Mynam asked:

When I study the history of philosophy and try to understand the world I'm thinking and thus living in
now, I seem always (no matter which philosopher or which time period I study) to come to the
conclusion that we humans are asking the same questions over and over; just in new forms and in
new aspects of reality (or non-reality). I do not mean that great thinkers have all been thinking about
the same issues; rather that they (and we) have been in the same path just in different points in
space-time. In the beginning I felt that we all are just improving and trying to ennoble the same
questions that the the ancient Greeks and even human thinkers long before them asked about their
surrounding world.

I'm not open minded enough to imagine what the questions complementary to today's (and
yesterday's) questions would be, or if those questions even could be defined as "questions" but I do
know that this reality we have created through our questions, i.e. our perception, cannot be the whole
truth (if there is a "whole" or a "truth").

Why are we not creating instead of recreating?

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That's a great question you posed! Perhaps you start looking at the history of art. Maybe that sheds
some light on the history of philosophy as you see it.

The Greeks seem to have had a similar concept of art as we had at least up to the middle of the 19th
century. But this is not exactly true, since there has been the art of the Middle Ages in between which
is totally different from Greek and Roman "classical" art. But from about 1350 to about 1850 the
classical ideal prevailed again. And this fading and reappearance of a special way to look at the world
had it's parallel in the history of philosophy too: The selection of philosophical problems and the style
of arguing has been very different in the Middle Ages from that in "classical" Antiquity and in
Renaissance, and Modern philosophical thought.

And then there has been another great revolution likewise in the arts and in philosophical arguments
starting from about the 1850s together with the rise of Industrial Society. You can mark two symbolic
dates: The first "World Exposition" 1851 in London and the appearance of the "Communist Manifesto"
in 1848 opening a year of revolutions swamping Europe. In those years, Turner and Corot and some
other painters began to change the traditional way of painting, and this led ultimately to the wave of
"impressionism" dominating the art-scene of Paris after the German-French War of 1870/71.

The main trait of Impressionism is a new "subjectivism" replacing the old "objectivism" of academic
art. The academic art of the time was still mainly concerned with mythical and historical themes and
with landscapes and townscapes and seascapes in a naturalistic fashion. The paintings look like
remakes of the Netherlandic art of the 17th century or as remakes of renaissance art or even gothic.
Not so the Impressionists: They ignored history and the past as subjects and the traditional way of
painting altogether and tried to have a fresh look at the world around them. They painted
coffee-shops and backyards with dancing people and "genre" and in this they still resembled the
Netherlandish paintings of Hals and Vermeer in a modernized way. It was "painting of the people for
the people" — not for the cultivated upper classes with their knowledge of history and mythology. But
that still only paved the way for the great revolution that was to come with the work of Cezanne, Van
Gogh, Gauguin and the Fauves and Cubists.

The revolution consisted in not only giving up the classical "great themes" of history and mythology
but the values of "realism" and "naturalism" altogether. A picture is not a copy from nature, is not
illustrating anything recent or past, be it important or unimportant, but a picture is a "work", consisting
of colours and forms and of nothing else. The world may be "cited" in such an art-work, but it is not
"represented" anymore. It simply is not the aim or the task of the artist, to illustrate or to represent
anything but his own ideas. The whole concept of "representative" art dominating European art from
Antiquity has been abandoned together with the traditional ideal of "beauty". The idea of beauty has
changed from Rafael to Luigi Fontana, from naked goddesses arranged in a mythical scene to naked
areas of colour arranged in a rectangle.

Now you ask what this has to do with your question concerning a new way of seeing the world with
philosophical eyes. The answer is, that exactly what has changed in art has changed in the same
years in philosophy. Cezanne said "Let us paint as if nobody ever has painted before!" In the same
mood Husserl said "let us think as if nobody ever has thought before!". Cezanne said "Forget all
themes, don't copy, don't illustrate, but construct a new world of artificial reality of it's own right!"
Husserl and Wittgenstein said "Forget all classical problems and arguments, go back to what people
experience and see how they use words to express those experiences!"

The years from about 1890 to about 1970 of European cultural history have been one of the greatest
cultural epochs in the history of mankind, comparable only to the Golden Era of Pericles or to that of
Florentian Renaissance. In this epoch the whole way we are looking at the world has changed
fundamentally, not only in the arts, but in literature and music and in mathematics and physics and in
the social sciences too — and in philosophy. And that explains in part the trouble some
philosophy-students have today with a strange modern "analytic" way of asking questions that seem
to ignore all traditional questions and answers concerning God and morals and mankind and what is
beauty and what is truth.

Your question is: "Why are we not creating instead of recreating?" As you may have got from the
arguments above, we are trying hard to "create". But then people are conservative and resisting
change. This must not be bad. The churches have resisted freedom of speech and thought with the
argument, that it would lead people astray into the wilderness of strange ideas and far from the truth.
The communists said likewise and the Nazis too. There are not too many people seeing in a liberal
and multicultural society much more than a social and moral chaos. You have to respect that for a
moment and think about it. Ask yourself how much real freedom you can accept and endure. One
alway needs a minimum of rule and regularity in life, of reliability, trustability and predictability.

If you change the world by "creating" a new one, this new world too will have it's problems of
reliability, trustability and predictability. You have to convince people that your new world is so much
more lovable and livable that they dare to give up what they are used to. But then people have been
cheated many times by false prophets like Hitler and Stalin and some more of that bunch. Why do
you think people are shunning genetic engineering and PID (pre-implantation-diagnostics)? It's not
that simple to create a new mankind! What will become of the family? How will we earn a living and
pay our rent or get our pensions and social security? All those questions are natural and have to be
answered if you want to create a new world.

Jesus has announced a new heaven and a new earth — but what do you see in history? You see the
churches and much superstition and bigotry and hypocrisy and moral repression. That was what
Voltaire and Nietzsche and Marcuse fought against.

A new society and a new philosophy is like a new house. You can try to build that, but you must be
sure that people will like to live there and that it does not collapse.

The philosophical house we are living in today has in part been built by Kant and Hegel on older
fundaments laid by Plato and Aristotle and Augustine, but has been modified by Marx and Nietzsche
and Freud, by Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and some more great philosophers of recent
time. If you want to build a new philosophical house for mankind, you are not free to build anything
fantastical. You always have to see the people living there. Try to see yourself and all those dear to
you, and then some more until everybody has a room to live in — and not a cell like a monk or a
prisoner or a bee. To devise such a house is no small task but requires the greatest of architects.

What is your time-scale? The pyramids of Gizah were built at about 2600 BC, and the Parthenon on
the Acropolis of Athens was built during the lifetime of Socrates some 2400 years ago. The gothic
cathedrals are some 800 years old and the Eiffel Tower is from 1889. Is that pace of human history
fast or is it slow? I think it is explosive! Think back to the year 1902: Who would have thought then of
how we are going today? So you can't predict what will be in 2102, one hundred years from now. A
new sort of cyborgs having replaced mankind? And you asked for "creating instead of recreating" and
you think "that they — the great thinkers — (and we) have been in the same path just in different
points in space-time!" Where should they have been? Maybe mankind will swamp the universe during
the next 1000 years. There must be some traditions of thought and feeling holding mankind together,
some language of mutual understanding and caring and respect. Don't be too impatient then. Things
may get out of control otherwise. Be nice to humankind.

Hubertus Fremerey

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