Philosophy at the end of the century: a survey of its past and future. (Sixtieth Anniversary, 1934-1994: The Legacy of Our Past.) Hans Jonas.
Abstract: The history of philosophy in the 20th century is described. At the turn of the century, epistemology ruled the day, to be followed by phenomenology as the dominant subject of philosophical interest. Phenomenology forced philosophers to raise questions about the real world's relation to the mind, as evidenced by Martin Heidegger's existential philosophy, which finally admitted the existence on non-cognitive factors. Heidegger aside, philosophy has still failed to address the relation between mind and nature, and this should be the goal of the discipline in the next century.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 New School for Social Research
My task is to speak to you about philosophy in this century and on the threshold of the next. I do not intend to speak here about Philosophy with a capital P, for it is doubtful whether such an identifiable entity exists. just compare it with the natural sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology--each has its well-defined subject matter whereas philosophy can deal with anything and everything. Then, too, these sciences of nature all have a clearly recognized method that each of them is strictly bound to follow. Philosophy, on the other hand, which is so fond of reflecting on the method of every other science, has yet to produce any binding method of philosophizing and possibly never will.
Above all, however, every branch of natural science can state at any given time what is valid in it and what is forever out of the question in the certainty that the latest findings are almost the most correct up to that moment. The past is, at the most, of historical interest. No physicist of today, for example, can rescue "phlogiston" from history's graveyard. But Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, Hume and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche offer continual subjects for debate for modern philosophers and can still find adherents among them. Whereas there can no longer be an alchemist or astrologer whom we take seriously, we can still take seriously an Aristotelian or Hegelian. In philosophy we cannot have a binding consensus about what is correct and what is false. We cannot even desire one; it would spell the death of philosophy.
That is why it is impossible to describe the "state" of philosophy at any given time with the same exactitude with which one can describe, for example, the state of physics. It is a partially vexing, partially welcome fact that there are as many philosophies and also as many views of philosophy as there are philosophers. Those who invited me to deliver this lecture were certainly not unaware of this, and they must, therefore, consent to my painting a very personal and perhaps thoroughly unrepresentative picture of the field of philosophy at the close of this century and of the challenge awaiting it in the one to come. In any case, what I have to offer is more a contribution to the never-ending discussion of philosophy than a report on its present state--a confession, in the last analysis, of a personal nature. The advantage that I have been "on the scene" for the past seventy years is balanced by the disadvantages that my participation has been selective and that I have kept my distance from some important currents, especially from the powerful one of analytic philosophy. Thus, the picture I present will be historically incomplete, for I shall speak only from the experience of my own thinking. Now to the subject at hand.
For philosophy--in its classic homeland of Germany--the century began without the fanfare associated in the field of physics with the names of Planck and Einstein. In spite of the significant impact of Husserl's Logical Investigations, which began to appear in the year 1900, his work cannot be compared with the work of those physicists. Nietzsche's influence was beginning to be noticeable, Kierkegaard was being discovered, from France the voice of Bergson was heard, and in Vienna logical positivism started to show signs of life. But in the universities the dominant philosophical interest was clearly epistemology. This field was practically identical with "the theory of cognitive consciousness," as set forth, for example, in the several varieties of neo-Kantianism. Deferring to the powerful position of the natural sciences, professors of philosophy had long since given up the attempt to formulate a philosophy of nature.
It was not until shortly after the First World War that an earthquake shook the field of philosophy, and here I can speak from my own experience because, by the accident of my year of birth, I found myself in the midst of it. In 1921 when, at the age of eighteen, I went to the University of Freiburg to study philosophy, the leading figure there was the already graying Edmund Husserl. "
henomenology," which he so passionately preached, was a program of self-examination of consciousness as the site of the appearance of all things possibly present to thought. A "pure" phenomenology of "pure" consciousness was to become the basis of all philosophy. "
ure" of what? Of the adventitious nature of all factual and individual elements, whereby inner awareness of essences is deemed able to extract that which is valid for all subjects in equal measure. A Platonizing element is unmistakable here, but--what is novel--it is applied to the field of subjectivity. The method, correspondingly, involves observation and description, not causal explanation as in psychology. The main accent rests on those functions of consciousness that constitute objects, that are cognitive and ultimately observing, and, in turn, can also be quite well observed themselves. Husserl was almost religiously convinced that the phenomenology he prescribed had finally made possible "philosophy as a rigorous science" and that he had brought to its culmination a major theoretical trend present in modern philosophy since Descartes.
There is not time to examine this theory more closely, but perhaps the following anecdote I recall hearing is indicative of its spirit. Someone--an outsider--once asked Husserl in person whether phenomenology had anything to say about God. The philosopher is said to have answered, "If we encounter him as a datum in consciousness, then we will certainly describe him." That sounds almost flippant, yet it is a fact that for many people Husserl's phenomenology became a path to God, mainly via Catholicism. I am thinking of Edith Stein and also of Max Scheler.
For myself, I confess gratefully that for the beginning philosopher phenomenology is a wonderful school in which to learn his trade. Respect for phenomena, practice in observing them, the rigorous task of describing them call for high standards to which one must strive to live. Yet even all this could not make philosophy into a "rigorous science"--that was a dream which Husserl brought with him from his early days as a mathematician and for which he had to be excused. But for his students the development of intuition was a life-long gain; it freed the area of intuition from the aura of irrationality that had clung to it ever since the days of the Mystics. On the other hand, I had my doubts about the adequacy of his theory, especially about its restrictive emphasis on pure consciousness. What about the existence of our body, I asked myself. Can we reduce it as well to a "datum of consciousness" without robbing the datum to be described of its real import--namely, that what is at stake is the existence or non-existence of the subject itself?
It is now my duty as speaker to announce that the theme of corporality" is a leitmotif that will sound throughout the remainder of my address; it will accompany us far beyond the special case of phenomenology and will be with us until the end of these remarks. What did the phenomenology of a Husserl have to say about the statement, "I am hungry?" Assuming there were a phenomenology of the sensations of hunger and satiety, would it say anything at all to me about what these sensations involve? About why human beings must eat? And about how much? Biology, along with physics and chemistry, enlightens us about the why, about the inexorable must." As for how much--good heavens, phenomenology's strictly qualitative awareness of essences cannot even begin to pose questions of a quantitative nature; yet the real, completely empirical size of our bodies has something to do with the answer. And in its turn the answer to "how much" leads to such unphilosophical questions as whether there is enough food and how to obtain it, and these then raise more questions concerning the just and unjust distribution of property as well as good and bad forms of society: here we find ourselves in the very midst of the burning questions of the time, from which phenomenology, in keeping with its self-definition, must remain aloof. Thus, it had nothing to say about the possible truth of Bert Brecht's brash lines written in those same years, "First comes the grub Then comes morality." In this respect, among our non-philosophical fellow students, the Marxists--in taking such questions seriously--were ahead of us.
But it was not from the Marxists that we non-political disciples of philosophy were to learn that "pure consciousness" is too pure for this world and that "direct awareness" is not the primary modality of our relationship to world and self. The new orientation sprang up in close proximity to phenomenology itself: it was the Existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The appearance of Sein and Zeit (Being and Time) in the year 1927 turned out to be that earthquake affecting the philosophy of our century referred to earlier. It shattered the entire quasi-optical model of a primarily cognitive consciousness, focusing instead on the willful, striving, feeble, and mortal ego. And this happened not, as one might assume, within the framework of psychology but of the age-old question, rescued from oblivion, concerning the meaning of "Sein." No one will expect me to give an outline of Heidegger's philosophy here, but something must be said about the experience of the great shift in thinking that it brought with it. Take, for example, the language of Being and Time, specifically--even more prominent than its strikingly metaphorical quality--the purely grammatical aspects of its conceptual style. What stands out immediately is the preference for using verbal forms as nouns: "In-der-Welt-sein" (being-in-the-world), "Geworfensein" (thrownness), "Miteinander-sein" (being-with-others), "Zuhanden-sein" (being-at-hand), "Sich-Vorwegsein" (being-ahead-of-oneself), "Vorlaufen zum Tode" (the anticipating of death). In German these are predominantly compounds containing the infinitive "Sein" (to be). The "time" in the book's title becomes "Zeitlichkeit" (temporality) and "Zeitigung" (temporalization) in the text, and instead of past and future we find "Gewesenheit" (pastness) and "Zukunftigkeit" (futurity). None of these are terms for objects but for events and for executions of actions: they do not refer to things but to ways of being; the concept of substance disappears, everything is always "in process," so to speak, and what was formerly called the subject is now called "Dasein." This extremely general and abstract infinitive becomes the technical designation for being in its specifically human forms, indeed for individual concrete persons as they experience themselves from within. Wherever "Dasein" occurs in Heidegger, "you" or "I" can be substituted but always as the agent of a specific kind of being. Da-sein" is also a compound: the "da" indicates that this special form of being surrounds itself with a horizon toward which it lives. Thanks to this verbal usage, a singular dynamism, indeed an element of drama, permeates the description of every relationship between ego and world; and the expectation of dynamic circumstances thus awakened by grammatical usage is fulfilled by the concrete imagery with which Heidegger--almost like a poet--describes the attributes of Dasein. For instance, "thrown" (or "projected" into the world, Dasein "projects" itself into the future.
Passing now from the question of language to that of meaning, let us examine the definition of "Dasein" with its new significance. To wit: Dasein is that form of being which in its being is concerned with this very being. "It is concerned with something": this is certainly no longer the transcendental consciousness met with in idealism. The end-oriented character of all subjectivity takes priority; it is essentially purpose-oriented, and its prime purpose is itself. "For the sake of" dominates all of Dasein's relations with the world. The "intentionality" of consciousness, which in Husserl's case quite neutrally indicates that it has an object, now turns out to be permeated with "interest"; will outweighs awareness, and the world is in practical terms primarily "there" for Dasein. Here lies a certain relationship with Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism and pragmatism, a connection that has not gone unnoticed.
But why must Dasein always be concerned with something and, in the last analysis, with itself? The answer: because without this concern it would perish, since it is constantly exposed to nothingness. Thus, along with its end-orientation, its overall purposiveness, Heidegger's definition of Dasein articulates its precarious and threatened quality: because it is mortal it must be concerned with existing as such. And this existing must at every moment be wrested from the constant imminence of death. For this reason the basic mode of Dasein's being is described as "care."
With the positing of care as the primary aspect of Dasein's being we have reached the heart of Heidegger's so-called "extentialism" (he himself did not use this term). It is in the perspective of care that the world can confront us as the quintessence of "at-handedness" and the things of this world as potential "stuff " or equipment," as something that can be of service in the end-means situation. That one's own being is the constant object of care does not mean that it is the only or even the foremost one. Much else that is transitory is encompassed by care: other persons--for example in the mode of "care-for" or "concern-for," perhaps to the point of self-abnegation--and even inanimate things, such as the uncompleted work to which the artist devotes his life. Here too it is a matter of one's own being in the sense that it can find fulfillment in total devotion to other beings.
Obviously, we are now at a threshold leading from an ontology of Dasein to the area of ethical conduct. Heidegger never really crosses it in Being and Time, nor, as far as I know, does he do so in his later works. To be sure, he does distinguish between "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" of existence, and it is clear that this is a value judgment--that, in other words, there are latent imperatives of should and should not present in the distinction. But Heidegger left it at that: namely, for him "authentic" and "inauthentic" are simply descriptions of alternative ways of being and of conditions present in every Dasein. In the first place and for the most part, people do not live as themselves but speak, think, and act as "one" speaks, thinks, and acts; it is only the "anticipating of death," that is, reflecting on one's own morality, that awakens in people the resolution to be their own selves, that is, to exist "authentically." Doubtless this state is superior to trivial everydayness," but what this resolution favors or opposes is not stated. That it is enveloped by "dread" is stated, however, and here as well as elsewhere we find the influence of Kierkegaard, from whom the word "existence" had received a new definition, applicable only to human beings. The foregoing must suffice to recall the gist of Being and Time, and this book, his most famous and influential, must stand for all of Heidegger, although the immense scope of his later work progressed beyond it in many respects.
I have two criticisms that are of concern to me here. The first goes back to one already provoked by the case of Husserl. Heidegger's concept of Dasein as "care" and as mortal is certainly more in keeping with our being's subjugation to nature than is Husserl's "pure consciousness." The adjective "mortal" in particular calls attention to the existence of the body with all its crass and demanding materiality. And the world can be "at hand" only for a being who possesses hands. But is the body ever mentioned? Is "care" ever traced back to it, to concern about nourishment, for instance--indeed, to physical needs at all? Except for its interior aspects, does Heidegger ever mention that side of our nature by means of which, quite externally, we ourselves belong to the world experienced by the senses, that world of which we, in blunt objective terms, are a part? Not that I know of Somehow German philosophy with its idealistic tradition was too lofty-minded to take this into account.
Thus, Heidegger too failed to bring the statement "I am hungry" within the purview of philosophy. In the last analysis, it was a very abstract mortality that we were meant to contemplate and that was meant to make us recognize the gravity of existence. By ignoring the concrete basis of ethics, Heidegger's interpretation of inwardness denied itself an important means of access to this field; with this lack, ethics for him remained empty of real content. It was crucial for human beings to choose, but what choices they should make was not stated.
Behind all of this, however, quite apart from Heidegger's particular case, lay an age-old one-sidedness from which philosophy has suffered: a certain disdain for nature, to which the mind or spirit felt itself superior. This was the heritage of the metaphysical dualism that has polarized Western thought since its origins in Platonism and Christianity. Soul and body, mind and mater, the interior life and the external world were, when not hostile, at least alien to each other and could be joined together theoretically only with difficulty. The split went right through the human individual, yet thinkers were in agreement as to which side the individual really belonged on. It was on this side that their gaze was fixed, and it was here that there was a world to be discovered which the eye does not see nor the hand grasp. It is to the long reign of dualism with its one-sided focus that we in the West owe the exploration of the realm of the soul, indeed the enrichment of the soul itself through constant reflection--an invaluable gain, exemplified by names like Augustine and Pascal but one whose price was high: mutual alienation between two parts of one whole. Its most recent form had been Descartes' splitting of reality into extension" and "thought." Extension, expressible in mathematical terms--in other words, the entire material world stripped of all inwardness--was handed over to the nascent natural sciences to become their exclusive domain. This was still philosophy's deed; it thereby renounced, however, its right to express itself any longer on matters pertaining to nature, reserving for itself henceforth only the cultivation of the field of consciousness. It was on this salvaged half of the dualistic heritage that German Idealism blossomed. And ever since, philosophy has no longer concerned itself with the whole. The universe of knowledge was divided by the academic world into the natural sciences and the humanities, and philosophy found itself as a matter of course among the latter--whereas rightfully it should have stood above this division. Thus, when I was a student in Germany, concentrators in philosophy were not required to know anything about developments in the natural sciences. It was not until emigration brought me to the Anglo-Saxon world that I found a lively interest among philosophers in the natural sciences and a desire to integrate their findings into the humane disciplines. (I shall mention here only the name of the great Alfred North Whitehead. For Heidegger, on the other hand, the natural sciences were, if I am not mistaken, little more than the creators of that soulless technology he deplored.
And yet that baffling "Dasein" of his emerged from the supposedly neutral "at-handness" of the external world that science reveals to us--emerged in the first place in the evolution of the species and then repeatedly in every case of conception and birth. That must say something about objective nature, which causes this--and us--to occur. Nature must be questioned, so to speak, about its intentions concerning us. Heidegger himself, after writing Being and Time, deemed necessary such a reversal of the question of being and called it "the turn." The question is no longer what does "world" mean for "Dasein," which finds itself in it, but what does "Dasein," that is, the human being, mean for the world that contains it--contains you and me. In the one case, it is the human being, in the other "being," which is the focal point of the relationship. But Heidegger never brings this question about being--how it is, namely, that being contains and maintains the human and what it thereby reveals about itself--into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution. Instead of taking into account this massively material basis that after all propounds the riddle, he invokes as our underlying determinant a highly spiritual entity that he calls "das Seyn" [the German word for "being" in an archaic spelling!. Here again, as previously in the case of his overlooking the body, this means simply that the question of being was spared the tremendous impact of considering the reciprocal relationship between human beings and nature--a relationship which at that very moment was entering a new and critical phase, although this was still unrecognized at the time.
This is the first of my two critical comments on the thinking of my great teacher. I must say a few words in defense of the presence of the second one in these observations of mine. It has to do with Heidegger's conduct in the year 1933. Does that have anything to do with philosophy? In my opinion, yes. Since ancient times philosophy, unlike every other branch of learning, has been guided by the idea that its pursuit shapes not only the knowledge but also the conduct of its disciples, specifically in the service of the Good, which is after all the goal of knowledge. At the very least, philosophy's schooling of its adherents in discriminating among values ought to protect them from being infected by the mass mind. The example of Socrates, which has served as a beacon for philosophy since its beginnings, has kept the belief in such an ennobling force from being extinguished. Therefore, when the most profound thinker of my time fell into step with the thundering march of Hitler's brown battalions, it was not merely a bitter personal disappointment for me but in my eyes a debacle for philosophy: philosophy itself, not only a man, had declared bankruptcy. Had its nimbus perhaps always been a false one? Would it ever be able to win back some of that splendor we had expected of it? The unique caliber of the philosopher in question made his fall from grace an historic event.
The counter-example I shall now adduce only poses a new question. Among my professors was Julius Ebbinghaus, a strict and uncompromising Kantian, not to be compared with Heidegger in significance. He had passed the test admirably; I learned of this and visited him in Marburg in 1945 to pay him my homage. He looked into my eyes with that old fire of absolute conviction and said: "But do you know what, Jonas? Without Kant I wouldn't have been able to do it." I suddenly realized that here theory and life were one. With which man, then, was philosophy in better hands? With the creative genius whose profundity did not keep him from a breach of faith in the hour of decision or with his unoriginal but upright colleague who remained pure? To this day I do not presume to have the answer to this question, but I believe it belongs--unanswered--in a retrospective look at philosophy in this century.
Just as for many other areas, the Second World War represented a watershed for philosophy. The reality of what had been experienced and the tasks it left behind could not be ignored. From the heaven of eternal thought, contemplation--unnerved--descended to the earth with its conflicting forces and intervened in the course of affairs. Noble abstention from events of the day was a thing of the past. Politics and society became the dual focus of philosophical interest. Moral engagement permeated theoretical investigation. Belatedly, the voices of Marxist philosophers long excluded from the universities of the West finally began to be heard as well. In Germany the major example of this turn to the problems of a frightened and guilt-ridden society was afforded by the Frankfort School, whose members had returned from exile; their "critical theory" is unimaginable without the ethical component, still present in the thinking of the School's second generation as represented by Habermas and Apel. There were parallel developments in France. Concurrently, to be sure, analytic philosophy with its exclusive emphasis on the theory of knowledge, originally born in Vienna, returned to the continent as a new force along with the Anglo-American victors. Its highly specialized branches are actually separate disciplines and as little touched by events of the day as is mathematics. The most prominent name here is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But among the events of the time was "Hiroshima," and this shock, perpetuated by the immediately following nuclear arms race, was the first trigger for a new and anxiety-ridden rethinking of the role of technology in the Western world. With its help, victory had been attained but at the cost of the constant danger of collective self-destruction. Thus, the philosophical critique of technology that now began stood initially completely in the shadow of terror (as in the case of Gunther Anders), and it was not to lose this apocalyptic aspect. To the fear of a sudden catastrophe was soon added the growing realization of the negative sides of technological triumphs in general, a realization that was accompanied by totally new questions for philosophy. For example, advances in biology and medicine led to a novel cooperation between philosophers and representatives of the life sciences for the purpose of clarifying the questions arising from the new discoveries. There is no longer room here for a simple yes or no as with the problem of nuclear weapons; instead, we find an area of fluid boundaries, subtle value judgments, and controversial decisions. Nor is there a Manichean struggle here between good and evil; no malevolent will is at work but rather the will to help. And yet inventive skill in the service of human welfare often turns out to be in conflict with human dignity. Biotechnology in particular has introduced into the realm of morality completely new dilemmas, heightened complications, and refined nuances that philosophy must take account of, although it often has nothing to offer except compromises between conflicting principles. This brings to light an important aspect of the entire technological syndrome: its previously undreamt of power, a product of the power of the human mind, confronts this same mind with new and previously undreamt of challenges.
This situation is magnified in the case of the impact of contemporary humankind's technology on the natural environment. And indeed, as this phenomenon--namely, the threat we pose to the planet's ecology--became more and more apparent during the second half of this century and finally even came to the attention of philosophers, suddenly one of the oldest philosophical questions, that of the relationship between human being and nature, between mind and matter--in other words, the age-old question of dualism--took on a totally new form. Now this question is no longer something to meditate on in the calm light of theory; it is illuminated by the lightning flashes of an approaching storm, warnings of a crisis that we, its unintentional creators, have the planetary duty of trying to avert. Thanks to this exceedingly practical aspect of the problem, the reconciliation between our presumptuous special status as humans and the universe as a whole, which is the source of our life, is becoming a central concern of philosophy. I see in this an urgent task for philosophy to address, both at the present moment and into the coming century. Because of this urgency, I hope you will permit me to devote the remainder of my remarks to this topic.
Clearly, philosophy can undertake its new assignment only in closest cooperation with the natural sciences, for they tell us what that material world is with which our mind is to make a new peace. Let us ask, then: what findings of physics, of cosmology, of biology must philosophy keep in view in trying to determine the status of mind in the total scheme of being? I shall confine myself to a few summary points.
Since Copernicus, to our knowledge it is no longer the entire cosmos that is the dwelling place of life but solely our planet Earth. Nothing in the remainder of the gigantic universe guarantees that there must be such a dwelling place at all. Therefore, we must regard ourselves and all life around us as a cosmic rarity, a stroke of luck that caused a potentiality, hidden in matter's womb and as a rule remaining hidden, to become, as an exception, reality. On the other hand, as Darwin taught us, what had become reality, thanks to the unique favorableness of special planetary conditions, demonstrated its ontological force in an eons-long process of evolution--changeable, without plan or goal, both creative and destructive--which populated the receptive biosphere with unforeseeable forms. In comparison with this earthly drama with its immensely complex creations, all the rest of the discernible universe is primitive and monotonous. But it is the same primeval substance, present throughout the universe in galaxies, suns, and planets, that has also brought forth life, pleasure and pain, desire and fear, seeing and feeling, love and hatred. No mere materialism as formulated by the physicists can ever comprehend this. Yet opposing every form of dualism is the monistic testimony of evolution, which, it seems to me, has not been adequately taken into account by any ontology put forward by philosophers. This cannot be the concern of the physical sciences by themselves, which are dependent solely upon physical data. These data taken by themselves can explain, by means of mere mechanistic causality and without postulating any special vital force or the like, even the subtlest complexity of organic structure and function as well as their phylogenetic development. Which makes even greater, then, the enigma of subjectivity that accompanies advancing levels of physical history and speaks an entirely different language. Natural scientists need to be deaf to this language or, if they do hear it, accuse it of lying, for it speaks of goals and purposes. But this enigma must give no rest to philosophy, which has to listen to both languages, that of the external and that of the internal world, uniting them in one statement about being that does justice to the psycho-physical totality of reality. We are still far distant from this welcome kind of ontology and do not know whether it will ever be our portion. Merely striving for it means venturing forth from the Cartesian certainty of exact knowledge into the uncertainty of metaphysical conjecture. I do not believe that in the long run this can be avoided.
Late in the evolution of life we encounter ourselves--human beings. We appeared on the scene only very recently. In the history of life, our entrance was an event with immense consequences, and it has not yet been determined whether we are equal to them. With us, the power of thought intervened in Earth's further development and severely impaired those biological mechanisms in effect until then that ensured the equilibrium of ecological systems. No longer did organisms with genetically fixed patterns of behavior struggle for their portion of habitat, with the result that each portion remained approximately constant; now the inventive genius of homo faber, free and responding to the perceived needs of the moment, dictated--one-sidedly, again and again, more and more rapidly--the conditions of future symbiosis. The span of time from the Paleolithic Age to the era of scientific technology is a long one in human history but very short in evolutionary terms, and since the rise of the modern natural sciences in the seventeenth century the tempo of change has accelerated exponentially. What we are experiencing today is the paradox of excessive success that threatens to turn into a catastrophe by destroying its own foundation in the natural world.
What has philosophy to do with all this? Until now it has posed questions about the good life of the individual, about the good society, about the good state. Since its beginnings, it has always concerned itself with human actions insofar as these occurred between human beings but scarcely ever with the human individual as an acting force in nature. But now the time for this has come. To address this problem, a new conception of human beings must be developed that takes into account their mind-body unity, thanks to which they are on the one hand a part of nature themselves and on the other extend beyond it. In this connection let us not deny that the practical use of the mind -- that is, its power over the body -- was, from the beginning and for a long time almost exclusively, in the service of the body: to better meet its needs, to attend to them more fully, to satisfy them for longer periods--and constantly to create new needs by making them fulfillable. In serving the body, the human mind wreaks havoc on nature. And in so doing, it increasingly adds to our needs and desires, more dignified than those of the body but possessing an appetite equally as ravenous for the Earth's resources. This is evidenced by the physical prodigality of advanced cultures, which only increases the impact of an already excessively large population upon the shrinking resources of the natural world. Indeed, the mind has made the human being into the most gluttonous of all creatures and this to such a degree that today the entire species is driven to live from the environment's unrenewable capital rather than from its income.
Knowledge about this situation is as new as the situation itself. But the knower here is that same mind which caused the situation in the first place. Thus, the future has not yet been decided. We say this in spite of the disturbingly questionable character of the human mind's present ascendancy. A few remarks about this state of affairs follow.
As we awake from a hundred years of technology's blithe plundering of the planet and its triumphant celebration of its successes, its Utopian dreams of happiness for the entire human race, we are discovering a previously unsuspected tragedy in the gift of the sixth day of creation as reported in Genesis: the granting of self-consciousness and intellect to a creature of physical needs and drives. Nobility and doom join hands in the human intellect, which taken by itself raises the human being into the realm of metaphysics but becomes, in its practical application, the instrument of extremely brutal biological success. In itself the mind represents the fulfillment of human destiny; around itself it spreads destruction. With it we reach the peak of being's self-affirmation, which became discernible with the first stirrings of a feeling and mortal life, and now it is undermining the foundation that sustains it. At the height of its triumph the mind is placing the species endowed with it before an abyss. But the very fact that it is beginning to see this abyss offers the glimmer of a chance of preventing the plunge over the edge. For the mind, which recognizes itself here as the source of doom, is after all not merely an instrument for attaining power over material objects but also has its own characteristic motivations arising from its perception of values. It forms the concepts of the good, of duty, and of guilt. It prides itself on its freedom of choice and thereby declares itself responsible for its actions. And since these actions now threaten the entire planet, the mind is also capable of recognizing its responsibility for the planet's survival.
It has become one of philosophy's tasks to reinforce this recognition and develop it further. First of all in the role of gadfly, with which Socrates compared his function as philosopher: we cannot keep silent a moment longer about these problems, and we must continually seek to awaken people's consciences. Next, we must work on the idea of a peace pact between mind and nature, for the sake of which arrogant humans must renounce much of that to which habit appears to entitle them. In addition to this must come, properly speaking, the philosophical effort to provide as rational a basis as possible for the imperative of responsibility within a comprehensive ontology and to make the absoluteness of this imperative as convincing as the enigma of creation will permit.
The actual articles of a possible peace pact itself can be worked out only by practical experts--in other words, not by philosophers. All the sciences concerning nature and human beings, concerning economics, politics, and society, must cooperate in drafting a planetary statement of condition along with suggestions for arriving at a budget balanced between human beings and nature. Whether so much as a theoretical agreement is attainable I do not know, and even less do I know whether one with the best possible practical grounding has a chance of being translated into action. Perhaps it will not be a matter of planning at all but of improvisations which the widely growing emergency will cause humanity's inventive genius to devise from occasion to occasion. I do not know--and probably no one does. Only the great imperative is overwhelmingly clear to me along with the fact that the human mind alone, the great creator of the danger, can be the potential rescuer from it. No rescuer god will relieve it of this duty, which its position in the order of things places upon it.
From the abyss that is now becoming visible there arise questions we have scarcely ever asked before. Here, in conclusion, a sampling of them. Can nature continue to tolerate the human mind, which it created from its own substance? Must it eliminate the human mind because it finds that mind too destructive of the natural order? Or can the mind ultimately make itself tolerable for nature once it has become aware that it is intolerable? Is peace possible when war was the primeval law governing the relationship between the two? Or was tragedy perhaps the original purpose behind the birth of mind? Is the drama, in spite of its tragic ending, worth performing for the sake of the unfolding of the plot? And how can we make the drama worthwhile in itself, regardless of the ending? How much of its worthwhileness can we sacrifice in order to attempt to avert catastrophe? Is it permissible for us to be inhumane so that humans can continue to live on Earth? And so on.
All of these are questions of the type Wittgenstein forbade us to ask, since there can be no verifiable answers to them. But they help us to recognize the existing situation, which forces these questions upon us, and to see that it is ourselves to whom these questions are addressed. And here we discover that what lies at the heart of these questions is not metaphysical brooding (which undoubtedly has its own justification) but an anguished sense of responsibility for this threatening state of affairs. It is that sense of responsibility which will give rise to answers involving action where there are none involving knowledge. And so the shudder of horror evoked by the last question I raised--that of dehumanization for the sake of saving humankind--can reinforce philosophy in its role as guardian of those basic values we cannot live without--even though it must simultaneously become the advocate of our living without much of value to which we have become accustomed.
In rethinking the concept of responsibility and of its extension--never conceived of before--to the behavior of our whole species toward the whole of nature, philosophy will be taking a first step in the direction of assuming this responsibility. As I take my leave now, it is my wish for philosophy that it persevere in this endeavor, undeterred by all justifiable doubt as to whether it will meet with success. The coming century has a right to this perseverance.
(*) A lecture delivered on May 25, 1992 in the Prinzvegenten Theater in Munich as part of the series "The End of the Century," sponsored by the Directors of the Bavarian State Theater and by the Literatur Handling in Munich. Originally published bu Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfort on the Main, 1993.
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