Facs
Transcript
Now here I can tell you a little story of my own inquiries in past years. I had to give lectures – I “had” to give because I wanted to give – lectures on the “History of the Philosophy of Religion,” as they were called, with a very clumsy name. Now I was decided not to do this without changing the name. So what did I do? I gave what I call a theonomous history of philosophy, a history of philosophy where the special history [i.e. philosophy – ed.] of religion was a very small section in my presentation, but there was a very large section dealing with the religious meaning of epistemology, or of Aristotelian logic, or of the metaphysical concepts or of the ethical ideals. That means: I tried to show – and to find out myself, first – the style of a period in its philosophical self-expression. But in doing so, it happened to me that I learned a little bit at that time about history of art and discovered that the history of art goes in a strict analogy with the history of philosophical thought, and that you can illustrate the one by the other. Now at the end of my showing you pictures, the last group, I will show you archaic gods and goddesses. If I can show them to you, you will see it has explained to me – together with the temples in southern Italy which I saw, from the 6th century before Christ – the whole meaning of the philosophy of c. Without them I wouldn't have understood d with them, it was suddenly like a lightning in which I felt able to understand not only the philosophical subject matter but also the expression of that subject matter in artistic form.
Now in this way we have styles in all periods of history, and these styles are present in all