophrenic situation, you see, then by his mind he can decide that he can take his body. And that is, by and large, the American situation, that every businessman feels that he has the right to blow out his brain. And you just are 20 years of the corner. But at 45, most of you will have the same temptation. You are just now playboys, who think, "Oh that will never happen, because it's all so nice."
Gentlemen, nice is no reason to stay in life; and ugly is no reason to go out of it. Suffering is no reason to take your life; and joy is no reason to stay in life. If you think so, gentlemen, you are quite mistaken. You think, because you are relatively happy now, that you are safe against suicide. That's a mistake. You just haven't lived, yet.
In other countries, all over the world, gentlemen, suicide has been sweated out for the last 150 years, since Goethe, the German poet in 1772 wrote a book called Werther -- W-e-r-t-h-e-r -- in which the problem of suicide is squarely placed before a young man who is disappointed in love and life.
And ever since, gentle- -- peop- -- the people in Europe have -- you know it from the Romantics and the Engl- -- in English poetry from Keats and Shelley -- Shelley did commit suicide as you know; there are others -- they have sweated it
out. That is, if a man came from a university and had -- was 25 years of age, you could be sure that at one -- in one dark night he has played with the idea of taking his life. He had a pistol or a dagger on his night table, and he tried, if he could do it.
And therefore the people in -- growing up in -- rom-- at your age have not committed suicide, because they were vaccinated. You are, as you boast, unfortunately, 12 years old. That is, and nothing is serious. And you will run up at 30, or 40, or 50 at some steep corner, and then you will not be prepared. The problem of suicide, gentlemen, is the application of the object principle to oneself. It's a typical academic thing. The old Roman Empire, gentlemen, saw the nobility of Rome commit suicide by the thousands. Seneca did it, and all his ilk. The -- in the first hundred years of our era, the whole nobility of Rome committed suicide, because they were stoics; they were academics; they were philosophers. And philosophy leads to the right of suicide, because philosophy claims to have the right to judge the world. And once you put yourself into the world, as a part of the world, there is absolutely no reason why there should be a difference between the poor uranium and yourself. If you can blow up uranium, you can also blow up yourself.
If everything is just everything, gentlemen, and everybody is just everybody, bodies are mortal. Bodies are transient. There's absolute -- no reason why your body should be different from uranium. And so we blow it up, both. One, you -- your own body you blow up by private means; and the universe we blow up by communal means. And so public law and private law have wonderful harmony. The Constitution of the United States can then be {rewritten}, you see, and it says that in "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind" commands to say that everybody can take his life, and the community can take the universe -- the life of the universe. That's by and large the doctrine that is held today.
Therefore gentlemen, since this is an untenable state of affairs, that you can blow up the universe just because you have the billions of dollars to waste on it and are in these various places, and because you claim the right that when your brother wants to commit suicide he may do so, I at least want to emigrate from this country in this sense, that I do not belong to a community in which these two rights are claimed. I have neither the right to blow up the -- the -- the created -- matter, nor have I right to blow up myself.
I look therefore for a different treatment of human beings, and of matter. Obviously it isn't true that peace can be made with things, gentlemen. Against things we wage war. It is not, gentlemen, in contradiction to the 400 years of human- -- of humanism, of Platonism, of Aristotelianism, of liberal education, but it is the logic that it entered in two world wars. In the period from 1500 to
1900 had absolutely to reason -- no reason to stop war, because it was objective. Now the best thing you can do, from a human -- with a human mind is to manipulate things. And the safest way of manipulating is to blow them, or to eat them, or to manufacture them, or to do what you please with them: to have soil erosion, to -- cut down all the forests, to have river -- water pollution. You know, that all is in order if the rivers are owned by you. But if you are owned by the rivers, as in Persia, where the sign of a free man that he -- was that he couldn't pollute the river because he worshiped it, then obviously the river is not a thing. And therefore it cannot be blo- -- polluted. It cannot, and it may not, and it is not, in such a country.
As you know, the Persians had only two -- two terrible things. And therefore they were before the philosophy ever polluted the world. They said, "Don't pollute the water, and don't pollute your mind by lying." Now in this country, as you know, the big lie is officially now enthroned in the Senate of America, and the pollution of rivers is not yet abolished. And on this basis, gentlemen, you will see what philosophy can do to you. It makes you so powerful that you can lie, as we do every day in propaganda, in -- in advertising, and expect even -- we call it "psychology." Psychology is a way of making people do things which they do not want to do. I call this cheating. It's called a science in this country.
When Chesterton, the Englishman came to this country, he said, "It's funny. We call `lying' what they in America call `psychology,' because -- a psychologist say -- makes people do things which they otherwise wouldn't do. Now in England, we have still the old fashion of calling this cheating." It's called psychology in this country.
(I don't understand what you mean when you said that the Europeans have sweated out the idea of suicide. Do you mean that because of the fact that they commit suicide before they're 25 and overcome it, that they're mature at the age of 25, and we're not until 40?)
Well, it's like the vaccination. You get the fever in a small, you see, in to a small portion, but not totally. Therefore when the fever really grips you, you are immune. You have immunity. Can you understand this?
(Does -- is it possible { } to take hold { } 25 and { } you're right there?)
Well, my -- our teachers in school used to say, "Young -- adolescents have to be risked in order to make men." Three men in my class committed suicide in the first three years after we graduated. So it's absolutely costly and expensive, you know. The freedom was certainly also, you see, used -- abused. Don't think that there weren't many students who committed suicide. But the rest, having shared
this experience with those who went the full way, you see, certainly were -- you see, knew what it was all about, knew that where the limits of human action, on human objectivity were. They knew that man does not have himself.
Gentlemen, that's a problem. We are talking at this moment of the limitations of academic science. Academic science tries to transform everything into a thing. Now I have tried to talk to you -- sense the last meetings -- in s- -- telling you that the scientist remained a miracle, that any scientist is a miracle, because he says something for the first time, and therefore he cannot be deduced by logic. You remember? However, if you are -- go to the whole way and treat, as in the Brave New World or in {Surface Man}, that's a very good book by a Danish writer { }, or when you go to all these lengths of 1984, you have the application of the principles of modern science to man.
What I want you to understand is, gentlemen, that you don't have to look to Russia; and you don't have to look to Aldous Huxley's novel, or to 1984. You have to look into your own mind to find the excesses of academic thinking. You are the people who have to wake up to the fact that the way you have organized your thinking, and you are run by a machine -- mechanized thinking, you have every reason to hope that you will be freed and delivered from this terrible juggernaut of nonsense, because you believe that it is desirable that men are treated objectively, and that it is possible. I have tried to show you that before you can treat things scientifically, you must live in a society which knows what peace is, and you must mis- -- live under an authority which gives it direction. Now we said the academic world knows all about all things about the universe. But the universe has neither direction, nor has it peace. The universe is at war, and the universe is at -- moves in cycles, in vicious circles. That's why you get today a philosophy as history, from Mr. Spengler or Mr. Toynbee, which shows you that everything is cyclical. That's the application of the academic thinking to man, on man. And it's all { }. Why should I be proud of a civilization which has its ups and downs? Do you think I'm just a top, or a ball, or a rubber ball? That's really what people try to tell you and me, that everything we do is just up and down, or {jip and jump} -- or how -- how is this word of Mr. Toynbee? And he thinks that's even wisdom.
({ }.)
No, the other, the Chinese. Yin and -- ?
(Yin and yang.)
Yes. I would say that's just nonsense. Certainly life begins where a person says, "This must be prevented. I as a human being am not -- willing to go in for
such a natural nonsense." And everybody is in -- overawed by this nonsense by which we have relapsed into pre-Christian times when a man was treated, as a -- as in China, as a part of the -- of the natural {universe}. There is no science then, because if I have to think what the universe commands, with it -- with up and down, and jip and jump, and yin and yang, and however -- and response and -- what is this other -- these dualisms { }?
Gentlemen, wherever you have dichotomies, you have nature. And you have slavery. You have no freedom. If everything is either-or, Sir -- gentlemen, I'm not there. Man begins when he says "neither-nor."
You see, if you want to -- to reform the United States of America, you certainly must be neither Republican nor Democrat at this moment. If you think you have to be either one, you are lost, because what this country needs is a decent civil service, which you can only get if you are neither Democrat nor Republican, for example. Only to show you that the neither-nors are the cheapest thing in the world. They always are only applicable to things. This is black or white. This is green over red. That's really very important to know, if I deal with your -- with your coat, or with your {chaftan}. But you -- you're called black and white. You are a saint and a sinner. And there life begins.
That is, we all begin on the other side of dichotomies. We can, because we begin with the experience of peace. And gentlemen, the experience of peace is that it's not a question of being either a woman or a man, either old or young, is the experience that we have to have women and men, and young and old. Who -- that's why the Church today is so funny by gathering young married couples, and the teenagers, and the old people together. Well, that's easy to have peace. But the Church is there for the peace between the incompatibles. So the Church is just a joke today, because it is naturalistic. It unites the people who -- are united anyway for naturalistic reasons. {There is} no minister, and it is necessary to tell the young couple that they can dance to- -- with each other. That is normal; that is natural. It's no longer anything divine or inspired in the Church if you group them by natural -- for natural reasons. But that's everywhere in this country, and the higher up you come into the so-called spiritual world in the Church, the more objective and the more natural is everything done. They're all rummage sales. Well, you know it's no worse -- nothing beforehand.
It's very typical that the Church today lives by rummage sales, where every contribution is worthless. People give to the rummage sale that which they think is -- is no longer needed by them. And that's how you try to group humanity, on the -- you call this rummage sale in humanity, you know how you call it in psychology or sociology? The lowest common denominator. That's your rummage salers -- sellers of humanity. And you say you have to unite people on
the lowest common denominator. That's the law of the universe at this moment in this country. Gentlemen, never get with anybody together on the lowest common denominator, you see. Build yourself a sep- -- separate toilet. It's worth it. That's the lowest common denominator.
Who wants to unite on these needs -- these common needs of the lowest common denominator? We all have to shit, certainly. There's no reason to form a club for that. But that's the ideal of your psychology, gentlemen. That's exactly the -- I only translate it into so many terms. I told you that when leadership and -- didn't I tell you the story of the psychologists and the Air Force? Eight million dollars spent on a -- on a -- on a transparent toilet seat so that people could watch who should become a general of the Air Force? How he behaved on the toilet? That's done today. Gentlemen, don't think that I'm joking with rummage sale. It's exactly true -- $8 million in a country that has not a cent for a decent salary for a teacher -- schoolteacher or a minister. But $8 million are spent for this nonsense. And you call this science. At the Air university, I've seen this instrument of torture myself. And the psychologist was not -- he didn't despise himself for doing that, for -- for pitching in there and spying on their -- how the -- how the people looked from the other side.
Well, you have not to despise the Air Force people, but the psychologists, and you people, who adore this kind of science, instead of laughing it out of court.
Now this is, then, gentlemen, the naturalistic treatment of man, against which today we have to protest. Because otherwise we -- we'll all be killed in the process. Or you'll kill yourself. That's the same. The same situation, gentlemen, prevailed 400 years back. At that moment, as you know, the scholastic cycle thought it could also understand things, and not only God. And so they burned the witches, and they burned the alchemists, because these people turned to things and said, "For things there is a different principle necessary, the academic principle, and not this university principle." You remember. It cannot be decided by discussion between two opposite opinions whether gold can be turned into matter, into energy, you see. Can be set free. It's impossible. You have to try it. And you remember that the university cycle consists in the application of this new principle, that except for motion, every fact about things has to be investigated all over the globe. You remember? And I've asked you to read the life of the classic and a founder -- it will be an examination question -- this pamphlet in the -- on the -- on reserve, in which I have tried to give back the honor; the honor is due to Paracelsus, the man who for the first time formulated the new problem of science: that nothing can be deduced by argument, about a plant, or an animal, or a stone, or a climate. You have to go there. Before, you don't know.
You all are -- take this for granted, gentlemen. There had -- came into the
world and -- with the same difficulty as today -- it is for myself to get a hearing and I say that science is overstepping its mark when it deals with a person { }. That science can neither develop authority about things, because things have no authority. Yet obviously, you have to have authority for the application of funds for science { }. And you have to have unanimous consent in the sciences that there shall be science.
Now gentlemen, the sentence, "There shall be science," is not a scientific sentence. It's a dogma, which you all believe. It's a part of the Christian dogma that God created the world, and that therefore we'd better look into it how He created it. Will you take this down, gentlemen? The dogma, "Let there be science," is not a scientific sentence. "Let there be science." It's an imperative. It's a command. Why do you bow to it? The superstitious man says, Let there no be -- not be science. Let there just be Christian science. But let there no be -- not be science." You still have today people who are afraid of science and say, "No." And then there are others who say, "Science is." You don't have to command it. And you don't have to explain how this command came into the world. This is your fault. You think science is.
Gentlemen, there has to be a dictum, a dogma, "Let there be science," so that the rich people in this country give enough money so that we can have research. You take again this for granted. Why do they do it, gentlemen? Because we know that the world is not a devil's heap, or hellfire, but is God's creation. It's an ordered world, and it deserves to be known, because for that purpose it was created, so that men might rule it and manipulate it and use it. And lead it -- things to their destination.
So gentlemen, the sentence, "Let there be science," stands outside the academic cycle itself, for the simple reason that it must be believed by the people who send their children to college and have not gone to -- an academic cycle themselves. That is, the sentence, "Let there be science," is common to uneducated and educated men. If you make it a reservation of the educated man alone, the educated man will always be in the minority and the people in Wisconsin will chase you and say, "We don't need scientists."
There was a professor of milk diet and milk treatment in Wisconsin. And he was dismissed because he dared to say that -- that margarine-butter was not bad. That was enough to have a -- a professor at the university of -- in Madison, Wisconsin, you see, lose his job, because the farmers in Wisconsin did not think that the science -- sentence, "Let there be science," applied to them.
Now you, I think, will not approve of this dismissal of this professor and at least you will hope to God that there is a neighboring state in which this truth
can be taught, so that Madison, Wisconsin has not an -- monopoly. Because if you think that everywhere the people cannot be told the truth about their hobby, and their pet, and their idol, and their illusion, you see, we really just say that it is hopeless, that there will never be science, because the one thing we are interested ourselves in -- must not be touched. It happened to be butter in Wisconsin. But you have something similar.
So gentlemen, will you take this down? The sentence, "Let there be science," has been under debate for the last 400 years. I take it in your sense, of natural science, the science of things. Let there be a science of all things, of the universe. And I want to say that by 1500 this sentence had to be preached and introduced because the theologian said, "No. We know all about witches. We know all about alchemists. We know all about the earth turning around the sun." So therefore, gentlemen, the sentence, "Let there be science," had to be introduced into the education of mankind at a certain hour. At this moment, in 1954, it has to be limited again to its proper meaning. And it can only mean, "Let there be a science of natural things."
Stop. So gentlemen, you don't know this double-edged sword. The same sentence, "Let there be science," was a triumph in 1500. Let there be a science of things -- of all things. Let us put this down. Of all -- every word here is equally important. The theologians said in 1500 or in 1486, "There are witches." That's the time -- year in which the -- at the end of the Middle Ages only, suddenly people said, "These alchemists, these people who discover new -- Africa and new worlds, they are demonic. They are not, you see, admitted to the kingdom, and the Church, and Christianity." That's the year in which the so-called "Hammer of the Witches" was published.
It's very interesting, gentlemen, that the $8 million spent on the toilet at the Air university at the end of this period, show you a similar, frivolous attempt to overstep the mark of one of the {three} cycles. When the two Dominican brethren in 1486 said that about the nature of things, they knew everything because they knew the incarnation -- believed in the incarnation, and they knew about the secrets of God, they made exactly the same mistake with regard to things which the psychologist today makes with regard to people. It is equally stupid to say that -- by observing shitting, and "I can know whether this man is a leader," when to say, "Because I know all about God and His saints, I can know how gold behaves, without looking at gold," I want you to understand that the mistake is the same mistake. It is the overstepping of the in- -- inherent meaning of your enterprise. The inherent meaning of theology was, "Who is in authority? What is an authority?" You remember it was the discovery that the authority of God was always greater than the authority of the sinner and of his father confessor. And that the authority of the -- justice was always greater than the authority of pope
or emperor. And that the authority of a -- plague of -- from Heaven, like an epidemic, was always greater than the Arabian or the Latin medicine. It was always a problem of the higher command, the higher authority.
When you, however, apply this to things, which are under authority, which have no authority in themselves, you go wrong. And that was the tremendous mistake of -- of the medieval cycle and with which you are very well acquainted.
But gentlemen, on the whole your mind is 200 years' obsolete. You believe in the prejudices of Benjamin Franklin against the Middle Ages. And then you think it's wonderful to discover the lightning rod. And that's why you have it on one of your houses. That is, you believe, as in 1750, that there are only two sci- -- ways of science: one, the theological way, into a religion and the other into the natural sciences. And then you say, "Let's try also to -- social -- society must be ruled by similar laws." And that's why you have today these -- Guggenheim and Ford Foundation and Rockefeller money applied to men as though they were ants and bees, or antelopes.
Gentlemen, long ago in the French Revolution, there was a man who rose in disgust against the physicists and mathematicians, just as I feel today against Mr. Einstein and Oppenheimer, et cetera -- these fools who didn't know what they were doing when they divulged the secrets of the universe to the government. And now they are very much surprised. At least they should have known what they were doing, that they were just armament and munitions facturers -- manufacturers. Nothing else. Well, this situation you think is new. Don't believe it for a minute.
The cycle of the sciences has always had the same border region in which it began to fall of grace. And my attempt today is to show you that the cycle of the natural sciences today very clearly is at its wits' end. And that was proclaimed by the founders of the new way of life in -- under Napoleon. In the Napoleonic wars, a man in France got up and says -- said, and you could repeat it today with the same emphasis, but perhaps not so eloquent as he -- he said, "Get you down, you mathematicians, you physicists, you chemists. What do I see? You sell out to the highest bidder for the production of new armaments. You sell your soul. You want to prove to the government that you deserve their support for your scientific endeavors, and so you promise some better guns, and better ammunition, and better steamships for the navy. And you succeed. And therefore you have prostituted your science. Step down from the place in society which the na‹ve people have given you wantonly, and make room for those who will warm those hearts again which you have frozen out."
That is said, gentlemen, by a very great man. And for this sentence is he great.
Had he said nothing else, he would have been your and my sponsor of your survival of your freedom. And the man's name is -- does anybody know? It is the Count Henri de Saint-Simon. He is the founder of social {existence} -- no, the founder of the social sciences. And he is despised today because the Marxians have said that he was a fan- -- fantastic man, but that Marx knew it all. Marx and Comte, the man who was the god in this depar- -- coun- -- college for many years, Auguste Comte, are both afterthoughts, so to speak, of Saint-Simon. SaintSimon was a count of the old frankish empire, a descendant of Charlemagne. And one day he said to himself, "For a thousand years, my family has enjoyed the privileges of the Carolingian empire and of the old Church. I have a tremendous fortune. I have a tremendous rank. All this, I must make down, to become worthy of the new cycle of life, which we {must start}. I must cease to be a count. I must cease to be rich. I must cease to be respected, because I must go down into the dirt from scratch, and share the fate of the s- -- man who works in the sweat of his brow, because otherwise I cannot solve the new problems of society."
That's a very great man who did this, gentlemen. And Henri de Saint-Simon -- do you take him down? -- is the first man who was hit, who was obsessed by the necessity of breaking the scientific cycle of the physicists and the mathematicians. He lived from 1760 to 1825. And the fact that you don't know of him, gentlemen, doesn't mean that he is obsolete, but only that you are ignorant. Because gentlemen, such a sponsor of the future can be unknown for 300 years or 500 years. It doesn't make any difference. Jesus was unknown in 200 A.D. to Plotinus, when he wrote his philosophy -- 280 years { } Plotinus { }. Well, this man was totally obsolete. { } wasn't so. Thirty years later, the emperor became a Christian.
So the Saint-Simonists, gentlemen, are not obsolete. But you are, because you live in a protected, sheltered, academic environment in which this isn't taken seriously. Now gentlemen, what is great about Saint-Simon is that he was the first existentialist. That is, he said -- "If I want to begin a new life, I mustn't do it with the mind. I must do it bodily. I must do it with my whole existence. I must go out of the old world."
So he went to America and he fought in the war of independence for America. And he proposed the -- Panama Canal to the viceroy of Spain and Mexico. And so in these two acts, he made himself, as you see, a citizen of the future. His disciples built the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is not an economic venture. The Suez Canal was the second great idea of Saint-Simon to change the map of the world so that the worlds could get to each other, to make serious use of our knowledge that the world is one. Now I think that's quite a brain. He encompassed the two greatest canal problems of the world: the Panama Canal, in his
youth when he was 23; and when he died, he left a -- a group of disciples who went to Egypt and actually built the Panama Canal. And Lesseps -- who has heard of Lesseps? Well, I'm glad { } -- is a Saint-Simonist. And his spiritual ancestor, the man who inspired him to try both, the Suez and the Panama Canal is Saint-Simon.
You remember what we said about Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe, and Galilei, you remember, and Kepler, the four -- generations. Well, so don't be surprised that Lesseps was the third generation after Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon died in 1829 -- -5. Lesseps built the Panama Canal in 1892. And in 1869, Aida was composed by Verdi for the opening of the Suez Canal in Egypt.
Will you take down these dates? You say that Goethals built the Panama Canal. That isn't true, gentlemen. It always takes one bankruptcy before you get -- anything goes, any business work, as you know. And the people who {did} fail were the great people in building the Panama Canal. When Uncle Sam took over, well, as he -- he just -- just pushed ahead and -- and had -- had con- -- build on all their mistakes and all their disappointments.
Gentlemen, it takes guts to allow yourself to become disappointed. That's more heroic, gentlemen. That's why we celebrate the cro- -- crucifixion of Jesus, although He was a total failure, because it takes more guts -- gets -- guts to go to the Cross than to become bishop of Rome and have a { } on your head, and be saluted by 120,000 Italian schoolchildren, { }. That's the pope. But Jesus had absolutely no sign of victory during His whole life. Just defeat.
And that's why I feel that Saint-Simon and Lesseps belong into American history, very definitely, because they planned the two great things, gentlemen, which go together: the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal. And I don't think we behave very reasonably about the Suez Canal at this moment. The United States have every reason to prevent the Egyptians to take over the Suez Canal, just as we have prevented the Colombians to take over the Panama Canal. And I -- I'm ashamed of our government, and of the people even more, who do not see that the -- England defends there the reason of the world, the reason why this canal was built. That's not a private, national en- -- enterprise of these Egyptians. It would have never come into being. And what the -- is the reason for something being in existence that has to be supported. The reason is that people a hundred years ago -- and Saint-Simon was the first -- understood that the munition makers, and the atom bomb manufacturers, these physicists who blindly served individual governments, had to be faced by facts that they are greater than states and nations; and these would be these worldwide canals, because they would force the nations to consider the earth as one. And who tells you that the people in Panama own the Panama Canal? Who tells you that the people in Egypt own
the Suez Canal? Isn't that's ridiculous? Or that the Spaniards e- -- own Gibraltar? As long as the English kept all the seven seas "open," they had the right to administer them. If you now try to replace the English, please replace them. But don't try to tell Mr. Nabib that he can go and -- and present every Israeli ship to go through the Suez Canal, because that's a private Egyptian enterprise. Isn't that unheard-of? And that's what we allow to happen every day. It's a lake now, a pond.
This comes, you see, when things are not understood. The canal system, {meaning} these two mighty canals -- is a victory over the 19th-century nationalism, which this man at the beginning of this century already foresaw as the only means of talking turkey. You see, Saint-Simon had this great insight then to say -- see that the nations of this world must be faced by facts that are bigger than their -- their own ideologies and their own { }. And these canals, you see, he thought would simply outrun national boundaries. It is an ingenious idea, of recreating the universe, you see, {in a new fashion}, isn't it?
Now, I have said this before -- these two things; I think you have some perspective. Saint-Simon at the age of 60 co- -- tried to commit suicide. He had nothing to eat. He lived on water only. Finally he found an old servant whom he -- who had served him in his days of great wealth and richness, and who supported him. And in his last five years, he went blind in the -- in the a- -- attempt to take his own life -- he -- he found some real pupils, {students}. That is, the -- the success of Saint-Simon came in the last five years of his life. All the first 60 years, he battled against these scientists. For example, he went -- would have dinner every week at great expense -- he had still his money left -- to feast all these mathematicians and all these chemists and physicists, to learn from them, to find out about them, to understand what they really were doing. And then at the end, he summarized it all in this great, you see, proclamation: "Step down." Step down.
But you may say, gentlemen, that every beginner of the new cycle wastes his time with getting out of the old. And you may say that Saint-Simon had only five years of great {merit,} of knowing what he should not do. Before, he had always {competitively} -- tried to be on good terms with the powers that be. And tried to talk them into build- -- into -- into reason.
You can think of Anselm of Canterbury, and of Ab‚lard, who also tried to make the new, you see, thinking work, within the local school of Paris or the -- the archbishopric of Canterbury, and didn't succeed. Anselm of Canterbury was exiled from -- from England to Rome, because the king of England of course wanted to have an indepen- -- didn't want to have an independent archbishop. And Ab‚lard, you know, was castrated by enemies and -- and exiled from Paris.
And now in the same way, Saint-Simon is a failure in his own life. And I want to -- to vaccinate you, gentlemen, with this experience that failure is greatness in such a situation, when it isn't done for any selfish reason, but in the service of something nobody understands, because it is said for the first time.
What is his firstness? His firstness is that the work mankind has to do all over the globe, and the love men have to show each other all over the earth, and at all times, deserve both a thorough, new organization. The first thing his disciples wrote was Code de la { }, Law Book on Shame. Those of you who know my disc on shame know that I have protested with Saint-Simon against this treatment of { }, of shame as something obnoxious, or something of a guilt complex, as in { }. Gentlemen, the future belongs to those who can be ashamed. And I'm afraid the American prognostication is very poor, because of this shamelessness. The only hope I have is that Americans are very deeply ashamed about their patriotism. And I therefore think that America -- the people are very good Americans because they don- -- never talk about it. The people, like the French, who always talk about their patriotism, as you know, they go home and...
[tape interruption]
...and that's why they have a great future. Thousands of years {to come}, the Russian nation will still flourish, because they have this great secrecy about {love}, you see. And I -- your only hope you have this same great secrecy about American patriotism. Everybody in this country knows that when people talk loud about patriotism, they are no patriots. Wouldn't you say -- wouldn't you agree with me?
So gentlemen, look where a nation -- where a group of people have their greatest embarrassment, their greatest reticence, their greatest silence, and you know where their greatest strength is. A man's strength is where his secret is, where he won't have his heart on his sleeve. Or how do you say it?
Now Saint-Simon knew this. And he had these two maxims, gentlemen: society must protect shame; shamelessness is destructive. And society must product on -- produc- -- protect honest work. Unemployment is immoral. All -- this he all said in 1817, 8 years before his death, when he published his first idea of an industrial society. Unemployment is immoral. Now gentlemen, it has taken 130 years before you can say such a thing in this country without being ridiculed. And as you know, Mr. Meany made a statement yesterday in which he said the rich people want unemployment again, because that means that they have an easier labor policy. And this is the battle today: is unemployment immoral? Or is it not? Every one of you must know that obviously the thing isn't so simple. It's like -- with the just laws in the Middle Ages, you see. Unjust laws may be diso-
beyed; just laws must be obeyed.
I would say with unemployment, gentlemen, we are faced today with a great question. Some unemployment is desirable, is inevitable for a capitalist -- if we have no unemployment whatsoever, you are the slave of accident. You cannot change your -- re-invest your labor force. I mean, it's impossible. We -- this is nonsense -- "no unemployed" is against life. Just as you have to have some white blood corpuscles in reserve when you have a -- a wound. You have to be able to delegate this pus into this wound to heal. They must be a surplus of your body. You have to have some loose ends. You see, you have to have loose ends to a certain extent. But if you get leukemia, that would be, you see, indefinite unemployment in your body. Leukemia means that these white -- same white blood corpuscles, which are very good to heal an open wound, you see, are deadly when they multiply.
And I would say that unemployment is not simply bad or good. That's not true, gentlemen. The -- unions are quite wrong when they say, "No unemployment," and the Chamber of Commerce is quite wrong when they say, "Oh, I welcome unemployment, because that means I can lower the wages." It's a much more subtle problem. How much unemployment? That's your problem, you see. There is a quality and quantity.
We all -- I'm very proud, gentlemen. I became a member of the modern era and ceased to be a romantic bourgeois of the 19th century, because I have been three times really unemployed. Being married and having a family, and I put myself into the -- into the hands of the labor unions who made me unemployed, because I have tried to teach them; and I wasn't a Marxian. They didn't the like the idea that much.
Gentlemen, to be unemployed I think is the baptism of the modern society. And to have a secret of love is the other credential of your initiation into this modern society. Nobody who still believes that everything should be said and known has made the grade beyond the 18th century. Gentlemen, Saint-Simon stands beyond the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment says, "Light is better than night." Saint-Simon says, "There must light and there must be night, in alternation." That is, shame. Shame says that at times you must be silent about your patriotism or your love. And at times, you must not. The girl which you get up for Green Key is not the girl you are going to marry. You have to keep it a secret. The dates which you date are the not the final choice. And the more screens you can put up with the girls which the other boys see, the safer you are in the real choice of your sweetheart. The great protection -- the other girl -- {for other girls}.
Now gentlemen, the Enlightenment then is the academic cycle. In the Enlightenment, knowledge is better than ignorance. In society, gentlemen, we are quite indifferent to knowledge or ignorance. We want to know at the right moment. We want to know when we have to know. And we want others not to know when they shouldn't know. That is, in Saint-Simon's cycle, there is a -- a silken -- not an iron, but a silken curtain which can be drawn and withdrawn according to the familiarity with which you { } certain people. Society has degrees of intimacy. Nature has not. Nature is better when known. Society is not better when it is known. When the government knows your income tax, it isn't any better. Just different.
Knowledge, gentlemen, of other people of your own life is very dangerous. At a certain moment, you want to tell them. At another moment, you say, "Go to hell. I won't tell you." Just as you see Mr. Eisenhower had to say it at this moment, because he can't govern with a body of -- of faithful officials if he doesn't protect them. So suddenly society comes down with a bang and says, "No. Knowledge is not better than -- than ignorance. There is a secret."
And "I would be ashamed," the president says, "if I would now jeopardize the confidence of one of my collaborators. I can't do that." The same is true -- will be true in the state department. Very soon nobody wants to serve in the state department, because these people are just exposed to all kinds of insults. You have to have intimacy in a secret service. You have to have a s- -- feeling of staff work, of team work. And who gives away the secrets of his team -- that's personal.
So gentlemen, draw the line. Saint-Simon and the modern sociologists: compare as Saint-Simon being modern, and the modern sociologists being quite obsolete. The modern sociology in Chicago still thinks that knowledge of the social facts at all costs is better than secrecy. If you are responsible for the running of any family, or any club, any city, any nation, you know very well that the dirty linen has to be washed at home. And you know very well that it is not desirable that anything is said at the wrong moment. There may be a time when it has to be said. But the timing is in itself an essential part of the social sciences, of the social knowledge.
Gentlemen, peace cannot be had without a relation to the time sense. Therefore, enlightenment has only validity for nature. You all are steeped in the idea of the Enlightenment. Therefore you do not belong into the 20th century. As long as you do not make room for secrecy, you do not. Now you -- everyone of you does, but you don't do it in -- in the realm of your scientific thinking. But I -- if you are good politicians, you do keep this a secret. Instead of Mr. Stevens, that he is secretary of the -- of war today, of defense, because he -- he kept his mouth shut at Yale for the first three years. And so he made the Senior Society, because
nobody knew on what -- how he stood on any one issue.
Now at least it takes nerve to be so silent. I don't recommend it. But I only want to tell you that you all are like Mr. Stevens, very well acquainted with the rules of a game which is not academic, not scientific, not objective, and not sociological, and not psychological. When you are out for your own advancement, you know very well that you have to keep a secret. Now gentlemen, who would a sociologist be who would not finally learn his lesson and say, "Therefore society is a living unit in which there must be secrets. Without secrets, no peaces." That's the logic of Saint-Simon.
So we have these two tenets, gentlemen, of the Saint-Simonists: peace, shame, solidarity. You must feel solidarity with those whose secrets you do not divulge. No unemployment. I mean, or unemployment as a shame. It must be considered. This is all new, gentlemen. For the last 130 years, Saint-Simon was so far ahead of his time that if you today go to New York City and publish these three things -- peace, secrecy, solidarity -- they either say you are Communist, or you say you are a Roman Catholic. You do not see -- they do not see that you are the most modern man in the world.
Gentlemen, when I went to school, there was in no textbook of -- of economics a chapter on unemployment. It didn't exist. It was a cause of such shame that the capitalistic textbooks just didn't mention it. Unemployment was not mentioned. You can look them up. Any book printed before 1930 in America or Germany has no special chapter on unemployment. Just something -- a { }. It's a crisis, you see. But nothing -- nothing specific. No problem how to deal with it. As you know, Mr. Keynes was the first who -- to acknowledge this. Rather late. SaintSimon knew it in 1817.
Then look at shame. Psychoanalysis says, "Say it all. Spit it out! No shame. Murder your father! Sleep with your mother!" Again, that's the latest news in this country. Gentlemen, how obsolete. If you treat marriage as nature, you can never get married. If you treat your parents as nature, you can never respect them. If you treat your children as nature, you can never educate them. Very simple, these three rules, gentlemen. You can't get -- love anybody who is nature; you can't respect anybody who is nature; and you can't educate anybody who is nature. You can train an animal, but you can't educate an animal. You can't love a piece of nature. You can rape it -- her. And you cannot respect a piece of nature. You can manipulate your parents, as you try to do.
Gentlemen, respect, education, and love are in society and they are not found in nature. They are not found in nature. Why, gentlemen? These three actions -- and again Saint-Simon knew this, or I -- I should say, divined it -- these three
actions come under a sanction which doesn't exist in nature, because to educate, gentlemen, and to love, and to respect, what is needed? Can you describe this to me? What is the difference from a -- from an animal -- why can't an animal respect, educate, and love? Very important for you to know. Of course by now you should know it if you look at the 10 commandments of education. I have talked about this all the time, but I -- I come back now with this -- why I'm quite -- surprised at you. You've forgotten it all.
Gentlemen, love, respect, and education point before your death -- beyond your death and before your birth. They make life that has gone on before you and life that comes after you of the same intensity and importance as your own. For a man who is educated, that which he is educated in is of the same vitality as his own little {nature}. Jefferson, or the Gettysburg Address, or the -- the -- Sermon on the Mount is right here today. No reason to say it's 1900 years old, if you are educated. Or you aren't educated. Respect, the same. These people are old whom you are meant to respect. But for an educated person, gentlemen -- you remember what we said -- there is no difference between old and new. Nothing is good because it is young. Nothing is good because it is old. You respect something despite the fact that it is old, because it is still eternally young.
If you now -- I make you respect Saint-Simon, it is because it doesn't matter that he died in 1825. Isn't that true? That's the only reason why you can respect somebody, because it doesn't matter that he is so old. I cannot ask you to respect me because I'm old; but I can ask you to respect me although I am old. If you can look through my wrinkles and my white hair, then you have made a step into the real world. And what is this world of yours which you come up with in 70 years of fleshly existence? It's really very little. In this, you couldn't learn to speak. In this, you couldn't learn to think. In this, you couldn't be educated. And in this, you can't respect, and you couldn't educate your children, because your children will live in another world again. And it will look quite different from yours. And can't you educate them just the same? Can't you fill them with a heavy contempt for the world? Can't you tell them that the world looks different every year? That now you have television and psychoanalysis, and they will have microvision, and I don't know -- psychosynthesis, and it will e- -- be equally stupid and equally rotten. And you have to tell this -- your poor children, because otherwise they will go exactly as bankrupt as you go by buying a television set without needing it.
It just so happens -- you all think that the newest is the best. You have absolutely no yardstick to penetrate beyond your own existence, and gentlemen -- so you have nothing to say. Gentlemen, in the -- in nature, we said, nature is reality minus speech. Nature is reality minus speech. Now gentlemen, society is reality ruled by the word. Respect, and education, and any declaration of love are forms
of speech. In wis- -- people you respect -- who are they? The people you listen to. The people whom you educate are the people you want to listen to you. Isn't that true? And people you love, gentlemen, you can converse with. You write lyrical poems to, or letters, correspondence. You correspond with your sweetheart when she is away.
The three groups, gentlemen, to which you have to speak are the woman -- women of your own time, the parents of the past, and the children of the future. You have to speak to the unborn children. You have to listen to the people who have lived before you. And that is the essence of a respected education. And you have to converse with the people around you, with your friends, and especially with your wo- -- wo- -- with the woman you love. If you have nothing to speak, she'll go and work outside or go into women's club, and she will make the speeches, as it is in this country, where the husband has nothing to say. And he has nothing to say. He's just funny. And that's why they sleep with every South American tenor or -- or Yugoslavian athlete, because they are so bored stiff, these poor women, because their husband has nothing to tell them. No miracles, no respect, no education, no gods, no shame, no secret. They're bored stiff, these poor women in this country.
Because they wait for a non-natural world, for a social world, gentlemen, in which all reality is mediated to them by the word, by that which is said. They are hungry for poetry. They are hungry for epics. They are hungry for drama, because -- I tell you gentlemen. Education is drama, because a young person is introduced into life and doesn't know how a -- {curtain rises}, and the --. You know when you bring -- bring up a child, how dramatic everything looks to the child. You have -- will have seen it before. But the see -- the child sees everything for the first time. In conversation with your sweetheart, it's all lyrics. It's all poetry. Rhyme. Duet -- you can sing a duet, as in Figaro. And epics -- that's what the old people tell you what has been before. That's history.
So you get the three forms of speech, gentlemen, in every family, in every human existence: epics, lyrics, drama. And you can't be without it. And then you get the fourth form. Who has been in Philosophy 9? Well, you remember -- when you want to get rid of your society, you analyze it in a novel, in a prose -- a prose novel, you see, in a naturalistic story. The short story is written to get rid, to get out of something. To lose your respect, to have nothing to do with it, just to look at it -- with detachment. In this country, as you know, you -- you think that "to write" means to write prose, and to analyze. Gentlemen, real writing is epical stories, like War and Peace, by Tolstoy. That's epics. Or John Brown's Body, by Vincent Stephen Ben‚t. That's epical -- it's poetic. And lyrics I need not tell you. I hope you write still some -- and drama. That's completely lacking today. It all ends in disaster. I mean, Mr. O'Neill doesn't introduce the youth of the country
into the dramatic events of the future, but Mourning Becomes Electra we have to li- -- sit through. Have you -- who has read that? Well, that's really the end of an era. Can't you understand? I mean, everything goes to pot.
That we call drama. That is, the future is just destruction. Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, obsession. There is nobody to be educated. Everybody is a slave of the patterns of the past. Nobody is to be emancipated. And it's very typical of this country, gentlemen, of Western man. If -- if Mr. O'Neill is a dramatist of this era, then why don't you take a ticket and fly as fast as you can to some other star? Because this world is at an end. If Mourning Becomes Electra is the expression of our time, gentlemen, I certainly have for the last 40 years nothing to do with it. I have always tried to write off The Decline of the West. This happened when I was born, so to speak, The Decline of the West. But you still eat it all up. You read Proust, and -- and you read O'Neill, and I don't know what. And -- James Joyce and -- and all these assassinations of the corpse of Western man, because there's no epics, there's no drama, and there's no lyrics in all this. It's just all analysis.
I pity you, gentlemen. Get out of this. You are obsolete. You are academic people. Analytical people. Psychologic people. You're treating men as things. Things die. Mourning Becomes Electra -- {sundered}. So let's get away from Electra.
So gentlemen, this is all Saint-Simon. The man who started with Saint-Simon the new Krei- -- cycle is a German. His name is Goethe -- G-o-e-t-h-e. Goethe was not a poet. If you want to understand Goethe, please drop this terrible expression that he was a poet, that -- because in English the word "poet" narrows him down to the -- to the author of some epics -- of some lyrics. And then they say, "šber allen Wipfeln ist Ruh" or something like that, you see.
Gentlemen, Emerson called him a writer, by which he wanted to say that there was nothing that Goethe did not try to articulate. And here we come a little nearer to the truth. Why is Goethe the father of the new cycle of the social sciences? For the simple reason that he said, "Everything I write is a fragment of one great confession." Now he has written scientific books. He has written letters. He has written dramas. He has written lyrics. He has written novels. He has written Faust, you know, which is a mixture -- like Dante's Divine Comedy, a mixture of drama and epics. There is no form of language, of style which Goethe has not used in his perhaps 120 volumes of his collected works.
What does this mean, gentlemen? He said it himself: "Everything I say -- are fragments of one full confession." And the second, "When other people lose language, I have been endowed with the gift of saying -- being able to say what I
suffer." He should have perhaps said, "I am able to say what you suffer." That would make it clear to you that Goethe is the first social scientist conscious of the fact that the social science, gentlemen, has to give back to the natural man the power to speak. Will you take this down? The problem of the social science is to give back to a naturalized individual the power to speak.
Goethe lived from 1749 to 1832; and his name is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was made an aristocrat. And he is, like Saint-Simon, the contemporary of Napoleon. But he is like Anselm of Canterbury, and -- Saint-Simon is like AbElard. Or he is like -- Saint-Simon is like Paracelsus and -- Goethe is like Copernicus. Copernicus -- will you take this down again, gentlemen? Anselm, Copernicus -- I have said this before, when we started on these cycle -- are peaceful aristocrats, to use a term you don't like, who are received by their contemporaries as dignified people, who are one of the society of their time. And they are not at odds.
Ab‚lard, Paracelsus and Saint-Simon are terribly at odds with their own time. They sacrifice their regular existence to the -- sowing of the new. And it keeps really -- it should take your breath, gentlemen, how many forms are needed in the kingdom of Heaven to give birth to new life. Goethe and Saint-Simon are totally different. Anselm and Ab‚lard are totally different. One -- Goethe is at peace with the emperor of Russia, the emperor of Austria. He is ennobled by the emperor of Austria. And Napoleon pays him the compliment as being the greatest man of his time. And Goe- -- the Werther, the book on suicide, was in the -- on every battlefield with Napoleon. He has read it seven times, I think. I have forgotten the number of times. But he told Goethe when he had read it many a times.
Only to show you how the man who is the greatest figure of the 19th century was struck down by the Werther. Now I already gave you -- away the secret. We talked about suicide without this connection with Goethe. But Goethe was able to illuminate, gentlemen, the borderline case of man as nature, and man as speaking. The suicide is only possible if self is thing. Werther is written on this discovery, that by writing it, he saved his own life. The word, gentlemen, comes over Goethe in -- an -- in this passionate book, which fed many generations of readers, by the way, because -- gentlemen, now the great secret comes in -- we speak to get beyond our own nature. We speak to save our lives. Speech has been implanted into man as our weapon against death. When you hear that your best friend wants to commit suicide, what do you do? You speak to him. And it usually is enough to take him back into reality. And a man who is spoken to usually is out of danger. If he is crazy, and you can't speak to him, you can't -- his word -- your word doesn't reach him, then he will still -- may -- may, you see, may jump out of the window. But that means that you have not spoken -- been
able to speak to him. But when you can reach a person by speaking to him, he enlarges the reality to which he belongs.
Gentlemen, by speaking, we get every moment beyond the here and now. I, by speaking to you at this moment, gentlemen, get you into 2050 and 1800, without any difficulty, because we are speaking of Goethe. And you believe it, that you can understand what Goethe meant. Isn't that miraculous? Here you sit in 1954 at this very moment in this classroom. Simply by my talking, you suddenly find yourself face to face with your grandchildren and with your great-grandfather. The word, gentlemen, is -- has come into the world against local and temporal death. If you depended on your little bit of an existence at this moment in this classroom, you very soon would have no oxygen. You would have no direction. You wouldn't know what to do tomorrow. If really everything should come out of this classroom here -- if you think this through, gentlemen -- you cannot live at all by that which is here. And you cannot live by that which you find in your dormitory. And you cannot live by that which you find in Baker Library. You can only live if the word by which you telephone, literally, into all times of past and future, if the word can make a connection.
The word, gentlemen, has the power to take everybody out of his here and now. And that's why we speak.
Goethe knew this. And Goethe therefore is not the advocate of the new, two topics: work and love, shame and solidarity. But he is the herald of the power to speak. The power to speak, gentlemen, is drained out of you at this moment. What is the power to speak, gentlemen? This will be the topic next time. But I hope I have made so much clear that although Goethe lived from 1749 to 1832 and Saint-Simon lived from 1760 to 1825, they are much younger than you. They both have started something that has to be done against your resistance. You are the stumbling block in this way, because you don't believe it.