A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes Read Free Page A

expression in the phenomenological method of Husserl, who is not at all interested in the noumena , but in phenomena.
    Critique of Practical Reason , Kant’s second great work.
    Today this work is outdated, although it has very authentic passages.Kant wanted to make of itsomething akin to the Critique of Pure Reason .But if the Critique of Pure Reason speaks about judgments by which one can know the world, the Critique of Practical Reason deals with judgments which qualify things (the quality of things).Example: this man pleases me, this bread is good.
    Here we perceive judgments as imperative judgments.
    Critique of Pure Reason: it is about understanding, about knowing.
    Critique of Practical Reason: it is about what I must do, to act (morals).
    Now, imperatives can be hypothetical or categorical.
    Imperatives when the will is autonomous, conditioned by nothing.Example: “One must be moral” is categorical.It does not depend on any condition.If I say that I must be moral in order to go to heaven or to have people’s respect, this is already a hypothetical imperative.This is important because, in our era, we confuse these things.
    For Kant, the moral imperative must be disinterested.
    Now morality depends entirely on will.Be careful: these are Kantian laws which are interpretedin a confused way.Example: if my mother is ill and I, with the best intentions of curing her, by mistake give her medicine which kills her, from the moral point of view, I am in order.
    That is why one must judge all of history’s greatest monsters by their intentions: Hitler, Stalin.
    If Hitler believed that the Jews were the malady of the world, he was in order from a moral point of view, even though he was wrong.But if he did so out of personal interest, then it is immoral.Morality, for him, is moral will, goodwill.
    Aristotle, this is classification, order,the objective world.
    Man considered as object, animal.
    Marx.For Marx, man is object.
    [Witold disagrees].The artist must be in the subjective.
    Read Kant’s biography by Thomas de Quincey.

Fourth Lesson
    Thursday, May 1, 1969
    Schopenhauer
    After Kant, there is a line of thought which could be outlined as follows:FichteSchelling German IdealismHegel“Idealism” why?Because it is subjective philosophy which is concerned with ideas.
    Kant had two successors (curious thing) of two different types:SchopenhauerNietzscheArthur Schopenhauer (19th century).
    Born in Danzig.
    He adopts the Kantian system with a formidable difference, which consists of the following.
    After Kant, all philosophers wanted to be involved with the thing in itself, the absolute.Yet Schopenhauer gets up and says, “It so happens thatno one knows what a thing is in itself, and well, me, I do know.”
    The world is stupefied, and Schopenhauer continues: “I know it from internal intuition.”Intuition means direct knowledge, not reasoned but “absolute.”
    Schopenhauer’s reasoning is as follows.
    Man is also a thing.Therefore, if I myself am a thing, I must seek my absolute in my intuition, what I am in my essence.And, says Schopenhauer, “I know that the most elementary and fundamental thing in myself is the will to live.”
    Here a door opens to a new philosophical thinking: philosophy stops being an intellectual demonstration, in order to enter into direct contact with life.For me (in France, almost no one shares my opinion) it is an extremely important date that opens the path to Nietzsche’s will to power, and to all of existential philosophy.We must understand that Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system did not take hold; in this sense, Schopenhauer did not express something solid.Which is why, I suppose, that Schopenhauer has not held his own as a philosopher.
    BUT WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? No philosophical system lasts for very long.But for me, philosophy has THE SUPREME VALUE OF ORGANIZING THE WORLD IN A VISION.
    For example, there are the extremely grandiose Kantian and Hegelian universes, there is also