(Knowledge and Freedom. . .P.41-54)

The expression science and freedom as used here and now, has a certain opposition in mind. It aims at an opponent who not only denies the freedom of science in theory but also threatens, limits, and destroys this freedom in practice.

In order to disuss this antagonistic situation with rational arguments and not simply to offer a "demonstration" (the ambiguity of this term, demonstration, is intimately related to our topic!), we have to comprehend clearly the opposing position, not only in its actual appearance but also in its roots. Only then will it become clear of what kind and what substance the one counter argument has to be, an argument that alone would be adequate to address and disprove the innermost conviction of the opponent.

This is not meant to sound simply like a general or "purely academic" reflection, the way it may appear at first. The critical literature on the totalitarian workers' state, right from the beginning, has said it again and again: that it is not at all some suddenly appearing oddity but rather that it fundamentally expresses openly what traditional society itself holds as "a secret and hidden view", for example, that the overriding and absolute concern with economic issues; . . . that the East has given form and reality to what the West in truth is thinking; . . . that we, "in our justified struggle against the Soviet slave state, are handicapped by one thing", namely, by the very same tendencies in our own society.

It might happen . . .that unexpectedly you feel forced, if you want to disprove your opponent, to revise our own premises. An experience of this kind, I think, is indeed waiting for those who set out to analyze the enslavement of science by the totalitarian workers' states. To be more specific: those who try to argue against this enslavement, through which the freedom of science is compromised, will have to face some arguments that can be overcome only by correcting certain notions commonly and for a long time, even for centuries, accepted by Western civilization. When we say, "argue", we do not mean political struggle or active or passive resistance but rational discussion only.

Those notions to be corrected contradict certain views up to now unchallenged in the Western world; they are in conflict, that is, with the thoughts not only of the great teachers of Chrisitianity, Augustine no less than Thomas Aquinas, but also Plato and Aristotle. Those ancient and these modern views both quite specifically speak to our topic here, namely, the nature of knowledge as such, and the relationship between knowledge and freedom.

My thesis here, in positive terms, is this: the decay of the freedom of science as it occurs in the totalitarian workers' states can be adequately counteracted, in the area of rational argumentation, only through the restoration of certain fundamental insights that have their origin in the premodern tradition of Western culture.

These insights shall be discussed here, though perforce in summary terms only. One of them, the most important, is found in Aristotle's Metaphysics. The first page of this book - we may be justified to see in it one of the "canonical" texts of the Western mind - already mention the freedom of knowledge. But let us be more precise. What is discussed there is a specific knowledge, a specific search for cognition and a specific attempt to gain knowledge: the one that among all the others is supremely free; the one, even, that alone can be called free, and "obviously" so. This would be a knowledge that has as its object the whole of reality, the fundamental reasons of all that is. A knowledge driven by the question as to the essence and the being of all that exists, absolutely and ultimately. A knowledge attempted when the innermost core of the human spirit directs all power of cognition toward the totality of all things, toward the roots and reasons of reality as such; which means: when the power of cognition reaches out to its most adequate and complete and unlimited object. We are talking here about that kind of knowledge called by Aristotle the "most authentically philosophic". it should also appear that we are not talking about something isolated and metaphysical (Aristotle himself, as is well known, neither knows nor uses this term at all). We are dealing here with the intrinsic "power of cognition" as such, the power moving within all concrete experiences and insights and giving them consistency and unity, as it is oriented toward it s proper object, the "totality of all that is".

It is this kind of knowledgve that Aristotle declares "alone truly free". The question arises: What does "free" mean here? We have reached, indeed, the critical and decisive point of our problem. "Free", says Aristotle - expressing, we think, a very ancient view, for instance, formulated also by his teacher, Plato, and later dominating the entire Western way of thinking - means the same here as "nonpractical". Praxis means the achievement of purposes; whatever serves its purpose is practical. That kind of knowledge, however, that is oriented toward the fundamental reasons of the world, and such knowledge alone, does not "serve" any purpose (so he affirms). It would even be impossible and unthinkable to employ it for any practical use at all, "For its reason to be lies entirely in itself." To exist, not in dependence on anything "without" but by and for reasons entirely "within" - this is precisely what human language calls "freedom".

This incredibly concise paragraph of Aristotle's Metaphysics (just twenty-some lines) lists, however, some further characteristics of that free and nonpractical knowledge, not to be omitted here. Aristotle adds this: knowledge that envisons the totality of all there is, proceeding by and for its own inherent reasons and thus truly free - such knowledege can never be achieved completely and perfectly by any human being; it is never fully at the disposal of man; it is, therefore, not something entirely within the human sphere, since human existence itself is subject and beholden to many and various needs and wants. One would have to say, according to Aristotle, that God alone could possess such knowledge in a perfect degree, it being oriented toward the divine root in all things anyway. This is the very reason why no other science could claim the same emimnence and dignity as the philosophical endeavor, although all of them are of greater necessity: necessariores omnes, dignior nulla (as the Latin of the versio antiqua has it). So says Aristotle.