Love and Culture: Why You Should Not Rip Off My Stereo: A Critique of Morality

How to learn more: say it; students and professors, questions and answers: how you can't have one without the other; Faust and the present dilemma of the university: no questions and irrelevant, obsolete, or unintelligible answers; how to become God (causa sui); why it's inevitable that we "love others as ourselves"; Thomas Hobbes' answer to violence and invitation to the "higher life"; why some people are more patriotic than others; getting more out of life and then thinking about giving; beyond suburbia, The Silent Majority, and 48 courses in 4 years.

. . . I'm sorry—his heart's not in it; he doesn't care. Why doesn't he care? Because, I think, he doesn't see the potential in the situation. The potential for him lies in seeing his groups as his first trial teaching situation. Most of the graduate students and the volunteers from my Plato class are going to be teachers, and this is their first crack at it. I was so thrilled when I had my first crack at it that I would gladly have done it for nothing, I would still gladly do it for nothing, because of its great potential for me. I'm not altruistic, as you know, I'm an egotist. The teaching situation is the one in which I grow most, benefit most.

When I come to your groups, I get much more out of it than anyone there—than any of you. This is because I'm concentrating 5 or 10 times as hard, because I'm 5 or 10 times as interested in what's going on—more concretely, because I always anticipate that, whatever's being said, I will be the next person to say something. I'm always listening as though it were incumbent on me to reply. That's the way you ought to participate in your groups as well. Whenever anyone is saying anything, you should concentrate as intently as though it were incumbent on you to reply.

Most of you are the quiet type. About 2/3 to 3/4 of you never open your mouths in discussion—you sit there with great wondering eyes and we know not what you think. If you belong to this 2/3 or 3/4 of the Silent Ones, by all means get in there and talk. I say 2/3 to 3/4 of you never open your mouths. But let me give you a bit of training in a priori thinking. What's the statistical average among women? Higher or lower? (Have you got your answer?) Right! It's higher. And how much statistically does a woman earn? (Ready?) Right again! Lower. Do you see any connection? Statistically, we know this. Now why? Why is this so? Well, I've been telling you for 5 weeks why this is so. But do you see how a priori thinking proceeds?

We all know quite a lot about women, blacks, homosexuals, little old ladies—if we would only think. When we begin thinking out things we already know (but in Plato’s terms we have “forgotten”), this is a priori thinking. Modern sociology begins when the American sociologist, Lester Frank Ward, puts a developed community in the wilderness, and starts deducing consequences. It comes pretty close to a description of American society, and Ward works it all out in his head, as the natural (or "inevitable") consequence of putting a developed community in the wilderness, like the early settlements of the American colonies. Frederick Jackson Turner virtually deduces American history with his frontier theory. That's a priori thinking, and you can do it too. It's the way one develops imagination, like mine.

The other way is by getting out and collecting facts, experiencing, observing directly, running tests, gathering statistics and the like—this is called a posteriori or (more often) empirical thinking, which English philosophers have traditionally stressed. (Not exhibited, for Hume's argument is as deductive as Kant's, but stressed.) Who's right, German idealists or British empiricists? Which is the true way to think, a priori or a posteriori, deductively or empirically? How absurd! Yet 5 years ago I took that question to make some sort of basic sense. I thought that somehow Hume and John Stuart Mill were on the wrong track, and Kant and Hegel and Heidegger were on the right track. How absurd! I finally discovered this when I began understanding Hegel, about 5 years ago. Obviously we are all on the same track, as we are all in the same boat. When you understand what they are really all about, Hume and Kant are as close together as President Nixon and Premier Kosygin. A priori and a posteriori are poles of a compass, not separate "bags or pigeon-holes. All thinking has elements of both, and the two are not really in conflict, only a tension. We can't do without either. In the one case, we'd be out of our senses and, in the other, out of our wits.

The reason I prefer a priori thinking, and am a German idealist, is that it does better things for our imagination—Aristotle's answer to Lord Russell. For the most part, we don't need more facts; we can't cope with all the facts we have. A lot of people think that they can't penetrate the "secret of life" because there are some crucial facts they don't know. I thought this all during the years I was under therapy. I thought the psychiatrist knew more about my life than I did, that he had some secret insight into the workings of my "nature" that would make sense of my life—if I could ever get him to tell it to me. (He never did.) We need to learn how to draw facts together into meaningful patterns, not simply groupings (as one would assume from reading Bacon and Locke). Read Bergson on laughter, Freud on slips of the tongue and dreams, Thorsten Veblen on consumption and leisure, Frederick Jackson Turner on the American frontier. This is all a priori thinking, and immensely helpful in developing imagination, which I see as the most important thing in life. Much more entertaining and rewarding than empirical studies of psychologists and sociologists, which I take to be the lowest segment of Plato's divided line in Book VI of the Republic (509e-511e).

We all know more about women, blacks, homosexuals, and little old ladies than we think—if we only think. The trouble is that we rarely do think. It almost appears, as Sartre never tires of harping at us, that there are many things which we systematically never get around to thinking about—leaving us, in A.E. Housman's formulation, "with flint in the bosom and guts in the head." Can you see how these two are the same thing? An exercise in a priori thinking; you already have all the facts." Why would I claim that "guts in the head"="flint in the bosom"?

One of the things I'm trying to do in teaching you how to think is to reduce the range of things you systematically never think about, once you have your firm convictions and fixed view of life. You all know, for example, that other men have to pay, and pay dearly, for the privileged lives you lead, that one man has to work two or three times his share to keep another sitting on his duff, doing anything he likes. (I define as "privileged" anyone who can sit around on his duff, while other men lift that barge and tote that bale—and this includes all of you here, including blacks.) You know all this, but you don't think about it very much—in fact, you hardly ever think of it. Conversely, if you think about it too much, like Terry Dalton and Leo Tolstoy, you're not going to be able to think either. If I spent a day with you, I could point out dozens of things about your behavior that you likewise systematically never think about, or dwell on too much, like Hamlet.

I'm not censuring you morally. To teach you how to think, I must reassure you that you can do anything you like, that there is no punishment, and that words do not oblige or condemn or justify. You can't change things anyway; it's been going on for 10,000 years. When you understand this, you're free to think anything you like, anything you can—you're not occupied defending yourself with moral principles that don't hold water anyway. It's moral principles and fixed attitudes which impede thinking, and which Socrates is always puncturing, in order to get thinking started.

So if you're the talkative type, begin to rein yourself in and pour more of your aggressive energy into drawing other people out. Lay less emphasis in being a lecturer, and telling people what you already have cold (or think you have cold) than on being an interrogator, and drawing them out. That's the way to popularity. So in your groups ask yourself whether you tend to talk too much or too little. (By and large the answer is one of the two.) If you talk too little, come on out! We want to hear what you think! We really do.

You're not going to disgrace yourself by saying something silly. Apparently one girl felt this was the danger—that, if she opened her mouth, she would look silly. Her teachers must have given her to understand this over many years, because when I asked her why she didn't participate more in class, she said professors are fast-draw artists—a metaphor from the old west—and she wasn't about to take them on until she had more practice. That's right. You throw things out there and we shoot them all down, for the most part. But where are you ever going to get the practice if you don't get in there and pitch?

Professors tend to be good lecturers but not good interrogators or moderators or interlocutors. Remember I said last time we don't train you, strangely enough, in the student's art, the art of asking questions. We examine and evaluate you only on your ability to answer, not ask, questions. It's considered a fringe benefit of small lecture courses that you occasionally have the opportunity to ask a question. Conversely professors are superlative lecturers, but often quite uninspired interrogators and interlocutors because they have never been trained to ask questions, only to answer them. Each man is a response to his environment, remember.

Consequently you get the impression that we have all the answers, and indeed we do have all the answers—to the questions we've already posed. The need is for us to find new questions. If you find a professor's lectures boring, it's because he desperately needs new questions to open him up and make him a student again, because the man who is not essentially a student is not essentially in the learning process; he's performing a role, and behaving as a functioning part of the system, but he's not in the learning process unless he himself is learning. And most professors are not learning in their courses. They know no more when they finish the course than when they began it. They have everything worked out in advance. You haven't taught them anything. But C.G. Jung insists that all communication is two-way: if you haven't taught them anything, they haven't taught you anything.

How do I know, or suspect, or divine that professors don't learn much from you? Because they don't quote you. They don't bubble over with the pleasure of your company. I have never heard a professor quote a student. I do it frequently, all the time now that I've hit on the vital role you play in my life. You bring me to life (your life) and keep me alive with new questions. If a professor is boring, it's because he has no vital, essential relations with students—only superficial, image-oriented ones. And that's as much your "fault" as his (if one talks that crazy old language).

This is the tragedy of Faust, and his relation to the student Wagner. Faust doesn't respect Wagner, who is an empty, pretentious graduate-student type (I know him so well)—but also the young Faust, young Goethe, me when I was that age. Faust doesn't have to make a pact with the devil and go halfway around the world to find love. It's right there in front of him, in the person of Wagner, his student, the promise of the future (!), the continuation of his thing. That Wagner is utterly unlovable is quite another question—or the same question.

Faust—and most professors nowadays—should read the Phaedrus. It would bring them back to life. Ordinarily both participants in the student-teacher relationship are worried about their image, and how the other evaluates him. You are manifestly worried about this, and we are unconsciously, subliminally worried about it, having repressed it beneath the ability of our consciousness to regain with any effort. This is the theme of Socrates' first speech in the Phaedrus. So we both suffer under the same system—but we, according to Goethe, far more than you.

If Wittgenstein is right and metaphysics is at the surface, you can see this, you can see our suffering, radiated through what are now called "vibes." We show it on our faces and in the tone of our voices. You can see and hear that we are essentially dead. Because we aren't responding to living, learning situations, are not learning ourselves, as though we were still 17. I'm still learning just the way I was when I was 17—more intensely, more energetically, because now it is all alive and fun. This is the way of learning I want to introduce you to.

So if you are the quiet type and don't talk in seminars, try to bring it out. Think constantly, when the other members of the group are talking, of what you would say if it were your turn to talk next, and after you have practiced that for a few questions, you will find that you have better and better things to say, perhaps, and then come out and actually say them! Even if I should leap on it, don't be discouraged. As you know, mistakes can be creative. Freud's blunders (e.g., about women) are as important as his most brilliant discoveries.

Two things are important in your contribution. First, that we simply hear what you think, your ad hoc response to the theory or the poem, whatever it may be. I want to hear what everyone has to say about Phaedrus' position or Pausanias' position, about Stendhal's notion of love as crystallization, about Blake's "London" and Donne's "The Good Morrow." Experts' views ordinarily bore me. And second, I need your questions and comments to keep me with the simple, basic, important things, so I don't lose myself in high-falutin abstractions. This is why, in the Phaedrus, we find the ideal learning relationship between an older, trained mind—for whom there is nothing immediate, nothing spontaneous, who doesn't respond to anything ad hoc—and a young, untrained mind, not laden with assumptions and abstractions. Everything that comes into my world is mediated by a huge complex of relationships—"Oh yes, I know about that!"—and I bring it into a complex of relationships that make it more interesting, more fascinating, mine.

This is the "coherence view of truth," that the truth of anything is not in the thing itself, but in the web of relationships that ties it to myriad other things. The truth of any proposition (and then of any situation) is the way it can be woven into a larger context of meaning. Things mean more to me because I have a larger context of reference available to me at any time.

Each man lives within the little principality of his own world, the things he's familiar with and able to respond to. Only because I've been working at it for 20 years, my principality is like a vast, far-flung empire—the Holy Roman Empire, and I'm the wandering emperor. Because, you know, it was a long time before kings and emperors had fixed seats. They traveled around staying with one of their loyal liege-men. So I'm a wandering emperor over this vast domain I call my "inner world" or my "spiritual life," and I have to make regular visitations to provinces and cities, or I'm no longer welcome there. Spinoza once paid me homage of sorts, but I didn't visit the town often enough, and now it no longer lowers its bridge.

I don't really know anything about Spinoza anymore, except I like causa sui, the cause of oneself, the self-made. I think Spinoza was the first man to name God. Only God is not a transcendent "one" beyond the heavens; God is the daydream of the future of mankind! We can become God; we can become causa sui. I feel myself a kind of causa sui—which doesn't mean I did it or can take credit for it. I'm only a product of the forces and influences working on me, especially since high school. That's why I "love others"—my professors, my friends, my beloved authors, my students, even my "enemies" (even L.B.J. and Richard Nixon)—"as I love myself." Remember Mike Russell has identified that as a tautology. It simply involves recognizing the conscious being in total reciprocity with its environment: Eliot's poet as catalyst, Heidegger's Zwischen (Between), Martin Buber's "I-Thou." If you're not an egoist or narcissistic, like Oscar Wilde, Mohammed Ali, Cyrano de Bergerac, Natasha Rostov, and me, the admonition to "love thy neighbor as thyself" can't possibly mean much to you.

I would portray the present-day university as a broken love relationship between teachers and students, who depend (or should depend) upon one another for their very lives. I don't mean our real lives, our minimal lives, our biological lives—in that sense we no longer depend on anyone. It was that sort of dependence which used to tie us together; the bond of all our relationships was dependence upon one another for survival, for our biological lives. Our notion of conjugal love, especially exclusive conjugal love, the monogamistic ideal, is rooted in this real dimension of life. That’s why it's in trouble now that everything is taken care of for us, and we no longer need one another or have to depend on one another for anything. But Platonic love, or the ideal love of a teacher and student, is not like that.

Students and teachers depend upon one another not for their so-called real lives (notice that "real" here means minimal) but for their significant lives, the lives that really mean something to them, the lives they are free to choose for themselves, so long as someone else is doing twice the amount of work necessary for our collective survival, leaving them free to do anything they like, particularly something quite unimportant, which makes no contribution to our economic or biological welfare, like what I am doing, and most of my colleagues in the university, especially my colleagues in the art department. All of this is no contribution to those pressing problems which may yet destroy us—no contribution at all. Yet we are free to do with our lives what we like, are free to become, in Spinoza's terms, causa sui, because someone else is the victim of injustice, and works twice or three times his share in order to support us doing nothing in the lap of luxury—as opposed to working our butts off and living in misery and degradation. This realization, I believe, was Tolstoy's "blow in the dark," as Stefan Zweig puts it. He could never regain his bearings after that.

Three years ago I was having my old Mercedes restored, an old '52 convertible Mercedes, and I had to go down to Los Angeles in the middle of summer and spend about an hour in a re-chroming shop. The heat was almost unendurable in that place, where people were dunking chrome, and I noticed that they all had handicaps or disabilities of some kind—one walked with a limp, another had a crippled hand. They have a physical disability which excludes them from a better job—all the better jobs, presumably—so they have to take a dreadful, horrendous job. And what do they get? At most I would wager $1.75 an hour—at most. In the black group last week I learned that it's an achievement to get the minimum wage in Watts, $1.75 an hour. If you get $1.75 an hour, that's an achievement, you're lucky. It's what our law guarantees you, and if you get it, you're bloody lucky. You work for $1.00 an hour in gas stations. "But that's illegal," I said naively. "But that's illegal!" Well he wanted the money, so he worked 13 hours a day for $1.00 an hour.

Well anyway, this is the injustice. I'm aware of it because I am a very imaginative man (like A.E. Housman), so that I will always remember that day when I was having my marvelous old Mercedes re-chromed, and saw all those cats who got the short end of the stick right down the line, beginning with their physical disability. And because some men have to live like that, other men can live like you and me. That's the inner connection between culture and injustice. The glory of my life involves other men's degradation. All talk of sin and personal responsibility strikes me as simply subterfuge to conceal this very unhappy fact.

There's nothing you can do about it, you see. When it dawned on Count Leo Tolstoy, it struck him like a blow in the dark, and he staggered through the rest of his life. He turned his back on War and Peace and Anna Karenina, put them down, became religious. “Silly old man,” I exclaimed when I read that. "Don't you put that down! That's my God you're putting down. That's blasphemy, talking that way of the greatest human achievement in history. Don't think you can get away with it just because it's yours." Tolstoy was as great a man as ever lived, and still a silly old man. I revere him, but I denounce his late writings in no uncertain terms. And even there I know what he means, and revere him all the more. The marvel and privilege of his own life, in the midst of a sea of suffering, finally became unendurable to him. He was too Christian, and broke under the strain.

It's the injustice of the world, of life, I'm talking about—not the injustice of the U.S.A. We have to get these problems clear and distinct (in Descartes' favorite expression). You tend to lump them all together and reject society out of hand. It's life that's monstrously unfair, not American institutions. Compare present-day America with Tolstoy's Russia or Blake's London or the 13th century or Salem, Mass. when Cotton Mather was riding high. In social justice we've made immense strides; it's taste and style and culture I'm worried about—some ultimate point and purpose to living. When we all have split-level ranch-style bungalows, what then? But remember that American suburbia, which many of you find so appalling, is only about 20 years old. There were no tract homes when I was in college. There were no freeways when I was in high school (one: the Pasadena Freeway). You tend to think of television as timeless, and I remember when frozen orange juice first blew my mind—I couldn't believe it. So there are problems of human nature and of western culture and of American institutions and of the present critical juncture of history, when we seem to have lost our way. Of course, if you lump these together, you're going to go into a tailspin like young Hamlet. The question is simply: what are you going to do with your lives?

Our great collective undertaking first falters in the 17th century and the announcement of this is a work published in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Leviathan is a whale who swallows people up; and Leviathan is Hobbes' name for society. Hobbes' question is: Why should any man not rip off another man's stereo? The unquestioned assumption that he shouldn't is the basis of all society. It's a question which only arose in 1651. Why shouldn't any man rip off another man's stereo? That was never a question until 1651—overtly. But now society is foundering. The beliefs that we have cherished are beginning in this century to appear as patent nonsense—empty, windy, theological nonsense. Now we have Jesus Christ, Superstar and Steal This Book! (Do those titles shock you?) It was beginning in Hobbes' day, even though a century later Dr. Johnson could still be a Christian fundamentalist. Descartes whispers it in his Discourse on Method; Hobbes thunders it in Leviathan.

Why not rip off another man's stereo? If anyone rips off my stereo, I am of course incensed (I'm not that benign!). But I'd never think to say he'd done something wrong—or at least I'd understand the cultural relativity of the word "wrong" when I said, "Yes, he committed a wrong; he violated the rules of the game." I hold society to be a game which we play and play freely. But why is any man committed to the game? You are committed to the rules of a game only if you are committed to the game itself. Why should the man who steals my stereo be committed to the game, the gentlemanly, upright social game? I don't know. Why should any of those people I saw in the re-chroming shop be committed to the game? I understand why I'm committed to the game—that makes perfect sense. I'm committed to the game because everything works to my advantage—the same reason the Bank of America is committed to the game. All language, all our form of explanation, justification, reasoning favors Bank of America and me. So I know why we're committed to the game.

I remember waiting for the bank to open one morning, and five minutes before it did, a little fellow, nicely dressed, came out and ran the flag up the flag-pole. I thought, "Marvelous there's patriotism." Now why is there a greater concern for the flag here than in Watts? Why aren't people in Watts as patriotic as people on the board of directors of Bank of America? Because they think the game is unequal, unfair, dreadful, horrendous—that's why.

Well there are two possible reasons why a man shouldn't rip off another man's stereo. Both of them come down to this: you're going to pay for it, and dearly. In the old (pre-Humean) explanation this takes the form of punishment you will receive after death in a place called "hell." Because you will go to hell—that's why you shouldn't rip off another man's stereo. You must realize how seriously people took this, virtually until our time, how seriously Shakespeare/Hamlet takes it. I had real "hell" experiences, paradoxically, in the years after I left the Church. Besides, it could be so, remember. We don't know anything.

The newer, sophisticated form of this argument is: because you're just missing it, if that's the way you approach life. There will be no punishment after death, but you are simply missing it right here, since honesty and respect for others and playing the game is the whole point of life. If you don't play the game, you miss the whole point of life. No punishment—just that you are missing it right here. That's essentially the argument of Kant's Foundation of a Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, second of his three critiques.

Well, neither of these arguments has been able to hold water. No one I know would stake his professional reputation arguing either of them here on the stage of Campbell Hall. So I know that both arguments have failed. For example, Adolf Hitler does not belong to a different species than the average man in Des Moines, Iowa. That is to say I do not ultimately judge or condemn Adolf Hitler. It seems to me unhelpful to say merely that he was an "evil" man, that he was possessed by evil. There were historical factors which produced Hitler; there are determinate, intelligible factors which produce every poor performance. And that is not to say that Hitler cannot be held accountable. But I can judge that Hitler did not get the most out of life.

Thomas Hobbes' argument was this. Look, it’s better that something be going on than that nothing be going on. If each of us simply goes for his piece of the pie—if the whole question of life is splitting up the pie and each man goes for his share—then life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short!” “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is Hobbes' description of his "state of nature": what life would be like apart from some great communal undertaking called "culture," to which we all contribute. Hobbes talks of violence, chaos, but one might also talk of boredom, where each man is an island, and collectively nothing is going on. That's the situation today, if I read the signs correctly. It's what existentialists and dramatists and sociologists are all writing about.

For the first time Hobbes tries deliberately to get people to commit themselves to the collective undertaking, because our commitment to the collective undertaking offers a higher quality of life. You should give yourself to the collective undertaking, give yourself to culture, to institutions, and primarily to the university because there is no "higher life" apart from culture and society. I want to say that there is no ("real") life apart from culture and society and the university and education. That's my modern, mundane translation of the principle of no salvation outside the Church.

But get what, then? Get what? Deeper life, richer life, more interesting, more exciting life. How? By learning and by stabilizing your own being in such a way that you can enjoy life. Because as long as your being is unstable (craving affirmation, reinforcement, love, and recognition), you're going to be kept from a great deal of the enjoyment of life, and of seeing what's going on right around you, of participating in that great spectacle Joseph Conrad spoke of, the passing pageant, the Great Mandala, as it passes through your brief moment of time. That's the way to get more out of life! And in order to do it you must work and study and use your heads and get as much as you can from all the people around you, your roommate, your friends, the kid or girl you love—get more from them all!

I can't argue that you have an obligation to make a contribution to our collective undertaking. That's old hat—pre-Hume, pre-Kant, pre-Wittgenstein. If any of my learned colleagues think they have an argument to put morality on a secure foundation, let them come and present it here, and put their professional reputation behind it. (That is Prof. Austin's notion of "truth.") The hall would rock with laughter—or it would be heavy with tedium, for no one would understand. The terminology would be too technical. This is essentially what is happening in philosophy today. No one understands, because the terminology is too technical—even so-called "ordinary language" philosophy—and the atmosphere is heavy with tedium. Philosophers no longer take a stand on any issue which the average man—or students—can understand. The university and society seem to be careening into nowhere, into violence or boredom, and the specter of Thomas Hobbes is at the door.

Why should you do anything at all und nicht vielmehr Nichts? If you want to spend your life dropping acid and living off food-coupons, you have a perfect right to—if one uses that crazy terminology. An airline company advertizes “the luxury you deserve”—how absurd! You can't get from the universe to Stephen Dedalus; it's not poetry backwards. Those food coupons are the way we pay you off, to reduce the danger of violence. You're not "missing it." There's no "it" to miss. We all have life, whole and entire. The barefoot kid with a fishing-pole is a viable ideal for the whole of life: "Living like the lilies in the field."

You don't have to do, produce, achieve anything. We must get this out of our systems. But for me the greatest challenge of life is doing, producing, achieving. The deepest possibility of life is creativity, which inevitably weaves your life together with others around you, and eventually with society as a whole. I can't argue that you are under any obligation to contribute to society, the small society of your life as well as the great society to which we all belong (which is phenomenologically a fiction); I can only remind you that you have an opportunity to contribute to society, that this is part of the deepest, richest, most exciting life possible. Man as an island is simply boring and sterile—the existentialists tell us that. Man is essentially social; the living being and its environment are utterly reciprocal. The larger your environment, the more things you care about and throw yourself into (are trained to care about and throw yourself into), the larger your life. It's a question of opportunity, not obligation.

It's ridiculous telling you there's something wrong with you if you don't like sex, if you're a “frigid woman” or something. The very word "frigid”' makes us shudder, makes us freeze. If you're “frigid” or “sterile,” you’re just missing it, aren't you? No, I thunder, no you're not. There's no “it” to miss. Frigid women are likely to be much more loving in things which don't involve the sensual. Especially if they're ("really") unloving, no matter what they do—as I once thought.

First we condemn you if you have sex, and then we condemn you if you don't. It's the same old game: what you have to do and be to be a real man or real woman. Freud carries on the Puritan tradition by putting far too much crucial importance on sex, divorced from every other dimension of our lives, and so do Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, in Kate Millett's account. Miller and Mailer simply revel in what the Pope forbids, but it's the same old game. "Not a word was spoken."

You can be anything you like. It's just a question of making the most out of the materials—the task of art. My mother, I suppose, was a frigid woman, and I have no doubt that she was one of the greatest women—certainly the greatest mother—that ever lived. Her style—in everything—was mind-shattering. And for over 30 years she never held a man in her arms. So if you don't enjoy sex, don't worry about it. You're no more obliged to enjoy sex than to enjoy Shakespeare or Mozart or the simple things of life or anything else the environment is constantly pushing on you. When you cease to worry about not enjoying it, or not doing it well, you may well relax, do it better, and begin to enjoy it more! It's simply a possibility in a world of possibilities, where we have the opportunity of getting into as much as we can. Only we're so deeply enmeshed in the language of obligation that we never get into a million things.

Once you really begin to get something out of life, you’ll be driven to give, to return it to the environment, to “pay off” for the marvel and injustice of your life, which I call the Leo Tolstoy syndrome. It's as simple as that; it's the ecology of the spirit. You can't get there by obligations, least of all negative obligations: don't steal other men's stereos; don't burn banks and R.O.T.C. buildings; don't smoke pot or drop acid; pay more attention to your appearance; please don't eat the daisies.

We've got to give all this up, knowing that you’ll do whatever you feel yourself driven to do. We've got to show you how to get something out of life, so that you have something to give, and the minimal moral requirements will take care of themselves, or simply fall by the wayside. If you succeed in throwing yourself into something—anything—as much as I have thrown myself into philosophy, you simply won't have the time or inclination (or courage) to go around stealing stereos and burning banks. I never had to give up cotton candy; the desire for it simply fell away.

This is the only way to human improvement—not by praying or heaping up moral obligations. If I had the life of the man who steals my stereo, I'd steal stereos too. I'm committed to this admission by my belief in rationality, that there are reasons for everything, and that we are all produced by the same factors, working in different ways. No God, no grace or virtue, no sin or personal deficiency—no ultimate individual explanation: "because he is a good man or a bad man." That's simple Aristotle, and after two and a half millenia, we still haven't gotten the message, the "joyous tidings."

Here's the reversal. Christianity says: Give people something, bring them something! It doesn't go into the question what you should bring them (which requires real thinking) or how you should go about getting something to bring them--just "Give!" I reverse this and say, "Get!" By trying to get, you will draw other people into activity. You'll be paying them the highest respect, the sort of respect which, in this Christian society, we rarely (almost never) pay one another. It is a rare thing indeed, it seems to me, when two people in this society approach one another to get something from one another. We're all trying like mad to give because that's all we've learned, that's all Christianity has preached for 2,000 years: Give, give, give! And so we all run around trying to give, and no one wants anything; no one needs it. Because everything is provided for us by the university, Time magazine, a full library, IBM, frozen foods, wash and wear clothing—everything!

A kid I was talking to last night said, "The alternatives to floating downstream are jail and the Mojave desert." Well I don't want you to go to jail, nor do I challenge you with any demand on your integrity, nor do I want you moving out into the wilderness, following the great Henry David Thoreau and the teaching of the East. I want you right in there, contesting positions of power with people who are simply conventional and rather empty. I want you to get fullness in your lives, and then be teachers, professors, authors, newspapermen and women, lawyers, judges, so that we begin working once again towards the ideals for which America stands.

We have become lost, utterly lost, in the last couple of decades. You don't appreciate history at your age. You think of suburbia as an aspect of human life, as though it had always been here. "It will always be here—suburbia is just part of the world!" Suburbia is historical! It comes about in the early 50's. Tract homes and freeways and frozen foods all come about in the 50's. I grew up without television, without suburbia, in what I call the world of Thornton Wilder—a completely different world.

Suburbia is a passing phenomenon, and America has only temporarily lost her way. The contempt with which America is looked upon at home and abroad is a passing phenomenon. But as I call upon you to contribute to this great undertaking, not to have your lives just for yourselves, but to weave them with the lives of others, and with American society and institutions, I put it in terms of your own self-interest—how you can get the most out of life for yourself, whether you believe in our collective undertaking or not. I claim there's no salvation outside society.

There's no reason why you must be in the "salvation" game, as I was. You may simply take life as it comes, and live like the barefoot kid with the fishing pole, dropping acid and living off food coupons. But if you want more out of life, and are banking your life on being more, you're in the "salvation" game and it will inevitably weave your lives closer with society, and other people.

Then the hope must come from the university. All improvement in mankind has come to us from education, and that is why I now revere education, worship it—because I believe all improvement in the human species has come from using our heads and learning to use them better and better. But present-day education I see as an empty, pretentious, travesty of “learning.” The university is as dead as any other aspect or dimension of this society—perhaps deadest of all. It does not lag behind the rest of society in the technological obsession. We're moving faster and faster. You now have to learn 48 things, read 400 books. I just have time to shout something at you as you're precipitated swiftly past me on a conveyor-belt. We who run the university are Charlie Chaplin figures, who make one movement and one movement only, and ask you to ape and mime us in this. The university is an empty, pretentious, embarrassing farce because of what I call the broken love-relationship between teachers and students who don't realize (in Platonic terms, have "forgotten") that they depend upon one another for their vital lives. When we realize this, when students teem with questions—new questions—and professors who are really open to them find new answers—when we are really in dialogue with one another—the university can burst into life. That, at least, is my dream. But we'll not get there fulfilling any number of obligations.

I've exaggerated today, especially at the end. But thinking always involves exaggeration; thinking begins with exaggeration. When we fasten on one factor of a complex situation and lift it out to consider it in isolation, we're already exaggerating. That is the process called abstraction: to fasten on one detail of a complex situation, and regard it alone as vital to the discussion and inquiry. So all thinking involves exaggeration. I call a Platonic idea a kind of parody or caricature, a paradigm or model. Faust is an exaggeration, and I see Faust as a Platonic idea, a parody or exaggeration of the life of an academic or intellectual or professor, who has found nothing in life and tells us about it. Because most of us attempt most of the time to conceal that fact, to conceal our unhappiness.