Rudolf Steiner's
Riddles of Philosophy, Presented in an Outline of Its History
is not a history of philosophy in the usual sense of
the word. It does not give a history of the philosophical systems, nor
does it present a number of philosophical problems historically. Its
real concern touches on something deeper than this, on riddles rather
than problems. Philosophical concepts, systems and problems are, to be
sure, to be dealt with in this book. But it is not their
history that is to be described here. Where they are discussed
they become symptoms rather than the objects of the search. The search
itself wants to reveal a process that is overlooked in the usual
history of philosophy. It is the mysterious process in which
philosophical thinking appears in human history. Philosophical
thinking as it is here meant is known only in Western Civilisation.
Oriental philosophy has its origin in a different kind of
consciousness, and it is not to be considered in this book.
What is new here is the treatment of the history of philosophic
thinking as a manifestation of the evolution of human consciousness.
Such a treatment requires a fine sense of observation. Not merely the
thoughts must be observed, but behind them the thinking in which they
appear.
To follow Steiner in his subtle description of the process of the
metamorphosis of this thinking in the history of philosophy we should
remember he sees the human consciousness in an evolution. It has not
always been what it is now, and what it is now it will not be in the
future. This is a fundamental conception of anthroposophy. The
metamorphosis of the consciousness is not only described in Steiner's
anthroposophical books but in a number of them directions are given
from which we can learn to participate in this transformation
actively. This is explicitly done not only in his
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment
but also in certain chapters of his
Theosophy, An Outline of Occult Science
and several other
of his anthroposophical books.
The objection may be raised at this point that the application of
concepts derived from spiritual exercises is not admissible in a field
of pure philosophical studies, where every concept used should be
clearly comprehensible without any preconceived ideas. Steiner's
earlier philosophical books did not seem to imply any such
presuppositions and his anthroposophical works therefore appear to
mark a definite departure from his earlier philosophical ones.
It is indeed significant that the anthroposophical works appear only
after a long period of philosophic studies. A glance at Rudolf
Steiner's bibliography shows that it is only after twenty years of
philosophical studies that his anthroposophy as a science of the
spirit appears on the scene. The purely philosophical publications
begin with his
Introductions to Goethe's Natural Scientific Writings
(1883 – 97) and with the
Fundamental Outline of a Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception
(1886). They are followed by his own theory of knowledge presented in
Truth and Science
in 1892 and his
Philosophy of Freedom
(also translated as
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity)
of 1894. This
work presents clearly the climax of Steiner's philosophy and it should
be studied carefully by anyone who intends to arrive at a valid
judgment of his later anthroposophy. It is, however, still several
years before the books appear that contain the result of his spiritual
science. Not only his book on
Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time
of 1895 and his
Goethe's World Conception
of 1897 but also his
World-and Life-Conceptions in the Nineteenth Century
of 1900 and even his
Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Its Relation to Modern World Conception
of 1901 could have been understood as merely historical descriptions.
With Steiner's next work we seem to enter an entirely different world.
Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity
clearly begin the series of his distinctly anthroposophic works.
Like his
Theosophy
(1904), his
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment
(1905/08) and his
Occult Science
(1910) it could
only have been written by an occultist who spoke from a level of
consciousness that one did not have to assume as the source of his
earlier books.
To the casual reader it could appear that there was a distinct break
in Steiner's world conception at the beginning of the century, and
this is also the conclusion drawn by some of his critics.
Rudolf Steiner's own words, however, as well as a study of both phases
of his work leave no doubt that there was no such break in his world
conception. He clearly states that knowledge derived from a higher
level of consciousness was always at his disposal, also at the time of
his early philosophical publications. His deep concern was the
question: How could one speak about worlds not immediately accessible
to scarcely anybody else in an age in which materialism and
agnosticism ruled without any serious opposition. He found both so
deeply rooted in Western Civilisation that he had to ask himself at
times: Will it always be necessary to keep entirely silent about this
higher knowledge.
In this time he turned to the study of representative thinkers of his
time and of the more recent past in whose conceptions of world and
life he now penetrated to experience their depth and their
limitations. In Goethe's world he found the leverage to overcome the
basic agnosticism and materialism to which the age had surrendered. In
Nietzsche he saw the tragic figure who had been overpowered by it and
whose life was broken by the fact that his spiritual sensitivity made
it impossible for him to live in this world and his intellectual
integrity forbade him to submit to what he had to consider as the
dishonest double standard of his time.
Neither Rudolf Steiner's Nietzsche book nor his writings on Goethe's
conception of the world are meant to be merely descriptive accounts of
philosophical systems or problems. They reveal an inner struggle of
the spirit that is caused by the spiritual situation of their time and
in which the reader must share to follow these books with a full
understanding. When these studies are then extended to comprise longer
periods of time as in the
World and Life Conceptions of the Nineteenth Century
and in
Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age
soul conditions under which the individual thinkers have to
work become more and more visible.
When Rudolf Steiner published the present work in 1914 as
The Riddles of Philosophy
he used the book on the
World and Life Conception of the Nineteenth Century
as the second part, which is
now preceded by an outline of the entire history of philosophy in the
Western world.
At this time Steiner's anthroposophical books had appeared in which
the evolution of human consciousness plays an important role. It could
now be partly demonstrated in an outline of the philosophic thinking
of the Western world.
Rudolf Steiner's approach to history is symptomatological, and it is
this method that he also applies to the history of philosophy. The
thoughts developed in the course of this history are treated as
symptomatic facts for the mode of thinking prevalent in a given time.
He sees four distinct phases in the course of Western thought
evolution. They are periods of seven to eight centuries each,
beginning with the pre-Socratic thinkers in Greece.
Here pure thought as such free of images develops out of an older form
of consciousness that is expressed in myths and symbolic pictures. It
reaches its climax in the classical philosophies of Socrates, Plato
and Aristotle and ends with the Hellenistic period.
A second phase begins with Christianity and reaches as far as the ninth century A.D. This time Rudolf Steiner characterizes
as the age of the awakening self-consciousness and he is convinced that an
intense historical study of this period will more and more prove the adequacy
of that term. The emergence of a greater self-awareness at this time
diminishes the importance of the conceptional thinking as the
religious concern of the soul with its own destiny grows. The emerging
self-consciousness of this phase is intensely felt, but does not lead
to an intellectual occupation with the concept of this
"self." In a third period a new concern becomes
prevalent when the scholastic philosophers become more and more
confronted with the tormenting question of the reality of thought
itself. What is often regarded as an aberration into mere verbal
quarrels, the medieval discussions of the significance of the
universal concepts, is now seen as a soul struggle of a profound human
concern. Thus the long war between Realism and Nominalism appears in a
new light. As the nominalists seem to emerge more and more as the
victors the thought climate for the fourth phase is gradually
prepared.
Since the Renaissance natural science proceeds to develop a world
conception in which the self-conscious ego must experience itself as a
foreign element. The emergence of this experience leads to a new inner
struggle in which the fourth phase of the history of philosophy is
from now on deeply engaged in its predominant thought currents: It is
the phase of consciousness in which we still live. The various forms
of idealistic[,] materialistic and agnostic philosophies are subject to
the tension caused by the indicated situation. As Steiner
characterizes them he points out that the different thinker
personalities can be quite unconscious of the currents that manifest
themselves in their thinking although their ideas and thought
combinations receive direction and form from them.
In the last chapter of the second part of the book Steiner describes
his own philosophy as he had developed it in his earlier books
Truth and Science
and
Philosophy of Freedom.
In this description the relation between his philosophical works and his
anthroposophical ones also becomes clear. As a philosophy of spiritual
activity, the
Philosophy of Freedom
had not merely given an
analysis of the factors involved in the process of knowledge, nor had
the possibility of human freedom within a world apparently determined
on all sides, merely been logically shown. What the study of this book
meant to supply was at the same time a course of concentrated exercise
of thinking that was to develop a new power through which man really
becomes free. As Aristotle's statement (Metaph. XII, 7) that
the actuality of thinking is life in this way becomes a real
experience of the thinker, human freedom is born. Man becomes free in
his actions in the external world, developing the moral imagination
necessary for the situation in which he finds himself. At the same
time his spirit frees itself from the bodily encasement in which
thoughts had appeared as unreal shadows. The process of his real
spiritual development has begun.
In this way the Riddles of Philosophy may be considered as a
bridge that can lead from Steiner's early philosophical works into the
study of anthroposophy. The undercurrents characterized in the four
main phases of the evolution of thought lead from potentiality to ever
increasing actuality of the awakening spirit. And for the exercises
described in the specific anthroposophic books there can be no better
preparation than the concentrated study of Rudolf Steiner's
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
Fritz C. A. Koelln
Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine April, 1973
∴
Preface to the 1914 Edition
I did not have the feeling that I was writing a "centennial
book" to mark the beginning of the century when I set about to
outline the World and Life Conceptions of the Nineteenth Century,
which appeared in 1901. The invitation to present this book as a
contribution to a collection of philosophical works only provided me
with the challenge to sum up results of the philosophical developments
since the age of Kant, at which I had arrived long ago, and which I
had meant to publish. When a new edition of the book became necessary
and when I reexamined its content, I became aware of the fact that
only through a considerable enlargement of the account as it was
originally given could I make completely clear what I had intended to
show. I had at that time limited myself to the characterization of the
last one hundred and thirty years of philosophical development. Such a
limitation is justifiable because this period indeed constitutes a
well-rounded totality that is closed in itself and could be portrayed
as such even if one did not mean to write a "centennial
book." But the philosophical views of the last century lived
within me in such a way that, in presenting its philosophical
problems, I felt resounding as undertones in my soul the solutions
that had been attempted since the beginning of the course of the
history of philosophy. This sensation appeared with greater intensity
as I took up the revision of the book for a new edition. This
indicates the reason why the result was not so much a new edition but
a new book.
To be sure, the content of the old book has essentially been preserved
word for word, but it has been introduced by a short account of the
philosophical development since the sixth century B.C. In the second
volume the characterization of the successive philosophies will be
continued to the present time. Moreover, the short remarks at the end
of the second volume entitled, Outlook, have been extended into
a detailed presentation of the philosophical possibilities of the
present. Objections may be raised against the composition of the book
because the parts of the earlier version have not been shortened,
whereas the characterization of the philosophies from the sixth
century B.C. to the nineteenth century A.D. has only been given in the
shortest outline. But since my aim is to give not only a short
outline of the history of philosophical problems but to discuss these
problems and the attempt at their solution themselves through their
historical treatment, I considered it correct to retain the more
detailed account for the last period. The way of approach in which
these questions were seen and presented by the philosophers of the
nineteenth century is still close to the trends of thought and
philosophical needs of our time. What precedes this period is of the
same significance to modern soul life only insofar as it spreads light
over the last time interval. The Outlook at the end of the
second volume had its origin in the same intention, namely, that of
developing through the account of the history of philosophy,
philosophy itself.
The reader will miss some things in this book that he might look for
in a history of philosophy — the views of Hobbes and others, for
instance. My aim, however, was not to enumerate all philosophical
opinions, but to present the course of development of the
philosophical problems. In such a presentation it is inappropriate to
record a philosophical opinion of the past if its essential points
have been characterized in another connection.
Whoever wants to find also in this book a new proof that I have
"changed" my views in the course of years will probably not
even then be dissuaded from such an "opinion" if I point out
to him that the presentation of the philosophical views that I gave in
the World and Life Conceptions has, to be sure, been enlarged
and supplemented, but that the content of the former book has been
taken over into the new one in all essential points, literally
unchanged. The slight changes that occur in a few passages seemed to
be necessary to me, not because I felt the need after fifteen years of
presenting some points differently, but because I found that a changed
mode of expression was required by the more comprehensive connection
in which here and there a thought appears in the new book, whereas in
the old one such a connection was not given. There will, however,
always be people who like to construe contradictions among the
successive writings of a person, because they either cannot or else do
not wish to consider the certainly admissible extension of such a
person's thought development. The fact that in such an extension much
is expressed differently in later years certainly cannot constitute a
contradiction if one does not mean by consistency that the latter
expression should be a mere copy of the earlier one, but is ready to
observe a consistent development of a person. In order to avoid the
verdict of "change of view" of critics who do not consider
this fact, one would have to reiterate, when it is a question of
thoughts, the same words over and over again.
Rudolf Steiner
April 1914
∴
Preface to the 1918 Edition
The thoughts from which the presentation of the content of this book
have grown and that form its basic support have been indicated in the
Preface of the 1914 edition following this. To what was said then, I
should like to add something connected with a question that lives more
or less consciously in the soul of one who turns to a book on the
riddles of philosophy. It is the question of the relation of
philosophical contemplation to immediate life. Every
philosophical thought that is not demanded by this life is condemned
to remain barren even if it should attract for awhile a few readers of
contemplative inclination. A fruitful thought must have its roots in
the processes of development that mankind as a whole has to undergo in
the course of its historical evolution. Whoever intends to depict the
history of the evolution of philosophical thought from any kind of
viewpoint can, for this purpose only, rely on such thoughts as are
demanded by life itself. They must be thoughts that, when carried into
the conduct of life, will penetrate man in such a way that he gains
from them energies capable of directing his knowledge. They must
become his advisors and helpers in the task of his existence. Because
mankind needs such thoughts, philosophical world views have come into
existence. If it were possible to master life without them, man would
never have been inwardly justified to think of the "Riddles of
Philosophy." An age that is unwilling to think such thoughts
shows through this fact merely that it does not feel the need to form
human life in such a way that it can really unfold itself in all
directions according to its original destination. But for such a
disinclination, a heavy penalty must be paid in the course of human
evolution. Life remains undeveloped in such ages, and men do not
notice their sickly state because they are unwilling to recognize the
demands that nevertheless continue to exist deeply seated within them
and that they just fail to satisfy. A following age shows the effect
of such a neglect. The grandchildren find in the formation of a
stunted life something that was caused by the omission of the
grandparents. This omission of the preceding age has turned into the
imperfect life of the later time into which the grandchildren find
themselves placed. In life as a whole, philosophy must rule. It
is possible to sin against this demand, but it is inevitable that this
sin will produce its effects.
We shall only understand the course of the development of
philosophical thought, the existence of the "Riddles of
Philosophy," if we have a feeling for the significance that the
philosophical contemplation of the world possesses for a whole, full
human existence. It is out of such a feeling that I have written about
the development of the riddles of philosophy. I have attempted to show
through the presentation of this development that such a feeling is
inwardly justified.
Against this feeling there will emerge from the outset in the minds of
some readers a certain dampening objection that at first sight seems
to be based on fact. Philosophical contemplation is supposed to be a
necessity of life, but in spite of this, the endeavor of human thought
in the course of its development does not produce clear-cut and
well-defined solutions to the riddles of philosophy. Rather are they
ambiguous and apparently contradictory. There are many historical
analyses that attempt to explain the only too apparent contradictions
through superficially formed ideas of evolution. They are not
convincing. To find one's way in this field, evolution must be taken
much more seriously than is usually the case. One must arrive at the
insight that there cannot be any thought that would be capable of
solving the riddles of the universe once and for all times in an
all-comprehensive way. Such is the nature of human thinking that a
newly found idea will soon transform itself in turn into a new riddle.
The more significant the idea is, the more light it will yield for a
certain time; the more enigmatic, the more questionable it will become
in a following age.
Whoever wants to view the history of human thought development from a
fruitful point of view must be able to admire the greatness of an idea
in one age, and yet be capable of producing the same enthusiasm in
watching this idea as it reveals its shortcoming in a later period. He
must also be able to accept the thought that the mode of thinking to
which he himself adheres will be replaced in the future by an entirely
different one. This thought must not divert him from recognizing fully
the "truth" of the view that he has conquered for himself.
The disposition of mind that is inclined to believe that thoughts of
an earlier time have been disposed of as imperfect by the
"perfect" ones of the present age, is of no help for
understanding the philosophical evolution of mankind.
I have attempted to comprehend the course of human thought development
by grasping the significance of the fact that a following age
contradicts philosophically the preceding one. In the introductory
exposition, Guiding Thoughts of the Presentation, I have stated
which ideas make such a comprehension possible. The ideas are of such
a nature that they will necessarily find a great deal of resistance.
At first acquaintance they will have the appearance of something that
just occurred to me and that I now wanted to force in a fantastic
manner on the whole course of the history of philosophy. Nevertheless,
I can only hope that one will find that the ideas are not thought up
as preconceived and then superimposed on the view of philosophical
development, but that they have been obtained in the same way in which
the natural scientist finds his laws. They have their source in the
observation of the evolution of philosophy. One has no right to
reject the results of an observation because they are in disagreement
with ideas that one accepts as right because of some kind of
inclination of thought without observation. Opposition to my
presentation will be based on the superstitious denial of the
existence of forces in human history that manifest themselves in
certain specific ages, and dominate effectively the development of
human thought in a meaningful and necessary way. I had to accept such
forces because the observation of this development had proved their
existence to me, and because this observation made apparent to me the
fact that the history of philosophy will only become a science if one
does not shrink back from recognizing forces of this kind.
It seems to me that it is only then possible to gain a tenable
attitude toward the riddles of philosophy, fruitful for life at the
present time, if one knows the forces that dominated the ages of the
past. In the history of thought, more than in any other branch of
historical reflection, it is necessary to let the present grow out of
the past. For in the comprehension of those ideas that satisfy the
demand of the present, we have the foundation for the insight that
spreads the right light over the past. The thinker who is incapable of
obtaining a philosophical viewpoint that is adequate to the dominating
impulses of his own age will also be unable to discover the
significance of the intellectual life of the past. I shall here leave
the question undecided whether or not in some other field of
historical reflection a presentation can be fruitful that does not at
least have a picture of the present situation in this field as a
foundation. In the field of the history of thought, such a procedure
would be meaningless. Here the object of the reflection must
necessarily be connected with the immediate life, and this life, in
which thought becomes actual as practice of life, can only be that of
the present.
With these words I have meant to characterize the feeling out of which
this presentation of the riddles of philosophy grew. Because of the
short time since the last edition, there is no occasion for change or
additions to the content of the book.
Rudolf Steiner
May 1918
∴
Preface to the 1923 Edition
When, on the occasion of its second edition in 1914, I enlarged my
book, World and Life Conceptions of the Nineteenth Century, the
result was the present volume, The Riddles of Philosophy. In
this book I intend to show those elements of world conceptions that
appear historically and that move the contemporary observer of these
riddles to experiences of greater depth of consciousness as he
encounters the feelings with which they were experienced by the
thinkers of the past. Such a deepening of the feelings is of profound
satisfaction to one who is engaged in a philosophical struggle. What
he in his own mind is striving for is strengthened through the fact
that he sees how this endeavor took shape in earlier thinkers on whom
life bestowed viewpoints that may be close to, or far from, his own.
In this way I intend in this book to serve those who need a
presentation of the development of philosophy as a supplement to their
own paths of thought. Such a supplement will be valuable to anyone
who, in his own mode of thinking, wishes to feel himself at one with
the intellectual work of mankind, and who would like to see that the
work of his own thoughts has its roots in a universal need of the
human soul. He can grasp this when he allows the essential elements of
the historical world conceptions to unfold before his eye.
For many observers, however, such a display has a depressive effect.
It causes doubt to invade their minds. They see thinkers of the past
contradicting their predecessors and contradicted by their successors
in turn. It is the intention in my account of this process to show how
this depressing aspect is extinguished by another element. Let us
consider two thinkers. At first glance the contradiction of their
thoughts strikes us as painful. We now take these thoughts under a
closer inspection. We find that both thinkers direct their attention
to entirely different realms of the world. Suppose one thinker had
developed in himself the frame of mind that concentrates on the mode
in which thoughts unfold in the inner weaving of the soul. For him it
becomes a riddle how these inward soul processes can become decisive
in a cognition concerning the nature of the external world. This point
of departure will lend a special color to all his thinking. He will
speak in a vigorous manner of the creative activity of the life of
thought. Thus, everything he says will be colored by idealism. A
second thinker turns his attention toward the processes accessible to
external sense perception. The thought processes through which he
holds these external events in cognitive perception do not themselves
in their specific energy enter the field of his awareness. He will
give a turn to the riddles of the universe that will place them in a
thought environment in which the ground of the world itself will
appear in a form that bears semblance to the world of the senses.
If one approaches the historical genesis of the conflicting world
views with presuppositions that result from such a thought
orientation, one can overcome the deadening effect these world
perspectives have on each other and raise the point of view to a level
from which they appear in mutual support.
Hegel and Haeckel, considered side by side, will at first sight
present the most perfect contradiction. Penetrating into Hegel's
philosophy, one can go along with him on the path to which a man who
lives entirely in thoughts is bound. He feels the thought element as
something that enables him to comprehend his own being as real.
Confronted with nature, the question arises in him of the relation in
which it stands toward the world of thought. It will be possible to
follow his turn of mind if one can feel what is relatively justified
and fruitful in such a mental disposition. If one can enter into
Haeckel's thoughts, one can again follow him part of the way. Haeckel
can only see what the senses grasp and how it changes. What is and
changes in this way he can acknowledge as his reality, and he is only
satisfied when he is able to comprise the entire human being,
including his thought activity, under this concept of being and
transformation. Now let Haeckel look on Hegel as a person who spins
airy meaningless concepts without regard to reality. Grant that Hegel,
could he have lived to know Haeckel, would have seen in him a person
who was completely blind to true reality. Thus, whoever is able to
enter into both modes of thinking will find in Hegel's philosophy the
possibility to strengthen his power of spontaneous, active thinking.
In Haeckel's mode of thought he will find the possibility to become
aware of relations between distant formations of nature that tend to
raise significant questions in the mind of man. Placed side by side
and measured against one another in this fashion, Hegel and Haeckel
will no longer lead us into oppressive skepticism but will enable us
to recognize how the striving shoots and sprouts of life are sent out
from very different corners of the universe.
Such are the grounds in which the method of my presentation has its
roots. I do not mean to conceal the contradictions in the history of
philosophy, but I intend to show what remains valid in spite of the
contradictions.
That Hegel and Haeckel are treated in this book to reveal what is
positive and not negative in both of them can, in my opinion, be
criticized as erroneous only by somebody who is incapable of seeing
how fruitful such a treatment of the positive is.
Let me add just a few more words about something that does not refer
to the content of the book but is nevertheless connected with it. This
book belongs to those of my works referred to by persons who claim to
find contradictions in the course of my philosophical development. In
spite of the fact that I know such reproaches are mostly not motivated
by a will to search for truth, I will nevertheless answer them
briefly.
Such critics maintain that the chapter on Haeckel gives the impression
of having been written by an orthodox follower of Haeckel. Whoever
reads in the same book what is said about Hegel will find it difficult
to uphold this statement. Superficially considered, it might, however,
seem as if a person who wrote about Haeckel as I did in this book had
gone through a complete transformation of spirit when he later
published books like Knowledge of the Higher World and Its
Attainment, An Outline of Occult Science, etc.
But the question is only seen in the right light if one remembers that
my later works, which seem to contradict my earlier ones, are based on
a spiritual intuitive insight into the spiritual world. Whoever
intends to acquire or preserve for himself an intuition of this kind
must develop the ability to suppress his own sympathies and
antipathies and to surrender with perfect objectivity to the subject
of his contemplation. He must really, in presenting Haeckel's mode of
thinking, be capable of being completely absorbed by it. It is
precisely from this power to surrender to the object that he derives
spiritual intuition. My method of presentation of the various world
conceptions has its origin in my orientation toward a spiritual
intuition. It would not be necessary to have actually entered into the
materialistic mode of thinking merely to theorize about the spirit.
For that purpose it is sufficient simply to show all justifiable
reasons against materialism and to present this mode of thought by
revealing its unjustified aspects. But to effect spiritual intuition
one cannot proceed in this manner. One must be capable of thinking
idealistically with the idealist and materialistically with the
materialist. For only thus will the faculty of the soul be awakened
that can become active in spiritual' intuition.
Against this, the objections might be raised that in such a treatment
the content of the book would lose its unity. I am not of that
opinion. An historical account will become the more faithful the more
the phenomena are allowed to speak for themselves. It cannot be the
task of an historical presentation to fight materialism or to distort
it into a caricature, for within its limits it is justified. It is
right to represent materialistically those processes of the world that
have a material cause. We only go astray when we do not arrive at the
insight that comes when, in pursuing the material processes, we are
finally led to the conception of the spirit. To maintain that the
brain is not a necessary condition of our thinking insofar as it is
related to sense perception is an error. It is also an error to assume
that the spirit is not the creator of the brain through which it
reveals itself in the physical world through the production and
formation of thought.
∴
Part I
I. Guiding Thoughts on the Method of Presentation
If we follow the work of the mind invested by man in his attempts to
solve the riddle of world and life, the words, "Know
Thyself," which were inscribed as a motto in the temple of
Apollo, will suggest themselves to the soul in its contemplation. The
understanding for a world conception rests on the fact that the human
soul can be stirred by the contemplation of these words. The nature of
a living organism involves the necessity of feeling hunger. The nature
of the human soul at a certain stage of its development causes a
similar necessity. It is manifest in the need to gain from life a
certain spiritual return that, just as food satisfies hunger,
satisfies the soul's challenge, "Know Thyself." This feeling
can lay hold on the human soul so powerfully that it can be forced to
think, "Only then am I fully human in the true sense of
the word when I develop within myself a relation to the world that
expresses its fundamental character in the challenge, ‘Know
Thyself’." The soul can reach the point where it considers this
feeling as an awakening out of the dream of life that it dreamt
before this particular experience.
During the first period of his life, man develops the power of memory
through which he will, in later life, recollect his experiences back
to a certain moment of his childhood. What lies before this
moment he feels as a dream of life from which he awoke. The human soul
would not be what it should be if the power of memory did not grow out
of the dim soul life of the child. In a similar way the human soul
can, at a more developed stage, think of its experience of the
challenge expressed in the words, "Know Thyself." It can
have the feeling that a soul life that does not awake out of its dream
of life through this experience does not live up to its inner
potentialities.
Philosophers have often pointed out that they are at a loss when asked
about the nature of philosophy in the true sense of the word. One
thing, however, is certain, namely, that one must see in philosophy a
special form of satisfying the need of the human soul expressed in the
challenge, "Know Thyself." Of this challenge one can know
just as distinctly as one can know what hunger is, although one may be
at a loss to give an explanation of the phenomenon of hunger that
would be satisfactory to everybody.
It was probably a thought of this kind that motivated Johann Gottlieb
Fichte when he stated that the philosophy a man chooses depends on the
kind of man he is. Animated by this thought, one can examine the
attempts that have been made in the course of history to find
solutions for the riddles of philosophy. In these attempts one will
find the nature of the human being himself revealed. For although man
will try to silence his personal interests entirely when he intends to
speak as a philosopher, there will, nevertheless, immediately appear
in a philosophy what the human personality can make out of
itself by unfolding those forces that are most centrally and most
originally its own.
Seen from this viewpoint, the examination of the philosophical
achievements with regard to the world riddles can excite certain
expectations.
We can hope that such an examination can yield results concerning the
nature of human soul development, and the writer of this book believes
that in exploring the philosophical views of the occident he has found
such results. Four distinctly discernible epochs in the evolution of
the philosophical struggle of mankind presented themselves to his
view. He had to recognize the difference of these epochs as distinct
as the difference of the species of a realm of nature. This
observation led him to acknowledge in the realm of the history of
man's philosophical development the existence of objective spiritual
impulses following a definite law of evolution of their own,
independent of the individual men in whom they are observed. The
achievements of these men as philosophers thus appear as the
manifestation of these impulses that direct the courses of events
under the surface of external history. The conviction is then
suggested that such results arise from the unprejudiced
observation of the historical facts, much as a natural law rests
on the observation of facts of nature. The author of this book
believes that he has not been misled by preconceptions to present an
arbitrary construction of the historical process, but that the facts
force the acknowledgment of results of the kind indicated.
It can be shown that in the evolutionary course of the philosophical
struggle of mankind, periods are distinguishable, each of which lasts
between seven and eight centuries. In each of these epochs there is a
distinctly different impulse at work, as if it were under the surface
of external history, sending its rays into the human personalities and
thus causing the evolution of man's mode of philosophizing while
taking its own definite course of development.
The way in which the facts support the distinction of these epochs is
to be shown in the present book. Its author would like, as far as
possible, to let the facts speak for themselves. At this point, he
wants to offer a few guiding lines from which, however, the thoughts
expressed in this book did not take their departure; they are
the results of this book.
One can be of the opinion that these guiding lines correctly should
have been placed at the end of the book because their truth follows
only from the content of the complete presentation. They are, however,
to precede the subject matter as a preliminary statement because they
justify the inner structure of the book. For although they were the
result of the author's research, they were naturally in his mind
before he wrote the book and had their effect on its form. For the
reader, however, it can be important to learn not only at the end of
the book why the author presents his subject in a certain way,
but to form his judgment concerning this method of presentation
already during the reading. But only so much is to be stated here as
is necessary for the understanding of the book's arrangement.
The first epoch of the development of philosophical views begins in
Greek antiquity. It can be distinctly traced back as far as Pherekydes
of Syros and Thales of Miletos and it comes to a close in the age of
beginning Christianity. The spiritual aspiration of mankind in this
age shows an essentially different character from that of earlier
times. It is the age of awakening thought life. Prior to this age, the
human soul lived in imaginative (symbolic) thought pictures that
expressed its relation to the world and existence.
All attempts to find the philosophical thought life developed in
pre-Greek times fail upon closer inspection. Genuine philosophy cannot
be dated earlier than the Greek civilization. What may at first glance
seem to resemble the element of thought in Oriental or Egyptian world
contemplation's proves, on closer inspection, to be not real thought
but parabolic, symbolic conception. It is in Greece that the
aspiration is born to gain knowledge of the world and its laws by
means of an element that can be acknowledged as thought also in
the present age. As long as the human soul conceives world phenomena
through pictures, it feels itself intimately bound up with them. The
soul feels itself in this phase to be a member of the world organism;
it does not think of itself as an independent entity separated from
this organism. As the pure pictureless thought awakens in the human
soul, the soul begins to feel its separation from the world. Thought
becomes the soul's educator for independence.
But the ancient Greek did not experience thought as modern man does.
This is a fact that can be easily overlooked. A genuine insight into
the ancient Greek's thought life will reveal the essential difference.
The ancient Greek's experience of thought is comparable to our
experience of a perception, to our experience of "red" or
"yellow." Just as we today attribute a color or tone percept
to a "thing," so the ancient Greek perceives thought in
the world of things and as adhering to them. It is for this reason
that thought at that time still is the connecting link between soul
and world. The process of separation between soul and world is just
beginning; it has not yet been completed. To be sure, the soul feels
the thought within itself, but it must be of the opinion to have
received it from the world and it can therefore expect the solution of
the world riddles from its thought experience. It is in this type of
thought experience that the philosophical development proceeds that
begins with Pherekydes and Thales, culminates in Plato and Aristotle
and then recedes until it ends at the time of the beginning of
Christianity. From the undercurrents of the spiritual evolution,
thought life streams into the souls of man and produces in these souls
philosophies that educate them to feel themselves in their
self-dependence independent of the outer world.
A new period begins with the dawn of the Christian era. The human soul
can now no longer experience thought as a perception from the outer
world. It now feels thought as the product of its own (inner) being.
An impulse much more powerful than the stream of thought life now
radiates into the soul from the deeper currents of the spiritual
creative process. It is only now that self-consciousness awakes in
mankind in a form adequate to the true nature of this
self-consciousness. What men had experienced in this respect before
that time had really only been harbingers and anticipatory phenomena
of what one should in its deepest meaning call inwardly experienced
self-consciousness.
It is to be hoped that a future history of spiritual evolution will
call this time the "Age of Awakening Self-Consciousness."
Only now does man become in the true sense of the' word aware of the
whole scope of his soul life as "Ego." The full weight of
this fact is more instinctively felt than distinctly known by the
philosophical spirits of that time. All philosophical aspirations of
that epoch retain this general character up to the time of Scotus
Erigena. The philosophers of this period are completely submerged in
religious conceptions with their philosophical thinking. Through this
type of thought formation, the human soul, finding itself in an
awakened self-consciousness entirely left to its own resources,
strives to gain the consciousness of its submergence in the life of
the world organism. Thought becomes a mere means to express the
conviction regarding the relation of man's soul to the world that one
has gained from religious sources. Steeped in this view, nourished by
religious conceptions, thought life grows like the seed of a plant in
the soul of the earth, until it breaks forth into the light.
In Greek philosophy the life of thought unfolds its own inner forces.
It leads the human soul to the point where it feels its
self-dependence. Then from greater depths of spiritual life an element
breaks forth into mankind that is fundamentally different from thought
life — an element that filled the soul with a new inner experience,
with an awareness of being a world in itself, resting on its inner
point of gravitation. Thus, self-consciousness is at first
experienced, but it is not as yet conceived in the form of thought.
The life of thought continues to be developed, concealed and
sheltered in the warmth of religious consciousness. In this way pass
the first seven or eight hundred years after the foundation of
Christianity.
The next period shows an entirely different character. The leading
philosophers feel the reawakening of the energy of thought life. For
centuries the human soul had been inwardly consolidated through the
experience of its self-dependence. It now begins to search for what it
might claim as its innermost self possession. It finds that this is
its thought life. Everything else is given from without; thought is
felt as something the soul has to produce out of its own depth, that
is, the soul is present in full consciousness at this process of
production. The urge arises in the soul to gain in thought a knowledge
through which it can enlighten itself about its own relation to the
world. How can something be expressed in thought life that is not
itself merely the soul's own product? This becomes the question of the
philosophers of that age. The spiritual trends of Nominalism, Realism,
Scholasticism and medieval Mysticism reveal this fundamental character
of the philosophy of that age. The human soul attempts to examine its
thought life with regard to its content of reality.
With the close of this third period the character of philosophical
endeavor changes. The self-consciousness of the soul has been
strengthened through century-long work performed in the examination of
the reality of thought life. One has learned to feel the life of
thought as something that is deeply related to the soul's own nature
and to experience in this union an inner security of existence. As a
mark of this stage of development, there shines like a brilliant star
in the firmament of the spirit, the words, "I think, therefore I
am," which were spoken by Descartes (1596 – 1650). One feels the
soul flowing in thought life, and in the awareness of this stream one
believes one experiences the true nature of the soul itself. The
representative of that time feels himself so secure within this
existence recognized in thought life that he arrives at the conviction
that true knowledge could only be a knowledge that is experienced in
the same way as the soul experiences thought life resting on its own
foundation. This becomes the viewpoint of Spinoza (1632 – 1677).
Now philosophies emerge that shape the world picture as it must be
imagined when the self-conscious human soul, conceived by the
life of thought, can have its adequate position within that world. How
must the world be depicted so that within it the human soul can be
thought to correspond adequately to the necessary concept of the
self-consciousness? This becomes the question that, in an unbiased
observation, we find at the bottom of the philosophy of Giordano Bruno
(1548 – 1600). It is also distinctly the question for which Leibnitz
(1646 – 1716) seeks the answer.
With conceptions of a world picture arising from such a question the
fourth epoch in the evolution of the philosophical world view begins.
Our present age is approximately in the middle of this epoch. This
book is to show how far philosophical knowledge has advanced in the
conception of a world picture in which the self-conscious soul can
find such a secure place, so that it can understand its own meaning
and significance within the existing world. When, in the first epoch
of philosophical search, philosophy derived its powers from the
awakening thought life, the human soul was spurred by the hope of
gaining a knowledge of a world to which it belongs with its true
nature, which is not limited to the life manifested through the body
of the senses.
In the fourth epoch the emerging natural sciences add a view of nature
to the philosophical world picture that gradually senses its own
independent ground. As this nature-picture develops, it retains
nothing of a world in which the self-conscious ego (the human soul
experiencing itself as a self-conscious entity) must recognize itself.
In the first epoch the human soul begins to detach itself from the
experienced external world and to develop a knowledge concerned with
the inner life of the soul. This independent soul life finds its power
in the awakening thought element. In the fourth period a picture 'of
nature emerges that has detached itself in turn from the inner soul
life. The tendency arises to think of nature in such a way that
nothing is allowed to be mixed into its conception that has been
derived from the soul and not exclusively from nature itself. Thus,
the soul is, in this period, expelled from nature, and with its inner
experiences confined to its subjective world. The soul is not about to
be forced to admit that everything it can gain as knowledge by itself
can have a significance only for itself. It cannot find in itself
anything to point to a world in which this soul could have its roots
with its true being. For in the picture of nature it cannot find any
trace of itself.
The evolution of thought life has proceeded through four epochs. In
the first, thought is experienced as a perception coming from without.
In this phase the human soul finds its self-dependence through the
thought process. In the second period, thought had exhausted its power
in this direction. The soul now becomes stronger in the experience of
its own entity. Thought itself now lives more in the background and
blends into self knowledge. It can no longer be considered as if it
were an external perception. The soul becomes used to experiencing it
as its own product. It must arrive at the question of what this
product of inner soul activity has to do with an external world. The
third period passes in the light of this question. The philosophers
develop a cognitive life that tests thought itself with regard to its
inner power. The philosophical strength of the period manifests itself
as a life in the element of thought as such, as a power to work
through thought in its own essence. In the course of this epoch the
philosophical life increases in its ability to master the element of
thought. At the beginning of the fourth period the cognitive
self-consciousness, on the basis of its thought possession, proceeds
to form a philosophical world picture. This picture is now challenged
by a picture of nature that refuses to accept any element of this
self-consciousness. The self-conscious soul, confronted with this
nature picture, feels as its fundamental question, "How do I gain
a world picture in which both the inner world with its true essence
and the external nature are securely rooted at the same time?"
The impulse caused by this question dominates the philosophical
evolution from the beginning of the fourth period; the philosophers
themselves may be more or less aware of that fact. This is also the
most important impulse of the philosophical life of the present age.
In this book the facts are to be characterized that show the effect of
that impulse. The first volume of the book is to present the
philosophical development up to the middle of the nineteenth century;
the second will follow that development into the present time. It is
to show at the end how the philosophical evolution leads the soul to
aspects toward a future human life in cognition. Through this, the
soul should be able to develop a world picture out of its own
self-consciousness in which its true being can be conceived
simultaneously with the picture of nature that is the result of the
modern scientific development.
A philosophical future perspective adequate to the present was to be
unfolded in this book from the historical evolution of the
philosophical world view.
∴
II. The World Conception of the Greek Thinkers
With Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century B.C., a
personality appears in the Greek intellectual-spiritual life in whom
one can observe the birth of what will be called in the following
presentation, "a world and life conception." What he has to
say about the problems of the world is, on the one hand, still like
the mythical symbolic accounts of a time that lies before the striving
for a scientific world conception; on the other hand, his imagination
penetrates through the picture, through the myth, to a form of
reflection that wants to pierce the problems of man's existence and of
his position in the world by means of thoughts. He still
imagines the earth in the picture of a winged oak around which Zeus
wraps the surface land, oceans, rivers, etc., like a woven texture. He
thinks of the world as permeated by spiritual beings of which Greek
mythology speaks.
But Pherekydes also speaks of three principles of the world: Of
Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon.
Throughout the history of philosophy there has been much discussion as
to what is to be understood by these three principles. As the
historical sources on the question of what Pherekydes meant to say in
his work, Heptamychos, are contradictory, it is quite
understandable that present-day opinions also do not agree. If we
reflect on the traditional accounts of Pherekydes, we get the
impression that we can really observe in him the beginning of
philosophical thought but that this observation is difficult because
his words have to be taken in a sense that is remote from the thought
habits of the present time; its real meaning is yet to be
determined.*
Pherekydes arrives at his world picture in a different way from that
of his predecessors. The significant fact is that he feels man to be a
living soul in a way different from earlier times. For the
earlier world view, the word, "soul," did not yet have the
meaning that it acquired in later conceptions of life, nor did
Pherekydes have the idea of the soul in the sense of later thinkers.
He simply feels the soul-element of man, whereas the later
thinkers want to speak clearly about it (in the form of thought) and
they attempt to characterize it in intellectual terms. Men of earlier
times do not as yet separate their own soul experience from the life
of nature. They do not feel that they stand as a special entity beside
nature. They experience themselves in nature as they experience
lightning and thunder in it, the drifting of the clouds, the course of
the stars or the growth of plants. What moves man's hand on his own
body, what places his foot on the ground and makes him walk, for the
prehistoric man, belongs to the same sphere of world forces that also
causes lightning, cloud formations and all other external events. What
he at this stage feels, can be expressed by saying, "Something
causes lightning, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot step,
moves the air of my breath within me, turns my head." If one
expresses what is in this way experienced, one has to use words that
at first hearing seem to be exaggerated. But only through these
exaggerations will it be possible to understand what is intended to be
conveyed.
A man who holds a world picture as it is meant here, experiences in
the rain that falls to the ground the action of a force that we at the
present time must call "spiritual" and that he feels to be
of the same kind as the force he experiences when he is about to exert
a personal activity of some kind or other. It should be of interest
that this view can be found again in Goethe in his younger years,
naturally in a shade of thought that it must assume in a personality
of the eighteenth century. We can read in Goethe's essay,
Nature:
She (nature) has placed me in life; she will also lead me out of it. I
trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not
hate her work. It was not I who spoke about her. Nay, what is true and
what is false — everything has been spoken by her. Everything is her
fault, everything her merit.
To speak as Goethe speaks here is only then possible if one feels
one's own being imbedded in nature as a whole and then expresses this
feeling in thoughtful reflection. As Goethe thought, so man of
an earlier time felt without transforming his soul experience into the
element of thought. He did not as yet experience thought; instead of
thought there unfolded within his soul a symbolic image. The
observation of the evolution of mankind leads back to a time in which
thought-like experiences had not yet come into being but in which the
symbolic picture rose in the soul of man when he contemplated the
events of the world. Thought life is born in man at a definite time.
It causes the extinction of the previous form of consciousness in
which the world is experienced in pictures.
For the thought habits of our time it seems acceptable to imagine that
man in archaic times had observed natural elements — wind and weather,
the growth of seeds, the course of the stars — and then poetically
invented spiritual beings as the active creators of these
events. It is, however, far from the contemporary mode of thinking to
recognize the possibility that man in older times experienced those
pictures as he later experienced thought, that is, as an inner reality
of his soul life.
One will gradually come to recognize that in the course of the
evolution of mankind a transformation of the human organization has
taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs of human nature,
which make possible the development of an independent thought life,
had not yet been formed. In this time man had, instead, organs, that
represented for him what he experienced in the world of pictures.
As this gradually comes to be understood, a new light will fall on the
significance of mythology on the one hand, and that of poetic
production and thought life on the other. When the independent inner
thought experience began, it brought the picture-consciousness to
extinction. Thought emerged as the tool of truth. This is only one
branch of what survived of the old picture-consciousness that had
found its expression in the ancient myth. In another branch the
extinguished picture-consciousness continued to live, if only as a
pale shadow of its former existence, in the creations of fantasy and
poetic imagination. Poetic fantasy and the intellectual view of the
world are the two children of the one mother, the old
picture-consciousness that must not be confused with the consciousness
of poetic imagination.
The essential process that is to be understood is the transformation
of the more delicate organization of man. It causes the beginning of
thought life. In art and poetry thought as such naturally does not
have an effect. Here the picture continues to exert its influence, but
it has now a different relation to the human soul from the one it had
when it also served in a cognitive function. As thought itself,
the new form of consciousness appears only in the newly emerging
philosophy. The other branches of human life are correspondingly
transformed in a different way when thought begins to rule in the
field of human knowledge.
The progress in human evolution that is characterized by this process
is connected with the fact that man from the beginning of thought
experience had to feel himself in a much more pronounced way
than before, as a separated entity, as a "soul." In myth
the picture was experienced in such a way that one felt it to be
in the external world as a reality. One experienced this reality at
the same time, and one was united with it. With thought, as
well as with the poetic picture, man felt himself separated
from nature. Engaged in thought experience, man felt himself as an
entity that could not experience nature with the same intimacy as he
felt when at one with thought. More and more, the definite feeling of
the contrast of nature and soul came into being.
In the civilizations of the different peoples this transition from the
old picture-consciousness to the consciousness of thought experience
took place at different times. In Greece we can intimately observe
this transition if we focus our attention on the personality of
Pherekydes of Syros. He lived in a world in which
picture-consciousness and thought experience still had an equal share.
His three principal ideas — Zeus, Chronos and Chthon — can only be
understood in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, feels
itself as belonging to the events of the external world. We are
dealing here with three inwardly experienced pictures and we find
access to them only when we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by
anything that the thought habits of our time are likely to imagine as
their meaning.
Chronos is not time as we think of it today. Chronos is a being that
in contemporary language can be called "spiritual" if one
keeps in mind that one does not thereby exhaust its meaning. Chronos
is alive and its activity is the devouring, the consumption of the
life of another being, Chthon. Chronos rules in nature; Chronos rules
in man; in nature and man Chronos consumes Chthon. It is of no
importance whether one considers the consumption of Chthon through
Chronos as inwardly experienced or as external events, for in both
realms the same process goes on. Zeus is connected with these two
beings. In the meaning of Pherekydes one must no more think of Zeus as
a deity in the sense of our present day conception of mythology, than
as of mere "space" in its present sense, although he is the
being through whom the events that go on between Chronos and Chthon
are transformed into spatial, extended form.
The cooperation of Chronos, Chthon and Zeus is felt directly as a
picture content in the sense of Pherekydes, just as much as one is
aware of the idea that one is eating, but it is also experienced as
something in the external world, like the conception of the colors
blue or red. This experience can be imagined in the following way. We
turn our attention to fire as it consumes its fuel. Chronos lives in
the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever regards fire in its
activity and keeps himself under the effect, not of independent
thought but of image content, looks at Chronos. In the activity of
fire, not in the sensually perceived fire, he experiences time
simultaneously. Another conception of time does not exist before
the birth of thought. What is called "time" in our present
age is an idea that has been developed only in the age of intellectual
world conception.
If we turn our attention to water, not as it is as water but as it
changes into air or vapor, or to clouds that are in the process of
dissolving, we experience as an image content the force of Zeus, the
spatially active "spreader." One could also say, the force
of centrifugal extension. If we look on water as it becomes solid, or
on the solid as it changes into fluid, we are watching Chthon. Chthon
is something that later in the age of thought-ruled world conception
becomes "matter," the stuff "things are made of";
Zeus has become "ether" or "space," Chronos
changes into "time."
In the view of Pherekydes the world is constituted through the
cooperation of these three principles. Through the combination of
their action the material world of sense perception — fire, air, water
and earth — come into being on the one hand, and on the other, a
certain number of invisible supersensible spirit beings who animate
the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos and Chthon could be referred
to as "spirit, soul and matter," but their significance is
only approximated by these terms. It is only through the fusion of
these three original beings that the more material realms of the world
of fire, air, water and earth, and the more soul-like and spirit-like
(supersensible) beings come into existence. Using expressions of later
world conceptions, one can call Zeus, space-ether; Chronos,
time-creator; Chthon, matter-producer — the three "mothers of the
world's origin." We can still catch a glimpse of them in Goethe's
Faust, in the scene of the second part where Faust sets out on
his journey to the "mothers."
As these three primordial entities appear in Pherekydes, they remind
us of conceptions of predecessors of this personality, the so-called
Orphics. They represent a mode of conception that still lives
completely in the old form of picture consciousness. In them we also
find three original beings: Zeus, Chronos and Chaos. Compared to these
"primeval mothers," those of Pherekydes are somewhat less
picture-like. This is so because Pherekydes attempts to seize, through
the exertion of thought, what his Orphic predecessors still held
completely as image-experience. For this reason we can say that he
appears as a personality in whom the "birth of thought life"
takes place. This is expressed not so much in the more thought-like
conception of the Orphic ideas of Pherekydes, as in a certain
dominating mood of his soul, which we later find again in several of
his philosophizing successors in Greece. For Pherekydes feels that he
is forced to see the origin of things in the "good"
(Arizon). He could not combine this concept with the "world of
mythological deities" of ancient times. The beings of this world
had soul qualities that were not in agreement with this concept. Into
his three "original causes" Pherekydes could only think the
concept of the "good," the perfect.
Connected with this circumstance is the fact that the birth of thought
life brought with it a shattering of the foundations of the inner
feelings of the soul. This inner experience should not be overlooked
in a consideration of the time when the intellectual world conception
began. One could not have felt this beginning as progress if one had
not believed that with thought one took possession of something that
was more perfect than the old form of image experience. Of course, at
this stage of thought development, this feeling was not clearly
expressed. But what one now, in retrospect, can clearly state with
regard to the ancient Greek thinkers was then merely felt. They felt
that the pictures that were experienced by our immediate ancestors did
not lead to the highest, most perfect, original causes. In these
pictures only the less perfect causes were revealed; we must raise our
thoughts to still higher causes from which the content of those
pictures is merely derived.
Through progress into thought life, the world was now conceived as
divided into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. In this more
spiritual sphere, which was only now felt as such, one had to conceive
what was formerly experienced in the form of pictures. To this was
added the conception of a higher principle, something thought of as
superior to the older, spiritual world and to nature. It was to this
sublime element that thought wanted to penetrate, and it is in this
region that Pherekydes meant to find his three "Primordial
Mothers." A look at the world as it appears illustrates what kind
of conceptions took hold of a personality like Pherekydes. Man finds a
harmony in his surroundings that lies at the bottom of all phenomena
and is manifested in the motions of the stars, in the course of the
seasons with their blessings of thriving plant-life, etc. In this
beneficial course of things, harmful, destructive powers intervene, as
expressed in the pernicious effects of the weather, earthquakes, etc.
In observing all this one can be lead to a realization of a dualism in
the ruling powers, but the human soul must assume an underlying unity.
It naturally feels that, in the last analysis, the ravaging hail, the
destructive earthquake, must spring from the same source as the
beneficial cycle of the seasons. In this fashion man looks through
good and evil and sees behind it an original good. The same good force
rules in the earthquake as in the blessed rain of spring. In the
scorching, devastating heat of the sun the same element is at work
that ripens the seed. The "good Mothers of all origin" are,
then, in the pernicious events also. When man experiences this
feeling, a powerful world riddle emerges before his soul. To find the
solution, Pherekydes turns toward his Ophioneus. As Pherekydes leans
on the old picture conception, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind of
"world serpent." It is in reality a spirit being, which,
like all other beings of the world, belongs to the children of
Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but that has later so changed that its
effects are directed against those of the "good mother of
origin." Thus, the world is divided into three parts. The first
part consists of the "Mothers," which are presented as good,
as perfect; the second part contains the beneficial world events; the
third part, the destructive or the only imperfect world processes
that, as Ophioneus, are intertwined in the beneficial effects.
For Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the
detrimental destructive world forces. Pherekydes stands with his
conceptive imagination at the borderline between picture and thought.
He does not think that there are devastating powers that he conceives
in the pictures of Ophioneus, nor does such a thought process develop
in him as an activity of fantasy. Rather, he looks on the detrimental
forces, and immediately Ophioneus stands before his soul as the red
color stands before our souls when we look at a rose.
Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception
does not, at first, distinguish in his thought between the events of
the "good mothers" and those of Ophioneus. At the borderline
of a thought-formed world conception, the necessity of this
distinction is felt, for only at this stage of progress does the soul
feel itself to be a separate, independent entity. It feels the
necessity to ask what its origin is. It must find its origin in the
depths of the world where Chronos, Zeus and Chthon had not as yet
found their antagonists. But the soul also feels that it cannot know
anything of its own origin at first, because it sees itself in the
midst of a world in which the "Mothers" work in conjunction
with Ophioneus. It feels itself in a world in which the perfect and
the imperfect are joined together. Ophioneus is twisted into the
soul's own being.
We can feel what went on in the souls of individual personalities of
the sixth century B.C. if we allow the feelings described here to make
a sufficient impression on us. With the ancient mythical deities such
souls felt themselves woven into the imperfect world. The deities
belonged to the same imperfect world as they did themselves.
The spiritual brotherhood, which was founded by Pythagoras of Samos
between the years 549 and 500 B.C. in Kroton in Magna Graecia, grew
out of such a mood. Pythagoras intended to lead his followers back to
the experience of the "Primordial Mothers" in which the
origin of their souls was to be seen. It can be said in this respect
that he and his disciples meant to serve "other gods" than
those of the people. With this fact something was given that must
appear as a break between spirits like Pythagoras and the people, who
were satisfied with their gods. Pythagoras considered these gods as
belonging to the realm of the imperfect. In this difference we also
find the reason for the "secret" that is often referred to
in connection with Pythagoras and that was not to be betrayed to the
uninitiated. It consisted in the fact that Pythagoras had to attribute
to the human soul an origin different from that of the gods of the
popular religion. In the last analysis, the numerous attacks that
Pythagoras experienced must be traced to this "secret." How
was he to explain to others than those who carefully prepared
themselves for such a knowledge that, in a certain sense, they,
"as souls," could consider themselves as standing even
higher than the gods of the popular religion? In what other form than
in a brotherhood with a strictly regulated mode of life could the
souls become aware of their lofty origin and still find themselves
deeply bound up with imperfection? It was just through this feeling of
deficiency that the effort was to be made to arrange life in such a
way that through the process of self-perfection it would be led back
to its origin. That legends and myths were likely to be formed about
such aspirations of Pythagoras is comprehensible. It is also
understandable that scarcely anything has come down to us historically
about the true significance of this personality. Whoever observes the
legends and mythical traditions of antiquity about Pythagoras in an
all-encompassing picture will nevertheless recognize in it the
characterization that was just given.
In the picture of Pythagoras, present-day thinking also feels the idea
of the so-called "transmigration of souls" as a disturbing
factor. It is even felt to be naive that Pythagoras is reported to
have said that he knew that he had already been on earth in an earlier
time as another human being. It may be recalled that that great
representative of modern enlightenment, Lessing, in his Education
of the Human Race, renewed this idea of man's repeated lives on
earth out of a mode of thinking that was entirely different from that
of Pythagoras. Lessing could conceive of the progress of the human
race only in such a way that the human souls participated repeatedly
in the life of the successive great phases of history. A soul brought
into its life in a later time as a potential ability what it had
gained from experience in an earlier era. Lessing found it natural
that the soul had often been on earth in an earthly body, and that it
would often return in the future. In this way, it struggles from life
to life toward the perfection that it finds possible to obtain. He
pointed out that the idea of repeated lives on earth ought not to be
considered incredible because it existed in ancient times, and
"because it occurred to the human mind before academic sophistry
had distracted and weakened it."
The idea of reincarnation is present in Pythagoras, but it would be
erroneous to believe that he — along with Pherekydes, who is mentioned
as his teacher in antiquity — had yielded to this idea because he had
by means of a logical conclusion arrived at the thought that the path
of development indicated above could only be reached in repeated
earthly lives. To attribute such an intellectual mode of thinking to
Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are told of his extensive
journeys. We hear that he met together with wise men who had preserved
traditions of oldest human insight. When we observe the oldest human
conceptions that have come down to us through posterity, we arrive at
the view that the idea of repeated lives on earth was widespread in
remote antiquity. Pythagoras took up the thread from the oldest
teachings of humanity. The mythical teachings in picture form appeared
to him as deteriorated conceptions that had their origin in older and
superior insights. These picture doctrines were to change in his time
into a thought-formed world conception, but this intellectual world
conception appeared to him as only a part of the soul's life. This
part had to be developed to greater depths. It could then lead the
soul to its origins. By penetrating in this direction, however, the
soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated lives on earth as
a soul perception. It does not reach its origins unless it
finds its way through the repeated terrestrial lives. As a wanderer
walking to a distant place naturally passes through other places on
his path, so the soul on its path to the "mothers" passes
the preceding lives through which it has gone during its descent from
its former existence in perfection, to its present life in
imperfection. If one considers everything that is pertinent in this
problem, the inference is inescapable that the view of repeated earth
lives is to be attributed to Pythagoras in this sense as his inner
perception, not as something that was arrived at through a process of
conceptual conclusion.
Now the view that is spoken of as especially characteristic of the
followers of Pythagoras is that all things are based on numbers. When
this statement is made, one must consider that the school of
Pythagoras was continued into later times after his death. Philolaus,
Archytas and others are mentioned as later Pythagoreans. It was about
them especially that one in antiquity knew they "considered
things as numbers." We can assume that this view goes back to
Pythagoras even if historical documentation does not appear possible.
We shall, however, have to suppose that this view was deeply and
organically rooted in his whole mode of conception, and that it took
on a more superficial form with his successors.
Let us think of Pythagoras as standing before the beginning of
intellectual world conception. He saw how thought took its origin in
the soul that had, starting from the "mothers," descended
through its successive lives to its state of imperfection; Because he
felt this he could not mean to ascend to the origins through mere
thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which
thought was not yet at home. There he found a life of the soul that
was beyond thought life. As the soul experiences proportional numbers
in the sound of music, so Pythagoras developed a soul life in which he
knew himself as living in a connection with the world that can be
intellectually expressed in terms of numbers. But for what is thus
experienced, these numbers have no other significance than the
physicist's proportional tone numbers have for the experience of
music.
For Pythagoras the mythical gods must be replaced by thought. At the
same time, he develops an appropriate deepening of the soul life; the
soul, which through thought has separated itself from the world, finds
itself at one with the world again. It experiences itself as
not separated from the world. This does not take place in a
region in which the world-participating experience turns into a
mythical picture, but in a region in which the soul reverberates with
the invisible, sensually imperceptible cosmic harmonies. It brings
into awareness, not its own thought intentions, but what cosmic powers
exert as their will, thus allowing it to become conception in the soul
of man.
In Pherekydes and Pythagoras the process of how thought-experienced
world conception originates in the human soul is revealed. Working
themselves free from the older forms of conception, these men arrive
at an inwardly independent conception of the "soul" distinct
from external "nature." What is clearly apparent in these
two personalities — the process in which the soul wrests its way out
of the old picture conceptions — takes place more in the
undercurrents of the souls of the other thinkers with whom it
is customary to begin the account of the development of Greek
philosophy. The thinkers who are ordinarily mentioned first are
Thales of Miletos (640 – 550 B.C.), Anaximander (born
610 B.C.), Anaximenes (flourished 600 B.C.) and Heraclitus
(born 500 B.C. at Ephesus).
Whoever acknowledges the preceding arguments to be justified will also
find a presentation of these men admissible that must differ from the
usual historical accounts of philosophy. Such accounts are, after all,
always based on the unexpressed presupposition that these men had
arrived at their traditionally reported statements through an
imperfect observation of nature. Thus the statement is made that the
fundamental and original being of all things was to be found in
"water," according to Thales; in the "infinite,"
according to Anaximander; in "air," according to Anaximenes;
in "fire," in the opinion of Heraclitus.
What is not considered in this treatment is the fact that these men
are still really living in the process of the genesis of intellectual
world conception. To be sure, they feel the independence of the human
soul in a higher degree than Pherekydes, but they have not yet
completed the strict separation of the life of the soul from the
process of nature. One will, for instance, most certainly construct an
erroneous picture of Thales's way of thinking if it is imagined that
he, as a merchant, mathematician and astronomer, thought about natural
events and then, in an imperfect yet similar way to that of a modern
scientist, had summed up his results in the sentence, "Everything
originates from water." To be a mathematician or an astronomer,
etc., in those ancient times meant to deal in a practical way with the
things of these professions, much in the way a craftsman makes use of
technical skills rather than intellectual and scientific knowledge.
What must be presumed for a man like Thales is that he still
experienced the external processes of nature as similar to inner soul
processes. What presented itself to him like a natural event, as did
the process and nature of "water" (the fluid, mudlike,
earth-formative element), he experienced in a way that was similar to
what he felt within himself in soul and body. He then experienced in
himself and outside in nature the effect of water, although to a
lesser degree than man of earlier times did. Both effects were for him
the manifestation of one power. It may be pointed out that at a
still later age the external effects in nature were thought of as
being akin to the inner processes in a way that did not provide for a
"soul" in the present sense as distinct from the body. Even
in the time of intellectual world conception, the idea of the
temperaments still preserves this point of view as a reminiscence of
earlier times.
One called the melancholic temperament, the earthy; the phlegmatic,
the watery; the sanguinic, the airy; the choleric, the fiery. These
are not merely allegorical expressions. One did not feel a completely
separated soul element, but experienced in oneself a soul-body entity
as a unity. In this unity was felt the stream of forces that go, for
instance, through a phlegmatic soul, to be like the forces in external
nature that are experienced in the effects of water. One saw these
external water effects to be the same as what the soul experienced in
a phlegmatic mood. The thought habits of today must attempt an empathy
with the old modes of conception if they want to penetrate into the
soul life of earlier times.
In this way one will find in the world conception of Thales an
expression of what his soul life, which was akin to the phlegmatic
temperament, caused him to experience inwardly. He experienced in
himself what appeared to him to be the world mystery of water. The
allusion to the phlegmatic temperament of a person is likely to be
associated with a derogatory meaning of the term. Justified as this
may be in many cases, it is nevertheless also true that the phlegmatic
temperament, when it is combined with an energetic, objective
imagination, makes a sage out of a man because of its calmness,
collectedness and freedom from passion. Such a disposition in Thales
probably caused him to be celebrated by the Greeks as one of their
wise men.
For Anaximenes, the world picture formed itself in another way. He
experienced in himself the sanguine temperament. A word of his has
been handed down to us that immediately shows how he felt the air
element as an expression of the world mystery. "As our soul,
which is a breath, holds us together, so air and breath envelop the
universe."
The world conception of Heraclitus will, in an unbiased contemplation,
be felt directly as a manifestation of his choleric inner life. A
member of one of the most noble families of Ephesus, he became a
violent antagonist of the democratic party because he had arrived at
certain views, the truth of which was apparent to him in his immediate
inner experience. The views of those around him, compared with his
own, seemed to him to prove directly in a most natural way, the
foolishness of his environment. Thus, he got into such conflicts that
he left his native city and led a solitary life at the Temple of
Artemis. Consider these few of his sayings that have come down to us.
"It would be good if the Ephesians hanged themselves as soon as
they grew up and surrendered their city to those under age." Or
the one about men, "Fools in their lack of understanding, even if
they hear the truth, are like the deaf: of them does the saying bear
witness that they are absent when present."
The feeling that is expressed in such a choleric temperament finds
itself akin to the consuming activity of fire. It does not live in the
restful calm of "being." It feels itself as one with eternal
"becoming." Such a soul feels stationary existence to be an
absurdity. "Everything flows," is, therefore, a famous
saying of Heraclitus. It is only apparently so if somewhere an
unchanging being seems to be given. We are lending expression to a
feeling of Heraclitus if we say, "The rock seems to represent an
absolute unchanging state of being, but this is only appearance; it is
inwardly in the wildest commotion; all its parts act upon one
another." The mode of thinking of Heraclitus is usually
characterized by his saying, "One cannot twice enter the same
stream, for the second time the water is not the same." A
disciple of Heraclitus, Cratylus, goes still further by saying that
one could not even enter the same stream once. Thus it is with all
things. While we look at what is apparently unchanging, it has already
turned into something else in the general stream of existence.
We do not consider a world conception in its full significance if we
accept only its thought content. Its essential element lies in the
mood it communicates to the soul, that is, in the vital force that
grows out of it. One must realize how Heraclitus feels himself with
his own soul in the stream of becoming. The world soul pulsates in his
own human soul and communicates to it of its own life as long as the
human soul knows itself as living in it. Out of such a feeling of
union with the world soul, the thought originates in Heraclitus,
"Whatever lives has death in itself through the stream of
becoming that is running through everything, but death again has life
in itself. Life and death are in our living and dying. Everything has
everything else in itself; only thus can eternal becoming flow through
everything." "The ocean is the purest and impurest water,
drinkable and wholesome to fishes, to men undrinkable and
pernicious." "Life and death are the same, waking and
sleeping, young and old; the first changes into the second and again
into the first." "Good and evil are one." "The
straight path and the crooked . . . are one."
Anaximander is freer from the inner life, more surrendered to the
element of thought itself. He sees the origin of things in a kind of
world ether, an indefinite formless basic entity that has no limits.
Take the Zeus of Pherekydes, deprive him of every image content that
he still possesses and you have the original principle of Anaximander:
Zeus turned into thought. A personality appears in Anaximander in whom
thought life is borne out of the mood of soul that still has, in the
preceding thinkers, the color of temperament. Such a personality feels
united as a soul with the life of thought, and thereby is not so
intimately interwoven with nature as the soul that does not yet
experience thought as an independent element. It feels itself
connected with a world order that lies above the events of
nature. When Anaximander says that men lived first as fishes in the
moist element and then developed through land animal forms, he means
that the spirit germ, which man recognizes through thinking as his
true being, has gone through the other forms only as through
preliminary stages, with the aim of giving itself eventually the shape
that has been appropriate for him from the beginning.
The thinkers mentioned so far are succeeded historically by
Xenophanes of Kolophon (born 570 B.C.); Parmenides (460
B.C., living as a teacher in Athens), younger and inwardly related to
Xenophanes; Zenon of Elea (who reached his peak around 500
B.C.); Melissos of Samos (about 450 B.C.).
The thought element is already alive to such a degree in these
thinkers that they demand a world conception in which the life of
thought is fully satisfied; they recognize truth only in this form.
How must the world ground be constituted so that it can be fully
absorbed within thinking? This is their question.
Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot stand the test of
thought; therefore, he rejects them. His god must be capable of being
thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is burdened
with qualities not appropriate to thought, whose function it is to
seek what is permanent. Therefore, God is the unchangeable, eternal
unity of all things to be seized in thought.
Parmenides sees the Untrue, the Deceiving, in sense-perceived,
external nature. He sees what alone is true in the Unity, the
Imperishable that is seized by thought. Zeno tries to come to terms
with, and do justice to, the thought experience by pointing out the
contradictions that result from a world view that sees truth in the
change of things, in the process of becoming, in the multiplicity that
is shown by the external world. One of the contradictions pointed out
by Zeno is that the fastest runner (Achilles) could not catch up with
a turtle, for no matter how slowly it moved, the moment Achilles
arrived at the point it had just occupied, it would have moved on a
little. Through such contradictions Zeno intimates how a conceptual
imagination that leans on the external world is caught in
self-contradiction. He points to the difficulty such thought meets
when it attempts to find the truth.
One will recognize the significance of this world conception, which is
called the "eleatic view" (Parmenides and Zeno are from
Elea), if one considers that those who hold this view have advanced
with the development of thought experience to the point of having
transformed it into a special art, the so-called dialectic. In the
"art of thought" the soul learns to feel itself in its
self-dependence and its inward self-sufficiency. With this step, the
reality of the soul is felt to be what it is through its own being. It
experiences itself through the fact that it no longer, as in earlier
times, follows the general world experience with its life, but unfolds
independent thought experience within itself. This experience is
rooted in itself and through it, it can feel itself planted into a
pure spiritual ground of the world. At first, this feeling is not
expressed as a distinctly formulated thought but, in the esteem it
enjoyed, it can be sensed vividly as a feeling in this age. According
to a Dialogue of Plato, the young Socrates is told by Parmenides that
he should learn the "art of thought" from Zeno; otherwise,
truth would be unattainable for him. This "art of thought"
was felt to be a necessity for the human soul intending to approach
the spiritual fundamental grounds of existence.
Whoever does not see how, in the progress of human development toward
the stage of thought experience, real experiences — the picture
experiences — came to an end with the beginning of this thought life,
will not see the special quality of the Greek thinkers from the sixth
to the fourth pre-Christian centuries in the light in which they must
appear in this presentation. Thought formed a wall around the human
soul, so to speak. The soul had formerly felt as if it were within the
phenomena of nature. What it experienced in these natural phenomena,
like the activities of its own body, presents itself to the soul in
the form of images that appeared in vivid reality. Through the power
of thought this entire panorama was now extinguished. Where previously
images saturated in content prevailed, thought now expanded through
the external world. The soul could experience itself in the
surroundings of space and time only if it united itself with thought.
One senses such a mood of soul in Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in
Asia Minor (born 500 B.C.). He found himself deeply bound up in his
soul with thought life. His thought life encompassed what is extended
in space and time. Expanded like this, it appears as the nous,
the world reason. It penetrates the whole of nature as an entity.
Nature, however, presents itself as composed only of little basic
entities. The events of nature that result from the combined actions
of these fundamental entities are what the senses perceive after the
texture of imagery has vanished from nature. These fundamental
entities are called homoiomeries. The soul experiences in
thought the connection with the world reason (the nous) inside its
wall. Through the windows of the senses it watches what the world
reason causes to come into being through the action of the
homoiomeries on each other.
Empedocles (born 490 B.C. in Agrigent) was a personality in whose
soul the old and the new modes of conception clash as in a violent
antagonism. He still feels something of the old mode of being in which
the soul was more closely interwoven with external existence. Hatred
and love, antipathy and sympathy live in the human soul. They also live
outside the wall that encloses it. The life of the soul is thus
homogeneously extended beyond its boundaries and it appears in forces
that separate and connect the elements of external nature — air,
fire, water and earth — thereby causing what the senses perceive
in the outer world.
Empedocles is, as it were, confronted with nature, which appears to
the senses to be deprived of life and soul, and he develops a soul
mood that revolts against this extirpation of nature's animation. His
soul cannot believe that nature really is what thought wants to make
of it. Least of all can it admit that it should stand in such a
relation to nature as it appears according to the intellectual world
conception. We must imagine what goes on in a soul that senses such a
discord in all its harshness, suffering from it. We shall then be
capable of entering into the experience of how, in this soul of
Empedocles, the old mode of conception is resurrected as the power of
intimate feeling but is unwilling to raise this fact into full
consciousness. It thus seeks a form of existence in a shade of
experience hovering between thought and picture that is reechoed in
the sayings of Empedocles. These lose their strangeness if they are
understood in this way. The following aphorism is attributed to him.
"Farewell. A mortal no longer, but an immortal god I wander about
. . . and as soon as I come into the flourishing cities I am
worshipped by men and women. They follow me by the thousands, seeking
the path of their salvation with me, some expecting prophecies,
others, curative charms for many diseases."
In such a way, a soul that is haunted by an old form of consciousness
through which it feels its own existence as that of a banished god who
is cast out of another form of existence into the soul-deprived world
of the senses, is dazed. He therefore feels the earth to be an
"unaccustomed place" into which he is cast as in punishment.
There are certainly other sentiments also to be found in the soul of
Empedocles because significant flashes of wisdom shine in his
aphorisms. His feeling with respect to the "birth of the
intellectual world conception" is characterized, however, by the
thought mood mentioned above.
The thinkers who are called the atomists regarded what nature had
become for the soul of man through the birth of thought in a different
way. The most important among them is Democritus (born 460 B.C.
in Abdera). Leucippus is a kind of forerunner to him.
With Democritus, the homoiomeries of Anaxagoras have become, to a
considerable degree, more material. In Anaxagoras, one can still
compare the entities of the basic parts with living germs. With
Democritus, they become dead indivisible particles of matter, which in
their different combinations make up the things of the outer world.
They mix freely as they move to and fro; thus, the events of nature
come to pass. The world reason (nous) of Anaxagoras, which has the
world processes grow out of the combined action of the homoiomeries
like a spiritual (incorporeal) consciousness, with Democritus, turns
into the unconscious law of nature (ananke). The soul is ready
to recognize only what it can grasp as the result of simple thought
combinations. Nature is now completely deprived of life and soul;
thought has paled as a soul experience into the inner shadow of
inanimate nature. In this way, with Democritus, the intellectual
prototype of all more or less materialistically colored world
conceptions of later times has made its appearance.
The atom world of Democritus represents an external world, a nature in
which no trace of soul life can be found. The thought experiences in
the soul, through which the soul has become aware of itself, are mere
shadow experiences in Democritus. Thus, a part of the fate of thought
experiences is characterized. They bring the human soul to the
consciousness of its own being, but they fill it at the same time with
uncertainty about itself. The soul experiences itself in itself
through thought, but it can at the same time feel that it lost its
anchorage in the independent spiritual world power that used to lend
it security and inner stability. This emancipation of the soul was
felt by the group of men in Greek intellectual life known as
"Sophists." The most important among them is Protagoras
of Abdera (480 – 410 B.C.). Also to be noted besides him are
Gorgias, Critias, Hippias, Thrasymachus and Prodicus.
The sophists are often presented as men who superficially played with
their thinking. Much has been contributed to this opinion by the
manner in which Aristophanes, the playwright of comedies, treated
them, but there are many things that can lead to a better appreciation
of the sophists. It is noteworthy that even Socrates, who to a certain
limited extent thought of himself as a pupil of Prodicus, is said to
have described him as a man who had done much for the refinement of
the speech and thinking of his disciples.
Protagoras's view is expressed in the famous statement, "Man is
the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are; of those
that are not, that they are not." In the sentiment underlying
this statement the thought experience feels itself sovereign. It does
not sense any connection with an objective world power. If Parmenides
is of the opinion that the senses supply man with a world of
deception, one could go further and add, "Why should not
thinking, although one experiences it, also deceive?" Protagoras,
however, would reply to this, "Why should it be man's concern if
the world outside him is not as he perceives and thinks it? Does he
imagine it for anyone else but himself? No matter how it may be for
another being, this should be of no concern to man. The contents of
his mind are only to serve him; with their aid he is to find his way
through the world. Once he achieves complete clarity about himself, he
cannot wish for any thought contents about the world except those that
serve him." Protagoras means to be able to build on thinking. For
this purpose he intends to have it rest exclusively on its own
sovereign power.
With this step, however, Protagoras places himself in contradiction to
the spirit that lives in the depths of Greek life. This spirit is
distinctly perceptible in the Greek character. It manifests itself in
the inscription, "Know Thyself," at the temple of Delphi.
This ancient oracle wisdom speaks as if it contained the challenge for
the progress of world conceptions that advances from the conception in
images to the form of consciousness in which the secrets of the world
are seized through thought. Through this challenge man is directed to
his own soul. He is told that he can hear the language in his soul
through which the world expresses its essence. He is thereby also
directed toward something that produces uncertainties and insecurities
for itself in its experience. The leading spirits of Greek
civilization were to conquer the dangers of this self-supporting soul
life. Thus, they were to develop thought in the soul into a world
conception.
In the course of this development the sophists navigated in dangerous
straits. In them the Greek spirit places itself at an abyss; it means
to produce the strength of equilibrium through its own power. One
should, as has been pointed out, consider the gravity and boldness of
this attempt, rather than lightly condemn it even though condemnation
is certainly justified for many of the sophists.
This attempt of the sophists takes place at a natural turning point of
Greek life. Protagoras lived from 480 to 410 B.C. The Peloponnesian
War, which occurred at this turning point of Greek civilization,
lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. Before this war the individual member of
Greek society had been firmly enclosed by his social connections.
Commonwealth and tradition provided the measuring stick for his
actions and thinking. The individual person had value and significance
only as a member of the total structure. Under such circumstances the
question, "What is the value of the individual human being?"
could not be asked. The sophists, however, do ask this question, and
in so doing introduce the era of Greek Enlightenment. Fundamentally,
it is the question of how man arranges his life after he has become
aware of his awakened thought life.
From Pherekydes (or Thales) to the sophists, one can observe how
emaciated thought in Greece, which had already been born before these
men, gradually finds its place in the stream of philosophical
development. The effect thought has when it is placed in the service
of world conception becomes apparent in them. The birth of thought,
however, is to be observed in the entire Greek life. One could show
much the same kind of development in the fields of art, poetry, public
life, the various crafts and trades, and one would see everywhere how
human activity changes under the influence of the form of human
organization that introduces thought into the world conception. It is
not correct to say that philosophy "discovers" thought. It
comes into existence through the fact that the newly born thought life
is used for the construction of a world picture that formerly had been
formed out of experiences of a different kind.
* * *
While the sophists led the spirit of Greece, expressed in the motto,
"Know Thyself," to the edge of a dangerous cliff, Socrates,
who was born in Athens about 470 and was condemned to death through
poison in 399 B.C., expressed this spirit with a high degree of
perfection.
Historically, the picture of Socrates has come down to us through two
channels of tradition. In one, we have the figure that his great
disciple, Plato (427 – 347 B.C.), has drawn of him. Plato presents his
philosophy in dialogue form, and Socrates appears in these dialogues
as a teacher. He is shown as the "sage" who leads the
persons around him through intellectual guidance to high stages of
insight. A second picture has been drawn by Xenophon in his
Memorabilia of Socrates. At first sight it seems as if Plato
had idealized the character of Socrates and as if Xenophon had
portrayed him more directly as he had been. But a more intimate
inspection would likely show that both Plato and Xenophon each drew a
picture of Socrates as they saw him from a special point of view. One
is justified, therefore, in considering the question as to how these
pictures supplement and illuminate each other.
The first thing that must appear significant here is that Socrates'
philosophy has come down to posterity entirely as an expression of his
personality, of the fundamental character of his soul life. Both Plato
and Xenophon present Socrates in such a way that in him his personal
opinion speaks everywhere. This personality carries in itself the
awareness that, whoever expresses his personal opinion out of the true
ground of the soul, expresses something that is more than just human
opinion, something that is a manifestation of the purposes of the
world order through human thinking. By those who think they know him,
Socrates is taken as the living proof for the conviction that truth is
revealed in the human soul through thinking if, as was the case with
Socrates, this soul is grounded in its own substance. Looking on
Socrates, Plato does not teach a doctrine that is asserted by
contemplative thought, but the thought has a rightly developed human
being speak, who then observes what he produces as truth. Thus, the
manner in which Plato behaves toward Socrates becomes an expression
for what man is in his relation to the world. What Plato has advanced
about Socrates is significant and also the way in which he, in his
activity as a writer, has placed Socrates in the world of Greek
spiritual life.
With the birth of thought man was directed toward his
"soul." The question now arises as to what this soul says
when it begins to speak, expressing what the world forces have laid
into it. Through the attitude Plato takes with respect to Socrates,
the resulting answer is that in the human soul the reason of the world
speaks what it intends to reveal to man. The foundation is laid with
this step for the confidence expressed in the revelations of
the human soul insofar as it develops thought in itself. The
figure of Socrates appears in the sign of this confidence.
In ancient times the Greek consulted the oracles in the most important
questions of life. He asked for prophecy, the revelation of the will
and the opinion of the spiritual powers. Such an arrangement is in
accord with the soul experience in images. Through the image man feels
himself bound to the powers holding sway over the world. The oracle,
then, is the institution by means of which somebody who is especially
gifted in that direction finds his way to the spiritual powers better
than other people. As long as one did not experience one's soul as
separated from the outer world, the feeling was natural that this
external world was able to express more through a special institution
than through everyday experience. The picture spoke from without. Why
should the outer world not be capable of speaking distinctly at a
special place? Thought speaks to the inner soul. With thought,
therefore, the soul is left to its own resources; it cannot
feel united with another soul as with the revelations of a priestly
oracle. To thought, one had to lend one's own soul. One felt of
thought that it was a common possession of all men.
World reason shines into thought life without especially established
institutions. Socrates felt that the force lives in the thinking soul
that used to be sought in the oracles. He experienced the
"daimonion" in himself, the spiritual force that leads the
soul. Thought has brought the soul to the consciousness of itself.
With his conception of the daimonion speaking in him that, always
leading him, told him what to do, Socrates meant to say, "The
soul that has found its way to the thought life is justified to feel
as if it communicated in itself with the world reason. It is an
expression of the high valuation of what the soul possesses in its
thought experience."
"Virtue," under the influence of this view, is placed in a
special light. Because Socrates values thought, he must presuppose
that true virtue in human life reveals itself in the life of thought.
True virtue must be found in thought life because it is from thought
life that man derives his value. "Virtue is teachable." In
this way is Socrates' conception most frequently expressed. It is
teachable because whoever really seizes thought life must be in its
possession. What Xenophon says about Socrates is significant in this
respect. Socrates teaches a disciple about virtue and the following
dialogue develops.
Socrates says:
Do you believe there is a doctrine and science of justice, just as
there is a doctrine of grammar?
The disciple:
Yes, I do.
Socrates:
Whom do you consider now as better versed in grammar, the one who
intentionally writes and reads incorrectly, or the one who does so
without intention?
The disciple:
I should think the one who does it intentionally, for if he meant to,
he could also do it correctly.
Socrates:
Does it not seem to you that the one who intentionally writes
incorrectly knows how to write, but the other one does not?
The disciple:
Without doubt.
Socrates:
Who now understands more of justice, he who intentionally lies or
cheats, or he who does so inadvertently?
Socrates attempts to make clear to the disciple that what matters is
to have the right thoughts about virtue. So also what Socrates says
about virtue aims at the establishment of confidence in a soul
that knows itself through thought experience. The right thoughts about
virtue are to be trusted more than all other motivations. Virtue makes
man more valuable when he experiences it in thought.
Thus, what the pre-Socratic age strove for becomes manifest in
Socrates, that is, the appreciation of what humanity has been given
through the awakened thought life. Socrates' method of teaching is
under the influence of this conception. He approaches man with the
presupposition that thought in life is in him; it only needs to be
awakened. It is for this reason that he arranges his questions in such
a way that the questioned person is stimulated to awaken his own
thought life. This is the substance of the Socratic method.
Plato, who was born in Athens in 427 B.C., felt, as a disciple
of Socrates, that his master had helped him to consolidate his confidence
in the life of thought. What the entire previous development tended to
bring into appearance reaches a climax in Plato. This is the conception
that in thought life the world spirit reveals itself. The awareness of
this conception sheds, to begin with, its light over all of Plato's soul
life. Nothing that man knows through the senses or otherwise has any
value as long as the soul has not exposed it to the light of thought.
Philosophy becomes for Plato the science of ideas as the world
of true being, and the idea is the manifestation of the world
spirit through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit
shines into the soul of man and reveals itself there in the form of
ideas; the human soul, in seizing the idea, unites itself with
the force of the world spirit. The world that is spread in space and
time is like the mass of the ocean water in which the stars are reflected,
but what is real is only reflected as idea. Thus, for Plato, the whole
world changes into ideas that act upon each other. Their effect in the
world is produced through the fact that the ideas are reflected in
hyle, the original matter. What we see as the many individual
things and events comes to pass through this reflection. We need not
extend knowledge to hyle, the original matter, however, for in it is no
truth. We reach truth only if we strip the world picture of everything
that is not idea. For Plato, the human soul is living in the idea, but
this life is so constituted that the soul is not a manifestation of its
life in the ideas in all its utterances. Insofar as it is submerged in
the life of ideas, it appears as the "rational soul"
(thought-bearing soul), and as such, the soul appears to itself when
it becomes aware of itself in thought perception. It must also manifest
itself in such a way that it appears as the "non-rational soul"
(not-thought-bearing soul), As such, it again appears in a twofold way
as courage-developing, and as appetitive soul. Thus, Plato seems to
distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: The rational soul,
the courage-like (or will-exertive) soul and the appetitive soul. We
shall, however, describe the spirit of his conceptional approach better
if we express it in a different way. According to its nature, the soul
is a member of the world of ideas, but it acts in such a way that it
adds an activity to its life in reason through its courage life and
its appetitive life. In this threefold mode of utterance it appears as
earthbound soul. It descends as a rational soul through physical birth
into a terrestrial existence, and with death again enters the world of
ideas. Insofar as it is rational soul, it is immortal, for as
such it shares with its life the eternal existence of the world of ideas.
Plato's doctrine of the soul emerges as a significant fact in the age
of thought perception. The awakened thought directed man's attention
toward the soul. A perception of the soul develops in Plato that is
entirely the result of thought perception. Thought in Plato has become
bold enough not only to point toward the soul but to express what the
soul is, as it were, to describe it. What thought has to say about the
soul gives it the force to know itself in the eternal. Indeed,
thought in the soul even sheds light on the nature of the temporal by
expanding its own being beyond this temporal existence. The soul
perceives thought. As the soul appears in its terrestrial life, it
could not produce in itself the pure form of thought. Where does the
thought experience come from if it cannot be developed in the life on
earth? It represents a reminiscence of a pre-terrestrial,
purely spiritual state of being. Thought has seized the soul in such a
way that it is not satisfied by the soul's terrestrial form of
existence. It has been revealed to the soul in an earlier state of
being (preexistence) in the spirit world (world of ideas) and the soul
recalls it during its terrestrial existence through the reminiscence
of the life it has spent in the spirit.
What Plato has to say about the moral life follows from this soul
conception. The soul is moral if it so arranges life that it exerts
itself to the largest possible measure as rational soul. Wisdom
is the virtue that stems from the rational soul; it ennobles human
life. Fortitude is the virtue of the will-exertive soul;
Temperance is that of the appetitive soul. These virtues come
to pass when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other
manifestations of the soul. When all three virtues harmoniously act
together, there emerges what Plato calls, Justice, the
direction toward the Good, Dikaiosyne.
Plato's disciple, Aristotle (born 384 B.C. in Stageira,
Thracia, died 321 B.C.), together with his teacher, represents a
climax in Greek thinking. With him the process of the absorption of
thought life into the world conception has been completed and come to
rest. Thought takes its rightful possession of its function to
comprehend, out of its own resources, the being and events of the
world. Plato still uses his conceptual imagination to bring thought to
its rightful authority and to lead it into the world of ideas. With
Aristotle, this authority has become a matter of course. It is now a
question of confirming it everywhere in the various fields of
knowledge. Aristotle understands how to use thought as a tool that
penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it had been the task
to overcome the thing or being of the external world. When it has been
overcome, the soul carries in itself the idea of which the external
being had only been overshadowed, but which had been foreign to it,
hovering over it in a spiritual world of truth. Aristotle intends to
submerge into the beings and events, and what the soul finds in this
submersion, it accepts as the essence of the thing itself. The soul
feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and as if
it had brought this essence for its own consumption into the thought
form in order to be able to carry it in itself as a reminder of the
thing. To Aristotle's mind, the ideas are in the things and events.
They are the side of the things through which these things have a
foundation of their own in the underlying material, matter (hyle).
Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of the soul shed its light
on his entire world conception. In both thinkers we describe the
fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if we succeed
in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. To
be sure, for both of them many detailed studies would have to be
considered that cannot be attempted in this sketch. But the direction
their mode of conception took is, for both, indicated in their soul
conceptions.
Plato is concerned with what lives in the soul and, as such, shares in
the spirit world. What is important for Aristotle is the question of
how the soul presents itself for man in his own knowledge. As it does
with other things, the soul must also submerge into itself in order to
find what constitutes its own essence. The idea, which, according to
Aristotle, man finds in a thing outside his soul, is the essence of
the thing, but the soul has brought this essence into the form of an
idea in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its
reality in the cognitive soul but in the external thing in connection
with its material (hyle). If the soul submerges into itself, however,
it finds the idea as such in reality. The soul in this sense is idea,
but active idea, an entity exerting action, and it behaves also in the
life of man as such an active entity. In the process of germination of
man it lays hold upon material existence.
While idea and matter constitute an inseparable unity in an external
thing, this is not the case with the human soul and its body. Here the
independent human soul seizes upon the corporeal part, renders the
idea ineffective that has been active in the body before and inserts
itself in its place. In Aristotle's view, a soul-like principle is
active already in the bodily element with which the human soul unites
itself, for he sees also in the bodies of the plants and of animals,
soul-like entities of a subordinate kind at work. A body that carries
in itself the soul elements of the plant and animal is, as it were,
fructified by the human soul. Thus, for the terrestrial man, a
body-soul entity is linked up with a spirit-soul entity. The
spirit-soul entity suppresses the independent activity of the
body-soul element during the earth life of man and uses the body-soul
entity as an instrument. Five soul manifestations come into being
through this process. These, in Aristotle, appear as five members of
the soul: The plant-like soul (threptikon), the sentient soul
(aisthetikon), the desire-developing soul (orektikon), the
will-exerting soul (kinetikon) and the spirit-soul (dianoetikon). Man
is spiritual soul through what belongs to the spiritual world and
what, in the process of germination, links itself up with the
body-soul entity. The other members of the soul come into being as the
spiritual soul unfolds itself in the body and thereby leads its earth
life.
With Aristotle's focus on a spiritual soul the perspective toward a
spiritual world in general is naturally given. The world picture of
Aristotle stands before our contemplative eye in such a way that we
see below the life of things and events, thus presenting matter and
idea; the higher we lift our eye, the more we see vanish whatever
bears a material character. Pure spiritual essence appears,
representing itself to man as idea, that is, the sphere of the world
in which deity as pure spirituality that moves everything has its
being. The spiritual soul of man belongs to this world sphere; before
it is united with a body-soul entity, it does not exist as an
individual being but only as a part of the world spirit. Through this
connection it acquires its individual existence separated from the
world spirit and continues to live after the separation from the body
as a spiritual being. Thus, the individual soul entity has its
beginning with the human earthly life and then lives on as immortal. A
preexistence of the soul before earth life is assumed by Plato but not
by Aristotle. The denial of the soul's preexistence is as natural to
Aristotle, who has the idea exist in the thing, as the opposite view
is natural to Plato, who conceives of the idea as hovering over the
thing. Aristotle finds the idea in the thing, and the soul acquires in
its body what it is to be in the spirit world as an individuality.
Aristotle is the thinker who has brought thought to the point where it
unfolds to a world conception through its contact with the essence of
the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought;
Aristotle seizes the thoughts and applies them to whatever he finds in
the world. The natural way, peculiar to Aristotle, in which he lives
in thought as a matter of course, leads him also to investigate logic,
the laws of thought itself. Such a science could only come into being
after the awakened thought had reached a stage of great maturity and
of such a harmonious relationship to the things of the outer world as
we find it in Aristotle.
Compared with Aristotle, the other thinkers of antiquity who appear as
his contemporaries or as his successors seem to be of much less
significance. They give the impression that their abilities lack a
certain energy that prevents them from attaining the stage of insight
Aristotle had reached. One gets the feeling that they disagree with
him because they are stating opinions about things they do not
understand as well as he. One is inclined to explain their views by
pointing to the deficiency that led them to utter opinions that have
already been disproved essentially in Aristotle's work.
To begin with, one can receive such an impression from the Stoics
and the Epicureans. Zeno of Kition (342 – 270 B.C.),
Kleanthes (born 200 B.C.), Chrysippus (282 – 209 B.C.),
and others belong to the Stoics, whose name was derived from the Hall
of Columns in Athens, the Stoa. They accept what appears reasonable to
them in earlier world conceptions, but they are mainly concerned with
finding out what man's position is in the world by contemplation of
it. They want to base on this, their decision as to how to arrange
life in such a way that it is in agreement with the world order, and
also in such a way that man can unfold his life in this world order
according to his own nature. According to them, man dulls his natural
being through desire, passion and covetousness. Through equanimity and
freedom from desire, he feels best what he is meant to be and what he
can be. The ideal man is the "sage" who does not hamper the
process of the inner development of the human being by any vice.
As the thinkers before Aristotle were striving to obtain the knowledge
that, after him, becomes accessible to man through the ability to
perceive thoughts in the full consciousness of his soul, with the
Stoics, reflection concentrates on the question as to what man is to
do in order to express his nature as a human being in the best way.
Epicurus (born 324 B.C., died 270 B.C.) developed in his own way
the elements that had already been latent in the earlier atomistic
thinkers. He builds a view of life on this foundation that can be
considered to be an answer to the question: As the human soul emerges
as the blossom of world processes, how is it to live in order to shape
its separate existence, its self-dependence in accordance with thinking
guided by reason? Epicurus could answer this question only by a method
that considered life only between birth and death, for nothing else can,
with perfect intellectual honesty, be derived from the atomistic world
conception. The fact of pain must appear to such a conception as a
peculiar enigma of life. For pain is one of those facts that drive the
soul out of the consciousness of its unity with the things of the world.
One can consider the motion of the stars and the fall of rain to be like
the motion of one's own hand, as was done in the world conception of
more remote antiquity. That is to say, one can feel in both kinds of
events the same uniform spirit-soul reality. The fact that events can
produce pain in man but cannot do so in the external world, however,
drives the soul to the recognition of its own special nature. A doctrine
of virtues, which, like the one of Epicurus, endeavors to live in
harmony with world reason, can, as may easily be conceived, appreciate
an ideal of life that leads to the avoidance of pain and displeasure.
Thus, everything that does away with displeasure becomes the highest
Epicurean life value.
This view of life found numerous followers in later antiquity,
especially among Roman gentlemen of cultural aspiration. The Roman
poet, T. Lucretius Carus (95 – 52 B.C.), has expressed it in perfect
artistic form in his poem, De Rerum Natura.
The process of perceiving thoughts leads the soul to the recognition
of its own being, but it can also occur that the soul feels powerless
to deepen its thought experience sufficiently to find a connection
with the grounds of the world through this experience. The soul then
finds itself torn loose from these grounds through its own thinking.
It feels that thinking contains its own being, but it does not find a
way to recognize in its thought life anything but its own statement.
The soul can then only surrender to a complete renunciation of any
kind of true knowledge. Pyrrho (360 – 270 B.C.) and his
followers, whose philosophical belief is called scepticism, were in
such a situation. Scepticism, the philosophy of doubt, attributes no
other power to the thought experience than the formation of human
opinions about the world. Whether or not these opinions have any
significance for the world outside man is a question about which it is
unwilling to make a decision.
[A true skeptic is agnostic on a subject. Doubt denotes
an opinion for which a burden of proof is needed. Skepticism should be
neutral – e.Ed]
In a certain sense, one can see a well-rounded picture in the series
of Greek thinkers. One will have to admit, of course, that such an
attempt to connect the views of the individual thinkers only too
easily brings out irrelevant aspects of secondary significance. What
remains most important is still the contemplation of the individual
personalities and the impressions one can gain concerning the fact of
how, in these personalities, the general human element is brought to
manifestation in special cases. One can observe a process in this line
of Greek thinkers that can be called the birth, growth and life of
thought: in the pre-Socratic thinkers, the prelude; in Socrates, Plato
and Aristotle, the culmination; after them, a decline and a kind of
dissolution of thought life.
Whoever contemplates this development can arrive at the question as to
whether thought life really has the power to give everything to the
soul toward which it has led it by bringing it to the complete
consciousness of itself. For the unbiased observer, Greek thought life
has an element that makes it appear "perfect" in the best
sense of the word. It is as if the energy of thought in the Greek
thinkers had worked out everything that it contains in itself. Whoever
judges differently will notice on closer inspection that somewhere in
his judgment an error is involved. Later world conceptions have
produced accomplishments through other forces of the soul. Of the
later thoughts as such, it can always be shown that with respect to
their real thought content they can already be found in some earlier
Greek thinker. What can be thought and how one can doubt about
thinking and knowledge, all enters the field of consciousness in Greek
civilization, and in the manifestation of thought the soul takes
possession of its own being.
Has Greek thought life, however, shown the soul that it has the power
to supply it with everything that it has stimulated in it? The
philosophical current called Neo-Platonism, which in a way forms an
aftermath of Greek thought life, was confronted with this question.
Plotinus (205 – 270 A.D.) was its chief representative.
Philo, who lived at the beginning of the Christian era in
Alexandria, could be considered a forerunner of this movement. He does
not base his effort to construct a world conception on the creative
energy of thought. Rather, he applies thought in order to
understand the revelation of the Old Testament. He interprets what is
told in this document as fact in an intellectual, allegorical manner.
For him, the accounts of the Old Testament turn into symbols for soul
events to which he attempts to gain access intellectually.
Plotinus does not regard thought experience as something that embraces
the soul in its full life. Behind thought life another life of the
soul must lie, a soul life that would be concealed rather than
revealed by the action of thought. The soul must overcome the life in
thought, must extinguish it in itself and only after this extinction
can it arrive at a form of experience that unites it with the origin
of the world. Thought leads the soul to itself; now it must seize
something in itself that will again lead it out of the realm into
which thought has brought it. What Plotinus strives for is an
illumination that begins in the soul after it has left the
realm to which it has been carried by thought. In this way he expects
to rise up to a world being that does not enter into thought life.
World reason, therefore, toward which Plato and Aristotle strive, is
not, according to Plotinus, the last reality at which the soul
arrives. It is rather the outgrowth of a still higher reality that
lies beyond all thinking. From this reality beyond all thought, which
cannot be compared with anything that could be a possible object of
thought, all world processes emanate.
Thought, as it could manifest itself in Greek spiritual life, has, as
it were, gone through a complete revolution and thereby all possible
relationships of man to thought seem to be exhausted. Plotinus looks
for sources other than those given in thought revelation. He leaves
the continuing evolution of thought life and enters the realm of
mysticism. It is not intended to give a description of the development
of mysticism here, but only the development of thought life and what
has its origin in this process is to be outlined. There are, however,
at various points in the spiritual development of mankind connections
between intellectual world conceptions and mysticism. We find such a
point of contact in Plotinus. His soul life is not ruled only by
thinking. He has a mystical experience that presents an inner
awareness without the presence of thoughts in his soul. In this
experience he finds his soul united with the world foundation. His way
of presenting the connection of the world with its ground, however, is
to be expressed in thoughts. The reality beyond thought is the most
perfect; what proceeds from it is less perfect. In this way, the
process continues down into the visible world, the most imperfect. Man
finds himself in this world of imperfection. Through the act of
perfecting his soul, he is to cast off what the world in which he
finds himself can give him, and is thus to find a path of development
through which he becomes a being that is of one accord with the
perfect origin.
We see a personality in Plotinus who feels the impossibility to
continue Greek thought life. He cannot find anything that would grow
as a further branch of world conception out of thought itself. If one
looks for the sense in which the evolution of philosophy proceeds, one
is justified in saying that the formation of picture conception has
turned into that of thought conceptions. In a similar way, the
production of thought conception must change again into something
else, but the evolution of the world conception is not ready for this
in the age of Plotinus. He therefore abandons thought and searches
outside thought experience. Greek thoughts, however, fructified by his
mystical experiences, develop into the evolutionary ideas that present
the world process as a sequence of stages proceeding in a descending
order, from a highest most perfect being to imperfect beings. In the
thinking of Plotinus, Greek thoughts continue to have their effect.
They do not develop as an organic growth of the original forces,
however, but are taken over into the mystical consciousness. They do
not undergo a transformation through their own energies but through
nonintellectual forces.
Ammonius Sakkas (175 – 242), Porphyrius
(232 – 304), Iamblichus (who lived in the fourth century A.D.),
Proclus (410 – 485), and others are followers and expounders
of this philosophy.
In a way similar to that of Plotinus and his successors, Greek
thinking in its more Platonic shade continued under the influence of a
nonintellectual element. Greek thought in its Pythagorean nuance is
treated by Nigidius Figulus, Apollonius of Tyana, Moderatus of
Gades, and others.
Footnote:
* This book, which is to give a picture of the world and life
conceptions of the nineteenth century is, in its second edition,
supplemented by a brief account of the preceding philosophies insofar
as they are based on an intellectual conception of the world. I
have done this because I feel that the ideas of the last century are
better shown in their inner significance if they are not taken by
themselves, but if the highlights of thought of the preceding ages
fall on them. In such an "introduction" not all the
"documentary materials" can be given that must form the
basis of this short sketch. If I should have the opportunity to
develop the sketch into an independent book, it would become clear
that the appropriate basis really exists. I also have no doubt that
others who want to see in this sketch a suggestion for new viewpoints
will find the documentary evidence in the historical sources that have
been traditionally handed down to us.
∴
III. Thought Life from the Beginning of the Christian Era to John Scotus Erigena
In the age that follows the flowering of the Greek world conceptions,
philosophy submerges into religious life. The philosophical trends
vanish, so to speak, into the religious currents and emerge only
later. It is not meant to imply by this statement that these religious
movements have no connection with the development of the philosophical
life. On the contrary, this connection exists in the most extensive
measure. Here, however, no statement about the evolution of religious
life is intended, but rather a characterization of the development of
the world conceptions insofar as it results from thought experience as
such.
After the exhaustion of Greek thought life, an age begins in the
spiritual life of mankind in which the religious impulses become the
driving forces of the intellectual world conceptions as well. For
Plotinus, his own mystical experience was the source of inspiration of
his ideas. A similar role for the spiritual development of mankind in
its general life is played by the religious impulses in an age that
begins with the exhaustion of Greek philosophy and lasts approximately
until John Scotus Erigena (died 885 A.D.)
The development of thought does not completely cease in this age. We
even witness the unfolding of magnificent and comprehensive thought
structures. The thought energies, however, do not have their source
within themselves but are derived from religious impulses.
The religious mode of conception in this period flows through the
developing human souls and the resulting world pictures are derived
from this stimulation. The thoughts that occur in this process are
Greek thoughts that are still exerting their influence. They are
adopted and transformed, but are not brought to new growth out of
themselves. The world conceptions emerge out of the background of the
religious life. What is alive in them is not self-unfolding thought,
but the religious impulses that are striving to manifest themselves in
the previously conquered thought forms.
We can study this development in several significant phenomena. We can
see Platonic and older philosophies engaged on European soil in the
endeavor to comprehend or to contradict what the religions spread as
their doctrines. Important thinkers attempt to present the revelations
of religion as fully justified before the forum of the old world
conceptions.
What is historically known as Gnosticism develops in this way
in a more Christian or a more pagan coloring. Personalities of
significance of this movement are Valentinus, Basilides and
Marcion. Their thought creation is a comprehensive conception
of world evolution. Cognition, gnosis, when it rises from the
intellectual to the trans-intellectual realm, leads into the
conception of a higher world-creative entity. This being is infinitely
superior to everything seen as the world by man, and so are the other
lofty beings it produces out of itself — the aeons. They form a
descending series of generations in such a way that a less perfect
aeon always proceeds from a more perfect one. As such, in a later
stage of evolution an aeon has to be considered to be also the creator
of the world that is visible to man and to which man himself belongs.
Into this world an aeon of the highest degree of perfection now can
join. It is an aeon that has remained in a purely spiritual, perfect
world and has there continued its development in the best possible
way, while other aeons produced the imperfect and eventually the
sensual world including man. In this manner, the connection of the two
worlds that have gone through different paths of evolution is
thinkable for the Gnostic. The imperfect world receives its
stimulation at a certain point of evolution by the perfect one in
order that it may begin to strive toward the perfect.
The Gnostics who were inclined toward Christianity saw in Christ Jesus
the perfect aeon, which has united with the terrestrial world.
Personalities like Clemens of Alexandria (died ca. 211 A.D.)
and Origen (born ca. 185 A.D.) stood more on a dogmatic
Christian ground. Clemens accepts the Greek world conceptions as a
preparation of the Christian revelation and uses them as instruments
to express and defend the Christian impulses. Origen proceeds in a
similar way.
We find a thought life inspired by religious impulses flowing together
in a comprehensive stream of conceptions in the writings of
Dionysius the Areopagite, which are mentioned from 533 A.D. on.
They probably had not been composed much earlier, but they do go back,
not in their details but in their characteristic features, to earlier
thinking of this age. Their content can be sketched in the following
way. When the soul liberates itself from everything that it can
perceive and think as being, when it also transcends beyond
what it is capable of thinking as non-being, then it can
spiritually divine the realm of the over-being, the hidden
Godhead. In this entity, primordial being is united with primordial
goodness and primordial beauty. Starting from this primeval trinity,
the soul witnesses a descending order of beings that lead down to man
in hierarchical array.
In the ninth century Scotus Erigena adopts this conception of the
world and develops it in his own way. The world for him presents
itself as an evolution in four forms of nature. The first of
these is the creating and not created nature. In it is
contained the purely spiritual primordial cause of the world out of
which evolves the creating and created nature. This is a sum of
purely spiritual entities and energies, which through their activity
produce the created and not creating nature, to which the
sensual world and man belong. They develop in such a way that they are
received into the not created and not creating nature, in which
the facts of salvation, the religious means of grace, etc., unfold
their effect.
In the world conceptions of the Gnostics, Dionysius and Scotus
Erigena, the human soul feels its roots in a world ground on which it
does not base its support through the forces of thought, but from
which it wants to receive the world of thought as a gift. The soul
does not feel secure in the native strength of thought. It strives,
however, to experience its relation to the world ground in the form of
thought. The soul has thought itself enlivened by another energy that
derives from religious impulses, whereas in the Greek thinkers it
lived out of its own strength. Thought in this age existed, so to
speak, in a form in which its own energy was dormant. In the same way,
we may also think of the energy of picture conception in the centuries
that preceded the birth of thought. There must have been an ancient
time when consciousness in the form of picture conception flourished,
the same as did the later thought consciousness in Greece. It then
drew its energy out of other impulses and only when it had gone
through this intermediate state did it transform into thought
experience. It is an intermediate state in the process of thought
development that we witness in the first centuries of the Christian
era.
In those parts of Asia where the conceptions of Aristotle had been
spread, the tendency now arose to lend expression to the semitic
religious impulses in the ideas of the Greek thinker. This tendency
was then transplanted also to European soil and so entered into the
European spiritual life through such thinkers as the great
Aristotelians, Averroës (1126 – 1198), Maimonides
(1135 – 1204), and others.
In Averroës, we find the view that it is an error to assume that a
special thought world exists in the personality of man. There is only
one homogeneous thought world in the divine primordial being.
As light can be reflected in many mirrors, so also one thought
world is revealed in many human beings. During human life on earth, to
be sure, a further transformation of the thought world takes place,
but this is, in reality, only a process in the spiritually homogeneous
primordial ground. With man's death, the individual revelation through
him simply comes to an end. His thought life now exists only in the
one thought life.
This world conception allows the Greek thought experience to continue
its effect, but does it in such a way that it is now anchored in the
uniform divine world ground. It leaves us with the impression of being
a manifestation of the fact that the developing human soul did not
feel in itself the intrinsic energy of thought. It therefore projected
this energy into an extra-human world power.
∴
IV. The World Conceptions of the Middle Ages
The rise of natural science in modern times had as its fundamental
cause the same search as the mysticism of Jakob Boehme. This becomes
apparent in a thinker who grew directly out of the spiritual movement,
which in Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Kepler (1571 – 1630),
Galileo (1564 – 1642), and others, led to the first great
accomplishments of natural science in modern times. This thinker is
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). When one sees how his world
consists of infinitely small, animated, psychically self-aware,
fundamental beings, the monads, which are uncreated and
indestructible, producing in their combined activity the phenomena of
nature, one could be tempted to group him with Anaxagoras, for whom
the world consists of the "homoiomeries."
Yet, there is a significant difference between these two thinkers. For
Anaxagoras, the thought of the homoiomeries unfolds while he is
engaged in the contemplation of the world; the world suggests these
thoughts to him. Giordano Bruno feels that what lies behind the
phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world picture in such a
way that the entity of the ego is possible in this world picture. The
ego must be a monad; otherwise, it could not be real.
Thus, the assumption of the monads becomes necessary. As only the
monad can be real, therefore, the truly real entities are monads with
different inner qualities.
In the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno,
something happens that is not raised into full consciousness; the
effect of this inner process is then the formation of the world
picture. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious soul process.
The ego feels that it must form such a conception of itself that its
reality is assured, and it must conceive the world in such a way that
the ego can be real in it. Giordano Bruno has to form the conception
of the monad in order to render possible the realization of both
demands. In his thought the ego struggles for its existence in the
world conception of the modern age, and the expression of this
struggle is the view: I am a monad; such an entity is uncreated and
indestructible.
A comparison shows how different the ways are in which Aristotle and
Giordano Bruno arrive at the conception of God. Aristotle contemplates
the world; he sees the evidence of reason in natural processes; he
surrenders to the contemplation of this evidence; at the same time,
the processes of nature are for him evidence of the thought of
the "first mover" of these processes. Giordano Bruno fights
his way through to the conception of the monads. The processes of
nature are, as it were, extinguished in the picture in which
innumerable monads are presented as acting on each other; God becomes
the power entity that lives actively in all monads behind the
processes of the perceptible world. In Giordano Bruno's passionate
antagonism against Aristotle, the contrast between the thinker of
ancient Greece and of the philosopher of modern times becomes
manifest.
It becomes apparent in the modern philosophical development in a great
variety of ways how the ego searches for means to experience its own
reality in itself. What Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561 – 1626)
represents in his writings has the same general character even if this
does not at first sight become apparent in his endeavors in the field
of philosophy. Bacon of Verulam demands that the investigation of
world phenomena should begin with unbiased observation. One should
then try to separate the essential from the nonessential in a
phenomenon in order to arrive at a conception of whatever lies at the
bottom of a thing or event. He is of the opinion that up to his time
the fundamental thoughts, which were to explain the world phenomena,
had been conceived first, and only thereafter were the description of
the individual things and events arranged to fit these thoughts. He
presupposed that the thoughts had not been taken out of the things
themselves. Bacon wanted to combat this (deductive) method with his
(inductive) method. The concepts are to be formed in direct contact
with the things. One sees, so Bacon reasons, how an object is consumed
by fire; one observes how a second object behaves with relation to
fire and then observes the same process with many objects. In this
fashion one arrives eventually at a conception of how things behave
with respect to fire. The fact that the investigation in former times
had not proceeded in this way had, according to Bacon's opinion,
caused human conception to be dominated by so many idols
instead of the true ideas about the things.
Goethe gives a significant description of this method of thought of
Bacon of Verulam.
Bacon is like a man who is well-aware of the irregularity,
insufficiency and dilapidated condition of an old building, and knows
how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon
it, to give up the land, the materials and all appurtenances, to look
for another plot, and to erect a new building. He is an excellent and
persuasive speaker. He shakes a few walls. They break down and some of
the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points out new building
grounds; people begin to level it off, and yet it is everywhere too
narrow. He submits new plans; they are not clear, not inviting.
Mainly, he speaks of new unknown materials and now the world seems to
be well-served. The crowd disperses in all directions and brings back
an infinite variety of single items while at home, new plans, new
activities and settlements occupy the citizens and absorb their
attention.
Goethe says this in his history of the theory of color where he speaks
about Bacon. In a later part of the book dealing with Galileo, he
says:
If through Verulam's method of dispersion, natural science seemed to
be forever broken up into fragments, it was soon brought to unity
again by Galileo. He led natural philosophy back into the human being.
When he developed the law of the pendulum and of falling bodies from
the observation of swinging church lamps, he showed even in his early
youth that, for the genius, one case stands for a thousand cases. In
science, everything depends on what is called, an aperçu, that
is, on the ability of becoming aware of what is really fundamental in
the world of phenomena. The development of such an awareness is
infinitely fruitful.
With these words Goethe indicated distinctly the point that is
characteristic of Bacon. Bacon wants to find a secure path for science
because he hopes that in this way man will find a dependable
relationship to the world. The approach of Aristotle, so Bacon feels,
can no longer be used in the modern age. He does not know that in
different ages different energies of the soul are predominantly active
in man. He is only aware of the fact that he must reject Aristotle.
This he does passionately. He does it in such a way that Goethe is
lead to say, "How can one listen to him with equanimity when he
compares the works of Aristotle and of Plato with weightless tablets,
which, just because they did not consist of a good solid substance,
could so easily float down to us on the stream of time."
Bacon does not understand that he is aiming at the same objective that
has been reached by Plato and Aristotle, and that he must use
different means for the same aim because the means of antiquity can no
longer be those of the modern age. He points toward a method that
could appear fruitful for the investigation in the field of external
nature, but as Goethe shows in the case of Galileo, even in this field
something more is necessary than what Bacon demands.
The method of Bacon proves completely useless, however, when the soul
searches not only for an access to the investigation of individual
facts, but also to a world conception. What good is a groping search
for isolated phenomena and a derivation of general ideas from them, if
these general ideas do not, like strokes of lightning, flash up out of
the ground of being in the soul of man, rendering account of their
truth through themselves. In antiquity, thought appeared like a
perception to the soul. This mode of appearance has been dampened
through the brightness of the new ego-consciousness. What can lead to
thoughts capable of forming a world conception in the soul must be so
formed as if it were the soul's own invention, and the soul must
search for the possibility of justifying the validity of its own
creation. Bacon has no feeling for all this. He, therefore, points to
the materials of the building for the construction of the new world
conception, namely, the individual natural phenomena. It is, however,
no more possible that one can ever build a house by merely observing
the form of the building stones that are to be used, than that a
fruitful world conception could ever arise in a soul that is
exclusively concerned with the individual processes of nature.
Contrary to Bacon of Verulam, who pointed toward the bricks of the
building, Descartes (Cartesius) and Spinoza turned their
attention toward its plan. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in
1650. The starting point of his philosophical endeavor is significant
with him. With an unbiased questioning mind he approaches the world,
which offers him much of its riddles partly through revealed religion,
partly through the observation of the senses. He now contemplates both
sources in such a way that he does not simply accept and recognize as
truth what either of them offers to him. Instead, he sets against the
suggestions of both sources the "ego," which answers out of
its own initiative with its doubt against all revelation and
against all perception. In the development of modern philosophical
life, this move is a fact of the most telling significance. Amidst the
world the thinker allows nothing to make an impression on his soul,
but sets himself against everything with a doubt that
can derive its support only from the soul itself. Now the soul
apprehends itself in its own action: I doubt, that is to say, I think.
Therefore, no matter how things stand with the entire world, in my
doubt-exerting thinking I come to the clear awareness that I am.
In this manner, Cartesius arrives at his Cogito ergo sum, I
think, therefore I am. The ego in him conquers the right to recognize
its own being through the radical doubt directed against the entire
world.
Descartes derives the further development of his world conception out
of this root. In the "ego" he had attempted to seize
existence. Whatever can justify its existence together with the ego
may be considered truth. The ego finds in itself, innate to it, the
idea of God. This idea presents itself to the ego as true, as distinct
as the ego itself, but it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego
cannot have it through its own power. Therefore, it comes from
transcendent reality to which it corresponds. Descartes believes in
the reality of the external world, not because this external world
presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself
and then subsequently in God, and because God must be thought as
truthful. For it would be untrue of God to suggest a real external
world to man if the latter did not exist.
It is only possible to arrive at the recognition of the reality of the
ego as Descartes does through a thinking that in the most direct
manner aims at the ego in order to find a point of support for the act
of cognition. That is to say, this possibility can be fulfilled only
through an inner activity but never through a perception from without.
Any perception that comes from without gives only the qualities of
extension. In this manner, Descartes arrives at the recognition of two
substances in the world: One to which extension, and the other to
which thinking, is to be attributed and that has its roots in the
human soul. The animals, which in Descartes's sense cannot apprehend
themselves in inner self-supporting activity, are accordingly mere
beings of extension, automata, machines. The human body, too, is
nothing but a machine. The soul is linked up with this machine. When
the body becomes useless through being worn out or destroyed in some
way, the soul abandons it to continue to live in its own element.
Descartes lives in a time in which a new impulse in the philosophical
life is already discernible. The period from the beginning of the
Christian era until about the time of Scotus Erigena develops in such
a way that the inner experience of thought is enlivened by a force
that enters the spiritual evolution as a powerful impulse. The energy
of thought as it awakened in Greece is outshone by this power.
Outwardly, the progress in the life of the human soul is expressed in
the religious movements and by the fact that the forces of the
youthful nations of Western and Central Europe become the recipients
of the effects of the older forms of thought experience. They
penetrate this experience with the younger, more elementary impulses
and thereby transform it. In this process one forward step in the
progress in human evolution becomes evident that is caused by the fact
that older and subtle traces of spiritual currents that have exhausted
their vitality, but not their spiritual possibilities, are continued
by youthful energies emerging from the natural spring of mankind. In
such processes one will be justified in recognizing the essential laws
of the evolution of mankind. They are based on rejuvenating tendencies
of the spiritual life. The acquired forces of the spirit can only then
continue to unfold if they are transplanted into young, natural
energies of mankind.
The first eight centuries of the Christian era present a continuation
of the thought experience in the human soul in such a way that the new
forces about to emerge are still dormant in hidden depths, but they
tend to exert their formative effect on the evolution of world
conception. In Descartes, these forces already show themselves at work
in a high degree. In the age between Scotus Erigena and approximately
the fifteenth century, thought, which in the preceding period did not
openly unfold, comes again to the fore in its own force. Now, however,
it emerges from a direction quite different from that of the Greek
age. With the Greek thinkers, thought is experienced as a
perception. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries it comes
from out of the depth of the soul so that man has the feeling: Thought
generates itself within me. In the Greek thinkers, a relation between
thought and the processes of nature was still immediately established;
in the age just referred to, thought stands out as the product of
self-consciousness. The thinker has the feeling that he must prove
thought as justified. This is the feeling of the nominalists and the
realists. This is also the feeling of Thomas Aquinas, who anchors the
experience of thought in religious revelation.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduce a new impulse to the
souls. This is slowly prepared and slowly absorbed in the life of the
soul. A transformation takes place in the organization of the human
soul. In the field of philosophical life, this transformation becomes
manifest through the fact that thought cannot now be felt as a
perception, but as a product of self-consciousness. This
transformation in the organization of the human soul can be observed
in all fields of the development of humanity. It becomes apparent in
the renaissance of art and science, and of European life, as well as
in the reformatory religious movements. One will be able to discover
it if one investigates the art of Dante and Shakespeare with respect
to their foundations in the human soul development. Here these
possibilities can only be indicated, since this sketch is intended to
deal only with the development of the intellectual world conception.
The advent of the mode of thought of modern natural science appears as
another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization.
Just compare the state of the form of thinking about nature as it
develops in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler with what has preceded
them, This natural scientific conception corresponds to the mood of
the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth
century. Nature is now looked at in such a way that the sense
observation is to be the only witness of it. Bacon is one, Galileo
another personality in whom this becomes apparent. The picture of
nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt
in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature,
every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness
gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the
observation of nature are more and more abruptly contrasted, separated
by a gulf, From Descartes on a transformation of the soul organization
becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from
the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a
new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt.
While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an
element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its
justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century
it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own
ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in
such a manner that the picture of nature could be considered a support
for its justification; now it becomes the task of this element of
thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength.
The thinkers of the time that now follows feel that in the thought
experience itself something must be found that proves this experience
to be the justified creator of a world conception.
The significance of the transformation of the soul life can be
realized if one considers the way in which philosophers of nature,
like H. Cardanus (1501 – 1576) and Bernardinus Telesius
(1508 – 1588), still spoke of natural processes. In them a picture
of nature still continued to show its effect and was to lose its power
through the emergence of the mode of conception of natural science of
Copernicus, Galileo and others. Something still lives in the mind of
Cardanus of the processes of nature, which he conceives as similar to
those of the human soul. Such an assertion would also have been
possible to Greek thinking. Galileo is already compelled to say that
what man has as the sensation of warmth within himself, for instance,
exists no more in external nature than the sensation of tickling that
a man feels when the sole of his foot is touched by a feather.
Telesius still feels justified to say that warmth and coldness are the
driving forces of the world processes, and Galileo must already make
the statement that man knows warmth only as an inner experience. In
the picture of nature he allows as thinkable only what contains
nothing of this inner experience. Thus, the conceptions of mathematics
and mechanics become the only ones that are allowed to form the
picture of nature. In a personality like Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 – 1519), who was just as great as a thinker as he was an
artist, we can recognize the striving for a new law-determined picture
of nature. Such spirits feel it necessary to find an access to nature
not yet given to the Greek way of thinking and its after effects in
the Middle Ages. Man now has to rid himself of whatever experiences he
has about his own inner being if he is to find access to nature. He is
permitted to depict nature only in conceptions that contain nothing of
what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.
Thus, the human soul dissociates itself from nature; it takes its
stand on its own ground. As long as one could think that the stream of
nature contained something that was the same as what was immediately
experienced in man, one could, without hesitation, feel justified to
have thought bear witness to the events of nature. The picture of
nature of modern times forces the human consciousness to feel itself
outside nature with its thought. This consciousness further
establishes a validity for its thought, which is gained through its
own power.
From the beginning of the Christian Era to Scotus Erigena, the
experience of thought continues to be effective in such a way that its
form is determined by the presupposition of a spiritual world, namely,
the world of religious revelation. From the eighth to the sixteenth
century, thought experience wrests itself free from the inner
self-consciousness but allows, besides its own germinating power, the
other power of consciousness, revelation, to continue in its
existence. From the sixteenth century on, it is the picture of nature
that eliminates the experience of thought itself; henceforth, the
self-consciousness attempts to produce, out of its own energies, the
resources through which it is possible to form a world conception with
the help of thought. It is with this task that Descartes finds himself
confronted. It is the task of the thinkers of the new period of world
conception.
Benedict Spinoza (1632 – 1677) asks himself, "What
must be assumed as a starting point from which the creation of a true
world picture may proceed? This beginning is caused by the feeling that
innumerable thoughts may present themselves in my soul as true; I can
admit as the corner stone for a world conception only an element whose
properties I must first determine." Spinoza finds that one can only
begin with something that is in need of nothing else for its being. He
gives the name, substance, to this being. He finds that there can be
only one such substance, and that this substance is God. If one observes
the method by which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophy,
one finds that he has modeled it after the method of mathematics. Just
as the mathematician takes his start from general truths, which the human
ego forms itself in free creation, so Spinoza demands that philosophy
should start from such spontaneously created conceptions. The one substance
is as the ego must think it to be. Thought in this way, it does not
tolerate anything existing outside itself as a peer, for then it would
not be everything. It would need something other than itself for its
existence. Everything else is, therefore, only of the substance,
as one of its attributes, as Spinoza says. Two such attributes are
recognizable to man. He sees the first when he looks at the outer world;
the second, when he turns his attention inward. The first attribute is
extension; the second, thinking. Man contains both attributes in his
being. In his body he has extension; in his soul, thinking. When he
thinks, it is the divine substance that thinks; when he acts, it is this
substance that acts. Spinoza obtains the existence (Dasein) for
the ego in anchoring it in the general all-embracing divine substance.
Under such circumstances there can be no question of an absolute freedom
of man, for man is no more to be credited with the initiative of his
actions and thought than a stone with that of its motion; the agent in
everything is the one substance. We can speak of a relative freedom in
man only when he considers himself not as an individual entity, but
knows himself as one with the one substance.
Spinoza's world conception, if consistently developed to its
perfection, leads a person to the consciousness: I think of myself in
the right way if I no longer consider myself, but know myself in my
experience as one with the divine whole. This consciousness then, to
follow Spinoza, endows the whole human personality with the impulse to
do what is right, that is to say, god-filled action. This results as a
matter of course for the one for whom the right world conception is
realized as the full truth. For this reason Spinoza calls the book in
which he presents his world conception, Ethics. For him,
ethics, that is to say, moral behavior, is in the highest sense the
result of the true knowledge of man's dwelling in the one substance.
One feels inclined to say that the private life of Spinoza, of the man
who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, out of his own free
will give away his fortune and sought his subsistence in poverty as a
craftsman, was in the rarest fashion the outer expression of his
philosophical soul, which knew its ego in the divine whole and felt
its inner experience, indeed, all experience, illumined by this
consciousness.
Spinoza constructs a total world conception out of thoughts. These
thoughts have to satisfy the requirement that they derive their
justification for the construction of the picture out of the
self-consciousness. In it their certainty must be rooted. Thoughts
that are conceived by human consciousness in the same way as the
self-supporting mathematical ideas are capable of shaping a world
picture that is the expression of what, in truth, exists behind the
phenomena of the world.
In a direction that is entirely different from that of Spinoza,
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) seeks the
justification of the ego-consciousness in the actual world. His point
of departure is like that of Giordano Bruno insofar as he thinks of
the soul or the "ego" as a monad. Leibniz finds the
self-consciousness in the soul, that is, the knowledge of the
soul of itself, a manifestation, therefore, of the ego. There cannot
be anything else in the soul that thinks and feels except the soul
itself, for how should the soul know of itself if the subject
of the act of knowing were something other than itself? Furthermore,
it can only be a simple entity, not a composite being, for the parts
in it could and would have to know of each other. Thus, the soul is a
simple entity, enclosed in itself and aware of its being, a monad.
Nothing can come into this monad that is external to it, for nothing
but itself can be active in it. All its experience, cognitive
imagination, sensation, etc., is the result of its own activity. It
could only perceive any other activity in itself through its defense
against this activity, that is to say, it would at any rate perceive
only itself in its defense. Thus, nothing external can enter
this monad. Leibniz expresses this by saying that the monad has no
windows. According to him, all real beings are monads, and only monads
truly exist. These different monads are, however, differentiated with
respect to the intensity of their inner life. There are monads of an
extremely dull inner life that are as if in a continual state of
sleep; there are monads that are, as it were, dreaming; there are,
furthermore, the human monads in wake-consciousness, etc., up to the
highest degree of intensity of the inner life of the divine principal
monad. That man does not see monads in his sense perception is caused
by the circumstance that the monads are perceived by him like the
appearance of fog, for example, that is not really fog but a swarm of
gnats. What is seen by the senses of man is like the appearance of a
fog formed by the accumulated monads.
Thus, for Leibniz the world in reality is a sum of monads, which do
not affect each other but constitute self-conscious beings, leading
their lives independently of each other, that is, egos. Nevertheless,
if the individual monad contains an after image of the general life of
the world in its inner life, it would be wrong to assume that this is
caused by an effect that the individual monads exert on each other. It
is caused by the circumstance that in a given case one monad
experiences inwardly by itself what is also independently experienced
by another monad. The inner lives of the monads agree like clocks that
indicate the same hours in spite of the fact that they do not affect
each other. Just as the clocks agree because they have been originally
matched, so the monads are attuned to each other through the
pre-established harmony that issues from the divine principal monad.
This is the world picture to which Leibniz is driven because he has to
form the picture in such a way that in it the self-conscious
life of the soul, the ego, can be maintained as a reality. It is a
world picture completely formed out of the "ego" itself. In
Leibniz's view, this can, indeed, not be otherwise. In Leibniz, the
struggle for a world conception leads to a point where, in order to
find the truth, it does not accept anything as truth that is revealed
in the outer world.
According to Leibniz, the life of man's senses is caused in such a way
that the monad of the soul is brought into connection with other
monads with a somnolent, sleeping and less acute self-consciousness.
The body is a sum of such monads. The one waking soul monad is
connected with it. This central monad parts from the others in death
and continues its existence by itself.
Just as the world picture of Leibniz is one that is wholly formed out
of the inner energy of the self-conscious soul, so the world picture
of his contemporary John Locke (1632 – 1704), rests entirely on
the feeling that such a productive construction out of the soul is not
admissible. Locke recognizes only those parts of a world conception as
justified that can be observed (experienced) and what can, on
the basis of the observation, be thought about the observed
objects. The soul for him is not a being that develops real
experiences out of itself, but an empty slate on which the outer world
writes its entries. Thus, for Locke, the human self-consciousness is a
result of the experience; it is not an ego that is the cause of an
experience. When a thing of the external world makes an impression on
the soul, it can be said that the thing contains only extension,
shape, motion in reality; through the contact with the senses, sounds,
colors, warmth, etc., are produced. What thus comes into being through
contact with the senses is only there as long as the senses are in
touch with the things. Outside the perception there are only
substances that are differently shaped and in various states of
motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, except shape and motion,
nothing of what the senses perceive has anything to do with things
themselves. With this assumption he makes the beginnings of a current
of world conception that is unwilling to recognize the impressions of
the external world experienced inwardly by man in his act of
cognition, as belonging to the world "in itself."
It is a strange spectacle that Locke presents to the contemplative
soul. Man is supposed to be capable of cognition only through the fact
that he perceives, and that he thinks about the content of the
perception, but what he perceives has only the least part to do with
the properties pertaining to the world itself. Leibniz withdraws from
what the world reveals and creates a world picture from within the
soul; Locke insists on a world picture that is created by the soul in
conjunction with the world, but no real picture of a world is
accomplished through such a creation. As Locke cannot, like Leibniz,
consider the ego itself as the fulcrum of a world conception,
he arrives at conceptions that appear to be inappropriate to support a
world conception because they do not allow the possession of the human
ego to be counted as belonging to the center of existence. A world
view like that of Locke loses the connection with every realm in which
the ego, the self-conscious soul, could be rooted because it
rejects from the outset any approaches to the world ground except
those that disappear in the darkness of the senses.
In Locke, the evolution of philosophy produces a form of world
conception in which the self-conscious soul struggles for its
existence in the world picture but loses this fight because it
believes that it gains its experiences exclusively in the intercourse
with the external world represented in the picture of nature. The
self-conscious soul must, therefore, renounce all knowledge concerning
anything that could belong to the nature of the soul apart from this
intercourse with the outside world.
Stimulated by Locke, George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) arrived at
results that were entirely different from his. Berkeley finds that the
impressions that the things and events of the world appear to produce
on the human soul take place in reality within this soul
itself. When I see "red," I must bring this
"redness" into being within myself; when I feel
"warm," the "warmth" lives within me. Thus it is
with all things that I apparently receive from without. Except for
those elements I produce within myself, I know nothing whatsoever
about the external things. Thus, it is senseless to speak about things
that consist of material substance, for I know only what appears in my
mind as something spiritual. What I call a rose, for instance, is
wholly spiritual, that is to say, a conception (an idea) experienced
by my mind. There is, therefore, according to Berkeley, nothing to be
perceived except what is spiritual, and when I notice that something
is effected in me from without, then this effect can only be caused by
spiritual entities, for obviously bodies cannot cause spiritual
effects and my perceptions are entirely spiritual. There are,
therefore, only spirits in the world that influence each other. This
is Berkeley's view. It turns the conceptions of Locke into their
contrary by construing everything as spiritual reality that had been
considered as impression of the material things. Thus, Berkeley
believes he recognizes himself with his self-consciousness immediately
in a spiritual world.
Others have been led to different results by the thoughts of Locke.
Condillac (1715 – 1780) is an example. He believes, like Locke, that
all knowledge of the world must and, indeed, can only depend on the
observation of the senses and on thinking. He develops this view to
the extreme conclusion that thinking has in itself no self-dependent
reality; it is nothing but a sublimated, transformed external
sensation. Thus, only sense perceptions must be accepted in a world
picture that is to correspond to the truth. His explanation in this
direction is indeed telling. Imagine a human body that is still
completely unawakened mentally, and then suppose one sense after
another to be opened. What more do we have in the sentient body than
we had before in the insensate organism? A body on which the
surrounding world has made impressions. These impressions made by the
environment have by no means produced what believes itself to be an
"ego." This world conception does not arrive at the
possibility of conceiving the "ego" as self-conscious
"soul" and it does not accomplish a world picture in which
this "ego" could occur. It is the world conception that
tries to deliver itself of the task of dealing with the self-conscious
soul by proving its nonexistence. Charles Bonnet (1720 – 1793),
Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715 – 1771), Julien de la Mettrie
(1709 – 1751) and the system of nature (systeme de la nature)
of Holbach that appeared in 1770 follow similar paths. In
Holbach's work all traces of spiritual reality have been driven out of
the world picture. Only matter and its forces operate in the world,
and for this spirit-deprived picture of nature, Holbach finds the
words, "0 nature, mistress of all being, and you, her daughters,
Virtue, Reason, and Truth, may you be forever our only
divinities."
In de la Mettrie's Man, a Machine, a world conception appears
that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only
nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must,
therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture
that we compare with the mirror. The physical organism would be
compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The
latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In
Man, a Machine, we read:
If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific
organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously
are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have
to deal with a very enlightened machine. . . . ‘Soul,’ therefore, is
only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought
picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by
it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of
motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to
move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way
in the physical and moral world. . . . If whatever thinks in my brain
is not a part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated
when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of
thought, calmly resting on my bed? (Compare de la Mettrie, Man, a
Machine, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 68.)
Voltaire (1694 – 1778) introduced the doctrines of Locke
into the circles in which these thinkers had their effect (Diderot,
Cabanis and others also belonged to them). Voltaire himself probably
never went so far as to draw the last consequences of these philosophers.
He allowed himself, however, to be stimulated by the thoughts of Locke
and his sparkling and dazzling writings. Much can be felt of these
influences, but he could not become a materialist in the sense of these
thinkers. He lived in too comprehensive a thought horizon to deny the
spirit. He awakened the need for philosophical questions in the widest
circles because he linked these questions to the interest of them. Much
would have to be said about him in an account that intended to trace
philosophical investigation of current events, but that is not the
purpose of this presentation. Only the higher problems of world
conception in its specific sense are to be considered. For this reason,
Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, the antagonist of the school of
enlightenment, are not to be dealt with here.
Just as Locke loses his path in the darkness of the senses, so does
David Hume (1711 – 1776) in the inward realm of the
self-conscious soul, the experience of which appears to him to be
ruled not by the forces of a world order, but by the power of human
habit. Why does one say that one event in nature is a cause and
another an effect? This is a question Hume asks. Man sees how the sun
shines on a stone; he then notices that the stone has become warm. He
observes that the first event often follows the second. Therefore, he
becomes accustomed to think of them as belonging together. He makes
the cause out of the sunshine, and the heating of the stone he turns
into the effect. Thought habits tie our perceptions together, but
there is nothing outside in a real world that manifests itself in such
a connection. Man sees a thought in his mind followed by a motion of
his body. He becomes accustomed to think of this thought as the cause
and of the motion as the effect. Thought habits, nothing more, are,
according to Hume, responsible for man's statements about the world
processes. The self-conscious soul can arrive at a guiding direction
for life through thought habits, but it cannot find anything in these
habits out of which it could shape a world picture that would have any
significance for the world event apart from the soul. Thus, for the
philosophical view of Hume, every conception that man forms beyond the
more external and internal observation remains only an object of
belief; it can never become knowledge. Concerning the fate of the
self-conscious human soul, there can be no reliable knowledge about
its relation to any other world but that of the senses, only belief.
The picture of Leibniz's world conception underwent a drawn-out
rationalistic elaboration through Christian Wolff (born in Breslau,
1679, professor in Halle). Wolff is of the opinion that a science
could be founded that obtains a knowledge of what is possible through
pure thinking, a knowledge of what has the potentiality for existence
because it appears free from contradiction to our thinking and can be
proven in this way. Thus, Wolff becomes the founder of a science of
the world, the soul and God. This world conception rests on the
presupposition that the self-conscious soul can produce thoughts in
itself that are valid for what lies entirely and completely outside
its own realm. This is the riddle with which Kant later feels himself
confronted; how is knowledge that is produced in the soul and
nevertheless supposed to have validity for world entities lying
outside the soul, possible?
In the philosophical development since the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the tendency becomes manifest to rest the self-conscious
soul on itself so that it feels justified to form valid conceptions
about the riddles of the world. In the consciousness of the second
half of the eighteenth century, Lessing (1729 – 1781) feels
this tendency as the deepest impulse of human longing. As we listen to
him, we hear many individuals who reveal the fundamental character of
that age in this aspiration.
Lessing strives for the transformation of the religious truths of
revelation into truths of reason. This aim is distinctly discernible
in the various turns and aspects that his thinking has to take.
Lessing feels himself with his self-conscious ego in a period of the
evolution of mankind that is destined to acquire through the power of
self-consciousness, what it had previously received from without
through revelation. What has preceded this phase of history becomes
for Lessing a process of preparation for the moment in which man's
self-consciousness becomes autonomous. Thus, for Lessing, history
becomes an "Education of the Human Race." This is also the
title of his essay, written at the height of his life, in which he
refuses to restrict the human soul to a single terrestrial life, but
assumes repeated earth lives for it. The soul lives its lives
separated by time intervals in the various periods of the evolution of
mankind, absorbs from each period what such a time can yield and
incarnates itself in a later period to continue its development. Thus,
the soul carries the fruits of one age of humanity into the later ages
and is "educated" by history. In Lessing's conception, the
"ego" is, therefore, extended far beyond the
individual life; it becomes rooted in a spiritually effective world
that lies behind the world of the senses.
With this view Lessing stands on the ground of a world conception that
means to stimulate the self-conscious ego to realize through its very
nature how the active agent within itself is not completely manifested
in the sense-perceptible individual life. In a different way, yet
following the same impulse, Herder (1744 – 1803) attempts to
arrive at a world picture. His attention turns toward the entire
physical and spiritual universe. He searches, as it were, for the plan
of this universe. The connection and harmony of the phenomena of
nature, the first dawning and sunrise of language and poetry, the
progress of historical evolution — with all this Herder allows his
soul to be deeply impressed, and often penetrates it with inspired
thought in order to reach a certain aim. According to Herder,
something is striving for existence in the entire external world that
finally appears in its manifested form in the human soul. The
self-conscious soul, by feeling itself grounded in the universe,
reveals to itself only the course its own forces took before it
reached self-consciousness. The soul may, according to Herder's view,
feel itself rooted in the cosmos, for it recognizes a process in the
whole natural and spiritual connection that had to lead to the soul
itself, just as childhood must lead to mature adulthood in man's
personal existence. It is a comprehensive picture of this world
thought of Herder that is expressed in his Ideas Toward a
Philosophy of the History of Mankind. It represents an attempt to
think the picture of nature in harmony with that of the spirit in such
a way that there is in this nature picture a place also for the
self-conscious human soul. We must not forget that Herder's world
conception reflects his struggle to come to terms simultaneously with
the conceptions of modern natural science and the needs of the
self-conscious soul. Herder was confronted with the demands of modern
world conception as was Aristotle with those of the Greek age. Their
conceptions receive their characteristic coloring from the different
way in which both thinkers had to take into account the pictures of
nature provided by their respective ages.
Herder's attitude toward Spinoza, contrary to that of other
contemporary thinkers, casts a light on his position in the evolution
of world conception. This position becomes particularly distinct if
one compares it to the attitude of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
(1743 – 1819). Jacobi finds in Spinoza's world picture the
elements that the human understanding must arrive at if it follows the
paths predestined for it by its own forces. This picture of the world
marks the limit of what man can know about the world. This knowledge,
however, cannot decide anything about the nature of the soul, about
the divine ground of the world or about the connection of the soul
with the latter for this knowledge. These realms are disclosed to man
only if he surrenders to an insight of belief that depends on a
special ability of the soul. Knowledge in itself must, therefore,
according to Jacobi, necessarily be atheistic. It can adhere strictly
to logical order, but it cannot contain within itself divine world
order. Thus, Spinozism becomes, for Jacobi, the only possible
scientific mode of conception but, at the same time, he sees in it a
proof of the fact that this mode of thinking cannot find the
connection with the spiritual world. In 1787 Herder defends Spinoza
against the accusation of atheism. He is in a position to do so, for
he is not afraid to feel, in his own way but similar to that of
Spinoza, man's experience with the divine being. Spinoza erects a pure
thought structure; Herder tries to gain a world conception not merely
through thinking but through the whole of the human soul life. For
him, no abrupt contrast exists between belief and knowledge if the
soul becomes clearly aware of the manner in which it experiences
itself. We express Herder's intention if we describe the experience of
the soul in the following way. When belief becomes aware of the
reasons that move the soul, it arrives at conceptions that are no less
certain than those obtained by mere thinking. Herder accepts
everything that the soul can find within itself in a purified form as
forces that can produce a world picture. Thus, his conception of the
divine ground of the world is richer, more saturated, than that of
Spinoza, but this conception allows the human ego to assume a
relationship to the world ground, which in Spinoza appears merely as a
result of thought.
We take our stand at a point where the various threads of the
development of modern world conceptions intertwine, as it were, when
we observe how the current of Spinoza's thought enters into it in the
eighties of the eighteenth century. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi published his
"Spinoza-Booklet." In it he relates a conversation between
himself and Lessing that took place shortly before Lessing's death.
According to this conversation, Lessing had confessed his adherence to
Spinozism. For Jacobi, this also establishes Lessing's atheism. If one
recognizes the "Conversation with Jacobi" as decisive for
the intimate thoughts of Lessing, one must regard him as a person who
acknowledges that man can only acquire a world conception adequate to
his nature if he takes as his point of support the firm conviction
with which the soul endows the thought living through its own
strength. With such an idea Lessing appears as a person whose feeling
prophetically anticipates the impulses of the world conceptions of the
nineteenth century. That he expresses this idea only in a conversation
shortly before his death, and that it is still scarcely noticeable in
his writings, shows how hard, even for the freest minds, the struggle
with the enigmatic questions that the modern age raised for the
development of world conceptions became.
A world conception has to be expressed in thoughts. But the convincing
strength of thought, which had found its climax in Platonism and which
in Aristotelianism unfolded in an unquestioned way, had vanished from
the impulses of man's soul. Only the spiritually bold nature of
Spinoza was capable of deriving the energy from the mathematical mode
of thinking to elaborate thought into a world conception that should
point as far as the ground of the world. The thinkers of the
eighteenth century could not yet feel the life-energy of thought that
allows them to experience themselves as human beings securely placed
into a spiritually real world. Lessing stands among them as a prophet
in feeling the force of the self-conscious ego in such a way that he
attributes to the soul the transition through repeated terrestrial
lives.
The fact that thought no longer entered the field of consciousness as
it did for Plato was unconsciously felt like a nightmare in questions
of world conceptions. For Plato, it manifested itself with its
supporting energy and its saturated content as an active entity of the
world. Now, thought was felt as emerging from the substrata of
self-consciousness. One was aware of the necessity to supply it with
supporting strength through whatever powers one could summon. Time and
again this supporting energy was looked for in the truth of belief or
in the depth of the heart, forces that were considered to be stronger
than thought, which was felt to be pale and abstract. This is what
many souls continually experience with respect to thought. They feel
it as a mere soul content out of which they are incapable of deriving
the energy that could grant them the necessary security to be found in
the knowledge that man may know himself rooted with his being in the
spiritual ground of the world. Such souls are impressed with the
logical nature of thought; they recognize such thought as a force that
would be needed to construct a scientific world view, but they demand
a force that has a stronger effect on them when they look for a world
conception embracing the highest knowledge. Such souls lack the
spiritual boldness of Spinoza needed to feel thought as the source of
world creation, and thus to know themselves with thought at the
world's foundation. As a result of this soul constitution, man often
scorns thought while he constructs a world conception; he therefore
feels his self-consciousness more securely supported in the darkness
of the forces of feeling and emotion. There are people to whom a
conception appears the less valuable for its relation to the riddles
of the world, the more this conception tends to leave the darkness of
the emotional sphere and enter into the light of thought. We find such
a mood of soul in I. G. Hamann (died 1788). He was, like many a
personality of this kind, a great stimulator, but with a genius like
Hamann, ideas brought up from the dark depths of the soul have a more
intense effect on others than thoughts expressed in rational form. In
the tone of the oracles Hamann expressed himself on questions that
fill the philosophical life of his time. He had a stimulating effect
on Herder as on others. A mystic feeling, often of a poetistic
coloring, pervades his oracular sayings. The urge of the time is
manifested chaotically in them for an experience of a force of the
self-conscious soul that can serve as supporting nucleus for
everything that man means to lift into awareness about world and life.
It is characteristic of this age for its representative spirits to
feel that one must submerge into the depth of the soul to find the
point in which the soul is linked up with the eternal ground of the
world; out of the insight into this connection, out of the source of
self-consciousness, one must gain a world picture. A considerable gap
exists, however, between what man actually was able to embrace with
his spiritual energies and this inner root of the self-consciousness.
In their spiritual exertion, the representative spirits do not
penetrate to the point from which they dimly feel their task
originates. They go in circles, as it were, around the cause of their
world riddle without coming nearer to it. This is the feeling of many
thinkers who are confronted with the question of world conception
when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spinoza begins to have
an effect. Ideas of Locke and Leibniz, also those of Leibniz in the
attenuated form of Wolff, pervade their minds. Besides the striving
for clarity of thought, the anxious mistrust against it is at work at
the same time, with the result that conceptions derived from the depth
of the heart are time and again inserted into the world picture for
its completion. Such a picture is found reflected in Lessing's friend,
Mendelssohn, who was hurt by the publication of Jacobi's
conversation with Lessing. He was unwilling to admit that this
conversation really had had the content that Jacobi reported. In that
case, Mendelssohn argues, his friend would actually have confessed his
adherence to a world conception that means to reach the root of the
spiritual world by mere thoughts, but one could not arrive at a
conception of the life of this root in this way. The world
spirit would have to be approached differently to be felt in the soul
as a life-endowed entity. This, Mendelssohn was sure, Lessing must
have meant. Therefore, he could only have confessed to a
"purified Spinozism," a Spinozism that would want to go
beyond mere thinking while striving for the divine origin of
existence. To feel the link with this origin in the manner it was made
possible by Spinozism was a step Mendelssohn was reluctant to take.
Herder did not shy away from this step because he enriched the thought
contours in the world picture of Spinoza with colorful,
content-saturated conceptions that he derived from the contemplation
of the panorama of nature and the world of the spirit. He could not
have been satisfied with Spinoza's thoughts as they were. As given by
their originator, they would have appeared to him as all painted gray
on gray. He observed what went on in nature and in history and placed
the human being into the world of his contemplation. What was revealed
to him in this way showed him a connection between the human being and
the origin of the world as well as the world itself, through the
conception of which he felt himself in agreement with Spinoza's
frame of mind. Herder was deeply and innately convinced that
the contemplation of nature and of historical evolution should lead to
a world picture through which man can feel his position in the world
as a whole as satisfactory. Spinoza was of the opinion that he could
arrive at such a world picture only in the light-flooded realm of a
thought activity that was developed after the model of mathematics. If
one compares Herder with Spinoza, remembering that Herder acknowledged
the conviction of the latter, one is forced to recognize that in the
evolution of modern world conception an impulse is at work that
remains hidden behind the visible world pictures themselves.
This impulse consists in the effort to experience in the soul
what binds the self-consciousness to the totality of the world
processes. It is the effort to gain a world picture in which the world
appears in such a way that man can recognize himself in it as
he must recognize himself when he allows the inner voice of his
self-conscious soul to speak to him. Spinoza means to satisfy the
desire for this kind of experience by having the power of thought
enfold its own certainty. Leibniz fastens his attention on the
soul and aims at a conception of the world as it must be
thought if the soul, correctly conceived of, is to appear rightly
placed in the world picture. Herder observes the world processes and
is convinced from the outset that the right world picture will emerge
in the soul if this soul approaches these processes in a healthy way
and in its full strength. Herder is absolutely convinced of the later
statement of Goethe that "every element of fact is already
theory." He has also been stimulated by the thought world of
Leibniz, but he would never have been capable of searching
theoretically for an idea of the self-consciousness in the form of the
monad first, and then constructing a world picture with this idea. The
soul evolution of mankind presents itself in Herder in a way that
enables him to point with special clarity and distinctiveness to the
impulse underlying it in the modern age. What in Greece has been
treated as thought (idea) as if it were a perception is now felt
as an inner experience of the soul, and the thinker is
confronted with the question: How must I penetrate into the depths of
my soul to be able to reach the connection of the soul with the ground
of the world in such a way that my thought will at the same
time be the expression of the forces of world creation? The age of
enlightenment as it appears in the eighteenth century is still
convinced of finding its justification in thought itself. Herder
develops beyond this viewpoint. He searches, not for the point of the
soul where it reveals itself as thinking, but for the living source
where the thought emerges out of the creative principle inherent in
the soul. With this tendency Herder comes close to what one can call
the mysterious experience of the soul with thought. A world conception
must express itself in thoughts, but thought only then endows the soul
with the power for which it searches by means of a world conception in
the modern age, when it experiences this thought in its process of its
birth in the soul. When thought is born, when it has turned into a
philosophical system, it has already lost its magical power over the
soul. For this reason, the power of thought and the philosophical
world picture are so often underestimated. This is done by all those
who know only the thought that is suggested to them from without, a
thought that they are supposed to believe, to which they are supposed
to pledge allegiance. The real power of thought is known only to one
who experiences it in the process of its formation.
How this impulse lives in souls in the modern age becomes prominently
apparent in a most significant figure in the history of philosophy —
Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713). According to him, an "inner
sense" lives in the soul; through this inner sense ideas enter
into man that become the content of a world conception just as the
external perceptions enter through the outer senses. Thus, Shaftesbury
does not seek the justification of thought in thought itself, but by
pointing toward a fact of the soul life that enables thought to enter
from the foundation of the world into the interior of the soul. Thus,
for Shaftesbury, man is confronted by a twofold outer world: The
"external," material one, which enters the soul through the
"outer" senses, and the spiritual outer world, which reveals
itself to man through his "inner sense."
In this age a strong tendency can be felt toward a knowledge of the
soul, for man strives to know how the essence of a world view is
anchored in the soul's nature. We see such an effort in Johann
Nicolaus Tetens (1736 – 1807). In his investigations of the soul
he arrived at a distinction of the soul faculties that has been
adopted into general usage at the present time: Thinking, feeling and
willing. It was customary before him to distinguish just between the
faculties of thinking and the appetitive faculty.
How the spirits of the eighteenth century attempt to watch the soul in
the process of creatively forming its world picture can be observed in
Hemsterhuis (1721 – 1790). In this philosopher, whom Herder
considered to be one of the greatest thinkers since Plato, the
struggle of the eighteenth century with the soul impulse of the modern
age becomes demonstrably apparent. The thoughts of Hemsterhuis can be
expressed approximately in the following way. If the human soul could,
through its own power and without external senses, contemplate the
world, the panorama of the world would lie displayed before it in a
single moment. The soul would then be infinite in the infinite. If the
soul, however, had no possibility to live in itself but
depended entirely on the outer senses, then it would be confronted
with a never ending temporal diffusion of the world. The soul would
then live, unconscious of itself, in an ocean of sensual
boundlessness. Between these two poles, which are never reached in
reality but which mark the limits of the inner life as two
possibilities, the soul lives its actual life; it permeates its own
infinity with the boundlessness of the world.
In this chapter the attempt has been made to demonstrate, through the
example of a few thinkers, how the soul impulse of the modern age
flows through the evolution of world conception in the eighteenth
century. In this current live the seeds from which the thought
development of the "Age of Kant and Goethe" grew.
∴
V. The World Conceptions of the Modern Age of Thought Evolution
The rise of natural science in modern times had as its fundamental
cause the same search as the mysticism of Jakob Boehme. This becomes
apparent in a thinker who grew directly out of the spiritual movement,
which in Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Kepler (1571 – 1630),
Galileo (1564 – 1642), and others, led to the first great
accomplishments of natural science in modern times. This thinker is
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). When one sees how his world
consists of infinitely small, animated, psychically self-aware,
fundamental beings, the monads, which are uncreated and
indestructible, producing in their combined activity the phenomena of
nature, one could be tempted to group him with Anaxagoras, for whom
the world consists of the "homoiomeries."
Yet, there is a significant difference between these two thinkers. For
Anaxagoras, the thought of the homoiomeries unfolds while he is
engaged in the contemplation of the world; the world suggests these
thoughts to him. Giordano Bruno feels that what lies behind the
phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world picture in such a
way that the entity of the ego is possible in this world picture. The
ego must be a monad; otherwise, it could not be real.
Thus, the assumption of the monads becomes necessary. As only the
monad can be real, therefore, the truly real entities are monads with
different inner qualities.
In the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno,
something happens that is not raised into full consciousness; the
effect of this inner process is then the formation of the world
picture. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious soul process.
The ego feels that it must form such a conception of itself that its
reality is assured, and it must conceive the world in such a way that
the ego can be real in it. Giordano Bruno has to form the conception
of the monad in order to render possible the realization of both
demands. In his thought the ego struggles for its existence in the
world conception of the modern age, and the expression of this
struggle is the view: I am a monad; such an entity is uncreated and
indestructible.
A comparison shows how different the ways are in which Aristotle and
Giordano Bruno arrive at the conception of God. Aristotle contemplates
the world; he sees the evidence of reason in natural processes; he
surrenders to the contemplation of this evidence; at the same time,
the processes of nature are for him evidence of the thought of
the "first mover" of these processes. Giordano Bruno fights
his way through to the conception of the monads. The processes of
nature are, as it were, extinguished in the picture in which
innumerable monads are presented as acting on each other; God becomes
the power entity that lives actively in all monads behind the
processes of the perceptible world. In Giordano Bruno's passionate
antagonism against Aristotle, the contrast between the thinker of
ancient Greece and of the philosopher of modern times becomes
manifest.
It becomes apparent in the modern philosophical development in a great
variety of ways how the ego searches for means to experience its own
reality in itself. What Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561 – 1626)
represents in his writings has the same general character even if this
does not at first sight become apparent in his endeavors in the field
of philosophy. Bacon of Verulam demands that the investigation of
world phenomena should begin with unbiased observation. One should
then try to separate the essential from the nonessential in a
phenomenon in order to arrive at a conception of whatever lies at the
bottom of a thing or event. He is of the opinion that up to his time
the fundamental thoughts, which were to explain the world phenomena,
had been conceived first, and only thereafter were the description of
the individual things and events arranged to fit these thoughts. He
presupposed that the thoughts had not been taken out of the things
themselves. Bacon wanted to combat this (deductive) method with his
(inductive) method. The concepts are to be formed in direct contact
with the things. One sees, so Bacon reasons, how an object is consumed
by fire; one observes how a second object behaves with relation to
fire and then observes the same process with many objects. In this
fashion one arrives eventually at a conception of how things behave
with respect to fire. The fact that the investigation in former times
had not proceeded in this way had, according to Bacon's opinion,
caused human conception to be dominated by so many idols
instead of the true ideas about the things.
Goethe gives a significant description of this method of thought of
Bacon of Verulam.
Bacon is like a man who is well-aware of the irregularity,
insufficiency and dilapidated condition of an old building, and knows
how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon
it, to give up the land, the materials and all appurtenances, to look
for another plot, and to erect a new building. He is an excellent and
persuasive speaker. He shakes a few walls. They break down and some of
the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points out new building
grounds; people begin to level it off, and yet it is everywhere too
narrow. He submits new plans; they are not clear, not inviting.
Mainly, he speaks of new unknown materials and now the world seems to
be well-served. The crowd disperses in all directions and brings back
an infinite variety of single items while at home, new plans, new
activities and settlements occupy the citizens and absorb their
attention.
Goethe says this in his history of the theory of color where he speaks
about Bacon. In a later part of the book dealing with Galileo, he
says:
If through Verulam's method of dispersion, natural science seemed to
be forever broken up into fragments, it was soon brought to unity
again by Galileo. He led natural philosophy back into the human being.
When he developed the law of the pendulum and of falling bodies from
the observation of swinging church lamps, he showed even in his early
youth that, for the genius, one case stands for a thousand cases. In
science, everything depends on what is called, an aperçu, that
is, on the ability of becoming aware of what is really fundamental in
the world of phenomena. The development of such an awareness is
infinitely fruitful.
With these words Goethe indicated distinctly the point that is
characteristic of Bacon. Bacon wants to find a secure path for science
because he hopes that in this way man will find a dependable
relationship to the world. The approach of Aristotle, so Bacon feels,
can no longer be used in the modern age. He does not know that in
different ages different energies of the soul are predominantly active
in man. He is only aware of the fact that he must reject Aristotle.
This he does passionately. He does it in such a way that Goethe is
lead to say, "How can one listen to him with equanimity when he
compares the works of Aristotle and of Plato with weightless tablets,
which, just because they did not consist of a good solid substance,
could so easily float down to us on the stream of time."
Bacon does not understand that he is aiming at the same objective that
has been reached by Plato and Aristotle, and that he must use
different means for the same aim because the means of antiquity can no
longer be those of the modern age. He points toward a method that
could appear fruitful for the investigation in the field of external
nature, but as Goethe shows in the case of Galileo, even in this field
something more is necessary than what Bacon demands.
The method of Bacon proves completely useless, however, when the soul
searches not only for an access to the investigation of individual
facts, but also to a world conception. What good is a groping search
for isolated phenomena and a derivation of general ideas from them, if
these general ideas do not, like strokes of lightning, flash up out of
the ground of being in the soul of man, rendering account of their
truth through themselves. In antiquity, thought appeared like a
perception to the soul. This mode of appearance has been dampened
through the brightness of the new ego-consciousness. What can lead to
thoughts capable of forming a world conception in the soul must be so
formed as if it were the soul's own invention, and the soul must
search for the possibility of justifying the validity of its own
creation. Bacon has no feeling for all this. He, therefore, points to
the materials of the building for the construction of the new world
conception, namely, the individual natural phenomena. It is, however,
no more possible that one can ever build a house by merely observing
the form of the building stones that are to be used, than that a
fruitful world conception could ever arise in a soul that is
exclusively concerned with the individual processes of nature.
Contrary to Bacon of Verulam, who pointed toward the bricks of the
building, Descartes (Cartesius) and Spinoza turned their
attention toward its plan. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in
1650. The starting point of his philosophical endeavor is significant
with him. With an unbiased questioning mind he approaches the world,
which offers him much of its riddles partly through revealed religion,
partly through the observation of the senses. He now contemplates both
sources in such a way that he does not simply accept and recognize as
truth what either of them offers to him. Instead, he sets against the
suggestions of both sources the "ego," which answers out of
its own initiative with its doubt against all revelation and
against all perception. In the development of modern philosophical
life, this move is a fact of the most telling significance. Amidst the
world the thinker allows nothing to make an impression on his soul,
but sets himself against everything with a doubt that
can derive its support only from the soul itself. Now the soul
apprehends itself in its own action: I doubt, that is to say, I think.
Therefore, no matter how things stand with the entire world, in my
doubt-exerting thinking I come to the clear awareness that I am.
In this manner, Cartesius arrives at his Cogito ergo sum, I
think, therefore I am. The ego in him conquers the right to recognize
its own being through the radical doubt directed against the entire
world.
Descartes derives the further development of his world conception out
of this root. In the "ego" he had attempted to seize
existence. Whatever can justify its existence together with the ego
may be considered truth. The ego finds in itself, innate to it, the
idea of God. This idea presents itself to the ego as true, as distinct
as the ego itself, but it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego
cannot have it through its own power. Therefore, it comes from
transcendent reality to which it corresponds. Descartes believes in
the reality of the external world, not because this external world
presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself
and then subsequently in God, and because God must be thought as
truthful. For it would be untrue of God to suggest a real external
world to man if the latter did not exist.
It is only possible to arrive at the recognition of the reality of the
ego as Descartes does through a thinking that in the most direct
manner aims at the ego in order to find a point of support for the act
of cognition. That is to say, this possibility can be fulfilled only
through an inner activity but never through a perception from without.
Any perception that comes from without gives only the qualities of
extension. In this manner, Descartes arrives at the recognition of two
substances in the world: One to which extension, and the other to
which thinking, is to be attributed and that has its roots in the
human soul. The animals, which in Descartes's sense cannot apprehend
themselves in inner self-supporting activity, are accordingly mere
beings of extension, automata, machines. The human body, too, is
nothing but a machine. The soul is linked up with this machine. When
the body becomes useless through being worn out or destroyed in some
way, the soul abandons it to continue to live in its own element.
Descartes lives in a time in which a new impulse in the philosophical
life is already discernible. The period from the beginning of the
Christian era until about the time of Scotus Erigena develops in such
a way that the inner experience of thought is enlivened by a force
that enters the spiritual evolution as a powerful impulse. The energy
of thought as it awakened in Greece is outshone by this power.
Outwardly, the progress in the life of the human soul is expressed in
the religious movements and by the fact that the forces of the
youthful nations of Western and Central Europe become the recipients
of the effects of the older forms of thought experience. They
penetrate this experience with the younger, more elementary impulses
and thereby transform it. In this process one forward step in the
progress in human evolution becomes evident that is caused by the fact
that older and subtle traces of spiritual currents that have exhausted
their vitality, but not their spiritual possibilities, are continued
by youthful energies emerging from the natural spring of mankind. In
such processes one will be justified in recognizing the essential laws
of the evolution of mankind. They are based on rejuvenating tendencies
of the spiritual life. The acquired forces of the spirit can only then
continue to unfold if they are transplanted into young, natural
energies of mankind.
The first eight centuries of the Christian era present a continuation
of the thought experience in the human soul in such a way that the new
forces about to emerge are still dormant in hidden depths, but they
tend to exert their formative effect on the evolution of world
conception. In Descartes, these forces already show themselves at work
in a high degree. In the age between Scotus Erigena and approximately
the fifteenth century, thought, which in the preceding period did not
openly unfold, comes again to the fore in its own force. Now, however,
it emerges from a direction quite different from that of the Greek
age. With the Greek thinkers, thought is experienced as a
perception. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries it comes
from out of the depth of the soul so that man has the feeling: Thought
generates itself within me. In the Greek thinkers, a relation between
thought and the processes of nature was still immediately established;
in the age just referred to, thought stands out as the product of
self-consciousness. The thinker has the feeling that he must prove
thought as justified. This is the feeling of the nominalists and the
realists. This is also the feeling of Thomas Aquinas, who anchors the
experience of thought in religious revelation.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduce a new impulse to the
souls. This is slowly prepared and slowly absorbed in the life of the
soul. A transformation takes place in the organization of the human
soul. In the field of philosophical life, this transformation becomes
manifest through the fact that thought cannot now be felt as a
perception, but as a product of self-consciousness. This
transformation in the organization of the human soul can be observed
in all fields of the development of humanity. It becomes apparent in
the renaissance of art and science, and of European life, as well as
in the reformatory religious movements. One will be able to discover
it if one investigates the art of Dante and Shakespeare with respect
to their foundations in the human soul development. Here these
possibilities can only be indicated, since this sketch is intended to
deal only with the development of the intellectual world conception.
The advent of the mode of thought of modern natural science appears as
another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization.
Just compare the state of the form of thinking about nature as it
develops in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler with what has preceded
them, This natural scientific conception corresponds to the mood of
the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth
century. Nature is now looked at in such a way that the sense
observation is to be the only witness of it. Bacon is one, Galileo
another personality in whom this becomes apparent. The picture of
nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt
in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature,
every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness
gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the
observation of nature are more and more abruptly contrasted, separated
by a gulf, From Descartes on a transformation of the soul organization
becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from
the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a
new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt.
While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an
element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its
justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century
it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own
ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in
such a manner that the picture of nature could be considered a support
for its justification; now it becomes the task of this element of
thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength.
The thinkers of the time that now follows feel that in the thought
experience itself something must be found that proves this experience
to be the justified creator of a world conception.
The significance of the transformation of the soul life can be
realized if one considers the way in which philosophers of nature,
like H. Cardanus (1501 – 1576) and Bernardinus Telesius
(1508 – 1588), still spoke of natural processes. In them a picture
of nature still continued to show its effect and was to lose its power
through the emergence of the mode of conception of natural science of
Copernicus, Galileo and others. Something still lives in the mind of
Cardanus of the processes of nature, which he conceives as similar to
those of the human soul. Such an assertion would also have been
possible to Greek thinking. Galileo is already compelled to say that
what man has as the sensation of warmth within himself, for instance,
exists no more in external nature than the sensation of tickling that
a man feels when the sole of his foot is touched by a feather.
Telesius still feels justified to say that warmth and coldness are the
driving forces of the world processes, and Galileo must already make
the statement that man knows warmth only as an inner experience. In
the picture of nature he allows as thinkable only what contains
nothing of this inner experience. Thus, the conceptions of mathematics
and mechanics become the only ones that are allowed to form the
picture of nature. In a personality like Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 – 1519), who was just as great as a thinker as he was an
artist, we can recognize the striving for a new law-determined picture
of nature. Such spirits feel it necessary to find an access to nature
not yet given to the Greek way of thinking and its after effects in
the Middle Ages. Man now has to rid himself of whatever experiences he
has about his own inner being if he is to find access to nature. He is
permitted to depict nature only in conceptions that contain nothing of
what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.
Thus, the human soul dissociates itself from nature; it takes its
stand on its own ground. As long as one could think that the stream of
nature contained something that was the same as what was immediately
experienced in man, one could, without hesitation, feel justified to
have thought bear witness to the events of nature. The picture of
nature of modern times forces the human consciousness to feel itself
outside nature with its thought. This consciousness further
establishes a validity for its thought, which is gained through its
own power.
From the beginning of the Christian Era to Scotus Erigena, the
experience of thought continues to be effective in such a way that its
form is determined by the presupposition of a spiritual world, namely,
the world of religious revelation. From the eighth to the sixteenth
century, thought experience wrests itself free from the inner
self-consciousness but allows, besides its own germinating power, the
other power of consciousness, revelation, to continue in its
existence. From the sixteenth century on, it is the picture of nature
that eliminates the experience of thought itself; henceforth, the
self-consciousness attempts to produce, out of its own energies, the
resources through which it is possible to form a world conception with
the help of thought. It is with this task that Descartes finds himself
confronted. It is the task of the thinkers of the new period of world
conception.
Benedict Spinoza (1632 – 1677) asks himself, "What
must be assumed as a starting point from which the creation of a true
world picture may proceed? This beginning is caused by the feeling that
innumerable thoughts may present themselves in my soul as true; I can
admit as the corner stone for a world conception only an element whose
properties I must first determine." Spinoza finds that one can only
begin with something that is in need of nothing else for its being. He
gives the name, substance, to this being. He finds that there can be
only one such substance, and that this substance is God. If one observes
the method by which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophy,
one finds that he has modeled it after the method of mathematics. Just
as the mathematician takes his start from general truths, which the human
ego forms itself in free creation, so Spinoza demands that philosophy
should start from such spontaneously created conceptions. The one substance
is as the ego must think it to be. Thought in this way, it does not
tolerate anything existing outside itself as a peer, for then it would
not be everything. It would need something other than itself for its
existence. Everything else is, therefore, only of the substance,
as one of its attributes, as Spinoza says. Two such attributes are
recognizable to man. He sees the first when he looks at the outer world;
the second, when he turns his attention inward. The first attribute is
extension; the second, thinking. Man contains both attributes in his
being. In his body he has extension; in his soul, thinking. When he
thinks, it is the divine substance that thinks; when he acts, it is this
substance that acts. Spinoza obtains the existence (Dasein) for
the ego in anchoring it in the general all-embracing divine substance.
Under such circumstances there can be no question of an absolute freedom
of man, for man is no more to be credited with the initiative of his
actions and thought than a stone with that of its motion; the agent in
everything is the one substance. We can speak of a relative freedom in
man only when he considers himself not as an individual entity, but
knows himself as one with the one substance.
Spinoza's world conception, if consistently developed to its
perfection, leads a person to the consciousness: I think of myself in
the right way if I no longer consider myself, but know myself in my
experience as one with the divine whole. This consciousness then, to
follow Spinoza, endows the whole human personality with the impulse to
do what is right, that is to say, god-filled action. This results as a
matter of course for the one for whom the right world conception is
realized as the full truth. For this reason Spinoza calls the book in
which he presents his world conception, Ethics. For him,
ethics, that is to say, moral behavior, is in the highest sense the
result of the true knowledge of man's dwelling in the one substance.
One feels inclined to say that the private life of Spinoza, of the man
who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, out of his own free
will give away his fortune and sought his subsistence in poverty as a
craftsman, was in the rarest fashion the outer expression of his
philosophical soul, which knew its ego in the divine whole and felt
its inner experience, indeed, all experience, illumined by this
consciousness.
Spinoza constructs a total world conception out of thoughts. These
thoughts have to satisfy the requirement that they derive their
justification for the construction of the picture out of the
self-consciousness. In it their certainty must be rooted. Thoughts
that are conceived by human consciousness in the same way as the
self-supporting mathematical ideas are capable of shaping a world
picture that is the expression of what, in truth, exists behind the
phenomena of the world.
In a direction that is entirely different from that of Spinoza,
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) seeks the
justification of the ego-consciousness in the actual world. His point
of departure is like that of Giordano Bruno insofar as he thinks of
the soul or the "ego" as a monad. Leibniz finds the
self-consciousness in the soul, that is, the knowledge of the
soul of itself, a manifestation, therefore, of the ego. There cannot
be anything else in the soul that thinks and feels except the soul
itself, for how should the soul know of itself if the subject
of the act of knowing were something other than itself? Furthermore,
it can only be a simple entity, not a composite being, for the parts
in it could and would have to know of each other. Thus, the soul is a
simple entity, enclosed in itself and aware of its being, a monad.
Nothing can come into this monad that is external to it, for nothing
but itself can be active in it. All its experience, cognitive
imagination, sensation, etc., is the result of its own activity. It
could only perceive any other activity in itself through its defense
against this activity, that is to say, it would at any rate perceive
only itself in its defense. Thus, nothing external can enter
this monad. Leibniz expresses this by saying that the monad has no
windows. According to him, all real beings are monads, and only monads
truly exist. These different monads are, however, differentiated with
respect to the intensity of their inner life. There are monads of an
extremely dull inner life that are as if in a continual state of
sleep; there are monads that are, as it were, dreaming; there are,
furthermore, the human monads in wake-consciousness, etc., up to the
highest degree of intensity of the inner life of the divine principal
monad. That man does not see monads in his sense perception is caused
by the circumstance that the monads are perceived by him like the
appearance of fog, for example, that is not really fog but a swarm of
gnats. What is seen by the senses of man is like the appearance of a
fog formed by the accumulated monads.
Thus, for Leibniz the world in reality is a sum of monads, which do
not affect each other but constitute self-conscious beings, leading
their lives independently of each other, that is, egos. Nevertheless,
if the individual monad contains an after image of the general life of
the world in its inner life, it would be wrong to assume that this is
caused by an effect that the individual monads exert on each other. It
is caused by the circumstance that in a given case one monad
experiences inwardly by itself what is also independently experienced
by another monad. The inner lives of the monads agree like clocks that
indicate the same hours in spite of the fact that they do not affect
each other. Just as the clocks agree because they have been originally
matched, so the monads are attuned to each other through the
pre-established harmony that issues from the divine principal monad.
This is the world picture to which Leibniz is driven because he has to
form the picture in such a way that in it the self-conscious
life of the soul, the ego, can be maintained as a reality. It is a
world picture completely formed out of the "ego" itself. In
Leibniz's view, this can, indeed, not be otherwise. In Leibniz, the
struggle for a world conception leads to a point where, in order to
find the truth, it does not accept anything as truth that is revealed
in the outer world.
According to Leibniz, the life of man's senses is caused in such a way
that the monad of the soul is brought into connection with other
monads with a somnolent, sleeping and less acute self-consciousness.
The body is a sum of such monads. The one waking soul monad is
connected with it. This central monad parts from the others in death
and continues its existence by itself.
Just as the world picture of Leibniz is one that is wholly formed out
of the inner energy of the self-conscious soul, so the world picture
of his contemporary John Locke (1632 – 1704), rests entirely on
the feeling that such a productive construction out of the soul is not
admissible. Locke recognizes only those parts of a world conception as
justified that can be observed (experienced) and what can, on
the basis of the observation, be thought about the observed
objects. The soul for him is not a being that develops real
experiences out of itself, but an empty slate on which the outer world
writes its entries. Thus, for Locke, the human self-consciousness is a
result of the experience; it is not an ego that is the cause of an
experience. When a thing of the external world makes an impression on
the soul, it can be said that the thing contains only extension,
shape, motion in reality; through the contact with the senses, sounds,
colors, warmth, etc., are produced. What thus comes into being through
contact with the senses is only there as long as the senses are in
touch with the things. Outside the perception there are only
substances that are differently shaped and in various states of
motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, except shape and motion,
nothing of what the senses perceive has anything to do with things
themselves. With this assumption he makes the beginnings of a current
of world conception that is unwilling to recognize the impressions of
the external world experienced inwardly by man in his act of
cognition, as belonging to the world "in itself."
It is a strange spectacle that Locke presents to the contemplative
soul. Man is supposed to be capable of cognition only through the fact
that he perceives, and that he thinks about the content of the
perception, but what he perceives has only the least part to do with
the properties pertaining to the world itself. Leibniz withdraws from
what the world reveals and creates a world picture from within the
soul; Locke insists on a world picture that is created by the soul in
conjunction with the world, but no real picture of a world is
accomplished through such a creation. As Locke cannot, like Leibniz,
consider the ego itself as the fulcrum of a world conception,
he arrives at conceptions that appear to be inappropriate to support a
world conception because they do not allow the possession of the human
ego to be counted as belonging to the center of existence. A world
view like that of Locke loses the connection with every realm in which
the ego, the self-conscious soul, could be rooted because it
rejects from the outset any approaches to the world ground except
those that disappear in the darkness of the senses.
In Locke, the evolution of philosophy produces a form of world
conception in which the self-conscious soul struggles for its
existence in the world picture but loses this fight because it
believes that it gains its experiences exclusively in the intercourse
with the external world represented in the picture of nature. The
self-conscious soul must, therefore, renounce all knowledge concerning
anything that could belong to the nature of the soul apart from this
intercourse with the outside world.
Stimulated by Locke, George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) arrived at
results that were entirely different from his. Berkeley finds that the
impressions that the things and events of the world appear to produce
on the human soul take place in reality within this soul
itself. When I see "red," I must bring this
"redness" into being within myself; when I feel
"warm," the "warmth" lives within me. Thus it is
with all things that I apparently receive from without. Except for
those elements I produce within myself, I know nothing whatsoever
about the external things. Thus, it is senseless to speak about things
that consist of material substance, for I know only what appears in my
mind as something spiritual. What I call a rose, for instance, is
wholly spiritual, that is to say, a conception (an idea) experienced
by my mind. There is, therefore, according to Berkeley, nothing to be
perceived except what is spiritual, and when I notice that something
is effected in me from without, then this effect can only be caused by
spiritual entities, for obviously bodies cannot cause spiritual
effects and my perceptions are entirely spiritual. There are,
therefore, only spirits in the world that influence each other. This
is Berkeley's view. It turns the conceptions of Locke into their
contrary by construing everything as spiritual reality that had been
considered as impression of the material things. Thus, Berkeley
believes he recognizes himself with his self-consciousness immediately
in a spiritual world.
Others have been led to different results by the thoughts of Locke.
Condillac (1715 – 1780) is an example. He believes, like Locke, that
all knowledge of the world must and, indeed, can only depend on the
observation of the senses and on thinking. He develops this view to
the extreme conclusion that thinking has in itself no self-dependent
reality; it is nothing but a sublimated, transformed external
sensation. Thus, only sense perceptions must be accepted in a world
picture that is to correspond to the truth. His explanation in this
direction is indeed telling. Imagine a human body that is still
completely unawakened mentally, and then suppose one sense after
another to be opened. What more do we have in the sentient body than
we had before in the insensate organism? A body on which the
surrounding world has made impressions. These impressions made by the
environment have by no means produced what believes itself to be an
"ego." This world conception does not arrive at the
possibility of conceiving the "ego" as self-conscious
"soul" and it does not accomplish a world picture in which
this "ego" could occur. It is the world conception that
tries to deliver itself of the task of dealing with the self-conscious
soul by proving its nonexistence. Charles Bonnet (1720 – 1793),
Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715 – 1771), Julien de la Mettrie
(1709 – 1751) and the system of nature (systeme de la nature)
of Holbach that appeared in 1770 follow similar paths. In
Holbach's work all traces of spiritual reality have been driven out of
the world picture. Only matter and its forces operate in the world,
and for this spirit-deprived picture of nature, Holbach finds the
words, "0 nature, mistress of all being, and you, her daughters,
Virtue, Reason, and Truth, may you be forever our only
divinities."
In de la Mettrie's Man, a Machine, a world conception appears
that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only
nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must,
therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture
that we compare with the mirror. The physical organism would be
compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The
latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In
Man, a Machine, we read:
If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific
organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously
are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have
to deal with a very enlightened machine. . . . ‘Soul,’ therefore, is
only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought
picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by
it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of
motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to
move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way
in the physical and moral world. . . . If whatever thinks in my brain
is not a part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated
when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of
thought, calmly resting on my bed? (Compare de la Mettrie, Man, a
Machine, Philosophische Bibliothek, Vol. 68.)
Voltaire (1694 – 1778) introduced the doctrines of Locke
into the circles in which these thinkers had their effect (Diderot,
Cabanis and others also belonged to them). Voltaire himself probably
never went so far as to draw the last consequences of these philosophers.
He allowed himself, however, to be stimulated by the thoughts of Locke
and his sparkling and dazzling writings. Much can be felt of these
influences, but he could not become a materialist in the sense of these
thinkers. He lived in too comprehensive a thought horizon to deny the
spirit. He awakened the need for philosophical questions in the widest
circles because he linked these questions to the interest of them. Much
would have to be said about him in an account that intended to trace
philosophical investigation of current events, but that is not the
purpose of this presentation. Only the higher problems of world
conception in its specific sense are to be considered. For this reason,
Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, the antagonist of the school of
enlightenment, are not to be dealt with here.
Just as Locke loses his path in the darkness of the senses, so does
David Hume (1711 – 1776) in the inward realm of the
self-conscious soul, the experience of which appears to him to be
ruled not by the forces of a world order, but by the power of human
habit. Why does one say that one event in nature is a cause and
another an effect? This is a question Hume asks. Man sees how the sun
shines on a stone; he then notices that the stone has become warm. He
observes that the first event often follows the second. Therefore, he
becomes accustomed to think of them as belonging together. He makes
the cause out of the sunshine, and the heating of the stone he turns
into the effect. Thought habits tie our perceptions together, but
there is nothing outside in a real world that manifests itself in such
a connection. Man sees a thought in his mind followed by a motion of
his body. He becomes accustomed to think of this thought as the cause
and of the motion as the effect. Thought habits, nothing more, are,
according to Hume, responsible for man's statements about the world
processes. The self-conscious soul can arrive at a guiding direction
for life through thought habits, but it cannot find anything in these
habits out of which it could shape a world picture that would have any
significance for the world event apart from the soul. Thus, for the
philosophical view of Hume, every conception that man forms beyond the
more external and internal observation remains only an object of
belief; it can never become knowledge. Concerning the fate of the
self-conscious human soul, there can be no reliable knowledge about
its relation to any other world but that of the senses, only belief.
The picture of Leibniz's world conception underwent a drawn-out
rationalistic elaboration through Christian Wolff (born in Breslau,
1679, professor in Halle). Wolff is of the opinion that a science
could be founded that obtains a knowledge of what is possible through
pure thinking, a knowledge of what has the potentiality for existence
because it appears free from contradiction to our thinking and can be
proven in this way. Thus, Wolff becomes the founder of a science of
the world, the soul and God. This world conception rests on the
presupposition that the self-conscious soul can produce thoughts in
itself that are valid for what lies entirely and completely outside
its own realm. This is the riddle with which Kant later feels himself
confronted; how is knowledge that is produced in the soul and
nevertheless supposed to have validity for world entities lying
outside the soul, possible?
In the philosophical development since the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, the tendency becomes manifest to rest the self-conscious
soul on itself so that it feels justified to form valid conceptions
about the riddles of the world. In the consciousness of the second
half of the eighteenth century, Lessing (1729 – 1781) feels
this tendency as the deepest impulse of human longing. As we listen to
him, we hear many individuals who reveal the fundamental character of
that age in this aspiration.
Lessing strives for the transformation of the religious truths of
revelation into truths of reason. This aim is distinctly discernible
in the various turns and aspects that his thinking has to take.
Lessing feels himself with his self-conscious ego in a period of the
evolution of mankind that is destined to acquire through the power of
self-consciousness, what it had previously received from without
through revelation. What has preceded this phase of history becomes
for Lessing a process of preparation for the moment in which man's
self-consciousness becomes autonomous. Thus, for Lessing, history
becomes an "Education of the Human Race." This is also the
title of his essay, written at the height of his life, in which he
refuses to restrict the human soul to a single terrestrial life, but
assumes repeated earth lives for it. The soul lives its lives
separated by time intervals in the various periods of the evolution of
mankind, absorbs from each period what such a time can yield and
incarnates itself in a later period to continue its development. Thus,
the soul carries the fruits of one age of humanity into the later ages
and is "educated" by history. In Lessing's conception, the
"ego" is, therefore, extended far beyond the
individual life; it becomes rooted in a spiritually effective world
that lies behind the world of the senses.
With this view Lessing stands on the ground of a world conception that
means to stimulate the self-conscious ego to realize through its very
nature how the active agent within itself is not completely manifested
in the sense-perceptible individual life. In a different way, yet
following the same impulse, Herder (1744 – 1803) attempts to
arrive at a world picture. His attention turns toward the entire
physical and spiritual universe. He searches, as it were, for the plan
of this universe. The connection and harmony of the phenomena of
nature, the first dawning and sunrise of language and poetry, the
progress of historical evolution — with all this Herder allows his
soul to be deeply impressed, and often penetrates it with inspired
thought in order to reach a certain aim. According to Herder,
something is striving for existence in the entire external world that
finally appears in its manifested form in the human soul. The
self-conscious soul, by feeling itself grounded in the universe,
reveals to itself only the course its own forces took before it
reached self-consciousness. The soul may, according to Herder's view,
feel itself rooted in the cosmos, for it recognizes a process in the
whole natural and spiritual connection that had to lead to the soul
itself, just as childhood must lead to mature adulthood in man's
personal existence. It is a comprehensive picture of this world
thought of Herder that is expressed in his Ideas Toward a
Philosophy of the History of Mankind. It represents an attempt to
think the picture of nature in harmony with that of the spirit in such
a way that there is in this nature picture a place also for the
self-conscious human soul. We must not forget that Herder's world
conception reflects his struggle to come to terms simultaneously with
the conceptions of modern natural science and the needs of the
self-conscious soul. Herder was confronted with the demands of modern
world conception as was Aristotle with those of the Greek age. Their
conceptions receive their characteristic coloring from the different
way in which both thinkers had to take into account the pictures of
nature provided by their respective ages.
Herder's attitude toward Spinoza, contrary to that of other
contemporary thinkers, casts a light on his position in the evolution
of world conception. This position becomes particularly distinct if
one compares it to the attitude of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi
(1743 – 1819). Jacobi finds in Spinoza's world picture the
elements that the human understanding must arrive at if it follows the
paths predestined for it by its own forces. This picture of the world
marks the limit of what man can know about the world. This knowledge,
however, cannot decide anything about the nature of the soul, about
the divine ground of the world or about the connection of the soul
with the latter for this knowledge. These realms are disclosed to man
only if he surrenders to an insight of belief that depends on a
special ability of the soul. Knowledge in itself must, therefore,
according to Jacobi, necessarily be atheistic. It can adhere strictly
to logical order, but it cannot contain within itself divine world
order. Thus, Spinozism becomes, for Jacobi, the only possible
scientific mode of conception but, at the same time, he sees in it a
proof of the fact that this mode of thinking cannot find the
connection with the spiritual world. In 1787 Herder defends Spinoza
against the accusation of atheism. He is in a position to do so, for
he is not afraid to feel, in his own way but similar to that of
Spinoza, man's experience with the divine being. Spinoza erects a pure
thought structure; Herder tries to gain a world conception not merely
through thinking but through the whole of the human soul life. For
him, no abrupt contrast exists between belief and knowledge if the
soul becomes clearly aware of the manner in which it experiences
itself. We express Herder's intention if we describe the experience of
the soul in the following way. When belief becomes aware of the
reasons that move the soul, it arrives at conceptions that are no less
certain than those obtained by mere thinking. Herder accepts
everything that the soul can find within itself in a purified form as
forces that can produce a world picture. Thus, his conception of the
divine ground of the world is richer, more saturated, than that of
Spinoza, but this conception allows the human ego to assume a
relationship to the world ground, which in Spinoza appears merely as a
result of thought.
We take our stand at a point where the various threads of the
development of modern world conceptions intertwine, as it were, when
we observe how the current of Spinoza's thought enters into it in the
eighties of the eighteenth century. In 1785 F. H. Jacobi published his
"Spinoza-Booklet." In it he relates a conversation between
himself and Lessing that took place shortly before Lessing's death.
According to this conversation, Lessing had confessed his adherence to
Spinozism. For Jacobi, this also establishes Lessing's atheism. If one
recognizes the "Conversation with Jacobi" as decisive for
the intimate thoughts of Lessing, one must regard him as a person who
acknowledges that man can only acquire a world conception adequate to
his nature if he takes as his point of support the firm conviction
with which the soul endows the thought living through its own
strength. With such an idea Lessing appears as a person whose feeling
prophetically anticipates the impulses of the world conceptions of the
nineteenth century. That he expresses this idea only in a conversation
shortly before his death, and that it is still scarcely noticeable in
his writings, shows how hard, even for the freest minds, the struggle
with the enigmatic questions that the modern age raised for the
development of world conceptions became.
A world conception has to be expressed in thoughts. But the convincing
strength of thought, which had found its climax in Platonism and which
in Aristotelianism unfolded in an unquestioned way, had vanished from
the impulses of man's soul. Only the spiritually bold nature of
Spinoza was capable of deriving the energy from the mathematical mode
of thinking to elaborate thought into a world conception that should
point as far as the ground of the world. The thinkers of the
eighteenth century could not yet feel the life-energy of thought that
allows them to experience themselves as human beings securely placed
into a spiritually real world. Lessing stands among them as a prophet
in feeling the force of the self-conscious ego in such a way that he
attributes to the soul the transition through repeated terrestrial
lives.
The fact that thought no longer entered the field of consciousness as
it did for Plato was unconsciously felt like a nightmare in questions
of world conceptions. For Plato, it manifested itself with its
supporting energy and its saturated content as an active entity of the
world. Now, thought was felt as emerging from the substrata of
self-consciousness. One was aware of the necessity to supply it with
supporting strength through whatever powers one could summon. Time and
again this supporting energy was looked for in the truth of belief or
in the depth of the heart, forces that were considered to be stronger
than thought, which was felt to be pale and abstract. This is what
many souls continually experience with respect to thought. They feel
it as a mere soul content out of which they are incapable of deriving
the energy that could grant them the necessary security to be found in
the knowledge that man may know himself rooted with his being in the
spiritual ground of the world. Such souls are impressed with the
logical nature of thought; they recognize such thought as a force that
would be needed to construct a scientific world view, but they demand
a force that has a stronger effect on them when they look for a world
conception embracing the highest knowledge. Such souls lack the
spiritual boldness of Spinoza needed to feel thought as the source of
world creation, and thus to know themselves with thought at the
world's foundation. As a result of this soul constitution, man often
scorns thought while he constructs a world conception; he therefore
feels his self-consciousness more securely supported in the darkness
of the forces of feeling and emotion. There are people to whom a
conception appears the less valuable for its relation to the riddles
of the world, the more this conception tends to leave the darkness of
the emotional sphere and enter into the light of thought. We find such
a mood of soul in I. G. Hamann (died 1788). He was, like many a
personality of this kind, a great stimulator, but with a genius like
Hamann, ideas brought up from the dark depths of the soul have a more
intense effect on others than thoughts expressed in rational form. In
the tone of the oracles Hamann expressed himself on questions that
fill the philosophical life of his time. He had a stimulating effect
on Herder as on others. A mystic feeling, often of a poetistic
coloring, pervades his oracular sayings. The urge of the time is
manifested chaotically in them for an experience of a force of the
self-conscious soul that can serve as supporting nucleus for
everything that man means to lift into awareness about world and life.
It is characteristic of this age for its representative spirits to
feel that one must submerge into the depth of the soul to find the
point in which the soul is linked up with the eternal ground of the
world; out of the insight into this connection, out of the source of
self-consciousness, one must gain a world picture. A considerable gap
exists, however, between what man actually was able to embrace with
his spiritual energies and this inner root of the self-consciousness.
In their spiritual exertion, the representative spirits do not
penetrate to the point from which they dimly feel their task
originates. They go in circles, as it were, around the cause of their
world riddle without coming nearer to it. This is the feeling of many
thinkers who are confronted with the question of world conception
when, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Spinoza begins to have
an effect. Ideas of Locke and Leibniz, also those of Leibniz in the
attenuated form of Wolff, pervade their minds. Besides the striving
for clarity of thought, the anxious mistrust against it is at work at
the same time, with the result that conceptions derived from the depth
of the heart are time and again inserted into the world picture for
its completion. Such a picture is found reflected in Lessing's friend,
Mendelssohn, who was hurt by the publication of Jacobi's
conversation with Lessing. He was unwilling to admit that this
conversation really had had the content that Jacobi reported. In that
case, Mendelssohn argues, his friend would actually have confessed his
adherence to a world conception that means to reach the root of the
spiritual world by mere thoughts, but one could not arrive at a
conception of the life of this root in this way. The world
spirit would have to be approached differently to be felt in the soul
as a life-endowed entity. This, Mendelssohn was sure, Lessing must
have meant. Therefore, he could only have confessed to a
"purified Spinozism," a Spinozism that would want to go
beyond mere thinking while striving for the divine origin of
existence. To feel the link with this origin in the manner it was made
possible by Spinozism was a step Mendelssohn was reluctant to take.
Herder did not shy away from this step because he enriched the thought
contours in the world picture of Spinoza with colorful,
content-saturated conceptions that he derived from the contemplation
of the panorama of nature and the world of the spirit. He could not
have been satisfied with Spinoza's thoughts as they were. As given by
their originator, they would have appeared to him as all painted gray
on gray. He observed what went on in nature and in history and placed
the human being into the world of his contemplation. What was revealed
to him in this way showed him a connection between the human being and
the origin of the world as well as the world itself, through the
conception of which he felt himself in agreement with Spinoza's
frame of mind. Herder was deeply and innately convinced that
the contemplation of nature and of historical evolution should lead to
a world picture through which man can feel his position in the world
as a whole as satisfactory. Spinoza was of the opinion that he could
arrive at such a world picture only in the light-flooded realm of a
thought activity that was developed after the model of mathematics. If
one compares Herder with Spinoza, remembering that Herder acknowledged
the conviction of the latter, one is forced to recognize that in the
evolution of modern world conception an impulse is at work that
remains hidden behind the visible world pictures themselves.
This impulse consists in the effort to experience in the soul
what binds the self-consciousness to the totality of the world
processes. It is the effort to gain a world picture in which the world
appears in such a way that man can recognize himself in it as
he must recognize himself when he allows the inner voice of his
self-conscious soul to speak to him. Spinoza means to satisfy the
desire for this kind of experience by having the power of thought
enfold its own certainty. Leibniz fastens his attention on the
soul and aims at a conception of the world as it must be
thought if the soul, correctly conceived of, is to appear rightly
placed in the world picture. Herder observes the world processes and
is convinced from the outset that the right world picture will emerge
in the soul if this soul approaches these processes in a healthy way
and in its full strength. Herder is absolutely convinced of the later
statement of Goethe that "every element of fact is already
theory." He has also been stimulated by the thought world of
Leibniz, but he would never have been capable of searching
theoretically for an idea of the self-consciousness in the form of the
monad first, and then constructing a world picture with this idea. The
soul evolution of mankind presents itself in Herder in a way that
enables him to point with special clarity and distinctiveness to the
impulse underlying it in the modern age. What in Greece has been
treated as thought (idea) as if it were a perception is now felt
as an inner experience of the soul, and the thinker is
confronted with the question: How must I penetrate into the depths of
my soul to be able to reach the connection of the soul with the ground
of the world in such a way that my thought will at the same
time be the expression of the forces of world creation? The age of
enlightenment as it appears in the eighteenth century is still
convinced of finding its justification in thought itself. Herder
develops beyond this viewpoint. He searches, not for the point of the
soul where it reveals itself as thinking, but for the living source
where the thought emerges out of the creative principle inherent in
the soul. With this tendency Herder comes close to what one can call
the mysterious experience of the soul with thought. A world conception
must express itself in thoughts, but thought only then endows the soul
with the power for which it searches by means of a world conception in
the modern age, when it experiences this thought in its process of its
birth in the soul. When thought is born, when it has turned into a
philosophical system, it has already lost its magical power over the
soul. For this reason, the power of thought and the philosophical
world picture are so often underestimated. This is done by all those
who know only the thought that is suggested to them from without, a
thought that they are supposed to believe, to which they are supposed
to pledge allegiance. The real power of thought is known only to one
who experiences it in the process of its formation.
How this impulse lives in souls in the modern age becomes prominently
apparent in a most significant figure in the history of philosophy —
Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713). According to him, an "inner
sense" lives in the soul; through this inner sense ideas enter
into man that become the content of a world conception just as the
external perceptions enter through the outer senses. Thus, Shaftesbury
does not seek the justification of thought in thought itself, but by
pointing toward a fact of the soul life that enables thought to enter
from the foundation of the world into the interior of the soul. Thus,
for Shaftesbury, man is confronted by a twofold outer world: The
"external," material one, which enters the soul through the
"outer" senses, and the spiritual outer world, which reveals
itself to man through his "inner sense."
In this age a strong tendency can be felt toward a knowledge of the
soul, for man strives to know how the essence of a world view is
anchored in the soul's nature. We see such an effort in Johann
Nicolaus Tetens (1736 – 1807). In his investigations of the soul
he arrived at a distinction of the soul faculties that has been
adopted into general usage at the present time: Thinking, feeling and
willing. It was customary before him to distinguish just between the
faculties of thinking and the appetitive faculty.
How the spirits of the eighteenth century attempt to watch the soul in
the process of creatively forming its world picture can be observed in
Hemsterhuis (1721 – 1790). In this philosopher, whom Herder
considered to be one of the greatest thinkers since Plato, the
struggle of the eighteenth century with the soul impulse of the modern
age becomes demonstrably apparent. The thoughts of Hemsterhuis can be
expressed approximately in the following way. If the human soul could,
through its own power and without external senses, contemplate the
world, the panorama of the world would lie displayed before it in a
single moment. The soul would then be infinite in the infinite. If the
soul, however, had no possibility to live in itself but
depended entirely on the outer senses, then it would be confronted
with a never ending temporal diffusion of the world. The soul would
then live, unconscious of itself, in an ocean of sensual
boundlessness. Between these two poles, which are never reached in
reality but which mark the limits of the inner life as two
possibilities, the soul lives its actual life; it permeates its own
infinity with the boundlessness of the world.
In this chapter the attempt has been made to demonstrate, through the
example of a few thinkers, how the soul impulse of the modern age
flows through the evolution of world conception in the eighteenth
century. In this current live the seeds from which the thought
development of the "Age of Kant and Goethe" grew.
∴
VI. The Age of Kant and Goethe
Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of world and
life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two
men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Kant and Goethe.
Another person who strove for such a clarity in the most forceful
way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted
with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote:
I am living in a new world. . . . Things I had thought could
never be proven to me, for instance, the concept of absolute freedom
and duty, now have been proven to me and I feel much happier because
of it. It is incomprehensible what a high degree of respect for humanity,
what strength this philosophy gives us; what a blessing it is for an
age in which morality had been destroyed in its foundation, and in
which the concept of duty had been struck from all dictionaries.
And when, on the basis of Kant's conception, he had built his own
Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to
Goethe with the words:
I consider you, and always have considered you, to be the
representative of the purest spiritual force of feeling on the level
of development that mankind has reached at the present time. To you
philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is its touchstone.
A similar attitude to both representative spirits was taken by
Schiller. He writes about Kant on October 28, 1794:
I am not at all frightened by the prospect that the law of change,
which shows no mercy to any human or divine work, will also destroy
the form of the Kantian as well as every other philosophy. Its
foundation, however, will not have to fear this destiny, for since the
human race exists, and as long as there has been a reason, this
philosophy has been silently acknowledged and mankind as a whole has
acted in agreement with its principles.
Schiller describes Goethe's conception in a letter addressed to him on
August 23, 1794:
For a long time I have, although from a considerable distance, watched
the course of your spirit, and with ever increasing admiration I have
observed the path you have marked out for yourself. You are seeking
the necessary in nature, but you are seeking it along the most
difficult road, which any spirit weaker than yours would be most
careful to avoid. You take hold of nature as a whole in order to
obtain light in a particular point; in the totality of nature's
various types of phenomena, you seek the explanation for the
individual. . . . Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and
from the cradle been surrounded by an exquisite nature and an
idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened;
perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the first
perception of things you would have caught the form of the Necessary,
and from your first experiences the grand style would have developed
in you. But now, having been born a German, your Greek spirit having
thus been cast into a northern world, you had no choice but that of
becoming a northern artist yourself, or of supplying your imagination
with what it is refused by reality through the help of your power of
thought and thus, to produce a second Greece, as it were, from
within and by means of reason.
Seen from the present age, Kant and Goethe can be considered spirits
in whom the evolution of world conception of modern times reveals
itself as in an important moment of its development. These spirits
experience intensely the enigmatic problems of existence, which have
formerly, in a more preparatory stage, been latent in the substrata of
the life of the soul.
To illustrate the effect that Kant exerted on his age, the statements
of two men who stood at the full height of their time's culture may be
quoted. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788:
For heaven's sake, do buy two books, Kant's Foundation for a
Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason.
Kant is not a light of the world but a complete radiating solar
system all at once.
Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:
Kant undertook the greatest work that philosophical reason has perhaps
ever owed to a single man. . . . Three things remain unmistakably
certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant bestowed on his
nation and the benefit that he brought to speculative thinking. Some
of the things he destroyed will never be raised again, some of those
to which he laid the foundation will never perish; most important of
all, he brought about a reform that has no equal in the whole history
of human thought.
This shows how Kant's contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the
development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself
considered it so important for this development that he judged its
significance equal to that which Copernicus's discovery of the
planetary motion holds for natural science.
Various currents of philosophical development of previous times
continue their effect in Kant's thinking and are transformed in his
thought into questions that determine the character of his world
conception. The reader who feels the characteristic traits in those of
Kant's writings that are most significant for his view is aware of a
special appreciation of Kant for the mathematical mode of thinking as
one of these traits. Kant feels that what is known in the way
mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in
itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is
capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of
mathematics cannot be doubted.
With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern
history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on
Spinoza's realm of thoughts, appears in Kant's mind. Spinoza wants to
construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop
strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science.
Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics
supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human
ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had
also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many
stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a
fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere passive
reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize
such a support yielding force. This Greek attitude toward the world of
thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within
the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support
to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied
by the fulfillment of the postulate that the soul should deal with
thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception.
As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to his conclusion,
"I think, therefore I am," and the statements connected with
it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to
possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same
general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture
for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict
necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance,
which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of
mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself
completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to
be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This
mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the
"ego" for the security it needs, leads this "ego"
to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has
lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual
world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent
existence.
Leibniz's thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul
is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed off in itself.
But this monad experiences only what it contains within itself;
the world order, which presents itself "from without, as it
were," is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which
consists only of monads, the order of which is the predetermined
(pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the
outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to
the human soul, the self-dependent existence in the universe, its
freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world's evolution.
If, however, it means to remain consistent with its basic principle,
it cannot avoid maintaining that everything known by the soul is
only the soul itself, that it is incapable of going outside the
self-conscious ego and that the universe cannot become revealed to the
soul in its truth from without.
For Descartes and for Leibniz, the convictions they had acquired in
their religious education were still effective enough that they
adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following
motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of
their world pictures. Into Descartes's world picture there crept the
conception of a spiritual world that he had obtained through religious
channels. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity
of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture
tended to extinguish his "ego." In Leibniz, religious
impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this
reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no
possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself.
Leibniz believed, nevertheless, that he could assume the existence of
the spiritual world outside the "ego." Spinoza, through a
certain courageous trait of his personality, actually drew the
consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for this
world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced
the self-dependence of this self-consciousness and found his supreme
happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance.
With regard to Kant we must raise the question of how he was compelled
to feel with respect to the currents of world conception, which had
produced its prominent representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and
Leibniz. For all soul impulses that had been at work in these three
were also active in him, and in his soul these impulses effected each
other and caused the riddles of world and mankind with which Kant
found himself confronted. A glance at the life of the spirit in the
Age of Kant informs us of the general trend of Kant's feeling with
respect to these riddles. Significantly, Lessing's (1729 –
1781) attitude toward the questions of world conception is symptomatic
of this intellectual life. Lessing sums up his credo in the words,
"The transformation of revealed truths into truths of reason is
absolutely necessary if the human race is to derive any help from
them." The eighteenth century has been called the century of the
Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood
enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's remark. Kant declared the
enlightenment to be "man's departure from his self-caused bondage
of mind," and as its motto he chose the words, "Have courage
to use your own mind." Even thinkers as prominent as
Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming
rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of
the "self-caused bondage of mind." They did not penetrate to
a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza's
doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep
impression on such spirits.
Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in
the course of this process he had arrived at results that were
entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the
enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significant
since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to
mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the
current of Leibniz's philosophy, which effected the spirits of that
age in the form "developed" by Wolff. From Goethe's
autobiography, Poetry and Truth, we receive an idea of how this
school of thought impressed deeper spirits as it reached them through
the channels of Wolff's conceptions. Goethe tells of the impressions
the lectures of Professor Winckler in Leipzig, given in the spirit of
Wolff, had made on him.
At the beginning, I attended my classes industriously and faithfully,
but the philosophy offered in no way succeeded in enlightening me. It
seemed strange to me that in logic I was to tear apart, isolate and
destroy, as it were, the intellectual operations I had been handling
with the greatest ease since the days of my childhood, in order to
gain an insight into their correct use. I thought I knew just about as
much as the lecturer about the nature of things, the world and God,
and on more than one occasion it seemed to me that there was a
considerable hitch in the matter.
About his occupation with Spinoza's writings, however, the poet tells
us, "I surrendered to this reading and, inspecting myself, I
believed never to have seen the world so distinctly."
There were, however, only a few people who could surrender to
Spinoza's mode of thought as frankly as Goethe. Most readers were led
into deep convicts of world conception by this philosophy. Goethe's
friend, F. H. Jacobi, is typical of them. He believed that he had to
admit that reason, left to its own resources, would not lead to the
doctrines of belief, but to the view at which Spinoza had arrived —
that the world is ruled by eternal, necessary laws. Thus, Jacobi found
himself confronted with an important decision: Either to trust his
reason and abandon the doctrines of his creed or to deny reason the
possibility to lead to the highest insights in order to be able to
retain his belief. He chose the latter. He maintained that man
possessed a direct certainty in his innermost soul, a secure belief
by virtue of which he was capable of feeling the truth of the
conception of a personal God, of the freedom of will and of
immortality, so that these convictions were entirely independent of
the insights of reason that were leaning on logical conclusions, and
had no reference to these things but only to the external things of
nature. In this way, Jacobi deposed the knowledge of reason to
make room for a belief that satisfied the needs of the heart.
Goethe who was not at all pleased by this dethronement of reason,
wrote to his friend, "God has punished you with metaphysics and
placed a thorn in your flesh; he has blessed me with physics. I cling
to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave everything to
you that you call, and may continue to call, religion. Your trust
rests in belief in God; mine in seeing." The
philosophy of the enlightenment ended by confronting the spirits with
the alternative, either to supplant the revealed truths by truths of
reason in the sense of Spinoza, or to declare war on the knowledge of
reason itself.
Kant also found himself confronted with this choice. The attitude he
took and how he made his decision is apparent from the clear account
in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure
Reason.
Now let us assume that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in
its strictest sense) as a property of our will, pleading practical
principles inherent in our reason that would be positively impossible
without the presupposition of freedom. Speculative reason, however,
having proven that this is not even thinkable, the former assumption,
made on behalf of morality, would have to give way to the latter,
whose opposite contains an obvious self-contradiction and therefore
freedom, and with it morality, would have to give way to the
mechanism of nature. But since, as the case lies, for the
possibility of morality nothing more is required than that the idea of
freedom be not contradictory in itself, and may at least be considered
as thinkable without the future necessity of being understood,
such that granting the freedom of a given action would not place
any obstacle into the attempt of considering the same action (see in
other relation) as a mechanism of nature. In this way, the doctrine of
morality maintains its place . . . which could, however, not have
happened if our critical philosophy had not previously enlightened us
about our inevitable ignorance with respect to things in
themselves, restricting all that we can know theoretically to mere
phenomena. In the same way, the positive value of the critical
principles of pure reason can be brought to light with regard to the
concepts of God and of the simple nature of our soul, which I
do, however, leave undiscussed here for the sake of brevity. I cannot
even assume God, freedom and immortality for the use of
practical reason if I do not at the same time deprive
speculative reason of its pretensions to excessive insight. . . .
I, therefore, had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for
belief. . . .
We see here how Kant stands on a similar ground as Jacobi in regard to
knowledge and belief.
The way in which Kant had arrived at his results had led through the
thought world of Hume. In Hume he had found the view that the things
and events of the world in no way reveal connections of thought to the
human soul, that the human mind imagined such connections only through
habit while it is perceiving the things and events of the world
simultaneously in space and successively in time. Kant was impressed
by Hume's opinion according to which the human mind does not receive
from the world what appears to it as knowledge. For Kant, the thought
emerged as a possibility: What is knowledge for the human mind does
not come from the reality of the world.
Through Hume's arguments, Kant was, according to his own confession,
awakened out of the slumber into which he had fallen in following
Wolff's train of ideas. How can reason produce judgments about God,
freedom and immortality if its statement about the simplest events
rests on such insecure foundation? The attack that Kant now had to
undertake against the knowledge of reason was much more far-reaching
than that of Jacobi. He had at least left to knowledge the possibility
of comprehending nature in its necessary connection. Now Kant had
produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science
with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,
which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that
our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a
ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly necessary
mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and
planets to have consolidated, and to have assumed the motions in which
they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant
thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the
fruitfulness of Spinoza's mode of thought, according to which
everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. He was so
convinced of this fruitfulness that in the above-mentioned work he
went so far as to exclaim, "Give me matter, and I will build you
a universe!" The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths
was so firmly established for him that he maintains in his Basic
Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper
sense of the word is only one in which the application of
mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, it would be out of the
question to assume such a certainty for the knowledge of mathematical
natural science, for, in that case, this knowledge would consist of
nothing but thought habits that man had developed because he had seen
the course of the world along certain lines. But there would not be
the slightest guaranty that these thought habits had anything to do
with the law-ordered connection of the things of the world. From his
presupposition Hume draws the conclusion:
The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object
follows another in an uninterrupted succession, but the power of force
which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed from us and
never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body. .
. . . (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. VII, part 1.)
If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of
Hume's view, we must say, "In accordance with the perceived
course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of
thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but
he is not entitled to maintain that this ‘connection’ is
anything but a mere thought habit." Now if this were the case,
then it would be a mere deception of the human reason to imagine that
it could, through itself, gain any insight into the nature of the
world, and Hume could not be contradicted when he says about every
world conception that is gained out of pure reason, "Throw it
into the fire, for it is nothing but deception and illusion."
Kant could not possibly adopt this conclusion of Hume as his own. For
him, the certainty of the knowledge of mathematical natural science
was irrevocably established. He would not allow this certainty to be
touched but was unable to deny that Hume was justified in saying that
we gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and by
forming for ourselves thoughts about their connection that are based
on this observation. If a law-ordered connection is inherent in
things, then we must also extract this connection out of them, but
what we really derive from the things is such that we know no more
about it than that it has been so up to the present time. We do not
know, however, whether such a connection is really so linked up with
the nature of things that it cannot change in any moment. If we form
for ourselves today a world conception based on our observations,
events can happen tomorrow that compel us to form an entirely
different one. If we received all our knowledge from things, there
would be no certainty. Mathematics and natural sciences are a proof of
this. That the world does not give its knowledge to the human
mind was a view Kant was ready to adopt from Hume. That this knowledge
does not contain certainty and truth, however, is a conclusion he was
not willing to draw. Thus, Kant was confronted with the question that
disturbed him deeply: How is it possible that man is in possession of
true and certain knowledge and that he is, nevertheless, incapable of
knowing anything of the reality of the world in itself?
Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human
knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world.
Our reason could never claim certainty about anything in a world lying
spread out around us so that we would be affected by it through
observation only. Therefore, our world can only be one that is
constructed by ourselves: A world that lies within the limits of our
minds. What is going on outside myself as a stone falls and causes a
hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is
enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance
with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind
requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two
is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs
a world for itself. No matter how the world outside ourselves might be
constructed, today's world may not coincide in even a single trait
with that of yesterday. This can never concern us for our mind
produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human
mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the
construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not
contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental
organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this
organization if we want to know what is unconditionally true.
"Reason does not derive its laws from nature but
prescribes them to nature." Kant sums up his conviction in
this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without
an impetus or impression from without. When I perceive the color red,
the perception, "red," is, to be sure, a state, a process
within me, but it is necessary for me to have an occasion to perceive
"red." There are, therefore, "things in
themselves," but we know nothing about them but the fact that
they exist. Everything we observe belongs to the appearances within
us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and
natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of
observation in the human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised
insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything
that we can know refers merely to processes within ourselves, to
appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant
expresses it. But the objects of the highest questions of reason —
God, Freedom and Immortality — can never become phenomena. We see the
appearances within ourselves; whether or not these have their origin
in a divine being we cannot know. We can observe our own psychic
conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is
a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to our knowledge.
About the "things in themselves," our knowledge cannot
produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas
concerning these "things in themselves" are true or false.
If they are announced to us from another direction, there is no
objection to assume their existence, but a knowledge concerning
them is impossible for us. There is only one access to these highest
truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within
us emphatically and distinctly, "You are morally obliged
to do this and that." This "Categorical Imperative"
imposes on us an obligation we are incapable of avoiding. But how
could we comply with this obligation if we were not in the possession
of a free will? We are, to be sure, incapable of knowledge
concerning this quality of our soul, but we must believe
that it is free in order to be capable of following its
inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, we have, therefore, no
certainty of knowledge as we possess it with respect to the objects of
mathematics and natural science, but we have moral certainty
for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads
to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his
destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. Without this possibility
his virtue would be void of meaning and significance. In order that
virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists
who secures this happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be an
intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: God.
Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through
this guarantee, in turn, the existence of God. Because man is a
sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect
world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to
say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which we are
denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by
Kant out of the moral belief in the voice of duty. It was
respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant
when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away
into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully
expressed in his Critique of Practical Reason:
Duty! Thou sublime, great name that containest nothing pleasurable to
bid for our favor, but demandest submission, . . . proclaiming a law
in the presence of which all inclinations are silenced although they
may secretly offer resistance. . . .
That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths
is what Kant considered as his discovery. Man has to renounce all
insight into a supersensible world, but from his moral nature springs
a compensation for this knowledge. No wonder Kant sees the highest
demand on man in the unconditional surrender to duty. If it were not
for duty to open a vista for him beyond the sensual world, man would
be enclosed for his whole life in the world of the senses. No matter,
therefore, what the sensual world demands; it has to give way before
the peremptory claims of duty, and the sensual world cannot, out of
its own initiative, agree with duty. Its own inclination is directed
toward the agreeable, toward pleasure. These aims have to be opposed
by duty in order to enable man to reach his destination. What man does
for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in
selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is the
rigorous task that is taught by Kant's moral philosophy. Do not allow
your will to be directed toward what satisfies you in your egotism,
but so act that the principles of your action can become those of all
men. In surrendering to the moral law, man attains his perfection. The
belief that this moral law has its being above all other events of the
world and is made real within the world by a divine being is, in
Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from the moral life. Man is
to be good, not because of his belief in a God whose will demands the
good; he is to be good only because of his feeling for duty. He is to
believe in God, however, because duty without God would be
meaningless. This is religion within the Limits of Mere Reason.
It is thus that Kant entitles his book on religious world
conception.
The course that the development of the natural sciences took since
they began to flourish has produced in many people the feeling that
every element that does not carry the character of strict necessity
should be eliminated from our thought picture of nature. Kant had this
feeling also. In his Natural History of the Heavens, he had
even outlined such a picture for a certain realm of nature that was in
accordance with this feeling. In a thought picture of this kind, there
is no place for the conception of the self-conscious ego that the man
of the eighteenth century felt necessary. The Platonic and the
Aristotelian thought could be considered as the revelation of nature
in the form in which that idea was accepted in the earlier age, and as
that of the human soul as well. In thought life, nature and the soul
met. From the picture of nature as it seems to be demanded by modern
science, nothing leads to the conception of the self-conscious soul.
Kant had the feeling that the conception of nature offered nothing to
him on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This
certainty had to be created for the modern age had presented the
self-conscious ego as a fact. The possibility had to be created to
acknowledge this fact, but everything that can be recognized as
knowledge by our understanding is devoured by the conception of
nature. Thus, Kant feels himself compelled to provide for the
self-conscious ego as well as for the spiritual world connected with
it, something that is not knowledge but nevertheless supplies
certainty.
Kant established selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit as the
foundation of moral life. In the realm of virtuous action, such a
devotion is not compatible with a surrender to the sensual world.
There is, however, a field in which the sensual is elevated in such a
way that it appears as the immediate expression of the spirit. That is
the field of beauty and art. In our ordinary life we want the sensual
because it excites our desire, our self-seeking interest. We desire
what gives us pleasure, but it is also possible to take a selfless
interest in an object. We can look at it in admiration, filled by a
heavenly delight and this delight can be quite independent of the
possession of the thing. Whether or not I should like to own a
beautiful house that I pass has nothing to do with the
"disinterested pleasure" that I may take in its beauty. If I
eliminate all desire from my feeling, there may still be found as a
remaining element a pleasure that is clearly and exclusively linked to
the beautiful work of art. A pleasure of this kind is an
"esthetic pleasure." The beautiful is to be distinguished
from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable excites my interest
because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to
be made real by me. In confronting the beautiful I have no such
interest that is connected with my person. What is it then, by means
of which my selfless delight is attracted? I can be pleased by a thing
only when its purpose is fulfilled, when it is so organized that it
serves an end. Fitness to purpose pleases; incongruity displeases, but
as I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful thing, as the
mere sight of it satisfies me, it is also not necessary that the
beautiful object really serves a purpose. The purpose is of no
importance to me; what I demand is only the appropriateness. For this
reason, Kant calls an object "beautiful" in which we
perceive fitness to purpose without thinking at the same time of a
definite purpose.
What Kant gives in this exposition is not merely an explanation but
also a justification of art. This is best seen if one remembers Kant's
feeling in regard to his world conception. He expresses his feeling in
profound, beautiful words:
Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing
admiration and awe: The starred heaven above me and the moral law
within me. At first, the sight of an innumerable world quantity
annihilates, as it were, my importance as a living creature, which
must give back to the planet that is a mere dot in the universe the
matter out of which it became what it is, after having been for a
short while (one does not know how) provided with the energy of life.
On second consideration, however, this spectacle infinitely raises my
value as an intelligent being, through my (conscious and free)
personality in which the moral law reveals to me a life that is
independent of the whole world of the senses, at least insofar as this
can be concluded from the purpose-directed destination of my
existence, which is not hemmed in by the conditions and limitations of
this life but extends into the infinite.
The artist now transplants this purpose-directed destination, which,
in reality, rules in the realm of the moral world, into the world of
the senses. Thus, the world of art stands between the realm of the
world of observation that is dominated by the eternal stern laws of
necessity, which the human mind itself has previously laid into this
world, and the realm of free morality in which commands of duty, as
the result of a wise, divine world-order, set out direction and aim.
Between both realms the artist enters with his works. Out of the realm
of the real he takes his material, but he reshapes this material at
the same time in such a fashion that it becomes the bearer of a
purpose-directed harmony as it is found in the realm of freedom. That
is to say, the human spirit feels dissatisfied both with the realms of
external reality, which Kant has in mind when he speaks of the starred
heaven and the innumerable things of the world, and also with the
realm of moral law. Man, therefore, creates a beautiful realm of
"semblance," which combines the rigid necessity of nature
with the element of a free purpose. The beautiful now is not only
found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is
nature-beauty as well as art-beauty. This beauty of nature is there
without man's activity. It seems, therefore, as if there were
observable in the world of reality, not merely the rigid law-ordered
necessity, but a free wisdom-revealing activity as well. The
phenomenon of the beautiful, nevertheless, does not force us to accept
a conception of this kind, for what it offers is the form of a
purpose-directed activity without implying also the thought of a real
purpose. Furthermore, there is not only the phenomenon of integrated
beauty but also that of integrated ugliness. It is, therefore,
possible to assume that in the multitude of natural events, which are
interconnected according to necessary laws, some happen to occur —
accidentally, as it were — in which the human mind observes an analogy
with man's own works of art. As it is not necessary to assume a real
purpose, this element of free purpose, which appears as it were by
accident, is quite sufficient for the esthetic contemplation of
nature.
The situation is different when we meet the entities in nature to
which the purpose concept is not merely to be attributed as accidental
but that carry this purpose really within themselves. There are also
entities of this kind according to Kant's opinion. They are the
organic beings. The necessary law-determined connections are
insufficient to explain them; these, in Spinoza's world conception are
considered not only necessary but sufficient, and by Kant are
considered as those of the human mind itself. For an "organism is
a product of nature in which everything is, at the same time,
purpose, just as it is cause and also effect." An organism,
therefore, cannot be explained merely through rigid laws that operate
with necessity, as is the case with inorganic nature. It is for this
reason that, although Kant himself had, in his General Natural
History and Theory of the Heavens, undertaken the attempt to
"discuss the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire
world structure according to Newtonian principles," he is of the
opinion that a similar attempt, applied to the world of organic
beings, would necessarily fail. In his Critique of Judgment, he
advances the following statement:
It is, namely, absolutely certain that in following merely mechanical
principles of nature we cannot even become sufficiently acquainted
with organisms and their inner possibility, much less explain them.
This is so certain that one can boldly say that it would be absurd for
man to set out on any such attempt or to hope that at some future time
a Newton could arise who would explain as much as the production of a
blade of grass according to natural laws into which no purpose had
brought order and direction. Such a knowledge must, on the contrary,
be altogether denied to man.
Kant's view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the
laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with
another opinion concerning a purpose-directed entity, for a purpose
points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an entity,
that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind
could explain a teleological being in the same way as an entity that
is merely constituted according to natural necessity, it would also
have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into
the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for
the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are
appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of
prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely
independent of the mind. The human mind would, therefore, have to be
not merely a cognitive, but a creative, spirit; its reason would, like
that of God, have to create the things.
Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as
it has been outlined here will understand its strong effect on Kant's
contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact
all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the
human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This
world conception leaves God, freedom and immortality, to the religious
spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory
for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally
certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason
is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws
for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that
suggests a designed order in the world.
But at what price did Kant obtain all this! He transferred all of
nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this
mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and
placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line
of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the
organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural
necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he
tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with
the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be observed
in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a
beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is
sufficient that it stimulates in us the conception of the purposeful
and thereby produces our delight.
Kant not only presents the view that man's knowledge is possible so
far as the law-structure of this knowledge has its origin in the
self-conscious soul, and the certainty concerning this soul comes out
of a source that is different from the one out of which our knowledge
of nature springs. He also points out that our human knowledge has to
resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which
thought itself seems to reign in nature. In taking this position, Kant
confesses by implication that he cannot imagine thoughts that are
conceived as active in the entities of nature themselves. The
recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul not
merely thinks, but in thinking shares the life of nature in its
inner experience. If somebody discovered that thoughts are capable not
merely of being received as perceptions, as is the case with the
Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that it is possible to
experience thoughts by penetrating into the entities of nature,
then this would mean that again a new element had been found that
could enter the picture of nature as well as the conception of the
self-conscious ego. The self-conscious ego by itself does not find a
place in the nature picture of modern times. If the self-conscious
ego, in filling itself with thought, is not merely aware that it forms
this thought, but recognizes in thought a life of which it can
know, "This life can realize itself also outside myself,"
then this self-conscious ego can arrive at the insight, "I hold
within myself something that can also be found without." The
evolution of modern world conception thus urges man on to the step: To
find the thought in the self-conscious ego that is felt to be alive.
This step Kant did not take; Goethe did.
* * *
In all essential points, Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant's
conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant
published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his
creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man
completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing
absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man's lawgiver as well.
Kant drew all nature into the human mind. Goethe considered everything
as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the
natural world order:
Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving
her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us
into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls
away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms. . . . A11 men are
in her and she is in them. . . . Even the most unnatural is Nature;
even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius. . . .We obey
her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even
when we mean to work against her. . . . Nature is everything. .
. . She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself. . . . She
has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust
myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her
work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it
all, true and false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the
merit.
This is the polar opposite to Kant's world conception. According to
Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the
human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It
is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his
essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy:
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world.
I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some
attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our
own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the
outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I
philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with an
unconscious naiveté, really believing that I saw my opinion before my
very eyes.
We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe's attitude toward Kant,
in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment
about the philosopher of Koenigsberg. This opposition between Kant and
himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had
engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do.
In the above-mentioned essay he says, "It was the introductory
passages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not
venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by
my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered."
Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one
occasion in a passage that has been published only from the papers of
the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische
Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of
Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he "considers the
subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the
point where the subjective and the objective meet with great
penetration but not quite correctly." Goethe just happens
to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in
the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit
of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it
reveals its secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but
it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe's
conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy
concerning Kant's world view "was brought up, I liked to take the
side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all
those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our
knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate
from experience." For Goethe believed that the eternal laws
according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit,
but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the
spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself.
It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller,
under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation
between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe
expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance
with Schiller:
Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which
elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It
developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his
character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self
determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had
certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as
self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from
the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in
the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations.
In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to
his difference with Schiller in these words. "He preached the
gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature
infringed upon." There was, indeed, an element of Kant's mode of
conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are
right in accepting what he himself said with regard to some
conversations he had with the followers of Kant. "They heard what
I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way.
More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to
me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure,
analogous to that of Kant, but in a curious fashion indeed."
Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of
the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature's
order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested
him during his Italian journey he wrote, "Like the highest works
of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according
to true and natural laws. Everything that is arbitrary
and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here
is God." When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely,
"according to the laws that Nature herself follows," then
his works contain the same godly element that is to be found in nature
itself. For Goethe, art is "a manifestation of secret natural
laws." What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher
level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of
nature, for "as man finds himself placed at the highest point of
nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has
again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own
existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues,
produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself
as far as to the production of the work of art." Everything is
nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man's works of art,
and everything in this nature is ruled by the same "eternal,
necessary and thereby divine laws," such that "the godhead
itself could not change anything about it" (Poetry and Truth,
Book XVI).
When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi's book, On Things Divine, it
made him "uneasy."
How could the book of a so warmly beloved friend, in which I was to
see the thesis developed that nature conceals God, be welcome to me!
My mode of world conception — purely felt, deeply-seated, inborn and
practised daily as it was — had taught me inviolably to see God in
Nature, Nature in God, and this to such an extent that this world
view formed the basis of my entire existence. Under these
circumstances, was not such a strange, one-sided and narrow-minded
thesis to estrange me in spirit from this most noble man for whose
heart I felt love and veneration? I did not, however, allow my painful
vexation to linger with me but took refuge in my old asylum, finding
my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics,
and as my inner education had progressed in the meantime, to my
astonishment I became aware of many things that revealed themselves to
me in a new and different light and affected me with a peculiar
freshness.
The realm of necessity in Spinoza's sense is a realm of inner
necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man
with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this
chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of
law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides
of its essence. "The sun sheds its light over those good and
evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine
brightly." Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature,
Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic
beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his
moral order and his art.
What God would just push the world from without,
And let it run in circles on his finger?
Him it behooves to move it in its core,
Be close to nature, hug her to her breast
So that what lives and weaves in him and is,
Will never lack his power and his spirit.
In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had
written the lines, "Into nature's sacred center, no created
spirits enter," Goethe turns with his sharpest words:
"Into nature's sacred center,"
O, Philistine past compare
"No created spirits enter"
Wished you never would remind
Me and all those of my kind
Of this shallow verbal banter.
We think we are everywhere
With every step in Nature's care.
"Happy he to whom she just
Shows her dry external crust."
I hear that repeated these sixty years
Curse under my breath so no one hears,
And to myself I a thousand times tell:
Nature has neither core nor shell,
Everything yields she gladly and well.
Nature is at our beck and call
Nature herself is one and all.
Better search yourself once more
Whether you be crust or core.
In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the
difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had
ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to
explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless
nature is explained. Concerning the various species in the plant
world, the leading botanist of that time, Linné, states that there
were as many species as there "have been created fundamentally
different forms." A botanist who holds such an opinion can only
attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to
differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not
consent to such a view of nature. "What Linnaeus wanted with
might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as
striving into union." Goethe searched for an entity that was
common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general
archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.
The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and
pots, here grow merrily and vigorously under the open sky, and while
they thus fulfill their destination, they become clearer to us. At the
sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and
favorite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd
the archetypal plant (Urpflanze)? There really must be such a
thing. How should I otherwise know that this or that given form is a
plant if they had not all been designed after one model?
On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this
archetypal plant by saying, "It is going to become the strangest
creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me. With
this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing
plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is
to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could
exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a
picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and
necessity." As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the
Heavens, exclaims, "Give me matter and I will build you a
world out of it," because he has gained insight into the
law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe pronounces
here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent
plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one
would be in possession of the law of their origin and their
development. What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic
nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to
necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the
letter in which he tells Herder about his discovery of the archetypal
plant, he adds, "The same law will be applicable to all other
living beings," and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his
persevering studies of the animal world led him to "feel free to
maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see
fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man,
were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only
varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms
daily through propagation."
In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full
opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky "adventure of
reason," should reason attempt to explain the living with regard
to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit
for such an explanation.
It is of infinite importance for reason not to eliminate the mechanism
of nature in its productions, and not to pass by this idea in their
explanation because without it no insight into the nature of things
can be obtained. Even if it is admitted to us that the highest
architect has created the forms of nature as they have been forever,
or predetermined those that form according to the same model in the
course of their development, our knowledge of nature would thereby
nevertheless not be furthered in the slightest degree because we do
not know at all the mode of action and the ideas of this being
that are to contain the principles of the possibility of the
natural beings and therefore cannot explain nature by means of them
from above.
Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:
If, in the moral realm through faith in God, virtue and immortality,
we are to lift ourselves into the higher region and to approach the
first Being, we should be in the same situation in the intellectual
field, so that we, through the contemplation of an ever creative
nature, should make ourselves worthy of a spiritual participation in
its productions. As I had at first unconsciously and, following an
inner instinct, insisted upon and relentlessly striven toward the
archetypal, the typical, as I had even succeeded in constructing an
appropriate picture, there was now nothing to keep me from
courageously risking the adventure of reason, as the old man
from Koenigsberg himself calls it.
In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea "with
which one can . . . invent plants to infinity, but they must be
consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless
they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a
picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and
necessity." Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not
merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the
self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego
experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both
self-contained and at the same time appertaining to the external
world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the
models of the creative powers. With this step the self-conscious ego
can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through
which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it
feels itself in union with the creative entities of nature. The
world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the
self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this
ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a
life-saturated reality. The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is
contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to
life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was
aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea.
In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea.
Goethe says of Kant's Critique of Judgment that he "owed a
most happy period of his life to this book." "The great
leading thoughts of this work were quite analogous to my previous
creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the
unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly
expressed in this book." Yet, this statement of Goethe must not
deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in
which it occurs, we also read, "Passionately stimulated, I
proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did
not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with
the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for
the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I
expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had
read."
A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to
Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole
universe reveals its law structure — "from the brick that falls
from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you
and that you convey." For "all effects of whatever kind they
may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most
continuous fashion and flow into one another."
A brick is loosened from a roof. We ordinarily call this
accidental. It hits the shoulder of a passerby, one would say
mechanically, but not completely mechanically; it follows the
laws of gravity and so its effect is physical. The torn vessels
of living tissue immediately cease to function; at the same moment,
the fluids act chemically, their elementary qualities emerge.
But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and
tries to restore itself. In the meantime, the whole human being is
more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. Upon
regaining consciousness the person feels ethically deeply hurt,
deploring the interrupted activity of whatever kind it might have
been, for man will only reluctantly yield to patience. Religiously,
however, it will be easy for him to ascribe this incident to
Providence, to consider it a prevention against a greater evil, as
a preparation for a good of a higher order. This may be
sufficient for the patient, but the recovered man arises genially,
trusts in God and in himself and feels himself saved. He may well
seize upon the accidental and turn it to his own advantage, thus
beginning a new and eternally fresh cycle of life.
Thus, with the example of a fallen brick Goethe illustrates the
interconnection of all kinds of natural effects. It would be an
explanation in Goethe's sense if one could also derive their strictly
law-determined interconnection out of one root.
Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most
significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the
attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was
fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world
conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy;
Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy
nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in
Goethe he could only turn "to the representative of the purest
spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity
that has been reached at the present time." But he had the
opinion of Kant "that no human mind can advance further than to
the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of
Judgment." Whoever penetrates into the world conception of
Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naiveté, will,
nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form
of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the
full light of consciousness. For this reason, his mode of conception
finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at
the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant's position with
which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they
begin to settle their account.
No matter how great Kant's influence was, his contemporaries could not
help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become
satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after
a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe's case. With Kant,
the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without
transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional
veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact
"that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither
presented nor proved it." And further:
This wonderful, unique man had either a divination for the truth
without being aware of the reasons for it, or he estimated his
contemporaries as insufficient to have these reasons conveyed to them,
or, again, he was reluctant during his lifetime to attract the
superhuman veneration that sooner or later would have been bestowed
upon him. No one has understood him as yet, and nobody will succeed in
doing so who does not arrive at Kant's results in following his own
ways; when it does happen, the world really will be astonished.
But I know just as certainly that Kant had such a system in mind,
that all statements that he actually did express are fragments and
results of this system, and have meaning and consistence only under
this presupposition.
For, if this were not the case, Fichte would "be more inclined to
consider the Critique of Pure Reason the product of the
strangest accident than as the work of a mind."
Other contemporaries also judged Kant's world of ideas to be
insufficient. Lichtenberg, one of the most brilliant and at the
same time most independent minds of the second half of the eighteenth
century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress
significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says,
"What does it mean to think in Kant's spirit? I believe it
means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward
the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of
the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the
aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they
ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What
is and must be subjective was taken as objective."
On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, "Should it
really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything
about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our
ideas of God and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves
his net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who
admire us because of our ideas of God and immortality just as we
admire the spider and silkworm?"
One could, however, raise a much more significant objection. If it is
correct that the law of human reason refers only to the inner worlds
of the mind, how do we then manage even to speak of things outside
ourselves at all? In that case, we should have to be completely caught
in the cobweb of our inner world. An objection of this kind is raised
by G. E. Schulze (1761 – 1833) in his book, Aenesidemus,
which appeared anonymously in 1792. In it he maintains that all
our knowledge is nothing but mere conceptions and we could in
no way go beyond the world of our inner thought pictures. Kant's
moral truths are also finally refuted with this step, for if
not even the possibility to go beyond the inner world is thinkable,
then it is also impossible that a moral voice could lead us into such
a world that is impossible to think. In this way, a new doubt with
regard to all truths develops out of Kant's view, and the philosophy
of criticism is turned into scepticism.
One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is S. Maimon
(1753 – 1800), who, from 1790 on, wrote several books that were
under the influence of Kant and Schulze. In them he defended with
complete determination the view that, because of the very nature of
our cognitive faculty, we are not permitted to speak of the existence
of external objects. Another disciple of Kant, Jacob Sigismund
Beck, went even so far as to maintain that Kant himself had really
not assumed things outside ourselves and that it was nothing but a
misunderstanding if such a conception was ascribed to him.
One thing is certain; Kant offered his contemporaries innumerable
points for attack and interpretations. Precisely through his
unclarities and contradictions, he became the father of the classical
German world conceptions of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel,
Herbart and Schleiermacher. His unclarities became new questions for
them. No matter how he endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make
place for belief, the human spirit can confess to be satisfied in the
true sense of the word only through knowledge, through cognition. So
it came to pass that Kant's successors strove to restore knowledge to
its full rights again, that they attempted to settle through
knowledge the highest needs of man.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814) seemed to be chosen by
nature to continue Kant's work in this direction. Fichte confessed,
"The love of knowledge and especially speculative knowledge, when
it has laid hold on man, occupies him to such an extent that no other
wish is left in him but that to pursue it with complete calm and
concentration." Fichte can be called an enthusiast of world
conception. Through this enthusiasm he must have laid a charm on his
contemporaries and especially on his students. Forberg, who was one of
his disciples, tells us:
In his public addresses his speech rushes powerfully on like a
thunderstorm that unloads its fire in individual strokes of lightning;
he lifts the soul up; he means to produce not only good men but great
men; his eye is stern; his step bold; through his philosophy he
intends to lead the spirit of the age; his imagination is not flowery,
but strong and powerful; his pictures are not graceful but bold and
great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of his object and he
moves in the realm of concepts with an ease that betrays that he not
only lives in this invisible land, but rules there.
The most outstanding trait in Fichte's personality is the grand,
serious style of his life conception. He measures everything by
the highest standards. In describing the calling of the writer, for
instance, he says:
The idea itself must speak, not the writer. All his arbitrary traits,
his whole individuality, all the manner and art peculiar to himself
must have died in his utterances so that the manner and art of his
idea alone may live, the highest life it can obtain in this language
and this age. Since he is free from the obligations of the oral
teacher, he is also free to conform to the-receptivity of others
without their excuses. He has not a given reader in mind but
postulates the one who reads him, laying down the law as to how he
must do so.
But the work of the writer is a work for eternity. Let future ages
swing up to a higher level in the science he has deposited in his
work. What he has laid down in his book is not only the science, but
the definite and perfect character of an age in regard to this
science, and this will retain its interest as long as there are human
beings in this world. Independent of all vicissitude, his writing
speaks in all ages to all men who are capable of bringing his letters
to life and who are stirred by his message, elevated and ennobled
until the end of the world.
A man speaks in these words who is aware of his call as a spiritual
leader of his age, and who seriously means what he says in the preface
to his Doctrine of Science: "My person is of no importance
at all, but Truth is of all importance for ‘I am a priest of
Truth’." We can understand that a man who, like him, lives
"in the Kingdom of Truth" does not merely mean to guide
others to an understanding, but that he intended to force
them to it. Thus, he could give one of his writings the title,
A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real
Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to
Understand. Fichte is a personality who believes that, in order to
walk life's course, he has no need of the real world and its facts;
rather, he keeps his eyes riveted on the world of idea. He holds those
in low esteem who do not understand such an idealistic attitude of
spirit.
While in the narrow horizon that is given through ordinary experience,
people think and judge more objectively and correctly than perhaps
ever before, most are, nevertheless, completely confused and dazzled
as soon as they are to go even one step further. Where it is
impossible to rekindle the once extinguished spark of the higher
genius, one has to leave them within the circle of their horizon and,
insofar as they are useful and necessary in this circle, one can grant
them their value in and for it without curtailment. But when they now
demand of us to bring down to their level everything they, themselves,
cannot reach up to, when they, for instance, demand that everything
printed should be useful as a cookbook, or as a textbook of
arithmetic, or as a book of general regulations and orders, and then
decry everything that cannot be used in such a fashion, then they are
very wrong indeed.
We know as well, and possibly better than they, that ideals cannot be
presented in the real world. What we maintain, however, is that the
reality has to be judged by them, to be modified through those who
feel the necessary strength for it within themselves. Suppose they
could not convince themselves of this necessity. Then they would lose
very little of what they are by nature anyway, and humanity would lose
nothing at all. Their decision would merely make clear that they alone
are not counted on in the scheme of providence for mankind's
perfection. Providence will doubtless continue to pursue its course;
we commend those people, however, to the care of a kind nature, to
supply them in due time with rain and sunshine, with wholesome food
and an undisturbed circulation of their gastric juices, at the same
time endowing them with clever thoughts!
Fichte wrote these words in the preface to the publication of the
lectures in which he had spoken to the students of Jena on the
Destination of the Scholar. Views like those of Fichte have
their origin in a great energy of the soul, giving sureness for
knowledge of world and life. Fichte had blunt words for all those who
did not feel the strength in themselves for such a sureness. When the
philosopher, Reinhold, ventured the statement that the inner voice of
man could also be in error, Fichte replied, "You say the
philosopher should entertain the thought that he, as an individual,
could also be mistaken and that he, therefore, could and should learn
from others. Do you know whose thought mood you are describing with
these words? That of a man who has never in his whole life been really
convinced of something." To this vigorous personality,
whose eyes were entirely directed to the inner life, it was repugnant
to search anywhere else for a world conception, the highest aim man
can obtain, except in his inner life. "All culture should be the
exercise of all faculties toward the one purpose of complete
freedom, that is to say, of the complete independence from everything
that is not we, ourselves, our pure Self (reason, moral law), for
only this is ours. . . ."
This is Fichte's judgment in his Contributions Toward the
Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution,
which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in
man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this one
purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we,
ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were
dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been
predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our
soul and our duties are, and that we thereby procured a
knowledge afterwards out of such an accomplished fact? If we
are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the
knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into
existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something.
For this reason, we cannot receive the highest truths. We must
create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can
only place something at the summit of his world conception that
obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of
the external world, "It is," we are doing so because
we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of
another being. What this other being is does not depend on us.
We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of
perception toward it. We should never know what "red,"
"warm," "cold" is, if we did not know it through
perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing,
nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, "They
are." What they are is what they tell us. This is
entirely different in regard to our own existence. Man does not say to
himself, "It is," but, "I am." He says, thereby,
not only that he is, but also what he is, namely, an
"I." Only another being could say concerning me,
"It is." This is, in fact, what another being would have
to say, for even in the case that this other being should have
created me, it could not say concerning my existence, "I
am." The statement, "I am," loses all meaning if it is
not uttered by the being itself that speaks about its own existence.
There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as
"I" except myself. This recognition of myself as an
"I," therefore, must be my own original action. No being
outside myself can have influence on this.
At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw
himself completely independent of every "foreign" entity. A
God could create me, but he would have to leave it to myself to
recognize myself as an "I." I give my ego-consciousness to
myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world
conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters
stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this
existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with
myself. They must become part of my "I" if I am to recognize
an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of
myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are
there for me. What I can say is only, my "self" feels
"red," my "self' feels "warm." Just as truly
as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my
feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I
can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external
world.
For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this
way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego,
projected by the ego's imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own
"self" the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived
the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent
external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite
understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external
world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called
knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing
through its knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all
such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with
itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through
what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it
accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by
itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world.
They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and
when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect,
even if I no longer participate in its action. What I know has being
only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a moral world
order independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we
derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral
world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if
existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is
something only for the ego, but this world order must be
something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we
cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, believe it.
In this manner Fichte also goes beyond knowledge and arrives at
a belief. Compared to this belief, all knowledge is as dream to
reality. The ego itself has only such a dream existence as long as it
contemplates itself. It makes itself a picture of itself, which
does not have to be anything but a passing picture; it is action
alone that remains. Fichte describes this dream life of the world
with significant words in his Vocation of Man:
There is nowhere anything permanent, neither within myself nor
outside, but there is only a never ceasing change. Nowhere do I know
of any being, not even of my own being. I, myself, do
not know at all, and I am not. Pictures are; they are the only
thing that is, and they know of themselves after the fashion of
pictures; hovering pictures that pass by, without anything that
they pass: interconnected through pictures of pictures, pictures
without anything that is depicted in them, without meaning and
purpose. I, myself, am one of these pictures; in fact, I am not even
that but only a confused picture of pictures. All reality is changed
into a strange dream without a life of which to dream, without a
spirit to do the dreaming; it changes into a dream, which is held
together by a dream of itself. Seeing — this is the dream;
thinking — the source of all beings, of all reality, which I
imagine, of my being, my strength of my purposes. This is
the dream of that dream.
In what a different light the moral world order, the world of belief,
appears to Fichte:
My will is to exert its effect absolutely through itself, without any
tool that would only weaken its expression, in a completely
homogeneous sphere, as reason upon reason, as spirit upon what is also
spirit; in a sphere to which, however, my will is not to give
the law of life, of activity, of progression, but which contains
this in itself. My will, then, is to exert itself upon self-active
reason, but self-active reason is will. The law of the supersensible
world accordingly would be a will. . . . This sublime will,
therefore, does not pursue its course separated from the rest of the
world of reason in a detached fashion. There is a spiritual bond
between the sublime will and all finite rational beings, and the
sublime will itself is this spiritual bond within the world of
reason. . . . I hide my face before you and I lay my hands on my lips.
What you are for yourself and how you appear to yourself, I can never
know as surely as I can never become you. After having lived through a
thousand spirit worlds a thousand times, I shall be able to understand
you as little as now in this house of clay. What I understand becomes
finite merely through my understanding it, and the finite can never be
changed into the infinite, not even through an infinite growth and
elevation. You are separated from the finite not by a difference in
degree but in kind. Through that gradation they will make you into a
greater and greater man, but never into God, into the infinite that is
capable of no measure.
Because knowledge is a dream and the moral world order is the only
true reality for Fichte, he places the life through which man
participates in the moral world order higher than knowledge, the
contemplation of things. "Nothing," so Fichte maintains,
"has unconditional value and significance except life; everything
else, for instance thinking, poetic imagination and knowledge, has
value only insofar as it refers in some way to the living, insofar as
it proceeds from it or means to turn back into it."
This is the fundamental ethical trait in Fichte's personality, which
extinguished or reduced in significance everything in his world
conception that does not directly tend toward the moral destination of
man. He meant to establish the highest, the purest aims and standards
for life, and for this purpose he refused to be distracted by any
process of knowledge that might discover contradictions with the
natural world order in these aims. Goethe made the statement,
"The active person is always without conscience; no one has
conscience except the onlooker." He means to say that the
contemplative man estimates everything in its true, real value,
understanding and recognizing everything in its own proper place. The
active man, however, is, above everything else, bent on seeing his
demands fulfilled; he is not concerned with the question of whether or
not he thereby encroaches upon the rights of things. Fichte was, above
all, concerned with action; he was, however, unwilling to be charged
by contemplation with lack of conscience. He, therefore, denied the
value of contemplation.
To effect life immediately — this was Fichte's continuous endeavor. He
felt most satisfied when he believed that his words could become
action in others. It is under the influence of this ardent desire that
he composed the following works. Demand to the Princess of Europe
to Return the Freedom of Thought, Which They Have Heretofore
Suppressed. Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness 1792;
Contributions Toward the Correction of the Public Judgment Concerning
the French Revolution 1793. This ardent desire also caused him to
give his powerful speeches, Outline of the Present Age
Presented in Lectures in Berlin in 1804 – 5; Direction Toward
the Beatific Life or Doctrine of Religion, Lectures given in
Berlin in 1806; finally, his Speeches to the German Nation,
1808.
Unconditional surrender to the moral world order, action that springs
out of the deepest core of man's nature: These are the demands through
which life obtains value and meaning. This view runs through all of
Fichte's speeches and writings as the basic theme. In his Outline
of the Present Age, he reprimands this age with flaming words for
its egotism. He claims that everybody is only following the path
prescribed by his lower desires, but these desires lead him away from
the great totality that comprises the human community in moral
harmony. Such an age must needs lead those who live in its tendency
into decline and destruction. What Fichte meant to enliven in the
human soul was the sense of duty and obligation.
In this fashion, Fichte attempted to exert a formative influence on
the life of his time with his ideas because he saw these ideas as
vigorously enlivened by the consciousness that man derives the highest
content of his soul life from a world to which he can obtain access by
settling his account with his "ego" all by himself. In so
doing man feels himself in his true vocation. From such a conviction,
Fichte coins the words, "I, myself, and my necessary purpose are
the supersensible."
To be aware of himself as consciously living in the supersensible is,
according to Fichte, an experience of which man is capable. When he
arrives at this experience, he then knows the "I" within
himself, and it is only through this act that he becomes a
philosopher. This experience, to be sure, cannot be "proven"
to somebody who is unwilling to undergo it himself. How little
Fichte considers such a "proof" possible is documented by
expressions like, "The gift of a philosopher is inborn, furthered
through education and then obtained by self-education, but there is no
human art to make philosophers. For this reason, philosophy
expects few proselytes among those men who are already formed,
polished and perfected. . . ."
Fichte is intent on finding a soul constitution through which the
human "ego" can experience itself. The knowledge of nature
seems unsuitable to him to reveal anything of the essence of the
"ego." From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century,
thinkers arose who were concerned with the question: What element
could be found in the picture of nature by means of which the human
being could become explainable in this picture? Goethe did not see the
question in this way. He felt a spiritual nature behind the externally
manifested one. For him, the human soul is capable of experiences
through which it lives not only in the externally manifested, but
within the creative forces. Goethe was in quest of the idea, as were
the Greeks, but he did not look for it as perceptible idea. He meant
to find it in participating in the world processes through
inner experience where these can no longer be perceived. Goethe
searched in the soul for the life of nature. Fichte also
searched in the soul itself, but he did not focus his search where
nature lives in the soul but immediately where the soul feels its own
life kindled without regard to any other world processes and world
entities with which this life might be connected. With Fichte, a world
conception arose that exhausted all its endeavor in the attempt to
find an inner soul life that compared to the thought life of the
Greeks, as did their thought life to the picture conception of the age
before them. In Fichte, thought becomes an experience of the ego as
the picture had become thought with the Greek thinkers. With Fichte,
world conception is ready to experience self-consciousness;
with Plato and Aristotle, it had arrived at the point to think
soul consciousness.
* * *
Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make place for belief, so
Fichte declared knowledge to be mere appearance in order to open the
gates for living action, for moral activity. A similar attempt was
also made by Schiller. Only in his case, the part that was
claimed by belief in Kant's philosophy, and by action in that of
Fichte, was now occupied by beauty. Schiller's significance in
the development of world conception is usually underestimated. Goethe
had to complain that he was not recognized as a natural scientist just
because people had become accustomed to take him as a poet, and those
who penetrate into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he
is appreciated so little by the scholars who deal with the history of
world conception, because Schiller's field is considered to be limited
to the realm of poetry.
As a thoroughly self-dependent thinker, Schiller takes his attitude
toward Kant, who had been so stimulating and thought-provoking to him.
The loftiness of the moral belief to which Kant meant to lift man was
highly appreciated by the poet who, in his Robbers, and
Cabal and Love, had held a mirror to the corruption of his
time. But he asked himself the question: Should it indeed be a
necessary truth that man can be lifted to the height of "the
categorical imperative" only through the struggle against his
desires and urges? Kant wanted to ascribe to the sensual nature of man
only the inclination toward the low, the self-seeking, the
gratification of the senses, and only he who lifted himself above the
sensual nature, who mortified the flesh and who alone allowed the pure
spiritual voice of duty to speak within him: Only he could be
virtuous. Thus, Kant debased the natural man in order to be able to
elevate the moral man so much the higher. To Schiller this judgment
seemed to contain something that was unworthy of man. Should it not be
possible to ennoble the impulses of man to become in themselves
inclined toward the life of duty and morality? They would then not
have to be suppressed to become morally effective. Schiller,
therefore, opposes Kant's rigorous demand of duty in the epigram:
Scruples of Conscience.
Gladly I serve my friends, but, alas, I do so with pleasure
And so I oftentimes grieve that I lack virtue indeed.
Decision.
There is no better advice; you must try to despise them
And with disgust you must do strictly as duty commands.
Schiller attempted to dissolve these "scruples of
conscience" in his own fashion. There are actually two impulses
ruling in man: The impulses of the sensual desire and the impulse of
reason. If man surrenders to the sensual impulse, he is a plaything of
his desires and passions, in short, of his egoism. If he gives himself
completely up to the impulses of reason, he is a slave of its rigorous
commands, its inexorable logic, its categorical imperative. A man who
wants to live exclusively for the sensual impulse must silence
reason; a man who wants to serve reason only must mortify
sensuality. If the former, nevertheless, listens to the voice of
reason, he will yield to it only reluctantly against his own will; if
the latter observes the call of his desires, he feels them as a burden
on his path of virtue. The physical nature of man and his spiritual
character then seem to live in a fateful discord. Is there no state in
man in which both the impulses, the sensual and the spiritual, live in
harmony? Schiller's answer to this question is positive. There is,
indeed, such a state in man. It is the state in which the beautiful
is created and enjoyed. He who creates a work of art follows a
free impulse of nature. He follows an inclination in doing so, but it
is not physical passion that drives him. It is imagination; it is the
spirit. This also holds for a man who surrenders to the enjoyment of a
work of art. The work of art, while it affects his sensuality,
satisfies his spirit at the same time. Man can yield to his desires
without observing the higher laws of the spirit; he can comply with
his duties without paying attention to sensuality. A beautiful work of
art affects his delight without awakening his desires, and it
transports him into a world in which he abides by virtue of his own
disposition. Man is comparable to a child in this state, following his
inclinations in his actions without asking if they run counter to the
laws of reason. "The sensual man is led through beauty . . . into
thinking; through beauty, the spiritual man is led back to matter,
returned to the world of the senses" (Letters on the Esthetic
Education of Man; Letter 18).
The lofty freedom and equanimity of the spirit, combined with strength
and vigor is the mood in which we should part from a genuine work of
art; there is no surer test of its true esthetic quality. If, after an
enjoyment of this kind, we find ourselves inclined to some particular
sentiment or course of action, but awkward and ill at ease for
another, then this can serve as infallible proof that we have not
experienced a pure esthetic effect; this may be caused by the
object or our mode of approach, or (as is almost always the case) by
both causes simultaneously. (Letter 22.)
As man is, through beauty, neither the slave of sensuality nor of
reason, but because through its mediation both factors contribute
their effect in a balanced cooperation in man's soul, Schiller
compares the instinct for beauty with the child's impulse who, in his
play, does not submit his spirit to the laws of reason, but employs it
freely according to his inclination. It is for this reason that
Schiller calls the impulse for beauty, play-impulse:
In relation to the agreeable, to the good, to the perfect, man is
only serious, but he plays with beauty. In this respect, to be
sure, we must not think of the games that go on in real life and that
ordinarily are concerned with material objects, but in real life we
should also search in vain for the beauty that is meant here. The
beauty existing in reality is on the same level as the play-impulse in
the real world, but through the ideal of beauty, which is upheld by
reason, an ideal is also demanded of the play-impulse that man is to
consider wherever he plays. (Letter 15.)
In the realization of this ideal play-impulse, man finds the reality
of freedom. Now, he no longer obeys reason, nor does he
follow sensual inclinations any longer. He now acts from inclination
as if the spring of his action were reason. "Man shall only play
with beauty and it is only with beauty that he shall play. . To
state it without further reserve, man plays only when he is human in
the full sense of the word and he is only wholly human when he is
playing." Schiller could also have said: In play man is
free; in following the command of duty, and in yielding to
sensuality, he is unfree. If man wants to be human in the full
meaning of the word, and also with regard to his moral actions, that
is to say, if he really wants to be free, then he must live in the
same relation to his virtues as he does to beauty. He must ennoble his
inclinations into virtues and must be so permeated by his virtues that
he feels no other inclination than that of following them. A man who
has established this harmony between inclination and duty can, in
every moment, count on the morality of his actions as a matter of
course.
From this viewpoint, one can also look at man's social life. A man who
follows his sensual desires is self-seeking. He would always be bent
on his own well-being if the state did not regulate the social
intercourse through laws of reason. The free man accomplishes through
his own impulse what the state must demand of the self-seeking. In a
community of free men no compulsory laws are necessary.
In the midst of the fearful world of forces, and in the awe-demanding
sanctuary of laws, the esthetic formative impulse is imperceptibly
building a third delightful realm of play and appearances in which man
is released from the fetters of all circumstances and freed from
everything that is called compulsion, both in the physical and in the
moral world. (Letter 27.)
This realm extends upward as far as the region where reason rules with
unconditional necessity and where all matter ceases; it stretches
below as far as the world in which the force of nature holds sway with
blind compulsion.
Thus, Schiller considers a moral realm as an ideal in which the temper
of virtue rules with the same ease and freedom as the esthetic taste
governs in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty
the model of a perfect moral social order in which man is liberated in
every direction. Schiller closes the beautiful essay in which he
proclaims this ideal with the question of whether such an order had
anywhere been realized. He answers with the words:
As a need, it exists in every delicately attuned soul; as an actuality
it can probably only be found, like the pure church and the pure
republic, in a few select circles where, not the thoughtless imitation
of heterogeneous customs, but the inherent beautiful nature guides the
demeanor, where man goes with undismayed simplicity and undisturbed
innocence through the most complicated situations without the need of
offending the freedom of others nor of defending his own, without need
of offending his dignity in order to show charm and grace.
In this virtue refined into beauty, Schiller found a mediation between
the world conceptions of Kant and Goethe. No matter how great the
attraction that Schiller had found in Kant when the latter had
defended the ideal of a pure humanity against the prevailing moral
order, when Schiller became more intimately acquainted with Goethe, he
became an admirer of Goethe's view of world and life. Schiller's mind,
always relentlessly striving for the purest clarity of thought, was
not satisfied before he had succeeded in penetrating also conceptually
into this wisdom of Goethe. The high satisfaction Goethe derived from
his view of beauty and art, and also for his conduct of life,
attracted Schiller more and more to the mode of Goethe's conception.
In the letter in which Schiller thanks Goethe for sending him his
Wilhelm Meister, he says:
I cannot express to you how painfully I am impressed when I turn from
a product of this kind to the bustle of philosophy. In the one world
everything is so serene, so alive, so harmoniously dissolved, so truly
human; in the other, everything is so rigorous, so rigid and abstract,
so unnatural, because nature is always nothing but synthesis and
philosophy is antithesis. I may claim, to be sure, to have in all my
speculations remained as faithful to nature as is compatible with the
concept of analysis; I may, indeed, have remained more faithful to her
than our Kantians considered permissible and possible. I feel,
nevertheless, the infinite distance between life and reflection, and
in such a melancholy moment I cannot help considering as a defect in
my nature what, in a more cheerful hour, I must regard as merely a
trait inherent in the nature of things. In the meantime, I am certain
of this at least: The poet is the only true man and, compared
to him, the best philosopher is merely a caricature.
This judgment of Schiller can only refer to the Kantian philosophy
with which he had had his experiences. In many respects, it estranges
man from nature. It approaches nature with no confidence in it but
recognizes as valid truth only what is derived from man's own mental
organization. Through this trait all judgments of that philosophy seem
to lack the lively content and color so characteristic of everything
that has its source in the immediate experience of nature's events and
things themselves. This philosophy moves in bloodless, gray and cold
abstractions. It has sacrificed the warmth we derive from the
immediate touch with things and beings and has exchanged the frigidity
of its abstract concepts for it. In the field of morality, also,
Kant's world conception presents the same antagonism to nature. The
duty-concept of pure reason is regarded as its highest aims. What man
loves, what his inclinations tend to, everything in man's being that
is immediately rooted in man's nature, must be subordinated to this
ideal of duty. Kant goes even as far as the realm of beauty to
extinguish the share that man must have in it according to his
original sensations and feelings. The beautiful is to produce a
delight that is completely "free from interest." Compare
that with how devoted, how really interested Schiller
approaches a work in which he admires the highest stage of artistic
production. He says concerning Wilhelm Meister:
I can express the feeling that permeates me and takes possession of me
as I read this book no better than as a sweet well-being, as a feeling
of spiritual and bodily health, and I am firmly convinced that this
must be the feeling with all readers in general. . . . I explain this
well-being with the quiet clarity, smoothness and transparence that
prevails throughout the book, leaving the reader without the slightest
dissatisfaction and disturbance, and producing no more emotion than is
necessary to kindle and support a cheerful life in his soul.
These are not the words of somebody who believes in delight without
interest, but of a man who is convinced that the pleasure in the
beautiful is capable of being so refined that a complete surrender to
this pleasure does not involve degradation. Interest is not to be
extinguished as we approach the work of art; rather are we to become
capable of including in our interest what has its source in the
spirit. The "true" man is to develop this kind of interest
for the beautiful also with respect to his moral conceptions. Schiller
writes in a letter to Goethe, "It is really worth observing that
the slackness with regard to esthetic things appears always to be
connected with moral slackness, and that a pure rigorous striving for
high beauty with the highest degree of liberality concerning
everything that is nature will contain in itself rigorism in moral
life."
The estrangement from nature in the world conception and in all of the
culture of the time in which he lived was felt so strongly by Schiller
that he made it the subject of his essay, On Naive and Sentimental
Poetry. He compares the life conception of his time with that of
the Greeks and raises the question, "How is it that we, who are
infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, can
render homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to her with fervour
and can embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest
sentiments." He answers this question by saying:
This is caused by the fact that, with us, nature has vanished out of
humanity and we therefore find her in reality only outside humanity in
the inanimate world. It is not our greater naturalness, but,
quite to the contrary, the unnaturalness of our lives, state of
affairs and customs that drives us to give satisfaction in the
physical to the awakening sense for truth and simplicity, which, like
the moral faculty from which it springs, lies without corruption and
inextinguishably in all men's hearts because we no longer can hope to
find it in the moral world. It is for this reason that the feeling
with which we cling to nature is so closely related to the sentiment
with which we lament the loss of the age of childhood and of the
child's innocence. Our childhood is the only unspoiled nature that we
still find in civilized humanity, and it is, therefore, no wonder that
every footstep of nature leads us back to our own childhood.
This was entirely different with the Greeks. They lived their lives
within the bounds of the natural. Everything they did sprang from
their natural conception, feeling and sentiment. They were
intimately bound to nature. Modern man feels himself in his own being
placed in contrast to nature. As the urge toward this primeval mother
of being cannot be extinguished, it transforms itself in the modern
soul into a yearning for nature, into a search for it. The Greek
had nature; modern man searches for nature.
As long as man is still pure nature and, to be sure, not brutal, he
acts as an undivided sensual unity and as a harmonizing whole. His
senses and his reason, his receptive and his self-active faculties,
have not as yet separated in their function and certainly do not act
in contradiction to each other. His sentiments are not the formless
play of chance; his thoughts, not the empty play of his imagination.
These thoughts have their origin in the law of necessity; the
sentiments, in reality. As soon as man comes into the state of
civilization, and as soon as art enters into his sphere of life, the
sensual harmony is dissolved and he can now only act as a
moral unity, that is to say, as striving for unity. The
agreement between his perception and his thought, which in his former
state was actual, is now merely ideal; it is no longer
in him, but beyond him; as a thought whose realization
is demanded, it is no longer a fact of his life.
The fundamental mood of the Greek spirit was naive, that of
modern man is sentimental. The Greeks' world conception could,
for this reason, be rightly realistic, for he had not yet separated
the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature included the spirit.
If he surrendered to nature, it was to a spirit-saturated nature.
This is not so with modern man. He has detached the spirit from
nature; he has lifted the spirit into the realm of gray abstractions.
If he were to surrender to his nature, he would yield to a
nature deprived of all spirit. Therefore, his loftiest striving must
be directed toward the ideal; through the striving for this
goal, spirit and nature are to be reconciled again. In Goethe's mode
of spirit, however, Schiller found something that was akin to the
Greek spirit. Goethe felt that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his
eyes because he felt reality as an undivided unity of spirit and
nature. According to Schiller, Goethe had preserved something in
himself that will be attained again by the "sentimental man"
when he has reached the climax of his striving. Modern man arrives at
such a summit in the esthetic mood as Schiller describes it in the
state of soul in which sensuality and reason are harmonized again.
The nature of the development of modern world conception is
significantly characterized in the observation Schiller made to Goethe
in his letter of August 23, 1794:
Had you been born a Greek and been surrounded since birth by exquisite
nature and idealizing art, your road would have been infinitely
shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With
the very first perception of things, you would have absorbed the form
of the necessary, and with your first experience, the grand style
would have developed within you. As it is now . . . since your Greek
spirit was cast into this nordic creation, you had no other choice
than either to become a nordic artist yourself or to supplement your
imagination by means of thought for what reality fails to supply, and
thus to give birth from within to another Greece.
Schiller, as these sentences show, is aware of the course that the
development of soul life has taken from the age of the ancient Greeks
until his own time, for the Greek soul life disclosed itself in the
life of thought and he could accept this unveiling because thought was
for him a perception like the perception of color and sounds. This
kind of thought life has faded away for modern man. The powers
that weave creatively through the world must be experienced by him as
an inner soul experience, and in order to render this imperceptible
thought life inwardly visible, it nevertheless must be filled by
imagination. This imagination must be such that it is felt as one with
the creative powers of nature.
Because soul consciousness has been transformed into
self-consciousness in modern man, the question of world
conception arises: How can self-consciousness experience itself so
vividly that it feels its conscious process as permeating the creative
process of the living world forces? Schiller answered this question
for himself in his own fashion when he claimed the life in the
artistic experience as his ideal. In this experience the human
self-consciousness feels its kinship with an element that transcends
the mere nature picture. In it, man feels himself seized by the
spirit as he surrenders as a natural and sensual being to the
world. Leibniz had attempted to understand the human soul as a
monad. Fichte had not proceeded from a mere idea to gain clarity of
the nature of the human soul; he searched for a form of experience
in which this soul lays hold on its own being. Schiller raises the
question: Is there a form of experience for the human soul in which it
can feel how it has its roots in spiritual reality? Goethe experiences
ideas in himself that present themselves to him at the same time as
ideas of nature.
In Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, the experienced idea — one
could also say, the idea-experience — forces its way into the
soul. Such a process had previously happened in the world of the
Greeks with the perceived idea, the idea-perception.
The world and life conception that lived in Goethe in a natural
(naive) way, and toward which Schiller strove on all detours of his
thought development, does not feel the need for the kind of
universally valid truth that sees its ideal in the mathematical form.
It is satisfied by another truth, which our spirit derives from the
immediate intercourse with the real world. The insights Goethe derived
from the contemplation of the works of art in Italy were, to be sure,
not of the unconditional certainty as are the theorems of mathematics,
but they also were less abstract. Goethe approached them with the
feeling, "Here is necessity, here is God." A truth that
could not also be revealed in a perfect work of art did not exist for
Goethe. What art makes manifest with its technical means of tone,
marble, color, rhythm, etc., springs from the same source from which
the philosopher also draws who does not avail himself of visual means
of presentation but who uses as his means of expression only thought,
the idea itself. "Poetry points at the mysteries of nature
and attempts to solve them through the picture," says Goethe.
"Philosophy points at the mysteries of reason and attempts
to solve them through the word." In the final analysis, however,
reason and nature are, for him, inseparably one; the same truth is the
foundation of both. An endeavor for knowledge, which lives in
detachment from things in an abstract world, does not seem to him to
be the highest form of cognitive life. "It would be the highest
attainment to understand that all factual knowledge is already
theory." The blueness of the sky reveals the fundamental law of
color phenomena to us. "One should not search for anything behind
the phenomena; they, themselves, are the message."
The psychologist, Heinroth, in his Anthology, called the mode
of thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the
natural formation of plants and animals, an "object-related
thinking" (Gegenstaendliches Denken). What he means is
that this mode of thinking does not detach itself from its objects,
but that the objects of observation are intimately permeated with this
thinking, that Goethe's mode of thinking is at the same time a form of
observation, and his mode of observation a form of thinking. Schiller
becomes a subtle observer as he describes this mode of spirit. He
writes on this subject in a letter to Goethe:
Your observing eye, which so calmly and clearly rests on things, keeps
you from being ever exposed to the danger of going astray in the
direction where speculation and an arbitrary, merely introspective
imagination so easily lose their way. Your correct intuition contains
everything, and in a far greater completeness, for which an analytical
mind searches laboriously; only because everything is at your disposal
as a complete whole are you unaware of your own riches, for
unfortunately we know only what we dissect. Spirits of your kind,
therefore, rarely know how far advanced they are and how little cause
they have to borrow from philosophy, which in turn can only learn from
them.
For the world conception of Goethe and Schiller, truth is not only
contained in science, but also in art. Goethe expresses his opinion as
follows, "I think science could be called the knowledge of the
general art. Art would be science turned into action. Science would be
reason, and art its mechanism, wherefore one could also call it
practical science. Thus, finally, science would be the theorem
and art the problem." Goethe describes the
interdependence of scientific cognition and artistic expression of
knowledge thus:
It is obvious that an. . . . artist must become greater and more
erudite if he not only has his talent but is also a well-informed
botanist; if he knows, starting from the root, all the influences of
the various parts of a plant on its thriving and growth, their
function and mutual effect; if he has an insight into the successive
development of the leaves, the flowers, the fertilization, the fruit
and the new germ, and if he contemplates this process. Such an artist
will not merely show his taste through his power of selection from the
realm of appearances, but he will also surprise us with his correct
presentation of the characteristic qualities.
Thus, truth rules in the process of artistic creation for the
artistic style depends, according to this view, ". . . on the
deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as
it is permissible to know it in visible and touchable forms." The
fact that creative imagination is granted a share in the process of
knowledge and that the abstract intellect is no longer considered to
be the only cognitive faculty is a consequence of this view concerning
truth. The conceptions on which Goethe based his contemplation's on
plant and animal formations were not gray and abstract thoughts but
sensual-supersensual pictures, created by spontaneous
imagination. Only observation combined with imagination can really
lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction; this is
Goethe's conviction. For this reason, Goethe said about Galileo that
he made his observations as a genius "for whom one case
represents a thousand cases . . . when he developed the doctrine of
the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps."
Imagination uses the one case in order to produce a content-saturated
picture of what is essential in the appearances; the intellect that
operates by means of abstractions can, through combination, comparison
and calculation of the appearances, gain no more than a general rule
of their course. This belief in the possible cognitive function of an
imagination that rises into a conscious participation in the creative
world process is supported by Goethe's entire world conception.
Whoever, like him, sees nature's activity in everything, can also see
in the spiritual content of the human imagination nothing but higher
products of nature. The pictures of fantasy are products of nature
and, as they represent nature, they can only contain truth, for
otherwise nature would lie to herself in these afterimages that she
creates of herself. Only men with imagination can attain to the
highest stages of knowledge. Goethe calls these men the
"comprehensive" and the "contemplative" in
contrast to the merely "intellectual-inquisitive," who have
remained on a lower stage of cognitive life.
The intellectual inquisitive need a calm, unselfish power of
observation, the excitement of curiosity, a clear intellect . . . ;
they only digest scientifically what they find ready-made.
The contemplative are already creative in their attitude, and
knowledge in them, as it reaches a higher level, demands contemplation
unconsciously and changes over into that form; much as they may shun
the word "imagination," they will, nevertheless, before they
are aware of it, call upon the support of creative imagination.
. . The comprehensive thinkers who, with a prouder name, could be
called creative thinkers, are, in their attitude, productive in the
highest sense, for, as they start from ideas, they express from the
outset the unity of the whole. From then on, it is the task of nature,
as it were, to submit to these ideas.
It cannot occur to the believer in such a form of cognition to speak
of limitations of human knowledge in a Kantian fashion, for he
experiences within himself what man needs as his truth. The
core of nature is in the inner life of man. The world conception of
Goethe and Schiller does not demand of its truth that it should
be a repetition of the world phenomena in conceptual form. It does not
demand that its conception should literally correspond to
something outside man. What appears in man's inner life as an ideal
element, as something spiritual, is as such not to be found in any
external world; it appears as the climax of the whole development. For
this reason, it does not, according to this philosophy, have to appear
in all human beings in the same shape. It can take on an individual
form in any individual. Whoever expects to find the truth in the
agreement with something external can acknowledge only one form of
it, and he will look for it, with Kant, in the type of metaphysics
that alone "will be able to present itself as
science." Whoever sees the element in which, as Goethe states in
his essay on Winckelmann, "the universe, if it could feel itself,
would rejoice as having arrived at its aim in which it could admire
the climax of its own becoming and being," such a thinker can say
with Goethe, "If I know my relation to myself and to the external
world, I call this truth; in this way everybody can have his own truth
and it is yet the same." For "man in himself, insofar as he
uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact apparatus of
physics that is possible. Yet, that the experiments separated, as it
were, from man, and that one wants to know nature only according to
the indications of artificial instruments, even intending to limit and
prove in this way what nature is capable of, is the greatest
misfortune of modern physics." Man, however, "stands so high
that in him is represented what cannot be represented otherwise. What
is the string and all mechanical division of it compared to the ear of
the musician? One can even say, ‘What are all elementary phenomena of
nature themselves compared to man who must master and modify them all
in order to be able to assimilate them to himself to a tolerable
degree.’ "
Concerning his world picture, Goethe speaks neither of a mere
knowledge of intellectual concepts nor of belief; he speaks of a
contemplative perception in the spirit. He writes to Jacobi,
"You trust in belief in God; I, in seeing." This seeing in
the spirit as it is meant here thus enters into the development of
world conception as the soul force that is appropriate to an age to
which thought is no longer what it had been to the Greek thinkers, but
in which thought had revealed itself as a product of
self-consciousness, a product, however, that is arrived at through the
fact that this self-consciousness is aware of itself as having its
being within the spiritually creative forces of nature. Goethe
is the representative of an epoch of world conception in which the
need is felt to make the transition from mere thinking to spiritual
seeing. Schiller strives to justify this transition against Kant's
position.
* * *
The close alliance that was formed by Goethe, Schiller and their
contemporaries between poetic imagination and world conception has
freed this conception from the lifeless expression that it must take
on when it exclusively moves in the region of the abstract intellect.
This alliance has resulted in the belief that there is a personal
element in world conception. It is possible for man to work out an
approach to the world for himself that is in accordance with his own
specific nature and enter thereby into the world of reality, not
merely into a world of fantastic schemes. His ideal no longer needs to
be that of Kant, which is formed after the model of mathematics and
arrives at a world picture that is once and for all finished and
completed. Only from a spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that
has an inspiring effect on the human individuality can a conception
like that of Jean Paul (1763 – 1825) arise. "The heart of
a genius, to whom all other splendor and help-giving energies are
subordinated, has one genuine symptom, namely, a new outlook on
world and life." How could it be the mark of the highest
developed man, of genius, to create a new world and life conception if
the conceived world consisted only in one form? Jean Paul is,
in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences
inside his own self the ultimate existence. He writes to Jacobi:
Properly speaking, we do not merely believe in divine freedom,
God and virtue, but we really see them manifested or in the
process of manifestation; this very seeing is a knowing and a
higher form of knowing, while the knowledge of intellect merely refers
to a seeing of a lower order. One could call reason the
consciousness of the only positive, for everything positive
experienced by sense perception does finally dissolve into the
spiritual, and understanding carries on its bustle only with
the relative, which in itself is nothing, so that before God all
conditions of "more or less," and all stages of comparison
cease to be.
Jean Paul will not allow anything to deprive him of the right to
experience truth inwardly and to employ all forces of the soul for
this purpose. He will not be restricted to the use of logical
intellect.
Transcendental philosophy (Jean Paul has in mind here the world view
following Kant) is not to tear the heart, man's living root, out of
his breast to replace it with a pure impulse of selfhood; I shall not
consent to be liberated from the dependence of Love, to be blessed by
pride only.
With these words he rejects the world-estranged moral order of Kant.
I remain firmly with my conviction that there are four last, and four
first things: Beauty, Truth, Morality and Salvation, and their
synthesis is not only necessary but also already a fact, but only in a
subtle spiritual-organic unity (and for just this reason it
is a unity), without which we could not find any understanding
of these four evangelists or world continents, nor any transition
between them.
The critical analysis of the intellect, which proceeded with an
extreme logical rigor, had, in Kant and Fichte, come to the point of
reducing the self-dependent significance of the real life-saturated
world to a mere shadow, to a dream picture. This view was unbearable
to men gifted with spontaneous imagination, who enriched life by the
creation of their imaginative power. These men felt the
reality; it was there in their perception, present in their souls, and
now it was attempted to prove to them its mere dreamlike quality.
"The windows of the philosophical academic halls are too high to
allow a view into the alleys of real life," was the answer of
Jean Paul.
Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced
all knowledge that does not spring from our own inner source. The
counter movement to his world conception is formed by the Romantic
Movement. Fichte acknowledges only the truth, and the inner life
of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the world conception of
the romanticists acknowledges only the inner life, and it declares as
valuable everything that springs from this inner life. The ego is not
to be chained by anything external. Whatever it produces is justified.
One may say about the romantic movement that it carries Schiller's
statement to its extreme consequence, "Man plays only where he is
human in the full sense of the word, and he is only wholly human when
he is playing." Romanticism wants to make the whole world into a
realm of the artistic. The fully developed man knows no other norms
than the laws he creates through his freely ruling imaginative power,
in the same way as the artist creates those laws he impresses into his
works. He rises above everything that determines him from without and
lives entirely through the springs of his own self. The whole world is
for him nothing but a material for his esthetic play. The seriousness
of man in his everyday life is not rooted in truth. The soul that
arrives at true knowledge cannot take seriously the things by
themselves; for such a soul they are not in themselves valuable. They
are endowed with value only by the soul. The mood of a spirit that is
aware of his sovereignty over things is called by the romanticists,
the ironical mood of spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780 – 1819) gave the
following explanation of the term "romantic irony": The
spirit of the artist must comprise all directions in one sweeping
glance and this glance, hovering above everything, looking down on
everything and annihilating it, we call "irony." Friedrich
Schlegel (1772 – 1829), one of the leading spokesmen for the
romantic turn of spirit, states concerning this mood of irony that it
takes everything in at a glance and rises infinitely above everything
that is limited, also above some form of art, virtue or genius. Whoever
lives in this mood feels bound by nothing; nothing determines the
direction of his activity for him. He can "at his own pleasure
tune himself to be either philosophical or philological, critical or
poetical, historical or rhetorical, antique or modern." The
ironical spirit rises above an eternal moral world order, for this
spirit is not told what to do by anything except himself. The ironist
is to do what he pleases, for his morality can only be an esthetic
morality. The romanticists are the heirs of Fichte's thought of the
uniqueness of the ego. They were, however, unwilling to fill this ego
with a moral belief, as Fichte did, but stood above all on the right
of fantasy and of the unrestrained power of the soul. With them,
thinking was entirely absorbed by poetic imagination. Novalis says,
"It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that the poet
represents a special profession. It is not anything special by
itself. It is the mode of activity proper to the human spirit. Are
not the imaginations of man's heart at work every minute?" The
ego, exclusively concerned with itself, can arrive at the highest
truth: "It seems to man that he is engaged in a conversation,
and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most
evident thoughts in a miraculous fashion.
Fundamentally, what the romanticists aimed at did not differ from what
Goethe and Schiller had also made their credo: A conception of man
through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible.
Novalis experiences his poems and contemplation's in a soul
mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that
of Fichte. Fichte's spirit, however, works the sharp contours of pure
concepts, while that of Novalis springs from a richness of soul,
feeling where others think, living in the element of love where others
aim to embrace what is and what goes on in the world with ideas. It is
the tendency of this age, as can be seen in its representative
thinkers, to search for the higher spirit nature in which the
self-conscious soul is rooted because it cannot have its roots in the
world of sense reality. Novalis feels and experiences himself as
having his being within the higher spirit nature. What he expresses he
feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit
nature. He writes:
One man succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Saris. What
did he see then? He saw — wonder of wonders — himself.
Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery
behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as
the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words:
The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always
revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should
see ourselves in the midst of it.
∴
VII. The Classics of World and Life Conception
A sentence in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Philosophy of
Nature strikes us like a flash of lightning illuminating the past
and future path of the evolution of philosophy. It reads, "To
philosophize about nature means to create nature." What had been
a deep conviction of Goethe and Schiller, namely, that creative
imagination must have a share in the creation of a world conception,
is monumentally expressed in this sentence. What nature yields
voluntarily when we focus our attention on it in observation and
perception does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot conceive
this meaning from without. He must produce it.
Schelling was especially gifted for this kind of creation. With him,
all spiritual energies tended toward the imagination. His mind was
inventive without compare. His imagination did not produce pictures as
the artistic imagination does, but rather concepts and ideas. Through
this disposition of mind he was well-suited to continue along Fichte's
path of thought. Fichte did not have this productive imagination. In
his search for truth he had penetrated as far as to the center of
man's soul, the "ego." If this center is to become the
nucleus for the world conception, then a thinker who holds this view
must also be capable of arriving at thoughts whose content are
saturated with world and life as he proceeds from the "ego"
as a vantage point. This can only be done by means of the power of
imagination, and this power was not at Fichte's disposal. For this
reason, he was really limited in his philosophical position all his
life to directing attention to the "ego" and to pointing out
that it has to gain a content in thoughts. He, himself, had been
unable to supply it with such a content, which can be learned clearly
from the lectures he gave in 1813 at the University of Berlin on the
Doctrine of Science (Posthumous Works, Vol. 1). For those who
want to arrive at a world conception, he there demands "a
completely new inner sense organ, which for the ordinary man does not
exist at all." But Fichte does not go beyond this postulate. He
fails to develop what such an organ is to perceive. Schelling saw the
result of this higher sense in the thoughts that his imagination
produced in his soul, and he calls this "intellectual
imagination" (intellectuelle Anschauung). For him, then,
who saw a product created by the spirit in the spirit's
statement about nature, the following question became urgent. How can
what springs from the spirit be the pattern of the law that rules in
the real world, holding sway in real nature? With sharp words
Schelling turns against those who believe that we "merely
project our ideas into nature," because "they have no
inkling of what nature is and must be for us. . . . For we are not
satisfied to have nature accidentally (through the intermediary
function of a third element, for instance) correspond to the laws of
our spirit. We insist that nature itself necessarily and fundamentally
should not only express, but realize, the laws of our spirit and that
it should only then be, and be called, nature if it did just this. . .
. Nature is to be the visible spirit: spirit the invisible nature.
At this point then, at the point of the absolute identity of the
spirit in us and of nature outside us, the problem must
be solved as to how a nature outside ourselves should be
possible."
Nature and spirit, then, are not two different entities at all but one
and the same being in two different forms. The real meaning of
Schelling concerning this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been
correctly grasped. It is necessary to immerse oneself completely into
his mode of conception if one wants to avoid seeing in it nothing but
a triviality or an absurdity. To clarify this mode of conception one
can point to a sentence in Schelling's book, On the World Soul,
in which he expresses himself on the nature of gravity. Many
people find a difficulty in understanding this concept because it
implies a so-called "action in distance." The sun attracts
the earth in spite of the fact that there is nothing between the sun
and earth to act as intermediary. One is to think that the sun extends
its sphere of activity through space to places where it is not
present. Those who live in coarse, sensual perceptions see a
difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act in a place
where it is not? Schelling reverses this thought process. He
says, "It is true that a body acts only where it is,
but it is just as true that it is only where it
acts." If we see that the sun affects the earth through
the force of attraction, then it follows from this fact that it
extends its being as far as our earth and that we have no right to
limit its existence exclusively to the place in which it acts through
its being visible. The sun transcends the limits where it is visible
with its being. Only a part of it can be seen; the other part reveals
itself through the attraction. We must also think of the relation of
spirit and nature in approximately this manner. The spirit is not
merely where it is perceived; it is also where it perceives. Its being
extends as far as to the most distant places where objects can still
be observed. It embraces and permeates all nature that it knows. When
the spirit thinks the law of an external process, this process does
not remain outside the spirit. The latter does not merely receive a
mirror picture, but extends its essence into a process. The spirit
permeates the process and, in finding the law of the process, it is
not the spirit in its isolated brain corner that proclaims this law;
it is the law of the process that expresses itself. The spirit has
moved to the place where the law is active. Without the spirit's
attention the law would also have been active but it would not have
been expressed. When the spirit submerges into the process, as it
were, the law is then, in addition to being active in nature,
expressed in conceptual form. It is only when the spirit withdraws its
attention from nature and contemplates its own being that the
impression arises that the spirit exists in separation from nature, in
the same way that the sun's existence appears to the eye as being
limited within a certain space when one disregards the fact that it
also has its being where it works through attraction. Therefore, if I,
within my spirit, cause ideas to arise in which laws of nature are
expressed, the two statements, "I produce nature," and
"nature produces itself within me," are equally true.
Now there are two possible ways to describe the one being that is
spirit and nature at the same time. First, I can point out the natural
laws that are at work in reality; second, I can show how the spirit
proceeds to arrive at these laws. In both cases I am directed by the
same object. In the first instance, the law shows me its activity in
nature; in the second, the spirit shows me the procedure used to
represent the same law in the imagination. In the one case, I am
engaged in natural science; in the other, in spiritual science. How
these two belong together is described by Schelling in an attractive
fashion:
The necessary trend of all natural science is to proceed from nature
toward intelligence. This, and nothing else, is at the bottom of the
tendency to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest
perfection of natural science would be the perfect transfiguration of
all laws of nature into laws of imagination and thinking. The
phenomena (the material element) must completely vanish and only the
laws (the formal element) must remain. This is the reason for the fact
that the more the law-structure in nature, itself, emerges, as if it
were breaking the crust, the more the covering element vanishes. The
phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear. The
phenomena of optics are nothing but a geometry, the lines of which are
drawn by the light, and this light, itself, is already of an ambiguous
materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism, all material traces have
already vanished. Of the phenomena of gravity, which, even according
to natural scientists, can only be understood as a direct spiritual
effect of action into distance, nothing is left but their law, the
application of which is the mechanism of the celestial motions on a
large scale. The completed theory of nature would be the one through
which the whole of nature would dissolve into intelligence. The
inanimate and consciousless products of nature are only unsuccessful
attempts of nature to reflect itself, and the so-called dead nature
is, in general, an immature intelligence, so that the intelligent
character shines through unconsciously in its phenomena. The highest
aim of nature — to become completely objective to itself — can be
reached by it only through the highest and last reflection, which is
man, or, more generally speaking, what we call reason, through which
nature returns in its own track and whereby it becomes evident that
nature originally is identical with what is known in us as the
intelligent and conscious element.
Schelling spun the facts of nature into an artful network of thought
in such a fashion that all of its phenomena stood as in an ideal,
harmonious organism before his creative imagination. He was inspired
by the feeling that the ideas that appear in his imagination are also
the creative forces of nature's process. Spiritual forces, then, are
the basis of nature, and what appears dead and lifeless to our eyes
has its origin in the spiritual. In turning our spirit to this, we
discover the ideas, the spiritual, in nature. Thus, for man, according
to Schelling, the things of nature are manifestations of the spirit.
The spirit conceals itself behind these manifestations as behind a
cover, so to speak. It shows itself in our own inner life in its right
form. In this way, man knows what is spirit, and he is therefore able
to find the spirit that is hidden in nature. The manner in which
Schelling has nature return as spirit in himself reminds one of what
Goethe believes is to be found in the perfect artist. The artist, in
Goethe's opinion, proceeds in the production of a work of art as
nature does in its creations. Therefore, we should observe in the
artist's creation the same process through which everything has come
into being that is spread out before man in nature. What nature
conceals from the outer eye is presented in perceptible form to man in
the process of artistic creation. Nature shows man only the finished
works; man must decipher from these works how it proceeded to produce
them. He is confronted with the creatures, not with the creator. In
the case of the artist, creation and creator are observed at the same
time. Schelling wants to penetrate through the products of nature to
nature's creative process. He places himself in the position of
creative nature and brings it into being within his soul as an artist
produces his work of art. What are, then, according to Schelling, the
thoughts that are contained in his world conception? They are the
ideas of the creative spirit of nature. What preceded the things and
what created them is what emerges in an individual human spirit as
thought. This thought is to its original real existence as a memory
picture of an experience is to the experience itself. Thereby, human
science becomes for Schelling a reminiscence of the spiritual
prototypes that were creatively active before the things existed. A
divine spirit created the world and at the end of the process it also
creates men in order to form in their souls as many tools through
which the spirit can, in recollection, become aware of its creative
activity. Schelling does not feel himself as an individual being at
all as he surrenders himself to the contemplation of the world
phenomena. He appears to himself as a part, a member of the creative
world forces. Not he thinks, but the spirit of the world forces
thinks in him. This spirit contemplates his own creative activity in
him.
Schelling sees a world creation on a small scale in the production of
a work of art. In the thinking contemplation of things, he sees a
reminiscence of the world creation on a large scale. In the panorama
of the world conception, the very ideas, which are the basis of things
and have produced them, appear in our spirit. Man disregards
everything in the world that the senses perceive in it and preserves
only what pure thinking provides. In the creation and enjoyment of a
work of art, the idea appears intimately permeated with elements that
are revealed through the senses. According to Schelling's view, then,
nature, art and world conception (philosophy) stand in the following
relation to one another. Nature presents the finished products; world
conception, the productive ideas; art combines both elements in
harmonious interaction. On the one side, artistic activity stands
halfway between creative nature, which produces without being aware of
the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and, on the other, the
thinking spirit, which knows these ideas without being able at the
same time to create things with their help. Schelling expresses this
with the words:
The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are therefore
products of one and the same activity. The concurrence of both (the
conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness leads to
the real world, with consciousness to the esthetic world. The
objective world is only the more primitive, still unconscious poem of
the spirit, the general organon of philosophy, and the philosophy
of art is the crowning piece of its entire structure.
The spiritual activities of man, his thinking contemplation and his
artistic creation, appear to Schelling not merely as the separate
accomplishments of the individual person, but, if they are understood
in their highest significance, they are at the same time the
achievement of the supreme being, the world spirit. In truly
dithyrambic words, Schelling depicts the feeling that emerges in the
soul when it becomes aware of the fact that its life is not merely an
individual life limited to a point of the universe, but that its
activity is one of general spirituality. When the soul says, "I
know; I am aware," then, in a higher sense, this means that the
world spirit remembers its action before the existence of things; when
the soul produces a work of art, it means that the world spirit
repeats, on a small scale, what that spirit accomplished on a large
scale at the creation of all nature.
The soul in man is not the principle of individuality, then, but that
through which he lifts himself above all selfhood, through which he
becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of selfless love, and, to crown it
all, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things and
thereby of art. The soul is no longer occupied with matter, nor is it
engaged in any direct intercourse with matter, but it is alone with
spirit as the life of things. Even when appearing in the body, the
soul is nevertheless free from the body, the consciousness of which —
in its most perfect formation — merely hovers like a light dream by
which it is not disturbed. The soul is not a quality, nor faculty, nor
anything of that kind in particular. The soul does not know, but is
knowledge. The soul is not good, not beautiful in the way that
bodies also can be beautiful, but it is beauty itself. (On the
Relation of Fine Arts to Nature.)
Such a mode of conception is reminiscent of the German mysticism that
had a representative in Jakob Boehme (1575 – 1624). In Munich, where
Schelling lived with short interruptions from 1806 – 1842, he enjoyed
the stimulating association with Franz Benedict Baader, whose
philosophical ideas moved completely in the direction of this older
doctrine. This association gave Schelling the occasion to penetrate
deeply into the thought world that depended entirely on a point of
view at which he had arrived in his own thinking. If one reads the
above quoted passage from the address, On the Relation of the Fine
Arts to Nature, which he gave at the Royal Academy of Science in
Munich in 1807, one is reminded of Jakob Boehme's view, "As thou
beholdest the depth and the stars and the earth, thou seest thy God,
and in the same thou also livest and hast thy being, and the
same God ruleth thee also . . . thou art created out of this
God and thou livest in Him; all thy knowledge also standeth in
this God and when thou diest thou wilt be buried in this God."
As Schelling's thinking developed, his contemplation of the world
turned into the contemplation of God, or theosophy. In 1809, when he
published his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the Nature of
Human Freedom and Topics Pertinent to This Question, he had
already taken his stand on the basis of such a theosophy. All
questions of world conception are now seen by him in a new light. If
all things are divine, how can there be evil in the world since God
can only be perfect goodness? If the soul is in God, how can it still
follow its selfish interests? If God is and acts within me, how can I
then still be called free, as I, in that case, do not at all act as a
self-dependent being?
Thus does Schelling attempt to answer these questions through
contemplation of God rather than through world contemplation. It would
be entirely incongruous to God if a world of beings were created that
he would continually have to lead and direct as helpless creatures.
God is perfect only if he can create a world that is equal to himself
in perfection. A god who can produce only what is less perfect than
he, himself, is imperfect himself. Therefore, God has created beings
in men who do not need his guidance, but are themselves free and
independent as he is. A being that has its origin in another being
does not have to be dependent on its originator, for it is not a
contradiction that the son of man is also a man. As the eye, which is
possible only in the whole structure of the organism, has nevertheless
an independent life of its own, so also the individual soul is, to be
sure, comprised in God, yet not directly activated by him as a part in
a machine.
God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. How he could find his
satisfaction in the most perfect machine is quite unintelligible. No
matter in what form one might think the succession of created beings
out of God, it can never be a mechanical succession, not a mere
causation or production so that the products would not be anything in
themselves. Nor could it be an emanation such that the emanating
entity would remain merely a part of the being it sprang from and
therefore would have no being of its own, nothing that would be
self-dependent. The sequence of things out of God is a self-revelation
of God. God, however, can only become revealed to himself in an
element similar to him, in beings that are free and act out of their
own initiative, for whose existence there is no ground but God but who
are themselves like God.
If God were a God of the dead and all world phenomena merely like a
mechanism, the individual processes of which could be derived from him
as their cause and mover, then it would only be necessary to describe
God and everything would be comprehended thereby. Out of God one would
be able to understand all things and their activity, but this is not
the case. The divine world has self-dependence. God created it, but it
has its own being. Thus, it is indeed divine, but the divine appears
in an entity that is independent of God; it appears in a non-divine
element. As light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born
out of non-divine existence, and from this non-divine element springs
evil, selfishness. God thus has not all beings in his power. He can
give them the light, but they, themselves, emerge from the dark night.
They are the sons of this night, and God has no power over whatever is
darkness in them. They must work their way through the night into the
light. This is their freedom. One can also say that the world is God's
creation out of the ungodly. The ungodly, therefore, is the first, and
the godly the second.
Schelling started out by searching for the ideas in all things, that
is to say, by searching for what is divine in them. In this way, the
whole world was transformed into a manifestation of God for him. He
then had to proceed from God to the ungodly in order to comprehend the
imperfect, the evil, the selfish. Now the whole process of world
evolution became a continuous conquest of the ungodly by the godly for
him. The individual man has his origin in the ungodly. He works his
way out of this element into the divine. This process from the ungodly
to the godly was originally the dominating element in the world. In
antiquity men surrendered to their natures. They acted naively out of
selfishness. The Greek civilization stands on this ground. It was the
age in which man lived in harmony with nature, or, as Schiller
expresses it in his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,
man, himself, was nature and therefore did not seek nature. With
the rise of Christianity, this state of innocence of humanity
vanishes. Mere nature is considered as ungodly, as evil, and is seen
as the opposite of the divine, the good. Christ appears to let the
light of the divine shine in the darkness of the ungodly. This is the
moment when "the earth becomes waste and void for the second
time," the moment of "birth of the higher light of the
spirit, which was from the beginning of the world, but was not
comprehended by the darkness that operated by and for itself, and was
then still in its concealed and limited manifestation. It appears in
order to oppose the personal and spiritual evil, also in personal and
human shape, and as mediator in order to restore again the connection
of creation and God on the highest level. For only the personal can
heal the personal, and God must become man to enable man to come to
God."
Spinozism is a world conception that seeks the ground of all
world events in God, and derives all processes according to external
necessary laws from this ground, just as the mathematical truths are
derived from the axioms. Schelling considers such a world conception
insufficient. Like Spinoza, he also believes that all things are in
God, but according to his opinion, they are not determined only by
"the lifelessness of his system, the soullessness of its form,
the poverty of its concepts and expressions, the inexorable harshness
of its statements that tallies perfectly with its abstract mode of
contemplation." Schelling, therefore, does find Spinoza's
"mechanical view of nature" perfectly consistent, but
nature, itself, does not show us this consistency.
All that nature tells us is that it does not exist as a result of a
geometric necessity. There is in it, not clear, pure reason, but
personality and spirit; otherwise, the geometric intellect, which has
ruled so long, ought to have penetrated it long ago. Intellect would
necessarily have realized its idol of general and eternal laws of
nature to a far greater extent, whereas it has everyday to acknowledge
nature's irrational relation to itself more and more.
As man is not merely intellect and reason but unites still other
faculties and forces within himself, so, according to Schelling, is
this also the case with the divine supreme being. A God who is clear,
pure reason seems like personified mathematics. A God, however, who
cannot proceed according to pure reason with his world creation but
continuously has to struggle against the ungodly, can be regarded as
"a wholly personal living being." His life has the greatest
analogy with the human life. As man attempts to overcome the imperfect
within himself as he strives toward his ideal of perfection, so such a
God is conceived as an eternally struggling God whose activity is the
progressive conquest of the ungodly. Schelling compares Spinoza's God
to the "oldest pictures of divinities, who appeared the more
mysterious the less individually-living features spoke out of
them." Schelling endows his God with more and more individualized
traits. He depicts him as a human being when he says, "If we
consider what is horrible in nature and the spirit-world, and how much
more a benevolent hand seems to cover it up for us, then we cannot
doubt that the deity is reigning over a world of horror, and that God
could be called the horrible, the terrible God, not merely
figuratively but literally."
Schelling could no longer look upon a God like this in the same way in
which Spinoza had regarded his God. A God who orders everything
according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason.
A personal God, as Schelling conceived him in his later life, is
incalculable, for he does not act according to reason alone. In a
mathematical problem we can predetermine the result through mere
thinking; with an acting human being this is not possible. With him,
we have to wait and see what action he will decide upon in a given
moment. Experience must be added to reason. A pure rational science
is, therefore, insufficient for Schelling for a conception of world
and God. In the later period of his world conception, he calls all
knowledge that is derived from reason a negative knowledge that has to
be supplemented by a positive knowledge. Whoever wants to know the
living God must not merely depend on the necessary conclusions of
reason; he must plunge into the life of God with his whole personal
being. He will then experience what no conclusion, no pure
reason can give him. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine
cause, but a free action of the personal God. What Schelling believed
he had reached, not by the cognitive process of the method of
reason, but by intuition as the free incalculable acts of
God, he has presented in his Philosophy of Revelation and
Philosophy of Mythology. He used the content of these two works
as the basis of the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after
he had been called to the Prussian capital by Frederic Wilhelm IV.
They were published only after Schelling's death in 1854.
With views of this kind, Schelling shows himself to be the boldest and
most courageous of the group of philosophers who were stimulated to
develop an idealistic world conception by Kant. Under Kant's
influence, the attempt to philosophize about things that transcended
thinking and observation was abandoned. One tried to be satisfied with
staying within the limits of observation and thinking. Where Kant,
however, had concluded from the necessity of such a resignation that
no knowledge of transcendent things was possible, the post-Kantians
declared that as observation and thinking do not point at a
transcendent divine element, they are this divine element
themselves. Among those who took this position, Schelling was the most
forceful. Fichte had taken everything into the ego; Schelling had
spread this ego over everything. What he meant to show was not, as
Fichte did, that the ego was everything, but that everything was ego.
Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ego's content of
ideas as divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only
elevated the human reason into a godly reason, but he made the human
life content into the godly personal entity. A world explanation that
proceeds from man and thinks of the course of the whole world as
having as its ground an entity that directs its course in the same way
as man directs his actions, is called anthropomorphism. Anyone
who considers events as being dependent on a general world reason,
explains the world anthropomorphically, for this general world
reason is nothing but the human reason made into this general reason.
When Goethe says, "Man never understands how anthropomorphic he
is," he has in mind the fact that our simplest statements
concerning nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say a body
rolls on because another body pushed it, we form such a conception
from our own experience. We push a body and it rolls on.
When we now see that a ball moves against another ball that thereupon
rolls on, we form the conception that the first ball pushed the
second, using the analogy of the effect we ourselves exert. Haeckel
observes that the anthropomorphic dogma "compares God's creation
and rule of the world with the artful creation of an ingenious
technician or engineer, or with the government of a wise ruler. God,
the Lord, as creator, preserver and ruler of the world is, in all his
thinking and doing, always conceived as similar to a human
being."
Schelling had the courage of the most consistent anthropomorphism. He
finally declared man, with all his life-content, as divinity, and
since a part of this life-content is not only the reasonable but the
unreasonable as well, he had the possibility of explaining also the
unreasonable in the world. To this end, however, he had to supplement
the view of reason by another view that does not have its source in
thinking. This higher view, according to his opinion, he called
"positive philosophy."
It "is the free philosophy in the proper sense of the word;
whoever does not want it, may leave it. I put it to the free choice of
everybody. I only say that if, for instance, somebody wants to get at
the real process, a free world creation, etc., he can have all this
only by means of such a philosophy. If he is satisfied with a rational
philosophy and has no need beyond it, he may continue holding this
position, only he must give up his claim to possess with and in a
rational philosophy what the latter simply cannot supply because of
its very nature, namely, the real God, the real process and a free
relation between God and world."
The negative philosophy "will remain the preferred philosophy for
the school, the positive philosophy, that for life. Only if both of
them are united will the complete consecration be obtained that can be
demanded of philosophy. As is well-known in the Eleusinian mysteries,
the minor mysteries were distinguished from the major ones and the
former were considered as a prerequisite stage of the latter . . . The
positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of the correctly
understood negative one and thus one may indeed say that in the
negative philosophy are celebrated the minor mysteries of philosophy,
in the positive philosophy, the major ones."
If the inner life is declared to be the divine life, then it appears
to be an inconsistency to limit this distinction to a part of this
inner life. Schelling is not guilty of this inconsistency. The moment
he declared that to explain nature is to create nature, he set the
direction for all his life conception. If thinking contemplation of
nature is a repetition of nature's creation, then the fundamental
character of this creation must also correspond to that of human
action; it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity.
We cannot know a free creation through the laws of reason; it must
reveal itself through other means.
* * *
The individual human personality lives and has its being in and
through the ground of the world, which is spirit. Nevertheless, man is
in possession of his full freedom and self-dependence. Schelling
considered this conception as one of the most important in his whole
philosophy. Because of it, he thought he could consider his
idealistic trend of ideas as a progress from earlier views since
those earlier views thought the individual to be completely determined
by the world spirit when they considered it rooted in it, and thereby
robbed it of its freedom and self-dependence.
For until the discovery of idealism, the real concept of freedom was
lacking in all systems, in that of Leibniz as well as in that of
Spinoza. A freedom that many of us had conceived and even boasted of
because of the vivid inner experience it touched on, namely, one that
is to consist merely in the domination of the intelligent principle
over the forces of sensuality and desire, such a freedom could be
derived from Spinoza's presupposition, not merely as a last resort,
but with clarity and the greatest of ease.
A man who had only this kind of freedom in mind and who, with the aid
of thoughts that had been borrowed from Spinozism, attempted a
reconciliation of the religious consciousness with a thoughtful world
contemplation, of theology and philosophy, was Schelling's
contemporary, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768 –
1834). In his speeches on Religion Addressed to the Educated Among
Its Scorners (1799), he exclaimed, "Sacrifice with me in
reverence to the spirit of the saintly departed Spinoza! The lofty
world spirit filled him; the infinite was his beginning and end; the
universe his only and eternal love. He reflected himself in holy
innocence and deep humility in the eternal world, and could observe
how he, in turn, was the world's most graceful mirror."
Freedom for Schleiermacher is not the ability of a being to decide
itself, in complete independence, on its life's own aim and direction.
It is, for him, only a "development out of oneself." But a
being can very well develop out of itself and yet be unfree in a
higher sense. If the supreme being of the world has planted a definite
seed into the separate individuality that is brought to maturity by
him, then the course of life of the individual is precisely
predetermined but nevertheless develops out of itself. A freedom of
this kind, as Schleiermacher thinks of it, is readily thinkable in a
necessary world order in which everything occurs according to a strict
mathematical necessity. For this reason, it is possible for him to
maintain that "the plant also has its freedom."
Because Schleiermacher knew of a freedom only in this sense, he
could also seek the origin of religion in the most unfree feeling, in
the "feeling of absolute dependence." Man feels that he
must rest his existence on a being other than himself, on God. His
religious consciousness is rooted in this feeling. A feeling is always
something that must be linked to something else. It has only a derived
existence. The thought, the idea, have so distinctly a self-dependent
existence that Schelling can say of them, "Thus thoughts, to be
sure, are produced by the soul, but the produced thought is an
independent power continuing its own action by itself, and indeed
growing within the soul to the extent that it conquers and subdues its
own mother." Whoever, therefore, attempts to grasp the supreme
being in the form of thoughts, receives this being and holds it as a
self-dependent power within himself. This power can then be
followed by a feeling, just as the conception of a beautiful
work of art is followed by a certain feeling of satisfaction.
Schleiermacher, however, does not mean to seize the object of
religion, but only the religious feeling. He leaves the object,
God, entirely indefinite. Man feels himself as dependent, but he does
not know the being on which he depends. All concepts that we form of
the deity are inadequate to the lofty character of this being. For
this reason, Schleiermacher avoids going into any definite concepts
concerning the deity. The most indefinite, the emptiest conception, is
the one he likes best. "The ancients experienced religion when
they considered every characteristic form of life throughout the world
to be the work of a deity. They had absorbed the peculiar form of
activity of the universe as a definite feeling and designated it as
such." This is why the subtle words that Schleiermacher uttered
concerning the essence of immortality are indefinite:
The aim and character of a religious life is not an immortality that
is outside of time, or behind time, or else merely after this
time, but one that is still in time. It is the immortality
that we can already have here in this temporal life and that is a
problem, the solution of which continually engages us. To become one
with the infinite in the midst of the finite, and to be eternal in
every moment, is the immortality of religion.
Had Schelling said this, it would have been possible to connect it
with a definite conception. It would then mean, "Man produces the
thought of God. This would then be God's memory of his own being. The
infinite would be brought to life in the individual person. It would
be present in the finite." But as Schleiermacher writes those
sentences without Schelling's foundations, they do no more than create
a nebulous atmosphere. What they express is the dim feeling that man
depends on something infinite. It is the theology in Schleiermacher
that prevents him from proceeding to definite conceptions concerning
the ground of the world. He would like to lift religious feeling,
piety, to a higher level, for he is a personality with rare depth of
soul. He demands dignity for true religious devotion. Everything that
he said about this feeling is of noble character. He defended the
moral attitude that is taken in Schlegel's Lucinde, which
springs purely out of the individual's own arbitrary free choice and
goes beyond all limits of traditional social conceptions. He could do
so because he was convinced that a man can be genuinely religious even
if he is venturesome in the field of morality. He could say,
"There is no healthy feeling that is not pious."
Schleiermacher did understand religious feeling. He was
well-acquainted with the feeling that Goethe, in his later age,
expressed in his poem, Trilogy of Passion:
From our heart's pureness springs a yearning tender
Unto an unknown Being, lofty, blameless,
In gratefulness unchallenged to surrender,
Unriddling for ourselves the Ever-Nameless In pious awe –
Because he felt this religious feeling deeply, he also knew how to
describe the inner religious life. He did not attempt to know
the object of this devotion but left it to be done by the various
kinds of theology, each in its own fashion. What he intended to
delineate was the realm of religious experience that is independent of
a knowledge of God. In this sense, Schleiermacher was a peacemaker
between belief and knowledge.
* * *
"In most recent times religion has increasingly contracted the
developed extent of its content and withdrawn into the intensive life
of religious fervor or feeling and often, indeed, in a
fashion that manifests a thin and meager content." Hegel wrote
these words in the preface of the second edition of his
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827). He continued
by saying:
As long as religion still has a creed, a doctrine, a dogmatic system,
it has something that philosophy can make its concern and use to join
hands with religion. This fact, however, must not be approached by the
inferior, dividing intellect through which modern religion is blinded.
It considers the realms of philosophy and religion as being mutually
exclusive and in separating them in this way assumes that they can
only be linked together externally. The real relation, and this is
implied also in the previous statement, is such that religion can, to
be sure, be without philosophy. Philosophy, however, cannot be without
religion, but comprises it within its own realm. The true religion,
the religion of the spirit, must have such a credo, must have a
content. The spirit is essentially consciousness of content
that has become objective. As feeling, it is the nonobjective content
itself and only the lowest stage of consciousness, and, indeed,
of the very form of soul life that man has in common with the animals.
It is thinking only that makes the spirit out of the soul, the soul
with which the animal also is gifted. Philosophy is only a
consciousness of this content, of the spirit and of its truth. It is
consciousness of man's essential nature that distinguishes him from
the animal and makes him capable of religion.
The whole spiritual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770 – 1831) becomes apparent when we hear words like these from
him, through which he wanted to express clearly and poignantly that he
regarded thinking that is conscious of itself as the highest
activity of man, as the force through which alone man can gain a
position with respect to the ultimate questions. The feeling of
dependence, which was considered by Schleiermacher as the originator
of religious experience, was declared to be characteristically the
function of the animal's life by Hegel. He stated paradoxically that
if the feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of
Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a
personality who lives completely in the element of thought.
Because man is a thinking being, common sense, no more than
philosophy, will ever relinquish its prerogative to rise from the
empirical world conception to God. This elevation has as its
prerequisite the world contemplation of thinking, not merely that
of the sensual, animal consciousness.
Hegel makes into the content of his world conception what can be
obtained by self-conscious thinking. For what man finds in any other
way can be nothing but a preparatory stage of a world conception.
The elevation of thinking above the sensual, its transcendence
from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the
supersensible that is taken with an abrupt termination of sensual
content — all this is thinking itself; this transition itself is
thinking. When such a transition is not to be made, it means
that no thinking is taking place. In fact, animals do not go beyond
sensual perception and immediate impression, and do not make this
leap. For this reason, they have no religion.
What man can extract from things through thinking is the highest
element that exists in them and for him. Only this element can he
recognize as their essence. Thought is, therefore, the essence of
things for Hegel. All perceptual imagination, all scientific
observation of the world and its events do, finally, result in man's
production of thoughts concerning the connection of things.
Hegel's work now proceeds from the point where perceptual imagination
and scientific observation have reached their destination: With
thought as it lives in self-consciousness. The scientific
observer looks at nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer
states about nature. The observer attempts to reduce the variety of
natural phenomena to a unity. He explains one process through the
other. He strives for order, for organic systematic simplicity in the
totality of the things that are presented to the senses in chaotic
multiplicity. Hegel searches for systematic order and harmonious
simplicity in the results of the scientific investigator. He adds to
the science of nature a science of the thoughts about nature. All
thoughts that can be produced about the world form, in a natural way,
a uniform totality. The scientific observer gains his thoughts from
being confronted with the individual things. This is why the thoughts
themselves appear in his mind also, at first individually, one beside
another. If we consider them now side by side, they become joined
together into a totality in which every individual thought forms an
organic link. Hegel means to give this totality of thoughts in his
philosophy. No more than the natural scientist, who wants to determine
the laws of the astronomical universe, believes that he can construct
the starry heavens out of these laws, does Hegel, who seeks the
law-ordered connections within the thought world, believe he can
derive from these thoughts any laws of natural science that can only,
be determined through empirical observation. The statement, repeated
time and again, that it was Hegel's intention to exhaust the full and
unlimited knowledge of the whole universe through pure thinking is
based on nothing more than a naive misunderstanding of his view. He
has expressed it distinctly enough: "To comprehend what is,
is the task of philosophy, for what is reasonable is real, and
what is real is reasonable. . . . When philosophy paints its
picture gray on gray, a figure of life has become old. . . . Minerva's
owl begins its fight only as the twilight of nightfall sets
in."
From these words it should be apparent that the factual knowledge must
already be there when the thinker arrives to see them in a new light
from his viewpoint. One should not demand of Hegel that he derive new
natural laws from pure thought, for he had not intended to do this at
all. What he had set out to do was to spread philosophical light over
the sum total of natural laws that existed in his time. Nobody demands
of a natural scientist that he create the starry sky, although in his
research he is concerned with the firmament. Hegel's views, however,
are declared to be fruitless because he thought about the laws of
nature and did not create these laws at the same time.
What man finally arrives at as he ponders over things is their
essence. It is the foundation of things. What man receives as his
highest insight is at the same time the deepest nature of things. The
thought that lives in man is, therefore, also the objective
content of the world. One can say that the thought is at first in the
world in an unconscious form. It is then received by the human spirit.
It becomes apparent to itself in the human spirit. Just as man, in
directing his attention into nature, finally finds the thought that
makes the phenomena comprehensible, so he also finds thought within
himself, as he turns his attention inward. As the essence of nature is
thought, so also man's own essence is thought. In the human
self-consciousness, therefore, thought contemplates itself. The
essence of the world arrives at its own awareness. In the other
creatures of nature thought is active, but this activity is not
directed toward itself but toward something other than itself. Nature,
then, does contain thought, but in thinking, man's thought is not
merely contained; it is here not merely active, but is directed toward
itself. In external nature, thought, to be sure, also unfolds life,
but there it only flows into something else; in man, it lives in
itself. In this manner the whole process of the world appears to Hegel
as thought process, and all occurrences in this process are
represented as preparatory phases for the highest event that there is:
The thoughtful comprehension of thought itself. This event takes place
in the human self-consciousness. Thought then works its way
progressively through until it reaches its highest form of
manifestation in which it comprehends itself.
Thus, in observing any thing or process of reality, one always sees a
definite phase of development of thought in this thing or
process. The world process is the progressive evolution of thought.
All phases except the highest contain within themselves a
self-contradiction. Thought is in them, but they contain more
than it reveals at such a lower stage. For this reason,, it overcomes
the contradictory form of its manifestation and speeds on toward a
higher one that is more appropriate. The contradiction then is the
motor that drives the thought development ahead. As the natural
scientist thoughtfully observes things, he forms concepts of them that
have this contradiction within themselves. When the philosophical
thinker thereupon takes up these thoughts that are gained from the
observation of nature, he finds them to be self-contradictory forms.
But it is this very contradiction that makes it possible to develop a
complete thought structure out of the individual thoughts. The thinker
looks for the contradictory element in a thought; this element is
contradictory because it points toward a higher stage of its
development. Through the contradiction contained in it, every thought
points to another thought toward which it presses on in the course of
its development. Thus, the philosopher can begin with the simplest
thought that is bare of all content, that is, with the abstract
thought of being. From this thought he is driven by the contradiction
contained therein toward a second phase that is higher and less
contradictory, etc., until he arrives at the highest stage, at thought
living within itself, which is the highest manifestation of the
spirit.
Hegel lends expression to the fundamental character of the evolution
of modern world conception. The Greek spirit knows thought as
perception; the modern spirit knows it as the self-engendered product
of the soul. In presenting his world conception, Hegel turns to the
creations of self-consciousness. He starts out by dealing only with
the self-consciousness and its products, but then he proceeds to
follow the activity of the self-consciousness into the phase in which
it is aware of being united with the world spirit. The Greek thinker
contemplates the world, and his contemplation gives him
an insight into the nature of the world. The modern thinker, as
represented by Hegel, means to live with his inner experience in the
world's creative process. He wants to insert himself into it. He is
then convinced that he discovers himself in the world, and he listens
to what the spirit of the world reveals as its being while this very
being is present and alive in his self-consciousness. Hegel is in the
modern world what Plato was in the world of the Greeks. Plato lifted
his spirit-eye contemplatively to the world of ideas so as to catch
the mystery of the soul in this contemplation. Hegel has the soul
immerse itself in the world-spirit and unfold its inner life after
this immersion. So the soul lives as its own life what has its ground
in the world spirit into which it submerged.
Hegel thus seized the human spirit in its highest activity, that is,
in thinking, and then attempted to show the significance of this
highest activity within the entirety of the world. This activity
represents the event through which the universal essence, which is
poured out into the whole world, finds itself again. The highest
activities through which this self-finding is accomplished are art,
religion and philosophy. In the work of nature, thought is contained,
but here it is estranged from itself. It appears not in its own
original form. A real lion that we see is, indeed, nothing but the
incarnation of the thought, "lion." We are, however, not
confronted here with the thought, lion, but with the corporeal being.
This being, itself, is not concerned with the thought. Only I, when I
want to comprehend it, search for the thought. A work of art that
depicts a lion represents outwardly the form that, in being confronted
with a real lion, I can only have as a thought-image. The
corporeal element is there in the work of art for the sole purpose of
allowing the thought to appear. Man creates works of art in order to
make outwardly visible that element of things that he can otherwise
only grasp in thoughts. In reality, thought can appear to itself in
its appropriate form only in the human self-consciousness. What really
appears only inwardly, man has imprinted into sense-perceived matter
in the work of art to give it an external expression. When Goethe
stood before the monuments of art of the Greeks, he felt impelled to
confess that here is necessity, here is God. In Hegel's
language, according to which God expresses himself in the thought
content of the world manifested in human self-consciousness, this
would mean: In the works of art man sees reflected the highest
revelations of the world in which he can really participate only
within his own spirit. Philosophy contains thought in its perfectly
pure form, in its original nature. The highest form of manifestation
of which the divine substance is capable, the world of thought, is
contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say the whole world
is divine, that is to say, permeated by thought, but in philosophy the
divine appears directly in its godliness while in other
manifestations it takes on the form of the ungodly. Religion stands
halfway between art and philosophy. In it, thought does not as yet
live as pure thought but in the form of the picture, the symbol. This
is also the case with art, but there the picture is such that it is
borrowed from the external perception. The pictures of religion,
however, are spiritualized symbols.
Compared to these highest manifestations of thought, all other human
life expressions are merely imperfect preparatory stages. The entire
historical life of mankind is composed of such stages. In following
the external course of the events of history one will, therefore, find
much that does not correspond to pure thought, the object of reason.
In looking deeper, however, we see that in historical evolution the
thought of reason is nevertheless in the process of being realized.
This realization just proceeds in a manner that appears as ungodly on
the surface. On the whole, one can maintain the statement,
"Everything real is reasonable." This is exactly the
decisive point, that thought, the historical world spirit, realizes
itself in the entirety of history. The individual person is merely a
tool for the realization of the purpose of this world spirit. Because
Hegel recognizes the highest essence of the world in thought,
he also demands of the individual that he subordinate himself to
the general thoughts that rule the world evolution.
The great men in history are those whose special personal purposes
contain the substantial element that is the will of the world spirit.
This content is their true power. It is also contained in the general
unconscious instincts of the people. They are inwardly driven to it
and have nothing further to fall back upon that would enable them to
resist the individual who has made the execution of such a purpose his
own interest. The people gather around his colors. He shows them and
brings into reality their own immanent purposes. If we appraise the
fate of these world-historical individuals, we must say that they have
had the good fortune to be the executive agent of a purpose that
represented a step in the progress of the general spirit. We can call
a ‘stratagem or reason,’ the way in which reason employs
individuals as its tools, for it has them execute their own purposes
with all fury of passion, and in so doing, it not only remains
unharmed, but actually realizes itself. The particular is mostly
negligible in comparison with the general; the individuals are
sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents the spectacle of
struggling individuals and, in the field of the particular, everything
happens in an entirely natural fashion. Just as in the animal nature
the preservation of life is purpose and instinct of the individual
specimen, and just as general reason holds sway while the individual
drops out, in the same way things also happen in the spiritual world.
The passions work mutual destruction on each other. Reason alone
wakes, follows its purpose and prevails.
Man as an individual can seize the comprehensive spirit only in his
thinking. Only in the contemplation of the world is God entirely
present. When man acts, when he enters the active life, he becomes a
link and therefore can also participate only as a link in the complete
chain of reason.
Hegel's doctrine of state is also derived from thoughts of this kind.
Man is alone with his thinking; with his actions he is a link of the
community. The reasonable order of community, the thought by which it
is permeated, is the state. The individual person, according to
Hegel, is valuable only insofar as the general reason, thought,
appears within such a person, for thought is the essence of things. A
product of nature does not possess the power to bring thought in its
highest form into appearance; man has this power. He will, therefore,
fulfill his destination only if he makes himself a carrier of thought.
As the state is realized thought, and as the individual man is only a
member within its structure, it follows that man has to serve the
state and not the state, man.
If the state is confused with society, and if its end is then defined
as the security and protection of property and individual freedom,
then it follows that the interest of the individual as such is the
last purpose for which the two are associated, and from this again it
would follow that it is merely a matter of an arbitrary choice of the
individual to become a member of the state or not. The state has,
however, an entirely different relation toward the individual. As it
is objective spirit, the individual man himself has objectivity, truth
and morality only insofar as he is a member of it. The union as such
is the true content and purpose, and it is the destination of the
individuals to lead a generally valid life. Their subsequent
satisfaction, activity and behavior has this substantial element of
general validity as its basis and as its result.
What place is there for freedom in such a life-conception? The
concept of freedom through which the individual human being is granted
an absolute to determine aim and purpose of his own activity is not
admitted as valid by Hegel. For what could be the advantage if the
individual did not derive his aim from the reasonable world of
thoughts but made his decision in a completely arbitrary fashion?
This, according to Hegel, would really be absence of freedom. An
individual of this kind would not be in agreement with his own
essence; he would be imperfect. A perfect individual can only want to
realize his essential nature, and the ability to do this is his
freedom. This essential nature now is embodied in the state.
Therefore, if man acts according to the state, he acts in freedom.
The state, in and by itself, is the moral universe, the realization of
freedom, and it is reason's absolute purpose that freedom be real. The
state is the spirit that has a foothold in the world, whereas in
nature it realizes itself only in a self-estranged form as dormant
spirit. . . . The fact that the state exists testifies to God's walk
through the world. It has its ground in the power of reason that
causes its self-realization through the force of will.
Hegel is never concerned with things as such, but always with their
reasonable, thoughtful content. As he always searched for
thoughts in the field of world contemplation, so he also wanted to see
life directed from the viewpoint of thought. It is for this
reason that he fought against indefinite ideals of state and society
and made himself the champion of the order existing in reality.
Whoever dreams of an indefinite ideal for the future believes, in
Hegel's opinion, that the general reason has been waiting for him to
make his appearance. To such a person it is necessary to explain
particularly that reason is already contained in everything that is
real. He called Professor Fries, whose colleague he was in Jena and
whose successor he became later in Heidelberg, the "General Field
Marshal of all shallowness" because he had intended to form such
an ideal for the future "out of the mush of his heart."
The comprehensive defense of the real and existing order has earned
Hegel strong reproaches even from those who were favorably inclined
toward the general trend of his ideas. One of Hegel's followers,
Johann Eduard Erdmann, writes in regard to this point:
The decided preponderance that Hegel's philosophy is granted in the
middle of the 1820's over all other contemporary systems has its cause
in the fact that the momentary calm that it established in the wake of
the wild struggles in the field of politics, religion and church
policy, correspond appropriately to a philosophy that has been called
— in reprehension by its antagonists, and in praise by its friends —
the ‘philosophy of the restoration.’
This name is justified to a much greater extent than its coiners had
realized.
One should not overlook the fact also that Hegel created, through his
sense of reality, a view that is in a high degree close and favorable
to life. Schelling had meant to provide a view of life in his
"Philosophy of Revelation," but how foreign are the
conceptions of his contemplation of God to the immediately experienced
real life! A view of this kind can have its value, at most, in festive
moments of solitary contemplation when man withdraws from the bustle'
of everyday life to surrender to the mood of profound meditation; when
he is engaged, so to speak, not in the service of the world, but of
God. Hegel, however, had meant to impart to man the all-pervading
feeling that he serves the general divine principle also in his
everyday activities. For him, this principle extends, as it were, down
to the last detail of reality, while with Schelling it withdraws to
the highest regions of existence. Because Hegel loved reality
and life, he attempted to conceive it in its most reasonable form. He
wanted man to be guided by reason every step of his life. In the last
analysis he did not have a low estimation of the individual's value.
This can be seen from utterances like the following.
The richest and most concrete is the most subjective, and the
element that withdraws the most into profundity is the most powerful
and all-comprehensive. The highest and most pointed peak is the
pure personality, which alone through the absolute dialectic,
which is nature, encompasses everything within itself and at the same
time, because it develops to the highest stage of freedom and insists
on simplicity, which is the first immediacy and generality.
But in order to become "pure personality" the individual has
to permeate himself with the whole element of reason and to absorb it
into his self, for the "pure personality," to be sure, is
the highest point that man can reach in his development, but man
cannot claim this stage as a mere gift of nature. If he has lifted
himself to this point, however, the following words of Hegel become
true:
That man knows of God is a communal knowledge in the meaning of the
ideal community, for man knows of God only insofar as God knows of
himself in man. This knowledge is self-consciousness of God, but also
a knowledge that God has of man; this knowledge that God has of man
is the knowledge that man has of God. The spirit of man, to know of
God, is only the spirit of God himself.
According to Hegel, only a man in whom this is realized deserves the
name of "personality," for with him reason and individuality
coincide. He realizes God within himself for whom he supplies in his
consciousness the organ to contemplate himself. All thoughts would
remain abstract, unconscious, ideal forms if they did not obtain
living reality in man. Without man, God would not be there in his
highest perfection. He would be the incomplete basic substance of the
world. He would not know of himself. Hegel has presented this God
before his realization in life. The content of the presentation is
Hegel's Logic. It is a structure of lifeless, rigid, mute
thoughts. Hegel, himself, calls it the "realm of shadows."
It is, as it were, to show God in his innermost, eternal essence
before the creation of nature and of the finite spirit. But as
self-contemplation necessarily belongs to the nature of God, the
content of the "Logic" is only the dead God who demands
existence. In reality, this realm of the pure abstract truth does not
occur anywhere. It is only our intellect that is capable of separating
it from living reality. According to Hegel, there is nowhere in
existence a completed first being, but there is only one in eternal
motion, in the process of continual becoming. This eternal
being is the "eternally real truth in which the eternally active
reason is free for itself, and for which necessity, nature and history
only serve as forms of manifestation and as vessels of its
glory."
Hegel wanted to show how, in man, the world of thoughts comprehends
itself. He expressed in another form Goethe's conception:
When a man's healthy nature acts in its entirety, when he feels
himself in the world as in a great, beautiful. worthy and cherished
whole, when inner harmony fills him with pure and free delight, then
the universe, if it could become aware of itself, would rejoice as
having reached its destination and would admire the peak of its own
becoming and being.
Translated into Hegel's language, this means that when man experiences
his own being in his thinking, then this act has not merely an
individual personal significance, but a universal one. The nature of
the universe reaches its peak in man's self-knowledge; it arrives at
its completion without which it would remain a fragment.
In Hegel's conception of knowledge this is not understood as the
seizing of a content that, without the cognitive process, exists
somewhere ready-made in the world; it is not an activity that produces
copies of the real events. What is created in the act of
thinking cognition exists, according to Hegel, nowhere else in the
world but only in the act of cognition. As the plant produces a
blossom at a certain stage of development, so the universe produces
the content of human knowledge. Just as the blossom is not there
before its development, so the thought content of the world
does not exist before it appears in the human spirit. A world
conception in which the opinion is held that in the process of
knowledge only copies of an already existing content come into being,
makes man into a lazy spectator of the world, which would also be
completely there without him. Hegel, however, makes man into the
active co-agent of the world process, which would be lacking its peak
without him.
Grillparzer, in his way, characterized Hegel's opinion concerning the
relation of thinking and world in a significant epigram:
It may be that you teach us prophetically God's form of thinking. But
it's human form, friend, you have decidedly spoiled.
What the poet has in mind here in regard to human thinking is just the
thinking that presupposes that its content exists ready-made in the
world and means to do nothing more than to supply a copy of it. For
Hegel, this epigram contains no rebuke, for this thinking about
something else is, according to his view, not the highest, most
perfect thinking. In thinking about a thing of nature one searches for
a concept that agrees with an external object. One then
comprehends through the thought that is thus formed what the external
object is. One is then confronted with two different elements, that
is, with the thought and with the object. But if one intends to ascend
to the highest viewpoint, one must not hesitate to ask the question:
What is thought itself? For the solution of this problem, however,
there is again nothing but thought at our disposal. In the highest
form of cognition, then, thought comprehends itself. No longer does
the question of an agreement with something outside arise. Thought
deals exclusively with itself. This form of thinking that has no
support in any external object appears to Grillparzer as destructive
for the mode of thinking that supplies information concerning the
variety of things spread out in time and space, and belonging to both
the sensual and spiritual world of reality. But no more than the
painter destroys nature in reproducing its lines and color on canvas,
does the thinker destroy the ideas of nature as he expresses them in
their spiritually pure form. It is strange that one is inclined to see
in thinking an element that would be hostile to reality because it
abstracts from the profusion of the sensually presented content. Does
not the painter, in presenting in color, shade and line, abstract from
all other qualities of an object? Hegel suitably characterized all
such objections with his nice sense of humor. If the primal substance
whose activity pervades the world "slips, and from the ground on
which it walks, falls into the water, it becomes a fish, an organic
entity, a living being. If it now slips and falls into the element of
pure thinking — for even pure thinking they will not allow as
its proper element — then it suddenly becomes something bad and
finite; of this one really ought to be ashamed to speak, and would be
if it were not officially necessary and because there is simply no use
denying that there is some such thing as logic. Water is such a cold
and miserable element; yet life nevertheless feels comfortably at home
in it. Should thinking be so much worse an element? Should the
absolute feel so uncomfortable and behave so badly in it?"
It is entirely in Hegel's sense if one maintains that the first being
created the lower strata of nature and the human being as well. Having
arrived at this point, it has resigned and left to man the task to
create, as an addition to the external world and to himself, the
thoughts about the things. Thus, the original being, together with
the human being as a co-agent, create the entire content of the world.
Man is a fellow-creator of the world, not merely a lazy spectator
or cognitive ruminator of what would have its being just as well
without him.
What man is in regard to his innermost existence he is through nothing
else but himself. For this reason, Hegel considers freedom, not as a
divine gift that is laid into man's cradle to be held by him forever
after, but as a result toward which he progresses gradually in the
course of his development. From life in the external world, from the
stage in which he is satisfied in a purely sensual existence, he rises
to the comprehension of his spiritual nature, of his own inner world.
He thereby makes himself independent of the external world; he follows
his inner being. The spirit of a people contains natural necessity and
feels entirely dependent on what is moral public opinion in regard to
custom and tradition, quite apart from the individual human being. But
gradually the individual wrests himself loose from this world
of moral convictions that is thus laid down in the external world and
penetrates into his own inner life, recognizing that he can develop
moral convictions and standards out of his own spirit. Man lifts
himself up to the vantage point of the supreme being that rules within
him and is the source of his morality. For his moral commandment, he
no longer looks to the external world but within his own soul. He
makes himself dependent only on himself (paragraph 552 of Hegel's
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). This independence,
this freedom then is nothing that man possesses from the outset, but
it is acquired in the course of historical evolution. World
history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of
freedom.
Since Hegel regards the highest manifestations of the human spirit as
processes in which the primal being of the world finds the completion
of its development, of its becoming, all other phenomena appear
to him as the preparatory stages of this highest peak; the final stage
appears as the aim and purpose toward which everything tends. This
conception of a purposiveness in the universe is different from the
one in which world creation and world government are thought to be
like the work of an ingenious technician or constructor of machines,
who has arranged all things according to useful purposes. A utility
doctrine of this kind was rigorously rejected by Goethe. On February
20th, 1831, he said to Eckermann (compare Conversations of Goethe
with Eckermann, Part II):
Man is inclined to carry his usual views from life also into science
and, in observing the various parts of an organic being, to inquire
after their purpose and use. This may go on for awhile and he may also
make progress in science for the time being, but he will come across
phenomena soon enough where such a narrow view will prove insufficient
and he will be entangled in nothing but contradictions if he does not
acquire a higher orientation. Such utilitarian teachers will say that
the bull has horns to defend itself with, but there I ask why the
sheep have none. Even when they have horns, why are they twisted
around the sheep's ears so that they cannot be of any use at all. It
is a different thing to say that the bull defends himself with his
horns because they are there. The question why is not
scientific at all. We fare a little better with the question how,
for if I ask the question, ‘How does the bull have horns?’ I am
immediately led to the observation of his organization, and this shows
me at the same time why the lion has no horns and cannot have any.
Nevertheless, Goethe recognizes, in another sense, a purposeful
arrangement in all nature that finally reaches its aim in man and has
all its works so ordered, as it were, that he will fulfill his
destination in the end. In his essay on Winckelmann, he writes,
"For to what avail is all expenditure and labor of suns and
planets and moons, of stars and galaxies, of comets and of nebulae,
and of completed and still growing worlds, if not at last a happy man
rejoices in his existence?" Goethe is also convinced that the
nature of all world phenomena is brought to light as truth in and
through man (compare what is said
in Part 1 Chapter VI).
To comprehend how
everything in the world is so laid out that man has a worthy task and
is capable of carrying it out is the aim of this world conception.
What Hegel expresses at the end of his Philosophy of Nature
sounds like a philosophical justification of Goethe's words:
In the element of life nature has completed her course and has made
her peace as she turns into a higher phase of being. The spirit has
thus emerged from nature. The aim of nature is her own death, to break
through the crust of immediate sensual existence, to burn as a phoenix
in order to emerge from this external garment, rejuvenated as spirit.
Nature thus becomes estranged from herself in order that she may
recognize her own being, thereby bringing about a reconciliation with
herself. . . . The spirit therefore exists before nature as its
real purpose; nature originates from the spirit.
This world conception succeeded in placing man so high because it saw
realized in man what is the basis of the whole world, as the
fundamental force, the primal being. It prepares its realization
through the whole gradual progression of all other phenomena but is
fulfilled only in man. Goethe and Hegel agree perfectly in this
conception. What Goethe had derived from his contemplative
observation of nature and spirit, Hegel expresses through his
lucid pure thinking unfolding its life in self-consciousness.
The method by which Goethe explained certain natural processes
through the stages of their growth and development is applied by Hegel
to the whole cosmos. For an understanding of the plant organism Goethe
demanded:
Watch how the plant in its growth changes step by step and,
gradually led on, transforms from blossoms to fruits.
Hegel wants to comprehend all world phenomena in the gradual progress
of their development from the simplest dull activity of inert matter
to the height of the self-conscious spirit. In the self-conscious
spirit he sees the revelation of the primal substance of the world.
∴
VIII. Reactionary World Conceptions
"The bud vanishes in the breaking of the blossom, and one could
say that the former is contradicted by the latter. In the same way,
the fruit declares the blossom to be a false existence and replaces it
as its truth. These forms are not merely different from one another
but they crowd each other out as they are incompatible. Their Quid
nature makes them at once into moments of the organic whole in which
they not only do not contradict each other, but in which the one is as
necessary as the other, and it is only this equal necessity that
constitutes the life of the whole."
In these words of Hegel, the most significant traits of his mode of
conception are expressed. He believes that the things of reality carry
within themselves their own contradiction and that the incentive for
their growth, for the living process of their development, is given by
the fact that they continually attempt to overcome this contradiction.
The blossom would never become fruit if it were without contradiction.
It would have no reason to go beyond its unquestioned existence.
An exactly opposite intellectual conviction forms the point of
departure of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776 – 1841). Hegel is a
sharp thinker, but at the same time a spirit with a great thirst for
reality. He would like to have only things that have absorbed the
rich, saturated content of the world into themselves. For this reason,
Hegel's thoughts must also be in an eternal flux, in a continuous
state of becoming, in a forward motion as full of contradictions as
reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker. He does not
attempt to penetrate into things but looks at them from the corner
into which he has withdrawn as an isolated thinker. The purely logical
thinker is disturbed by a contradiction. He demands clear concepts
that can exist side by side. One concept must not interfere with
another. The thinker sees himself in a strange situation because he is
confronted with reality that is full of contradictions, no matter what
he may undertake. The concepts that he can derive from this reality
are unsatisfactory to him. They offend his logical sense. This feeling
of dissatisfaction becomes the point of departure. Herbart feels that
if the reality that is spread out before his senses and before his
mind supplies him with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the
true reality for which his thinking is striving. He derives his task
from this situation. The contradictory reality is not real being but
only appearance. In this view he follows Kant to a certain degree, but
while Kant declares true being unattainable to thinking cognition,
Herbart believes one penetrates from appearance to being by
transforming the contradictory concepts of appearance and changing
them into concepts that are free from contradictions. As smoke
indicates fire, so appearance points at a form of being as its ground.
If, through our logical thinking, we elaborate out of a contradictory
world picture given to us by our senses and our mind, one that is not
contradictory, then we gain from this uncontradictory world picture
what we are looking for. This world picture, to be sure, does not
appear in this form that is free from contradictions, but it
lies behind the apparent one as true reality. Herbart does not set out
to comprehend the directly given reality, but creates another reality
through which the former is to become explainable. He arrives in this
fashion at an abstract thought system that looks rather meager as
compared to the rich, full reality. The true reality cannot be a
unity, for a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite
variety of the real things and events. It must be a plurality of
simple entities, eternally equal to themselves, incapable of change
and development. Only a simple entity that unchangeably preserves its
qualities is free from contradictions. An entity in development is
something different in one moment from what it is in another, that is,
its qualities are contradictory at various times. The true world is,
therefore, a plurality of simple, never-changing entities, and what we
perceive are not these simple entities but their relations to one
another. These relations have nothing to do with the real being. If
one simple entity enters into a relationship with another, the two
entities are not changed thereby, but I do perceive the result of
their relationship. The reality we perceive directly is a sum of
relations between real entities. When one entity abandons its relation
to another and replaces it by a relationship with a third entity,
something happens without touching the being of the entities
themselves. It is this event that we perceive, namely, our apparent
contradictory reality. It is interesting to note how Herbart, on the
basis of this conception, forms his thoughts concerning the life of
the soul. The soul is, as are all other real entities, simple and
unchangeable in itself. This entity is now engaged in relations with
other beings. The expression of these relations is life in
thought-pictures. Everything that happens within us — imagination,
feeling, will — is an interplay between the soul and the rest of the
world of real entities. Thus, for Herbart, the soul life becomes the
appearance of relations into which the simple soul-entity enters with
the world. Herbart has a mathematical mind, and his whole world
conception is derived fundamentally from mathematical conceptions. A
number does not change when it becomes the link of an arithmetical
operation. Three remains three, whether it is added to four or
subtracted from seven. As the numbers have their place within the
mathematical operations, so do the individual entities within the
relationships that develop between them. For this reason, psychology
becomes an arithmetical operation for Herbart. He attempts to apply
mathematics to psychology. How the thought-images condition each
other, how they effect one another, what results they produce through
their coexistence are things calculated by Herbart. The
"ego" is not the spiritual entity that we lay hold of in our
self-consciousness, but it is the result of the cooperation of all
thought-pictures and thereby also nothing more than a sum, a last
expression of relationships. Of the simple entity, which is the basis
of our soul life, we know nothing, but its continual relation to other
entities is apparent to us. In this play of relations one
entity is entangled. This condition is expressed by the fact that
all these relationships are tending toward a center, and this tendency
expresses itself in the thought of the ego.
Herbart is, in another sense than Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte
and Hegel, a representative of the development of modern world
conception. Those thinkers attempt a representation of the
self-conscious soul in a world picture capable of containing this
self-conscious soul as an element. In so doing they become the
spokesmen for the spiritual impulse of their age. Herbart is
confronted with this impulse and he must admit the feeling that this
impulse is there. He attempts to understand it, but in the form of
thinking that he imagines to be the correct one, he finds no
possibility of penetrating into the life of the self-conscious being
of the soul. He remains outside of it. One can see in Herbart's world
conception what difficulties man's thinking encounters when it tries
to comprehend what it has essentially become in the course of
mankind's evolution. Compared to Hegel, Herbart appears like a thinker
who strives in vain for an aim at which Hegel believes actually to
have arrived. Herbart's thought constructions are an attempt to
outline as an external spectator what Hegel means to present through
the inner participation of thought. Thinkers like Herbart are also
significant for the characterization of the modern form of world
conception. They indicate the aim that is to be reached by the very
display of their insufficient means for the attainment of this aim.
The spiritual aim of the age motivates Herbart's struggle; his
intellectual energy is inadequate to understand and to express this
struggle sufficiently. The course of the philosophical evolution shows
that, besides the thinkers who move on the crest of the time-impulses,
there are also always some active ones who form world conceptions
through their failure to understand these impulses. Such world
conceptions may well be called reactionary.
Herbart reverts to the view of Leibniz. His simple soul entity is
unchangeable; it neither grows nor decays. It existed when this
apparent life contained within man's ego began, and will again
withdraw from these relations when this life ceases to continue
independently. Herbart arrives at his conception of God through his
world picture, which contains many simple entities that produce the
events through their relations. Within these processes we observe
purpose-directed order. But the relations could only be accidental and
chaotic if the entities, which, according to their own nature, would
have nothing in common, were left entirely to themselves. The fact
that they are teleologically ordered, therefore, points toward a wise
world ruler who directs their relations. "No one is capable of
giving a close definition of deity," says Herbart. He condemns
"the pretensions of the systems that speak of God as of an object
to be comprehended in sharply drawn contours by means of which we
would rise to a knowledge for which we are simply denied the
data."
Man's actions and artistic creations are completely without foundation
in this world picture. All possibility to fit them into this system is
lacking. For what could a relationship of simple entities that are
completely indifferent to all processes mean to the actions of man? So
Herbart is forced to look for independent tools both for ethics and
for esthetics. He believes he finds them in human feeling. When man
perceives things or events, he can associate the feeling of pleasure
or displeasure with them. We are pleased when we see man's will going
in a direction that is in agreement with his convictions. When we make
the opposite observation, the feeling of displeasure overcomes us.
Because of this feeling we call the agreement of conviction and will
good; the discord, we call morally reprehensible. A feeling of this
kind can be attached only to a relationship between moral
elements. The will as such is morally indifferent, as is also the
conviction. Only when the two meet does ethical pleasure or
displeasure emerge. Herbart calls a relation of moral elements a
practical idea. He enumerates five such practical-ethical ideas: The
idea of moral freedom, consisting of the agreement of will and moral
conviction; the idea of perfection that has its basis in the fact that
the strong pleases rather than the weak; the idea of right, which
springs from displeasure with antagonism; the idea of benevolence,
which expresses the pleasure that one feels as one furthers the will
of another person; the idea of retribution, which demands that all
good and evil that has originated in a person is to be compensated
again in the same person.
Herbart bases his ethics on a human feeling, on moral sentiment. He
separates it from the world conception that has to do with what is,
and transforms it into a number of postulates of what should
be. He combines it with esthetics and, indeed, makes it a part of
them. For the science of esthetics also contains postulates concerning
what is to be. It, too, deals with relations that are associated with
feelings. The individual color leaves us esthetically indifferent.
When one color is joined to another, this combination can be either
satisfactory or displeasing to us. What pleases in a combination is
beautiful; what displeases, is ugly. Robert Zimmermann (1824 –
1898) has ingeniously constructed a science of art on these
principles. Only a part of it, the part that considers those relations
of beauty that are concerned with the realm of action, is to be the
ethics or the science of the good. The significant writings of Robert
Zimmermann in the field of esthetics (science of art) show that even
attempts at philosophical formulations that do not reach the summit of
cultural impulses of a time can produce important stimulation's for
the development of the spirit.
Because of his mathematically inclined mind, Herbart successfully
investigated those processes of human soul life that really do go on
with a certain regularity in the same way with all human beings. These
processes will, of course, not prove to be the more intimate and
individually characteristic ones. What is original and characteristic
in each personality will be overlooked by such a mathematical
intellect, but a person of such a mentality will obtain a certain
insight into the average processes of the mind and, at the same time,
through his sure skill in handling the arithmetical calculations, will
control the measurement of the mental development. As the laws of
mechanics enable us to develop technical skills, so the laws of the
psychological processes make it possible for us to devise a technique
in education for the development of mental abilities. For this reason,
Herbart's work has become fruitful in the field of pedagogy. He has
found many followers among pedagogues, but not among them alone. This
seems at first sight hard to understand with regard to a world
conception offering a picture of meager, colorless generalities, but
it can be explained from the fact that it is just the people who feel
a certain need for a world conception who are easily attracted by such
general concepts that are rigidly linked together like terms of an
arithmetical operation. It is something fascinating to experience how
one thought is linked to the next as if it were through a
self-operative mechanical process, because this process awakens in the
observer a feeling of security. The mathematical sciences are so
highly appreciated because of this assurance. They unfold their
structure, so to speak, through their own force. They only have to be
supplied with the thought material and everything else can be left to
their logical necessity, which works automatically. In the progress of
Hegel's thinking, which is saturated with reality, the thinker
continually has to take the initiative. There is more warmth, more
direct life in this mode of thinking, but it also requires the
constant support of the soul forces. This is because it is reality in
this case that the thinker catches in his thoughts, an ever-flowing
reality that at every point shows its individual character and fights
against every logical rigidity. Hegel also had a great number of
pupils and followers, but they were much less faithful than those of
Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality enlivened his
thoughts, they exerted their charm, and as long as his words were
heard under its spell, they carried great conviction. After Hegel's
death many of his pupils went their own paths. This is only natural,
for whoever is self-dependent will also shape his own attitude toward
reality in his own fashion. We observe a different process with
Herbart's pupils. They elaborate the master's doctrine, but they
continue the fundamental stock of his thoughts without change. A
thinker who finds his way into Hegel's mode of thinking penetrates
into the course of the world's development that is manifested in
innumerable evolutionary phases. The individual thinker, of course,
can be stimulated to follow this course of evolution, but he is free
to shape the various stages according to his own individual mode of
conception. In Herbart's case, however, we deal with a firmly
constructed thought system that commands confidence through the
solidity of its structure. One may reject it, but if one accepts it,
one will have to accept it in its original form. For the individual
personal element, which challenges and forces us to face the self of
another thinker with our own self, is lacking here.
* * *
"Life is a miserable affair; I have decided to spend mine by
thinking about it." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1861)
spoke these words in a conversation with Wieland at the beginning of
his university years, and his world conception sprang from this mood.
Schopenhauer had experienced personal hardship and had observed the
sad lives of others when he decided upon concentrating on
philosophical thought as a new aim of life. The sudden death of his
father, caused by a fall from a storehouse, his bad experiences in his
career as a merchant, the sight of scenes of human miseries that he
witnessed as a' young man while traveling, and many other things of
similar kind had produced in him the wish, not so much to know the
world, but rather to procure for himself a means to endure it through
contemplation. He needed a world conception in order to calm his
gloomy disposition. When he began his university studies, the thoughts
that Kant, Fichte and Schelling introduced to the German philosophical
life were in full swing. Hegel's star was just then rising. In 1806 he
had published his first larger work, The Phenomenology of the
Spirit. In Goettingen, Schopenhauer heard the teachings of
Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of the book, Aenesidemus,
who was, to be sure, in a certain respect an opponent of Kant, but
who nevertheless drew the student's attention to Kant and Plato as the
two great spirits toward whom he would have to look. With fiery
enthusiasm Schopenhauer plunged into Kant's mode of conception. He
called the revolution that his study caused in his head a spiritual
rebirth. He found it even more satisfactory because he considered it
to be in agreement with the views of Plato, the other philosopher
Schulze had pointed out to him.
Plato had said, "As long as we approach the things and events
merely through sensual perceptions, we are like men who are chained in
a dark cave in such a way that they cannot turn their heads;
therefore, they can only see, by means of the light of a fire burning
behind them, the shadows upon the opposite wall, the shadows of real
things that are carried between the fire and their backs, the shadows
of each other and of themselves. These shadows are to the real things
what the things of sensual perception are to the ideas, which
are the true reality. The things of the sensually perceptible world
come into existence and pass again, the ideas are eternal."
Did not Kant teach this, too? Is not the perceptible world only a
world of appearances for him also? To be sure, the sage from
Koenigsberg did not attribute this eternal reality to the ideas, but
with respect to the perception of the reality spread out in space and
time, Schopenhauer thought Plato and Kant to be in complete agreement.
Soon he also accepted this view as an irrevocable truth. He argued,
"I have a knowledge of the things insofar as I see, hear, feel
them, etc., that is to say, insofar as I have them as a thought
picture in my mind's eye. An object then can be there for me only
by being represented to my mind as a thought image. Heaven, earth,
etc., are therefore my mind's imaginations, for the "thing
in itself' that corresponds to them has become my mind's object only
by taking on the character of a thought representation."
Although Schopenhauer found everything that Kant stated concerning the
subjective character of the world of perception absolutely correct, he
was not at all satisfied with regard to Kant's remarks concerning the
thing in itself. Schulze had also been an opponent of Kant's view in
this respect. How can we know anything at all of a "thing in
itself"? How can we even express a word about it if our knowledge
is completely limited to thought pictures of our mind, if the
"thing in itself" lies completely outside their realm?
Schopenhauer had to search for another path in order to come to the
"thing in itself." In his search he was influenced by the
contemporary world conceptions more than he ever admitted. The element
that Schopenhauer added to the conviction that he had from Kant and
Plato as the "thing in itself," we find also in Fichte,
whose lectures he had heard in 1811 in Berlin. We also find this
element in Schelling. Schopenhauer could hear the most mature form of
Fichte's views in Berlin. This last form is preserved in Fichte's
posthumous works. Fichte declared with great emphasis, while
Schopenhauer, according to his own admission, "listened
attentively," that all being has its last roots in a universal
will. As soon as man discovers will in himself, he gains the
conviction that there is a world independent of himself as an
individual. Will is not a knowledge of the individual but a form of
real being. Fichte could also have called his world conception,
The World as Knowledge and Will. In Schelling's book,
Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom and Matters Connected with
This Problem, we actually find the sentences, "In the last
and deepest analysis there is no other being than will. Will is
fundamental being and will alone can claim all its predicates: To be
without cause, eternal, independent of time, self-assertive. All
philosophy is striving for just this aim, to find this highest
expression."
That will is fundamental being becomes Schopenhauer's view also. When
knowledge is extinguished, will remains, for will also precedes
knowledge. "Knowledge has its origin in my brain," says
Schopenhauer, "but my brain must have been produced through an
active, creative force. Man is aware of such a creative energy in his
own will." Schopenhauer now attempts to prove that what is active
in all other things is also will. The will, therefore, is, as
the "thing in itself," at the root of all reality that is
merely represented in the thought pictures of our mental life,
and we can have a knowledge of this "thing in itself." It is
not, as Kant's "thing in itself," beyond our perceptive
imagination but we experience its actuality within our own organism.
The development of modern world conception is progressive in
Schopenhauer insofar as he is the first thinker to make the attempt to
elevate one of the fundamental forces of the self-consciousness
to the general principle of the world. The active self-consciousness
contains the riddle of the age. Schopenhauer is incapable of finding a
world picture that contains the roots of self-consciousness.
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had attempted to do that. Schopenhauer
takes one force of the self-consciousness, will, and
claims that this element is not merely in the human soul but in the
whole world. Thus, for him, man is not rooted with his full
self-consciousness in the world's foundation, but at least with a part
of it, with his will. Schopenhauer thus shows himself to be one of
those representatives of the evolution of modern world conception who
can only partially encompass the fundamental riddle of the time within
their consciousness.
Goethe also had a profound influence on Schopenhauer. From the autumn
of 1813 until the following spring, the young Schopenhauer enjoyed the
company of the poet. Goethe introduced him personally to his doctrine
of colors. Goethe's mode of conception agreed completely with the view
that Schopenhauer had developed concerning the behavior of our sense
organs and our mind in the process of perception of things and events.
Goethe had undertaken careful and intensive investigations concerning
the perceptions of the eye and phenomena of light and colors, and had
elaborated their results in his work, Concerning the Doctrine of
Colors. He had arrived at results that differed from those of
Newton, the founder of the modern theory of color. The antagonism that
exists in this field between Newton and Goethe cannot be judged
properly if one does not start by pointing to the difference between
the world conceptions of these two personalities. Goethe considered
the sense organs of man as the highest physical apparatuses. For the
world of colors, he therefore had to estimate the eye as his highest
judge for the observation of law-determined connections. Newton and
the physicists investigated the phenomena that are pertinent to this
question in a fashion that Goethe called "the greatest misfortune
of modern physics," and that consisted in the fact that the
experiments have been separated, as it were, from man.
One wants to know nature only according to the indications of
artificial instruments and thereby even intends to limit and to prove
what nature is capable of.
The eye perceives light and darkness and, within the light-dark field
of observation, the colors. Goethe takes his stand within this field
and attempts to prove how light, darkness and the colors are
connected. Newton and his followers meant to observe the processes of
light and colors as they would go on if there were no human eye. But
the stipulation of such an external sphere is, according to Goethe's
world conception, without justification. We do not obtain an insight
into the nature of a thing by disregarding the effects we observe, but
this nature is given to us through the mind's exact observation of the
regularity of these effects. The effects that the eye perceives, taken
in their totality and represented according to the law of their
connection are the essence of the phenomena of light and color,
not a separated world of external processes that are to be determined
by means of artificial instruments.
It is really of no avail that we attempt to express directly the
nature of a thing. What we are aware of are effects, and a complete
account of these effects might possibly encompass the essence of that
thing. Vainly do we endeavor to describe the character of a man;
we put his deeds and actions together, however, and a picture of his
character arises before our eyes. Colors are the actions of light;
they are what light does and suffers. In this sense we can expect
information from them concerning the nature of light. Color and light
are indeed in close relation but we must think of them both as
belonging to nature as a whole; for it is nature as a whole that is
ready to manifest itself in special ways to the sense of the eye.
Here we find Goethe's world view applied to a special case. In the
human organism, through its senses, through the soul of man, there is
revealed what is concealed in the rest of nature. In man, nature
reaches its climax. Whoever, therefore, like Newton, looks for the
truth of nature outside man, will not find it, according to Goethe's
fundamental conviction.
Schopenhauer sees in the world that the mind perceives in space and
time only an idea of this mind. The essence of this world of thought
pictures is revealed to us in our will, by which we see our own
organism permeated. Schopenhauer, therefore, cannot agree with a
physical doctrine that sees the nature of light, not in the mental
content of the eye, but in a world that is supposed to exist separated
from the eye. Goethe's mode of conception was, for this reason, more
agreeable to Schopenhauer because Goethe did not go beyond the world
of the perceptual content of the eye. He considered Goethe's view to
be a confirmation of his own opinion concerning this world. The
antagonism between Goethe and Newton is not merely a question of
physics but concerns the world conception as a whole. Whoever is of
the opinion that a valid statement about nature can be arrived at
through experiments that can be detached from the human being must
take his stand with Newton's theory of color and remain on that
ground. Modern physics is of this opinion. It can only agree with the
judgment concerning Goethe's theory of colors that Helmholtz expressed
in his essay, Goethe's Anticipations of Future Ideas in Natural
Science:
Wherever it is a question of problems that can be solved through
poetic divination producing imaginative pictures, the poet has shown
himself capable of the most excellent work; wherever only a
consciously applied inductive method could have helped, Goethe has
failed.
If one sees in the pictures of human imagination only products that
are added to an already complete nature, then it is of course
necessary to determine what goes on in nature apart from these
pictures. But if one sees in them manifestations of the essence
contained in nature as Goethe did, then one will consult them in
investigating the truth. Schopenhauer, to be sure, shares neither the
first nor the second standpoint. He is not at all ready to recognize
sense perceptions as containing the essence of things. He rejects the
method of modern physics because physics does not limit itself to the
element that alone is directly given, namely, that of perceptions as
mental pictures. But Schopenhauer also transformed this question from
a problem of physics into one of world conception. As he also begins
his world conception with man and not with an external world apart
from man, he had to side with Goethe, who had consistently drawn the
conclusion for the theory of colors that necessarily follows if one
sees in man with his healthy sense organs "the greatest and most
exact physical apparatus." Hegel, who as a philosopher stands
completely on this foundation, had for this reason forcefully defended
Goethe's theory of colors. He says in his Philosophy of Nature:
For the description of the color phenomenon that is adequate to its
concept, we are indebted to Goethe, who was attracted early by the
phenomena of color and light and who was drawn to their contemplation
especially in painting; his pure and simple sense of nature had to
revolt against such barbarism of reflected thought as is found in
Newton. Goethe took up everything about light and color that had been
stated and experimentally demonstrated since Plato. He conceived the
phenomenon as simple, and the truest instinct of reason does consist
in the ability of approaching a phenomenon from that side that allows
its simplest representation.
For Schopenhauer, the essential ground for all world processes is the
will. It is an eternal dark urge for existence. It contains no
reason because reason comes into existence only in the human brain,
which in turn is created by the will. Hegel sees the spirit as the
root of the world in self-conscious reason, and in human reason, only
as individual realization of the general world reason. Schopenhauer,
by contrast, recognizes reason only as a product of the brain, as a
mere bubble that comes into being at the end of the process in which
will, the unreasoning blind urge, has created everything else first.
In Hegel, all things and processes are permeated by reason; in
Schopenhauer, everything is without reason, for everything is the
product of the will without reason. The personality of Schopenhauer
exemplifies unequivocally a statement of Fichte, "The kind of
world conception a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is."
Schopenhauer had bad experiences and had become acquainted with the
worst side of the world before he decided to spend his life in
contemplation of it. It is for this reason that he is satisfied to
depict the world as essentially deprived of reason as a result of
blind will. Reason, according to his mode of thinking, has no power
over unreason, for it is itself the result of unreason; it is illusion
and dream, produced out of will. Schopenhauer's world conception is
the dark, melancholy mood of his soul translated into thought. His eye
was not prepared to follow the manifestations of reason in the world
with pleasure. This eye saw only unreason that was manifest in sorrow
and pain. Thus, his doctrine of ethics could only be based on the
observation of suffering. An action is moral only if it has its
foundation in such an observation. Sympathy, pity, must be the
source of human actions. What better course could be taken by a man
who has gained the insight that all beings suffer than to let his
actions be guided by pity. As everything unreasonable and evil has its
roots in will, man will stand morally the higher the more he mortifies
his unruly will in himself. The manifestation of this will in the
individual person is selfishness, egotism. Whoever surrenders to pity
and thereby wills not for himself but for others, has become master of
the will.
One method of freeing oneself from the will consists in surrendering
to artistic creations and to the impressions that are derived from
works of art. The artist does not produce to satisfy a desire for
something; he does not produce his works because of a will that is
selfishly directed toward things and events. His production proceeds
out of unegotistic joy. He plunges into the essence of things in pure
contemplation. This is also true of the enjoyment of art. As long as
we approach a work of art with the desire stirring in us to own it, we
are still entangled in the lower appetites of the will. Only when we
admire beauty without desiring it have we raised ourselves to the
lofty stage where we no longer are dependent on the blind force of
will. Then art has become for us a means to free ourselves for the
moment from the unreasoning force of the blind will to exist. The
deliverance takes place in its purest form in the enjoyment of the
musical work of art, for music does not speak to us through the
medium of representative imagination as do the other arts. Music
copies nothing in nature. As all things and events are only mental
pictures, so also the arts that take these things as models can only
make impressions on us as manifestations of imaginations. Man produces
tone out of himself without a natural model. Because man has will as
his own essence within himself, it can only be the will through which
the world of music is directly released. It is for this reason that
music so deeply moves the human soul. It does this because music is
the manifestation of man's inner nature, his true being, his will, and
it is a triumph of man that he is in possession of an art in which he
enjoys selflessly, freed from the fetters of the will, what is the
root of all desire, of all unreason. This view of Schopenhauer
concerning music is again the result of his most personal nature. Even
before his university years, when he was apprenticed to a merchant in
Hamburg, he wrote to his mother:
How did the heavenly seed find a place on the hard ground on which
necessity and poverty struggle for every little spot? We have been
banished from the primordial spirit and are not to reach up to him.
Yet, a pitiful angel has begged the heavenly flower for us and it
blossoms in full glory rooted in this soil of misery. The pulsation's
of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the
centuries of barbarism, and a direct resonance of the eternal
is preserved in this art for us, understandable to every soul and
exalted above even vice and virtue.
From the attitude that is taken toward art by the two antipodes of
world conception, Hegel and Schopenhauer, one can learn how a world
conception deeply affects the personal relation of man toward the
various realms of life. Hegel, who saw in man's world of conceptions
and ideas the climax toward which all external nature strives as its
perfection, can recognize as the most perfect art only the one in
which the spirit appears in its most perfect form, and in which this
spirit at the same time clings to the element that continuously
strives toward the spirit. Every formation of external nature tends
to be spirit, but it does not reach this aim. When a man now
creates such an external spatial form, endowing it as an artist with
the spirit for which material itself strives without being capable of
reaching it, then he has produced a perfect work of art. This is the
case in the art of sculpture. What otherwise appears only in
the inward life of the soul as formless spirit, as idea, is shaped by
the artist out of matter. The soul, the inner life that we perceive in
our consciousness as being without shape, is what speaks out of a
statue, out of a formation of space. This marriage of the sensual
world with the world of the spirit represents the artistic ideal of a
world conception that sees the purpose of nature in the creation of
the spirit, and therefore can also recognize the beautiful only in a
work that appears as immediate expression of the spirit emerging in
the form of nature. Whoever, like Schopenhauer, however, sees in all
nature only mental pictures, cannot possibly recognize the ideal of
art in a work that imitates nature. He must choose an art as his ideal
that is free of all nature, that is to say, music.
Schopenhauer considered everything that leads toward the extirpation,
the mortification of the will quite consistently as desirable, for an
extirpation of the will means an extinction of the unreasonable in the
world. Man is to give up will. He is to kill all desire within
himself. Asceticism is, for this reason, Schopenhauer's moral
ideal. The wise man will extinguish within himself all wishes; he will
annihilate his will completely. He will reach the point where no
motivation forces him to exert his will. All striving consists merely
in quietistic yearning for deliverance from all life. In the
world-renouncing life-views in Buddhism, Schopenhauer acknowledged a
doctrine of profound wisdom. Compared to Hegel's, one can thus call
Schopenhauer's world view reactionary. Hegel attempted everywhere to
affect a reconciliation of man with life; he always strove to present
all action as a cooperation with a reason-directed order of the world.
Schopenhauer regarded enmity to life, withdrawal from reality and
world flight as the ideal of the wise man.
* * *
Hegel's mode of world and life conception contains an element that can
produce doubts and questions. Hegel's point of departure is pure
thinking, the abstract idea, which he himself once called "an
oyster-like, gray or entirely black" being (in a letter to Goethe
on February 20, 1821), of which he maintained at the same time should
be considered the "representation of God as he is in his eternal
essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit." The
aim that he reaches is the individual human spirit endowed with a
content of its own, through whom first comes to light what led only a
shadow-like existence in a gray, oyster-like element. This can easily
be understood to mean that a personality as a living
self-conscious being does not exist outside the human spirit. Hegel
derives the content-saturated element that we experience within
ourselves from the ideal element that we obtain through thinking.
It is quite comprehensible that a spirit of a certain inner
disposition felt repulsed by this view of world and life. Only
thinkers of such a selfless devotion as that of Karl Rosenkranz
(1805 – 1879) could so completely find their way into Hegel's
movement of thought and, in such perfect agreement with Hegel, create
for themselves structures of ideas that appear like a rebirth of
Hegel's own thought structure in a less impressive medium. Others
could not understand how man is to be enlightened through pure idea
with respect to the infinity and variety of the impressions that pour
in on him as he directs his observations toward nature, crowded as it
is with colors and forms, and how he is to profit if he lifts his soul
from experiences in the world of sensation, feeling and
perception-guided imagination to the frosty heights of pure thought.
To interpret Hegel in this fashion is to misunderstand him, but it is
quite comprehensible that he should have been misunderstood in this
way.
This mood that was dissatisfied with Hegel's mode of thinking found
expression in the current thought that had representatives in Franz
Xaver von Baader (1765 – 1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause
(1781 – 1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797 – 1879),
Christian Hermann Weisse (1801 – 1866), Anton Guenther
(1783 – 1863), Karl Friedrich Eusebius Thrahndorff (1782 –
1863) Martin Deutinger (1815 – 1864), and Hermann Ulrici
(1806 – 1884). They attempted to replace the gray, oyster-like
pure thought of Hegel by a life-filled, personal, primal entity, an
individual God. Baader called it an "atheistic conception"
to believe that God attained a perfect existence only in man. God must
be a personality and the world must not, as Hegel thought, proceed
from him like a logical process in which one concept always
necessarily produces the next. On the contrary, the world must be
God's free creation, the product of his almighty will. These thinkers
approach the Christian doctrine of revelation. To justify and fortify
this doctrine scientifically becomes the more-or-less conscious
purpose of their thinking. Baader plunged into the mysticism of
Jakob Boehme (1757 – 1624), Meister Eckhardt (1250 –
1329), Tauler (1290 – 1361) and Paracelsus (1494 –
1541), whose language, so rich in pictures, he considered a much more
appropriate means to express the most profound truths than the pure
thoughts of Hegel's doctrine. That Baader also caused Schelling to
enrich his thoughts with a deeper and warmer content through the
assimilation's of conceptions from Jakob Boehme has already been
mentioned.
In the course of the development of the modern world conception
personalities like Krause will always be remarkable. He was a
mathematician who allowed himself to be swayed by the proud, logically
perfect character of this science, and attempted a solution of the
problems of world conception after the model of the method he was used
to as a mathematician. Typical of this kind of thinker is the great
mathematician, Newton, who treated the phenomena of the visible
universe as if it were an arithmetical problem but, at the same time,
satisfied his own need concerning the fundamental questions of world
conception in a fashion that approached the belief to be found in
revealed religion. Krause finds it impossible to accept a conception
that seeks the primal being of the world in the things and
processes. Whoever, like Hegel, looks for God in the world cannot find
him, for the world, to be sure, is in God, but God is not in the
world. He is a self-dependent being resting within himself in blissful
serenity. Krause's world of ideas rests on "thoughts of an
infinite, self-dependent being, outside of which there is nothing;
this being comprises everything by itself and in itself as the one
ground, and that we have to think of as the ground of reason,
nature and humanity." He does not want to have anything in common
with a view "that takes the finite or the world as the sum total
of everything finite to be God itself, idolizing and confusing it with
God." No matter how deep one may penetrate into the reality given
to the senses and the mind, one will never arrive in this way at the
fundamental ground of all being. To obtain a conception of this being
is possible only if one accompanies all finite observation with a
divinatory vision of an over-worldly reality.
Immanuel Hermann Fichte settled his account with Hegelianism
poignantly in his essay, Propositions for the Prolegomena of
Theology (1826), and Contributions Toward a Characterization of
Modern Philosophy (1829). Then, in numerous works, he tried to
prove and elaborate his view that a conscious personal being must be
recognized as the basis of all world phenomena. In order to procure an
emphatic effect for the opposition to Hegel's conception, which
proceeded from pure thought, Immanuel Hermann Fichte joined hands with
friends who were of the same opinion. In 1837, together with Weisse,
Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäs, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth and
others, he began the publication of the Journal for Philosophy and
Speculative Theology. It is Fichte's conviction that we have risen
to the highest knowledge only if we have understood that "the
highest thought that truly solves the world problem is the idea of a
primal subject or absolute personality, which knows and fathoms
itself in its ideal as well as real infinity."
The world creation and preservation that comprises the world
reality, consists solely in the uninterrupted
consciousness-permeated will-direction of God, such that he is only
consciousness and will, but both in a highest union, therefore, only
person, or person in the most eminent sense of the word.
Chr. Hermann Weisse believed that it was necessary to proceed from
Hegel's world conception to a completely theological mode of
conception. In the Christian idea of the three personalities in the
one deity, he saw the aim of his thinking. He attempted to
represent this idea as the result of a natural and unsophisticated
common sense and did so with an uncommon array of ingenuity. In his
triune, Weisse believed that in a personal deity possessing a living
will he had something infinitely richer than Hegel with his
gray idea. This living will is to "give to the inner godly nature
with one breath the one definite form and no other that is implied at
all places in the Holy Writ of the Old and New Testaments. In it, God
is shown prior to the creation of the world as well as during and
after that event in the shining element of his glory as surrounded by
an interminable heavenly host of serving spirits in a fluid immaterial
body, which enables him to fully communicate with the created
world."
Anton Guenther, the "Viennese Philosopher," and Martin
Deutinger, who was under his influence, move with the thoughts of
their world conception completely within the framework of the catholic
theological mode of conception. Guenther attempts to free man from the
natural world order by dividing him into two parts — a natural being
that belongs to the world of necessary law, and a spirit being that
constitutes a self-dependent part of a higher spirit world and has an
existence comparable to an "entity" as described by Herbart.
He believes that he overcomes Hegelianism in this manner and that he
supplies the foundation for a Christian world conception. The Church
itself was not of this opinion, for in Rome Guenther's writings were
included in the Prohibitory Index. Deutinger fought vehemently against
Hegel's "pure thinking," which, in his opinion, ought to be
prevented from devouring life-filled reality. He ranks the living will
higher than pure thought. It can, as creative will, produce something;
thought is powerless and abstract. Thrahndorff also takes living will
as his point of departure. The world cannot be explained from the
shadowy realm of ideas, but a vigorous will must seize these ideas in
order to create real being. The world's deepest content does not
unfold itself to man in thoughtful comprehension, but in an emotional
reaction, in love through which the individual surrenders to
the world, to the will that rules in the universe. It is quite
apparent that all these thinkers endeavor to overcome thinking and its
object, the pure idea. They are unwilling to acknowledge thinking as
the highest manifestation of the spirit of man. In order to comprehend
the ultimate substance of the world, Thrahndorff wants to approach it,
not with the power of knowledge, but of love. It is to become
an object of emotion, not of reason. It is the belief of these
philosophers that through clear, pure thinking the ardent, religious
devotion to the primordial forces of existence are destroyed.
This opinion has its root in a misconception of Hegel's thought world.
Its misunderstanding becomes especially apparent in the views
concerning Hegel's attitude toward religion that spread after his
death. The lack of clarity that began to prevail regarding this
attitude resulted in a split among Hegel's followers into one party
that considered his world conception to be a firm pillar of revealed
Christianity, and another that used his doctrine to dissolve the
Christian conceptions and to replace them by a radically liberal view.
Neither party could have based its opinion on Hegel if they had
understood him correctly, for Hegel's world conception contains
nothing that can be used for support of a religion or for its
destruction. He had meant to do this with respect to any religion as
little as he had intended to create any natural phenomena through his
pure thought. As he had set out to extract the pure thought from the
processes of nature in order to comprehend them in that way, so he had
also, in the case of religion, merely the intention to bring its
thought content to the surface. As he considered everything that is
real in the world as reasonable just because it is real, so he held
this view also in regard to religion. It must come into existence by
soul forces quite beyond those that are at the disposal of the thinker
when he approaches them in order to comprehend them.
It was also an error of such thinkers as Fichte, Weisse, Deutinger and
others that they fought against Hegel because he had not proceeded
from the realm of pure thought to the religious experience of the
personal deity. Hegel had never set himself a task of this kind. He
considered that to be the task of the religious consciousness. The
younger Fichte, Weisse, Krause, Deutinger and the rest wanted to
create a new religion through their world conception. Hegel
would have considered such a task to be as absurd as the wish to
illuminate the world through the idea of light, or to create a
magnet out of the thought of magnetism. To be sure, in Hegel's
opinion, religion has its root in the idea, just as the whole world of
nature and the spirit. For this reason, it is possible that the human
spirit can rediscover this idea in religion, but as the magnet was
created out of the thought of magnetism before the human mind
came into being, and as the latter only afterwards has to
comprehend the magnet's creation, so also religion has become
what it is before its thought emerged in the human soul as an
illuminating part of world conception. If Hegel had lived to
experience the religious criticism of his pupils, he would have felt
compelled to say, "Take your hands off all foundation of
religion, off all creation of religious conceptions, as long as
you want to remain thinkers and do not intend to become
messiahs." The world conception of Hegel, if it is correctly
understood, cannot have a retroactive effect on the religious
consciousness. The philosopher who reflects on the realm of art has
the same relation to his object as the thinker who wants to fathom the
nature of religion.
* * *
The Halle Yearbooks, published from 1838 to 1843 by Arnold Ruge
and Theodor Echtermeyer, served as a forum for the philosophical
controversies of the time. Starting with a defense and explanation of
Hegel, they soon proceeded to develop his ideas independently, and
thus made the transition to the views that are called "radical
world conceptions" in the next chapter. After 1841, the editors
called their journal, The German Yearbook, and, as one of their
aims, they considered "the fight against political illiberality,
against theories of feudalism and landed property." In the
historical development of the time they became active as radical
politicians, demanding a state in which perfect freedom prevails.
Thus, they abandoned the spirit of Hegel, who wanted to understand
history, not to make it.
∴
IX. The Radical World Conceptions
At the beginning of the forties of the last century a man who had
previously thoroughly and intimately penetrated the world conceptions
of Hegel, now forcefully attacked them. This man was Ludwig
Feuerbach (1804 – 1872). The declaration of war against the
philosophy in which he had grown up is given in a radical form in his
essay, Preliminary Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy
(1842), and Principle of the Philosophy of the Future
(1843). The further development of his thoughts can be followed in
his other writings, The Essence of Christianity (1841), The
Nature of Religion (1845), and Theogony (1857).
In the activity of Ludwig Feuerbach a process is repeated in the field
of the science of the spirit that had happened almost a century
earlier (1759) in the realm of natural science through the activity of
Caspar Friedrich Wolff. Wolff's work had meant a reform of the
idea of evolution in the field of biology. How the idea of evolution
was understood before Wolff can be most distinctly learned from the
views of Albrecht von Haller, a man who opposed the reform of
this conception most vehemently. Hailer, who is quite rightly
respected by physiologists as one of the most significant spirits of
this science, could not conceive the development of a living being in
any other form than that in which the germ already contains all parts
that appear in the course of life, but on a small scale and perfectly
pre-formed. Evolution, then, is supposed to be an unfolding of
something that was there in the first place but was hidden from
perception because of its smallness, or for other reasons. If this
view is consistently upheld, there is no development of anything new.
What happens is merely that something that is concealed, encased, is
continuously brought to the light of day. Hailer stood quite
rigorously for this view. In the first mother, Eve, the whole human
race was contained, concealed on a small scale. The human germs have
only been unfolded in the course of world history. The same conception
is also expressed by the philosopher Leibniz (1646 – 1716):
So I should think that the souls, which some day will be human souls,
have been in the seed stage, as it is also with those of other
species; that they have existed in the form of organized things in our
forefathers as far back as Adam, that is to say, since the beginning
of things.
Wolff opposed this idea of evolution with one of his own in Theoria
Generationis, which appeared in 1759. He proceeded from the
supposition that the members of an organism that appear in the course
of life have not existed previously but come into being at the moment
they become perceptible as real new formations. Wolff showed that the
egg contains nothing of the form of the developed organism but that
its development constitutes a series of new formations. This view made
the conception of a real becoming possible, for it showed how
something comes into being that had not previously existed and that
therefore "comes to be" in the true sense of the word.
Hailer's view really denies becoming as it admits only a
continuous process of becoming visible of something that had
previously existed. This scientist had opposed the idea of Wolff with
the peremptory decree, "There is no becoming" (Nulla est
epigenesis). He had, thereby, actually brought about a situation
in which Wolff s view remained unconsidered for decades. Goethe blames
this encasement theory for the resistance with which his endeavors to
explain living beings was met. He had attempted to comprehend the
formations in organic nature through the study of the process of their
development, which he understood entirely in the sense of a true
evolution, according to which the newly appearing parts of an organism
have not already had a previously concealed existence, but do indeed
come into being when they appear. He writes in 1817 that this
attempt, which was a fundamental presupposition of his essay on the
metamorphosis of plants written in 1790, "was received in a cold,
almost hostile manner, but such reluctance was quite natural. The
encasement theory, the concept of pre-formation, of a
successive development of what had existed since Adam's times, had in
general taken possession even of the best minds."
One could see a remnant of the old encasement theory even in Hegel's
world conception. The pure thought that appears in the human mind was
to have been encased in all phenomena before it came to its
perceptible form of existence in man. Before nature and the individual
spirit, Hegel places his pure thought that should be, as it were,
"the representation of God as he was according to his eternal
essence before the creation" of the world. The development of the
world is, therefore, presented as an unwrapping of pure thought. The
protest of Ludwig Feuerbach against Hegel's world conception was
caused by the fact that Feuerbach was unable to acknowledge the
existence of the spirit before its real appearance in man, just
as Caspar Friedrich Wolff had been unable to admit that the parts of
the living organism should have been pre-formed in the egg. Just as
Wolff saw spontaneous formations in the organs of the developed
organism, so did Feuerbach with respect to the individual spirit of
man. This spirit is in no way there before its perceptible existence;
it comes into being only in the moment it appears. According to
Feuerbach, it is unjustified to speak of an all-embracing spirit, of a
being in which the individual spirit has its roots. No reason-endowed
being exists prior to its appearance in the world that would shape
matter and the perceptible world, and in this way cause the appearance
of man as its visible afterimage. What exists before the development
of the human spirit consists of mere matter and blind forces that form
a nervous system out of themselves concentrated in the brain. In the
brain something comes into existence that is a completely
new formation, something that has never been before: the human
soul, endowed with reason. For such a world conception there is no
possibility to derive the processes and things from a spiritual
originator because, according to this view, a spiritual being is a new
formation through the organization of the brain. If man projects a
spiritual element into the external world, then he imagines
arbitrarily that a being like the one that is the cause of his own
actions exists outside of himself and rules the world. Any spiritual
primal being must first be created by man through his fantasy; the
things and processes of the world give us no reason to assume its
original existence. It is not the original spirit being that has
created man after his image, but man has formed a fantasy of such a
primal entity after his own image. This is Feuerbach's conviction.
"Man's knowledge of God is man's knowledge of himself, of his own
nature. Only the unity of being and consciousness is truth. Where
God's consciousness is, there is also God's being: it is,
therefore, in man" (The Essence of Christianity, 1841). Man
does not feel strong enough to rest within himself; he therefore
created an infinite being after his own image to revere and to
worship. Hegel's world conception had eliminated all other qualities
from the supreme being, but it had retained the element of reason.
Feuerbach removes this element also and with this step he removes the
supreme being itself. He replaces the wisdom of God completely by the
wisdom of the world. As a necessary turning point in the development
of world conception, Feuerbach declares the "open confession and
admission that the consciousness of God is nothing but the
consciousness of humanity," and that man is "incapable of
thinking, divining, imagining, feeling, believing, willing, loving and
worshipping as an absolute divine being any other being than the
human being." There is an observation of nature and an
observation of the spirit, but there is no observation of the nature
of God. Nothing is real but the factual.
The real in its reality, or as real, is the real as the object of the
senses, the sensual. Truth, reality and sensuality are
identical. Only a sensual being is a true, a real being. Only through
the senses is an object given in the true sense of the word, not
through thinking by itself. The object that is given in thinking, or
identical with it, is only thought.
Indeed, this can be summed up as follows. The phenomenon of thinking
appears in the human organism as a new formation, but we are not
justified to imagine that this thought had existed before its
appearance in any form invisibly encased in the world. One should not
attempt to explain the condition of something actually given by
deriving it from something that is assumed as previously existing.
Only the factual is true and divine, "what is immediately sure of
itself, that-which directly speaks for and convinces of itself, that
which immediately effects the assertion of its existence, what is
absolutely decided, incapable of doubt, clear as sunlight. But only
the sensual is of such a clarity. Only where the sensual begins does
all doubt and quarrel cease. The secret of immediate knowledge is
sensuality." Feuerbach's credo has its climax in the words,
"To make philosophy the concern of humanity was my first
endeavor, but whoever decides upon a path in this direction will
finally be led with necessity to make man the concern of
philosophy." "The new philosophy makes man, and with him
nature as the basis of man, the only universal and ultimate object of
philosophy; it makes an anthropology that includes physiology in it —
the universal science."
Feuerbach demands that reason is not made the basis of departure at
the beginning of a world conception but that it should be considered
the product of evolution, as a new formation in the human organism in
which it makes its actual appearance. He has an aversion to any
separation of the spiritual from the physical because it can be
understood in no other way than as a result of the development of the
physical.
When the psychologist says, "I distinguish myself from my
body," he says as much as when the philosopher in logic or
metaphysics says, "I leave human nature unconsidered." Is it
possible to leave your own nature out of consideration? Are you not
doing so as a human being? Do you think without a head? Thoughts are
departed souls. All right, but is not even a departed soul still a
faithful picture of a human being who was once in the flesh? Do not
even the most general metaphysical concepts of being and essence
change as the real being and essence of man changes? What does "I
leave human nature out of consideration," then mean? Nothing more
than this: I leave man unconsidered so far as he is the object of my
consciousness and of my thinking, but not the man who lies behind my
consciousness; that is to say, not my own nature to which my process
of abstraction also is bound whether I like it or not. So, as a
psychologist, you may disregard your body, but in your nature you are
intimately linked to it, that is, you think yourself as
distinguishable from your body but you are not at all really
different from it because of this thought. . . . Was Lichtenberg not
right when he maintained that one really should not say, "I
think," but, "It thinks"? If, indeed, the "I
think" now distinguishes itself from the body, does that force us
to conclude that the process that is expressed in the words, "It
thinks," the involuntary element of our thinking, the root and
the basis of the "I think," is also distinct from the body?
How is it, then, that we cannot think at all times, that the thoughts
are not at our disposal whenever we choose? Why do we often fail to
make headway with some intellectual work in spite of the greatest
exertion of our will until some external occasion, often no more than
a change in the weather, sets our thoughts afloat again? This is
caused by the fact that our thought process is also an organic
activity. Why must we often carry some thoughts with us for years
before they become clear and distinct to us? For the reason that
our thoughts also are subject to an organic development, that our
thoughts also must have their time to mature as well as the fruits in
the field or the child in the mother's womb.
* * *
Feuerbach drew attention to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a
thinker who died in 1799 and who must be considered a precursor of a
world conception that found expression in thinkers like Feuerbach.
Lichtenberg's stimulating and thought-provoking conceptions were less
fruitful for the nineteenth century probably because the powerful
thought structures of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel overshadowed
everything. They overshadowed the spiritual development to such a
degree that ideas that were expressed aphoristically as strokes of
lightning, even if they were as brilliant as Lichtenberg's, could be
overlooked. We only have to be reminded of a few statements of this
important person to see that in the thought movement introduced by
Feuerbach the spirit of Lichtenberg experiences a revival.
God created man after his image, which probably means that man created
God after his own image.
Our world is going to be so sophisticated one day that it will be as
ridiculous to believe in God as it is nowadays to believe in ghosts.
Is our concept of God really anything but a personified mystery?
The conception that we form of a soul is very much like that of a
magnet in the earth. It is merely a picture. It is an innate trick in
man to think everything in this form.
Rather than to claim that the world is reflected in us, we should say
that our reason is reflected in the world. We just cannot help
discovering order and wisdom in the world; it follows from the nature
of our thought faculty. But it does not necessarily follow that what
we must think should really be so. . . . In this way, then, no God can
be proven.
We become aware of certain conceptions that do not depend on us; then
there are others of which we at least think that they depend on us.
Where is the boundary line between them? We only know that our
perceptions, conceptions and thoughts are there. It thinks, one
should say, just as one says, It rains, or, Thought strikes
as one says, Lightning strikes.
If Lichtenberg had combined such original flashes of thought with the
ability to develop a harmoniously rounded world conception, he could
not have remained unnoticed to the degree that he did. In order to
form a world conception, it is not only necessary to show superiority
of mind, as Lichtenberg did, but also the ability to form ideas in
their interconnection in all directions and to round them plastically.
This faculty he lacked. His superiority is expressed in an excellent
judgment concerning the relation of Kant to his contemporaries:
I believe that just as the followers of Mr. Kant always charge their
opponents with not understanding him, there are also some among them
who believe that Mr. Kant must be right because they understand him.
His mode of conception is new and different from the usual one, and,
if one now suddenly has begun to understand it, one is inclined to
accept it as truth, especially since he has so many ardent followers.
But one should always consider that this understanding is not as yet a
reason to believe it to be true. I believe that most of Kant's
followers, overwhelmed by the joy of having understood an abstract and
obscurely presented system, were also convinced that this system had
been proven.
How akin in spirit Feuerbach could feel to Lichtenberg becomes
especially clear if one compares the views of both thinkers with
respect to the relation of their world conceptions to practical life.
The lectures Feuerbach gave to a number of students during the winter
of 1848 on The Nature of Religion closed with these words:
I only wish that I have not failed in the task that I set for myself
as I expressed it in the first hours, namely, to convert you from
friends of God to friends of men, from believers into thinkers, from
praying men to working men, from adherents to a supersensible realm to
students of this world, from being Christians, who according to their
own confession and admission are half animal and half angel, into
human beings, into entirely human beings.
Whoever, like Feuerbach, bases all world conception on the knowledge
of nature and man, must also reject all direction and duties in the
field of morality that are derived from a realm other than man's
natural inclinations and abilities, or that set aims that do not
entirely refer to the sensually perceptible world. "My right
is my lawfully recognized desire for happiness; my duty is
the desire for happiness of others that I am compelled to
recognize." Not in looking with expectation toward a world beyond
do I learn what I am to do, but through the contemplation of this one.
Whatever energy I spend to fulfill any task that refers to the next
world, I have robbed from this world for which I am exclusively meant.
"Concentration on this world" is, therefore, what
Feuerbach demands. We can read similar expressions in Lichtenberg's
writings. But just such passages in Lichtenberg are always mixed with
elements that show how rarely a thinker who lacks the ability to
develop his ideas in himself harmoniously succeeds in following an
idea into its last consequences. Lichtenberg does, indeed, demand
concentration on this world, but he mixes conceptions that refer to
the next even into the formulation of this demand.
I believe that many people, in their eagerness for an education for
heaven, forget the one that is necessary for the earth. I should
think that man would act wisest if he left the former entirely to
itself. For if we have been placed into this position by a wise
being, which cannot be doubted, then we should do the best we can and
not allow ourselves to be dazzled by revelations. What man needs to
know for his happiness he certainly does know without any more
revelations than he possesses according to his own nature.
Comparisons like this one between Lichtenberg and Feuerbach are
significantly instructive for the historical evolution of man's world
conception. They show most distinctly the direction in which these
personalities advance because one can learn from them the change that
has been wrought by the time interval that lies between them.
Feuerbach went through Hegel's philosophy. He derived the strength
from this experience to develop his own opposing view. He no longer
felt disturbed by Kant's question of whether we are in fact entitled
to attribute reality to the world that we perceive, or whether this
world merely existed in our minds. Whoever upholds the second
possibility can project into the true world behind the perceptual
representations all sorts of motivating forces for man's actions. He
can admit a supernatural world order as Kant had done. But whoever,
like Feuerbach, declares that the sensually perceptible alone is real
must reject every supernatural world order. For him there is no
categorical imperative that could somehow have its origin in a
transcendent world; for him there are only duties that result from the
natural drives and aims of man.
To develop a world conception that was as much the opposite of Hegel's
as that of Feuerbach, a personality was necessary that was as
different from Hegel as was Feuerbach. Hegel felt at home in the midst
of the full activity of his contemporary life. To influence the actual
life of the world with his philosophical spirit appeared to him a most
attractive task. When he asked for his release from his professorship
at Heidelberg in order to accept another chair in Prussia, he
confessed that he was attracted by the expectation of finding a sphere
of activity where he was not entirely limited to mere teaching, but
where it would also be possible for him to affect the practical life.
"It would be important for him to have the expectation of moving,
with advancing age, from the precarious function of teaching
philosophy at a university to another activity and to become useful in
such a capacity."
A man who has the inclinations and convictions of a thinker must live
in peace with the shape that the practical life of his time has taken
on. He must find the ideas reasonable by which this life is permeated.
Only from such a conviction can he derive the enthusiasm that makes
him want to contribute to the consolidation of its structure.
Feuerbach was not kindly inclined toward the life of his time. He
preferred the restfulness of a secluded place to the bustle of what
was for him "modern life." He expresses himself distinctly
on this point:
I shall never, at any rate, be reconciled with the life in the city.
To go from time to time into the city to teach there, that I consider,
after the impressions I have already stated here, to be good and
indeed my duty, but then I must go back again into the solitude of the
country to study and rest there in the arms of nature. My next task is
to prepare my lectures as my audience wants them, or to prepare my
father's papers for print.
From his seclusion Feuerbach believed himself to be best able to judge
what was not natural with regard to the shape that the actual human
life assumed. To cleanse life from these illusions, and what was
carried into it by human illusions, was what Feuerbach considered to
be his task. To do this he had to keep his distance from life as much
as possible. He searched for the true life but he could not find it in
the form that life had taken through the civilization of the time. How
sincere he was with his "concentration on this world" is
shown by a statement he made concerning the March revolution. This
revolution seemed to him a fruitless enterprise because the
conceptions that were behind it still contained the old belief in a
world beyond.
The March revolution was a child of the Christian belief, even if it
was an illegitimate one. The constitutionalists believed that the Lord
only had to say, "Let there be freedom! Let there be right!"
and right and freedom would be there. The republicans believed that
all they had to do was to will a republic to call it to life.
They believed, therefore, in the creation of a republic out of
nothing. The constitutionalists transplanted the idea of the
Christian world-miracles to the field of politics; the republicans,
that of the Christian miracle of action.
Only a personality who is convinced that he carries within him the
harmony of life that man needs can, in the face of the deep hostility
that existed between him and the real world, utter the hymns in praise
of reality that Feuerbach expressed. Such a conviction rings out of
words like these:
Lacking any expectation for the next world, I can hold myself in this
one in the vale of tears of German politics and European political
life in general, alive and in mental sanity, only by making the
present age into an object of Aristophanic laughter.
Only a personality like this could search for all those forces in man
himself that the others wanted to derive from external powers.
The birth of thought in the Greek world conception had had the effect
that man could no longer feel himself as deeply rooted in the world as
had been possible with the old consciousness in the form of picture
conceptions. This was the first step in the process that led to the
formation of an abyss between man and the world. A further stage in
this process consisted in the development of the mode of thinking of
modern natural science. This development tore nature and the human
soul completely apart. On the one side, a nature picture had to arise
in which man in his spiritual-psychical essence was not to be found,
and on the other, an idea of the human soul from which no bridge led
into nature. In nature one found law-ordered necessity. Within its
realm there was no place for the elements that the human soul finds
within: The impulse for freedom, the sense for a life that is rooted
in a spiritual world and is not exhausted within the realm of sensual
existence. Philosophers like Kant escaped the dilemma only by
separating both worlds completely, finding a knowledge in the one, and
in the other, belief. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
conceived the idea of the self-conscious soul to be so comprehensive
that it seemed to have its root in a higher spirit nature. In
Feuerbach, a thinker arises who, through the world picture that can be
derived from the modern mode of conception of natural science, feels
compelled to deprive the human soul of every trait contradictory to
the nature picture. He views the human soul as a part of nature. He
can only do so because, in his thoughts, he has first removed
everything in the soul that disturbed him in his attempt to
acknowledge it as a part of nature. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel took
the self-conscious soul for what it was; Feuerbach changes it into
something he needs for his world picture. In him, a mode of conception
makes its appearance that is overpowered by the nature picture. This
mode of thinking cannot master both parts of the modern world picture,
the picture of nature and that of the soul. For this reason, it leaves
one of them, the soul picture, completely unconsidered. Wolff's idea
of "new formation" introduces fruitful thought impulses to
the nature picture. Feuerbach utilizes these impulses for the
spirit-science that can only exist, however, by not admitting the
spirit at all. Feuerbach initiates a trend of modern philosophy that
is helpless in regard to the most powerful impulse of the modern soul
life, namely, man's active self-consciousness. In this current of
thought, that impulse is dealt with, not merely as an incomprehensible
element, but in a way that avoids the necessity of facing it in its
true form, changing it into a factor of nature, which, to an unbiased
observation, it really is not.
* * *
"God was my first thought, reason my second and man my
third and last one." With these words Feuerbach describes the
path along which he had gone, from a religious believer to a follower
of Hegel's philosophy, and then to his own world conception. Another
thinker, who, in 1834, published one of the most influential books of
the century, The Life of Jesus, could have said the same thing
of himself. This thinker was David Friedrich Strauss (1808 –
1874). Feuerbach started with an investigation of the human soul and
found that the soul had the tendency to project its own nature into
the world and to worship it as a divine primordial being. He attempted
a psychological explanation for the genesis of the concept of God. The
views of Strauss were caused by a similar aim. Unlike Feuerbach,
however, he did not follow the path of the psychologist but that of
the historian. He did not, like Feuerbach, choose the concept of God
in general in its all-embracing sense for the center of his
contemplation, but the Christian concept of the "God
incarnate," Jesus. Strauss wanted to show how humanity arrived at
this conception in the course of history. That the supreme divine
being reveals itself to the human spirit was the conviction of Hegel's
world conception. Strauss had accepted this, too. But, in his opinion,
the divine idea, in all its perfection, cannot realize itself in an
individual human being. The individual person is always merely an
imperfect imprint of the divine spirit. What one human being lacks in
perfection is presented by another. In examining the whole human race
one will find in it, distributed over innumerable individuals, all
perfection's belonging to the deity. The human race as a whole, then,
is God made flesh, God incarnate. This is, according to Strauss, the
true thinker's concept of Jesus. With this viewpoint Strauss sets out
to criticize the Christian concept of the God incarnate. What,
according to this idea, is distributed over the whole human race,
Christianity attributes to one personality who is supposed to have
existed once in the course of history.
The quality and function, which the doctrine of the Church attributes
to Christ, are contradictory to each other if applied to one
individual, one God incarnate; in the idea of the human race,
they harmonize with one another.
Supported by careful investigations concerning the historical
foundation of the Gospels, Strauss attempts to prove that the
conceptions of Christianity are a result of religious fantasy. Through
this faculty the religious truth that the human race is God incarnate
was dimly felt, but it was not comprehended in clear concepts but
merely expressed in poetic form, in a myth. For Strauss, the story of
the Son of God thus becomes a myth in which the idea of humanity was
poetically treated long before it was recognized by thinkers in the
form of pure thought. Seen from this viewpoint, all miraculous
elements of the history of Christianity become explainable without
forcing the historian to take refuge in the trivial interpretation
that had previously often been accepted. Earlier interpretations had
often seen in those miracles intentional deceptions and fraudulent
tricks to which either the founder of the religion himself had
allegedly resorted in order to achieve the greatest possible effect of
his doctrine, or which the apostles were supposed to have invented for
this purpose. Another view, which wanted to see all sorts of natural
events in the miracles, was also thereby eliminated. The miracles are
now seen as the poetic dress for real truths. The story of humanity
rising above its finite interests and everyday life to the knowledge
of divine truth and reason is represented in the picture of the dying
and resurrected saviour. The finite dies to be resurrected as the
infinite.
We have to see in the myths of ancient peoples a manifestation of the
picture consciousness of primeval times out of which the consciousness
of thought experience developed. A feeling for this fact arises in the
nineteenth century in a personality like Strauss. He wants to gain an
orientation concerning the development and significance of the life of
thought by concentrating on the connection of world conception with
the mythical thinking of historical times. He wants to know in what
way the myth-making imagination still affects modern world conception.
At the same time, he aspires to see the human self-consciousness
rooted in an entity that lies beyond the individual personality by
thinking of all humanity as a manifestation of the deity. In this
manner, he gains a support for the individual human soul in the
general soul of humanity that unfolds in the course of historical
evolution.
Strauss becomes even more radical in his book, The Christian
Doctrine in the Course of Its Historical Development and Its Struggle
with Modern Science, which appeared in the years 1840 and 1841.
Here he intends to dissolve the Christian dogmas in their poetic form
so as to obtain the thought content of the truths contained in them.
He now points out that the modern consciousness is incompatible with
the consciousness that clings to the old mythological picture
representation of the truth.
May, then, the believers allow the knowers to go their own way
unmolested and vice versa; we do not deprive them of their belief; let
them grant us our philosophy, and, if the super-pious should succeed
in ejecting us from their church, we shall consider that as a gain.
Enough wrong compromises have now been attempted; only the separation
of the opposite camps can now lead us ahead.
These views of Strauss produced an enormous uproar. It was deeply
resented that those representing the modern world conception were no
longer satisfied in attacking only the basic religious conceptions in
general, but, equipped with all scientific means of historical
research, attempted to eliminate the irrelevancy about which
Lichtenberg had once said that it consisted of the fact that
"human nature had submitted even to the yoke of a book."
He continued:
One cannot imagine anything more horrible, and this example alone
shows what a helpless creature man really is in concreto,
enclosed as he really is in this two-legged vessel of earth, water
and salt. If it were ever possible that reason could have a despotic
throne erected, a man who seriously wanted to contradict the
Copernican system through the authority of a book would have to be
hanged. To read in a book that it originates from God is not a proof
as yet that it really does. It is certain, however, that our reason
has its origin in God no matter in what sense one takes the word God.
Reason punishes, where it rules, only through the natural consequences
of a transgression or through instruction, if instruction can be
called punishment.
Strauss was discharged from his position as a tutor at the Seminary of
Tuebingen because of his book, The Life of Jesus, and when he
then accepted a professorship in theology at the University of Zurich,
the peasants came to meet him with threshing flails in order to make
the position of the dissolver of the myth impossible and to force his
retirement.
Another thinker, Bruno Bauer (1809 – 1882), in his criticism of
the old world conception from the standpoint of the new, went far
beyond the aim that Strauss had set for himself. He held the same view
as Feuerbach, that man's nature is also his supreme being and any
other kind of a supreme being is only an illusion created after man's
image and set above himself. But Bauer goes further and expresses this
opinion in a grotesque form. He describes how he thinks the human ego
came to create for itself an illusory counter-image, and he uses
expressions that show they are not inspired by the wish for an
intimate understanding of the religious consciousness as was the case
with Strauss. They have their origin in the pleasure of destruction.
Bauer says:
The all-devouring ego became frightened of itself; it did not dare to
consider itself as everything and as the most general power, that is
to say, it still kept the form of the religious spirit and thus
completed its self-alienation in setting its own general power against
itself in fear and trembling for its own preservation and salvation.
Bruno Bauer is a personality who sets out to test his impetuous
thinking critically against everything in existence. That thinking is
destined to penetrate to the essence of things is a conviction he
adopted from Hegel's world conception, but he does not, like Hegel,
tend to let thinking lead to results and a thought structure. His
thinking is not productive, but critical. He would have felt a
definite thought or a positive idea as a limitation. He is unwilling
to limit the power of critical thought by taking his departure from a
definite point of view as Hegel had done.
Critique is, on the one hand, the last act of a definite philosophy,
which through this act frees itself from the limitation of a positive
determination, still curtailed in its generality. It is, therefore, on
the other hand, the presupposition without which philosophy cannot be
raised to the last level of generality of the self-consciousness.
This is the credo of the Critique of World Conception to which
Bruno Bauer confesses. This "critique" does not believe in
thoughts and ideas but in thinking alone. "Only now has man been
discovered," announces Bauer triumphantly, for now man is bound
by nothing except his thinking. It is not human to surrender to a
non-human element, but to work everything out in the melting pot of
thinking. Man is not to be the afterimage of another being, but above
all, he is to be "a human being," and he can become human
only through his thinking. The thinking man is the true man. Nothing
external, neither religion nor right, neither state nor law, etc., can
make him into a human being, but only his thinking. The weakness of a
thinking that strives to reach the self-consciousness but cannot do so
is demonstrated in Bauer.
* * *
Feuerbach had declared the "human being to be man's supreme
being; Bruno Bauer maintained that he had discovered it for the first
time through his critique of world conception; Max Stirner
(1806 – 1856) set himself the task of approaching this
"human being" completely without bias and without
presupposition in his book, The Only One and His Possession,
which appeared in 1845. This is Stirner's judgment:
With the power of desperation, Feuerbach grasps at the entire content
of Christianity, not in order to throw it away, but, on the contrary,
in order to seize it, to draw upon this content for so long and so
ardently desired and yet always so remote, with a last effort down
from heaven, to have and to hold onto it forever. Is this not the
clutch of last despair, a matter of life and death, and is it not at
the same time the Christian yearning and passionate desire for the
beyond? The hero does not mean to depart into the beyond, but to draw
the beyond down to himself so that it should turn into this
world. Has not all the world since then been screaming more or
less consciously, "This world is all that matters; heaven must
come down to earth and must be felt here already?"
Stirner opposes the view of Feuerbach with his violent contradiction:
The highest being, to be sure, is man's being, but exactly because it
is his being and not he, himself, is it a matter of complete
indifference whether we contemplate it outside man, considering it as
God, or whether we find it in him and call it "the nature of
man," or the "human being." I am neither God nor the
human being, neither the highest being nor my own being, and
for this reason, it is fundamentally of no importance whether I think
this nature within myself or without. We do, indeed, always think the
supreme being in both forms of beyondness, in the inward one as well
as in the outward one at the same time, for the "spirit of
God" is, according to Christian conception, also "our
spirit" and "dwelleth within us." This spirit dwells in
heaven and within us. We, poor things, are nothing but his
"dwelling place" and if Feuerbach now goes about and
destroys his heavenly habitations and forces him bag and baggage to
move into us, then we, as his terrestrial quarters, will become very
badly overcrowded.
The individual human ego does not consider itself from its own
standpoint but from the standpoint of a foreign power. A religious man
claims that there is a divine supreme being whose afterimage is man.
He is possessed by this supreme being. The Hegelian says that there is
a general world reason and it realizes itself to reach its climax in
the human ego. The ego is therefore possessed by this world reason.
Feuerbach maintains that there is a nature of the human being and
every particular person is an individualized afterimage of this
nature. Every individual is thereby possessed by the idea of
the "nature of humanity." For only the individual man is
really existing, not the "generic concept of humanity" by
which Feuerbach replaces the divine being. If, then, the individual
man places the "genus man" above himself, he abandons
himself to an illusion, just as much as when he feels himself
dependent on a personal God. For Feuerbach, therefore, the
commandments the Christian considers as given by God, and which for
this reason he accepts as valid, change into commandments that have
their validity because they are in accordance with the general idea of
humanity. Man now judges himself morally by asking the question: Do my
actions as an individual correspond to what is adequate to the nature
of humanity in general? For Feuerbach says:
If the essence of humanity is man's supreme being, then the highest
and first law of his practical life must also be the love of man to
man. Homo homini deus est, man is God to man. Ethics is in
itself a divine power. Moral relationships are by themselves truly
religious relationships. Life in general is, in its substantial
connections, of a thoroughly divine nature. Everything that is right,
true and good carries the ground of its salvation in its own
qualities. Friendship is and shall be sacred, as shall be property and
marriage, and sacred shall be the well-being of every man, but sacred
in and for itself.
There are, then, general human powers, and ethics is one of them. It
is sacred in and for itself; the individual has to submit to it. The
individual is not to will what it decides out of its own initiative,
but what follows from the direction of the sacred ethics. The
individual is possessed by this ethics. Stirner characterizes
this view as follows:
The God of all, namely, the human being, has now been elevated to be
the God of the individual, for it is the highest aim of all of us to
be a human being. As no one can entirely become what the idea of
humanity expresses, however, the "human being" remains for
every individual a sublime beyond, an unattainable supreme being, a
God.
But such a supreme being is also thinking, which has been
elevated to be God by the critique of world conception. Stirner cannot
accept this either.
The critical thinker is afraid of becoming dogmatic, or of
making positive statements. Of course, he would in doing so become the
opposite of a critic, a dogmatist; he would then be as bad as a
dogmatist as he is now good as a critic. . . . There must by no means
be any dogma! This is his dogma. For the critic stays on the same
ground with the dogmatist, namely, on the ground of thought.
Like the dogmatist, he always proceeds from a thought, but he
differs insofar as he abandons the practice of preserving the
principal thought in the process of thinking; he does not allow
this process to become stabilized. He only emphasizes the process of
thinking against the belief in thoughts, the process of the former
against the stagnation of the latter. No thought is safe against
criticism because it is thinking or the thinking spirit itself. . . .
I am no antagonist of criticism, that is to say, I am no dogmatist and
feel that the teeth of the critic that tear the flesh of the dogmatist
do not touch me. If I were a dogmatist, I should place a dogma, a
thought, an idea, a principle, at the beginning, and I should begin
this process as a systematic thinker by spinning it out into a system
that is a thought structure. If, on the other hand, I were a critical
thinker, that is, an opponent of the dogmatist, then I should lead the
fight of free thinking against the enslaved thought. I should defend
thinking against the result of this activity. But I am neither the
champion of thought nor of thinking.
Every thought is also produced by the individual ego of an individual,
even the thought of one's own being, and when man means to know his
own ego and wants to describe it according to its nature, he
immediately brings it into dependence on this nature. No matter what I
may invent in my thinking, as soon as I determine and define myself
conceptually, I make myself the slave of the result of the definition,
the concept. Hegel made the ego into a manifestation of reason, that
is to say, he made it dependent on reason. But all such generalities
cannot be valid with regard to the ego because they all have their
source in the ego. They are caused by the fact that the ego is
deceived by itself. It is really not dependent, for everything on
which it could depend must first be produced by the ego. The ego must
produce something out of itself, set it above itself and allow it to
turn into a spectre that haunts its own originator.
Man, you have bats in your belfry; there is a screw loose in your
head! You imagine big things; you invent a whole world of Gods that is
supposed to be there for your benefit, a realm of spirit for which you
are destined, an ideal that is becoming you. You have an idée
fixe!
In reality, no thinking can approach what lives within me as
"I." I can reach everything with my thinking; only my ego is
an exception in this respect. I cannot think it; I can only
experience it. I am not will; I am not idea; I am that no more
than the image of a deity. I make all other things comprehensible to
myself through thinking. The ego I am. I have no need to define
and to describe myself because I experience myself in every moment. I
need to describe only what I do not immediately experience, what is
outside myself. It is absurd that I should also have to conceive
myself as a thought, as an idea, since I always have myself as
something. If I face a stone, I may attempt to explain to myself what
this stone is. What I am myself, I need not explain; it is
given in my life.
Stirner answers to an attack against his book:
The "only one" is a word and with a word it should be
possible to think something; a word should have a thought
content. But the "only one" is a thoughtless word; it
does not have a thought content. What then is its content if it is not
thought? It is a content that cannot be there a second time and
therefore is also incapable of being expressed; for if it could
be expressed, really and completely pressed out, then it would be
there a second time; it would be there in the expression. Because the
content of the "only one" is not a thought content, it is
also unthinkable and ineffable, but because it is ineffable, this
perfectly empty phrase is at the same time not a phrase. Only
when nothing is said of you, when you are simply called, are you
recognized as you. As long as something is said of you, you are
recognized only as this something (human being, spirit, Christian,
etc.). The "only one" does not contain a statement because
it is only name, saying nothing more than that you are you and
nothing but you; that you are a unique "you" and you
yourself. Through this, you are without a predicate, and thereby
without quality, calling, legal standing and restriction, and so
forth. (Compare Stirner's Kleine Schriften, edited by J. H.
Mackay, pp. 116.)
Stirner, in an essay written in 1842, The Untrue Principle of Our
Education, or Humanism and Realism, had already expressed his
conviction that thinking cannot penetrate as far as the core of the
personality. He therefore considers it an untrue educational principle
if this core of the personality is not made the objective of
education, but when knowledge as such assumes this position in a
one-sided way.
A knowledge that does not so purge and concentrate itself that it
inspires the will, or in other words, that only weighs me down with
possession and property instead of having become entirely one with me
so that the freely moving ego, unhampered by any cumbersome belongings
travels through the world with an open mind; a knowledge, then, that
has not become personal will make a miserable preparation for
life. . . . If it is the cry of our time, after the freedom of
thought has been obtained, to continue this freedom to its end
through which it turns into the freedom of will so that the
latter can be realized as the aim of a new epoch, then the last aim of
education can no longer be knowledge but a will that is
born out of knowledge, and the revealing expression of the
educational aim is the personal or free man. . . . As in
certain other spheres, so also in that of education, freedom is not
allowed to break forth; the power of opposition is not yielded
the floor: subordination is insisted upon. Only formal and
material drill is the aim of this education; in the menagerie of the
humanists nothing but "scholars" are produced and in that of
the realists, nothing but "useful citizens." Both then
produce nothing but submissive human beings. Knowledge
must die to be resurrected as will and to restore itself
daily in free personalities.
The personality of the individual human being can alone contain the
source of his actions. The moral duties cannot be commandments that
are given to man from somewhere, but they must be aims that man sets
for himself. Man is mistaken if he believes that he does something
because he follows a commandment of a general code of sacred ethics.
He does it because the life of his ego drives him to it. I do not love
my neighbor because I follow a sacred commandment of neighborly love,
but because my ego draws me to my neighbor. It is not that I am
to love him; I want to love him. What men have wanted
to do they have placed as commandments above themselves. On this
point Stirner can be most easily understood. He does not deny moral
action. What he does deny is the moral commandment. If man
only understands himself rightly, then a moral world order will be the
result of his actions. Moral prescriptions are a spectre, an
idée fixe, for Stirner. They prescribe something at which man
arrives all by himself if he follows entirely his own nature. The
abstract thinkers will, of course, raise the objection, "Are
there not criminals?" These abstract thinkers anticipate general
chaos if moral prescriptions are not sacred to man. Stirner could
reply to them, "Are there not also diseases in nature? Are they
not produced in accordance with eternal unbreakable laws just as
everything that is healthy?"
As little as it will ever occur to any reasonable person to reckon the
sick with the healthy because the former is, like the latter, produced
through natural laws, just as little would Stirner count the immoral
with the moral because they both come into being when the individual
is left to himself. What distinguishes Stirner from the abstract
thinkers, however, is his conviction that in human life morality will
be dominating as much as health is in nature, when the decision is
left to the discretion of individuals. He believes in the moral
nobility of human nature, in the free development of morality out of
the individuals. It seems to him that the abstract thinkers do not
believe in this nobility, and he is, therefore, of the opinion that
they debase the nature of the individual to become the slave of
general commandments, the corrective scourges of human action. There
must be much evil depravity at the bottom of the souls of these
"moral persons," according to Stirner, because they are so
insistent in their demands for moral prescriptions. They must indeed
be lacking love because they want love to be ordered to them as a
commandment that should really spring from them as spontaneous
impulse.
Only twenty years ago it was possible that the following criticism
could be made in a serious book:
Max Stirner's book, The Only One and His Possession, destroyed
spirit and humanity, right and state, truth and virtue as if they were
idols of the bondage of thought, and confessed without reluctance,
"I place nothing above myself!" (Heinrich von Treitschke,
Deutsche Geschichte, Part V, pp. 416; 1927.)
This only proves how easily Stirner can be misunderstood as a result
of his radical mode of expression because, to him, the human
individual was considered to be so noble, so elevated, unique and free
that not even the loftiest thought world was supposed to reach up to
it. Thanks to the endeavors of John Henry Mackay, we have today a
picture of his life and his character. In his book, Max Stirner,
His Life and His Work (Berlin, 1898), he has summed up the
complete result of his research extending over many years to arrive at
a characterization of Stirner who was, in Mackay's opinion, "The
boldest and most consistent of all thinkers."
Stirner, like other thinkers of modern times, is confronted with the
self-conscious ego, challenging comprehension. Others search for means
to comprehend this ego. The comprehension meets with difficulties
because a wide gulf has opened up between the picture of nature and
that of the life of the spirit. Stirner leaves all that without
consideration. He faces the fact of the self-conscious ego and uses
every means at his disposal to express this fact. He wants to speak of
the ego in a way that forces everyone to look at the ego for himself,
so that nobody can evade this challenge by claiming that the ego is
this or the ego is that. Stirner does not want to point out an idea or
a thought of the ego, but the living ego itself that the personality
finds in itself.
Stirner's mode of conception, as the opposite pole to that of Goethe,
Schiller, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, is a phenomenon that had to
appear with a certain necessity in the course of the development of
modern world conception. Stirner became aware of the self-conscious
ego with an inescapable, piercing intensity. Every thought production
appeared to him in the same way in which the mythical world of
pictures is experienced by a thinker who wants to seize the world in
thought alone. Against this intensely experienced fact, every other
world content that appeared in connection with the self-conscious ego
faded away for Stirner. He presented the self-conscious ego in
complete isolation.
Stirner does not feel that there could be difficulties in presenting
the ego in this manner. The following decades could not establish any
relationship to this isolated position of the ego. For these decades
are occupied above all with the task of forming the nature picture
under the influence of the mode of thought of natural science. After
Stirner had presented the one side of modern consciousness, the fact
of the self-conscious ego, the age at first withdraws all attention
from this ego and turns to the picture of nature where this
"ego" is not to be found.
The first half of the nineteenth century had born its world conception
out of the spirit of idealism. Where a bridge is laid to lead to
natural science, as it is done by Schelling, Lorenz Oken (1779 – 1851)
and Henrik Steffens (1773 – 1845), it is done from the viewpoint of
the idealistic world conception and in its interest. So little was the
time ready to make thoughts of natural science fruitful for world
conceptions that the ingenious conception of Jean Lamarck pertaining
to the evolution of the most perfect organisms out of the simple one,
which was published in 1809, drew no attention at all. When in 1830
Geoffroy de St. Hilaire presented the idea of a general natural
relationship of all forms of organisms in his controversy with
Couvier, it took the genius of Goethe to see the significance of this
idea. The numerous results of natural science that were contributed in
the first half of the century became new world riddles for the
development of world conception when Charles Darwin in 1859, opened up
new aspects for an understanding of nature with his treatment of the
world of living organisms.
∴
Part II
Introductory Remarks to the 1914 Edition
The description of the life of the philosophical spirit from the
middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, which has been
attempted in this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy, cannot
be of the same character as the survey of the works of the preceding
thinkers. This survey had to remain within the most restricted circle
of the philosophical problems. The last sixty years represent the age
in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from
different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy
formerly stood. During this time, the view arose that maintained that
the results of natural science shed the necessary light on the
question of man's nature, his relation to the world and other riddles
of existence, which the intellectual work of philosophy had formerly
sought to supply. Many thinkers who wanted to serve philosophy now
tried to imitate the mode of investigation of natural science. Others
laid the foundation for their world conception, not in the fashion of
the old philosophical mode of thinking, but simply by taking over that
basis from the mode of conception of natural science, biology or
physiology. Those who meant to preserve the independence of philosophy
believed it best to examine thoroughly the results of natural science
in order to prevent them from invading the philosophical sphere. It is
for this reason necessary, in presenting the philosophical life of
this period, to pay attention to the views that, derived from natural
science, have been introduced into world conceptions. The significance
of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines
the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one
realizes for oneself the tendencies of scientific thinking according
to which they were developed. This situation is given expression in
this book by the fact that some parts of it are formulated almost as
if a presentation of general natural scientific ideas, and not one of
philosophical works, had been intended. The opinion appears to be
justified that this method of presentation shows distinctly how
thoroughly natural science has influenced the philosophical life of
the present time.
A reader who finds it reconcilable to his mode of thinking to conceive
the evolution of the philosophical life along the lines indicated in
the introduction of the first volume of this book, and for which the
more detailed account of the book has attempted to supply the
foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated
relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as
a necessary phase of its evolution. Through the centuries since the
beginning of Greek philosophy this evolution tended to lead the human
soul toward the experience of its inner essential forces. With this
inner experience the soul became more and more estranged in the world
that the knowledge of external nature had erected for itself. A
conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the
observation of the external world that it does not show any
inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences
in its inner world. This conception considers it as unjustified to
paint the world picture in a way that it would show these inner
experiences of the human soul as well as the results of the research
of natural science. It characterizes the situation in which philosophy
found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in
which many currents of thought can still be found in the present time.
Such a judgment does not have to be artificially introduced to the
study of the philosophy of this age. It can be arrived at by simply
observing the facts. The second volume of this book attempts to record
this new development, but it has also made it necessary to add to the
second edition a final chapter that contains "A Brief Outline of
an Approach to Anthroposophy."
One can be of the opinion that this account does not belong in the
framework of the whole book but, in the preface to the first volume,
it was announced that the purpose of this presentation "is not
only to give a short outline of the history of philosophical problems,
but also to discuss these problems and the attempts at their solution
through their historical treatment." The view expressed in this
book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted
solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an
element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests
itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can
no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture. As it
is the philosophical conviction of the author of this book that the
account of the final chapter deals with soul experiences that are
adequate to bring fulfillment to the search of modern philosophy, he
feels he was justified in adding this chapter to his presentation. As
a result of observation of these philosophies, it seems to the author
to be basically characteristic of them and of their historical
manifestation that they do not consistently continue their direction
toward the goal they are seeking. This direction must lead toward the
world conception that is outlined at the end of the book, which aims
at a real science of the spirit. The reader who can agree with
this can find in this conception something that supplies the solutions
to problems that the philosophy of the present time poses without
giving answers. If this is true, the content of the last chapter will
also throw light on the historical position of modern
philosophy.
The author of this book does not imagine that everyone who can accept
the content of the final chapter must necessarily also seek a world
conception that replaces philosophy by a view that can no longer be
recognized as a philosophy by traditional philosophers. What this book
means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it
understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is,
to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it. In this
way, philosophy retains its significance for everyone who, according
to his mode of thinking, must demand a secure intellectual foundation
for the results of this soul experience. Whoever can accept these
results through a natural sense for truth, is justified in feeling
himself on secure ground even if he pays no special attention to a
philosophical foundation of these results. But whoever seeks the
scientific justification of the world conception that is
presented at the end of the book, must follow the path of the
philosophical foundation.
That this path, if it is followed through to its end, leads to the
experience of a spiritual world, and that the soul through this
experience can become aware of its own spiritual essence through a
method that is independent of its experience and knowledge through the
sense world, is what the presentation of this book attempts to prove.
It was not the author's intention to project this thought as a
preconceived idea into his observation of philosophical life. He
wanted to search without bias for the conception expressed in this
life itself. He has at least endeavored to proceed in this way. He
believes that this thought could be best presented by speaking the
language of a natural scientist, as it were, in some parts of the
book. Only if one is capable of temporarily identifying oneself
completely with a certain point of view is it possible to do full
justice to it. By this method of deliberately taking the position of a
world view, the human soul can most safely obtain the ability to
withdraw from it again and enter into modes of conception that have
their source in realms that are not comprised by this view of the
world.
* * *
The printing of this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy was
about half finished before the great war that mankind is now
experiencing broke out. It was finished just as this event began. This
is only to indicate what outer events stirred and occupied my soul as
the last thoughts included in this book passed before my inner eye.
Rudolf Steiner
September 1, 1914
∴
I. The Struggle Over the Spirit
Hegel felt that with his thought structure he had arrived at the goal
for which the evolution of world conception had been striving since
man had attempted to conquer the enigmatic problems of existence
within the realm of thought experiences. With this feeling he wrote,
toward the end of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences,
the following words. "The concept of philosophy is the idea
that thinks itself; it is knowing truth. . . . Philosophical
knowledge has in this manner gone back to its beginning, and the
content of logic thus becomes its result as the spiritual
element that has revealed itself as truth, as it is in itself and
for itself."
The experience of itself in thought, according to Hegel, is to give to
the human soul the consciousness of being at its true original source.
In drinking from this source, filling itself with thoughts from it,
the soul is supposed to live in its own true essence and in that of
nature at the same time, for both nature and the soul are
manifestations of thought. Through the phenomena of nature the thought
world looks at the soul, which seizes in itself the creative power of
thought so that it knows itself in union with all world processes. The
soul thus sees its own narrow circle of self-consciousness enlarged
through the fact that the world observes itself consciously in it. The
soul thereby ceases to consider itself merely as something that is
aware of itself in the transitory sensual body between birth and
death. The imperishable spirit, which is not bound to any sensual
existence, knows itself in the soul, and the soul is aware of being
bound to this spirit in an inseparable union.
Let us place ourselves in the position of, the soul of a personality
who could follow Hegel's trend of ideas to the extent that he believed
that he experienced the presence of thought in his consciousness in
the same way as Hegel himself. We can then feel how, for such a soul,
age-old enigmatic questions appear to be placed in a light that can be
highly satisfactory to such an inquirer. Such satisfaction is indeed
apparent, for instance, in the numerous writings of the Hegelian
thinker, Karl Rosenkranz. As we absorb these writings with
concentrated attention (System of Philosophy, 1850;
Psychology, 1844; Critical Explanations of the Hegelian
Philosophy, 1851), we feel ourselves confronted with a personality
who is convinced he has found in Hegel's ideas what can provide a
satisfactory cognitive relation to the world for the human soul.
Rosenkranz can be mentioned in this respect as a significant example
because he is not at all blindly following Hegel every step, but shows
that he is a spirit motivated by the consciousness that Hegel's
position toward world and man contains the possibility of giving a
healthy foundation to a world conception.
What could a thinker like Rosenkranz experience with regard to this
foundation? Since the birth of thought in ancient Greece, and during
centuries of philosophical investigation of the riddles of existence
with which every soul was fundamentally confronted, a number of major
problems have crystallized. In modern times the problem of the
significance, the value and the limits of knowledge has moved, as the
fundamental problem, into the center of philosophical reflection. What
relation has man's perception, conception and thought to the real
world? Can this process of perception and thinking result in a
knowledge that is capable of enlightening man concerning the questions
about which he wants to be enlightened? For a person who thinks like
Hegel, this question answers itself through the implication in Hegel's
thought concept. As he gains hold of thought, he is convinced he
experiences the creative spirit of the world. In this union with
creative thought he feels the value and true significance of
cognition. He cannot ask, "What is the meaning of
knowledge?" for he experiences this significance as he is engaged
in the act of knowing. Through this fact the Hegelian is directly
opposed to all Kantianism. Witness what Hegel himself has to say
against the Kantian method of investigating cognition before the act
of knowledge has taken place.
A main point of the critical philosophy consists in the fact that
before it sets out to develop a knowledge of God, the essence of
things, etc., it is demanded that the faculty of knowledge must be
investigated as to whether it is capable of doing such things. One
must know the instrument before one undertakes the work that is
to be achieved by means of it. If this instrument should prove
insufficient, all endeavor would be wasted. This thought has appeared
so plausible that it aroused the greatest admiration and
agreement, and led knowledge, motivated by an interest in the objects
of knowledge, back to itself. If, however, one does not want to
deceive oneself with words, it is quite easy to see that other
instruments can be investigated and judged in some other way than by
undertaking the work with them for which they are meant. But knowledge
can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge;
in the case of this so-called instrument, the process to test it
is nothing but knowledge itself. To know before one knows is as absurd
as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn
to swim before he dared go into the water.
For Hegel, the main point was that the soul should experience itself
as filled with the living world thought. Thus, it grows beyond its
ordinary existence; it becomes, as it were, the vessel in which world
thought, living in thinking, seizes itself in full consciousness. The
soul is not merely felt as a vessel of this world spirit but as an
entity conscious of its union with that spirit. Thus it is, according
to Hegel, not possible to investigate the essence of knowledge. We
must immediately raise ourselves into participation in this essence
through its experience and, with that step, we are directly inside the
process of knowledge. If one stands inside that process, one is in
possession of that knowledge and feels no longer the need to
inquire after its significance. If one cannot take this stand, one
lacks also the ability to investigate it. The Kantian philosophy is an
impossibility for Hegel's world conception because, in order to answer
the question, "How is knowledge possible," the soul would
first have to produce knowledge. In that case, the question of its
existence could not be raised beforehand.
In a certain sense Hegel's philosophy amounts to this: He allows the
soul to lift itself to a certain height at which point it grows into
unity with the world. With the birth of thought in Greek philosophy
the soul separated from the world. The soul is felt as in solitude as
opposed to the world. In this seclusion the soul finds itself holding
sway within itself. It is Hegel's intention to bring this experience
of thought to its climax. At the same time he finds the creative world
principle in the highest thought experience. The soul has thus
completed the course of a perfect circle in separating itself at first
from the world in order to search for thought. It feels itself
separated from the world only as long as it recognizes in thought
nothing but thought. It feels united with the world again as it
discovers in thought the original source of the world. Thus, the
circle is closed. Hegel can say, "In this manner science has
returned to its beginning."
Seen from such a viewpoint, the other main problems of human knowledge
are set in such a light that one can believe one sees all existence in
one coherent world conception. As a second major problem, one can
consider the question of deity as the ground of the world. The
elevation of the soul that enables the world thought to awaken to
self-knowledge as it lives within the soul is, for Hegel, at the same
time the soul's union with the divine world ground. According to him,
one therefore cannot ask the question, "What is the divine
ground of the world?" or, "What is man's relation toward
it?" One can only say, "When the soul really experiences
truth in the act of knowledge, it penetrates into this ground of the
world."
A third major question in the above-mentioned sense is the
cosmological problem, that is to say, the problem of the inner essence
of the outer world. This essence can, according to Hegel, be sought
only in thought itself. When the soul arrives at the point of
experiencing thought in itself, it also finds in its self-experience
the form of thought it can recognize as it observes the processes and
entities of the external world. Thus, it can, for instance, find
something in its thought experience of which it knows immediately that
this is the essence of light. As it then turns its eye to nature, it
sees in the external light the manifestation of the thought essence of
light.
In this way, for Hegel, the whole world dissolves into thought entity.
Nature swims, as it were, as a frozen part in the cosmos of thought,
and the human soul becomes thought in the thought world.
The fourth major problem of philosophy, the question of the nature and
destiny of the soul, seems to Hegel's mind satisfactorily answered
through the true progress of thought experience. At first, the soul
finds itself bound to nature. In this connection it does not know
itself in its true entity. It divorces itself from this nature
existence and finds itself then separated in thought, arriving at last
at the insight that it possesses in thought both the true essence of
nature and its own true being as that of the living spirit as it lives
and weaves as a member of this spirit.
All materialism seems to be overcome with this philosophy. Matter
itself appears merely as a manifestation of the spirit. The
human soul may feel itself as becoming and having its being in the
spiritual universe.
In the treatment of the problem of the soul the Hegelian world
conception shows probably most distinctly what is unsatisfactory about
it. Looking at this world conception, the human soul must ask,
"Can I really find myself in the comprehensive thought
construction of the world erected by Hegel?" We have seen that
all modern world conception must look for a world picture in which the
entity of the human soul finds an adequate place. To Hegel, the whole
world is thought; within this thought the soul also has its
supersensible thought existence. But can the soul be satisfied to be
contained as world thought in the general thought world? This question
arises in thinkers who had been stimulated by Hegel's philosophy in
the middle of the nineteenth century.
What are really the most urgent riddles of the soul? They are the ones
for the answers of which the soul must feel a yearning, expecting from
them the feeling of security and a firm hold in life. There is, to
begin with, the question, "What is the human soul
essentially?" Is the soul identical with the corporeal existence
and do its manifestations cease with the decay of the body as the
motion of the hands of a clock stop when the clock is taken apart? Or,
is the soul an entity independent of the body, possessing life and
significance in a world apart from that in which the body comes into
being and dissolves into nothing? Connected with these questions is
another problem. How does man obtain knowledge of such a world? Only
in answering this question can man hope to receive light for
the problems of life: Why am I subjected to this or that destiny? What
is the source of suffering? What is the origin of morality?
Satisfaction can be given only by a world conception that offers
answers to the above-mentioned questions and at the same time proves
its right to give such answers.
Hegel offered a world of thoughts. If this world is to be the all
inclusive universe, then the soul is forced to regard itself in its
inner substance as thought. If one seriously accepts this cosmos of
thought, one will find that the individual soul life of man dissolves
in it. One must give up the attempt to explain and to understand this
individual soul life and is forced to say that the significance of the
soul does not rest in its individual experience but in the fact
that it is contained in the general thought world. This is what the
Hegelian world conception fundamentally does say. One should contrast
it with what Lessing had in mind when he conceived the ideas of his
Education of the Human Race. He asked the question of the
significance for the individual human soul beyond the life that
is enclosed between birth and death. In pursuing this thought of
Lessing one can say that the soul after physical death goes through a
form of existence in a world that lies outside the one in which man
lives, perceives and thinks in his body; after an appropriate time,
such a purely spiritual form of experience is followed again by a new
earth life. In this process a world is implied with which the human
soul, as a particular, individual entity, is bound up. Toward this
world the soul feels directed in searching for its own true being.
As soon as one conceives the soul as separated from the connection
with its physical form of existence, one must think of it as belonging
to that same world. For Hegel, however, the life of the soul, in
shedding all individual traits, is absorbed first into the general
thought process of the historical evolution, then into that of the
general spiritual-intellectual world processes. In Hegel's sense, one
solves the riddle of the soul in leaving all individual traits of that
soul out of consideration. The individual is not real, but the
historical process. This is illustrated by the passage toward the end
of Hegel's Philosophy of History:
We have exclusively considered the progress of the concept and had to
renounce the tempting pleasure to depict the fortune, the flourishing
periods of the peoples, the greatness and the beauty of the
individuals, the interest of their destiny in sorrow and joy.
Philosophy has to deal only with the lustre of the idea that is
reflected in world history. Weary of the immediate passions in the
world of reality, philosophy emancipates into contemplation; it is the
interest of philosophy to recognize the course of development of the
self-realization of the idea.
Let us look at Hegel's doctrine of the soul. We find here the
description of the process of the soul's evolution within the body as
"natural soul," the development of consciousness of self and
of reason. We then find the soul realizing the ideas of right,
morality and the state in the external world. It is then described how
the soul sees in world history, as a continuous life, what it
thinks as ideas. It is shown how it lives these ideas as art
and religion, and how the soul unites with the truth that thinks
itself, seeing itself in the living creative spirit of the universe.
Every thinker who feels like Hegel must be convinced that the world in
which he finds himself is entirely spirit, that all material existence
is also nothing but a manifestation of the spirit. If such a thinker
searches for the spirit, he will find it essentially as active
thought, as living, creative idea. This is what the soul is
confronted with. It must ask itself if it can really consider
itself as a being that is nothing but thought essence. It can be felt
as the real greatness, the irrefutable element of Hegel's world
conception that the soul, in rising to true thought, feels elevated to
the creative principle of existence. To feel man's relation to the
world in this way was an experience of deep satisfaction to those
personalities who could follow Hegel's thought development.
How can one live with this thought? That was the great riddle
confronting modern world conception. It had resulted from the
continuation of the process begun in Greek philosophy when thought had
emerged and when the soul had thereupon become detached from external
existence. Hegel now has attempted to place the whole range of thought
experience before the soul, to present to the soul, as it were,
everything it can produce as thought out of its depths. In the face of
this thought experience Hegel now demands of the soul that it
recognize itself according to its deepest nature in this experience,
that it feel itself in this element as in its deepest ground.
With this demand of Hegel the human soul has been brought to a
decisive point in the attempt to obtain a knowledge of its own being.
Where is the soul to turn when it has arrived at the element of pure
thought but does not want to remain stationary at this point From the
experience of perception, feeling and will, it proceeds to the
activity of thinking and asks, "What will result if I think about
perception, feeling and will?" Having arrived at thinking, it is
at first not possible to proceed any further. The soul's attempt in
this direction can only lead to thinking again. Whoever follows
the modern development of philosophy as far as the age of Hegel can
have the impression that Hegel pursues the impulses of this
development to a point beyond which it becomes impossible to go so
long as this process retains the general character exhibited up to
that time. The observation of this fact can lead to the question: If
thinking up to this stage brings philosophy in Hegel's sense to the
construction of a world picture that is spread out before the soul,
has this energy of thinking then really developed everything
that is potentially contained within it? It could be, after all,
that thinking contains more possibilities than that of mere thinking.
Consider a plant, which develops from the root through its stem and
leaves into blossom and fruit. The life of this plant can now be
brought to an end by taking the seed from the fruit and using it as
human food, for instance. But one can also expose the seed of the
plant to the appropriate conditions with the effect that it will
develop into a new plant.
In concentrating one's attention on the significance of Hegel's
philosophy, one can see how the thought picture that man develops of
the world unfolds before him like a plant; one can observe that the
development is brought to the point where the seed, thought, is
produced. But then this process is brought to an end, just as in the
life of the plant whose seed is not developed further in its own
organic function, but is used for a purpose that is as extraneous to
this life as the purpose of human nutrition is to the seed of the
reproductive organs. Indeed, as soon as Hegel has arrived at the point
where thought is developed as an element, he does not continue the
process that brought him to this point. He proceeds from sense
perception and develops everything in the human soul in a process that
finally leads to thought. At this stage he stops and shows how this
element can provide an explanation of the world processes and world
entities. This purpose can indeed be served by thought, just as the
seed of a plant may be used as human food. But should it not be
possible to develop a living element out of thought? Is it not
possible that this element is deprived of its own life through the use
that Hegel makes of it, as the seed of a plant is deprived of its life
when it is used as human food? In what light would Hegel's philosophy
have to appear if it were possibly true that thought can be used for
the enlightenment, for the explanation of the world processes, as a
plant seed can be used for food but only by sacrificing its continued
growth? The seed of a plant, to be sure, can produce only a plant of
the same kind. Thought, however, as a seed of knowledge, could, if
left to its living development, produce something of an entirely new
kind, compared to the world picture from which its evolution would
proceed. As the plant life is ruled by the law of repetition,
so the life of knowledge could be under the law of enhancement
and elevation. It is unthinkable that thought as we employ it for
the explanation of external science should be merely a byproduct of
evolution, just as the use of plant seeds for food is a sidetrack in
the plant's continuous development. One can dismiss ideas of this kind
on the ground that they have their origin in an arbitrary imagination
and that they represent mere possibilities without any value. It is
just as easily understood that the objection can be raised that at the
point at which this idea would be developed we would enter the realm
of arbitrary fantasy. To the observer of the historical development of
the philosophies of the nineteenth century this question can
nevertheless appear in a different light. The way in which Hegel
conceives the element of thought does indeed lead the evolution of
world conception to a dead end. One feels that thought has reached an
extreme; yet, if one wants to introduce this thought in the form in
which it is conceived in the immediate life of knowledge, it becomes a
disappointing failure. There arises a longing for a life that should
spring from the world conception that one has accomplished.
Friedrich Theodor Vischer begins to write his Esthetics in
Hegel's manner in the middle of the nineteenth century. When finished,
it is a work of monumental importance. After its completion he becomes
the most penetrating critic of his own work. If one searches for the
deeper reason for this strange process, one finds that Vischer has
become aware of the fact that, as he had permeated his work with
Hegelian thoughts, he had introduced an element that had become dead,
since it had been taken out of the ground that had provided its life
conditions, just as a plant seed dies when its growth is cut off. A
peculiar perspective is opening before us as we see Hegel's world
conception in this light. The nature of the thought element could
demand to be received as a living seed and, under certain conditions,
to be developed in the soul. It could unfold its possibility by
leading beyond the world picture of Hegel to a world conception in
which the soul could come to a knowledge of its own being with which
it could truly hold its own position in the external world. Hegel has
brought the soul to the point where it can live with the element of
thought; the progress beyond Hegel would lead to the thought's
growth in the soul beyond itself and into a spiritual world.
Hegel understood how the soul magically produces thought within
itself and experiences itself in thought. He left to posterity the
task of discovering by means of living thoughts, which are active in a
truly spiritual world, the real being of the soul that cannot fully
experience itself in the element of mere thought.
It has been shown in the preceding exposition how the development of
modern world conception strives from the perception of thought
toward the experience of thought. In Hegel's world conception
the world seems to stand before the soul as a self-produced thought
experience, but the trend of evolution seems to indicate further
progress. Thought must not become stationary as thought; it must not
be merely thought, not be experienced merely through
thinking; it must awaken to a still higher life.
As arbitrary as all this may appear at first, it is nevertheless the
view that prevails when a more penetrating observation of the
development of modern world conception in the nineteenth century is
made. Such an observation shows how the demands of an age exert their
effect in the deeper strata of the evolution of history. It shows the
aims that men set for themselves as attempts to do justice to
these demands. Men of modern times were confronted with the world
picture of natural science. It was necessary to find conceptions
concerning the life of the soul that could be maintained while this
world picture was sustained. The whole development from Descartes,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, to Hegel, appears as a struggle for such
conceptions. Hegel brings this struggle to a certain conclusion. His
mode of thinking, as he presents the world as thought, appears to be
latent everywhere with his predecessors. He takes the bold step as a
thinker to bring all world conceptions to a climax by uniting them in
a comprehensive thought picture. With him the age has, for the time
being, exhausted the energy of its advancing impulses. What was
formulated above, that is, the demand to experience the life of
thought inwardly, is unconsciously felt. This demand is felt as
a burden on the souls at the time of the middle of the nineteenth
century. People despair of the impossibility of fulfilling this
demand, but they are not fully aware of their despair. Thus, a
stagnation in the philosophical field sets in. The productivity with
respect to philosophical ideas ceases. It would have had to develop in
the indicated direction, but first it seems to be necessary to pause
in deliberation about the achievement that has been attained. Attempts
are made to start from one point or another of the philosophical
predecessors, but the force to continue the world picture of Hegel
fruitfully is lacking.
Witness Karl Rosenkranz's description of the situation in the preface
to his Life of Hegel (1844):
It is not without regret that I part from this work, but it is
necessary to proceed at some time from becoming to
existence. Does it not seem, however, that we are nowadays only
the gravediggers and survivors to set monuments to the philosophers
who were born in the second half of the eighteenth century, and who
died in the first of the nineteenth century? Kant began this march of
death of the German philosophers in 1804. He was followed by Fichte,
Jacobi, Solger, Reinhold, Krause, Schleiermacher, William von
Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, Herbart, Baader, Wagner, Windischmann,
Fries, and so many others. . . . Do we see a succeeding generation for
this harvest of death? Are we capable also of sending into the second
half of our century a venerable group of thinkers? Are there living
among our young men those who are inspired to immortal exertion for
speculative contemplation, by Platonic enthusiasm and Aristotelian joy
of painstaking industry? . . . Strangely enough, in our day the
talents seem to be not quite able to hold onto their task. They
are quickly used up and after a few promising flowers, they become
barren and begin to copy and repeat themselves at the very moment
when, after having overcome their still immature, imperfect, one-sided
and stormy youthful attempts, periods of forceful and concentrated
activity should begin. Some of them, full of exaggerated eagerness, go
too far in their quest and must, like Constantin Frantz, take back
partly in later books what they said in earlier ones . . .
It can often be seen that, after the middle of the nineteenth century,
people found themselves forced to subscribe to such a judgment of the
philosophical situation of the time. The excellent thinker, Franz
Brentano, made the following statement in the inaugural speech for his
professorship, Concerning the Reasons for Discouragement in the
Philosophical Field, in 1874:
In the first decades of our century the lecture halls of the German
philosophers were overcrowded; in more recent times, this flood has
been followed by an ebb tide. One often hears that gifted men accuse
the younger generation of lacking the sense for the highest branches
of knowledge. That would be a sad but also an incomprehensible fact.
How could it be that the entire new generation should be inferior' to
the earlier one in spiritual momentum and mobility? It was in reality
not a lack of talent but . . . lack of confidence that had the effect
of decreasing philosophical studies. If the hope for success had come
back, the highest honors in this field would be waiting in vain to be
conquered . . .
In Hegel's lifetime, and for a short time after, there already were
people who felt that his world picture showed its weakness in the very
point that contained its greatness. His world conception leads toward
thought but also forces the soul to consider its nature to be
exhausted in the thought element. If this world conception would bring
thought in the above-mentioned sense to a life of its own, then this
could only happen within the individual soul life; the soul would
thereby find its relation toward the whole cosmos. This was felt, for
instance, by Troxler, but he did not develop the conviction beyond the
state of a dim feeling. In lectures that he gave at the University of
Bern in 1835 he expressed himself as follows:
Not only now but also twenty years ago, we have been living with the
most intimate conviction, and we have tried to show this in writing
and speech, that a philosophy and an anthropology that was to embrace
man in his entirety, God and the world, can only be founded on the
idea and the reality of man's individuality and immortality. For this
fact, the whole book, Insight into Man's Nature, which appeared
in 1811, is an undeniable proof. It is also borne out in the last
chapter of our Anthropology entitled, "The Absolute
Personality," which had a wide circulation in the form of a
booklet. We therefore take the liberty to quote from the beginning of
that chapter. "The whole inner nature of man has been constructed
on divine misproportions, which are dissolved in the glory of a
super-terrestrial destination, as all motivating springs have their
origin in the spirit and only the weights are from the world. We have
now traced these misproportions with their manifestations from their
dark earthly root, and have followed the spiral of the heavenly plant,
which appears to wind only around a great and noble stem from all
sides and in all directions. We approach the top, which continues to
rise, unattainable and continuously beyond our grasp, into the upper,
brighter realms of another world whose light is only softly dawning on
us and the breath of which we may feel . . ."
Such words sound to a man of the present sentimental and not very
scientific, but one only needs to observe the goal toward which
Troxler steers. He does not want to dissolve the nature of man into a
world of ideas but attempts to lay hold on man in man as the
individual and immortal personality. Troxler wants to see the
nature of man anchored in a world that is not merely thought. For this
reason, he calls attention to the fact that one can distinguish
something in the human being that binds man to a world beyond the
sensual world and that is not merely thought.
Philosophers of earlier times have already distinguished a subtle,
noble soul body from the coarser material body, or, in this sense,
assumed a kind of sheath of the spirit, a soul that was endowed with
the picture of the body they called model (Schema) and that was
the inner higher man for them.
Troxler, himself, divided man into material body (Koerper),
soul body (Leib), soul (Seele) and spirit
(Geist). He thereby distinguished the entity of the soul in a
manner that allowed him to see the latter enter the sense world with
its material body and soul body, and extend into a supersensible world
with its soul and spirit. This entity spreads its individual activity
not merely into the sense world but also into the spiritual world. It
does not lose its individuality in the mere generality of thought, but
Troxler does not arrive at the point of conceiving thought as a living
seed of knowledge in the soul. He does not succeed in justifying the
individual members of soul and spirit by letting this germ of
knowledge live within the soul. He does not suspect that thought could
grow into something during his life that could be considered as the
individual life of the soul, but he can speak of this individual
existence of the soul only from a dimly experienced feeling, as it
were. Troxler could not come to more than such a feeling concerning
these connections because he was too dependent on positive dogmatic
religious conceptions. Since he was in possession of a far-reaching
comprehensive knowledge of the evolution of world conception, his
rejection of Hegelian philosophy can nevertheless be seen as of
greater significance than one that springs from mere personal
antipathy. It can be seen as an expression of the objection against
Hegel that arises from the intellectual mood of the Hegelian age
itself. In this light we have to understand Troxler's verdict:
Hegel has brought speculation to the highest stage of its perfection
and in the very act of doing so he has destroyed it. His system has
become for this intellectual current the last word; its indirect
verdict is: Up to this point and not a step further!
In this form Troxler asks the question, which, if developed from a dim
feeling into a clear idea, would probably have to be expressed as
follows: How does the philosophical world conception develop beyond
the phase of the mere thought experience in Hegel's sense to an inner
participation in thought that has come to life?
A book that is characteristic of the relation of Hegel's world
conception toward the mood of the time was published by C. H.
Weisse in 1834 with the title, The Philosophical Secret
Doctrine of the Immortality of the Human Individual. In this book
is to be found the following passage:
Whoever has studied Hegel's philosophy in its entire inner connection,
is acquainted with the manner in which this philosophy, as it is
constructed with perfect consistency in its dialectic method, shows
the subjective spirit of the finite individual as absorbed into
the objective spirit of law, state and morality. The subjective spirit
thus becomes subordinated. It is simultaneously accepted and rejected
until it finally changes into a dependent element of this higher
spirit. In this fashion, the finite individual, as it has long been
noted both in and outside Hegel's school, is made into a transitory
phenomenon. . . . What purpose, what significance could there be for
the continued existence of such an individual after the world spirit
has passed through it . . .?
Weisse attempts to contrast this meaninglessness of the individual
soul with his own description of its imperishable existence. That he,
too, could not really progress beyond Hegel can be easily understood
from his line of thought that has been briefly outlined in an earlier
chapter of this book.
The powerlessness of Hegel's thought picture could be felt when it was
confronted with the individual entity of the soul, and it showed up
again in the rising demand to penetrate deeper into nature than is
possible by mere sense perception. That everything presented to the
senses in reality represents thought and as such is spirit was
seen clearly by Hegel, but whether one had gained an insight into
all spirit in nature by knowing this spirit of nature
as a new question. If the soul cannot grasp its own being by
means of thought, could it not still be the case that with another
form of experience of its own being the soul could nevertheless
experience deeper forces and entities in nature? Whether such
questions are formulated in completely distinct awareness or not is
not the point in question. What matters is whether or not they can
be asked with regard to a world conception. If this is possible,
then such a world conception leaves us with the impression of being
unsatisfactory. Because this was the case with Hegel's philosophy, it
was not accepted as one that gives the right picture of the world,
that is, one to which the highest problems and world riddles could be
referred. This must be distinctly observed if the picture that is
presented by the development of world conception in the middle of the
nineteenth century is to be seen in its proper light. In this time
further progress was made with respect to the picture of external
nature, which, even more powerfully than before, weighed on the
general human outlook on the world. It should be understandable that
the philosophical conceptions of this time were engaged in a hard
struggle since they had, as described above, arrived at a critical
point. To begin with it is noteworthy to observe how Hegel's followers
attempted to defend his philosophy.
Carl Ludwig Michelet (1801 – 93), the editor of Hegel's
Philosophy of Nature, wrote in his preface to this work in 1841:
Will people continue to consider it a limitation of philosophy to
create only thoughts and not even a leaf of grass? That is to say that
it can create only the general, lasting, truly valuable, and not the
particular, sensual transitory? But if one should see the limitation
of philosophy not only in the fact that philosophy cannot produce the
particular, but also in the fact that it does not even know how
it is made, then the answer is: This "how" does not
stand higher than knowledge but rather lower than knowledge;
therefore, knowledge cannot have its limitation in this respect. As
the question is asked "how" this change of the idea into the
reality takes place, knowledge is lost for the reason that nature is
the unconscious idea and the leaf of grass grows without any
knowledge. But true creation of general values is the one element of
which philosophical inquiry cannot be deprived. . . . And now we
maintain that the purest thought development of speculation will be in
the most perfect agreement with the results of experience, and its
sense for nature will discover nothing in nature but embodied ideas.
In the same preface Michelet also expresses a hope:
Thus Goethe and Hegel are the two geniuses who, in my opinion, are
destined to blaze the trail for a speculative physics of the future,
as they prepare the reconciliation of speculation and experience
… . Especially these Hegelian lectures could best of all have
the effect of paving the way for a recognition in this respect, for as
they show a comprehensive empirical knowledge, they represent the
surest test for Hegel's speculation.
The subsequent time did not lead to such a reconciliation. A certain
animosity against Hegel took possession of ever widening circles. The
spread of this feeling against him in the course of the fifties of the
last century can be seen from the words that Friedrich Albert Lange
uses in his History of Materialism in 1865:
His (Hegel's) whole system moves within the realm of our thoughts and
fantasies about things that are given high-sounding names with
complete disregard as to the validity that the phenomena and the
concepts derived from them can have. . . . Through Schelling and
Hegel, pantheism became the dominant mode of thinking in natural
philosophy, a world conception that with a certain mystical depth
implies at the same time, almost as a matter of principle, the danger
of fantastic extravagance. Instead of separating experience and the
world of the senses strictly from the ideal element, and instead of
trying to find the reconciliation of these realms in the nature of
man, the pantheist undertakes the unification of spirit and nature
through the verdict of poetic reason without any critical
intervention.
This view concerning Hegel's mode of thinking is, to be sure, as
inadequate to Hegel's world conception as possible. (See Hegel's
philosophy as described in the chapter, The Classics of World
Conception.) It does dominate numerous spirits as early as the
middle of the nineteenth century, however, and it gains progressively
more ground. A man who, from 1833 to 1872, was in an influential
position with the German intellectual life as a professor of
philosophy in Berlin, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802 –
72), could be sure of meeting strong public approval when he
pronounced the judgment that Hegel wanted "to teach without
learning" through his method because he was under the impression
"that he was in possession of the divine concept, which is
hampered by the process of laborious research work." It was in
vain that Michelet attempted to correct such a judgment by quoting
Hegel's own words: "To experience we owe the development of
philosophy. The empirical sciences prepare the content of the
particular to the point where they can be admitted into the realm of
philosophy. They also imply thereby the need of thinking itself to
come up with concrete definitions."
Characteristic of the course of development of the world conceptions
of the middle decades of the nineteenth century is an observation made
by an important but unfortunately little known thinker, K. Ch.
Planck. In the preface of an excellent book published in 1850 and
entitled, The World Ages, he says:
To realize consciously that everything is under the condition of a
purely natural order of law, and at the same time to produce the full
self-conscious freedom of the spirit, the self-dependent inner law of
its nature, this twofold tendency, which is the distinguishing
fundamental signature of modern history, presents in its most direct
and pure form also the task of the present book. The first tendency
becomes apparent on all sides since the revival of the sciences in the
rebirth of independent and comprehensive natural research and its
liberation from the purely religious life. It can be seen in the
change of the whole physical world conception caused by this, as well
as in the ever increasing matter of factness of the view of things in
general. It appears finally, in its highest form, in the philosophical
tendency to comprehend the laws of nature according to their inner
necessity, but it also shows its practical aspect in the gradual
development of this immediate present life with respect to its natural
conditions.
The growing influence of the natural sciences is expressed in words
like this. The confidence in these sciences was becoming greater. The
belief became predominant that through the means and the results of
the natural sciences one could obtain a world conception that is free
from the unsatisfactory elements of the Hegelian one.
A picture of the total change that took place in this direction can be
derived from a book that can be considered as representative of this
period in the fullest sense of the word, Alexander von Humboldt's,
Cosmos, Sketch of a Physical World Description. The author, who
represents the pinnacle of education in the field of physical science
of his time, speaks of his confidence in a world conception of natural
science:
My confidence is based on the splendid state 'of the natural sciences
themselves, whose wealth consists no longer in the abundance of their
facts but in the interconnections of the observations. The general
results that impress every educated mind as interesting have
wonderfully multiplied since the end of the eighteenth century. The
individual facts stand less isolated by themselves; the gaps between
the formations are closed. What remained for a long time obscure to
the inquiring mind when seen in a narrower horizon becomes explained
through the observations that have been obtained on an expedition into
the most distant regions. Forms of plants and animals, which seemed to
be isolated for a long time, are now falling in line through the
discovery of connecting links or through forms of transition. A
general interconnection, not in a simple linear direction, but in a
netlike, woven texture according to a higher development, or the
stunted growth of certain organisms, is what gradually unfolds before
the eye of the inquiring natural observer. . . . The general study of
nature awakens in us, as it were, organs that have long been dormant.
We enter into a more intimate relation with the outer world.
In his Cosmos, Humboldt leads the description of nature only to
the gateway of a world conception. He does not make the attempt to
connect the wealth of the phenomena by means of general ideas of
nature, but links the things and facts in a natural way to each other
as can be expected from "the entirely objective turn of his
mind."
Soon other thinkers emerged who were bold enough to make combinations
and who tried to penetrate into the nature of things on the basis of
natural science. What they intended to produce was nothing less than a
radical transformation of all former philosophical world and life
conceptions by means of modern science and knowledge of nature. In the
most forceful way the natural science of the nineteenth century had
paved the way for them. What they intended to do is radically
expressed by Feuerbach:
To assume God before nature is about the same as to assume the church
before you have the stone out of which it is built, or to assume that
the art of architecture has put the stones together to make a building
before the chemical compounds that make up the stone, in short, before
the natural genesis and formation of the stone.
The first half of the century produced many results of natural science
that are bricks for the architecture of a new structure of world
conception. It is, to be sure, correct that a building cannot be
erected if there are no bricks to do it with, but it is no less true
that one cannot do anything with these bricks if, independent of
them, a picture of the building to be erected does not exist. Just
as no structure can come into existence if one puts these bricks
together at random, one upon the other and side by side, joining them
with mortar as they come, so can no world conception come from the
individual known truths of natural science if there is not,
independent of these and of physical research, a power in the
human soul to form the world conception. This fact was left out of
consideration by the antagonists of an independent philosophy.
In examining the personalities who in the eighteen-fifties took part
in the erection of a structure of world conception, the features of
three men are particularly prominent: Ludwig Buechner (1824 –
99), Carl Vogt (1817 – 95) and Jacob Moleschott (1822 –
93). If one wants to characterize the fundamental feeling that
inspires these three men, one need only repeat Moleschott's words:
If man has investigated all properties of the materials that make an
impression on his developed sense organs, he has thereby grasped the
essence of things. With this accomplishment he arrives at his — that
is to say, humanity's — absolute knowledge. Another knowledge does not
exist for man.
All philosophy that has been so far advanced has, according to these
men, yielded only knowledge without lasting meaning. The idealistic
philosophers believe, according to Buechner and those who shared his
views, that they derive their knowledge from reason. Through this
method, however, one cannot, as Buechner maintains, come to a
meaningful structure of conceptions. "But truth can only be
gained by listening to nature and her rule," says Moleschott. At
that time and during the following years, the protagonists for such a
world conception, directly derived from nature, were collectively
called materialists. It was emphatically declared that this
materialism was an age-old world conception, concerning which
enlightened spirits had long recognized how unsatisfactory it was for
a higher thinker. Buechner attacked that opinion. He pointed out that:
In the first place materialism, or the whole philosophical current
moving in its direction, has never been disproved. It is not only the
oldest form of philosophical contemplation in existence but also one
that emerged anew with new energies at every revival of philosophy in
the course of history. Furthermore, the materialism of our day is no
longer the same as it was formerly with Epicurus or the
Encyclopedists, but an entirely different thought current or methods,
which is supported by the results of the positive sciences. This is a
method that is distinguished from its preceding form by the fact that
it is no more like the older materialism, a system, but a simple
realistic philosophical contemplation of existence that, above all,
traces the uniform principle in the world of nature and of the spirit,
striving to show everywhere a natural and law-determined connection of
all phenomena of that world.
Goethe's attitude toward Holbach, one of the most prominent
materialists of the eighteenth century French Encyclopedists,
illustrates the position a spirit, who strives in a most pronounced
way for a thinking in accordance with nature and does full justice to
the mode of conception of natural science, can nevertheless take
toward materialism. Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (1723 –
1789) published his Systeme de la Nature in 1770. Goethe, who
came across this book in Strassburg, in Poetry and Truth
describes the repulsive impression that he received from it.
Matter was to be there from eternity, and it was to have been in
motion from eternity. Through this motion, now to the right, now to
the left in all directions, it was to have produced without further
difficulty all the infinite phenomena of existence. This we might even
have accepted as satisfactory if the author had really constructed
before our eyes the world out of his matter in motion. But he might
have known as little about nature as we did, for after postulating a
few general concepts, he again turns away from nature in order to
transform what appears higher than nature, or what appears as a higher
nature in nature, into the material, heavy nature, to be sure, in
motion, but without direction and shape, and he thinks that he gained
a great deal in so doing.
Goethe was deeply convinced that "theory in itself and by itself
has no value except to make us believe in the connection of the
phenomena." (Sprueche in Prosa, Deutsche
Nationalliteratur, Goethe's Werke, Vol. 36, 2, pp. 357.)
The results of natural science gained in the first half of the
nineteenth century were, to be sure, as knowledge of facts,
well-suited to supply a foundation to the materialists of the fifties
for their world conception. Science has penetrated deeper and deeper
into the connections of the material processes insofar as they can be
reached by sense observation and by the form of thinking that is based
on that sense observation. If one now wants to deny to oneself and to
others that there is spirit active in matter, one nevertheless
unconsciously reveals this spirit. For what Friedrich Theodor Vischer
says in the third volume of his essay, On Old and New Things,
is in a certain sense quite correct. "That the so-called
matter can produce something, the function of which is spirit, is in
itself the complete proof against materialism." In this sense,
Buechner unconsciously disproves materialism by attempting to prove
that the spiritual processes spring from the depths of the material
facts presented to sense observation.
An example that shows how the results of natural science took on forms
that could be of a deeply penetrating influence on the conception of
the world is given in Woehler's discovery of 1828. This
scientist succeeded in producing a substance synthetically outside the
living organism that had previously only been known to be formed
within. This experiment seemed to supply the proof that the former
belief, which assumed that certain material compounds could be formed
only under the influence of a special life force contained in the
organism, was incorrect. If it was possible to produce such compounds
outside the living body, then one could draw the conclusion that the
organism was also working only with the forces with which chemistry
deals. The thought arose for the materialists that, if the living
organism does not need a special life force to produce what formerly
had been attributed to such a force, why should this organism then
need special spiritual energies in order to produce the processes to
which mental experiences are bound? Matter in all its qualities now
became for the materialists what generates all things and processes
from its core. From the fact that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and
nitrogen combine in an organic compound, it did not seem far to go to
Buechner's statement, "The words soul, spirit, thought, feeling,
will, life, do not stand for any real things but only for properties,
qualifications, functions of the living substance, or results of
entities that have their basis in the material forms of
existence." A divine being or the human soul were no longer
called immortal by Buechner, but rather matter and energy. Moleschott
expressed the same conviction with the words:
Energy is not a creative God; no essence of things is detachable from
the material basis. It is a quality of matter, inseparable from it,
eternally inherent in it. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are the powers
that split the firmest rock and transform it into fluid processes in
which life is generated. Change of matter and form in the individual
parts while the fundamental structure remains the same is the mystery
of animal life.
The research done in the first half of the nineteenth century in
natural science enabled Ludwig Buechner to express the view, "In
a way similar to that in which the steam engine produces motion, the
intricate organic complication of energy endowed materials in the
animal body produces a sum total of certain effects, which, combined
in a unity, are called spirit, soul, thought by us." And Karl
Gustav Reuschle declared in his book, Philosophy and Natural
Science, in Memory of David Friedrich Strauss (1874), that the
results of natural science themselves implied a philosophical element.
The affinities that one discovered between the natural forces were
thought to lead into the mysteries of existence.
Such an important relation was found by Oersted in 1819 in
Copenhagen. He saw that a magnetic needle is deflected by an electric
current. Faraday discovered the corresponding phenomenon in
1831, that by moving a magnet toward a spirally twisted copper wire,
electricity can be generated in the latter. Electricity and magnetism
thereby were shown to be related natural phenomena. Both energies were
no longer isolated facts; it was now apparent that they had a common
basis in their material existence. Julius Robert Mayer
penetrated deeper into the nature of matter and energy in the
eighteen-forties when he became aware of the fact that there exists a
definite relation that can be expressed numerically between mechanical
work and heat. Out of pressure, impact and friction, etc., that is to
say, out of work, heat is generated. In the steam engine, heat is
again changed into work. The quantity of heat produced by a given
amount of work can be calculated from the quantity of this work. If
one changes the quantity of heat that is necessary to heat a kilogram
of water by one degree centigrade into work, one can with this work
lift 424 kilograms to a height of one meter. It cannot be surprising
that the discovery of such facts was considered to be a vast progress
away from such explanations concerning matter as Hegel had offered:
"The transition from ideality to reality, from abstraction to
concrete existence, in this case, from space and time to the reality
that appears as matter, is incomprehensible for the intellect and
therefore appears to it always as something external and merely
given." The significance of a remark of this kind is recognized
only if thought as such can be seen as something valuable. This
consideration, however, would not occur to the above-mentioned
thinkers.
To discoveries such as these concerning the unity of the organic
forces of nature, others were added that threw light on the problem of
the composition of the world of organisms. In 1838 the botanist,
Schleiden, recognized the significance of the simple cell for
the plant organism. He showed that every texture of the plant, and
therefore the plant itself, is made up of these "elementary
organisms." Schleiden had recognized this "elementary
organism" as a little drop of mucilaginous fluid surrounded by a
cellular membrane. These cells are so multiplied and joined to one
another that they form the structure of the plant. Soon after this,
Schwann discovered the same general structure for the world of
animal organisms. Then, in 1827, the brilliant naturalist, Karl
Ernst van Baer, discovered the human egg. He also described the
process of the development of higher animals and of man from the egg.
In this way one had everywhere given up the attempt to look for ideas
that could be considered fundamental for the things of nature.
Instead, one had observed the facts that show in which way the higher,
more complicated processes and entities of nature develop from the
simpler and lower ones. The men who were in search of an idealistic
interpretation of the phenomena of the world became ever more rare. It
was still the spirit of idealistic world conception that in 1837
inspired the anthropologist, Burdach, with the view that life did not
have its origin in matter but rather a higher force transformed matter
according to its own design. Moleschott had already said, "The
force of life, as life itself, is nothing more than the result of the
complicated interacting and interweaving physical and chemical
forces."
The consciousness of the time tended to explain the universe through
no other phenomena than those that are displayed before the eyes of
men. Charles Lyell's work, Principles of Geology, which was
published in 1830, brought the whole older geology to an end with this
principle of explanation. Up to Lyell's epoch-making work it was
believed that the evolution of the earth had taken place in abrupt
revolutions. Everything that had come into being on earth was supposed
to have been destroyed repeatedly by complete catastrophes. Over the
graves of the victims new creations were supposed to have risen. In
this manner, one explained the presence of the remnants of plants and
animals in the various strata of the earth. Cuvier was the principal
representative who believed in such repeated periods of creation.
Lyell was convinced that it was unnecessary to assume such
interruptions of the steady course of evolution of the earth. If one
only presupposed sufficiently long periods of time, one could say that
forces today still at work on earth caused the entire development. In
Germany, Goethe and Karl von Hoff had already professed such a view.
Von Hoff maintained it in his History of the Natural Changes of the
Surface of the Earth, Documented by Traditional Sources, which
appeared in 1822. With great boldness of thought, enthusiasts Vogt,
Buechner and Moleschott set out to explain all phenomena from material
processes as they take place before the senses of man.
The situation that arose when the physiologist, Rudolf Wagner, found
himself opposed by Carl Vogt was typical of the intellectual warfare
that the materialists had to wage. In 1852, in the paper,
Allgemeine Zeitung, Wagner had declared himself in favor of
accepting an independent soul entity, thereby opposing the view of
materialism. He said "that the soul could divide itself because
the child inherited much from his father and much also from his
mother." Vogt answered this statement for the first time in his
Pictures from Animal Life. His position in this controversy is
clearly exposed in the following:
The soul, which is to be the substance, the very essence of the
individuality of the individual, indivisible entity, is to be capable
of dividing itself. Theologists, be sure you catch this heretic. He
has been up to now one of your people! Divided souls! If the soul can
be divided in the act of conception as Mr. Rudolf Wagner thinks, then
it could also be possible that this soul could be divided in death,
the portion that was burdened with sins going into purgatory, while
the other part would go directly into paradise. Mr. Wagner also
promises at the end of his physiological letters some excursions into
the field of the physiology of the divided souls.
The controversy became intense when Wagner, at the assembly of natural
scientists in Goettingen in 1854, read a paper against materialism
entitled, Man's Creation and the Substance of the Soul. He
meant to prove two things. In the first place, he set out to show that
the results of modern physical science were not a contradiction of the
biblical belief in the descent of the human race from one couple. In
the second instance, he wanted to demonstrate that these results did
not imply anything concerning the soul. Vogt wrote a polemical
treatise, Bigoted Faith and Science (Koehlerglaube und
Wissenschaft), against Wagner in 1855, which showed him to be
equipped with the full insight of the natural science of his time. At
the same time, he appeared to be a sharp thinker who, without reserve,
disclosed his opponents' conclusions as illusions. Vogt's
contradiction of Wagner's first statement comes to a climax in the
passage, "All investigations of history and of natural history
lead to the positive proof of the origin of the human races from a
plurality of roots. The doctrines of the Scripture concerning Adam and
Noah, and the twice occurring descent of man from a single couple are
scientifically untenable legends."
Against Wagner's doctrine of the soul, Vogt maintained that we see the
psychical activities of man develop gradually as part of the
development of the physical organs. From childhood to the maturity of
life we observe that the spiritual activities become more perfect.
With the shrinking of the senses and the brain, the "spirit"
shrinks proportionally. "A development of this kind is not
consistent with the assumption of an immortal soul substance that has
been planted into the brain as its organ."
That the materialists, as they fought their opponents, were not merely
confronted with intellectual reasons but also with emotions, becomes
perfectly clear in the controversy between Vogt and Wagner. For Wagner
had appealed, in a paper at Goettingen, for the moral need that could
not endure the thought that "mechanical machines walking about
with two arms and legs" should finally be dissolved into
indifferent material substances, without leaving us the hope that the
good they are doing should be rewarded and the evil punished. Vogt's
answer was, "The existence of an immortal soul is, for Mr.
Wagner, not the result of investigation and thought. . . . He needs an
immortal soul in order to see it tortured and punished after the death
of man."
Heinrich Czolbe (1819 – 73) attempted to show that there
is a point of view from which the moral world order can be in agreement
with the views of materialism. In his book, The Limits and Origin
of Knowledge Seen in Opposition to Kant and Hegel, which appeared
in 1865, he explained that every theology had its origin in a
dissatisfaction with this world.
The exclusion of the supersensible, or those incomprehensible things
that lead to the assumption of a second world, that is, to naturalism,
is in no way forced upon us through the power of the facts of natural
science — not even through philosophy that means to know everything —
but in the last analysis through morality, namely, through that
particular kind of moral behavior in man toward the world that we can
call satisfaction with the natural world.
Czolbe considers the longing for a supernatural world actually a.
result of an ingratitude against the natural world. The basic causes
of a philosophy that looks toward a world beyond this one are, for
him, moral shortcomings, sins against the spirit of the natural world
order. For these sins distract us "from the striving toward the
highest possible happiness of every individual" and from
fulfilling the duty that follows from such a striving "against
ourselves and others without regard for supernatural reward and
punishment." According to Czolbe, every human being is to be
filled with a "grateful acceptance of his share of earthly
happiness, which may be possibly small, and with a humble acceptance
of its limits and its necessary sorrow." Here we meet a rejection
of a supernatural world order for moral reasons.
In Czolbe's world conception one also sees clearly what qualities made
materialism so acceptable to human thinking, for there is no doubt
that Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott were not philosophers to a
sufficient degree to demonstrate the foundations of their views
logically. Without losing their way in heights of idealistic thoughts,
in their capacity as naturalists they drew their conclusions more from
sense observations. To render an account of their method by justifying
it from the nature of human knowledge was no enterprise to their
liking. Czolbe, however, did undertake just that. In his New
Presentation of Sensualism (1855), we find the reasons given why
he considers a knowledge built on the basis of sensual perceptions
valuable. Only a knowledge of this kind supplies concepts, judgments
and conclusions that can be distinctly conceived and envisaged. Every
conclusion that leads to something sensually inconceivable, and every
indistinct concept is to be rejected. The soul element is not clearly
conceivable, according to Czolbe, but the material on which the
spiritual appears as a quality. He therefore attempts to reduce
self-consciousness to visible material processes in the essay he
published in 1856, The Genesis of Self-consciousness, an Answer to
Professor Lotze. Here he assumes a circular movement of the parts
of the brain. Through such a motion returning in its own track, the
impression that a thing causes in the senses is made into a conscious
sensation. It is strange that this physical explanation of
consciousness became, at the same time, the occasion for him to
abandon his materialism. This is the point where one of the weaknesses
inherent in materialism becomes apparent in him. If he had remained
faithful to his principle, he would never have gone further than the
facts that are accessible to the senses allow. He would speak of no
other processes in the brain than those that can positively be
asserted through the means of natural science. What Czolbe sets out to
establish is, however, an aim in an infinite distance. Spirits like
Czolbe are not satisfied with what is investigated, they
hypothetically assume facts that have not as yet been investigated.
Such an alleged fact is the circular motion of the parts of the brain.
A complete investigation of the brain will most likely lead to the
discovery of processes of a kind that do not occur anywhere else in
the world. From them, one will be able to draw the conclusion that the
psychical processes conditioned by brain processes do occur only
in connection with a brain. Concerning his hypothetical circular
movements, Czolbe could not claim that they were limited to the brain.
They could occur also outside the animal organism, but in that case,
they would have to lead to psychical phenomena also in inanimate
objects. Czolbe, who is so insistent on perceptual clarity, actually
does not consider an animation of all nature as impossible. He asks,
"Should not my view be a realization of the world soul, which
Plato defended in his Timaeus? Should we not be able to find here the
point where the Leibnizian idealism, which has the whole world consist
of animated entities (monads), unites with modern naturalism?"
On a larger scale the mistake that Czolbe made with circular brain
motion occurred again in the brilliant thinker, Carl Christian
Planck (1819 – 80). The writings of this man have been completely
forgotten, in spite of the fact that they belong to the most
interesting works of modern philosophy. Planck strives as intensely as
any materialist for a world conception that is completely derived from
perceptible reality. He criticizes the German idealism of Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel for seeking the essence of things one-sidedly in
the idea. "To explain things really out of themselves is to
recognize them in their original conditioned state and in their
finiteness." (Compare Planck, The World Ages.) "There
is only the one and truly pure nature, so that mere nature in the
narrower sense of the word and spirit are opposites only within the
one nature in the higher and more comprehensive sense."
Now the strange thing happens in Planck's philosophy that he declares
the real, the world extending before him, to be the element that the
explanation of the world has to seek. He nevertheless does not proceed
with the observation of the facts in order to reach this element of
the real world extending before him, for he believes that human reason
is capable of penetrating through its own power to the real. Hegel
had, according to Planck, made the mistake of having reason
contemplate its own being so that it saw itself again in all things.
Planck, however, intended to have reason no longer withheld within its
own limits, but to have it go beyond itself into the element of
extension, the truly real. Planck blames Hegel because Hegel had
reason spin its own cobweb out of itself, whereas he, himself, is bold
enough to have reason spin real objective existence. Hegel maintained
that the spirit is capable of comprehending the essence of things
because reason is the essence of things and because it comes
into being in the human spirit. Planck declares that the essence of
things is not reason, but he uses reason merely to represent this
essence. A bold world construction, brilliantly conceived, but
conceived far from real observation, far from real things, yet
constructed in the belief that it was entirely permeated with genuine
reality — such is Planck's structure of ideas. He considers the world
process a living interplay of expansion and contraction. Gravity is
for him the tendency of the bodies, spread in space, to contract. Heat
and light are the tendency of a body to bring its contracted matter
into activity at a distance, and therefore the tendency of expansion.
Planck's relation toward his contemporaries is most interesting.
Feuerbach said of himself, "Hegel maintains the standpoint that
he wants to construct the world; my standpoint is to know the world as
being; he descends, I ascend. Hegel stands man on his head; I place
him on his feet, which are resting on geology." With these words
the materialists could also have characterized their credo, but Planck
proceeds in his method exactly like Hegel. He believes, however, that
he proceeds like Feuerbach and the materialists. The materialists, if
they had interpreted his method in their own way, would have had to
say to him, "From your standpoint you attempt to construct the
world. Nevertheless, you believe you proceed by recognizing the world
as being; you descend, but you take this descent to be an ascent. You
stand the world on its head and you are of the opinion that that head
is a foot." The will toward natural, factual reality could
probably not be expressed more poignantly than through the world
conception of a man who wanted to produce not merely ideas but reality
out of reason.
The personality of Planck appears no less interesting when he is
compared with his contemporary, Max Stirner. It is significant here to
consider Planck's ideas concerning the motivations of human action and
community life. As the materialist proceeded from the materials and
forces actually presented to the senses to arrive at their explanation
of nature, so Stirner started from the real individual personality as
a guide line for human behavior. Reason is only with the individual.
What reason decides on as a guide line for action can therefore also
have validity only for the individual. Life in community will
naturally result from the natural interaction of the individual
personalities. If everyone acts according to his reason, the most
desirable state of affairs will come to pass through the most free
cooperation of all. The natural community life comes into being as a
matter of course if everyone has reason rule his own individuality
since, according to the materialists, the natural view of worldly
phenomena comes to pass if one has the things express their nature and
if one limits the activity of reason to a mere combination and
interpretation of the statements of the senses. As Planck does not
explain the world by allowing things to speak for themselves, but
decides by his reason what the things allegedly say, so he also does
not, in regard to community life, depend on a real interaction of
personalities but dreams of an association of peoples with a supreme
judicial power serving the general welfare and ordered by reason. Here
also, then, he considers it possible that reason should master what
lies beyond the personality.
The original general law of right demands necessarily its external
existence in a general power of right, for it would itself not be real
as a general element in an external form if it were left to the
individuals themselves to execute it, as the individuals by themselves
are, according to their legal positions, only representatives of their
personal right, not as the general right as such.
Planck constructs the general power of right because he can realize
the idea of right for himself only in this manner. Five years earlier,
Max Stirner had written, "My own master and the creator of my own
right — I recognize no other source of right than myself. Neither God,
nor state, nor nature, nor man himself with his ‘eternal human
rights,’ neither a divine nor a human right." It is his opinion
that the real right of the individual cannot exist within a general
right. It is thirst for reality that drives Stirner to take his
negative attitude toward an unreal general right. It is the same
thirst for reality that, in turn, motivates Planck in his attempt to
crystallize out of an idea a real state of right.
In reading Planck's books one feels that he was deeply disturbed by
the thought of a twofold world order. He considered the belief in such
an interaction of two world orders — a natural order and a purely
spiritual one — as something contrary to nature and intolerable.
There have been thinkers before Planck's time, of course, who strove
for a purely natural-scientific mode of conception. Leaving aside
several other more or less clear attempts in this direction, Lamarck,
for instance, in 1809 outlined a picture of the genesis and
development of living organisms, which, according to the state of
knowledge of his time, should have had a great deal of attraction for
a contemporary world conception. He thought of the simplest organisms
as having come into existence through inorganic processes under
certain conditions. Once an organism is formed in this way, it
develops, through adjustment to given conditions of the external
world, new formations that serve its life. It grows new organs because
it needs them. The organisms then are capable of transformation and
thereby also of perfection. Lamarck imagines this transformation in
the following way. Consider an animal that gets its food from high
trees. It is therefore compelled to stretch its neck. In the course of
time its neck then becomes longer under the influence of this need. A
short-necked animal is transformed into the giraffe with its long
neck. The animals, then, have not come into existence in their
variety, but this variety has developed in the course of time under
the influence of changing conditions. Lamarck is of the opinion that
man is included in this evolution. Man has developed in the course of
time out of related forms similar to monkeys into forms that allowed
him to satisfy higher physical and spiritual needs. Lamarck in this
way linked up the whole world of organisms, including man, to the
realm of the inorganic.
Lamarck's attempt at an explanation of the varieties of the forms of
life was met with little attention by his contemporaries. Two decades
later a controversy arose in the French Academy between Geoffroy St.
Hilaire and George Cuvier. Geoffroy St. Hilaire believed he recognized
a common structural design in the world of animal organisms in spite
of its great variety. Such a general plan was a necessary prerequisite
for an explanation of their development from one another. If they had
developed from one another, they must have had some fundamental common
element in spite of their variety. In the lowest animal something must
be recognizable that only needs perfection in order to change this
lower form in the course of time into that of a higher animal. Cuvier
turned strongly against the consequences of this view. He was a
cautious man who pointed out that the facts did not uphold such
far-reaching conclusions. As soon as Goethe heard of this conflict, he
considered it the most important event of the time. Compared to this
controversy, the interest that he took in the July Revolution, a
political event that took place at the same time, appears
insignificant … . Goethe expressed himself on this point
clearly enough in a conversation that he had with Soret in August,
1830. He saw clearly that the adequate conception of the organic world
depended on this controversial point. In an essay Goethe supported St.
Hilaire with great intensity. (Compare Goethe's writings on natural
science, Vol. 36, Goethe Edition, Deutsche National Literatur.) He
told Johannes von Mueller that he considered Geoffroy St. Hilaire to
be moving in the same direction he himself had taken up fifty years
earlier. This shows clearly what Goethe meant to do when he began,
shortly after his arrival in Weimar, to take up his studies on animal
and plant formations. Even then he had an explanation of the variety
of living forms in mind that was more adequate to nature, but he was
also a cautious man. He never maintained more than what the facts
entitled him to state, and he tells in his introduction to his
Metamorphosis of the Plant that the time was then in
considerable confusion with respect to these facts. The opinion
prevailed, as Goethe expressed it, that it was only necessary for the
monkey to stand up and to walk on his hind legs in order to become a
human being.
The thinkers of natural science maintained a mode of conception that
was completely different from that of the Hegelians. For the
Hegelians, it was possible to remain within their ideal world. They
could develop their idea of man from their idea of the monkey without
being concerned with the question of how nature could manage to bring
man into being in the real world side by side with the monkey.
Michelet had simply pronounced that it was no concern of the idea to
explain the specific "how" of the processes in the real
world. The thinker who forms an idealistic world conception is, in
this respect, in the same position as the mathematician who only has
to say through what thought operation a circle is changed into an
ellipse and an ellipse into a parabola or hyperbola. A thinker,
however, who strives for an explanation through facts would have to
point at the actual processes through which such a transformation can
come to pass. He is then forming a realistic world conception. Such a
thinker will not take the position that Hegel describes:
It has been a clumsy conception of the older and also of the more
recent philosophy of nature to consider the development and transition
of one form and realm of nature into a higher one as an external and
real production that one has dated back into the darkness of the past
for the sake of clarification. It is characteristic of nature to be so
external in its structure that its forms fall apart in differentiated
manifestations and that these. forms exist indifferently side by side;
the idea, which guides the stages in their succession, is the
inner nature of these separated manifestations. Such nebulous
conceptions, which are really just sensual conceptions, as, for
instance, the alleged progression of plants and animals from water,
and then again, the evolution of the more developed animal formations
from the lower ones, and so forth, must be given up by a thoughtful
contemplation. (Hegel's Werke, 1847, Vol. 7, p. 33.)
In opposition to such a statement of an idealistic thinker, we hear
that of the realistic Lamarck:
In the primal beginning only the simplest and lowest animals and
plants developed, and only lastly those of a highly complicated
organization. The course of the evolution of the earth and its organic
population was quite gradual and not interrupted by violent
revolutions. The simplest animals and the simplest plants that occupy
the lowest stages on the scale of organisms have come into existence,
and do so even today, through spontaneous generation (generatio
spontanea).
There was in Germany also a man of the same conviction as Lamarck.
Lorenz Oken (1779 – 1859) presented a natural evolution of
organic beings that was based on "sensual conceptions." To
quote him, "Everything organic has originated from a slimy
substance (Urschleim), is merely slime formed in various ways.
This original slime has come into being in the ocean in the course of
the planetary evolution out of inorganic matter."
In spite of such deeply provocative turns of thought there had to be,
especially with thinkers who were too cautious to leave the thread of
factual knowledge, a doubt against a naturalistic mode of thinking of
this kind as long as the question of the teleology of living beings
had not been cleared. Even Johannes Mueller, who was a pioneer as a
thinker and as a research scientist, was, because of his consideration
of the idea of teleology, prompted to say:
The organic bodies are distinguished from the inorganic not merely by
the composition of elements that they represent, but also by the
continuous activity that is at work in living organic matter, which
creates also teleologically and in a reason-directed plan, by
arranging the parts for the purpose of the whole. It is this that is
the distinguishing mark of an organism. (Johannes Mueller, Handbuch
der Physiologic des Menschen, 3, 1838; Vol. 1, p. 19.)
With a man like Johannes Mueller, who remained strictly within the
limits of natural scientific research, and for whom the thought of
purpose-conformity remained as a private conviction in the background
of his factual research work, this view was not likely to produce any
particular consequences. He investigated the laws of the organisms in
strict objectivity regardless of the purpose connection, and became a
reformer of modern natural science through his comprehensive mind; he
knew how to make use of the physical, chemical, anatomical,
zoological, microscopical and embryological knowledge in an unlimited
way. His view did not keep him from basing psychological qualities of
the objects of his studies on their physical characteristics. It was
one of his fundamental convictions that no one could be a psychologist
without being a physiologist. But if a thinker went beyond the field
of research in natural science and entered the realm of a general
world conception, he was not in the fortunate position easily to
discard an idea like that of teleological structure. For this reason,
it is easy to understand why a thinker of the importance of Gustave
Theodor Fechner (1801 – 87) would make the statement in his book,
Zend-Avesta, or Concerning the Nature of Heaven and the World
Beyond (1852), that it seems strange how anyone can believe that
no consciousness would be necessary to create conscious beings as the
human beings are, since even unconscious machines can be created only
by conscious human beings. Also, Karl Ernst von Baer, who
followed the evolution of the animals from their initial state, could
not resist the thought that the processes in living organisms were
striving toward certain goals and that the full concept of purpose
was, indeed, to be applied for all of nature. (Karl Ernst von Baer,
Studies from the Field of Natural Science, 1876, pp. 73 &
82.)
Difficulties of this kind, which confront certain thinkers as they
intend to build up a world picture, the elements of which are supposed
to be taken entirely from the sensually perceptible nature, were not
even noticed by materialistic thinkers. They attempted to oppose the
idealistic world picture of the first half of the century with one
that receives a11 explanation exclusively from the facts of nature.
Only in a knowledge that had been gained from these facts did they
have any confidence.
There is nothing more enlightening concerning the inner conviction of
the materialists than this confidence. They have been accused of
taking the soul out of things and thereby depriving them of what
speaks to man's heart, his feelings. Does it not seem that they do
take all qualities out of nature that lift man's spirit and that they
debase nature into a dead object that satisfies only the intellect
that looks for causes but deprives us of any inner involvement? Does
it not seem that they undermine morality that rises above mere natural
appetites and looks for motivations, merely advocating the cause of
animal desires, subscribing to the motto: Let us eat and drink and
follow our physical instincts for tomorrow we die? Lotze (1817 – 81)
indeed makes the statement with respect to the materialistic thinkers
of the time in question that the followers of this movement value the
truth of the drab empirical knowledge in proportion to the degree in
which it offends everything that man's inner feelings hold sacred.
When one becomes acquainted, however, with Carl Vogt, one finds in him
a man who had a deep understanding for the beauty of nature and who
attempted to express this as an amateur painter. He was a person who
was not at all blind to the creations of human imagination but felt at
home with painters and poets. Quite a number of materialists were
inspired by the esthetic enjoyment of the wonderful structure of
organisms to a point where they felt that the soul must have its
origin in the body. The magnificent structure of the human brain
impressed them much more than the abstract concepts with which
philosophy was concerned. How much more claim to be considered as the
causes of the spirit, therefore, did the former seem to present than
the latter.
Nor can the reproach that the materialists debased morality be
accepted without reserve. Their knowledge of nature was deeply bound
up with ethical motivations. Czolbe's endeavor to stress the moral
foundation of naturalism was shared by other materialists. They all
meant to instill in man the joy of natural existence; they intended to
direct him toward his duties and his tasks on earth. They felt that
human dignity could be enhanced if man could be conscious of having
developed from a lower being to his present state of perfection. They
believed that only a man who knows the material necessities that
underlie his actions is capable of properly judging them. They argued
that only he knows how to judge a man according to his value
who is aware that matter is the basis for life in the universe, that
with natural necessity life is connected with thought and thought in
turn gives rise to good and ill will. To those who see moral freedom
endangered by materialism, Moleschott answers:
Everybody is free who is joyfully aware of the natural necessity of
his existence, his circumstances, claims and demands, and of the
limits and extent of his sphere of activity. A man who understands
this natural necessity knows also his right to fight his way through
for demands that are in accordance with the needs of the human race.
More than that, because only that freedom that is in harmony with the
genuinely human will be defended with natural necessity by the
species. We can be assured of the final victory over all suppressors
in any struggle for human ends.
With attitudes of this kind, with a devotion to the wonders of nature,
with moral sentiments as described above, the materialists were ready
to receive the man who overcame the great obstacle for a naturalistic
world conception. This man appeared to them in Charles Darwin.
His work, through which the teleological idea was placed on the
solid ground of natural science, was published in 1859 with the title,
The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
For an understanding of the impulses that are at work in the evolution
of philosophical world conception, the examples of the advances in
natural science mentioned (to which many others could be added) are
not significant in themselves. What is important is the fact
that advances of this kind coincided in time with the development of
the Hegelian world picture. The presentation of the course of
evolution of philosophy in the previous chapters has shown that the
modern world picture, since the days of Copernicus, Galileo, etc.,
stood under the influence of the mode of conception of natural
science. This influence, however, could not be as significant as that
of the accomplishment of the natural sciences of the nineteenth
century. There were also important advances of natural science at the
turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We only need to be
reminded of the discovery of oxygen by Lavoisier, and of the findings
in the field of electricity by Volta and many others. In spite of
these discoveries spirits like Fichte, Schelling and Goethe could,
while they fully recognized these advances, nevertheless, arrive at a
world picture that started from the spirit. They could not be so
powerfully impressed by the mode of conception of natural science as
were the materialistic thinkers in the middle of the nineteenth
century. It was still possible to recognize on the one side of
the world picture the conceptions of natural science, and on the
other side of it, certain conceptions that contained more
than "mere thought." Such a conception was, for
instance, that of the "force of life," or of the
"teleological structure" of an organism. Conceptions of this
kind made it possible to say that there is something at work in the
world that does not come under the ordinary natural law, something
that is more spiritual. In this fashion one obtained a conception of
the spirit that had, as it were, "a factual content." Hegel
had then proceeded to deprive the spirit of all factual elements. He
had diluted it into "mere thought." For those for whom
"mere thoughts" could be nothing but pictures of
factual elements, this step appeared as the philosophical proof of the
unreality of the spirit. These thinkers felt that they had to find
something that possessed a real content for them to take the place of
Hegel's "mere thought things." For this reason, they sought
the origin of the "spiritual phenomena" in material
processes that could be sensually observed "as facts." The
world conception was pressed toward the thought of the material origin
of the spirit through the transformation of the spirit that Hegel had
brought about.
If one understands that there are deeper forces at work in the
historical course of human evolution than those appearing on the
surface, one will recognize the significance for the development of
world conception that lies in the characteristic attitude that the
materialism of the nineteenth century takes toward the formation of
the Hegelian philosophy. Goethe's thoughts contained the seeds for a
continuation of a philosophy that was taken up by Hegel, but
insufficiently. If Goethe attempted to obtain a conception with his
"archetypal plant" that allowed him to experience this
thought inwardly so that he could intellectually derive from it such a
specific plant formation as would be capable of life, he showed
thereby that he was striving to bring thought to life within his soul.
Goethe had reached the point where thought was about to begin a
lifelike evolution, while Hegel did not go beyond thought as such. In
communion with a thought that had come to life within the soul, as
Goethe attempted, one would have had a spiritual experience that could
have recognized the spirit also in matter. In "mere thought"
one had no such experience. Thus, the evolution of world conception
was put to a hard test. According to the deeper historical impulses,
the modern time tended to experience not thought alone, but to
find a conception for the self-conscious ego through which one could
be aware that this ego is firmly rooted in the structure of the world.
In conceiving this ego as a product of material processes, one had
pursued this tendency by simply following the trend in a form easily
understandable at that time. Even the denial of the spiritual
entity of the self-conscious ego by the materialism of the nineteenth
century still contains the impulse of the search for this ego. For
this reason, the impulse with which natural science affected
philosophy in this age was quite different from the influences it had
had on previous materialistic currents. These earlier currents had not
as yet been so hard pressed by something comparable to Hegel's thought
philosophy to seek for a safe ground in the natural sciences. This
pressure, to be sure, does not affect the leading personalities to a
point where they are clearly aware of it, but as an impulse of the
time, it exerts its effect in the subconscious currents of the soul.
∴
II. Darwinism and World Conception
If the thought of the teleological structure of nature was to be
reformed in the sense of a naturalistic world conception, the
purpose-adjusted formation of the organic world had to be explained in
the same fashion as the physicist or the chemist explains the lifeless
processes. When a magnet attracts iron shavings, no physicist will
assume that there is a force at work in the magnet that aims toward
the purpose of the attraction. When hydrogen and oxygen form water as
a compound, the chemist does not interpret this process as if
something in both substances had been actively striving toward the
purpose of forming water. An explanation of living beings that is
guided by a similar naturalistic mode of thinking must conclude that
organisms become purpose-adjusted without anything in nature planning
this purpose-conformity. This conformity comes to pass without being
anywhere intended. Such an explanation was given by Charles Darwin. He
took the point of view that there is nothing in nature that plans the
design. Nature is never in a position to consider whether its products
are adequate to a purpose or not. It produces without choosing between
what is adequate to a purpose and what is not.
What is the meaning of this distinction anyhow? When is a thing in
conformity with a purpose? Is it not when it is so arranged that the
external circumstances correspond to its needs, to its life
conditions? A thing is inadequate to purpose when this is not the
case. What will happen if, while a complete absence of plan in nature
characterizes the situation, formations of all degrees of
purpose-conformity, from the most to the least adequately adapted
form, come into existence? Every being will attempt to adapt its
existence to the given circumstances. A being well-adjusted to life
will do so without much difficulty; one less adequately endowed will
succeed only to a lesser degree. The fact must be added to this that
nature is not a parsimonious housekeeper in regard to the production
of living beings. The number of germs is prodigious. The abundant
production of germs is backed up by inadequate means for the support
of life. The effect of this will be that those beings that are better
adapted to the acquisition of food will more easily succeed in their
development. A well-adapted organic being will prevail in the strife
for existence over a less adequately adjusted one. The latter must
perish in this competition. The fit, that is to say, the one adapted
to the purpose of life, survives; the unfit, that is, the one not so
adapted, does not. This is the "struggle for life." Thus,
the forms adequate to the purpose of life are preserved even if nature
itself produces, without choice, the inadequate side by side with the
adequate. Through a law, then, that is as objective and as devoid of
any wise purpose as any mathematical or mechanical law of nature can
be, the course of nature's evolution receives a tendency toward a
purpose-conformity that is not originally inherent in it.
Darwin was led to this thought through the work of the social
economist Malthus entitled Essay on the Principle of Population
(1798). In this essay the view is advanced that there is a
perpetual competition going on in human society because the population
grows at a much faster pace than the supply of food. This law that
Malthus had stated as valid for the history of mankind, was
generalized by Darwin into a comprehensive law of the whole world of
life.
Darwin now set out to show how this struggle for existence becomes the
creator of the various forms of living beings and that thereby the old
principle of Linnaeus was overthrown, that "we have to count as
many species in the animals and vegetable kingdoms as had been
principally created." The doubt against this principle was
clearly formed in Darwin's mind when, in the years 1831 – 36, he was
on a journey to South America and Australia. He tells how this doubt
took shape in him.
When I visited the Galapagos Archipelago during my journey on
H.M.S. Beagle, at a distance of about 500 miles from the shores
of South America, I saw myself surrounded by strange species of birds,
reptiles and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Almost all
of them bore the unmistakable stamp of the American continent. In the
song of the mocking-thrush, in the sharp scream of the vultures, in
the large candlestick-like opuntias I noticed distinctly the vicinity
of America; and yet these islands were separated from the continent by
many miles and were very different in their geological constitution
and their climate. Even more surprising was the fact that most of the
inhabitants of each of the individual islands of the small archipelago
were specifically different although closely related. I often asked
myself how these strange animals and men had come into being. The
simplest way seemed to be that the inhabitants of the various islands
were descended from one another and had undergone modifications in the
course of their descent, and that all inhabitants of the archipelago
were descendants of those of the nearest continent, namely, America,
where the colonization naturally would have its origin. But it was for
a long time an unexplainable problem to me how the necessary
modification could have been obtained.
The answer to this question is contained in the naturalistic
conception of the evolution of the living organism. As the physicist
subjects a substance to different conditions in order to study its
properties, so Darwin, after his return, observed the phenomena that
resulted in living beings under different circumstances. He made
experiments in breeding pigeons, chickens, dogs, rabbits and plants.
Through these experiments it was shown that the living forms
continuously change in the course of their propagation. Under certain
circumstances some living organisms change so much after a few
generations that in comparing the newly bred forms with their
ancestors, one could speak of two completely different species, each
of which follows its own design of organization. Such a variability of
forms is used by the breeder in order to develop organisms through
cultivation that answer certain demands. A breeder can produce a
species of sheep with an especially fine wool if he allows only those
specimens of his flock to be propagated that have the finest wool. The
quality of the wool is then improved in the course of the generations.
After some time, a species of sheep is obtained which, in the
formation of its wool, has progressed far beyond its ancestors. The
same is true with other qualities of living organisms. Two conclusions
can be drawn from this fact. The first is that nature has the tendency
to change living beings; the second, that a quality that has begun to
change in a certain direction increases in that direction, if in the
process of propagation of organic beings those specimens that do not
have this quality are excluded. The organic forms then assume other
qualities in the course of time, and continue in the direction of
their change once this process has begun. They change and transmit the
changed qualities to their descendants.
The natural conclusion from this observation is that change and
hereditary transmission are two driving principles in the evolution of
organic beings. If it is to be assumed that in the natural course of
events in the world, formations that are adapted to life come into
being side by side with those not adapted as well as others, it must
also be supposed that the struggle for life takes place in the most
diversified forms. This struggle effects, without a plan, what the
breeder does with the aid of a preconceived plan. As the breeder
excludes the specimen from the process of propagation that would
introduce undesired qualities into the development, so the struggle
for life eliminates the unfit. Only the fit survive in evolution. The
tendency for perpetual perfection enters thus into the evolutionary
process like a mechanical law. After Darwin had seen this and after he
had thereby laid a firm foundation to a naturalistic world conception,
he could write the enthusiastic words at the end of his work, The
Origin of Species, which introduced a new epoch of thought:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death the most exalted
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of
the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view
of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by
the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet
has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been and are being evolved.
At the same time one can see from this sentence that Darwin does not
derive his conception from any anti-religious sentiment but merely
from the conclusions that for him follow from distinctly significant
facts. It was not hostility against the needs of religious experience
that persuaded him to a rational view of nature, for he tells us
distinctly in his book how this newly acquired world of ideas appeals
to his heart.
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the
view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it
accords better with what we know of the laws impressed in matter by
the Creator that the production and extinction of the past and present
inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes,
like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I
view all beings not as special creations, but as the linear
descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed
of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become
ennobled. . . . Hence, we may look with some confidence to a secure
future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and
for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will
tend to progress toward perfection.
Darwin showed in great detail how the organisms grow and spread, how,
in the course of their development, they transmit their properties
once they are acquired, how new organs are produced and change through
use or through lack of use, how in this way the organic beings are
adjusted to their conditions of existence and how finally through the
struggle for life a natural selection takes place by means of which an
ever increasing variety of more and more perfect forms come into
being.
In this way an explanation of teleologically adjusted beings seems to
be found that requires no other method for organic nature than that
which is used in inorganic nature. As long as it was impossible to
offer an explanation of this kind it had to be admitted, if one wanted
to be consistent, that everywhere in nature where a purpose-adjusted
being came into existence, the intervention of an extraneous power had
to be assumed. In every such case one had to admit a miracle.
Those who for decades before the appearance of Darwin's work had
endeavored to find a naturalistic world and life conception now felt
most vividly that a new direction of thought had been given. This
feeling is expressed by David Friedrich Strauss in his book,
The Old and the New Faith (1872).
One sees this is the way it must go; this is where the new banner is
waving sprightly in the wind. It is a real joy in the sense of the
loftiest joys of intellectual advance. We philosophers and critical
theologians talked and talked to discredit the idea of a miracle. Our
decree had no effect whatever, because we did not know how to
demonstrate this idea as a superfluous one, because we did not know
how to avoid it for we did not know of any energy of nature with which
we could replace it where it seemed to be most necessary to be
assumed. Darwin has demonstrated this energy of nature, this procedure
of nature; he has opened the door through which a fortunate posterity
will throw out the miracle once and for all times. Everyone who knows
how much depends on miracles will praise him for that deed as one of
the greatest benefactors of the human race.
Through Darwin's idea of fitness it is possible to think the concept
of evolution really in the form of a natural law. The old doctrine of
involution, which assumes that everything that comes into existence
has been there in a hidden form before (compare pages
in Part 1 Chapter IX),
had been deprived of its last hope with
this step. In the process of evolution as conceived by Darwin, the
more perfect form is in no way contained in the less perfect one, for
the perfection of a higher being comes into existence through
processes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ancestors of
this being. Let us assume that a certain evolutionary series has
arrived at the marsupials. The form of the marsupials contains nothing
at all of a higher, more perfect form. It contains only the ability to
change at random in the course of its propagation. Certain
circumstances then come to pass that are independent of any
"inner" latent tendency of development of the form of the
marsupials but that are such that of all possible variations
(mutations) the pro-simians survive. The forms of the marsupials
contained that of the pro-simians no more than the direction of a
rolling billiard ball contains the path it will take after it has been
deflected from its original course by a second billiard ball.
Those accustomed to an idealistic mode of thinking had no easy time in
comprehending this reformed conception of evolution. Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, a man of extraordinary acumen and subtlety of
spirit who had come from Hegel's school, writes as late as 1874 in an
essay:
Evolution is an unfolding from a germ that proceeds from attempt to
attempt until the picture that the germ contained latently as a
possibility has become real. But once this is accomplished it stops
and holds on to the form that is found, keeping it as a permanent one.
Every concept as such would lose its firm outline if we were to
consider the types that have existed on our planet for so many
thousands of years as forever variable and above all if we were so to
consider our own human type. We should then be unable any longer to
trust our thoughts, the laws conceived by our thinking, our feelings,
the pictures of our imagination, all of which are nothing but the
clarifying imitations of forms of nature as it is known to us.
Everything becomes questionable.
In another passage in the same essay he says:
I still find it a little hard, for instance, to believe that we should
owe our eye to the process of seeing, our ear to that of hearing. The
extraordinary weight that is given to the process of natural selection
is something I am not quite satisfied with.
If Vischer had been asked whether or not he imagined that hydrogen and
oxygen contained within themselves in a latent form a picture of water
to make it possible for the latter to develop from the former, he
would undoubtedly have answered, "No, neither in oxygen nor in
hydrogen is there anything contained of the water that is formed; the
conditions for the formation of this substance are given only when
hydrogen and oxygen are combined under certain circumstances." Is
the situation then necessarily different when, through the two factors
of the marsupials and the external conditions, the pro-simians came
into being? Why should the pro-simians be contained as a possibility,
as a scheme, in the marsupials in order to be capable of being
developed from them? What comes into being through evolution is
generated as a new formation without having been in existence in any
previous form.
Thoughtful naturalists felt the weight of the new teleological
doctrine no less than Strauss. Hermann Helmholtz belongs,
without doubt, among those who, in the eighteen-fifties and sixties,
could be considered as representatives of such thoughtful naturalists.
He stresses the fact that the wonderful purpose-conformity in the
structure of living organisms, which becomes increasingly apparent as
science progresses, challenges the comparison of all life processes to
human actions. For human actions are the only series of phenomena that
have a character that is similar to the organic ones. The fitness of
the arrangements in the world of organisms does, according to our
judgment, in most cases indeed far surpass what human intelligence is
capable of creating. It therefore cannot surprise us that it has
occurred to people to seek the origin of the structure and function of
the world of living beings in an intelligence far superior to that of
man. Helmholtz says:
Before Darwin one could admit two kinds of explanations for the fact
of organic purpose adjustment, both of which depended on an
interference of a free intelligence in the course of natural
phenomena. One either considered, according to the vitalistic theory,
the life-processes as perpetually guided by a life-soul; or one saw in
each species an act of a supernatural intelligence through which it
was supposed to have been generated. . . . Darwin's theory contains an
essentially new creative thought. It shows that a purpose-adjustment
of the form in the organisms can come to pass also without
interference of an intelligence through the random effect of a natural
law. This is the law of the transmission of individual peculiarities
from the parents to the descendants, a law that was long known and
recognized but was merely in need of a definite demarcation.
Helmholtz now is of the opinion that such a demarcation is given by
the principle of natural selection in the struggle for existence. A
scientist who, like Helmholtz, belongs to the most cautious
naturalists of that time, J. Henle, said in a lecture, "If
the experiences of artificial breeding were to be applied to the
hypothesis of Oken and Lamarck, it would have to be shown how nature
proceeds in order to supply the mechanism through which the
experimental breeder obtains his result. This is the task Darwin set
for himself and that he pursued with admirable industry and
acumen."
The materialists were the ones who felt the greatest enthusiasm of all
from Darwin's accomplishment. They had long been convinced that sooner
or later a man like him would have to come along who would throw a
philosophical light on the vast field of accumulated facts that was so
much in need of a leading thought. In their opinion, the world
conception for which they had fought could not fail after Darwin's
discovery. Darwin approached his task as a naturalist. At first he
moved within the limits reserved to the natural scientist. That his
thoughts were capable of throwing a light on the fundamental problems
of world conception, on the question of man's relation to nature, was
merely touched upon in his book:
In the future I see open fields for far more important researches.
Psychology will be securely based on the foundation . . ., of the
necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.
Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
For the materialists, this question of the origin of man became, in
the words of Buechner, a matter of most intimate concern. In lectures
he gave in Offenbach during the winter of 1866 – 67, he says:
Must the theory of transformation also be applied to our own race?
Must it be extended to man, to us? Shall we have to submit to an
application of the same principles or rules that have caused the life
of all other organisms for the explanation of our own genesis and
origin? Or are we — the lords of creation — an exception?
Natural science clearly taught that man could not be an exception. On
the basis of exact anatomical investigations the English physiologist,
T. H. Huxley, wrote in his book, Man's Place in Nature (1863):
The critical comparison of all organs and their modification in the
series of the monkeys leads us to one and the same result, that the
anatomical differences that separate man from the gorilla and the
chimpanzee are not as great as the differences that separate the
anthropoid apes from the lower species of monkeys.
Could there still be a doubt in the face of such facts that natural
evolution had also produced man — the same evolution that had caused
the series of organic beings as far as the monkey through growth,
propagation, inheritance, transmutation of forms and the struggle for
life?
During the course of the century this fundamental view penetrated more
and more into the mainstream of natural science. Goethe, to be sure,
had in his own way been convinced of this, and because of this
conviction he had most energetically set out to correct the opinion of
his contemporaries, which held that man lacked an intermaxillary bone
in his upper jaw. All animals were supposed to have this bone; only
man, so one thought, did not have it. In its absence one saw the proof
that man was anatomically different from the animals, that the plan of
his structure was to be thought along different lines. The
naturalistic mode of Goethe's thinking inspired him to undertake
elaborate anatomical studies to abolish this error. When he had
achieved this goal he wrote in a letter to Herder, convinced that he
had made a most important contribution to the knowledge of nature;
"I compared the skulls of men and animals and I found the trail,
and behold, there it is. Now I ask you not to tell, for it must be
treated as a secret. But I want you to enjoy it with me, for it is
like the finishing stone in the structure of man; now it is complete
and nothing is lacking. Just see how it is!"
Under the influence of such conceptions the great question of
philosophy of man's relation to himself and to the external world led
to the task of showing by the method of natural science what actual
process had led to the formation of man in the course of evolution.
Thereby the viewpoint from which one attempted to explain the
phenomena of nature changed. As long as one saw in every organism
including man the realization of a purposeful design of structure, one
had to consider this purpose also in the explanation of organic
beings. One had to consider that in the embryo the later organism is
potentially indicated. When this view was extended to the whole
universe, it meant that an explanation of nature fulfilled its task
best if it showed how the later stages of evolution with man as the
climax are prepared in the earlier stages.
The modern idea of evolution rejected all attempts of science to
recognize the potential later phases in the earlier stages.
Accordingly, the later phase was in no way contained in the earlier
one. Instead, what was gradually developed was the tendency to search
in the later phases for traces of the earlier ones. This principle
represented one of the laws of inheritance. One can actually speak of
a reversal of the tendency of explanation. This reversal became
important for ontogenesis, that is, for the formation of the ideas
concerning the evolution of the individual being from the egg to
maturity. Instead of showing the predisposition of the later organs in
the embryo, one set out to compare the various stages that an organism
goes through in the course of its individual evolution from the egg to
maturity with those of other forms of organisms. Lorenz Oken was
already moving in this direction. In the fourth volume of his
General History of Nature for All Classes of Readers he wrote:
Years ago, through my physiological investigations, I arrived at the
view that the developmental stages of the chicken in the egg have much
similarity with different classes of animals. In the beginning it
shows only the organs of infusoria, thereupon gradually assuming those
of the polyps, jellyfish, shellfish, snails and so forth. Conversely,
then, I also had to consider the classes of animals as evolutionary
stages that proceeded parallel to the developmental stages of the
chicken. This view of nature challenged me to the most minute
observation of those organs that are added as new forms to every
higher class of animal, as well as of the ones that are developed one
after the other during the developmental process. It is, of course,
not easy to establish a complete parallelism with such a difficult
object as a chick egg because its development is so incompletely
known. But to prove that the parallelism actually exists is indeed not
difficult. It is most distinctly shown in the transformation of the
insects, which is nothing more than the development of the young going
on before our eyes outside the egg, and actually in so slow a tempo
that we can observe and investigate every embryonic stage at our
leisure.
Oken compares the stages of transformation of the insects with the
other animals and finds that the caterpillars have a great similarity
with worms, and the cocoons with crustaceous animals. From such
similarities this ingenious thinker draws the conclusion that
"there is, therefore, no doubt that we are here confronted with a
conspicuous similarity that justifies the idea that the evolutionary
history in the egg is nothing but a repetition of the history of the
creation of the animal classes." It came as a natural gift to
this brilliant man to apprehend a great idea for which he did not even
need the evidence of supporting facts. But it also lies in the nature
of such subtle ideas that they have no great effect on those who work
in the field of science. Oken appears like a comet on the firmament of
German philosophy. His thought supplies a flood of light. From a rich
treasure of ideas he suggests leading concepts for the most divergent
facts. His method of formulating factual connections, however, was
somewhat forced. He was too much preoccupied with the point he wanted
to make. This attitude also prevailed in his treatment of the law of
the repetition of certain animal forms in the ontogeny of others
mentioned above.
In contrast to Oken, Karl Ernst von Baer kept to the facts as
firmly as possible when he spoke, in his History of the Evolution
of Animals (1828), of the observations that had led Oken to his
idea:
The embryos of the mammals, birds, lizards and snakes, and probably
also those of the turtles, in their earlier stages are extraordinarily
similar to one another in their whole formation as well as in their
individual parts. These embryos are so similar in fact that they can
often only be distinguished by their sizes. I have in my possession
two little embryos in alcohol that I forgot to label, and now I cannot
possibly determine to what class they belong. They could be lizards,
little birds or young mammals, so similar is the head and trunk
formation of these animals. The extremities are still completely
absent in these embryos and, even if they were there, at the first
stages of their development they would not tell us anything because
the feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and feet of birds, as well
as the hands and feet of men, all develop from the same original form.
Such facts of embryological development excited the greatest interest
of those thinkers who tended toward Darwinism. Darwin had proven the
possibility of change in organic forms and, through transformation,
the species now in existence might possibly be descended from a few
original forms, or perhaps only one. Now it was shown that in their
first phases of development the various living organisms are so
similar to each other that they can scarcely be distinguished from one
another, if at all. These two ideas, the facts of comparative
embryology and the idea of descent, were organically combined in 1864
by Fritz Müller (1821 – 97) in his thoughtful essay, Facts
and Arguments for Darwin. Müller is one of those high-minded
personalities who needs a naturalistic world conception because they
cannot breathe spiritually without it. Also, in regard to his own
action, he would feel satisfaction only when he could feel that his
motivation was as necessary as a force of nature. In 1852 Müller
settled in Brazil. For twelve years he was a teacher at the gymnasium
in Desterro on the island of Santa Catharina, not far from the coast
of Brazil. In 1867 he had to give up this position. The man of the new
world conception had to give way to the reaction that, under the
influence of the Jesuits, took hold of his school. Ernst Haeckel has
described the life and activity of Fritz Müller in the Jenaische
Zeitschrift fur Naturwissenschaft (Vol. XXXI N.F. XXIV 1897).
Darwin called Müller the "prince of observers," and the
small but significant booklet, Facts and Arguments for Darwin,
is the result of a wealth of observations. It deals with a
particular group of organic forms, the crustaceans, which are
radically different from one another in their maturity but are
perfectly similar at the time when they leave the egg. If one
presupposes, in the sense of Darwin's theory of descent, that all
crustacean forms have developed from one original type, and if one
accepts the similarity in the early stages as an inherited element of
the form of their common ancestor, one has thereby combined the ideas
of Darwin with those of Oken pertaining to the repetition of the
history of the creation of the animal species in the evolution of the
individual animal form. This combination was accomplished by Fritz
Müller. He thereby brought the earlier forms of an animal class into a
certain law-determined connection with the later ones, which, through
transformation, have formed out of them. The fact that at an earlier
stage the ancestral form of a being now living has had a particular
form caused its descendants at a later time to have another particular
form. By studying the stages of the development of an organism one
becomes acquainted with its ancestors whose nature has caused the
characteristics of the embryonic forms. Phylogenesis and ontogenesis
are, in Fritz Müller's book, connected as cause and effect. With this
step a new element had entered the Darwinian trend of ideas. This fact
retains its significance even though Müller's investigations of the
crustaceans were modified by the later research of Arnold Lang.
Only four years had passed since the appearance of Darwin's Origin
of the Species when Müller's book was published as its defense and
confirmation. Müller had shown how, with one special class of animals,
one should work in the spirit of the new ideas. Then, in 1866, seven
years after the Origin of the Species, a book appeared that
completely absorbed this new spirit. Using the ideas of Darwinism on a
high level of scientific discussion, it threw a great deal of light on
the problems of the interconnection of all life phenomena. This book
was Ernst Haeckel's General Morphology of Organisms. Every page
reflected his attempt to arrive at a comprehensive synopsis of the
totality of the phenomena of nature with the help of new thoughts.
Inspired by Darwinism, Haeckel was in search of a world conception.
Haeckel did his best in two ways to attempt a new world conception.
First, he continually contributed to the accumulation of facts that
throw light on the connection of the entities and energies of nature.
Second, with unbending consistency he derived from these facts the
ideas that were to satisfy the human need for explanation. He held the
unshakable conviction that from these facts and ideas man can arrive
at a fully satisfactory world explanation. Like Goethe, Haeckel was
convinced in his own way that nature proceeds in its work
"according to eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws, so that
not even the deity could change it." Because this was clear to
him, he worshipped his deity in these eternal and necessary laws of
nature and in the substances in which they worked. As the harmony of
the natural laws, which are with necessity interconnected, satisfies
reason, according to his view, so it also offers to the feeling heart,
or to the soul that is ethically or religiously attuned, whatever it
may thirst for. In the stone that falls to the ground attracted by
gravity there is a manifestation of the same divine order that is
expressed in the blossom of a plant and in the human spirit that
created the drama of Wilhelm Tell.
How erroneous is the belief that the feeling for the wonderful beauty
of nature is destroyed by the penetration of reason into laws of
nature is vividly demonstrated in the work of Ernst Haeckel. A
rational explanation of nature had been declared to be incapable of
satisfying the needs of the soul. Wherever man is disturbed in his
inner life through knowledge of nature, it is not the fault of
knowledge but of man himself. His sentiments are developed in a wrong
direction. As we follow a naturalist like Haeckel without prejudice on
his path as an observer of nature, we feel our hearts beat faster. The
anatomical analysis, the microscopic investigation does not detract
from natural beauty but reveals a great deal more of it. There is no
doubt that there is an antagonism between reason and imagination,
between reflection and intuition, in our time. The brilliant essayist,
Ellen Key, is without doubt right in considering this antagonism as
one of the most important phenomena of our time (compare Ellen Key,
Essays, S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1899). Whoever, like Ernst
Haeckel, digs deep into the treasure mine of facts, boldly emerges
with the thoughts resulting from these facts and climbs to the heights
of human knowledge, can see in the explanation of nature only an act
of reconciliation between the two contesting forces of reflection and
intuition that "alternate in forcing each other into
submission" (Ellen Key). Almost simultaneously with the
publication of the book in which Haeckel presented with unflinching
intellectual honesty his world conception derived from natural
science, that is, with the appearance of his Riddles of the
Universe in 1899, he began a serial publication called Artforms
of Nature. In it he gives pictures of the inexhaustible wealth of
wonderful formations that nature produces and that surpass "by
far all artistic forms created by man" in beauty and in variety.
The same man who introduces our mind to the law-determined order of
nature leads our imagination to the beauty of nature.
The need to bring the great problems of world conception into direct
contact with scientific, specialized research led Haeckel to one of
the facts concerning which Goethe said that they represent the
significant points at which nature yields the fundamental ideas for
its explanation of its own accord, meeting us halfway in our search.
This was realized by Haeckel as he investigated how Oken's thesis,
which Fritz Müller had applied to the crustaceans, could be fruitfully
applied to the whole animal kingdom. In all animals except the
Protista, which are one-celled organisms, a cup- or jug-shaped body,
the gastrula, develops from the zygote with which the organism begins
its ontogenesis. This gastrula is an animal form that is to be found
in the first stages of development of all animals from the sponges to
man. It consists merely of skin, mouth and stomach. There is a low
class of zoophytes that possess only these organs during their lives
and therefore resemble gastrulae. This fact is interpreted by Haeckel
from the point of view of the theory of descent. The gastrula form is
an inherited form that the animal owes to the form of its common
ancestor. There had been, probably millions of years before, a species
of animals, the gastrae, that was built in a way similar to that of
the lower zoophytes still living today — the sponges, polyps, etc.
From this animal species all the various forms living today, from the
polyps, sponges, etc., to man, repeat this original form in the course
of their ontogenies.
In this way an idea of gigantic scope had been obtained. The path
leading from the simple to the complicated, to the perfect form in the
world of organisms, was thereby indicated in its tentative outline. A
simple animal form develops under certain circumstances. One or
several individuals of this form change to another form according to
the conditions of life to which they are exposed. What has come into
existence through this transmutation is again transmitted to
descendants. There are then two different forms, the old one that has
retained the form of the first stage, and a new one. Both of these
forms can develop in different directions and into different degrees
of perfection. After long periods of time an abundant wealth of
species comes into existence through the transmission of the earlier
form and through new formations by means of the process of adaptation
to the conditions of life.
In this manner Haeckel connects today's processes in the world of
organisms with the events of primeval times. If we want to explain
some organ of an animal of the present age, we look back to the
ancestors that had developed this organ under the circumstances in
which they lived. What has come into existence through natural causes
in earlier times has been handed down to our time through the process
of heredity. Through the history of the species the evolution of the
individual receives its explanation. The phylogenesis, therefore,
contains the causes for the ontogenesis. Haeckel expresses this fact
in his fundamental law of biogenetics: "The short ontogenesis or
development of the individual is a rapid and brief repetition, an
abbreviated recapitulation of the long process of phylogenesis, the
development of the species."
Through this law every attempt at explanation through special
purposes, all teleology in the old sense, has been eliminated. One no
longer looks for the purpose of an organ; one looks for the causes
through which it has developed. A given form does not point to a goal
toward which it strives, but toward the origin from which it sprang.
The method of explanation for the organic phenomena has become the
same as that for the inorganic. Water is not considered the aim of
oxygen, nor is man considered the purpose of creation. Scientific
research is directed toward the origin of, and the actual cause for,
living beings. The dualistic mode of conception, which declares that
the organic and the inorganic has to be explained according to two
different principles, gives way to a monistic mode of conception, to a
monism that has only one uniform mode of explanation for the whole of
nature.
Haeckel characteristically points out that through his discovery the
method has been found through which every dualism in the
above-mentioned sense must be overcome.
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. With this
statement our basically monistic conception of organic evolution is
clearly characterized, and on the truth of this principle depends
primarily the truth of the gastraea theory. . . . Every naturalist,
who in the field of biogenesis is not satisfied with a mere admiration
of strange phenomena but strives for an understanding of their
significance, will, in the future, either have to side with or against
this principle. It marks at the same time the complete break that
separates the older teleological and dualistic morphology from the new
mechanical and monistic one. If the physiological functions of
inheritance and adaptation have been proven to be the only causes of
the process of organic formation, then every kind of teleology, of
dualistic and metaphysical mode of conception has thereby been
eliminated from the field of biogenesis; the sharp contrast between
the leading principles is clearly marked. Either a direct and causal
connection between ontogeny and phylogeny exists or it does not. There
is no third possibility! Either epigenesis and descent, or
pre-formation and creation! (Compare also
in Part 1 Chapter IX
of this book.)
After Haeckel had absorbed Darwin's view of the origin of man he
defended forcefully the conclusion that must be drawn from it. It was
impossible for him just to hint hesitatingly, like Darwin, at this
"problem of all problems." Anatomically and physiologically
man is not distinguishable from the higher animals. Therefore, the
same origin must be attributed to him as to them. Haeckel boldly
defended this opinion and the consequences that followed from it for
the conception of the world. There was no doubt for him that in the
future the highest manifestations of man's life, the activities of his
spirit, were to be considered under the same viewpoint as the function
of the simplest living organism. The observation of the lowest
animals, the protozoa, infusoria, rhizopods, taught him that these
organisms had a soul. In their motions, in the indications of the
sensations they show, he recognized manifestations of life that only
had to be increased and perfected in order to develop into man's
complicated actions of reason and will.
Beginning with the gastraea, which lived millions of years ago, what
steps does nature take to arrive at man? This was the comprehensive
question as stated by Haeckel. He supplied the answer in his
Anthropogenesis, which appeared in 1874. In its first part,
this book deals with the history of the individual (ontogenesis), in
the second part, with that of the species (phylogenesis). He showed
point by point how the latter contains the causes of the former. Man's
position in nature had thereby been determined according to the
principles of the theory of descent. To works like Haeckel's
Anthropogenesis, the statement that the great anatomist,
Karl Gegenbaur, made in his Comparative Anatomy (1870)
can be justly applied. He wrote that in exchange for the method of
investigation Darwin gave to science with his theory he received in
return clarity and firmness of purpose. In Haeckel's view, the method
of Darwinism had also supplied science with the theory of the origin
of man.
What actually was accomplished by this step can be appreciated in its
full measure only if one looks at the opposition with which Haeckel's
comprehensive application of the principles of Darwinism was received
by the followers of idealistic world conceptions. It is not even
necessary to quote those who, blindly believing in the traditional
opinion, turned against the "monkey theory," or those who
believed that all finer, higher morality would be endangered if men
were no longer convinced that they had a "purer, higher
origin." Other thinkers, although quite open-minded with regard
to new truths, found it difficult to accept this new truth.
They asked themselves the question, "Do we not deny our own
rational thinking if we no longer look for its origin in a general
world reason over us, but in the animal kingdom below?"
Mentalities of this sort eagerly attacked the points where Haeckel's
view seemed to be without support of the facts. They had powerful
allies in a number of natural scientists who, through a strange bias,
used their factual knowledge to emphasize the points where actual
experience was still insufficient to prove the conclusions drawn by
Haeckel. The typical, and at the same time the most impressive,
representative of this viewpoint of the naturalists was Rudolf
Virchow (1821 – 1902). The opposition of Virchow and Haeckel can
be characterized as follows. Haeckel puts his trust in the inner
consistency of nature, concerning which Goethe is of the opinion that
it is sufficient to make up for man's inconsistency. Haeckel,
therefore, argues that if a principle of nature has been verified for
certain cases, and if we still lack the experience to show its
validity in other cases, we have no reason to hold the progress of our
knowledge back. What experience denies us today, it may yield
tomorrow. Virchow is of the opposite opinion. He wants to yield as
little ground as possible to a comprehensive principle. He seems to
believe that life for such a principle cannot be made hard enough. The
antagonism between these two spirits was brought to a sharp point at
the Fiftieth Congress of German naturalists and doctors in 1877.
Haeckel read a paper there on the topic, The Theory of Evolution of
Today in Its Relation to Science in General.
In 1894 Virchow felt that he had to state his view in the following
way. "Through speculation one has arrived at the monkey theory;
one could just as well have ended up with an elephant theory or a
sheep theory." What Virchow demanded was incontestable proof of
this theory. As soon as something turned up that fitted as a link in
the chain of the argumentation, Virchow attempted to invalidate it
with all means at his disposal.
Such a link in the chain of proof was presented with the bone remnants
that Eugen Dubois had found in Java in 1894. They consisted of a skull
and thigh bone and several teeth. Concerning this find, an interesting
discussion arose at the Congress of Zoologists at Leyden. Of twelve
zoologists, three were of the opinion that these bones came from a
monkey and three thought they came from a human being; six, however,
believed they presented a transitional form between man and monkey.
Dubois shows in a convincing manner in what relation the being whose
bone remnants were under discussion stood to the present monkey, on
the one hand, and to man of today, on the other. The theory of
evolution of natural science must claim such intermediary forms. They
fill the holes that exist between numerous forms of organisms. Every
new intermediary form constitutes a new proof for the kinship of all
living organisms. Virchow objected to the view that these bone
remnants came from such an intermediary form. At first, he declared
that it was the skull of a monkey and the thigh bone of a man. Expert
paleontologists, however, firmly pronounced, according to the careful
report, on the finding, that the remnants belonged together. Virchow
attempted to support his view that the thigh bone could be only that
of a human being with the statement that a certain growth in the bone
proved that it must have had a disease that could only have been
healed through careful human attention. The paleontologist, Marsch,
[e.Ed: perhaps American paleontologist, Othniel Charles Marsh
(1831 – 1899)]
however, maintained that similar bone extuberances occurred in wild
animals as well. A further statement of Virchow's, that the deep
incision between the upper rim of the eye socket and the lower skull
cover of the alleged intermediary form proved it to be the skull of a
monkey was then contradicted by the naturalist Nehring, who claimed
that the same formation was found in a human skull from Santos,
Brazil. Virchow's objections came from the same turn of mind that also
caused him to consider the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy, etc., as
pathological formations, while Haeckel's followers regarded them as
intermediary forms between monkey and man.
Haeckel did not allow any objections to deprive him of his confidence
in his mode of conception. He continued his scientific work without
swerving from the viewpoints at which he had arrived, and through
popular presentations of his conception of nature, he influenced the
public consciousness. In his book, Systematic Phylogenesis, Outline
of a Natural System of Organisms on the Basis of the History of
Species (1894 – 96), he attempted to demonstrate the natural
kinship of organisms in a strictly scientific method. In his
Natural History of Creation, which, from 1868 – 1908, appeared
in eleven editions, he gave a popular explanation of his views. In
1899, in his popular studies on monistic philosophy entitled, The
Riddles of the Universe, he gave a survey of his ideas in natural
philosophy by demonstrating without reserve the many applications of
his basic thoughts. Between all these works he published studies on
the most diverse specialized researches, always paying attention at
the same time to the philosophical principles and the scientific
knowledge of details.
The light that shines out from the monistic world conception is,
according to Haeckel's conviction, to "disperse the heavy clouds
of ignorance and superstition that have heretofore spread an
impenetrable darkness over the most important one of all problems of
human knowledge, that is, the problem concerning man's origin, his
true nature and his position in nature." This is what he said in
a speech given August 26, 1898 at the Fourth International Congress of
Zoologists in Cambridge, On Our Present Knowledge Concerning the
Origin of Man. In what respect his world conception forms a bond
between religion and science, Haeckel has shown in an impressive way
in his book, Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science, Credo
of a Naturalist, which appeared in 1892.
If one compares Haeckel with Hegel, one can see distinctly the
difference in the tendencies of world conception in the two halves of
the nineteenth century. Hegel lives completely in the idea and accepts
only as much as he needs from the world of facts for the illustration
of his idealistic world picture. Haeckel is rooted with every fiber of
his being in the world of facts, and he derives from this world only
those ideas toward which these facts necessarily tend. Hegel always
attempts to show that all beings tend to reach their climax of
evolution in the human spirit; Haeckel continuously endeavors to prove
that the most complicated human activities point back to the simplest
origins of existence. Hegel explains nature from the spirit; Haeckel
derives the spirit from nature. We can, therefore, speak of a reversal
of the thought direction in the course of the century. Within German
intellectual life, Strauss, Feuerbach and others began this process of
reversal. In their materialism the new direction found a provisional
extreme expression, and in Haeckel's thought world it found a strictly
methodical-scientific one. For this is the significant thing in
Haeckel, that all his activity as a research worker is permeated by a
philosophical spirit. He does not at all work toward results that for
some philosophical motivation or other are considered to be the aim of
his world conception or of his philosophical thinking. What is
philosophical about him is his method. For him, science itself has the
character of a world conception. His very way of looking at things
predestines him to be a monist. He looks upon spirit and nature with
equal love. For this reason he could find spirit in the simplest
organism. He goes even further than that. He looks for the traces of
spirit in the inorganic particles of matter:
Every atom possesses an inherent quantity of energy and in this sense
is animate. Without assuming a soul for the atom, the simplest and
most general phenomena of chemistry are unexplainable. Pleasure and
displeasure, desire and aversion, attraction and repulsion must be a
common property of all material atoms. For the motion of the atoms,
which must take place in the formation and dissolution of every
chemical compound can only be explained if we assume that they have
sensation and will. On this assumption the generally accepted chemical
doctrine of affinity is really based.
As he traces spirit down to the atom so he follows the purely material
mechanism of events up to the most lofty accomplishments of the
spirit:
The spirit and soul of man are also nothing else but energies that are
inseparably bound to the material substratum of our bodies. As the
motion of our flesh is bound to the form elements of our muscles, so
our mind's power of thinking is bound to the form elements of our
brains. Our spiritual energies are simply functions of these physical
organs just as every energy is a function of a material body.
One must not confuse this mode of conception with one that dreams
souls in a hazy mystical fashion into the entities of nature and then
assumes that they are more or less similar to that of man. Haeckel is
a strict opponent of a world conception that projects qualities and
activities of man into the external world. He has repeatedly expressed
his condemnation of the humanization of nature, of anthropomorphism,
with a clarity that cannot be misunderstood. If he attributes
animation to inorganic matter, or to the simplest organisms, he means
by that nothing more than the sum of energy manifestations that we
observe in them. He holds strictly to the facts. Sensation and will
are for him no mystical soul energies but are nothing more
than what we observe as attraction and repulsion. He does not mean to
say that attraction and repulsion are really sensation and
will. What he means is that attraction and repulsion are on the lowest
stage what sensation and will are on a higher one. For evolution is
for him not merely an unwrapping of the higher stages of the spiritual
out of the lower forms in which they are already contained in a hidden
fashion, but a real ascent to new formations, an intensification of
attraction and repulsion into sensation and will (compare prior comments
in this Chapter).
This fundamental view of Haeckel agrees in a certain way with that of
Goethe. He states in this connection that he had arrived at the
fulfillment of his view of nature with his insight into the "two
great springs of all nature," namely, polarity and
intensification (Polarität und Steigerung), polarity
"belonging to matter insofar as we think of it materially,
intensification insofar as we think of it spiritually. The former is
engaged in the everlasting process of attraction and repulsion, the
latter in a continual intensification. As matter can never be and act
without spirit, however, nor spirit without matter, so matter can also
be intensified and the spirit will never be without attraction and
repulsion."
A thinker who believes in such a world conception is satisfied to
explain by other such things and processes, the things and processes
that are actually in the world. The idealistic world conceptions need,
for the derivation of a thing or process, entities that cannot be
found within the realm of the factual. Haeckel derives the form of the
gastrula that occurs in the course of animal evolution from an
organism that he assumes really existed at some time. An idealist
would look for ideal forces under the influence of which the
developing germ becomes the gastrula. Haeckel's monism draws
everything he needs for the explanation of the real world from the
same real world. He looks around in the world of the real in order to
recognize in which way the things and processes explain one another.
His theories do not have the purpose for him, as do those of the
idealist, to find a higher element in addition to the factual
elements, but they merely serve to make the connection of the facts
understandable. Fichte, the idealist, asked the question of man's
destination. He meant by that something that cannot be completely
presented in the form of the real, the factual; something that reason
has to produce as an addition to the factually given existence, an
element that is to make the real existence of man translucent by
showing it in a higher light. Haeckel, the monistic contemplator of
the world, asks for the origin of man, and he means by that the
factual origin, the lower organism out of which man had developed
through actual processes.
It is characteristic that Haeckel argues for the animation of the
lower organisms. An idealist would have resorted to rational
conclusions. He would present necessities of thought. Haeckel refers
to what he has seen.
Every naturalist, who, like me, has observed for many years the life
activities of the one-celled protozoa, is positively convinced that
they, too, possess a soul. This cellular soul consists also of a sum
of sensations, perceptions and will activities; sensation, thinking
and will of our human souls differ from those of the cellular soul
only in degree.
The idealist attributes spirit to matter because he cannot accept the
thought that spirit can develop from mere matter. He believes that one
would have to deny the spirit if one does not assume it to exist
before its appearance in forms of existence without organs, without
brains. For the monist, such thoughts are not possible. He does not
speak of an existence that is not manifested externally as such. He
does not attribute two kinds of properties to things: those that are
real and manifested in them and those that in a hidden way are latent
in them only to be revealed at a higher stage of development. For him,
there is what he observes, nothing else, and if the object of
observation continues its evolution and reaches a higher stage in the
course of its development, then these later forms are there
only in the moment when they become visible.
How easily Haeckel's monism can be misunderstood in this direction is
shown by the objections that were made by the brilliant thinker,
Bartholomaeus von Carneri (1821 – 1909), who made lasting
contributions for the construction of an ethics of this world
conception. In his book, Sensations and Consciousness, Doubts
Concerning Monism (1893), he remarks that the principle, "No
spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit," would
justify our extending this question to the plant and even to the next
rock we may stumble against, and to attribute spirit also to them.
Without doubt such a conclusion would lead to a confusion of
distinctions. It should not be overlooked that consciousness arises
only through the cell activity in the cerebrum. "The conviction
that there is no spirit without matter, that is to say, that all
spiritual activity is bound to a material activity, the former
terminating with the latter, is based on experience, while there is no
experience for the statement that there is always spirit connected
with matter." Somebody who would want to attribute animation to
matter that does not show any trace of spirit would be like one who
attributed the function to indicate time not to the mechanism of a
watch but to the metal out of which it is made.
Properly understood, Haeckel's view is not touched by Carneri's
criticism. It is safe from this criticism because Haeckel holds
himself strictly within the bounds of observation. In his Riddles
of the Universe, he says, "I, myself, have never defended the
theory of atom-consciousness. I have, on the contrary, expressly
emphasized that I think the elementary psychic activities of sensation
and will, which are attributed to the atoms, as unconscious."
What Haeckel wants is only that one should not allow a break in the
explanation of natural phenomena. He insists that one should trace
back the complicated mechanism by which spirit appears in the brain,
to the simple process of attraction and repulsion of matter.
Haeckel considers the discovery of the organs of thought by Paul
Flechsig to be one of the most important accomplishments of modern
times. Flechsig had pointed out that in the gray matter of the brain
there are to be found the four seats of the central sense organs, or
four "inner spheres of sensation," the spheres of touch,
smell, sight and hearing. "Between the sense centers lie thought
centers, the ‘real organs of mental life.’ They are the highest organs
of psychic activity that produce thought and consciousness. . . .
These four thought centers, distinguished from the intermediate sense
centers by a peculiar and highly elaborate nerve structure, are the
true organs of thought, the only organs of our consciousness.
Recently, Flechsig has proved that man has some especially complicated
structures in some of these organs that cannot be found in the other
mammals and that explain the superiority of human consciousness."
(Riddles of the Universe, Chapt. X.)
Passages like these show clearly enough that Haeckel does not intend
to assume, like the idealistic philosophers, the spirit as implicitly
contained in the lower stages of material existence in order to be
able to find it again on the higher stages. What he wanted to do was
to follow the simplest phenomena to the most complicated ones in his
observation, in order to show how the activity of matter, which in the
most primitive form is manifested in attraction and repulsion, is
intensified in the higher mental operations.
Haeckel does not look for a general spiritual principle for lack of
adequate general laws explaining the phenomena of nature and mind. So
far as his need is concerned, his general law is indeed perfectly
sufficient. The law that is manifested in the mental activities seems
to him to be of the same kind as the one that is apparent in the
attraction and repulsion of material particles. If he calls atoms
animated, this has not the same meaning that it would have if a
believer in an idealistic world conception did so. The latter would
proceed from the spirit. He would take the conceptions derived from
the contemplation of the spirit down into the simplest functions of
the atoms when he thinks of them as animated. He would explain thereby
the natural phenomena from entities that he had first projected into
them. Haeckel proceeds from the contemplation of the simplest
phenomena of nature and follows them up to the highest spiritual
activities. This means that he explains the spiritual phenomena from
laws that he has observed in the simplest natural phenomena.
Haeckel's world picture can take shape in a mind whose observation
extends exclusively to natural processes and natural entities. A mind
of this kind will want to understand the connection within the
realm of these events and beings. His ideal would be to see what the
processes and beings themselves reveal with respect to their
development and interaction, and to reject rigorously everything that
might be added in order to obtain an explanation of these processes
and activities. For such an ideal one is to approach all nature as one
would, for instance, proceed in explaining the mechanism of a watch.
It is quite unnecessary to know anything about the watchmaker, about
his skill and about his thoughts, if one gains an insight into the
mechanical actions of its parts. In obtaining this insight one has,
within certain limits, done everything that is admissible for the
explanation of the operation of the watch. One ought to be clear about
the fact that the watch itself cannot be explained if another method
of explanation is admitted, as, for instance, if somebody thought of
some special spiritual forces that move the hour and minute hands
according to the course of the sun. Every suggestion of a special life
force, or of a power that works toward a "purpose" within
the organisms, appears to Haeckel as an invented force that is added
to the natural processes. He is unwilling to think about the natural
processes in any other way than by what they themselves disclose to
observation. His thought structure is to be derived directly
from nature.
In observing the evolution of world conception, this thought structure
strikes us, as it were, as the counter-gift from the side of natural
science to the Hegelian world conception, which accepts in its thought
picture nothing from nature but wants everything to originate
from the soul. If Hegel's world conception said that the
self-conscious ego finds itself in the experience of pure thought,
Haeckel's view of nature could reply that the thought experience is a
result of the nature processes, is, indeed, their highest product. If
the Hegelian world conception would not be satisfied with such a
reply, Haeckel's naturalistic view could demand to be shown some inner
thought experience that does not appear as if it were a mirror
reflection of events outside thought life. In answer to this demand, a
philosophy would have to show how thought can come to life in the soul
and can really produce a world that is not merely the intellectual
shadow of the external world. A thought that is merely thought, merely
the product of thinking, cannot be used as an effective objection to
Haeckel's view. In the comparison mentioned above, he would maintain
that the watch contains nothing in itself that allows a conclusion as
to the personality, etc., of the watchmaker. Haeckel's naturalistic
view tends to show that, as long as one is merely confronted with
nature, one cannot make any statement concerning nature except what it
records. In this respect this naturalistic conception is significant
as it appears in the course of the development of world conception. It
proves that philosophy must create a field for itself that lies
in the realm of spontaneous creativity of thought life beyond the
thoughts that are gained from nature.
Philosophy must take the step beyond Hegel that was pointed out in a
previous chapter. It cannot consist of a method that moves in
the same field with natural science. Haeckel himself probably felt not
the slightest need to pay any attention to such a step of philosophy.
His world conception does bring thoughts to life in the soul, but only
insofar as their life has been stimulated by the observation of
natural processes. The world picture that thought can create when it
comes to life in the soul without this stimulus represents the kind of
higher world conception that would adequately complement Haeckel's
picture of nature. One has to go beyond the facts that are directly
contained in the watch if one wants to know, for instance, something
about the form of the watchmaker's face. But, for this reason, one has
no right to demand that Haeckel's naturalistic view itself should not
speak as Haeckel does when he states what positive facts he has
observed concerning natural processes and natural beings.
∴
III. The World as Illusion
Besides the current of world conception that, through the idea of
evolution, wants to bring the conception of the phenomena of nature
and that of the spirit into complete unity, there is another that
expresses their opposition in the strongest possible form. This
current also springs from natural science. Its followers ask,
"What is our basis as we construct a world conception by means of
thinking? We hear, see and touch the physical world through our
senses. We then think about the facts that our senses supply
concerning that world. We form our thoughts accordingly concerning the
world at the testimony of the senses. But are the statements of our
senses really to be trusted?"
Let us consult actual observations. The eye conveys to us the
phenomena of light. We say an object sends us red light when the eye
has the sensation of red. But the eye conveys sensations of light to
us also in other cases. When it is pushed or pressed, or when an
electric current flows through our head, the eye also has sensations
of light. It is, therefore, possible that in cases in which we have
the sensation of a light-sending body, something could go on in that
object that has no semblance to our sensation of light. The eye,
nevertheless, would transmit light to us.
The physiologist, Johannes Mueller (1801 – 58), drew the conclusion
from these facts that what man has as his actual sensation does not
depend on the external processes but on his organization. Our nerves
transmit sensations to us. As we do not have the sensation of the
knife that cuts us but a state of our nerves that appears to us as
pain, so we also do not have a sensation of the external world when
something appears to us as light. What we then really have is a state
of our optic nerve. Whatever may happen outside, the optic nerve
translates this external event into the sensation of light. "The
sensation is not a process that transmits a quality or a state of an
external object to our consciousness but one that transmits a quality,
a state of our nerves caused by an external event, to our
consciousness. This Johannes Mueller called "the law of specific
sense energies." If that is correct, then our observations
contain nothing of the external world but only the sum of our own
inner conditions. What we perceive has nothing to do with the external
world; it is a product of our own organization. We really perceive
only what is in us.
Natural scientists of great renown regarded this thought as an
irrefutable basis of their world conception. Hermann Helmholtz (1821 –
94) considered it as the Kantian thought — that all our knowledge had
reference only to processes within ourselves, not to things in
themselves — translated into the language of natural science (compare
Vol. I of this book). Helmholtz was of the opinion that the world of
our sensations supplies us merely with the signs of the physical
processes in the world outside.
I have been convinced that it is necessary to formulate the relation
between the sensation and its object by declaring the sensation to be
merely the sign of the effect of the object. The nature of the sign
demands only that the same sign be always given to the same object.
Beyond this requirement there is no more similarity necessary between
the sensation and its object than between the spoken word and the
object that we denote with it. We cannot even call our sense
impression pictures, for a picture depicts the same by the same. In a
statue we represent one bodily form through another bodily form; in a
drawing we express the perspective view of an object by the same
perspective in the picture; in a painting we depict color through
color.
Our sensations, therefore, must differ more from the events they
represent than pictures differ from the objects they depict. In our
sensual world picture we have nothing objective but a completely
subjective element, which we ourselves produce under the stimulation
of the effects of an external world that never penetrates into us.
This mode of conception is supported from another side by the
physicist's view of the phenomena of sensation. A sound that we hear
draws our attention to a body in the external world, the parts of
which are in a certain state of motion. A stretched string vibrates
and we hear a tone. The string transmits the vibrations to the air.
They spread and reach our ear; a tone sensation is transmitted to us.
The physicist investigates the laws according to which the physical
particles outside move while we hear these tones. He finds that the
subjective tone sensation is based on the objective motion of the
physical particles. Similar relations are observed by the physicist
with respect to the sensations of light. Light is also based on
motion, only this motion is not transmitted by the vibrating particles
of the air, but by the vibrations of the ether, the thinnest matter
that fills the whole space of the universe. By every light-emitting
body, the ether is put into the state of undulatory vibrations that
spread and meet the retina of our eye and excite the optic nerve,
which then produces the sensation of light within us. What in our
world picture appears as light and color is motion outside in space.
Schleiden expresses this view in the following words:
The light outside ourselves in nature is motion of the ether. A motion
can be slow and fast; it can have this or that direction, but there is
obviously no sense in speaking of light or dark, of green or red
motion. In short, outside ourselves, outside the beings who have the
sensation, there is no such thing as bright and dark, nor are there
any colors.
The physicist expels colors and light from the external world because
he finds only motion in it. The physiologist feels that he is forced
to withdraw them into the soul because he is of the opinion that the
nerve indicates only its own state of irritation no matter what might
have excited it. The view that is given with these presuppositions is
sharply delineated by Hippolyte Taine (1828 – 93) in his book,
Reason. The external perception is, according to his opinion,
nothing but hallucination. A person who, under the influence of
hallucination, perceives a death skull three steps in front of him,
has exactly the same perception as someone who receives the light rays
sent out by a real skull. It is the same inner phantom that exists
within us no matter whether we are confronted with a real skull or
whether we have a hallucination. The only difference between the one
perception and the other is that in one case the hand stretched out
toward the object will grasp empty air, whereas in the other case it
will meet some solid resistance. The sense of touch then supports the
sense of sight. But does this support really represent an irrefutable
testimony? What is correct for one sense is also valid for the other.
The sensations of touch can also turn out to be hallucinations.
The anatomist Henle expresses the same view in his Anthropological
Lectures (1876) in the following way:
Everything through which we believe to be informed about an external
world consists merely of forms of our consciousness for which the
external world supplies merely the exciting cause, the stimulus, in
the language of the physiologists. The external world has no colors,
tones and tastes. What it really contains we learn only indirectly or
not at all. How the external world affects a sense, we merely conclude
from its behavior toward the other senses. We can, for instance, in
the case of a tone, see the vibrations of the tuning fork with our
eyes and feel it with our fingers. The nature of certain stimuli,
which reveal themselves only to the one sense, as, for instance, the
stimuli of the sense of smell, is still inaccessible to us. The number
of the properties of matter depends on the number and on the keenness
of the senses. Whoever lacks a sense loses a group of properties
without a chance of regaining them. A person who would have an extra
sense would have an organ to grasp qualities of which we have no other
inkling than the blind man has of color.
If one glances over the physiological literature from the second half
of the nineteenth century, one sees that this view of the subjective
nature of the world picture of our perceptions has gained increasing
acceptance. Time and again one comes across variations of the thought
that is expressed by J. Rosenthal in his General Physiology of
Muscles and Nerves (1877). "The sensations that we receive
through external impressions are not dependent on the nature of these
impressions but on the nature of our nerve cells. We have no sensation
of what exerts its effect on our body but only of the processes in our
brain."
To what extent our subjective world picture can be said to give us an
indication of the objective external world, is expressed by Helmholtz
in his Physiological Optics:
To ask the question if cinnabar is really red as we see it or if this
is only a sense deception is meaningless. A red-blind person will see
cinnabar as black or in a dark yellow-gray shade; this is also a
correct reaction for the special nature of his eye. He must only know
that his eye happens to be different from that of other people. In
itself one sensation is neither more nor less correct or incorrect
than the other, even if the people who see the red have the great
majority on their side. The red color of cinnabar exists only insofar
as the majority of men have eyes that are of a similar nature. One can
say with exactly the same right that it is a quality of cinnabar to be
black for red-blind people. It is a different question, however, if we
maintain that the wave length of light that is reflected by cinnabar
has a certain length. This statement, which we can make without
reference to the special nature of our eye, is only concerned with the
relations of the substance and the various systems of ether waves.
It is apparent that for such a conception all phenomena of the world
are divided into two completely separated parts, into a world of
motions that is independent of the special nature of our faculty of
perception, and a world of subjective states that are there only
within the perceiving subjects. This view has been expressed sharply
and pointedly by the physiologist, Du Bois-Reymond (1818 – 96), in his
lecture, On the Limits of Natural Science, which he gave at the
forty-fifth assembly of German naturalists and physicians on August
14, 1872 in Leipzig. Natural science is the reduction of processes we
perceive in the world to motions of the smallest physical particles of
a "dissolution of natural processes into mechanics of
atoms," for it is a "psychological fact of experience that,
wherever such a dissolution is successful" our need for
explanation is for the time being satisfied. Moreover, it is a known
fact that our nervous system and our brain are of a material nature.
The processes that take place within them can also be only processes
of motion. When sound or light waves are transmitted to my sense
organs and from there to my brain, they can here also be nothing but
motions. I can only say that in my brain a certain process of motion
goes on, and I have simultaneously the sensation "red." For
if it is meaningless to say of cinnabar that it is red, it is not less
meaningless to say of a motion of the brain particles that it is
bright or dark, green or red. "Mute and dark in itself, that is
to say, without qualities," such is the world according to the
view that has been obtained through the natural scientific conception,
which
. . . knows instead of sound and light only vibrations of a
property-free fundamental matter that now can be weighed and then
again is imponderable. . . . The Mosaic word, "And there was
light," is physiologically incorrect. Light came into being only
when the first red eye spot of the infusoria differentiated for the
first time between light and darkness. Without the substance of the
optic and auditory sense this world, glowing in colors and resounding
around us, would be dark and silent. (Limits of Natural
Science.)
Through the processes in the substance of our optic and auditory
senses a resounding and colorful world is, according to this view,
magically called into existence. The dark and silent world is
physical; the sounding and colorful one is psychic. Whereby does the
latter arise out of the former; how does motion change into sensation?
This is where we meet, according to Du Bois-Reymond, one of the
"limits of natural science." In our brain and in the
external world there are only motions; in our soul, sensations appear.
We shall never be able to understand how the one can arise out of the
other.
At first sight it appears is if, through the knowledge of material
processes in the brain, certain processes and latent abilities can
become understandable. I am thinking of our memory, the stream of the
association of our thought pictures, the effect of exercise, specific
talents and so forth. But a little concentration at this point tells
us that this view is an error. We would only learn something
concerning the inner conditions of our mental life that are
approximately of the same nature as our sense impressions, but we
should learn nothing that would explain how the mental life comes into
existence through these conditions. What possible connections can
there be between certain motions of certain atoms in my brain, on the
one hand, and, on the other, such undeniable and undefinable facts
expressed by the words: I feel pain; I am delighted; I taste something
sweet, smell the scent of roses, hear the sound of an organ, see red,
and also the certainty that immediately follows from all this,
Therefore I am. It is altogether incomprehensible that it should not
be a matter of perfect indifference to a number of atoms of carbon,
hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., what their position is and how they
move, how this has been and how it will be.
There is no bridge for our knowledge that leads from motion to
sensation. This is the credo of Du Bois-Reymond. From motion in the
material world we cannot come into the psychical world of sensations.
We know that sensation arises from matter in motion, but we do not
know how this is possible. Also, in the world of motion we cannot go
beyond motion. For our subjective perceptions we can point at certain
forms of motions because we can infer the course of these motions from
the process of our perceptions, but we have no conception of what it
is that is moving outside in space. We say that matter moves. We
follow its motions as we watch the reactions of our sensations, but as
we do not observe the object in motion but only a subjective sign of
it, we can never know what matter is. Du Bois-Reymond is of the
opinion that we might be able to solve the riddle of sensation if the
riddle of matter were disclosed. If we knew what matter is, we should
probably also know how it produces sensations, but both riddles are
inaccessible to our knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond meant to check those
who wanted to go beyond this limit with the words, "Just let them
try the only alternative that is left, namely, supra-naturalism, but
be sure that science ends where supra-naturalism begins."
The results of modern natural science are two sharply marked
opposites. One of them is the current of monism. It gives the
impression of penetrating directly from natural science to the most
significant problems of world conception. The other declares itself
incapable of proceeding any further with the means of natural science
than to the insight that to a certain subjective state there is a
certain corresponding process of motion. The representatives of the
two currents vehemently oppose each other. Du Bois-Reymond rejected
Haeckel's History of Creation as fiction (compare Du
Bois-Reymond's speech, Darwin versus Galiani). The ancestral
trees that Haeckel constructs on the basis of comparative anatomy,
ontogeny and paleontology appear to Du Bois-Reymond to be of
"approximately the same value as are the ancestral trees of the
Homeric heroes in the eyes of historical criticism." Haeckel, on
the other hand, considers the view of Du Bois-Reymond to be an
unscientific dilettantism that must naturally give support to the
reactionary world conceptions. The jubilation of the spiritualists
over Du Bois-Reymond's "Limitation Speech" was so much the
more resonant and justified, as Du Bois-Reymond had, up to that time,
been considered an important representative of the principle of
scientific materialism.
What captivates many people in the idea of dividing the world
dualistically into external processes of motion and inner, subjective
processes of sensation and perception is the possibility of an
application of mathematics to the external processes. If one assumes
material particles (atoms) with energies to exist, one can calculate
in which way such atoms have to move under the influence of these
energies. What is so attractive in astronomy with its methods of
strict calculations is carried into the smallest elements. The
astronomer determines the motion of the celestial bodies by
calculating the laws of the mechanics of the heavens. In the discovery
of the planet Neptune we experienced a triumph of the mechanism of the
heavens. One can also reduce the motions that take place in the
external world when we hear a tone and see a color to laws that govern
the motions of the celestial bodies. Possibly one will be able in the
future to calculate the motion that goes on in our brain while we form
the judgment, two times two is four. The moment when everything that
can be expressed in mathematical formulas has been calculated will be
the one in which the world has been explained mathematically. Laplace
has given a captivating description of the ideal of such an
explanation of the world in his Essai Philosophique sur les
Probabilités (1814):
A mind that would know for a given moment all forces that activate
nature as well as the mutual position of the entities of which nature
consists would, if its power of comprehension were otherwise
sufficient, comprehend in the same formula the motions of the largest
celestial body and of the lightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain
for such a mind, and the future as well as the past would be within
the scope of its perfect and immediate knowledge. Man's power of
reasoning offers, with the perfection that it has given to astronomy,
a feeble imitation of such a mind.
Du Bois-Reymond says in connection with these words:
As the astronomer predicts the day on which a comet reemerges from the
depth of world space after years in the firmament of heaven, so would
this mind read in its calculation the day when the Greek cross will
shine from the mosque of the Hagia Sophia and when England will burn
its last coal.
There can be no doubt that even the most perfect mathematical
knowledge of a process of motion would not enlighten me with regard to
the question of why this motion appears to me as a red color. When one
ball hits another, we can explain the direction of the second ball but
we cannot in this way determine how a certain motion produces the red
color. All we can say is that when a certain motion is given, a
certain color is also given. While we can explain, apparently,
as opposed to merely describe, what can be determined through
calculation, we cannot go beyond a mere description in anything that
defies calculation.
A significant confession was made by Gustav Robert Kirchhoff
(1824 – 87) when, in 1874, he defined the task of mechanics:
"It is to describe the motions occurring in nature in the most
complete and simple way." Mechanics applies mathematics.
Kirchhoff confesses that with the help of mathematics no more can be
obtained than a complete and simple description of the processes in
nature.
To those personalities who demand of an explanation something
essentially more than just a description according to certain points
of view, the confession of Kirchhoff could serve as a confirmation of
their belief that there are "limits to our knowledge of
nature." Referring to Kirchhoff, Du Bois-Reymond praises the wise
reserve of the master, who characterizes the task of mechanics as that
of describing the motions of the bodies, and places this in contrast
to Ernst Haeckel, who "speaks of atom souls."
* * *
An important attempt to base his world conception on the idea that all
our perceptions are merely the result of our own organization has been
made by Friedrich Albert Lange (1828 – 73) with his History
of Materialism (1864). He had the boldness and consistency of
thought that does not allow itself to be blocked by any obstacle but
follows its fundamental conception to its last conclusion. Lange's
strength lay in a forceful character that was expressed in many
directions. His was a personality able to take up many things, and he
had sufficient ability to carry them out.
One important enterprise was his renewal of Kant's conception that,
with the support of modern natural science, we perceive things not as
they require it, but as our organization demands it.
Lange did not really produce any new conceptions, but he did throw
light into given thought worlds that is rare in its brightness. Our
organization, our brain, in connection with our senses, produces the
world of sensation. I see "blue," or I feel
"hardness," because I am organized in this particular way. I
combine the sensations into objects. By combining the sensations of
"white" and "soft," etc., I produce, for instance,
the conception of wax. When I follow my sensation with my thoughts, I
do not move in the external world. My intellect produces connections
within the world of my sensations according to the laws of my reason.
When I saw that the qualities I perceive in a body presuppose a matter
with laws of motion, I also do not go outside of myself. I find that I
am forced through my organization to add the thoughts of processes of
motion to my sensations.
The same mechanism that produces our sensations also produces our
conception of matter. Matter, equally, is only a product of my
organization, just as color and tone. Even when we speak of things in
themselves, we must be clearly aware of the fact that we cannot go
beyond our own realm. We are so organized that we cannot possibly go
beyond ourselves. Even what lies beyond our realm can be represented
to ourselves only through our conception. We become aware of a
limit to our world. We argue that there must be something beyond the
limit that causes sensations in us. But we can only go as far as to
that limit, even the limit we set ourselves because we can go no
further. "A fish can swim in water in the pond, not in the earth,
but it can hit its head against the bottom and the walls." In the
same way we live within the realm of our conceptions and sensations,
but not in the external things. We hit against a limit, however, where
we cannot go any further, where we must say no more than that beyond
this is the unknown. All conceptions we produce concerning this
unknown are unjustified because we cannot do anything but relate the
conceptions we have obtained within ourselves to the unknown. If we
wanted to do this, we should be no wiser than a fish that would say,
"Here I cannot go any further. Therefore, I want to go into some
other kind of water in which I will try to swim in some other
way." But the fact is that the fish can swim only in water and
nowhere else.
This is supplemented by another thought that belongs with the first
line of reasoning. Lange, as the spirit of an inexorable desire for
consistency, linked them together. In what situation am I when I
contemplate myself? Am I not as much bound to the laws of my own
organization as I am when I consider something else? My eye observes
an object. Without an eye there is no color. I believe that there is
an object in front of me, but on closer inspection I find that it is
my eye, that is to say, I, myself, that produces the object. Now I
turn my observation to my eye itself. Can I do this in any other way
except by means of my organs? Is not the conception that I obtain of
myself also just my idea? The world of the senses is the product of
our organization. Our visible organs are like all other parts of the
phenomenal world, only pictures of an unknown object. Our real
organization remains, therefore, as unknown to us as the objects of
the external world. What we have before us is merely the product of
both. Affected by an unknown world through an unknown ego, we produce
a world of conceptions that is all we have at our disposal.
Lange asks himself the question: Where does a consistent materialism
lead? Let all our mental conclusions and sense perceptions be produced
by the activity of our brain, which is bound to material conditions,
and our sense organs, which are also material. We are then confronted
with the necessity of investigating our organism in order to see how
it functions, but we can do this only by means of our organs. No color
without an eye, but also no eye without an eye.
The consistently materialistic view is immediately reversed into a
consistently idealistic one. There is no break to be assumed in our
nature. We must not attribute some functions of our being to a
physical nature and others to a spiritual one, but we are justified to
assume physical conditions for everything, including the mechanism of
our thinking, and we should not rest until we have found them. But we
are as much justified if we consider as mere pictures of the really
existing world, not only the external world as it appears to us, but
also the organs with which we apprehend this world. The eye with which
we believe we see is itself only a product of our imagination. When we
find that our visual pictures are produced by the structure and
function of the eye, we must never forget that the eye with all its
contrivances — the optic nerve as well as the brain and the structures
we may still discover in it as causes of our thinking — are only ideas
that, to be sure, form a world that is consistent and interconnected
in itself, but merely a world that points beyond itself. . The senses
supply us, as Helmholtz says, with the effects of the things, not with
faithful pictures, and certainly not with the things themselves. Among
these effects are also the senses themselves as well as the brain and
the molecular movements assumed in it. (History of Materialism,
1887.)
Lange, therefore, assumes a world beyond our world that may consist of
the things in themselves or that may not even have anything to do with
this "thing in itself," since even this concept, which we
form at the limit of our own realm, belongs merely to the world of our
ideas.
Lange's world conception, then, leads to the opinion that we have only
a world of ideas. This world, however, forces us to acknowledge
something beyond its own sphere. It also is completely incapable of
disclosing anything about this something. This is the world conception
of absolute ignorance, of agnosticism.
It is Lange's conviction that all scientific endeavor that does not
limit itself to the evidence of the senses and the logical intellect
that combines these elements of evidence must remain fruitless. That
the senses and the intellect together, however, do not supply us with
anything but a result of our own organization, he accepts as evidently
following from his analysis of the origin of knowledge. The world is
for him fundamentally a product of the fiction of our senses and of
our intellects. Because of this opinion, he never asks the question of
truth with regard to the ideas. A truth that could enlighten us about
the essence of the world is not recognized by Lange. He believes he
has obtained an open road for the ideas and ideals that are formed by
the human mind and that he has accomplished this through the very fact
that he no longer feels the need of attributing any truth to the
knowledge of the senses and the intellect. Without hesitation he
considered everything that went beyond sensual observation and
rational combination to be mere fiction. No matter what the idealistic
philosophers had thought concerning the nature of facts, for him it
belonged to the realm of poetic fiction.
Through this turn that Lange gave to materialism there arose
necessarily the question: Why should not the higher imaginative
creations be valid if even the senses are creative? What is the
difference between these two kinds of creation? A philosopher who
thinks like this must have a reason for admitting certain conceptions
that is quite different from the reason that influences a thinker who
acknowledges a conception because he thinks it is true. For Lange,
this reason is given by the fact that a conception has value for life.
For him, the question is not whether or not a conception is true, but
whether it is valuable for man. One thing, however, must be clearly
recognized: That I see a rose as red, that I connect the effect with
the cause, is something I have in common with all creatures endowed
with the power of perception and thinking. My senses and my reason
cannot produce any additional values, but if I go beyond the
imaginative product of senses and reason, then I am no longer bound to
the organization of the whole human species. Schiller, Hegel and every
Tom, Dick and Harry sees a flower in the same way. What Schiller
weaves in poetic imagination around the flower, what Hegel thinks
about it, is not imagined by Tom, Dick and Harry in the same way. But
just as Tom, Dick and Harry are mistaken when they think that the
flower is an entity existing externally, so Schiller and Hegel would
be in error if they took their ideas for anything more than poetic
fiction that satisfied their spiritual needs. What is poetically
created through the senses and the intellect belongs to the whole
human race, and no one in this respect can be different from anybody
else. What goes beyond the creation of the senses and of reason is the
concern of the individual. Nevertheless, this imaginative creation of
the individual is also granted a value by Lange for the whole human
race, provided that the individual creator "who produces it is
normal, richly gifted and typical in his mode of thinking, and is,
through his force of spirit, qualified to be a leader."
In this way, Lange believes that he can secure for the ideal world its
value by declaring that also the so-called real world is a product of
poetic creation. Wherever he may look, Lange sees only fiction,
beginning with the lowest stage of sense perception where "the
individual still appears subject to the general characteristics of the
human species, and culminating with the creative power in
poetry."
The function of the senses and of the combining intellect, which
produce what is reality for us, can be called a lower function if one
compares them with the soaring flight of the spirit in the creative
arts. But, in general and in their totality, these functions cannot be
classified as a principally different activity of the mind. As little
as our reality is a reality according to our heart's desire, it is
nevertheless the firm foundation of our whole spiritual existence. The
individual grows out of the soil of the species, and the general and
necessary process of knowledge forms the only secure foundation for
the individual's rise to an esthetic conception of the world.
(History of Materialism.)
What Lange considers to be the error of the idealistic world
conception is not that it goes beyond the world of the senses and the
intellect with its ideas, but that it believes it possesses in these
ideas more than the individual thinker's poetic fantasy. One should
build up for oneself an ideal world, but one should be aware that this
ideal world is no more than poetic imagination. If this idealism
maintains it is more than that, materialism will rise time and again
with the claim: I have the truth; idealism is poetry. Be that so, says
Lange: Idealism is poetry, but materialism is also poetry. In idealism
the individual is the creator, in materialism, the species. If they
both are aware of their natures, everything is in its right place: the
science of the senses and the intellect that provide proofs for the
whole species, as well as the poetry of ideas with all its conceptions
that are produced by the individual and still retain their value for
the race.
One thing is certain: Man is in need of an ideal world created by
himself as a supplement of reality, and the highest and noblest
functions of his spirit are actively combined in such creations. But
is this free activity of the spirit to be allowed repeatedly to assume
the deceptive form of a proof-establishing science? If so, materialism
will emerge again and again to destroy the bolder speculations and try
to satisfy reason's demand for unity with a minimum of elevation above
the real and actually provable. (History of Materialism.)
In Lange's thinking, complete idealism is combined with a complete
surrender of truth itself. The world for him is poetry, but a poetry
that he does not value any less than he would if he could acknowledge
it as reality.
Thus, two currents of a distinctly natural scientific character can be
distinguished as abruptly opposing each other in the development of
modern world conception: The monistic current in which Haeckel's mode
of conception moved, and the dualistic one, the most forceful and
consistent defender of which was Friedrich Albert Lange. Monism
considers the world that man can observe to be a true reality and has
no doubt that a thinking process that depends on observation can also
obtain knowledge of essential significance concerning this reality.
Monism does not imagine that it is possible to exhaust the fundamental
nature of the world with a few boldly thought out formulas. It
proceeds as it follows the facts, and forms new ideas in regard to the
connections of these facts. It is convinced, however, that these ideas
do supply a knowledge of a true reality. The dualistic conception of
Lange divides the world into a known and an unknown part. It treats
the first part in the same fashion as monism, following the lead of
observation and reflective thought, but it believes that nothing at
all can be known concerning the true essential core of the world
through this observation and through this thought. Monism believes in
the truth of the real and sees the human world of ideas best supported
if it is based on the world of observations. In the ideas and ideals
that the monist derives from natural existence, he sees something that
is fully satisfactory to his feeling and to his moral need. He finds
in nature the highest existence, which he does not only want to
penetrate with his thinking for the purpose of knowledge, but to which
he surrenders with all his knowledge and with all his love.
In Lange's dualism nature is considered to be unfit to satisfy the
spirit's highest needs. Lange must assume a special world of higher
poetry for this spirit that leads beyond the results of observation
and its corresponding thought. For monism, true knowledge represents a
supreme spiritual value, which, because of its truth, grants man also
the purest moral and religious pathos. To dualism, knowledge cannot
present such a satisfaction. Dualism must measure the value of life by
other things, not by the truth it might yield. The ideas are not
valuable because they participate in the truth. They are of value
because they serve life in its highest forms. Life is not valued by
means of the ideas, but the ideas are appreciated because of their
fruitfulness for life. It is not for true knowledge that man strives
but for valuable thoughts.
* * *
In recognizing the mode of thinking of natural science Friedrich
Albert Lange agrees with monism insofar as he denies the uses of all
other sources for the knowledge of reality, but he also denies this
mode of thinking any possibility to penetrate into the essential of
things. In order to make sure that he himself moves on solid ground he
curtails the wings of human imagination. What Lange is doing in such
an incisive fashion corresponds to an inclination of thought that is
deeply ingrained in the development of modern world conception. This
is shown with perfect clarity also in another sphere of thinking of
the nineteenth century. This thinking developed, through various
stages, viewpoints from which Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903)
started as he laid the foundations for a dualism in England. Spencer's
dualism appeared at approximately the same time as Lange's in Germany,
which strove for natural scientific knowledge of the world on the one
hand and, on the other, confessed to agnosticism so far as the essence
of things is concerned. When Darwin published his work, The Origin
of Species, he could praise the natural scientific mode of thought
of Spencer:
Mr. Herbert Spencer, in an Essay (1852), has contrasted the theories
of the Creation and the Development of organic beings with remarkable
skill and force. He argues from the analogy of domestic production,
from the changes which the embryos of many species undergo, from the
difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, and from the
principle of general gradation that species have been modified; and he
attributes the modification to the change of circumstances. The author
(1855) has also treated Psychology on the principle of the necessary
requirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. (The
Origin of Species, Historical Sketch.)
Also, other thinkers who followed the method of natural science felt
attracted to Spencer because he tried to explain all reality from the
inorganic to the psychological in the manner expressed in Darwin's
words above. But Spencer also sides with the agnostics, so that Lange
is justified when he says, "Herbert Spencer, whose philosophy is
closely related to ours, believes in a materialism of the phenomenal
world, the relative justification of which, within the realm of
natural science, finds its limit in a thought of an unknowable
absolute."
It is quite likely that Spencer arrived at his viewpoint from
assumptions similar to those of Lange. He had been preceded in England
by thinkers who were guided by a twofold interest. They wanted to
determine what it is that man really possesses with his knowledge, but
they also were resolved not to shatter by doubt or reason the
essential substance of the world. They were all more or less dominated
by the sentiment that Kant described when he said, "I had to
suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief." (Compare the
first volume of this book.)
The beginning of the development of the world conception of the
nineteenth century in England is marked by the figure of Thomas
Reid (1710 – 96). The fundamental conviction of this man can be
expressed in Goethe's words as he describes his own activity as a
scientist as non-speculative: "In the last analysis it seems to
me that my method consists merely m the practical and self-rectifying
operations of common sense that dares to practice its function in a
higher sphere." (Compare Goethe's Werke, Vol. 38, p. 595 in
Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur.) This common sense
does not doubt in any way that it is confronted with real essential
things and processes as it contemplates the world. Reid believes that
a world conception is viable only if it upholds this basic view of a
healthy common sense. Even if one admitted the possibility that our
observation could be deceptive and that the true nature of things
could be different from the picture that is supplied to us by our
senses and our intellect, it would not be necessary to pay any
attention to such a possibility. We find our way through life only if
we believe in our observation; nothing beyond that is our concern.
In taking this point of view Reid is convinced that he can arrive at
really satisfactory truths. He makes no attempt to obtain a conception
of things through complicated thought operations but wants to reach
his aim by going back to the basic principles that the soul
instinctively assumes. Instinctively, unconsciously, the soul
possesses what is correct, before the attempt is made to illumine the
mind's own nature with the torch of consciousness. It knows
instinctively what to think in regard to the qualities and processes
of the physical world, and it is endowed instinctively with the
direction of moral behavior, of a judgment concerning good and evil.
Through his reference to the truths innate in "common
sense," Reid directs the attention of thought toward an
observation of the soul. This tendency toward a psychological
observation becomes a lasting and characteristic trait in the
development of the English world conception.
Outstanding personalities within this development are William
Hamilton (1788 – 1856), Henry Mansel (1820 – 71),
William Whewell (1794 – 1866), John Herschel (1792 –
1871), James Mill (1773 – 1836), John Stuart Mill (1806
– 73), Alexander Bain (1818 – 1903) and Herbert Spencer
(1820 – 1903). They all place psychology in the center of their
world conception.
William Hamilton also recognizes as truth what the soul from
the beginning feels inclined to accept as true. With respect to
fundamental truths proofs and comprehension ceases. All one can do
is observe their emergence at the horizon of our consciousness. In
this sense they are incomprehensible. But one of the fundamental
manifestations of our consciousness is also that everything in this
world depends on something that is unknown to us. We find in this
world in which we live only dependent things, but not absolutely
independent ones. Such independent things must exist, however. When
a dependent thing is found, an independent thing is assumed. With
our thinking we do not enter the independent entity. Human knowledge
is meant for the dependent and it becomes involved in contradictions
if its thoughts, which are well-suited to the dependent, are applied
to the independent. Knowledge, therefore, must withdraw as we approach
the entrance toward the independent. Religious belief is here in its
place. It is only through his admission that he cannot know anything
of the essential core of the world that man can be a moral being. He
can accept a God who causes a moral order in the world. As soon as it
has been understood that all logic has exclusively to do with the
dependent, not the independent, no logic can destroy this belief in
an infinite God.
Henry Mansel was a pupil and follower of Hamilton, but he
expressed Hamilton's view in still more extreme forms. It is not
going too far to say that Mansel was an advocate of belief who no
longer judged impartially between religion and knowledge, but who
defended religious dogma with partiality. He was of the opinion that
the revealed truths of religion involve our knowledge necessarily in
contradictions. This is not supposed to be the fault of the revealed
truths but has its cause in the limitation of the human mind, which
can never penetrate into regions from which the statements of
revelation arise.
William Whewell believed that he could best obtain a conception
concerning the significance, origin and value of human knowledge by
investigating the method through which leading men of science arrived
at their insights. In his History of the Inductive Sciences
(1840), he set out to analyze the psychology of scientific investigation.
Thus, by studying outstanding scientific discoveries, he hoped to find
out how much of these accomplishments was due to the external world
and how much to man himself. Whewell finds that the human mind always
supplements its scientific observations. Kepler, for example, had the
idea of an ellipse before he found that the planets move in ellipses.
Thus, the sciences do not come about through a mere reception from
without but through the active participation of the human mind that
impresses its laws on the given elements. These sciences do not extend
as far as the last entities of things. They are concerned with the
particulars of the world. Just as everything, for instance, is assumed
to have a cause, such a cause must also be presupposed for the whole
world. Since knowledge fails us with respect to that cause, the dogma
of religion must step in as a supplement. Herschel, like Whewell, also
tried to gain an insight into the genesis of knowledge in the human
mind through the observation of many examples. His Preliminary
Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy appeared in 1831.
John Stuart Mill belongs with those thinkers who are deeply
imbued with the conviction that one cannot be cautious enough in
determining what is certain and uncertain in human knowledge. The
fact that he was introduced to the most diversified branches of
knowledge in his boyhood, most likely gave his mind its characteristic
turn. As a child of three he received instructions in the Greek
language, and soon afterwards was taught arithmetic. He was exposed
to the other fields of instruction at a correspondingly early age.
Of even greater importance was the method of instruction used by his
father, James Mill, who was himself an important thinker. Through
him vigorous logic became the second nature of John Stuart. From his
autobiography we learn: "Anything which could be found out by
thinking I was never told until I had exhausted my efforts to find
it out for myself." The things that occupy the thinking of such
a person must become his destiny in the proper sense of the word.
"I have never been a child, I have never played cricket. It is,
after all, better to let nature take its own course," says John
Stuart Mill as one whose destiny had so uniquely been to live almost
exclusively in thinking. Because of his development, he had to
experience to the fullest the problems concerning the significance
of knowledge. How can knowledge, which for him was life, lead also
to the source of the phenomena of the world? The direction in which
Mill's thought developed in order to obtain clarity concerning these
problems was probably determined early by his father. James Mill had
proceeded by starting from psychological experience. He had observed
the process by which idea is linked to idea in man's mind. Through
connecting one concrete idea to another we obtain our knowledge of
the world. We must then ask ourselves: What is the relation between
the order in which the ideas are linked and the order of the things
in the world? Through such a mode of conception our thinking begins
to distrust its own power because man can associate ideas in a manner
that is entirely different from the connection of the things in the
external world. This mistrust is the basis of John Stuart Mill's
logic, which appeared in 1843 as his chief work under the title,
System of Logic.
In matters of world conception a more pronounced contrast is scarcely
thinkable than that between Mill's Logic and Hegel's Science
of Logic, which appeared twenty-seven years earlier. In Hegel we
find the highest confidence in thinking, the full assurance that we
cannot be deceived by what we experience within ourselves. Hegel
experiences himself as a part, a member of the world, and what he
experiences within himself must also belong to the world. Since he has
the most direct knowledge of himself, he believes in the content of
this knowledge and judges the rest of the world accordingly. He argues
as follows: When I perceive an external thing, it is possible that the
thing shows only its surface to me and that its essence remains
concealed. This is not possible in my own case. I understand my own
being. I can then compare the things outside with my own being. If
they reveal some element of my own essence on their surface, I am
justified in attributing to them something of my own nature. It is for
this reason that Hegel expects confidently to find outside in nature
the very spirit and the thought connections that he finds within
himself.
Mill, however, experiences himself not as a part of the world but as a
spectator. The things outside are an unknown element to him and the
thoughts that man forms concerning them are met by Mill with distrust.
One observes men and learns from his observations that all men die.
One forms the judgment that all men are mortal. The Duke of Wellington
is a man; therefore, the Duke of Wellington is mortal. This is the
conclusion the observer comes to. What gives him the right to do so?
This is the question John Stuart Mill asks. If a single human being
would prove to be immortal, the whole judgment would be upset. Are we
justified in supposing that, because all men up to this time have
died, they will continue to do so in the future? All knowledge is
uncertain because we draw conclusions from observations we have made
and transfer them to things we cannot know anything about, since we
have not observed them directly. What would somebody who thinks like
Hegel have to say about such a conception? It is not difficult to
imagine the answer. We know from definite concepts that in every
circle all diameters are equal. If we find a circle in the real world,
we maintain that its diameters, too, are equal. If we observe it a
quarter of an hour later and find that its diameters are unequal, we
do not decide that under certain circumstances the diameter of a
circle can also be unequal. But we say that what was formerly a circle
has for some reason been elongated into an ellipse.
If we think like Hegel, this is the attitude we take toward the
judgment, all men are mortal. It is not through observation but
through an inner thought experience that we form the concept of man.
For the concept of man, mortality is as essential as the equality of
the diameters is for the concept of the circle. If we find a being in
the real world that has all the other characteristics of man, we
conclude that this being must also have that of mortality, in the same
way that all other properties of the circle allow us to conclude that
it has also that of the equality of diameters. If Hegel came across a
being that did not die, he could only say, "That is not a
man." He could not say, "A man can also be immortal."
Hegel makes the assumption that the concepts in us are not arbitrarily
formed but have their root in the essence of the world, as we
ourselves belong to this essence. Once the concept of man has formed
within us, it is clear that it has its origin in the essence of
things, and we are fully justified in applying it to this essence. Why
has this concept of mortal man formed within us? Surely only because
it has its ground in the nature of things. A person who believes that
man stands entirely outside of the order of things and forms his
judgments as an outsider can argue that we have until now seen men
die, and therefore we form the spectator concept: mortal men. The
thinker who is aware that he himself belongs to the order of things
and that it is they that are manifested within his thoughts, forms the
judgment that up to this time all men have died; to die, then, is
something that belongs to their nature, and if somebody does not die,
he is not a man but something else. Hegel's logic has become a logic
of things: For Hegel, the manifestation of logic is an effect of the
essence of the world; it is not something that the human mind has
added from an outside source to this essence. Mill's logic is the
logic of a bystander, of a mere spectator who starts out by cutting
the thread through which it is connected with the world.
Mill points out that the thoughts, which in a certain age appear as
absolutely certain inner experiences, are nevertheless reversed in a
later time. In the Middle Ages it was, for instance, believed that
there could not possibly be antipodes and that the stars would have to
drop from the sky if they did not cling to fixed spheres. Man will,
therefore, only be capable of the right attitude toward his knowledge
if he, in spite of his awareness that the logic of the world is
expressed in this knowledge, forms in every individual case his
judgment through a careful methodical examination of his conceptual
connections guided by observation, a judgment that is always in need
of correction.
It is the method of observation that John Stuart Mill attempts to
determine with cool detachment and calculation. Let us take an
example. Suppose a phenomenon had always occurred under certain
conditions. In a given case a number of these conditions appear again,
but a few of them are now missing. The phenomenon in question does not
occur. We are forced to conclude that the conditions that were not
provided and the phenomenon that failed to occur stood in a causal
relationship. If two substances have always combined to form a
chemical compound and this result fails to be obtained in a given
case, it is necessary to inquire what condition is lacking that had
always been present before. Through a method of this kind we arrive at
conceptions concerning connections of facts that can be rightly
considered as being grounded in the nature of things. Mill wants to
follow the methods of observation in his analysis. Logic, which Kant
maintained had not progressed a single step since Aristotle, is a
means of orientation within our thinking itself. It shows how to
proceed from one correct thought to the next. Mill's logic is a means
of orientation within the world of facts. It intends to show how one
obtains valid judgments about things from observation. He does not
even admit mathematics as an exception. Mathematics must also derive
its basic insights from observation. For example, in all observed
cases we have seen that two intersecting straight lines diverge and do
not intersect again. Therefore we conclude that they will never
intersect again, but we do not have a perfect proof for this
statement. For John Stuart Mill, the world is thus an alien element.
Man observes its phenomena and arranges them according to what they
announce to his conceptual life. He perceives regularities in the
phenomena and through logical, methodical investigations of these
regularities he arrives at the laws of nature. But there is nothing
that leads him to the principle of the things themselves. One can well
imagine that the world could also be entirely different. Mill is
convinced that everybody who is used to abstraction and analysis and
who seriously uses his abilities will, after a sufficient exercise of
his imagination, have no difficulty with the idea that there could be
another stellar system in which nothing could be found of the laws
that have application to our own.
Mill is merely consistent in his bystander viewpoint of the world when
he extends it to man's own ego. Mental pictures come and go, are
combined and separated within his inner life; this is what man
observes. He does not observe a being that remains identical with
itself as "ego" in the midst of this constant flow of ideas.
He has observed that mental pictures emerge within him and he assumes
that this will continue to be the case. From this possibility, namely,
that a world of perceptions can be grouped around a center, arises the
conception of an "ego." Thus, man is a spectator also with
respect to his own "ego." He has his conceptions tell him
what he can know about himself. Mill reflects on the facts of memory
and expectation. If everything that I know of myself is to consist of
conceptual presentations, then I cannot say: I remember a
conception that I have had at an earlier time, or I expect the
occurrence of a certain experience, but I must say: A present
conception remembers itself or expects its future occurrence. If
we speak, so Mill argues, of the mind as of a sequence of perceptions,
we must also speak of a sequence of perceptions that is aware of
itself as becoming and passing. As a result, we find ourselves in the
dilemma of having to say that either the "ego" or the mind
is something to be distinguished from the perceptions, or else we must
maintain the paradox that a mere sequence of perceptions is capable of
an awareness of its past and future. Mill does not overcome this
dilemma. It contains for him an insoluble enigma. The fact is that he
has torn the bond between himself, the observer, and the world, and he
is not capable of restoring the connection. The world for him remains
an unknown beyond himself that produces impressions on man. All man
knows of this transcendent unknown is that it can produce perceptions
in him. Instead of having the possibility of knowing real things
outside himself, he can only say in the end that there are
opportunities for having perceptions. Whoever speaks of things in
themselves uses empty words. We move on the firm ground of facts only
as long as we speak of the continuous possibility of the occurrence of
sensations, perceptions and conceptions.
John Stuart Mill has an intense aversion to all thoughts that are
gained in any way except through the comparison of facts, the
observation of the similar, the analogous, and the homogeneous
elements in all phenomena. He is of the opinion that the human conduct
of life can only be harmed if we surrender to the belief that we could
arrive at any truth in any way except through observation. This
disinclination of Mill demonstrates his hesitation to relate himself
in his striving for knowledge to the things of reality in any other
way than by an attitude of passivity. The things are to dictate to man
what he has to think about them. If man goes beyond this state of
receptivity in order to say something out of his own self about
the things, then he lacks every assurance that this product of his
own activity has anything to do with the things. What is
finally decisive in this philosophy is the fact that the thinker who
maintains it is unable to count his own spontaneous thinking as
belonging to the world. The very fact that he himself is active in
this thinking makes him suspicious and misleads him. He would best of
all like to eliminate his own self completely, to be absolutely sure
that no erroneous element is mixed into the objective statements of
the phenomena. He does not sufficiently appreciate the fact that his
thinking is a part of nature as much as the growth of a leaf of grass.
It is evident that one must also examine one's own spontaneous
thinking if one wants to find out something concerning it.
How is man, to use a statement of Goethe, to become acquainted with
his relation to himself and to the external world if he wants to
eliminate himself completely in the cognitive process? Great as Mill's
merits are for finding methods through which man can learn those
things that do not depend on him, a view concerning man's relation to
himself and of his relation to the external world cannot be obtained
by his methods. All these methods are valid only for the special
sciences, not, however, for a comprehensive world conception. No
observation can teach what spontaneous thinking is; only thinking can
experience this in itself. As this thinking can only obtain
information concerning its own nature through its own power, it is
also the only source that can shed light on the relation between
itself and the external world. Mill's method of investigation excludes
the possibility of obtaining a world conception because a world
conception can be gained only through thinking that is
concentrated in itself and thereby succeeds in obtaining an insight
into its own relation to the external world. The fact that John Stuart
Mill had an aversion to this kind of self-supporting thinking can be
well understood from his character. Gladstone said in a letter
(compare Gompertz: John Stuart Mill, Vienna, 1889) that in
conversation he used to call Mill the "Saint of
Rationalism." A person who practices thinking in this way imposes
rigorous demands on thinking and looks for the greatest possible
precautionary measures so that it cannot deceive him. He becomes
thereby mistrustful with respect to thinking itself. He believes that
he will soon stand on insecure ground if he loses hold of external
points of support. Uncertainty with regard to all problems that go
beyond strictly observational knowledge is a basic trait in Mill's
personality. In reading his books we see everywhere that Mill treats
such problems as open questions concerning which he does not risk a
sure judgment.
* * *
The belief that the true nature of things is unknowable is also
maintained by Herbert Spencer. He proceeds by asking: How do I
obtain what I call truths concerning the world? I make certain
observations concerning things and form judgments about them. I
observe that hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions combine to
form water. I form a judgment concerning this observation. This is a
truth that extends only over a small circle of things. I then observe
under what circumstances other substances combine. I compare the
individual observations and thereby arrive at more comprehensive, more
general truths concerning the process in which substances in general
form chemical compounds. All knowledge consists in this; we proceed
from particular truths to more comprehensive ones. We finally arrive
at the highest truth, which cannot be subordinated to any other and
which we therefore must accept without further explanation. In this
process of knowledge we have, however, no means of penetrating to the
absolute essence of the world, for thinking can, according to this
opinion, do no more than compare the various things with one another
and formulate general truths with respect to the homogeneous element
in them. But the ultimate nature of the world cannot, because of its
uniqueness, be compared to any other thing. This is why thinking fails
with regard to the ultimate nature. It cannot reach it.
In such modes of conception we always sense, as an undertone, the
thinking that developed from the basis of the physiology of the senses
(compare above
to the first part of this Chapter).
In many philosophers this thought has
inserted itself so deeply into their intellectual life that they
consider it the most certain thought possible. They argue as follows:
One can know things only by becoming aware of them. They then change
this thought, more or less unconsciously, into: One can know only of
those things that enter our consciousness, but it remains unknown how
the things were before they entered our consciousness. It is for this
reason that sense perceptions are considered as if they were in our
consciousness, for one is of the opinion that they must first enter
our consciousness and must become part of it in the form of
conceptions if we are to be aware of them.
Also, Spencer clings to the view that the possibility of the process
of knowledge depends on us as human beings. We therefore must assume
an unknowable element beyond that which can be transmitted to us by
our senses and our thinking. We have a clear consciousness of
everything that is present in our mind. But an indefinite
consciousness is associated with this clear awareness that claims that
everything we can observe and think has as its basis something we can
no longer observe and think. We know that we are dealing with mere
appearances and not with full realities existing independently by
themselves. But this is just because we know definitely that our world
is only appearance, that we also know that an unimaginable real world
is its basis. Through such turns of thought Spencer believes it
possible to arrange a complete reconciliation between religion and
knowledge. There is something that religion can grasp in belief, in a
belief that cannot be shaken by an impotent knowledge.
The field, however, that Spencer considers to be accessible to
knowledge must, for him, entirely take on the form of natural
scientific conceptions. When Spencer himself ventures to explain, he
does so in the sense of natural science.
Spencer uses the method of natural science in thinking of the process
of knowledge. Every organ of a living being has come into existence
through the fact that this being has adapted itself to the conditions
under which it lives. It belongs to the human conditions of life that
man finds his way through the world with the aid of thinking. His
organ of knowledge develops through the adaptation of his conceptual
life to the conditions of his external life. By making statements
concerning things and processes, man adjusts himself to the
surrounding world. All truths have come into being through this
process of adaptation, and what is acquired in this way can be
transmitted through inheritance to the descendants. Those who think
that man, through his nature, possesses once and for all a certain
disposition toward general truths are wrong. What appears to be such a
disposition did not exist at an earlier stage in the ancestors of man,
but has been acquired by adaptation and transmitted to the
descendants. When some philosophers speak of truths that man does not
have to derive from his own individual experience but that are given
a priori in his organization, they are right in a certain
respect. While it is obvious that such truths are acquired, it must be
stressed that they are not acquired by man as an individual but as a
species. The individual has inherited the finished product of an
ability that has been acquired at an earlier age.
Goethe once said that he had taken part in many conversations on
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and that he had noticed how on
those occasions the old basic problem had been renewed, "How much
does our inner self contribute to our spiritual existence, how much
the external world?" And Goethe goes on to say, "I had never
separated the two; when I was philosophizing in my own way on things,
I did so with an unconscious naïveté and was really convinced that I
saw with my eyes my opinion before me."
Spencer looks at this "old basic problem" from the point of
view of natural science. He believed he could show that the developed
human being also contributed to his spiritual existence through his
own self. This self, is also made up of the inherited traits that had
been acquired by our ancestors in their struggle with the external
world. If we today believe we see with our eyes our opinions before
us, we must remember that they were not always our opinions but that
they were once observations that were really made by our eyes in the
external world. Spencer's way of thinking, then, is, like that of John
Stuart Mill, one that proceeds from psychology. But Mill does not go
further than the psychology of the individual. Spencer goes from the
individual back to his ancestors. The psychology of the individual is
in the same position as the ontogenesis of zoology. Certain phenomena
of the history of the individual are explainable only if they are
referred back to phenomena of the history of the species. In the same
way, the facts of the individual's consciousness cannot be understood
if taken alone. We must go back to the species. We must, indeed, go
back beyond the human species to acquisitions of knowledge that were
accomplished by the animal ancestors of man. Spencer uses his great
acumen to support this evolutionary history of the process of
cognition. He shows in which way the mental activities have gradually
developed from low stages at the beginning, through ever more accurate
adaptations of the human mind to the external world and through
inheritance of these adaptation. Every insight that the individual
human being obtains through pure thought and without experience about
things has been obtained by humanity or its ancestors through
observation or experience. Leibniz thought he could explain the
correspondence of man's inner life with the external world by assuming
a harmony between them that was pre-established by the creator.
Spencer explains this correspondence in the manner of natural science.
The harmony is not pre-established, but gradually developed. We here
find the continuation of natural scientific thinking to the highest
aspects of human existence. Linnaeus had declared that every living
organic form existed because the creator had made it as it is. Darwin
maintained that it is as it is because it had gradually developed
through adaptation and inheritance. Leibniz declared that thinking is
an agreement with the external world because the creator had
established this agreement. Spencer maintained that this agreement is
there because it has gradually developed through adaptations and
inheritance of the thought world.
Spencer was motivated in his thought by the need for a naturalistic
explanation of spiritual phenomena. He found the general direction for
such an explanation in Lyell's geology (compare
in Part 2 Chapter I).
In this geology, to be sure, the idea is still rejected that organic forms
have gradually developed one from another. It nevertheless receives a
powerful support through the fact that the inorganic (geological)
formations of the earth's surface are explained through such a gradual
development and through violent catastrophes. Spencer, who had a
natural scientific education and who had for a time also been active
as a civil engineer, recognized at once the full extent of the idea of
evolution, and he applied it in spite of Lyell's opposition to it. He
even applied this idea to spiritual processes. As early as 1850, in
his book, Social Statistics, he described social evolution in
analogy with organic evolution. He also acquainted himself with the
studies of Harvey and Wolff in embryonic development (compare
Part I, Chapter IX of this book),
and he plunged into the works of Karl
Ernst von Baer (compare above
in Part II Chapter II),
which showed him that
evolution proceeded from the development of a homogeneous uniform
state to one of variety, diversity and abundance. In the early stages
of embryological development the organisms are very similar; later
they become different from one another (compare above
in Part II Chapter II).
Through Darwin this evolutionary thought was completely confirmed.
From a few original organic forms the whole wealth of the highly
diversified world of formations has developed.
From the idea of evolution, Spencer wanted to proceed to the most
general truths, which, in his opinion, constituted the aim of all
human striving for knowledge. He believed that one could discover
manifestations of this evolutionary thought in the simplest phenomena.
When, from dispersed particles of water, a cloud is formed in the sky,
when a sand pile is formed from scattered grains of sand, Spencer saw
the beginnings of an evolutionary process. Dispersed matter is
contracted and concentrated to a whole. It is just this process that
is presented to us in the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of world evolution.
Dispersed parts of a chaotic world nebula have contracted. The
organism originates in just this way. Dispersed elements are
concentrated in tissues. The psychologist can observe that man
contracts dispersed observations into general truths. Within this
concentrated whole, articulation and differentiation take place. The
original homogeneous mass is differentiated into the individual
heavenly bodies of the solar system; the organism differentiates
itself into the various organs.
Concentration alternates with dissolution. When a process of evolution
has reached a certain climax, an equilibrium takes place. Man, for
instance, develops until he has evolved a maximum of harmonization of
his inner abilities with external nature. Such a state of equilibrium,
however, cannot last; external forces will effect it destructively.
The evolutionary process must be followed by a process of dissolution;
what had been concentrated is dispersed again; the cosmic again
becomes chaotic. The process of evolution can begin anew. Thus,
Spencer sees the process of the world as a rhythmic play of motion. It
is certainly not an uninteresting observation for the comparative
history of the evolution of world conception that Spencer, from the
observation of the genesis of world phenomena, reaches here a
conclusion that is similar to one Goethe expressed in connection with
his ideas concerning the genesis of life. Goethe describes the growth
of a plant in the following way:
May the plant sprout, blossom or bear fruit, it is always by the same
organs that the prescription of nature is fulfilled in various
functions and under frequently changing forms. The same organ, which
at the stem expands as a leaf and takes on a most differentiated
shape, now contracts again in the calyx, spreads out in the petal,
epitomizes in the organs of reproduction and finally once more swells
as fruit.
If one thinks of this conception as being transferred to the whole
process of the world, one arrives as Spencer's contraction and
dispersion of matter.
* * *
Spencer and Mill exerted a great influence on the development of world
conception in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigorous
emphasis on observation and the one-sided elaboration of the methods
of observational knowledge of Mill, along with the application of the
conceptions of natural science to the entire scope of human knowledge
by Spencer could not fail to meet with the approval of an age that saw
in the idealistic world conception of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel
nothing but degeneration of human thinking. It was an age that showed
appreciation only for the successes of the research work of natural
science. The lack of unity among the idealistic thinkers and what
seemed to many a perfect fruitfulness of a thinking that was
completely concentrated and absorbed in itself, had to produce a
deep-seated suspicion against idealism. One may say that a widespread
view of the last four decades of the nineteenth century is clearly
expressed in words spoken by Rudolf Virchow in his address, The
Foundation of the University of Berlin and the Transition from the Age
of Philosophy into that of Natural Science (1893): "Since the
belief in magic formulas has been forced back into the most backward
circles of the people, the formulas of the natural philosopher have
met with little approval." And one of the most significant
philosophers of the second half of the century, Eduard von Hartmann,
sums up the character of his world conception in the motto he placed
at the head of his book, Philosophy of the Unconscious: Speculative
Results Obtained by the Inductive Method of Natural Science. He is
of the opinion that it is necessary to recognize "the greatness
of the progress brought about by Mill, through which all attempts of a
deductive method of philosophy have been defeated and made obsolete
for all times." (Compare Eduard von Hartmann, Geschichte der
Metaphysik, 2 part, page 479.)
The recognition of certain limits of human knowledge that was shown by
many naturalists was also received favorably by many religiously
attuned souls. They argued as follows: The natural scientists observe
the inorganic and organic facts of nature and they attempt to find
general laws by combining the individual phenomena. Through these laws
processes can be explained, and it is even possible to predetermine
thereby the regular course of future phenomena. A comprehensive world
conception should proceed in the same way; it should confine itself to
the facts, establish general truths within moderate limits and not
maintain any claim to penetrate into the realm of the
"unknowable." Spencer, with his complete separation of the
"knowable" and the "unknowable," met the demand of
such religious needs to a high degree. The idealistic mode of thought
was, on the other hand, considered by such religiously inclined
spirits to be a fantastic aberration. As a matter of principle, the
idealistic mode of conception cannot recognize an
"unknowable," because it has to uphold the conviction that
through the concentrated penetration into the inner life of man a
knowledge can be attained that covers not merely the outer surface of
the world but also its real core.
The thought life of some influential naturalists, such as Thomas Henry
Huxley, moved entirely in the direction of such religiously inclined
spirits. Huxley believed in a complete agnosticism with regard to the
essence of the world. He declared that a monism, which is in general
agreement with Darwin's results, is applicable only to external
nature. Huxley was one of the first to defend the Darwinian
conceptions, but he is at the same time one of the most outspoken
representatives of those thinkers who believed in the limitation of
that mode of conception. A similar view is also held by the physicist
Johaan Tyndall (1820 – 93) who considered the world process to
be an energy that is completely inaccessible to the human intellect.
According to him, it is precisely the assumption that everything in
the world comes into existence through a natural evolution that makes
it impossible to accept the thought that matter, which is, after all,
the carrier of the whole evolution, should be no more than what our
intellect can comprehend of it.
* * *
A characteristic phenomenon of his time is the personality of the
English statesman, James Balfour (1840 – 1930). In 1879, in his
book, A Defense of Philosophical Doubt, Being an Essay on the
Foundations of Belief, he expressed a credo that is doubtless
similar to that held by many other thinkers. With respect to
everything that man is capable of explaining he stands completely on
the ground of the thought of natural science. For him, there is no
other knowledge but natural science, but he maintains at the same time
that his knowledge of natural science is only rightly understood if it
is clear that the needs of man's soul and reason can never be
satisfied by it. It is only necessary to understand that, in the last
analysis even in natural science, everything depends on faith in the
ultimate truths for which no further proof is possible. But no harm is
done in that this trend of thoughts leads us only to belief, because
this belief is a secure guide for our action in daily life. We believe
in the laws of nature and we master them through this belief. We
thereby force nature to serve us for our purpose. Religious belief is
to produce an agreement between the actions of man and his higher
needs that go beyond his everyday life.
The world conceptions that have been discussed under the title,
"The World as Illusion," show that they have as their basis
a longing for a satisfactory relationship of the self-conscious ego to
the general world picture. It is especially significant that they do
not consciously consider this search as their philosophical aim, and
therefore do not expressly turn their inquiry toward that purpose.
Instinctively as it were, they permit their thinking to be influenced
by the direction that is determined by this unconscious search. The
form that this search takes is determined by the conceptions of modern
natural science. We approach the fundamental character of these
conceptions if we fix our attention on the concept of
"consciousness." This concept was introduced to the life of
modern philosophy by Descartes. Before him, it was customary to depend
more on the concept of the "soul" as such. Little attention
was paid to the fact that only a part of the soul's life is spent in
connection with conscious phenomena. During sleep the soul does not
live consciously. Compared to the conscious life, the nature of the
soul must therefore consist of deeper forces, which in the waking
state are merely lifted into consciousness. The more one asked the
question of the justification and the value of knowledge in the light
of clear and distinct ideas, however, the more it was also felt that
the soul finds the most certain elements of knowledge when it does not
go beyond its own limits and when it does not delve deeper into itself
than consciousness extends. The opinion prevailed that everything else
may be uncertain, but what my consciousness is, at least, as such is
certain. Even the house I pass may not exist without me; that the
image of this house is now in my consciousness: this I
may maintain. But as soon as we fix our attention on this
consciousness, the concept of the ego inevitably grows together with
that of the consciousness. Whatever kind of entity the "ego"
may be outside the consciousness, the realm of the "ego" can
be conceived as extending as far as the consciousness. There is no
possibility of denying that the sensual world picture, which the soul
experiences consciously, has come into existence through the
impression that is made on man by the world. But as soon as one clings
to this statement, it becomes difficult to rid oneself of it, for
there is a tendency thereby to imply the judgment that the processes
of the world are the causes, and that the content of our consciousness
is the effect. Because one thinks that only the effect is contained in
the consciousness, it is believed that the cause must be in a world
outside man as an imperceptible "thing in itself."
The presentation that is given above shows how the results of modern
physiological research lead to an affirmation of such an opinion. It
is just this opinion through which the "ego" finds itself
enclosed with its subjective experiences within its own boundaries.
This subtly produced intellectual illusion, once formed, cannot be
destroyed as long as the ego does not find any clues within itself of
which it knows that they refer to a being outside the subjective
consciousness, although they are actually depicted within that
consciousness. The ego must, outside the sensual consciousness, feel a
contact with entities that guarantee their being by and through
themselves. It must find something within that leads it
outside itself. been said here concerning thoughts that
are brought to life can have this effect. As long as the ego has
experienced thought only within itself, it feels itself confined with
it within its own boundary. As thought is brought to life it
emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes
place that is, to be sure, experienced subjectively by the ego, but by
its own nature is an objective process. This breaks the
"ego" loose from everything that it can feel only as
subjective.
So we see that also the conceptions for which the world is illusion
move toward a point that is reached when Hegel's world picture is so
transformed that its thought comes to life. These conceptions take on
the form that is necessary for a world picture that is unconsciously
driven by an impulse in that direction. But in them, thinking still
lacks the power to work its way through to that aim. Even in their
imperfection, however, these conceptions receive their general
character from this aim, and the ideas that appear are the external
symptoms of active forces that remain concealed.
∴
IV. Echoes of the Kantian Mode of Conception
Only a few personalities in the second half of the nineteenth century
attempted to find a firm foundation for the relation of a conception
of the self-conscious ego toward the general world picture by going
deeply into Hegel's mode of thought. One of the best thinkers along
these lines was Paul Asmus (1842 – 1876), who died as a young
man. In 1873 he published a book entitled, The Ego and the Thing in
Itself. In it he shows how it is possible, through Hegel's
approach to thinking and the world of ideas, to obtain a relation of
man toward the essence of things. He explains in an ingenious way that
we have in man's thinking an element that is not alien to reality but
full of life and fundamentally real, an element on which we only have
to concentrate in order to arrive at the essence of existence. In a
most illuminating way he describes the course of the evolution of
world conception that began with Kant, who had seen in the "thing
in itself" an element that was alien and inaccessible to man, and
led to Hegel, who was of the opinion that thought comprised not only
itself as an ideal entity but also the "thing in itself."
Voices like this found scarcely a hearing. This became most poignantly
clear in the slogan, "Back to Kant," which became popular in
a certain current of philosophical life after Eduard Zeller's speech
at the University of Heidelberg, On the Significance and Task of
the Theory of Knowledge.
The conceptions, partly conscious and partly unconscious, which led to
this slogan, are approximately as follows. Natural science has shaken
the confidence in spontaneous thinking that means to penetrate by
itself to the highest questions of existence, but we cannot be
satisfied with the mere results of natural science for they do not
lead beyond the external view of things. There must be grounds of
existence concealed behind this external aspect. Even natural science
itself has shown that the world of colors, tones, etc., surrounding us
is not a reality outside in the objective world but that it is
produced through the function of our senses and our brain (compare
above,
to Part II Chapter III).
For this reason, it is necessary to ask these
questions: In what respect do the results of natural science point
beyond their own limits toward the higher problems: What is the nature
of our knowledge? Can this knowledge lead to a solution of that higher
task? Kant has asked such questions with great emphasis. In order to
find one's own position, one wanted to study how he had approached
them. One wanted to think over with the greatest possible precision
Kant's line of thought, attempting to avoid his errors and to find in
the continuation of his ideas a way that led out of the general
perplexity.
A number of thinkers endeavored to arrive at a tenable goal, starting
from Kantian points of departure. The most important among them were
Hermann Cohen (1842 – 1916), Otto Liebmann (1840 –
1912), Wilhelm Windelband (1848 – 1916), Johannes Volkelt
(1842 – 1930) and Benno Erdmann (1851 – 1921). Much
perspicacity can be found in the writings of these men. A great deal
of work was done inquiring into the nature and extent of the human
faculty of knowledge. Johannes Volkelt who, insofar as he was active
as an epistomologist, lives entirely within this current, also
contributed a thorough work on Kant's Theory of Knowledge
(1879) in which all problems characterizing this trend of thought
are discussed. In 1884 he gave the inaugural address for his
professorship in Basel in which he made the statement that all
thinking that goes beyond the results of the special empirical
sciences of facts must have "the restless character of seeking
and searching, of cautious trial, defensive reserve and deliberate
admission." It should be an "advance in which one must
partly withdraw again, a yielding in which one nevertheless holds on
to a certain degree" (On the Possibility of Metaphysics,
Hamburg & Leipzig, 1884).
This new attempt to start from Kant appears in a special light in Otto
Liebmann. His writings, Contributions Toward the Analysis of
Reality (1876), Thoughts and Facts (1882), Climax of
Theories (1884), are veritable models of philosophical criticism.
Here a caustic mind ingeniously discovers contradictions in the worlds
of thought, reveals as half truths what appear as safe judgments, and
shows what unsatisfactory elements the individual sciences contain
when their results appear before the highest tribunals of thought.
Liebmann enumerates the contradictions of Darwinism. He reveals its
insufficiently founded assumptions and its defective thought
connections, maintaining that something is needed to fill in the gaps
to support the assumptions. On one occasion he ends an exposition he
gives of the nature of living organisms with the words:
Plant seeds do not lose their ability to germinate after lying dry for
ages, and grains of wheat found in Egyptian mummy cases, after having
been hermetically sealed and buried for thousands of years, when sowed
in a moist soil, thrive excellently. Wheel animalcules (rotatoria) and
other infusoria that have been gathered completely dried up from a
gutter pipe are newly revived by rain water. Even frogs and fishes
that have turned into ice cakes in freezing water revive when
carefully thawed out. All these facts are capable of completely
opposite interpretations. . . . In short, every form of categorical
denial in this matter would be crude dogmatism. Therefore, we
discontinue our argument.
This phrase, "We discontinue our argument," really
expresses, even if it does not do so literally, every final thought of
Liebmann's reflection. It is, indeed, the final conclusion of many
recent followers and elaborators of Kantianism. They do not succeed in
doing more than emphasize that they receive the things into their
consciousness. Therefore, everything that they see, hear, etc., is not
outside in the world but within themselves and they are incapable of
deciding anything concerning the outside. A table stands before me,
argues the Neo-Kantian, but, really, this only seems to be so. Only a
person who is naively concerned with problems of philosophy can say,
"Outside myself is a table." A person who has overcome that
naïveté says, "An unknown something produces an impression within
my eye; this eye and my brain make out of the impression the sensation
brown. As I have this sensation brown not merely at an isolated point
but can let my eye run over a plane surface and four columnar forms,
so the brownness takes the shape of an object that is this table. When
I touch this table, it offers resistance. It makes an impression on my
sense of touch, which I express by attributing hardness to the picture
that has been produced by the eye. At the suggestion of some
"thing in itself" that I do not know, I have therefore
created this table out of myself. The table is my mental content. It
is only in my consciousness.
Volkelt presents this view at the beginning of his book on Kant's
Theory of Knowledge:
The first fundamental condition that the philosopher must clearly
realize is the insight that, to begin with, our knowledge extends to
nothing more than our conceptions. Our conceptions are the only things
that we immediately and directly experience, and for just that reason
that we experience them immediately, even the most radical doubt
cannot deprive us of the knowledge of them. But the knowledge that
goes beyond my faculty of conception is not protected from doubt. (I
use this expression here always in its most comprehensive sense so
that all physical events are included in the term.) Therefore, all
knowledge that goes beyond the conceptions must be marked as doubtful
at the outset of the philosophical reflection.
Otto Liebmann also uses this thought to defend the statement: Man can
no more know that the things he conceives are not, than he can
know positively that they are. "For the very reason that
no conceiving subject can escape the sphere of its subjective
imagination, because it can never grasp and observe what may exist or
not exist outside its subjectivity, leaping thereby over its own
consciousness and emancipating itself from itself. For this reason it
would also be absurd to maintain that the object does not exist
outside the subjective conception" (O. Liebmann, Contributions
toward the Analysis of Reality).
Both Volkelt and Liebmann nevertheless endeavor to prove that man
finds something in the world of his conceptions that is not merely
observed or perceived, but that is added to the perception by thought
— something that at least points toward the essence of things.
Volkelt is of the opinion that there is a fact within the conceptual
life that points to something that lies outside the life of
conception. This fact consists in the logical necessity with which
certain conceptions suggest themselves to man. In his book, The
Sources of Human Certainty that appeared in 1906, we read
Volkelt's view:
If one seeks the basis of the certainty of our knowledge, one finds
two points of origin, two sources of certainty. Even if an intimate
cooperation of both sources of certainty is necessary if real
knowledge is to result, it is nevertheless impossible to reduce one
source to the other. The one source of certainty is the self-assurance
of consciousness, the awareness of the facts of my consciousness. That
I am consciousness is just as true as the fact that my
consciousness testifies to the existence of certain processes and
states, certain contents and forms. Without this source of certainty
there would be no cognitive process; it supplies the material through
the elaboration of which all knowledge is produced. The other source
of certainty is the necessity of thought, the certainty of logical
compulsion, the objective consciousness of necessity. With it
something absolutely new is given that cannot possibly be derived from
the certainty of our self-awareness in consciousness.
Concerning this second source of certainty, Volkelt expresses himself
in his book mentioned above as follows:
The immediate experience allows us to become aware of the fact that
certain combinations of concepts show a peculiar form of compulsion to
be inherent in them that is essentially different from all other kinds
of compulsion that are associated with conceptions. This compulsion
forces us to think certain concepts as belonging together, not merely
in the conscious process in which we are aware of them but also in a
corresponding objective interconnection, independent of the conscious
conceptions. Furthermore, this compulsion does not force us in a
manner to suggest that we should forfeit our moral satisfaction or our
inner happiness, our salvation and so forth, but it contains the
suggestion that objective reality would have to annihilate itself in
itself, would have to lose its possibility of existence if the
opposite of what it prescribes as a necessity were to take place. What
distinguishes this compulsion then is that the very thought of the
opposite of that necessity forcing itself upon us, would be
experienced as a call that reality should revolt against the
conditions of its existence. This peculiar, immediately experienced
compulsion is generally called logical compulsion or thought
necessity. The logically necessary reveals itself directly as an
announcement of the object itself. It is the peculiarly meaningful
significance, the reason-guided illumination that is contained in
everything logical, that bears witness with immediate evidence of the
objective, real validity of the logical connections of concepts.
(Kant's Theory of Knowledge, pp. 208 ff.)
Otto Liebmann confesses toward the end of his essay, The Climax of
Theories, that in his opinion the whole thought structure of human
knowledge, from the ground floor of the science of observation up to
the most airy regions of the highest hypotheses of world conception,
is permeated by thoughts that point beyond perception. "Fragments
of percepts must first be supplemented by an extraordinary amount of
non-observed elements linked together and connected in a definite
order according to certain operations of the mind." But how can
one deny that human thinking has the ability to know something through
its own activity as long as it is necessary to resort to this activity
even if one merely wants to obtain order among the facts of the
observed precepts? Neo-Kantianism is in a curious position. It would
like to confine itself within the boundaries of consciousness and
within the life of conception, but it is forced to confess that it is
impossible to take a step "within" these boundaries that
does not lead in all directions beyond those limits. Otto Liebmann
ends the second booklet of his Thought and Facts as follows:
If, on the one hand, seen from the viewpoint of natural science, man
were nothing but animated dust, then, on the other, all nature, as it
appears in space and time, when seen from the only viewpoint that is
immediately accessible and given to us, is an anthropocentric
phenomenon.
There are many who hold the view that the world of observation is
merely human conception in spite of the fact that it must
extinguish itself if it is correctly understood. It is repeated again
and again in the course of the last decades in many variations.
Ernst Laas (1837 – 1885) forcefully defended the point of view
that only positive facts of perception should be wrought into
knowledge. Alois Riehl (1849 – 1924), proceeding from the same
fundamental view, declares that there could be no general world
conception at all, and that everything that goes beyond the various
special sciences should only be a critique of knowledge. Knowledge is
obtained only in the special sciences; philosophy has the task of
showing how this knowledge comes about and of taking care that thought
should not add any element that can not be justified by the facts.
Richard Wahle in his book, The Whole of Philosophy and Its
End (1894), eliminates with utmost scrutiny everything that the
mind has added to the "occurrences" of the world until
finally the mind stands in the ocean of occurrences that stream by,
seeing itself in this ocean as one such occurrence, nowhere finding a
point capable of providing a meaningful enlightenment concerning them.
This mind would have to exert its own energy to produce order in the
occurrences. But then it would be the mind itself that had introduced
that order into nature. If the mind makes a statement about the
essence of the occurrences, it derives this not from the things but
from itself. This it could only do if it admitted that in its own
activity something essential could go on. The assumption would have to
be made that the mind's judgment could have significance also for
things. But in its own judgment this confidence is something that,
according to Wahle's world conception, the mind is not entitled to
have. It must stand idly by and watch what flows past, around and
inside itself, and it would only contribute to its own deception if it
were to put any credence in a conception that it formed itself about
the occurrences.
What final answer could a mind find that looked into the world
structure, tossing about within itself problems concerning the nature
and purpose of events? As it seemed to occupy a firm stand in
opposition to the surrounding world, it has had to experience that it
dissolved into a flight of occurrences and flowed together with other
occurrences. The mind did no longer "know" the world. It had
to admit: I am not certain that there are "knowers," but
there are simply occurrences. They do, to be sure, make their
appearance in a manner that the concept of knowledge could emerge
prematurely and without justification. . . . and "concepts"
emerged and flitted by to bring light into the occurrences, but they
were will-o'-the-wisps, specters of wishful thinking, miserable
postulates whose evidence meant nothing, empty forms of knowledge.
Unknown factors must rule the change. Darkness was spread over nature,
occurrences are the veil of the true . . . (The Whole of Philosophy
and Its End ).
Wahle closes his book, which is to represent the "gifts" of
philosophy to the individual sciences, theology, physiology, esthetics
and civic education, with these words, "May the age begin when
people will say: once was philosophy."
In the above mentioned book by Wahle, as well as in his other books,
Historical Survey of the Development of Philosophy (1895) and
On the Mechanism of the Mental Life (1906), we have one of the
most significant symptoms of the evolution of world conception in the
nineteenth century. The lack of confidence with respect to knowledge
begins with Kant and leads, finally, as it appears in Wahle, to a
complete disbelief in any philosophical world conception.
∴
V. World Conceptions of Scientific Factuality
An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis
of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth
century by Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857). This enterprise, which
was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de
Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830 – 42), was sharply
antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of
the first half of the nineteenth century. It also opposed, although
not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived
from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin.
What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel,
the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, was
completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to
contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two
personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself
opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself
to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes
of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is
to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective
interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws
of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte's
objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world
pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by
Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is
given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any
attention to Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as
physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of knowledge for him.
As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is
unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte. He has a mathematical bent of
mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical
problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no
feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly
more life-saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and
physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His
world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this
fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine.
What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life
and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and
machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his
presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of
the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the
sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by
physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the
last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the
knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences
as simple as mathematics. The phenomena with which the individual
sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws
are considered to be fundamentally always the same.
* * *
The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are
still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between
soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L'homme)
that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757 – 1808) gave in 1797
and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in
Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the
development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in
France. They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac's
mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too
closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of
inorganic nature and their operation. Cabanis investigates the
influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's
intellectual and emotional disposition. He develops the conception
that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated entities
that have nothing in common but that they constitute an inseparable
whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his
fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His
predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have
derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we
start by observing the world of the spiritual as open-mindedly as we
observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the
natural phenomena.
Destutt de Tracy (1754 – 1836) proceeded in a similar way.
He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without
bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or
scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if
one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers
had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if
one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a
being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous
activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the
effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance
in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We
experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves,
but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our
own existence but also an external world that resists us.
Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers — Maine de Biran
(1766 – 1824) and André-Marie Ampère (1775 – 1826) were led
by the self-observation of the soul in entirely different directions.
Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems
to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood,
we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two
factors of man's inner life are made the objects of observation by
Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through
the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of
himself through active work, his character. He follows the
ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source
of knowledge in man's inner life. The forces of which we learn through
introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an
external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less
similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces
outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul
a similar force and consequently could compare this with what
corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is
untiring in his search for the processes in man's soul. He pays
special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in
the inner life processes that exist long before the light of
consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran's search for wisdom within
the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In
the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come
closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own
being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an
immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the God within us.
The attraction of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he
presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of
presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary.
The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought
world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville's
book, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées, 1857, and his
edition, Oeuvres inédités de Maine de Biran). As old men,
Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of
philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampère was among
those who were acquainted with Biran's views. As a natural scientist,
he became prominent through the extension of Oersted's observation
concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above
>in Part II Chapter I).
Biran's mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampère
more scientific-methodical. Ampère follows with interest the
interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also
the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world
phenomena with the aid of thinking.
What is significant in this current of world conception, which
chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of
Condillac, is the circumstance that the life of the soul itself is
decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality
of the human being is brought into the foreground of the
investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless
for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they
investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they
do not want to treat its phenomena as homogeneous with the other
processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there
emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans
distinctly toward the spirit.
Victor Cousin (1792 – 1867) traveled through Germany several
times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of
the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel
and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the
École normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a
great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating
eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received
from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not
through the observation of the external world but through that of the
human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can
be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of
the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought
do not merely rule in man's inner life but also outside in nature and
in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained
in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was
not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of
human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that
a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea,
in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a
profound impression on Cousin's French audience, which in its most
recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without
precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role
that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some
great and fundamental ideas.
Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development
of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of
science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed
truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a
world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was
the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this
stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity — one in
which it believed in gods, and subsequently, one in which it
surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in
the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and
from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage,
man's thinking projected anthropomorphic gods into the processes of
nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in
which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the gods with
abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason,
world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give
way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation
of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of
observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the
facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely
combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms
obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to
the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its
divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract
thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution
of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc.,
will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws
like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring
families, associations, legal views and state institutions into
existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make
bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to
operate. The science of human social life, of human development,
sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and
he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have
gradually acquired.
In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon
(1760 – 1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would
only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his
own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a
strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process
following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with
Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that
Saint-Simon's views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and
utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original
direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an attempt to
elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific
accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them
merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the
same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte
saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere
systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to
the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of
facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view
that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have
a voice in the formulation of a world conception.
* * *
Within German spirit-life Eugen Dühring (1833 – 1921) appeared
as a forceful champion of Comte's thought. This was expressed in 1865
in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded
his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly
Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in
numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science,
philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Dühring's
work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical
and mechanistic mode of thought. Dühring is outstanding in his
endeavor to analyze his observations of nature in accordance with
mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he
loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this
characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be
explained with which Dühring judges so many things. Where it is
necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher
ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and
antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal
circumstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind,
becomes completely arbitrary when he undertakes to evaluate human
accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather
unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a
personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times,
whose entire significance consisted, in Dühring's opinion, in a few
poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpass Dühring in his
under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he
does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite
of this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures
in the development of modern world conception. No one who has
penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he
has been profoundly affected by them.
Dühring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not
proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific
modes of thought "found themselves in the state of childish
immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no
matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under
these circumstances or just occasionally individual elements or
degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category
of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is
already decomposed by putrefaction," (Course of Philosophy).
What Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel achieved, Dühring
condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks;
idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He
means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to
nature because it "does away with all artificial and unnatural
fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the
measure of all ideal conceptions"; reality is conceived in this
philosophy "in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a
dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception."
(Course of Philosophy)
One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who
confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical
combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations.
Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts.
This is Dühring's verdict. Dühring means to raise this form of
thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends
exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him
with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of
whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the
world process, all investigations, which, like Kant's, want to limit
the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion. One should
not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the
mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world.
What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.
"The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner
logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a constitution
and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general
logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations
of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid
for the special case, that its object is the totality of being,
together with its chief forms. Since the most general thinking decides
to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest
principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all
reality and its forms. (Course of Philosophy)
Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it
can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal
picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all-penetrating law that
carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized.
How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the
relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to
suppose that nature would create an organ through which it would
reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and
law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in
human thinking. "The ideal system of our thought is the picture
of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has,
in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in
the form of real existence."
In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there
exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the
element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality
has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up
to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues
to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for
thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought
it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists
only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small
parts. In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality
come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that
is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause
and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of
reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for
every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is
without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to space, thinking
proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds
beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this
real fact and imagines space as infinite and filled with an infinite
number of heavenly bodies. According to Dühring, one ought to realize
that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality.
They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that
are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above
this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.
If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from
reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed
from human action, to nature. Dühring, as he proceeds from such
presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its
production an imagination any more than he does to man in his
creation. "Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has
its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that
precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of
subjective feelings" (Course of Philosophy). The thought
upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a
mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so
completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the
external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject
it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these
conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are
derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only
man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then
gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such
attempts could also be observed in nature.
The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at
all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow
only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature
in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If
subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative
separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical
error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly
the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its
various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not
intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect
parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the constitution in both
directions. (Course of Philosophy)
Dühring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the
concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he
has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical
conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a
mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that
was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what
motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being
develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a
triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not
be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well?
Dühring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed
formations that nature produces through the combinations of its
energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly
delineated forms of space. He finds nothing inappropriate in
attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite
formations. Dühring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of
nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes
it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as
every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Dühring's view is,
therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert
Lange. Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in
which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction;
Dühring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes
actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him.
Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation
of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality
(compare above,
to Part II Chapter III).
It is also consistent if Dühring wants to
extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to
nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man
and through man belongs to the natural events as much as do the
inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in
nature.
Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic
opponent to Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the
fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature,
it would have to be the same with man's life:
Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral
thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in
an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better
morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with
the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course
of Philosophy)
According to Dühring's life-conception, what man feels as moral
impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in
nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces
that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants
into man instincts of sympathy. By them he allows himself to be
determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the
activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Dühring
attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of
themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.
The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak,
subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary
process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further
explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious
mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of
Philosophy)
But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law
begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of
what had already been there in the unconscious mechanism. This
mechanism, to be sure, is unconscious, but it is nevertheless wise,
for "the earth with all it produces, as well as all causes of
life's maintenance that lie outside, especially in the sun and all
influences that come from the whole surrounding world in general —
this entire organization and arrangement must be thought of as
essentially produced for man, which is to say, in agreement with his
well-being." (Course of Philosophy)
* * *
Dühring ascribes thought and even aims and moral tendencies to nature
without admitting that he thereby idealizes nature. But, for an
explanation of nature, higher ideas are necessary that transcend the
real. According to Dühring, however, there must be nothing like that;
he therefore changes their meaning by interpreting them as facts.
Something similar happened in the world conception of Julius
Hermann von Kirchmann (1802 – 84), who published his Philosophy
of Knowledge in 1864 at about the same time Dühring's Natural
Dialectic appeared. Kirchmann proceeds from the supposition that
only what is perceived is real. Man is connected with reality through
his perception. Everything that he does not derive from perception he
must eliminate from his knowledge of reality. He succeeds in doing
this if he rejects everything that is contradictory.
"Contradiction is not," is Kirchmann's second principle,
which follows his first principle, "The perceived is."
Kirchmann admits only feelings and desires as the states of the soul
of man that have an existence by themselves.
Knowing forms a contrast to the other two states, to feeling and
desire. . . . It is possible that there is in knowing something
underlying, perhaps something similar to, pressure and tension, but if
it is conceived in this way it cannot be grasped in its essence. As
knowing, and it is only as such that it is to be investigated here, it
merely makes itself into a mirror of another being. There is no better
parable for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is the more
perfect the less it shows of itself and the more it reflects another
being, so it is also with knowing. Its essence is the pure reflection
of a being other than itself, without mixing in its own state of
being. (Philosophy of Knowledge, 1864)
One cannot imagine a greater contrast to Hegel's mode of conception
than this view of knowledge. While with Hegel the essence of a thing
appears in thinking, in the element that the soul adds in spontaneous
activity to the percept, Kirchmann's ideal of knowledge consists of a
mirror picture of percepts from which all additions by the soul itself
have been eliminated.
To judge Kirchmann's position in the intellectual life correctly, one
must consider the great difficulty with which somebody who had the
will to erect an independent structure of world conception was met in
his time. The results of natural science, which were to produce a
profound influence on the development of world conceptions, were still
young. They were just sufficient to shake the belief in the classical
idealistic world conception that had had to erect its proud structure
without the aid of modern natural science. In the face of the wealth
of detailed knowledge, it became difficult to reconstruct fundamental
philosophical thoughts. The thread that led from the scientific
knowledge of facts to a satisfactory total conception of the world was
gradually lost in the general consciousness. A certain perplexity took
hold of many. An understanding for the lofty flight of thought that
had inspired the world conception of Hegel was scarcely to be found
anywhere.
∴
VI. Modern Idealistic World Conceptions
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the mode of conception
of natural science was blended with the idealistic traditions from the
first half, producing three world conceptions that show a distinctive
individual physiognomy. The three thinkers responsible for this were
Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817 – 81), Gustav Theodor Fechner
(1801 – 87), and Eduard von Hartmann (1842 – 1906).
In his work, Life and Life-force, which appeared in 1842 in
Wagner's Handwörterbuch der Physiologic, Lotze opposed the
belief that there is in living beings a special force, the life force,
and defended the thought that the phenomena of life are to be
explained exclusively through complicated processes of the same kind
as take place in lifeless nature. In this respect, he sided entirely
with the mode of conception of modern natural science, which tried to
bridge the gap between the lifeless and the living. This attitude is
reflected in his books that deal with subjects of natural science,
General Pathology and Therapy as Mechanical Sciences (1842) and
General Physiology of the Physical Life (1851). With his
Elements of Psychophysics (1860) and Propaedeutics of
Esthetics (1876), Fechner contributed works that show the spirit
of a strictly natural scientific mode of conception. This was now done
in fields that before him had been treated almost without exception in
the sense of an idealistic mode of thinking. But Lotze and Fechner
felt that need to construct for themselves an idealistic world of
thought that went beyond the view of natural science. Lotze was forced
to take this direction through the quality of his inner disposition.
This demanded of him not merely an intellectual observation of the
natural law in the world, but challenged him to seek life and
inwardness of the kind that man feels within himself in all things and
processes. He wanted to "struggle constantly against the
conceptions that acknowledge only one half of the world, and the less
important one at that, only the unfolding of facts into new facts, of
forms into new forms, but not the constant reconversion of all those
externalities into elements of inner relevance, into what alone has
value and truth in the world, into bliss and despair, admiration and
disgust, love and hatred, into joyful certainty and doubtful yearning,
into all the nameless forms of suspense and fear in which life goes
on, that alone deserves to be called life."
Lotze, like many others, has the feeling that the human picture of
nature becomes cold and drab if we do not permeate it with the
conceptions that are taken from the human soul (compare above
pages . . . ) What in Lotze is caused by his inner disposition of feeling,
appears in Fechner as the result of a richly developed imagination
that has the effect of always leading from a logical comprehension of
things to a poetic interpretation of them. He cannot, as a natural
scientific thinker, merely search for the conditions of man's becoming
and for the laws that will cause his death again. For him, birth and
death become events that draw his imagination to a life before birth
and to a life after death. Fechner writes in his Booklet on Life
after Death:
Man lives on earth not once, but three times. His first stage of life
is a continuous sleep; the second, an alternation between sleeping and
waking; the third, an eternal waking. In the first stage, man lives in
solitude and in the dark; in the second, he lives in fellowship and as
a separate being side by side and among others in a light that
reflects the surface for him; in the third stage, his life interweaves
with that of other spirits to a higher life in the highest spirit, and
his sight penetrates the essence of the finite things. In the first
phase, the body develops from its germ and produces the organs for the
second; in the second phase, the spirit develops from its germ and
produces its organ for the third; and in the third phase, the divine
germ that lies in the spirit of every human being develops. It can be
dimly felt and instinctively apprehended by a genius pointing toward a
realm beyond, which is dark for us but bright as day for the spirit of
the third phase. The transition from the first phase of life to the
second is called birth; the transition from the second to the third is
called death.
Lotze has given an interpretation of the phenomena of the world that
is in keeping with the needs of his inner disposition in his works,
Microcosm (1858 – 64), Three Books of Logic (1874) and
Three Books of Metaphysics (1879). The notes taken from the
lectures he gave on the various fields of philosophy also have
appeared in print. He proceeds by following the strictly natural,
law-determined course of the world and by interpreting this regularity
in the sense of an ideal, harmonious, soul-filled order and activity
of the world-ground. We see that one thing has an effect on another,
but one could not produce the effect on the other if fundamental
kinship and unity did not exist between them. The second thing would
have to remain indifferent to the activity of the first if it did not
possess the ability to behave in agreement with the action of the
first and to arrange its own activity accordingly. A ball can be
caused to move by another ball that hits it only if it meets the other
ball with a certain understanding, so to speak, if it finds within
itself the same understanding of motion as is contained in the first.
The ability to move is something that is contained in the first ball
as well as in the second, as common to both of them. All things and
processes must have such common elements. That we perceive them as
things and events is caused by the fact that we, in our observation,
become acquainted only with their surface. If we were able to see
their inner nature, we would observe not what separates them but what
connects them to form a great world totality. There is only one being
in our experience that we do not merely know from without but from
within, that we cannot merely look at, but into, that
our sight can penetrate. This is our own soul, the totality of our own
spiritual personality. But since all things must possess a common
element in their inner being, so they must also have in common with
our soul the element that constitutes our soul's inner core. We may,
therefore, conceive the inner nature of things as similar to the
quality of our own soul. The world ground that rules as the common
element of all things can be thought by us in no other way than as a
comprehensible personality after the image of our own personality.
Our heart's ardent desire to grasp the highest that it may divine can
be satisfied by no other form of existence than that of the
personality, no other form can be seriously considered. This
aspiration of our heart is so much guided by the conviction that the
living, self-possessed and self-enjoying form of the ego is the
undeniable prerequisite and the only home of all good and all values.
It is so much filled with a silent disdain of all existence that
appears lifeless, that we always find the early phases of religion,
when it is given to myth making, occupied with the attempt to
transfigure the natural reality into a spiritual one. It has, however,
never felt a need to reduce something that is spiritually alive to a
blind reality as its firmer ground.
Lotze expresses his own feeling with regard to the things of nature as
follows:
I do not know them, these dead masses of which you speak; for me
everything is life and inner alertness; rest and death are nothing but
a dull transitory appearance of an ever active inner weaving.
If natural processes, as they appear in the observation, are only such
dull transitory shadows, then one cannot expect to find their deepest
essence in the regularity that presents itself to the observation, but
in the "ever active weaving" of all inspiring, all
comprehensive personality, its aims and purposes. Lotze, therefore,
imagines that in all natural activity a personality's moral purpose is
manifested toward which the world is striving. The laws of nature are
the external manifestation of an all pervading ethical order of the
world. This ethical interpretation of the world is in perfect harmony
with what Lotze says concerning the continuous life of the soul after
death:
We have no other thought at our disposal than the general idealistic
conviction that every created thing or being will remain in existence
whose continuation is essential for the meaning of the world.
Everything that serves only in a transitory phase of the course of the
world will at some time cease to exist. That this principle does not
justify certain rash applications need scarcely be mentioned. We
certainly do not know the merits that would be adequate to earn the
claim for eternal existence for one being, nor the defects that would
deny it to others. (Three Books of Metaphysics)
At the point where Lotze's reflections touch the realm of the great
enigmatic problems of philosophy, his thoughts show an uncertain and
wavering character. One can notice that he does not succeed in
securing from his two sources of knowledge, natural science and
psychological self-observation, a reliable conception concerning man's
relation to the course of the world. The inner force of
self-observation does not penetrate to a thinking that could justify
the ego feeling itself as a definite entity within the totality of the
world. In his lectures, Philosophy of Religion, we read:
The belief in immortality has no other sure foundation than the
need for religion. For this reason it also impossible to state
anything beyond a simple metaphysical statement concerning the nature
of continued existence. Such a statement would be: As we regard every
entity to be merely a creature of God, there is no
fundamentally valid right that the individual soul could claim,
for instance, as a substance, to demand eternal individual
existence. We can merely maintain that every entity is preserved by
God only as long as its existence has a valuable significance for the
totality of His world plan . . .
The indefinite character of such principles expresses the extent to
which Lotze's ideas can penetrate into the realm of the great
philosophical problems.
* * *
In his little book, Life after Death, Fechner says of the
relation of man to the world:
What does the anatomist see when he looks into man's brain? A tangle
of white fibres, the meaning of which he cannot fathom. What does he
see in himself? A world of lights, sounds, thoughts, reminiscences,
fantasies, sentiments of love and hatred. In this way you must imagine
the relationship of the side of the world that you see as you are
externally confronted with it, to what this world sees in itself, and
you must not demand that the inside and the outside of the world
should show a greater similarity than in yourself, who is only a part
of it. It is only the fact that you are a part of this world that
allows you to see within yourself a part of what the world experiences
inwardly.
Fechner imagines that the world spirit stands in the same relation to
the world of matter as the human spirit does to the human body. He
then argues: Man speaks of himself when he speaks of his body, but he
also speaks of himself when he deals with his spirit. The anatomist
who investigates the tangle of dead brain fibres is confronted with
the organ that once was the source of thoughts and imaginations. When
the man, whose brain the anatomist observes, was still alive, he did
not have before him in his mind the fibres of his brain and their
physical function, but a world of mental contents. What has changed
then when, instead of a man who experiences his inner soul content,
the anatomist looks at the brain, the physical organ of that soul? Is
it not in both cases the same being, the same man that is inspected?
Fechner is of the opinion that the object is the same, merely the
point of view of the observer has changed. The anatomist observes from
outside what was previously viewed by man from inside. It is as if one
looks at a circle first from without and then from within. In the
first case, it appears convex, in the second, concave. In both cases,
it is the same circle. So it is also with man. If he looks at himself
from within, he is spirit; if the natural scientist looks at him from
without, he is body, matter.
According to Fechner's mode of conception, it is of no use to ponder
on how body and spirit effect each other, for they are not two
entities at all; they are both one and the same thing. They appear to
us only as different when we observe them from different viewpoints.
Fechner considers man to be a body that is spirit at the same time.
From this point of view it becomes possible for Fechner to imagine all
nature as spiritual, as animated. With regard to his own being, man is
in the position to inspect the physical from within and thus to
recognize the inside directly as spiritual. Does not the thought then
suggest itself that everything physical, if it could be inspected from
within, would appear as spiritual? We can see the plant only from
without, but is it not possible that it, too, if seen from within,
would prove to be a soul? This notion grew in Fechner's imagination
into the conviction that everything physical is spiritual at the same
time. The smallest material particle is animated, and the combination
of particles to form more perfect material bodies is merely a process
viewed from the outside. There is a corresponding inner process that
would, if one could observe it, present itself as the combination of
individual souls into more comprehensive souls. If somebody had the
ability to observe from within the physical processes of our earth
with the plants, animals and men living on it, the totality would
appear to him as the soul of the earth. So it would also be with the
solar system, and even with the whole world. The universe seen from
without is the physical cosmos; seen from within, it is the
all-embracing spirit, the most perfect personality, God.
A thinker who wants to arrive at a world conception must go beyond the
facts that present themselves to him without his own activity. But
what is achieved by this going beyond the results of direct
observation is a question about which there are the most divergent
views. Kirchhoff expressed his view (compare above,
to Part II Chapter III)
by saying that even through the strictest science one cannot obtain
anything but a complete and simple description of the actual events.
Fechner proceeds from an opposite viewpoint. It is his opinion that
this is "the great art, to draw conclusions from this world to
the next, not from reasons that we do not know nor from
presuppositions that we accept, but from facts with which we are
acquainted, to the greater and higher facts of the world beyond, and
thereby to fortify and support from below the belief that depends on
higher viewpoints and to establish for it a living relationship toward
life. (The Booklet on Life after Death) According to this
opinion, Fechner does not merely look for the connection of the
outwardly observed physical phenomena with the inwardly experienced
spiritual processes, but he adds to the observed soul phenomena
others, the earth spirit, the planetary spirit, the world spirit.
Fechner does not allow his knowledge of natural science, which is
based on a firm foundation, to keep him from raising his thoughts from
the world of the senses into regions where they envisage world
entities and world processes, which, if they exist, must be beyond the
reach of sense perception. He feels stimulated to such an elevation
through his intimate contemplation of the world of the senses, which
reveals to his thinking more than the mere sense perception would be
capable of disclosing. This "additional content" he feels
inclined to use in imagining extrasensory entities. In his way,
he strives thus to depict a world into which he promises to introduce
thoughts that have come to life. But such a transcendence of sensory
limits did not prevent Fechner from proceeding according to the
strictest method of natural science, even in the realm that borders
that of the soul. It was he who created the scientific methods for
this field.
Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics (1860) is the fundamental
work in this field. The fundamental law on which he based
psychophysics states that the increase of sensation caused in man
through an increase of external impressions, proceeds proportionately
slower than the intensification of the stimulating impressions. The
greater the strength of the stimulus at the outset, the less the
sensation grows. Proceeding from this thought, it is possible to
obtain a measured proportion between the external stimulus (for
instance, the strength of physical light) and the sensation (for
instance, the intensity of light sensation). The continuation of this
method established by Fechner has resulted in the elaboration of the
discipline of psychophysics as an entirely new science, concerned with
the relation of stimuli toward sensations, that is to say, of the
physical to the psychical.
Wilhelm Wundt, who continued to work in Fechner's spirit in this
field, characterizes the founder of the science of psychophysics in an
excellent description:
Probably none of his other scientific achievements show in such a
splendid way the rare combination of gifts that were at Fechner's
disposal as do his psychophysical works. To produce a work like his
Elements of Psychophysics, it was necessary to be intimately
acquainted with the principles of the exact method of mathematical
physics and at the same time to possess an inclination to probe the
most profound problems of being, a combination that was realized only
in him. For this purpose he needed the originality of thinking that
enabled him to adapt freely the inherited research methods to fit his
own needs, and the courage never to show any hesitation to proceed
along new and untrodden paths. The observations of E. H. Weber,
which were admirable for their ingenious simplicity but limited in
their scope, the isolated and often more arbitrary than deliberately
devised experimental methods and results of other physiologists —
these formed the modest material out of which he built a new science.
Important insights into the interrelation between body and soul have
resulted from the experimental method suggested by Fechner. Wundt
characterizes this new science in his Lectures on the Human and
Animal Soul (1863) as follows:
I shall show in the following exposition that the experiment is the
chief instrument in psychology. It leads us from the facts of
consciousness to those processes that prepare the conscious life in
the dark background of the soul. Self-observation provides, as does
observation in general, merely the composite phenomena. It is only
through the experiment that we free the phenomenon of all accidental
circumstances to which it is bound in nature. Through the experiment
we produce the phenomenon synthetically out of the conditions we
ourselves control. Change these conditions and we thereby also change,
in a measurable way, the phenomenon itself. In this way, it is always
the experiment that leads us to the laws of nature because only in the
experiment can we observe simultaneously the causes and the results.
It is doubtless only in a borderline territory of the field of
psychology that the experiment is really fruitful, that is, in the
territory where the conscious processes lead to the backgrounds of the
soul life where they are no longer conscious but material processes.
The psychical phenomena in the proper sense of the word can, after
all, only be obtained by a purely spiritual observation. Nevertheless,
E. Kräpelin, a psychophysicist, is fully justified when he says
"that the young science will always be capable of maintaining its
independent position side by side with the other branches of the
natural sciences and particularly the science of physiology"
(Psychological Works, published by E. Kräpelin, Vol. I, part 1,
page 4).
* * *
When Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the
Unconscious in 1869 he did not so much have in mind a world
conception based on the results of modern natural science but rather
one that would raise to a higher level the ideas of the idealistic
systems of the first half of the nineteenth century, since these
appeared to him insufficient in many points. It was his intention to
free these ideas of their contradictions and to develop them
completely. It seemed to him that Hegel's, Schelling's and
Schopenhauer's thoughts contained potential truths that would only
have to be fully developed. Man cannot be satisfied by merely
observing facts if he intends to know things and processes of the
world. He must proceed from facts to ideas. These ideas cannot be
considered to be an element that our thinking arbitrarily adds to the
facts. There must be something in them that corresponds to the things
and events. This corresponding element cannot be the element of
conscious ideas, for these are brought about only through the material
processes of the human brain. Without a brain there is no
consciousness. We must, therefore, assume that an unconscious ideal
element in reality corresponds to the conscious ideas of the human
mind.
Hartmann, like Hegel, considers the idea as the real element in things
that is contained in them beyond the perceptible, that is to say,
beyond the accessible to sense observation. But the mere content of
the ideas would never be capable of producing a real process within
them. The idea of a ball cannot collide with the idea of another ball.
The idea of a table cannot produce an impression on the human eye. A
real process requires a real force. In order to gain a conception of
such a force, Hartmann borrows from Schopenhauer. Man finds in his
soul a force through which he imparts reality to his thought and to
his decisions. This force is the will. In the form in which it is
manifest in the human soul the will presupposes the existence of the
human organism. Through the organism it is a conscious will. If we
want to think of a force as existing in things, we can conceive of it
only as similar to the will, the only energy with which we are
immediately acquainted. We must, however, think of this will as
something without consciousness. Thus, outside man an unconscious will
rules in things that endows them with the possibility of becoming
real. The world's content of idea and will in their combination
constitutes its unconscious basis.
Although the world, without doubt, presents a logical structure
because of its content of ideas, it nevertheless owes its real
existence to a will that is entirely without logic and reason. Its
content is endowed with reason; that this content is a reality
is caused by unreason. The rule of unreason is manifested in the
existence of the pain by which all beings are tortured. Pain
out-balances pleasure in the world. This fact, which is to be
philosophically explained from the non-logical will element, Eduard
von Hartmann tries to establish by careful investigations of the
relation of pleasure and displeasure in the world. Whoever does not
indulge in illusions but observes the evils of the world objectively
cannot arrive at any other result than that there is much more
displeasure in the world than pleasure. From this, we must conclude
that non-being is preferable to being. Non-being, however, can be
attained only when the logical-reasonable idea annihilates being.
Hartmann, therefore, regards the world process as a gradual
destruction of the unreasonable will by the reasonable world of ideas.
It must be the highest moral task of man to contribute to this
conquest of the will. All cultural progress must aim at this final
conquest. Man is morally good if he participates in the progress of
culture, if he demands nothing for himself but selflessly devotes
himself to the great work of liberation from existence. He will
without doubt do that if he gains the insight that pain must always be
greater than pleasure and that happiness is for this reason
impossible. Only he who believes happiness to be possible can maintain
an egotistic desire for it. The pessimistic view of the preponderance
of pain over pleasure is the best remedy against egotism. Only in
surrendering to the world process can the individual find his
salvation. The true pessimist is led to act unegotistically.
What man does consciously, however, is merely the unconscious, raised
into consciousness. To the conscious contribution of human work
to the cultural progress, there corresponds an unconscious
general process consisting of a progressive emancipation of the
primordial substance of the world from will. The beginning of the
world must already have served this aim. The primordial substance had
to create the world in order to free itself gradually with the aid of
the idea from the power of the will.
Real existence is the incarnation of the godhead. The world process is
the history of the passion of the incarnate God and at the same time
the path for the redemption of the God crucified in the flesh.
Morality is the cooperating work for the shortening of this path of
passion and redemption. (Hartmann, Phenomenology of the Moral
Consciousness, 1879, Page 871.)
Hartmann elaborated his world conception in a series of comprehensive
works and in a great number of monographs and articles. These writings
contain intellectual treasures of extraordinary significance. This is
especially the case because Hartmann knew how to avoid being
tyrannized by his basic thoughts in the treatment of special problems
of science and life, and to maintain an unbiased attitude in the
contemplation of things. This is true to a particularly high degree in
his Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness in which he
presents the different kinds of human doctrines of morality in logical
order. He gives in it a kind of "natural history" of the
various moral viewpoints, from the egotistical hunt for happiness
through many intermediate stages to the selfless surrender to the
general world process through which the divine primordial substance
frees itself from the bondage of existence.
Since Hartmann accepts the idea of purpose for his world conception,
it is understandable that the mode of thinking of natural science that
rests on Darwinism appears to him as a one-sided current of ideas. To
Hartmann the idea tends in the whole of the world process toward the
aim of non-being, and the ideal content is for him purposeful also in
every specific phase. In the evolution of the organism Hartmann sees a
purpose in self-realization. The struggle for existence with its
process of natural selection is for him merely auxiliary functions of
the purposeful rule of ideas (Philosophy of the Unconscious,
10. Ed., Vol. III, Page 403).
* * *
The thought life of the nineteenth century leads, from various sides,
to a world conception that is characterized by an uncertainty of
thought and by an inner hopelessness. Richard Wahle declares
definitely that thinking is incapable of contributing anything to the
solution of "transcendent" questions, or of the highest
problems, and Eduard von Hartmann sees in all cultural work nothing
but a detour toward the final attainment of the ultimate purpose —
complete deliverance from existence. Against the currents of such
ideas, a beautiful statement was written in 1843 by the German
linguist, Wilhelm Wackernagel in his book, On the Instruction in
the Mother Tongue. Wackernagel says that doubt cannot supply the
basis for a world conception; he considers it rather as an
"injury" that offends not only the person who wants to know
something, but also the things that are to be known.
"Knowledge," he says, "begins with confidence."
Such confidence for the ideas that depend on the research methods of
natural science has been produced in modern times, but not for a
knowledge that derives its power of truth from the self-conscious ego.
The impulses that lie in the depths of the development of the
spiritual life require such a powerful will for the truth. Man's
searching soul feels instinctively that it can find satisfaction only
through such a power. The philosophical endeavor strives for such a
force, but it cannot find it in the thoughts that it is capable of
developing for a world conception. The achievements of the thought
life fail to satisfy the demands of the soul. The conceptions of
natural science derive their certainty from the observation of the
external world. Within one's soul one does not find the strength that
would guarantee the same certainty. One would like to have truths
concerning the spiritual world concerning the destiny of the soul and
its connection with the world that are gained in the same way as the
conceptions of natural science.
A thinker who derived his thoughts as much from the philosophical
thinking of the past as from his penetration of the mode of thinking
of natural science was Franz Brentano (1828 – 1912). He
demanded of philosophy that it should arrive at its results in the
same manner as natural science. Because of this imitation of the
methods of natural science, he hoped that psychology, for instance,
would not have to renounce its attempts to gain an insight into the
most important problem of soul life.
But for the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle to attain sure knowledge
concerning the continued life of our better part after the dissolution
of our body, the laws of the association of ideas, the development of
convictions and opinions and of the origin and development of pleasure
and love would be anything but a true compensation. If this new
natural scientific method of thinking would really bring about the
elimination of the problem of immortality, this would have to be
considered as significant for psychology.
This is Brentano's statement in his Psychology from the Empirical
Standpoint, (1870, page 20).
Symptomatic of the weakness of a psychology that intends to follow the
method of natural science entirely is the fact that such a serious
seeker after truth as Franz Brentano did not write a second volume of
his psychology that would really have taken up the highest problems
after the first volume that dealt only with questions that had to be
considered as "anything but a compensation for these highest
questions of the soul life." The thinkers of that time lacked the
inner strength and elasticity of mind that could do real justice to
the demand of modern times. Greek thought mastered the conception of
nature and the conception of the soul life in a way that allowed both
to be combined into one total picture. Subsequently, human thought
life developed independently of and separated from nature, within the
depths of the soul life, and modern natural science supplied a picture
of nature. From this fact the necessity arose to find a conception of
the soul life within the self-conscious ego that would prove strong
enough to hold its own in conjunction with the image of nature in a
general world picture. For this purpose, it is necessary to find a
point of support within the soul itself that carried as surely as the
results of natural scientific research. Spinoza believed he had found
it by modeling his world conception after the mathematical method;
Kant relinquished the knowledge of the world of things in themselves
and attempted to gain ideas that were to supply, through their moral
weight, to be sure, not knowledge, but a certain belief.
Thus we observe in these searching philosophers a striving to anchor
the soul life in a total structure of the world. But what is still
lacking is the strength and elasticity of thought that would form the
conceptions concerning the soul life in a way to promise a solution
for the problems of the soul. Uncertainty concerning the true
significance of man's soul experiences arises everywhere. Natural
science in Haeckel's sense follows the natural processes that are
perceptible to the senses and it sees the life of the soul only as a
higher stage of such natural processes. Other thinkers find that we
have in everything the soul perceives only the effects of extra-human
processes that are both unknown and unknowable. For these thinkers,
the world becomes an "illusion," although an illusion that
is caused by natural necessity through the human organization.
As long as the art of looking around corners has not been invented,
that is, to conceive without conceptions, the proud self-restrictions
of Kant, that we can know of reality only that it is, not
what it is, will have to be acknowledged as the final decision.
This is the judgment of Robert Zimmermann, a philosopher of the second
half of the nineteenth century. For such a world conception the human
soul, which cannot have any knowledge of its own nature of
"what it is," sails into an ocean of conceptions
without becoming aware of its ability to find something in this vast
ocean that could open vistas into the nature of existence. Hegel had
been of the opinion that he perceived in thinking itself the inner
force of life that leads man's ego to reality. For the time that
followed, "mere thinking" became a lightly woven texture of
imaginations containing nothing of the nature of true being. When, in
the search for truth, an opinion ventures to put the emphasis on
thinking, the suggested thoughts have a ring of inner uncertainty, as
can be seen in this statement of Gideon Spicker: "That thinking
in itself is correct, we can never know for sure, neither empirically
nor logically . . ." (Lessing's Weltanschauung, 1883, page
5).
In a most persuasive form, Philipp Mainländer (1841 – 1876) gave
expression to this lack of confidence in existence in his
Philosophy of Redemption. Mainländer sees himself confronted by
the world picture toward which modern natural science tends so
strongly. But it is in vain that he seeks for a possibility to anchor
the self-conscious ego in a spiritual world. He cannot achieve through
this self-conscious ego what had first been realized by Goethe,
namely, to feel in the soul the resurrection of an inner living
reality that experiences itself as spiritually alive in a living
spiritual element behind a mere external nature. It is for this reason
that the world appears to Mainländer without spirit. Since he can
think of the world only as having originated from the spirit, he must
consider it as a remainder of a past spiritual life. Statements like
the following are striking:
Now we have the right to give to this being the well-known name that
always designates what no power of imagination, no flight of the
boldest fantasy, no abstract thinking however profound, no intently
devout heart, no enraptured and transported spirit ever attained:
God. But this simple oneness is of the past; it is no
longer. In a transformation of its nature, it has dispersed itself
into a world of diversity. (Compare Max Seiling's essay,
Mainländer.)
If, in the existing world, we find only reality without value or
merely the ruins of value, then the aim of the world can only be its
destruction. Man can see his task only in a contribution to this
annihilation. (Mainländer ended his life by suicide.) According to
Mainländer, God created the world only in order to free himself from
the torture of his own existence. "The world is the means for the
purpose of non-being, and it is the only possible means for this
purpose. God knew that he could change from a state of super-reality
into non-being only through the development of a real world of
multiformity. (Philosophic der Erlösung)
This view, which springs from mistrust in the world, was vigorously
opposed by the poet, Robert Hamerling (1830 – 89) in his posthumously
published philosophical work, Atomism of Will. He rejects
logical inquiries concerning the value or worthlessness of the world
and starts from an original inner experience:
Almost all men with very few exceptions want to live at any price, no
matter whether they are happy or unhappy. The main thing is not
whether they are right in wanting this, but that they
want this; this is simply undeniable. Yet the doctrinarian pessimists
do not consider this decisive fact. They only balance, in learned
reflections, pleasure and pain as life brings them in its particular
instances. Since pleasure and pain are matters of feeling, it is
feeling and not intellect that is decisive in striking the balance of
pleasure and pain. This balance is actually to be found in all
humanity, one can even say in everything that has life, and is in
favor of the pleasure of existence. That everything alive wants to
live and wants this under all circumstances, wants to live at any
price, is the great fact against which all doctrinarian talk is
powerless.
Hamerling then contemplates the thought: There is something in the
depth of the soul that clings to existence, expressing the nature of
the soul with more truth than the judgments that are encumbered by the
mode of conception of modern natural science as they speak of the
value of life. One could say that Hamerling feels a spiritual point of
gravity in the depth of the soul that anchors the self-conscious ego
in the living and moving world. He is, therefore, inclined to see in
this ego something that guarantees its existence more than the thought
structures of the philosophers. He finds a main defect in modern world
conception in the opinion "that there is too much sophistry in
the most recent philosophy directed against the ego," and he
would like to explain this "from the fear of the soul, of
a special soul-entity or even a thing-like conception of a soul."
Hamerling points significantly to the really important question,
"The ideas of the ego are interwoven with the elements of
feeling. . . . What the spirit has not experienced, it is also
incapable of thinking. . . ." For Hamerling, all higher world
conception hinges on the necessity of feeling the act of thinking
itself, of experiencing it inwardly. The possibility of penetrating
into those soul-depths in which the living conceptions can be attained
that lead to a knowledge of the soul entity through the inner strength
of the self-conscious ego is, according to Hamerling, barred by a
layer of concepts that originated in the course of the development of
modern world conception, and change the world picture into a mere
ocean of ideas. He introduces his philosophy, therefore, with the
following words:
Certain stimuli produce odors within our organ of smell. Thus, the
rose has no fragrance if nobody smells it. Certain air vibrations
produce sounds in the ear. Sound then does not exist without an ear. A
gunshot would not ring out if nobody heard it.
Such conceptions have in the course of modern thought development
become so definite a part of thinking that Hamerling added to the
quoted exposition the words:
If this, dear reader, does not seem plausible to you, if your mind
stirs like a shy horse when it is confronted with this fact, do not
bother to read another line; leave this book and all others that deal
with philosophical things unread, for you lack the ability that is
necessary for this purpose, that is, to apprehend a fact without bias
and to adhere to it in your thoughts. (Atomism of Will)
Hamerling's last poetic effort was his Homunculus. In this work
he intended to present a criticism of modern civilization. He
portrayed in a radical way in a series of pictures what a humanity is
drifting to that has become soulless and believes only in the power of
external natural laws. As the poet of Homunculus, he knows no
limit to his criticism of everything in this civilization that is
caused by this false belief. As a thinker, however, Hamerling
nevertheless capitulates in the full sense of the word to the mode of
conception described in this book in the chapter, "The World as
Illusion." He does not hesitate to use words like the following.
The extended spatial corporeal world as such exists only insofar as we
perceive it. Anyone who adheres to this principle will understand what
a naive error it is to believe that there is, in addition to the
impression (Vorstellung) that we call "horse"
still another horse, which is actually the real horse and of which
our inner impression is only a kind of copy. Outside of myself, let it
be said again, there is only the sum total of those conditions that
produce within my senses an idea (Anschauung) that I call
horse.
With respect to the soul life, Hamerling feels as if nothing of the
world's own nature could ever penetrate into the ocean of its thought
pictures. But he has a feeling for the process that goes on in the
depths of modern soul development. He feels that the knowledge of
modern man must vigorously light up with its own power of truth within
the self-conscious ego, as it had manifested itself in the perceived
thought of the Greeks. Again and again he probes his way toward the
point where the self-conscious ego feels itself endowed with the
strength of its true being that is at the same time aware of standing
within the spiritual life of the world. But he only senses this and
thus fails to arrive at any further revelation. So he clings to the
feeling of existence that pulsates within his soul and that seems to
him more substantial, more saturated with reality than the mere
conceptions of the ego, the mere thought of the ego. "From the
awareness or feeling of our own being we gain a concept of
being that goes far beyond the status of being merely an object of
thought. We gain the concept of a being that not merely is
thought, but thinks."
Starting from this ego that apprehends itself in its feeling of
existence, Hamerling attempts to gain a world picture. What the ego
experiences in its feeling of existence is, according to him,
"the atom-feeling within us" (Atomgefühl). The ego
knows of itself, and it knows itself as an "atom" in
comparison with the world. It must imagine other beings as it finds
itself in itself: as atoms that experience and feel themselves. For
Hamerling, this seems to be synonymous with atoms of will, with
will-endowed monads. For Hamerling's Atomism of Will,
the world becomes a multitude of will-endowed monads, and the
human soul is one of the will-monads. The thinker of such a world
picture looks around himself and sees the world as spiritual, to be
sure, but all he can discover of the spirit is a manifestation of the
will. He can say nothing more about it. This world picture reveals
nothing that would answer the questions concerning the human soul's
position in the evolutionary process of the world, for whether one
considers the soul as what it appears before all philosophical
thinking, or whether one characterizes it according to this thinking
as a monad of will, it is necessary to raise the same enigmatic
questions with regard to both soul-conceptions. If one thought like
Brentano, one could say, "For the hopes of a Plato and
Aristotle to attain sure knowledge concerning the continued life of
our better part after the dissolution of our body, the knowledge that
the soul is a monad of will among other monads of will is anything but
a true compensation."
In many currents of modern philosophical life one notices the
instinctive tendency (living in the subconsciousness of the thinkers)
to find in the self-conscious ego a force that is unlike that of
Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz and others. One seeks a force through
which this ego, the core of the human soul can be so conceived that
man's position in the course and the evolution of the world can become
revealed. At the same time, these philosophical currents show that the
means used in order to find such a force have not enough intensity in
order to fulfill "the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle" (in
Brentano's sense) to do justice to the modern demands of the soul. One
succeeds in developing opinions, for instance, concerning the possible
relation of our perceptions to the things outside, or concerning the
development and association of ideas, of the genesis of memory, and of
the relation of feeling and will to imagination and perception. But
through one's own mode of conception one locks the doors to questions
that are concerned with the "hopes of Plato and Aristotle."
It is believed that through everything that could be thought with
regard to these "hopes," the demands of a strictly
scientific procedure would be offended that have been set as standards
by the mode of thinking of natural science.
The ideas of the philosophical thought picture of Wilhelm Wundt (1832
– 1920) aim no higher than their natural scientific basis permits. For
Wundt, philosophy is "the general knowledge that has been
produced by the special sciences" Wundt, System of
Philosophy). By the methods of such a philosophy it is only
possible to continue the lines of thought created by the special
sciences, to combine them, and to put them into a clearly arranged
order. This Wundt does, and thus he allows the general form of his
ideas to become entirely dependent on the habits of conception that
develop in a thinker who, like Wundt, is acquainted with the special
sciences, that is, a person who has been active in some particular
field of knowledge such as the psychophysical aspect of psychology.
Wundt looks at the world picture that the human soul produces through
sense experience and at the conceptions that are experienced in the
soul under the influence of this world picture. The scientific method
considers sense perceptions as effects of processes outside man. For
Wundt, this mode of conception is, in a certain sense, an unquestioned
matter of course. He considers as external reality, therefore, what is
inferred conceptually on the basis of sense perceptions. This external
reality as such is not inwardly experienced; it is assumed by the soul
in the same way that a process is assumed to exist outside man that
effects the eye, causing, through its activity, the sensation of
light. Contrary to this process, the processes in the soul are
immediately experienced. Here our knowledge is in no need of
conclusions but needs only observations concerning the
formation and connection of our ideas and their relation to our
feelings and will impulses. In these observations we deal only with
soul activities that are apparent in the stream of consciousness, and
we have no right to speak of a special soul that is manifested in this
stream of consciousness. To assume matter to be the basis of the
natural phenomena is justifiable for, from sense perceptions, one must
conclude, by means of concepts, that there are material processes. It
is not possible in the same sense to infer a soul from the psychic
processes.
The auxiliary concept of matter is . . . bound to the indirect or
conceptual nature of all natural science. It is impossible to conceive
how the direct and intuitive inner experience should demand such an
auxiliary concept as well. . . . (Wundt, System of Philosophy).
In this way, the question of the nature of the soul is, for Wundt, a
problem to which in the last analysis neither the observation of the
inner experience nor any conclusions from these experiences can lead.
Wundt does not observe a soul; he perceives only psychical activity.
This psychical activity is so manifested that whenever it appears, a
parallel physical process takes place at the same time. Both
phenomena, the psychical activity and the physical process, are parts
of one reality: they are in the last analysis the same thing; only man
separates them in his observation. Wundt is of the opinion that a
scientific experience can recognize only such spiritual processes as
are bound to physical processes. For him, the self-conscious ego
dissolves into the psychical organism of the spiritual processes that
are to him identical with the physical processes, except that these
appear as spiritual-psychical when they are seen from within.
But if the ego tries to find what it can consider as characteristic
for its own nature, it discovers its will-activity. Only by its
will does it distinguish itself as a self-dependent entity from
the rest of the world. The ego thus sees itself induced to acknowledge
in will the fundamental character of being. Considering its own
nature, the ego admits that it may assume will-activity as the source
of the world. The inner nature of the things that man observes
in the external world remains concealed behind the observation. In his
own being he recognizes the will as the essence and may conclude that
what meets his will from the external world is of a nature homogeneous
with his will. As the will activities of the world meet and affect one
another, they produce in one another the ideas, the inner life of the
units of will. This all goes to show how Wundt is driven by the
fundamental impulse of the self-conscious ego. He goes down into man's
own entity until he meets the ego that manifests itself as will and,
taking his stand within the will-entity of the ego, he feels justified
to attribute to the entire world the same entity that the soul
experiences within itself. In this world of will, also, nothing
answers the "hopes of Plato and Aristotle."
Hamerling approaches the riddles of the world and of the soul as a man
of the nineteenth century whose disposition of mind is enlivened by
the spiritual impulses that are at work in his time. He feels these
spiritual impulses in his free and deeply human being to which it is
only natural to ask questions concerning the riddle of human
existence, just as it is natural for ordinary man to feel hunger and
thirst. Concerning his relation to philosophy, he says:
I felt myself above all as a human being, as a whole and full human
being, and it was thus that the great problems of existence and life
were my most intimate spiritual interest. I did not turn suddenly
toward philosophy. It was not that I accidentally developed an
inclination in that direction, nor because I wanted to try myself out
in a new field. I have been occupied with the great problems of human
knowledge from my early youth through the natural and irresistible
bent that drives man in general to the inquiry of the truth and to the
solution of the riddles of existence. Nor could I ever regard
philosophy as a special science, which one could take up or neglect as
one would statistics or forestry. But I always considered it to be the
investigation of questions of the most intimate, the most important
and the most interesting human concern. (Atomism of Will)
In the course that his philosophical investigations take, Hamerling
becomes affected by forces of thought that had, in Kant, deprived
knowledge of the power to penetrate to the root of existence and that
led during the nineteenth century to the opinion that the world was an
illusion of our mind. Hamerling did not surrender unconditionally to
this influence but it does encumber his view. He searched within the
self-conscious ego for a point of gravity in which reality was to be
experienced and he believed he had found this point in the will.
Thinking was not felt by Hamerling as it had been experienced in
Hegel. Hamerling saw it only as "mere thinking" that is
powerless to seize upon reality. In this way, Hamerling appraised the
will in which he believed he experienced the force of being.
Strengthened by the will apprehended in the ego as a real force, he
meant to plunge into a world of will-monads.
Hamerling starts from an experience of the world riddles, which he
feels as vividly and as directly as a hunger of the soul. Wundt
is driven to these questions by the results to be found in the broad
field of the special sciences of modern times. In the manner in which
he raises his questions on the basis of these sciences, we feel the
specific power and the intellectual disposition of these sciences. His
answers to these problems are, as in Hamerling, much influenced by the
directing forces of modern thought that deprive this form of thinking
of the possibility to feel itself within the wellspring of reality. It
is for this reason that Wundt's world picture becomes a "mere
ideal survey" of the nature picture of the modern mode of
conception. For Wundt also, it is only the will in the human
soul that proves to be the element that cannot be entirely deprived of
all being through the impotence of thinking. The will so obtrudes
itself into the world conception that it seems to reveal its
omnipotence in the whole circumference of existence.
In Hamerling and Wundt two personalities emerge in the course of the
development of philosophy who are motivated by forces that attempt to
master by thought the world riddles with which the human soul finds
itself confronted through its own experience as well as through the
results of science. But in both personalities these forces have the
effect of finding within themselves nothing that would allow the
self-conscious ego to feel itself within the source of reality. These
forces rather reach a point where they can no longer uphold the
contact with the great riddles of the universe. What they cling to is
the will, but from this world of will nothing can be learned that
would assure us of the "continued life of our better part after
the dissolution of the body," or that would even touch on the
riddles of the soul and the world. Such world conceptions originate
from the natural irrepressible bent "that drives man in general
to the investigation of the truth and to the solution of the riddles
of existence." Since they use the means that, according to the
opinion of certain temporary tendencies, appear as the only
justifiable ones, they arrive at a mode of conception that contains no
elements of experience to bring about the solution.
It is apparent that man sees himself at a given time confronted with
the problems of the world in a definite form; he feels instinctively
what he has to do. It is his responsibility to find the means for the
answer. In using these means he may not be equal to the challenge
presenting itself from the depths of the spiritual evolution.
Philosophies that work under such conditions represent a struggle
for an aim of which they are not quite consciously aware. The aim
of the evolution of the modern world conception is to experience
something within the self-conscious ego that gives being and reality
to the ideas of the world picture. The characterized philosophical
trends prove powerless to attain such life and such reality. Thought
no longer gives to the ego or the self-conscious soul, the inner
support that insures existence. This ego has moved too far away from
the ground of nature to believe in such a guarantee as was once
possible in ancient Greece. It has not as yet brought to life within
itself what this ground of nature once supplied without demanding a
spontaneous creativity of the soul.
∴
VII. Modern Man and His World Conception
The Austrian thinker, Bartholomaeus Carneri (1871 – 1909) attempted to
open wide perspectives of world conception and ethics on the ground of
Darwinism. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of
Species, he published his work, Morality and Darwinism
(1871), in which he used the new world of ideas as the basis of an
ethical world conception in a comprehensive way. (Compare his books,
Foundation of Ethics, 1881, Man as His Own Purpose,
1878, and Modern Man, Essays on Life Conduct, 1891.)
Carneri tries to find in the picture of nature the elements through
which self-conscious ego is conceivable within this picture. He would
like to think this world picture so wide and so comprehensive as to
contain the human soul within its scope. He aims at the reunion of the
ego with the mother ground of nature, from which it has become
separated. He represents in his world conception the opposite tendency
to the philosophy for which the world becomes an illusion of the
imagination and which, for that reason, renounces all connection with
the reality of the world so far as knowledge is concerned.
Carneri rejects all moral philosophy that intends to proclaim for man
other moral commandments than those that result from his own nature.
We must remember that man is not to be understood as a special being
beside all other things of nature but that he is a being that has
gradually developed from lower entities according to purely natural
laws. Carneri is convinced that all life is like a chemical process.
"The digestion in man is such a process as well as the nutrition
of the plant." At the same time, he emphasizes that the chemical
process must be raised to a higher form of evolution if it is to
become plant or animal.
Life is a chemical process of a special kind; it is the individualized
chemical process, for the chemical process can reach a point where it
can maintain itself without certain conditions . . . that it formerly
needed.
It is apparent that Carneri observes that lower processes are
transformed into higher ones, that matter takes on higher forms of
existence through the perfection of its functions.
As matter, we conceive the substance insofar as the properties that
result from its divisibility and its motion effect our senses
physically, that is to say, as mass. If this division or
differentiation goes so far as to produce phenomena that are no longer
sensually perceptible but only perceptible to our thinking, we say the
effect of the substance is spiritual.
Also, morality does not exist as a special form of reality; it is a
process of nature on a higher level. Therefore, the question cannot be
raised: What is man to do to comply with some special moral
commandment that is valid for him? We can only ask: What appears as
morality when the lower processes develop into the higher spiritual
ones?
While moral philosophy proclaims certain moral laws and commands that
they are to be kept so that man may be what he ought to be, our ethics
develops man as he is. It wants to do no more than to show him what he
may at some time become. While the former moralizing philosophy knows
of duties to be enforced by punishments, our ethics uphold an ideal
from which any compulsion would merely distract because it can be
approached only on the path of knowledge and of freedom.
As the chemical process individualizes itself into a living being on a
higher level, so on a still higher level life is transformed into
self-consciousness. The entity that has become self-conscious no
longer merely looks out into nature; it looks back into itself.
The awakened self-consciousness constituted, if conceived
dualistically, a break with nature, and man felt himself separated
from nature. This breach existed only for him, but for him it was
complete. It had not developed as suddenly as it is taught in Genesis,
just as the days of creation must not be taken literally as days. But
with the completion of self-consciousness, the breach was a fact and
with the feeling of boundless lonesomeness that overcame man in this
state, his ethical development began.
Up to a certain point nature leads life. At this point,
self-consciousness arises, man comes into existence. "His further
development is his own work and what keeps him on the course of
progress is the power and the gradual clarification of his
wishes." Nature takes care of a11 other beings, but it endows man
with desires and expects him to take care of their fulfillment. Man
has within himself the impulse to arrange his existence in agreement
with his wishes. This impulse is his desire for happiness:
This impulse is unknown to the animal. It knows only the instinct for
self-preservation; to develop that instinct into the desire for
happiness, the human self-consciousness is necessary as a fundamental
condition.
The striving for happiness is the basis of all action:
The martyr who sacrifices his life, be it for his scientific
conviction or for his belief in God, aims for nothing but his
happiness. He finds it in the first case in his loyalty of conviction,
and in the second case he expects it in a better world. To everyone
happiness is the last aim and no matter how different the picture may
be that the individual has of this happiness, it is to every sentient
living being the beginning and the end of all his thinking and
feeling.
As nature gives man only the need for happiness, this image of
happiness must have its origin within man himself. Man creates for
himself the pictures of his happiness. They spring from his ethical
fantasy. Carneri finds in this fantasy the new concept that prescribes
the ideals of our action to our thinking. The "good" is, for
Carneri, "identical with progressive evolution, and since
evolution is pleasure . . . happiness not merely constituted the aim
but also the moving element that drives toward that aim."
Carneri attempted to find the way that leads from the natural order to
the sources of morality. He believed he had found the ideal power that
propels the ethical world order as spontaneously from one moral event
to the next as the material forces on the physical level develop
formation after formation and fact after fact.
Carneri's mode of conception is entirely in agreement with the idea of
evolution that does not permit the notion that a later phase of
development is already pre-formed in an earlier one, but considers it
as a really new formation. The chemical process does not contain
implicitly animal life, and happiness develops as an entirely new
element on the ground of the animal's instinct for self-preservation.
The difficulty that lies in this thought caused a penetrating thinker,
W. H. Rolph, to develop the line of reasoning that he set down in his
book, Biological Problems, an Attempt at the Development of a
Rational Ethics (1884). Rolph asks himself, "What is the
reason that a form of life does not remain at a given stage but
develops progressively and becomes more perfect?" This problem
presents no difficulty for a thinker who maintains that the later form
is already implicitly contained in the earlier one. For him, it is
quite clear that what is at first implicit will become explicit at a
certain time. But Rolph was not willing to accept this answer. On the
other hand, however, he was also not satisfied with the "struggle
for existence" as a solution of the problem. If a living being
fights only for the satisfaction of its necessary needs, it will, to
be sure, overpower its weaker competitors, but it will itself remain
what it is. If one does not want to attribute a mysterious, mystical
tendency toward perfection to this being, one must seek the cause of
this perfection in external, natural circumstances. Rolph tries to
give an explanation by stating that, whenever possible, every being
satisfies its needs to a greater extent than is necessary.
Only by introducing the idea of insatiability does the Darwinian
principle of perfection in the struggle for life become acceptable,
for it is only thus that we have an explanation for the fact that the
creature acquires, whenever it can do so, more than it needs for
maintaining its status quo, and that it grows excessively whenever the
occasion is given for it. (Biological Problems)
What takes place in this realm of living beings is, in Rolph's
opinion, not a struggle for acquisition of the necessary means of life
but a "struggle for surplus acquisition." "While
the Darwinist knows of no life struggle as long as the existence of
the creature is not threatened, I consider this struggle as ever
present. It is simply primarily a struggle for life, a struggle for
the increase of life, not a struggle for existence." Rolph draws
from these natural scientific presuppositions the conclusions for his
ethics:
Expansion of life, not its mere preservation, struggle for advantage,
not for existence, is the rallying cry. The mere acquisition of life's
necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained
is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and
striving for continuous improvement of the condition of life is the
characteristic impulse of animal and man. (Biological Problems)
Rolph's thoughts stimulated Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
to produce his own ideas of evolution after having gone through other
phases of his soul life. At the beginning of his career as an author,
the idea of evolution and natural science in general had been far from
his thoughts. He was at first deeply impressed by the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer, and from him he adopted the conception of pain as
lying at the bottom of all existence. Unlike Schopenhauer and Eduard
van Hartmann, Nietzsche did not seek the redemption from this pain in
the fulfillment of moral tasks. It was his belief rather that the
transformation of life into a work of art that leads beyond the pain
of existence. Thus, the Greeks created a world of beauty and
appearance in order to make this painful existence bearable. In
Richard Wagner's musical drama he believed he found a world in which
beauty lifts man beyond pain. It was in a certain sense a world of
illusion that was quite consciously sought by Nietzsche in order to
overcome the misery of the world. He was of the opinion that, at the
root of the oldest Greek culture, there had been the will of man to
forget the real world through a state of intoxication.
Singing and dancing man manifests himself as a member of a higher
community. He has forgotten to walk and to speak and, in his dance, he
is about to fly up into the air. (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)
With these words Nietzsche describes and explains the cult of the
ancient worshippers of Dionysos, in which he saw the root of all art.
Nietzsche maintained of Socrates that he had overpowered this
Dionysian impulse by placing reason as judge over them. The statement,
"Virtue is teachable," meant, according to Nietzsche, the
end of a comprehensive, impulsive culture and the beginning of a much
feebler phase dominated by thinking. Such an idea arose in Nietzsche
under the influence of Schopenhauer, who placed the untamed, restless
will higher than the systematizing thought life, and under the
influence of Richard Wagner who, both as a man and as an artist,
followed Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche was, by his own inclination, also
a contemplative nature. After having surrendered for awhile to the
idea of the redemption of the world through beauty as mere appearance,
he felt this conception as a foreign element to his own nature,
something that had been implanted in him through the influence of
Richard Wagner, with whom he had been connected by friendship.
Nietzsche tried to free himself from this trend of ideas and to come
to terms with a conception of reality that was more in agreement with
his own nature. The fundamental trait of his character compelled him
to experience the ideas and impulses of the development of a modern
world conception as a direct personal fate. Other thinkers formed
pictures of a world conception and the process of this formative
description constituted their philosophic activity. Nietzsche is
confronted with the world conceptions of the second half of the
nineteenth century, and it becomes his destiny to experience
personally all the delight but also all the sorrows that these world
conceptions can cause if they affect the very substance of the human
soul. Not only theoretically but with his entire individuality at
stake, Nietzsche's philosophical life developed in such a way that
representative world conceptions of modern times would completely take
hold of him, forcing him to work himself through to his own solutions
in the most personal experiences of life.
How can one live if one must think that the world is as
Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner imagine it to be? This became the
disturbing riddle for him. It was not, however, a riddle for which
he sought a solution by means of thinking and knowledge. He had to
experience the solution of this problem with every fibre of his
nature. Others think philosophy; Nietzsche had to live
philosophy. The modern life of world conception becomes completely
personal in Nietzsche. When an observer meets the philosophies of
other thinkers, he feels inclined to judge; this is one-sided, that
is incorrect, etc. With Nietzsche such an observer finds himself
confronted with a ,world conception within the life of a human being,
and he sees that one idea makes this human being healthy while another
makes him ill. For this reason, Nietzsche becomes more and more a poet
as he presents his picture of world and life. It is also for this
reason that a reader who cannot agree with Nietzsche's presentation
insofar as his philosophy is concerned, can still admire it because
of its poetic power.
What an entirely different tone comes into the modern history of
philosophy through Nietzsche as compared to Hamerling, Wundt and even
Schopenhauer! These thinkers search contemplatively for the ground of
existence and they arrive at the will, which they find in the depths
of the human soul. In Nietzsche this will is alive. He absorbs the
philosophical ideas, sets them aglow with his ardent will-nature and
then makes something entirely new out of them: A life through which
will-inspired ideas and idea-illumined will pulsate. This happens in
Nietzsche's first creative period, which began with his Birth of
Tragedy (1870), and had its full expression in his four
Untimely Meditations: David Strauss Confessor and Author; On the
Use and Disadvantage of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator;
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In the second phase of his life, it
was Nietzsche's destiny to experience deeply what a life and world
conception based exclusively on the thought habits of natural science
can be to the human soul. This period is expressed in his works,
Human, All Too Human (1878), The Dawn of Day (1881), and
Gay Science (1882).
Now the ideals that inspired Nietzsche in his first period have
cooled; they appear to him as bubbles of thought. His soul now wants
to gain strength, to be invigorated in its feeling by the
"reality" of the content that can be derived from the mode
of conception of natural science. But Nietzsche's soul is full of
life; the vigor of this inner life strives beyond anything that it
could owe to the contemplative observation of nature. The
contemplation of nature shows that the animal becomes man. As the soul
feels its inner power of life, the conception arises: The animal bore
man in itself; must not man bear within himself a higher being, the
superman? Nietzsche's soul experiences in itself the superman
wresting himself free from man. His soul revels in lifting the modern
idea of evolution that was based on the world of the senses to the
realm that the senses do not perceive, a realm that is felt when the
soul experiences the meaning of evolution within itself. "The
mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not
sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power
and influence. The search and striving for a continuous improvement of
the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and
man." This conviction, which in Rolph was the result of
contemplative observation, becomes in Nietzsche an inner experience,
expressed in a grandiose hymn of philosophic vision. The knowledge
that represents the external world is insufficient to him; it must
become inwardly increasingly fruitful. Self-observation is poverty. A
creation of a new inner life that outshines everything so far in
existence, everything man is already, arises in Nietzsche's soul. In
man, the superman is born for the first time as the meaning of
existence. Knowledge itself grows beyond what it formerly had been; it
becomes a creative power. As man creates, he takes his stand in
the midst of the meaning of life. With lyrical ardor Nietzsche
expresses in his Zarathustra (1884) the bliss that his soul
experiences in creating "superman" out of man. A knowledge
that feels itself as creative perceives more in the ego of man than
can be lived through in a single course of life; it contains more than
can be exhausted in such a single life. It will again and again return
to a new life. In this way the idea of "eternal recurrence"
of the human soul thrusts itself on Nietzsche to join his idea of
"superman."
Rolph's idea of the "enhancement of life" grows in Nietzsche
into the conception of the "Will to Power," which he
attributes to all being and life in the world of animal and of man.
This "Will to Power" sees in life "an appropriation,
violation, overpowering of the alien and weaker being, its annexation
or at least, in the mildest case, its exploitation." In his book,
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche sang his hymn of praise to
his faith in the reality and the development of man into
"superman." In his unfinished work, Will to Power,
Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values, he wanted to reshape all
conceptions from the viewpoint that no other will in man held higher
sway than the will for power.
The striving for knowledge becomes in Nietzsche a real force that
comes to life in the soul of man. As Nietzsche feels this animation
within himself, life assumes in him such an importance that he places
it above all knowledge and truth that has not been stirred into life.
This again led him to renounce all truth and to seek in the will for
power a substitute for the will for truth. He no longer asks, "Is
what we know true?" but rather, "Is it sustaining and
furthering life?"
"What matters in all philosophizing is never ‘the truth’ but
something entirely different, let us call it health, the future,
power, life . . ." What man really strives for is always power;
he only indulged himself in the illusion that he wanted
"truth." He confused the means with the end. Truth is merely
a means for the purpose. "The fact that a judgment is wrong is no
objection to it." What is important is not whether a judgment is
true or not, but "the question to what degree it advances and
preserves life, preserves a race, perhaps even breeds a race."
"Most thinking of a philosopher is done secretly by his instincts
and thus forced into certain channels." Nietzsche's world
conception is the expression of a personal feeling as an individual
experience and destiny.
In Goethe the deep impulse of modern philosophical life became
apparent; he felt the idea come to life within the self-conscious ego
so that with this enlivened idea this ego can know itself in the core
of the world. In Nietzsche the desire exists to let man develop his
life beyond himself; he feels that then the meaning of life must be
revealed in what is inwardly self-created being, but he does not
penetrate essentially to what man creates beyond himself as the
meaning of life. He sings a grandiose hymn of praise to the superman,
but he does not form his picture; he feels his growing reality
but he does not see him. Nietzsche speaks of an "eternal
recurrence," but he does not describe what it is that recurs. He
speaks of raising the form of life through the will to power, but
where is the description of the heightened form of life? Nietzsche
speaks of something that must be there in the realm of the unknown,
but he does not succeed in going further than pointing at the unknown.
The forces that are unfolded in the self-conscious ego are also not
sufficiently strong in Nietzsche to outline distinctly a reality that
he knows as weaving and breathing in human nature.
We have a contrast to Nietzsche's world conception in the
materialistic conception of history and life that was given its most
pregnant expression by Karl Marx (1818 – 83). Marx denied that
the idea had any share in historical evolution. For him, the real
factors of life constituted the actual basis of this evolution, and
from them are derived opinions concerning the world that men have been
able to form according to the various situations of life in which they
find themselves. The man who is working physically and under the power
of somebody else has a world conception that differs from that of the
intellectual worker. An age that replaces an older economic form with
a new one brings also different conceptions of life to the surface of
history. If one wants to understand a historical age, one must, for
its explanation, go back to its social conditions and its economic
processes. All political and cultural currents are only
surface-reflectings of these deeper processes. They are essentially
ideal effects of real facts, but they have no share in those facts. A
world conception, therefore, that is caused by ideal factors can have
no share in the progressive evolution of our present conduct of life.
It is rather our task to take up the real conflicts of life at the
point at which they have arrived, and to continue their development in
the same direction.
This conception evolved from a materialistic reversal of Hegelianism.
In Hegel, the ideas are in a continuous progress of evolution and the
results of this evolution are the actual events of life. What Auguste
Comte derived from natural scientific conceptions as a conception of
society based on the actual events of life, Karl Marx wants to attain
from the direct observation of the economic evolution. Marxism is the
boldest form of an intellectual current that starts from the
historical phenomena as they appear to external observation, in order
to understand the spiritual life and the entire cultural development
of man. This is modern "sociology." It in no way accepts man
as an individual but rather as a member of social evolution. Man's
conceptions, knowledge, action and feeling are all considered to be
the result of social powers under the influence of which the
individual stands.
Hippolyte Taine (1828 – 93) calls the sum total of the forces
determining every cultural event the "milieu." Every work of
art, every institution, every action is to be explained from preceding
and simultaneous circumstances. If we know the race, the milieu and the
moment through and in which a human achievement comes into being, we
have explained this work. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 – 65),
in his System of Acquired Rights (1861), showed how conditions
of rights and laws, such as property, contract, family, inheritance,
etc., arise and develop. The mode of conception of the Romans created a
kind of law that differed from that of the Germans. In none of these
thoughts is the question raised as to what arises in the human individual,
what does he produce through his own inner nature? The question that
is always asked is: What are the causes in the general social conditions
for the life of the individual? One can observe in this thought tendency
an opposite inclination to the one prevailing at the beginning of the
nineteenth century with regard to the question of man's relation to the
world. It was then customary to ask: What rights can man claim through
his own nature (natural rights), or in what way does man obtain knowledge
in accordance with his own power of reason as an individual? The
sociological trend of thought, however, asks: What are the legal and
intellectual concepts that the various social groupings cause to arise
in the individual?
The fact that I form certain conceptions concerning things does not
depend on my power of reasoning but is the result of the historical
development that produced me. In Marxism the self-conscious ego is
entirely deprived of its own nature; it finds itself drifting in the
ocean of facts. These facts develop according to the laws of natural
science and of social conditions. In this world conception the
impotence of modern philosophy with regard to the human soul
approaches a maximum. The "ego," the self-conscious human
soul, wants to find in itself the entity through which it can assert
its own significance within the existence of the world, but it is
unwilling to dive into its own depths. It is afraid it will not
find in its own depths the support of its own existence and essence.
It wants to derive its own being from an entity that lies outside
its own domain. To do this, the ego follows the thought habits
developed in modern times under the influence of natural science, and
turns either to the world of material events or to that of social
evolution. It believes it understands its own nature in the totality
of life if it can say to itself, "I am, in a certain way,
conditioned by these events, by this evolution."
Such philosophical tendencies show that there are forces at work in
the souls of which they are dimly aware, but which cannot at first be
satisfied by the modern habits of thought and research. Concealed from
consciousness, spiritual life works in human souls. It drives these
souls to go so deep into the self-conscious ego that this ego can find
in its depths what leads to the source of world existence. In this
source the human soul feels its kinship with a world entity that is
not manifested in the mere phenomena and entities of nature.
With respect to these phenomena and entities modern times have arrived
at an ideal of research with which the scientist feels secure in his
endeavor. One would now also like to feel this security in the
investigation of the nature of the human soul. It has been shown above
that, in leading thinkers, the striving for such security resulted in
world pictures that no longer contain any elements from which
satisfactory conceptions of the human soul could be derived. The
attempt is made to treat philosophy according to the method of natural
science, but in the process of this treatment the meaning of the
philosophical question itself is lost. The task with which the human
soul is charged from the very depth of its nature goes far beyond
anything that the thinkers are willing to recognize as safe methods of
investigation according to the modern habits of thought.
In appraising the situation of the development of modern world
conception thus characterized, one finds as the most outstanding
feature the pressure that the mode of thought of natural
science has exerted on the minds of people ever since it attained its
full stature. One recognizes as the reason for this pressure the
fruitfulness, the efficiency of this mode of thinking. An affirmation
of this is to be found in the work of a natural scientist like T.
H. Huxley (1825 – 95). He does not believe that one could find
anything in the knowledge of natural science that would answer the
last questions concerning the human soul. But he is convinced that our
search for knowledge must confine itself to the limits of the mode of
conception of natural science and we must admit that man simply has no
means by which to acquire a knowledge of what lies behind nature. The
result of this opinion is that natural science contains no insight
concerning man's highest hopes for knowledge, but it allows him to
feel that in this mode of conception the investigation is placed on
secure ground. One should, therefore, abandon all concern for
everything that does not lie within the realm of natural science, or
one should consider it as a matter of belief.
The effect of this pressure caused by the method of natural science is
clearly expressed in a thought current called pragmatism that appeared
at the turn of the century and intended to place all striving for
truth on a secure basis. The name "pragmatism" goes back to
an essay that Charles Pierce published in the American journal,
Popular Science, in 1878. The most influential representatives
of this mode of conception are William James (1842 – 1910) in
America and F. C. Schiller (1864 – 1937) in England, who uses
the word "humanism." Pragmatism can be called disbelief in
the power of thought. It denies that thinking that would remain within
its own domain is capable of producing anything that can be proved as
truth and knowledge justifiable by itself. Man is confronted with
processes of the world and must act. To accomplish this, thinking
serves him in an auxiliary function. It sums up the facts of the
external world into ideas and combines them. The best ideas are those
that help him to achieve the right kind of action so that he can
attain his purpose in accordance with the facts of the world. These
ideas man recognizes as his truth. Will is the ruler of man's relation
to the world, not thinking. James deals with this matter in his book,
The Will to Believe. The will determines life; this is its
undeniable right. Therefore, will is also justified in influencing
thought. It is, to be sure, not to exert its influence in determining
what the facts are in a particular case; here the intellect is to
follow the facts themselves. But it will influence the understanding
and interpretation of reality as a whole. "If our scientific
knowledge extended as far as to the end of things, we might be able to
live by science alone. But since it only dimly lights up the edges of
the dark continent that we call the universe, and since we must form,
at our own risk, some sort of thought of this universe to which we
belong with our lives, we shall be justified if we form such thoughts
as agree with our nature — thoughts that enable us to act, hope and
live."
According to this conception, our thought has no life that could
possibly concentrate and deepen in itself and, in Hegel's sense, for
example, penetrate to the source of existence. It merely emerges in
the human soul to serve the ego when it takes an active part in the
world with its will and life. Pragmatism deprives thought of the power
it possessed from the rise of the Greek world conception. Knowledge is
thus made into a product of the human will. In the last analysis, it
can no longer be the element into which man plunges in order to find
himself in his true nature. The self-conscious ego no longer
penetrates into its own entity with the power of thinking. It loses
itself in the dark recesses of the will in which thought sheds no
light on anything except the aims of life. But these, as such, do not
spring from thought. The power exerted by external facts on man has
become excessively strong. The conscious ability to find a light in
the inner life of thought that could illumine the last questions of
existence has reached the zero point. In pragmatism, the development
of modern philosophy falls shortest of what the spirit of this
development really demands: that man may find himself as a thinking
and self-conscious ego in the depths of the world in which this ego
feels itself as deeply connected with the wellspring of existence, as
the Greek truth-seeker did through his perceived thought. That the
spirit of modern times demands this becomes especially clear through
pragmatism. It places man in the focal point of his world picture. In
man, it was to be seen how reality rules in existence. Thus,
the chief question was directed toward the element in which the
self-conscious ego rests. But the power of thought was not sufficient
to carry light into this element. Thought remained behind in the upper
layers of the soul when the ego wanted to take the path into its own
depth.
In Germany Hans Vaihinger (1852 – 1933) developed his
Philosophy of As-If (1911) along the same lines as pragmatism.
This philosopher regards the leading ideas that man forms about the
phenomena of the world not as thought images through which, in the
cognitive process, the soul places itself into a spiritual reality,
but as fictions that lead him to find his way in the world. The
"atom," for instance, is imperceptible. Man forms the
thought of the "atom." He cannot form it in order to know
something of a reality, but merely "as if' the external
phenomena of nature had come to pass through compound actions of
atoms. If one imagines that there are atoms, there will be order in
the chaos of perceived natural phenomena. It is the same with all
leading ideas. They are assumed, not in order to depict facts that are
given solely by perception. They are invented, and reality is then
interpreted "as if" the content of these imagined concepts
really were the basis of reality. The impotence of thought is thus
consciously made the center of this philosophy. The power of the
external facts impresses the mind of the thinker so overwhelmingly
that he does not dare to penetrate with his "mere thought"
into those regions from which the external reality springs. But as we
can only hope to gain an insight into the nature of man if we have
spiritual means to penetrate into the characterized regions, there can
be no possibility of approaching the highest riddles of the universe
through the "As-If Philosophy."
We must now realize that both "pragmatism" and the
"As-If Philosophy" have grown out of the thought practice of
the age that is dominated by the method of natural science. Natural
science can only be concerned with the investigation of the connection
of external facts, of facts that can be observed in the field of sense
perception. In natural science it cannot be a question of making the
connections themselves, at which its investigation aims, sensually
perceptible, but merely of establishing these connections in
the indicated field. By following this basic principle, modern natural
science became the model for all scientific cognition and, in
approaching the present time, it has gradually been drawn into a
thought practice that operates in the sense of "pragmatism"
and the "As-If Philosophy." Darwinism, for instance, was at
first driven to proclaim a line of evolution of living beings from the
most imperfect to the most perfect and thus to conceive man as a
higher form in the evolution of the anthropoid apes. But the
anatomist, Carl Gegenbaur, pointed out as early as 1870 that it is
the method of investigation applied to such an idea of
evolution that constitutes the fruitful part of it. The use of this
method of investigation has continued to more recent times, and one is
quite justified in saying that, while it remained faithful to its
original principle, it has led beyond the views with which it was
originally connected. The investigation proceeded "as if"
man had to be sought within the line of descent of the anthropoid
apes. At the present time, one is not far from recognizing that this
cannot be so, but that there must have been a being in earlier times
whose true descendants are to be found in man, while the anthropoid
apes developed away from this being into a less perfect species. In
this way the original modern idea of evolution has proved to be only
an auxiliary step in the process of investigation.
While such a thought practice holds sway in natural science, it seems
quite justified for natural science to deny that, in order to solve
world riddles, there is any scientific cognitive value in an
investigation of pure thought carried out by means of a thought
contemplation in the self-conscious ego. The natural scientist feels
that he stands on secure ground when he considers thinking only as a
means to secure his orientation in the world of external facts. The
great accomplishments to which natural science can point at the turn
of the twentieth century agree well with such a thought practice. In
the method of investigation of natural science, "pragmatism"
and the "As-If Philosophy" are actually at work. If these
modes of conception now appear to be special philosophical thought
tendencies also, we see in this fact that modern philosophy has
basically taken on the form of natural science.
For this reason, thinkers who instinctively feel how the demand of the
spirit of modern world conception is secretly at work will quite
understandably be confronted with the question: How can we uphold a
conception of the self-conscious ego in the face of the perfection
of the natural scientific method? It may be said that natural
science is about to produce a world picture in which the
self-conscious ego does not find a place, for what natural science can
give as a picture of the external man contains the self-conscious soul
only in the manner in which the magnet contains its energy. There are
now two possibilities. We either delude ourselves into believing that
we produce a serious statement when we say, "Our brain
thinks," and then accept the verdict that "the spiritual
man" is merely the surface expression of material reality, or we
recognize in this "spiritual man" a self-dependent essential
reality and are thus driven out of the field of natural science with
our knowledge of man. The French philosophers, Emile Boutroux
(1845 – 1921) and Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), are thinkers
who accept the latter possibility.
Boutroux proceeds from a criticism of the modern mode of conception
that intends to reduce all world processes to the laws of natural
science. We understand the course of his thought if we consider that a
plant, for example, contains processes that, to be sure, are regulated
by laws effective also in the mineral world, but that it is quite
impossible to imagine that these mineral laws themselves cause this
plant life through their own content. If we want to recognize that
plant life develops on the basis of mineral activity, we must
presuppose that it is a matter of perfect indifference to the mineral
forces if plant life develops from this basis. There must be a
spontaneously creative element added to the mineral agencies if plant
life is to be produced. There is, therefore, a creative element
everywhere in nature. The mineral realm is there but a creative
element stands behind it. The latter produces the plant life based on
the ground of the mineral world. So it is in all the spheres of
natural order up to the conscious human soul, indeed, including all
sociological processes. The human soul does not spring from mere
biological laws, but directly from the fundamental creative element
and it assimilates the biological processes and laws to its own
entity. The fundamental creative element is also at work in the
sociological realm. This brings human souls into the appropriate
connections and interdependence. Thus, in Boutroux's book, On the
Concept of Natural Laws in the Science and Philosophy of Today
(1895), we find:
Science shows us a hierarchy of laws, which we can, to be sure, bring
closer and closer together but which we cannot blend into a single
law. It shows us, furthermore, besides this relative dissimilarity of
the laws, a mutual influence of these laws on each other. The physical
laws affect the living being, but the biological laws are at work at
the same time.
Boutroux turns his attention from the natural laws represented in the
thinking of natural science to the creative process behind these laws.
Emerging directly from this process are the entities that fill the
world. The behavior of these entities to one another, their mutual
effect on each other, can be expressed in laws that are conceivable in
thought. What is thus conceived becomes, as it were, a basis of the
natural laws for this mode of conception. The entities are real and
manifest their natures according to laws. The sum total of these laws,
which in the final analysis constitute the unreal and are attached to
an intellectually conceived existence, constitutes matter. Thus,
Boutroux can say:
Motion (what he means is the totality of everything that happens
between entities according to natural laws) is, in itself, obviously
as much an abstraction as thinking in itself. Actually, there are only
living entities, their nature being halfway between the pure concepts
of thinking and motion. These living entities form a hierarchy and
activity circulates in them from above to below and from below to
above. The spirit moves matter neither directly nor indirectly, for
there is no raw matter and what constitutes the nature of matter is
closely connected with what constitutes the nature of the spirit.
But if natural laws are only the sum total of the interrelation of the
entities, then the human soul also does not stand in the world as a
whole in such a way that it could be explained from natural laws; from
its own nature it adds its manifestations to the other laws. With this
step, freedom, the spontaneous self-revelation, is secured for the
soul. One can see in this philosophical mode of thinking the attempt
to gain clarity concerning the true essence of nature in order to
acquire an insight into the relation of the human soul to it. Boutroux
arrives at a conception of the human soul that can only spring from
its self-manifestation. In former times, according to Boutroux, one
saw in the mutual influences of the entities, the manifestation of the
"capriciousness and arbitrariness" of spiritual beings.
Modern thinking has been freed from this belief by the knowledge of
natural laws. As these laws exist only in the cooperative processes of
the entities, they cannot contain anything that might determine the
entities.
The mechanical natural laws that have been discovered by modern
science are, in fact, the bond that connects the external world with
the inner realm. Far from constituting a necessity, they are our
liberators; they allow us to add to the contemplation in which the
ancients were locked up, a science of action.
These words point to the demand of the spirit of modern world
conception that has repeatedly been mentioned in this book. The
ancients were limited to contemplation. To them, the soul was in the
element of its true nature when it was in thought contemplation. The
modern development demands a "science of action." This
science, however, could only come into being if the soul could, in
thinking, lay hold of its own nature in the self-conscious ego, and if
it could arrive, through a spiritual experience, at inner activities
of the self with which it could see itself as being grounded in its
own entity.
Henri Bergson tries to penetrate to the nature of the self-conscious
ego in a different way so that the mode of conception of natural
science does not become an obstacle in this process. The nature of
thinking itself has become a world riddle through the development
of the world conceptions from the time of the Greeks to the present
age. Thought has lifted the human soul out of the world as a whole.
Thus, the soul lives with the thought element and must direct the
question to thought: How will you lead me again to an element in which
I can feel myself really sheltered in the world as whole? Bergson
considers the scientific mode of thinking. He does not find in it the
power through which it could swing itself into a true reality. The
thinking soul is confronted with reality and gains thought images from
it. It combines these images, but what the soul acquires in this
manner is not rooted within reality; it stands outside reality.
Bergson speaks of thinking as follows:
It is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thoughts
from the mobile reality, but there is no means whatever of
reconstituting the mobility of the real with the fixity of concepts.
(Introduction to Metaphysics)
Proceeding from thoughts of this kind, Bergson finds that all attempts
to penetrate reality by means of thinking had to fail because they
undertook something of which thinking, as it occurs in life and
science, is quite incapable to enter into true reality. If, in this
way, Bergson believes he recognizes the impotence of thinking, he does
not mean to say that there is no way by means of which the right kind
of experience in the self-conscious ego may reach true reality. For
the ego, there is a way outside of thinking — the way of immediate
experience, of intuition.
To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings
of thought . . . Symbolic knowledge is relative through preexisting
concepts, which goes from the fixed to the moving, but not so
intuitive knowledge, which establishes itself in the moving reality
and adopts the life itself of things. (Introduction to
Metaphysics)
Bergson believes that a transformation of our usual mode of thinking
is possible so that the soul, through this transformation, will
experience itself in an activity, in an intuitive perception, in which
it unites with a reality that is deeper than the one that is
perceived in ordinary knowledge. In such an intuitive perception the
soul experiences itself as an entity that is not conditioned by the
physical processes, which produce sensation and movement. When man
perceives through his senses, and when he moves his limbs, a corporeal
entity is at work in him, but as soon as he remembers something
a purely psychic-spiritual process takes place that is not
conditioned by corresponding physical processes. Thus, the whole
inner life of the soul is a specific life of a psychic-spiritual
nature that takes place in the body and in connection with it, but not
through the body. Bergson investigated in detail those results of
natural science that seemed to oppose his view. The thought indeed
seems justified that our physical functions are rooted in bodily
processes when one remembers how, for instance, the disease of a part
of the brain causes an impediment of speech. A great many facts of
this kind can be enumerated. Bergson discusses them in his book,
Matter and Memory, and he decides that all these facts do not
constitute any proof against the view of an independent
spiritual-psychical life.
In this way, modern philosophy seems through Bergson to take up its
task that is demanded by the time, the task of a concentration of the
experience of the self-conscious ego, but it accomplishes this step by
declaring thought as impotent. Where the ego is to experience itself
in its own nature, it cannot make use of the power of thinking. The
same holds for Bergson insofar as the investigation of life is
concerned. What must be considered as the driving element in the
evolution of the living being, what places these beings in the world
in a series from the imperfect to the perfect, we cannot know through
a thoughtful contemplation of the various forms of the living beings.
But if man experiences himself in himself as psychical life, he stands
in the element of life that lives in those beings and knows itself in
him. This element of life first had to pour itself out in innumerable
forms to prepare itself for what it later becomes in man. The effusion
of life (elan vital), which arouses itself into a thinking
being in man, is there already manifested in the simple living entity.
In the creation of all living beings it has so spent itself that it
retains only a part of its entire nature, the part, to be sure, that
reveals itself as the fruit of all previous creations of life. In this
way, the entity of man exists before all other living beings,
but it can live its life as man only after having ejected all other
forms of life, which man then can observe from without as one
form among all others. Through his intuitive knowledge Bergson
wants to vitalize the results of natural science so that he can say:
It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will,
man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had
succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses
are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the
vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and
above the accidents of evolution. (Creative Evolution)
From lightly woven and easily attainable thoughts like this, Bergson
produces an idea of evolution that had been expressed previously in a
profound mode of thought by W. H. Preuss in his book,
Spirit and Matter (1882). Preuss also held that man has not
developed from the other natural beings but is, from the beginning the
fundamental entity, which had first to eject his preliminary stages
into the other living beings before he could give himself the form
appropriate for him on earth. We read in the above-mentioned book:
The time should have come . . . to establish a theory of origin of
organic species that is not based solely on one-sidedly proclaimed
theorems from descriptive natural science, but is also in agreement
with the other natural laws that are at the same time the laws of
human thinking. What is necessary is a theory that is free from all
hypothesizing and that rests solely on strict conclusions from
natural scientific observations in the widest sense of the
word; a theory that saves the concept of the species according to the
actual possibility, but at the same time adapts Darwin's concept of
evolution to its own field and tries to make it fruitful. The center
of this new theory is man, the species unique on our planet: Homo
sapiens. It is strange that the older observers began with the
objects of nature and then went astray to such an extent that they did
not find the way that leads to the human being. This aim had been
attained by Darwin only in an insufficient and unsatisfactory way as
he sought the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals,
while the naturalist should begin with himself as a human being in
order to proceed through the entire realm of existence and of thinking
and to return finally to humanity. . . . It was not by accident
that the human nature resulted from the entire terrestrial evolution,
but by necessity. Man is the aim of all telluric processes and every
other form that occurs beside him has borrowed its traits from him.
Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos. . . . When his
germinating state (man in his potentiality) had come into being, the
remaining organic substance no longer had the power to produce further
human possibilities. What developed thereafter became animal or plan.
. . .
Such a view attempts to recognize man as placed on his ground by the
development of modern world conception, that is to say, outside
nature, in order to find something in such a knowledge of man that
throws light on the world surrounding him. In the little known thinker
from Elsfleth, W. H. Preuss, the ardent wish arises to gain a
knowledge of the world at once through an insight into man.
His forceful and significant ideas are immediately directed to the
human being. He sees how this being struggles its way into existence.
What it must leave behind on its way, what it must slough off, remains
as nature with its entities on a lower stage of evolution surrounding
man as his environment. The way toward the riddles of the world in
modern philosophy must go through an investigation of the human entity
manifested in the self-conscious ego. This becomes apparent through
the development of this philosophy. The more one tries to enter into
its striving and its search, the more one becomes aware of the fact
that this search aims at such experiences in the human soul that do
not only produce an insight into the human soul itself, but also
kindles a light by means of which a certain knowledge concerning the
world outside man can be secured. In looking at the views of Hegel and
related thinkers, more recent philosophers came to doubt that there
could be the power in the life of thought to spread its light
beyond the realm of the soul itself. The element of thought seemed not
strong enough to engender an activity that could explain the being and
the meaning of the world. By contrast, the natural scientific mode of
conception demanded a penetration into the core of the soul that
rested on a firmer ground than thought can supply.
Within this search and striving the attempts of Wilhelm Dilthey
(1833 – 1911) take a significant position. In writings like his
Introduction to the Cultural Sciences, and his Berlin Academy
treatise, Contributions to the Solution of the Problem of Our
Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Right (1890),
he offered expositions that are filled with all the philosophical
riddles that weigh on the modern development of world conception. To
be sure, the form of his presentation, which is given in the modern
terminology used by scholars, prevents a more general impression being
created by what he has to say. It is Dilthey's view that through the
thoughts and imaginations that appear in his soul man cannot even
arrive at the certainty that the perceptions of the senses correspond
to a reality independent of man. Everything that is of the nature of
thought, ideation and sense perception is picture. The world that
surrounds man could be a dream without a reality independent of him if
he were exclusively dependent on such pictures in his awareness of the
real world. But not only these pictures present themselves in the
soul. In the process of life the soul is filled with will, activity
and feeling, all of which stream forth from it and are recognized as
an immediate experience rather than intellectually. In willing and
feeling the soul experiences itself as reality, but if it experienced
itself only in this manner, it would have to believe that its
own reality were the only one in the world. This assumption could be
justified only if the will could radiate in all directions without
finding any resistance. But that is not the case. The
intentions of the will cannot unfold their life in that way. There is
something obtruding itself in their path that they have not produced
but that must nevertheless be accepted by them.
To "common sense" such a thought development of a
philosopher can appear as hairsplitting. The historical account must
not be deflected by such judgment. It is important to gain an insight
into the difficulty that modern philosophy had to create for itself in
regard to a question that seems so simple and in fact superfluous to
"common sense," that is, if the world man sees, hears, etc.,
may rightly be called real. The "ego" that had, as
shown above in our historical account of the development of
philosophical world riddles, separated itself from the world, strives
to find its way back into the world from what appears in its own
consciousness as a state of loneliness. It is Dilthey's opinion that
this way cannot be found back into the world by saying that the soul
experiences pictures (thoughts, ideas, sensations), and since these
pictures appear in our consciousness they must have their causes in a
real external world. A conclusion of this kind would not, according to
Dilthey, give us the right to speak of a real external world, for such
a conclusion is drawn within the soul according to the needs of
this soul, and there is no guarantee that there really is in
the external world what the soul believes in following its own
needs. Therefore, the soul cannot infer an external world; it
would expose itself to the danger that its conclusion might have a
life only within the soul but without any significance for an external
world. Certainty concerning an outer world can be gained by the soul
only if this external world penetrates into the inner life of the
"ego," so that within this "ego" not only
the "ego" but also the external world itself unfolds its
life. This happens, according to Dilthey, when the soul experiences in
its will and its feeling something that does not spring
from within. Dilthey attempts to decide from the most self-evident
facts a question that is for him a fundamental problem of all world
conception. A passage like the following may illustrate this:
As a child presses his hand against a chair in order to move it, he
measures his power against the resistance; his own life and the object
are experienced together. But now let the child be locked up. It is in
vain that he rattles against the door; now his entire excited will
becomes aware of the compulsion of an overwhelming powerful external
world that hinders and restricts, and compresses, as it were, his own
self-willed life. The desire to escape from the displeasure and to
gratify his impulses is followed by the consciousness of obstruction,
displeasure and dissatisfaction. What the child thus experiences
follows him through his entire adult life. The resistance becomes
pressure. We seem to be everywhere surrounded by walls of actual facts
through which we cannot break. The impressions remain, no matter how
much we would like to change them; they vanish although we strive to
cling to them; impulses of motion directed by the idea of avoiding
something that causes pain are, under certain circumstances always
followed by emotions that hold us within the realm of pain. Thus, the
reality of the external world grows, so to speak, progressively more
dense around us.
Why is such a reflection, which seems unimportant for many people,
developed in connection with the highest problems of philosophy? It
seems hopeless to gain an insight into man's position in the world as
a whole from such points of departure. What is essential, however, is
the fact that philosophy arrived at reflections of this kind on its
way, to use Brentano's words once more, to "gain certainty for
the hopes of Plato and Aristotle concerning the continued life of our
better part after the dissolution of our body." To attain sure
knowledge of this kind seems to become more difficult the more the
intellectual development advances. The "self-conscious ego"
feels itself more and more ejected from the world; it seems to find in
itself less and less the elements that connect it with the world in a
way different from that of our "body," which is subject to
"dissolution." While this "self-conscious ego"
searched for a certain knowledge concerning its connection with an
eternal world of the spirit, it lost the certainty of an insight in
its connection with the world as revealed through the perception of
the senses. In our discussion of Goethe's world conception, it was
shown how Goethe searched for such experiences of the soul that carry
it into a reality lying behind sense perception as a spiritual world.
In this world conception the attempt is made to experience something
within the soul through which it no longer lives exclusively
within its own confines in spite of the fact that it feels the
experienced content as its own. The soul searches for world
experiences in itself through which it participates with its
experience in an element that it cannot reach through the mediation of
the mere physical organs. Although Dilthey's mode of reflection may
appear to be quite unnecessary, his efforts must be considered as
belonging to the same current of the philosophical development. He is
intent on finding an element within the soul that does not
spring from the soul but belongs to an independent realm. He
would like to prove that the world enters the experience of the soul.
Dilthey does not believe that such an entrance can be accomplished by
the thought element. For him, the soul can assimilate in its entire
life content, in will, striving and feeling, something that is not
only soul but part of the real external world. We recognize a human
being in our soul as real not by forming a representative thought
picture of the person we see before us, but by allowing his will and
his feeling to enter into our own will and sentiment. Thus, a human
soul, in Dilthey's opinion, acknowledges a real external world not
because this outer world conveys its reality through the thought
element, but because the soul as a self-conscious ego, experiences
inwardly in itself the external world. In this manner he is led to
acknowledge the spiritual life as something of a higher significance
than the mere natural existence. He produces a counterbalance to the
natural scientific mode of conception with his view, and he even
thinks that nature as a real external world can be acknowledged only
because it can be experienced by the spiritual part of our soul. The
experience of the natural is a subdivision of our general soul
experience, which is of a spiritual nature, and spiritually our soul
is part of a general spiritual development on earth. A great spiritual
organism develops and unfolds in cultural systems in the spiritual
experience and creative achievement of the various peoples and ages.
What develops its forces in this spiritual organism permeates the
individual human souls. They are embedded in the spiritual organism.
What they experience, accomplish and produce receives its impulses not
from the stimulation's of nature, but from the comprehensive spiritual
life. Dilthey's mode of conception is full of understanding for that
of natural science. He often speaks in his discussions of the results
of the natural scientists, but, as a counterbalance to his recognition
of natural development, he insists on the independent existence of a
spiritual world. Dilthey finds the content of a science of the
spiritual in the contemplation of the cultures of different peoples
and ages.
Rudolf Eucken (1864 – 1926) arrives at a similar recognition
of an independent spiritual world. He finds that the natural scientific
mode of thought becomes self-contradictory if it intends to be more
than a one-sided approach to reality, if it wants to proclaim
what it finds within the possible grasp of its own knowledge as the
only reality. If one only observed nature as it offers itself to the
senses, one could never obtain a comprehensive conception of it. In
order to explain nature, one must draw on what the spirit can experience
only through itself, what it can never derive from external observation.
Eucken proceeds from the vivid feeling that the soul has of its own
spontaneous work and creation when it is occupied in the contemplation
of external nature. He does not fail to recognize in which way the soul
is dependent on what it perceives through its sense organs and how it
is determined through everything that has its natural basis in the body.
But he directs his attention to the autonomous regulating and life-inspiring
activity of the soul that is independent of the body. The soul gives
direction and conclusive connection to the world of sensations and
perceptions. It is not only determined by stimuli that are derived
from the physical world but it experiences purely spiritual impulses
in itself. Through these impulses the soul is aware that it has its
being in a real spiritual world. Into its experiences and creations
flow the forces from a spiritual world to which it belongs. This
spiritual world is directly experienced as real in the soul that knows
itself as one with that world. In this way, the soul sees itself,
according to Eucken, supported by a living and creative spiritual
world. It is his opinion that the thought element, the intellectual
forces, are not powerful enough to fathom the depths of this spiritual
world. What streams from the spiritual world into man pours itself into
his entire comprehensive soul life, not only into his intellect. This
world of the spirit is endowed with the character of personality of
a substantial nature. It also impregnates the thought element but it
is not confined to it. The entire soul may feel itself in a substantial
spiritual connection.
Eucken, in his numerous writings, knows how to describe in a lofty and
emphatic way this spiritual world as it weaves and has its being:
The Struggle for a Spiritual Content of Life (1896), Truth
Content of Religion (1901), Basic Outlines of a New Life
Conception, Spiritual Currents of the Present Time, Life Conceptions
of the Great Thinkers, and Knowledge and Life. In these
books he tries to show from different points of view how the human
soul, as it experiences itself and as it understands itself in this
experience, is aware of being permeated and animated by a creative,
living spiritual substance of which it is a part and a member. Like
Dilthey, Eucken describes, as the content of the independent spiritual
life, what unfolds in the civilizations of humanity in the moral,
technical, social and artistic creations of the various peoples and
ages.
In a historical presentation as is herein attempted, there is no place
for criticism of the described world conceptions. But it is not
criticism to point out how a world conception develops new questions
through its own character, for it is thus that it becomes a part of
the historical development. Dilthey and Eucken speak of an independent
spiritual world in which the individual human soul is embedded. Their
theory of this spiritual world, however, leaves the following
questions open: What is this spiritual world and in what way does the
human soul belong to it? Does the individual soul vanish with the
dissolution of the body after it participated within that body in the
development of the spiritual life manifested in the cultural creations
of the different peoples and ages? One can, to be sure, answer these
questions from Dilthey's and Eucken's point of view by saying that
what the human soul can know in its own life does not lead to results
with respect to these questions. But this is precisely what can be
said to characterize such world conceptions that they lead, through
their mode of conception, to no means of cognition that could
guide the soul or the self-conscious ego beyond what can be
experienced in connection with the body. In spite of the intensity
with which Eucken stresses the independence and reality of the
spiritual world, what the soul experiences according to his world
conception of this spiritual world, and in connection with it, is
experienced through the body. The hopes of Plato and Aristotle, so
often referred to in this book, with regard to the nature of the soul
and its independent relation to the spiritual world are not touched by
such a world conception. No more is shown than that the soul, as long
as it appears within the body, participates in a spiritual world that
is quite rightly called real. What it is in the spiritual world as an
independent spiritual entity cannot be discussed within this
philosophy. It is characteristic of these modes of conception that
they do, to be sure, arrive at a recognition of a spiritual world and
also of the spiritual nature of the human soul. But no knowledge
results from this recognition concerning the position of the soul, the
self-conscious ego, in the reality of the world, apart from the fact
that it acquires a consciousness of the spiritual world through the
life of the body.
The historical position of these modes of conception in the
development of philosophy appears in its right light if one recognizes
that they produce questions that they cannot answer with their own
means. They maintain emphatically that the soul becomes in itself
conscious of a spiritual world that is independent of itself. But how
is this consciousness acquired? Only through the means of cognition
that the soul has in and through its existence in the body. Within
this form of existence a certainty of a real spiritual world
arises. But the soul finds no way to experience its own self-contained
entity in the spirit outside the body. What the spirit
manifests, stimulates and creates within the soul is perceived
by it as far as the physical existence enables it to do so. What it is
as a spirit in the spiritual world and, in fact, whether or not
it is a separate entity within that world, is a question that cannot
be answered by the mere recognition of the fact that the soul
within the body can be conscious of its connection with a
living and creative spiritual world. To obtain an answer of this kind
it would be necessary for the self-conscious human soul, while it
advances to a knowledge of the spiritual world, to become aware of its
own mode of life in the world of the spirit, independent of the
conditions of its bodily existence. The spiritual world would not only
have to enable the soul entity to recognize its reality but it would
have to convey something of its own nature to the soul. It would have
to reveal to the soul in what way it is different from the world of
the senses and in what manner it allows the soul entity to participate
in this different mode of existence.
A feeling for this question lives in those philosophers who want to
contemplate the spiritual world by directing their attention toward
something that cannot, according to their opinion, be found
within the mere observation of nature. If it could be shown that there
is something with regard to which the natural scientific mode of
conception would prove to be powerless, then this could be considered
to guarantee the justification of assuming a spiritual world. A mode
of thought of this kind had already been indicated by Lotze (compare
in Part II Chapter VI
of this volume). It found forceful representatives later
in Wilhelm Windelband (1848 – 1915), Heinrich Rickert
(1863 – 1936) and others. These thinkers are of the opinion that
there is an element entering into the world conception that is
inaccessible to the natural scientific mode of thought. They consider
this element to be the "values" that are of decisive
importance in human life. The world is no dream but a reality if it
can be shown that certain experiences of the soul contain something
that is independent of this soul. The actions, endeavors and will
impulses of the soul are no longer sparks that light up and vanish in
the ocean of existence, if one must recognize that there is something
that endows them with values independent of the soul. Such
values, however, the soul must acknowledge for its will
impulses and its actions just as much as it must recognize that its
perceptions are not merely produced by its own effort. Action and will
impulses of man do not simply occur like facts of nature; they must be
considered from the point of view of a legal, moral, social, esthetic
or scientific value. It is quite right to insist that during
the evolution of civilizations in different ages and of different
peoples, man's views concerning the values of right, morality, beauty
and truth have undergone changes. If Nietzsche could speak of a
"revaluation of all values," it must be acknowledged that
the value of actions, thoughts and will intentions is determined from
without in a similar way to the way perceptual ideation receives the
character of reality from without. In the sense of the
"philosophy of values" one can say: As the pressure
or resistance of the natural external world make the
difference between an idea that is a mere picture of fantasy or one
that represents reality, so the light and approbation that fall on the
soul life from an external spiritual world decide whether or not an
impulse of the will, an action and a thought endeavor have a value
in the world as a whole or are only arbitrary products of the
soul. As a stream of values, the spiritual world flows through the
lives of men in the course of history. While the human soul feels
itself as living in a world determined by values, it experiences
itself in a spiritual element. If this mode of conception were
seriously carried out, all statements that man could make concerning
the spiritual would have to take on the form of value judgments. The
only thing one could then say about anything not revealed in nature
and therefore not to be known through the natural scientific mode of
conception, would be in which way and in what respect it possessed an
independent value in the whole of the world. The question would then
arise: If one disregards everything in the human soul that natural
science has to say about it, is it then valuable as a member of the
spiritual world, and does it have a significant independent value? Can
the riddles of philosophy concerning the soul be solved if one cannot
speak of its existence but only of its value? Will not the
philosophy of values always be forced to adopt a language similar to
that of Lotze when he speaks of the continuation of the soul?
Since we consider every being only as a creature of God, there
is no fundamentally valid right on which the individual soul,
for instance as a "substance," could base its claim in order
to demand an eternal, individual, continued existence. Perhaps we can
only maintain that every being will be preserved by God as long
as its existence is of a valuable significance for the whole of
His world plan. . . . (Compare page
in Part II Chapter VI).
of this volume.)
Here the "value" of the soul is spoken of as its
decisive character. Some attention, however, is also paid to the
question of how this value may be connected with the preservation
of existence. One can understand the position of the philosophy of
value in the course of the development of philosophy if one considers
that the natural scientific mode of conception is inclined to claim
all knowledge of existence for itself. If that is granted,
philosophy can do nothing but resign itself to the investigation of
something else, and such a "something else" is seen in these
"values." The following question, as an unsolved problem,
can be found in Lotze's statement: Is it at all possible to go no
further than to define and characterize values and to renounce all
knowledge concerning the form of existence of the values?
* * *
Many of the most recent schools of thought prove to be attempts to
search within the self-conscious ego, which in the course of the
philosophical development feels itself more and more separated from
the world, for an element that leads back to a reunion with the world.
The conceptions of Dilthey, Eucken, Windelband, Rickert and others are
such attempts. They want to do justice both to the demands of natural
science and to the contemplation of the experience of the soul so that
a science of the spirit appears as a possibility beside the science of
nature. The same aims are followed by the thought tendencies of
Herman Cohen (1842 – 1918) (compare
in Part II Chapter IV
of this volume),
Paul Natorp (1854 – 1924), August Stadler (1850 – 1910),
Ernst Cassirer (1874 – 1945), Walter Kinkel (born 1871)
and others who share their philosophical convictions. In directing
their attention to the processes of thinking itself, they believe that
in this highest activity of the self-conscious ego the soul gains hold
on an inner possession that allows it to penetrate into reality. They
turn their attention to what appears to them as the highest fruit of
thinking. A simple example of this would be the thinking of a circle
in which specific representative thought pictures of any circle are
disregarded entirely. As much can be embraced in this way by pure
thinking as can be encompassed by the power of our soul through
which we can penetrate into reality. For what we can think in this way
manifests its own nature through thinking in the consciousness of man.
The sciences strive to arrive, by means of their observations,
experiments and methods, at such results concerning the world as can
be seized in pure thinking. They will have to leave the fulfillment of
this aim to a far distant future, but one can nevertheless say that
insofar as they endeavor to have pure thought, they also strive to
convey the true essence of things to the possession of the
self-conscious ego. When man makes an observation in the sensual
external world, or in the course of historical life, he has, according
to this conception, no true reality before him. What the observation
of the senses offers is merely the challenge to search for a reality,
not a reality in itself. Only when, through the activity of the soul,
a thought appears, so to speak, to reveal itself at the very place
where the observation has been made, is the living reality of the
observed object integrated into real knowledge. The progressively
developing knowledge replaces with thought what has been observed in
the world. What the observation showed in the beginning was there only
because man with his senses, with his everyday imagination, realizes
at first for himself the nature of things in his own limited way. What
he has at his disposal in this way has significance only for himself.
What he substitutes as thought for the observation is no longer
troubled by his own limitation. It is as it is thought, for thought
determines its own nature and reveals itself according to its own
character in the self-conscious ego. Thought does not allow the ego to
determine its character in any way.
There lives in this world conception a subtle feeling for the
development of thought life since its first philosophical flowering
within Greek intellectual life. It was the thought experience that
gave to the self-conscious ego the power to be vigorously conscious of
its own self-dependent entity. In the present age this power of
thought can be experienced in the soul as the impulse that, seized
within the self-conscious ego, endows this ego with the awareness that
it is not a mere external observer of things but that it lives
essentially in an intimate connection with their reality. It is in
thought itself that the soul can feel it contains a true and
self-dependent reality. As the soul thus feels itself interwoven with
thought as a content of life that breathes reality, it can again
experience the supporting power of the thought element as this was
experienced in Greek philosophy. It can be experienced again as
strongly as it was felt in the philosophy that took thought as a
perception. It is true that in the world conception of Cohen and
kindred spirits, thought cannot be considered as a perception in the
sense of Greek philosophy. But in this conception the inner permeation
of the ego with the thought world, which the ego acquired through its
own work, is such that this experience includes, at the same time, the
awareness of its reality.
The connection with Greek philosophy is emphasized by these thinkers.
Cohen expresses himself on this point as follows. "The relation
that Parmenides forged as the identity of thinking and being must
persist." Another thinker who also accepts this conception,
Walter Kinkel, is convinced that "only thinking can know being,
for both thinking and being are, fundamentally understood, one and the
same." It is through this doctrine that Parmenides became the
real creator of scientific idealism (Idealism and Realism).
It is also apparent from the presentations of these thinkers how
the formulation of their thoughts presupposes the century-long
effect of the thought evolution since the Greek civilization. In spite
of the fact that these thinkers start from Kant, which could have
fostered in them the opinion that thought lives only within the soul,
outside true reality, the supporting power of thought exerts itself in
them. This thought has gone beyond the Kantian limitation and it
forces these thinkers who contemplate its nature to become convinced
that thought itself is reality, and that it also leads the soul into
reality if it acquires this element rightly in inner work and,
equipped with it, seeks the way into the external world. In this
philosophical mode of thinking thought proves intimately connected
with the world contemplation of the self-conscious ego. The
fundamental impulse of this thought tendency appears like a discovery
of the possible service that the thought element can accomplish for
the ego. We find in the followers of this philosophy views like these:
"Only thinking itself can produce what may be accepted as
being." "Being is the being of thinking" (Cohen).
Now the question arises: Can these philosophers expect of their
thought experience, which is produced through the conscious work in
the self-conscious ego, what the Greek philosopher expected of it when
he accepted thought as a perception? If one believes to perceive
thought, one can be of the opinion that it is the real world that
reveals it. As the soul feels itself connected with thought as a
perception, it can consider itself as belonging to the element of the
world that is thought, indestructible thought, while the sense
perception reveals only destructible entities. The part of the human
being that is perceptible to the senses can then be supposed to be
perishable, but what emerges in the human soul as thought makes it
appear as a member of the spiritual, the true reality. Through such a
view the soul can conceive that it belongs to a truly real world. This
could be achieved by a modern world conception only if it could show
that the thought experience not only leads knowledge into a
true reality, but also develops the power to free the soul from the
world of the senses and to place it into true reality. The doubts that
arise in regard to this question cannot be counteracted by the insight
into the reality of the thought element if the latter is considered as
acquired by perception actively produced through the work of the soul.
For, from what could the certainty be derived that what the soul
produces actively in the world of the senses, can also give it a real
significance in a world that is not perceived by senses? It could be
that the soul, to be sure, could procure a knowledge of reality
through its actively produced thoughts, but that nevertheless the soul
itself was not rooted in this reality. Also, this world conception
merely points to a spiritual life, but it cannot prevent the unbiased
observer from finding philosophical riddles at its end that demand
answers and call for soul experiences for which this philosophy does
not supply the foundations. It can arrive at the conviction that
thought is real, but it cannot find through thought a guarantee for
the reality of the soul.
* * *
The philosophical thinking at which A. v. Leclaire (born 1848),
Wilhelm Schuppe (1836 – 1913), Johannes Rehmke (1848 –
1930), von Schubert-Soldern (born 1852), and others arrived,
shows how philosophical inquiry can remain confined to the narrow
circle of the self-conscious ego without finding a possibility to make
the transition from this region into the world where this ego could
link its own existence to a world reality. There are certain
differences among these philosophies, but what is characteristic of
all of them is that they all stress that everything man can count as
belonging to his world must manifest itself within the realm of his
consciousness. On the ground of their philosophy the thought
cannot be conceived that would even presuppose anything about a
territory of the world if the soul wanted to transcend with its
conceptions beyond the realm of consciousness. Because the
"ego" must comprise everything to which its knowledge
extends within the folds of its consciousness, because it holds it
within the consciousness, it therefore appears necessary to this view
that the entire world is within the limits of this awareness.
That the soul should ask itself: How do I stand with the possession of
my consciousness in a world that is independent of this consciousness,
is an impossibility for this philosophy. From its point of view, one
would have to decide to give up all questions of this kind. One would
have to become blind to the fact that there are inducements
within the realm of the conscious soul life to look beyond that realm,
just as in reading one does not look for the meaning in the
forms that are visible on the paper, but to the significance that is
expressed by them. As in reading, it is a question not of
studying the forms of the letters as it is of no importance for
the conveyed meaning to consider the nature of these forms themselves,
so it could be irrelevant for an insight into true reality that within
the sphere of the "ego" everything capable of being known
has the character of consciousness.
The philosophy of Carl du Prel (1839 – 99) stands as an
opposite pole to this philosophical opinion. He is one of the spirits
who have deeply felt the insufficiency of the opinion that considers
the natural scientific mode of conception to which so many people have
grown accustomed to be the only possible form of world explanation. He
points out that this mode of conception unconsciously sins against its
own statements, for natural science must admit on the basis of its own
results
that we never perceive the objective processes of nature but rather
their effect on us, not vibrations of the ether but light, not air
vibrations but sounds. We have then, so to speak, a subjectively
falsified world picture, but this does not interfere with our
practical orientation because this falsification shows no individual
differences and proceeds in a constant manner and according to law. .
. . Materialism itself has proved through natural science that the
world transcends beyond our senses. It has undermined its own
foundation and it has sawed off the branch on which it had been
sitting. As a philosophy, however, it still continues to sit on that
branch. Materialism, therefore, has no right at all to call itself a
philosophy … . It has only the justification of a branch of
knowledge; furthermore, the world, the object of its study, is a world
of mere appearance. To try to build a world conception on this
foundation is an obvious self-contradiction. The real world is
entirely different, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, from the
one that is known to materialism, and only the real world can be the
object of a philosophy. (Carl du Prel, The Riddle of Man.)
Such objections are necessarily caused by the materialistically
colored mode of thought of natural science. Its weakness is noticed by
many people who share the point of view of du Prel. The latter can be
considered as a representative of a pronounced trend of modern
philosophy. What is characteristic of this trend is the way in which
it tries to penetrate into the realm of the real world. This
way still shows the aftereffect of the natural scientific mode of
conception, although the latter is at the same time most violently
criticized. Natural science starts from the facts that are accessible
to the sensory consciousness. It finds itself forced to refer to a
supersensible element, for only the light is sensually perceptible,
not the vibrations of the ether. The vibrations then belong to a realm
that is, at least, extrasensory in its nature. But has natural science
the right to speak of an extrasensory element? It means to limit
its investigations to the realm of sense perceptions. Is anyone
justified to speak of supersensible elements who restricts his
scientific endeavors to the results of the consciousness that is bound
to the senses and therefore to the body?
Du Prel wants to grant this right of investigating the supersensible
only to a thinker who seeks the nature of the human soul outside the
realm of the senses. What he considers as the chief demand in this
direction is the necessity to demonstrate manifestations of the soul
that prove the soul is also active when it is not bound to the body.
Through the body the soul develops its sensual consciousness.
In the phenomena of hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and
somnambulism, it becomes apparent that the soul is active when the
sensual consciousness is eliminated. The soul life, therefore, extends
further than the realm of consciousness. It is here that du Prel
arrives at the diametrically opposite position to those of the
characterized philosophers of the all-embracing consciousness who
believe that the limits of consciousness define at the same time the
entire realm of philosophy. For du Prel, the nature of the soul is to
be sought outside the circle of this consciousness. If,
according to him, we observe the soul when it is active without the
usual means of the senses, we have the proof that it is of a
supersensible nature.
Among the means through which this can be done, du Prel and many
others count, besides the observation of the above-mentioned
"abnormal" psychic phenomena, also the phenomena of
spiritualism. It is not necessary to dwell here on du Prel's opinion
concerning this field, for what constitutes the mainspring of his view
becomes apparent also if one considers only his attitude toward
hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism. Whoever wants to
prove the spiritual nature of the human soul cannot limit himself to
showing that the soul has to refer to a supersensible world in its
cognitive process. For natural science could answer that it does not
follow that the soul is itself rooted in the supersensible
realm because it has a knowledge of a supersensible world. It
could very well be that knowledge of the supersensible could also be
dependent on the activity of the body and thus be of significance
only for a soul that is bound to a body. It is for this reason
that du Prel feels it necessary to show that the soul not only
knows the supersensible while it is itself bound to the body,
but that it experiences the supersensible while it is outside
the body. With this view, he also arms himself against objections that
can be raised from the viewpoint of the natural scientific mode of
thinking against the conceptions of Eucken, Dilthey, Cohen, Kinkel and
other defenders of a knowledge of a spiritual world. He is, however,
not protected against the doubts that must be raised against his own
procedure.
Although it is true that the soul can find an access to the
supersensible only if it can show how it is itself active outside
the sensual realm, the emancipation of the soul from the sensual
world is not assured by the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism and
hypnotic suggestion, nor by all other processes to which du Prel
refers for this purpose. In regard to all these phenomena it can be
said that the philosopher who wants to explain them still proceeds
only with the means of his ordinary consciousness. If this
consciousness is to be useless for a real explanation of the world,
how can its explanations, which are applied to the phenomena
according to the conditions of this consciousness, be of any
decisive significance for these phenomena? What is peculiar in du Prel
is the fact that he directs his attention to certain facts that point
to a supersensible element, but that he, nevertheless, wants to remain
entirely on the ground of the natural scientific mode of thought when
he explains those facts. But should it not be necessary for the soul
to enter the supersensible in its mode of thinking when the
supersensible becomes the object of its interest? Du Prel looks
at the supersensible, but as an observer he remains within the
realm of the sensual world. If he did not want to do this, he would
have to demand that only a hypnotized person can say the right things
concerning his experiences under hypnosis, that only in the state of
somnambulism could knowledge concerning the supersensible be acquired
and that what the not-hypnotized, the non-somnambulist must think
concerning these phenomena is of no validity. If we follow this
thought consistently, we arrive at an impossibility. If one speaks of
a transposition of the soul outside the realm of the senses into
another form of existence, one must intend to acquire the knowledge of
this existence within that other region. Du Prel points at a
path that must be taken in order to gain access to the supersensible.
But he leaves the question open regarding the means that are to be
used on this path.
* * *
A new thought current has been stimulated through the transformation
of fundamental physical concepts that has been attempted by Albert
Einstein (1879 – 1955). The attempt is of significance also for
the development of philosophy. Physics previously followed its given
phenomena by thinking of them as being spread out in empty three
dimensional space and in one dimensional time. Space and time were
supposed to exist outside things and events. They were, so to speak,
self-dependent, rigid quantities. For things, distances were measured
in space. For events, duration was determined in time. Distance and
duration belong, according to this conception, to space and time, not
to things and events. This conception is opposed by the theory of
relativity introduced by Einstein. For this theory, the distance
between two things is something that belongs to those things
themselves. As a thing has other properties it has also the property
of being at a certain distance from a second thing. Besides these
relations that are given by the nature of things there is no such
thing as space. The assumption of space makes a geometry that is
thought for this space, but this same geometry can be applied to the
world of things. It arises in a mere thought world. Things have to
obey the laws of this geometry. One can say that the events and
situations of the world must follow the laws that are established
before the observation of things. This geometry now is
dethroned by the theory of relativity. What exists are only things and
they stand in relations to one another that present themselves
geometrically. Geometry thus becomes a part of physics, but then one
can no longer maintain that their laws can be established before
the observation of the things. No thing has any place in
space but only distances relative to other things.
The same is assumed for time. No process takes place at a definite
time; it happens in a time-distance relative to another event. In this
way, temporal distances in the relation of things and spatial
intervals become homogenous and flow together. Time becomes a fourth
dimension that is of the same nature as the three dimensions of space.
A process in a thing can be determined only as something that takes
place in a temporal and spatial distance relative to other events. The
motion of a thing becomes something that can be thought only in
relation to other things.
It is now expected that only this conception will produce
unobjectionable explanations of certain physical processes while such
processes lead to contradictory thoughts if one assumes the existence
of an independent space and independent time.
If one considers that for many thinkers a science of nature was
previously considered to be something that can be mathematically
demonstrated, one finds in the theory of relativity nothing less than
an attempt to declare any real science of nature null and void. For
just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it
could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the
observation of nature. Contrary to this view, it is now maintained
that the things and processes of nature themselves determine
the relations of space and time. They are to supply the mathematical
element. The only certain element is surrendered to the uncertainty of
space and time observations.
According to this view, every thought of an essential reality that
manifests its nature in existence is precluded. Everything is only in
relation to something else.
Insofar as man considers himself within the world of natural things
and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of
this theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in
mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner
life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what
is "substantial in itself' in the realm of nature but in
transcending nature, in the realm of the spirit.
It will not be possible to evade the theory of relativity for the
physical world, but precisely this fact will drive us to a knowledge
of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is
the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that
is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of the observation of
nature. That the theory of relativity forces us to think in
this way constitutes its value within the development of world
conception.
* * *
It was the intention of this book to describe the development of what
may be called philosophical activity in the proper sense of the word.
The endeavor of such spirits as Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoi and others
had for this reason to be left unconsidered, significant as discussion
of their contribution must appear when it is a question of following
the currents that lead from philosophy into our general spiritual
culture.
∴
VIII. A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy
If one observes how, up to the present time, the philosophical world
conceptions take form, one can see undercurrents in the search and
endeavor of the various thinkers, of which they themselves are not
aware but by which they are instinctively moved. In these currents
there are forces at work that give direction and often specific form
to the ideas expressed by these thinkers. Although they do not want to
focus their attention on the forces directly, what they have to say
often appears as if driven by hidden forces, which they are unwilling
to acknowledge and from which they recoil. Forces of this kind live in
the thought worlds of Dilthey, Eucken and Cohen. They are led by
cognitive powers by which they are unconsciously dominated but that do
not find a conscious development within their thought structures.
Security and certainty of knowledge is being sought in many
philosophical systems, and Kant's ideas are more or less taken as its
point of departure. The outlook of natural science determines,
consciously or unconsciously, the process of thought formation. But it
is dimly felt by many that the source of knowledge of the external
world must be sought in the self-conscious soul. Almost all of these
thinkers are dominated by the question: How can the self-conscious
soul be led to regard its inner experiences as a true manifestation of
reality? The ordinary world of sense perception has become
"illusion" because the self-conscious ego has, in the course
of philosophical development, found itself more and more isolated with
its subjective experiences. It has arrived at the point where it
regards even sense perception merely as inner experience that is
powerless to assure being and permanence for them in the world of
reality. It is felt how much depends on finding a point of support
within the self-conscious ego. But the search stimulated by this
feeling only leads to conceptions that do not provide the means of
submerging with the ego into a world that provides satisfactory
support for existence.
To explain this fact, one must look at the attitude toward the reality
of the external world taken by a soul that has detached itself from
that reality in the course of its philosophical development. This soul
feels itself surrounded by a world of which it first becomes aware
through the senses. But then it also becomes conscious of its own
activity, of its own inner creative experience. The soul feels, as an
irrefutable truth, that no light, no color can be revealed without the
eye's sensitivity for light and color. Thus, it becomes aware of
something creative in this activity of the eye. But if the eye
produces the color by its spontaneous creation, as it must be assumed
in such a philosophy, the question arises: Where do I find something
that exists in itself, that does not owe its existence to my own
creative power? If even the manifestations of the senses are nothing
but results of the activity of the soul, must this not be true to even
a higher degree with our thinking, through which we strive for
conceptions of a true reality? Is this thinking not condemned to
produce pictures that spring from the character of the soul life but
can never provide a sure approach to the sources of existence?
Questions of this kind emerge everywhere in the development of modern
philosophy.
It will be impossible to find the way out of the confusion resulting
from these questions as long as the belief is maintained that the
world revealed by the senses constitutes a complete, finished and
self-dependent reality that must be investigated in order to know its
inner nature. The human soul can arrive at its insights only through a
spontaneous inner creativity. This conviction has been described in a
previous chapter of this book, "The World as Illusion," and
in connection with the presentation of Hamerling's thoughts. Having
reached this conviction, it is difficult to overcome a certain impasse
of knowledge as long as one thinks that the world of the senses
contains the real basis of its existence within itself and that
one therefore has to copy with the inner activity of the soul what
lies outside.
This impasse will be overcome only by accepting the fact that, by its
very nature, sense perception does not present a finished
self-contained reality, but an unfinished, incomplete reality, or a
half-reality, as it were.
As soon as one presupposes that a full reality is gained through
perceptions of the sensory world, one is forever prevented from
finding the answer to the question: What has the creative mind to add
to this reality in the act of cognition? By necessity one shall have
to sustain the Kantian option: Man must consider his knowledge to be
the inner product of his own mind; he cannot regard it as a process
that is capable of revealing a true reality. If reality lies
outside the soul, then the soul cannot produce anything that
corresponds to this reality, and the result is merely a product of the
soul's own organization.
The situation is entirely changed as soon as it is realized that the
human soul does not deviate from reality in its creative effort for
knowledge, but that prior to any cognitive activity the soul conjures
up a world that is not real. Man is so placed in the world that
by the nature of his being he changes things from what they really
are. Hamerling is partly right when he says:
Certain stimuli produce the odor within our organ of smell. The rose,
therefore, has no fragrance if nobody smells it. . . . If this, dear
reader, does not seem plausible to you, if your mind stirs like a shy
horse when it is confronted with this fact, do not bother to read
another line; leave this book and all others that deal with
philosophical things unread, for you lack the ability that is
necessary for this purpose, that is, to apprehend a fact without bias
and to adhere to it in your thoughts. (Compare pages
of this volume.)
How the sensory world appears when man is confronted with it,
depends without a doubt on the nature of the soul. Does it not follow
then that this appearance of the world is a product of man's soul?
An unbiased observation shows, however, that the unreal character
of the external sense world is caused by the fact that when man is
directly confronted by things of the world, he suppresses something
that really belongs to them. If he unfolds a creative inner life that
lifts from the depths of his soul the forces that lie dormant in them,
he adds something to the part perceived by the senses and thereby
turns a half-reality to its entirety. It is due to the nature of the
soul that, at its first contact with things, it extinguishes
something that belongs to them. For this reason, things appear to
the senses not as they are in reality but as they are modified by the
soul. Their delusive character (or their mere appearance) is caused by
the fact that the soul has deprived them of something that really
belongs to them.
Inasmuch as man does not merely observe things, he adds something to
them in the process of knowledge that reveals their full reality. The
mind does not add anything to things in the process of cognition that
would have to be considered as an unreal element, but prior to the
process of knowledge it has deprived these things of something that
belongs to their true reality. It will be the task of philosophy to
realize that the world accessible to man is an "illusion"
before it is approached in the process of cognition. This
process, however, leads the way toward a full understanding of
reality. The knowledge that man creates during the process of
cognition seems to be an inner manifestation of the soul only because
he must, before the act of cognition, reject what comes from the
nature of things. He cannot see at first the real nature of things
when he encounters them in mere observation. In the process of
knowledge he unveils what was first concealed. If he regards as a
reality what he had at first perceived, he will now realize that he
has added the results of his cognitive activity to reality. As soon as
he recognizes that what was apparently produced by himself has to be
sought in the things themselves, that he merely failed to see it
previously, he will then find that the process of knowing is a real
process by which the soul progressively unites with world reality.
Through it, it expands its inner isolated experience to the experience
of the world.
In a short work,
Truth and Science,
published in 1892, the
author of the present book made a first attempt to prove
philosophically what has been briefly described. Perspectives are
indicated in this book that are necessary to the philosophy of the
present age if it is to overcome the obstacles it has encountered in
its modern development. A philosophical point of view is outlined in
this essay in the following words:
The initial form in which reality confronts the ego is not its true
manifestation but the final form, which the ego fashions out of it,
is. The first form is altogether without significance for the
objective world; it is of importance only as a basis for the processes
of cognition. Therefore, it is not the form of the world that is
presented by theory that must be considered subjective but the one the
ego encounters initially as in mere perception.
A further exposition of this point of view is given in the author's
later philosophical work,
Philosophy of Freedom
(1894) (translated also with the title,
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity).
There an attempt is made to give the philosophical
foundations for a conception that was outlined in
Truth and Science.
It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first
without their corresponding concept, but to our mental organization.
Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the
relevant elements come to us from two sources, from perceiving and
from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has
nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap
between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as
a spectator, confront the things.
And later on it is stated:
The percept is that part of reality that is given objectively; the
concept the part that is given subjectively, through intuition. Our
mental organization tears the reality apart into these two factors.
The one factor presents itself to perception, the other to intuition.
Only the union of the two, that is, the percept fitting systematically
into the universe, constitutes the full reality. If we take mere
percepts by themselves we have no reality but rather disconnected
chaos. If we take by itself the law and order connecting the percepts
then we have nothing but abstract concepts. Reality is not contained
in the abstract concept. It is, however, contained in thoughtful
observation, which does not one-sidedly consider either concept or
percept alone, but rather the union of the two.
In accepting this point of view we shall be able to think of mental
life and of reality as united in the self-conscious ego. This is the
conception toward which philosophical development has tended since the
Greek era and that has shown its first distinctly recognizable traces
in the world conception of Goethe. The awareness arises that this
self-conscious ego does not experience itself as isolated and divorced
from the objective world, but its detachment from this world is
experienced merely as an illusion of its consciousness. This isolation
can be overcome if man gains the insight that at a certain stage of
his development he must give a provisional form to his ego in order to
suppress from his consciousness the forces that unite him with the
world. If these forces exerted their influences in his consciousness
without interruption, he would never have developed a strong,
independent self-consciousness. He would be incapable of experiencing
himself as a self-conscious ego. The development of
self-consciousness, therefore, actually depends on the fact that the
mind is given the opportunity to perceive the world without that part
of reality that is extinguished by the self-conscious ego prior
to an act of cognition.
The world forces belonging to this part of reality withdraw into
obscurity in order to allow the self-conscious ego to shine forth in
full power. The ego must realize that it owes its self-knowledge to a
fact that spreads a veil over the knowledge of the world. It follows
that everything that stimulates the soul to a vigorous, energetic
experience of the ego, conceals at the same time the deeper
foundations in which this ego has its roots. All knowledge acquired by
the ordinary consciousness tends to strengthen the self-conscious ego.
Man feels himself as a self-conscious ego through the fact that he
perceives an external world with his senses, that he experiences
himself as being outside this external world and that, at a certain
stage of scientific investigation, he feels himself in relation to
this external world in such a way that it appears to him as
"illusion." Were it not so, the self-conscious ego would not
emerge. If, therefore, in the act of knowledge one attempts merely to
copy what is observed before knowledge begins, one does not arrive at
a true experience of full reality, but only at an image of a
"half reality."
Once this is admitted to be the situation, one can no longer look for
the answer of the riddles of philosophy within the experiences of the
soul that appear on the level of ordinary consciousness. It is the
function of this consciousness to strengthen the self-conscious ego.
To achieve this it must cast a veil over the connection of the ego
with the objective world, and it therefore cannot show how the soul is
connected with the true world. This explains why a method of knowledge
that applies the means of the natural scientific or similar modes of
conception must always arrive at a point where its efforts break down.
This failing of many modern thinkers has previously been pointed out
in this book, for, in the final analysis, all scientific endeavor
employs the same mode of thinking that serves to detach the
self-conscious ego from the true reality. The strength and greatness
of modern science, especially of natural science, is based on the
unrestrained application of this method.
Several philosophers such as Dilthey, Eucken and others, direct
philosophical investigation toward the self-observation of the soul.
But what they observe are those experiences of the soul that form the
basis for the self-conscious ego. Thus, they do not penetrate to the
sources in which the experiences of the soul originate. These sources
cannot be found where the soul first observes itself on the level of
ordinary consciousness. If the soul is to reach these sources, it must
go beyond this ordinary consciousness. It must experience something in
itself that ordinary consciousness cannot give to it. To ordinary
thinking, such an experience appears at first like sheer nonsense. The
soul is to experience itself knowingly in an element without
carrying its consciousness into that element. One is to transcend
consciousness and yet be conscious! But in spite of all this, we shall
either continue to get nowhere, or we shall have to open new aspects
that will reveal the above mentioned "absurdity" to be only
apparently so since it really indicates the direction in which we must
look for help to solve the riddles of philosophy.
One will have to recognize that the path into the "inner region
of the soul" must be entirely different from the one that is
taken by many philosophies of modern times. As long as soul
experiences are taken the way they present themselves to ordinary
consciousness, one will not reach down into the depths of the soul.
One will be left merely with what these depths release. Such is the
case with Eucken's world conception. It is necessary to penetrate
below the surface of the soul. This is, however, not possible by means
of the ordinary experiences. The strength of these rests precisely in
the fact that they remain in the realm of the ordinary consciousness.
The means to penetrate deeper into the soul can be found if one
directs one's attention to something that is, to be sure, also at work
in the ordinary consciousness, but does not enter it while it is
active.
While man thinks, his consciousness is focused on his thoughts. He
wants to conceive something by means of these thoughts; he wants to
think correctly in the ordinary sense. He can, however, also direct
his attention to something else. He can concentrate his attention on
the activity of thinking as such. He can, for instance, place into the
center of his consciousness a thought that refers to nothing external,
a thought that is conceived like a symbol that has no connection to
something external. It is now possible to hold onto such a thought for
a certain length of time. One can be entirely absorbed by the
concentration on this thought. The important thing with this exercise
is not that one lives in thoughts but that one experiences the
activity of thinking. In this way, the soul breaks away from an
activity in which it is engaged in ordinary thinking.
If such an inner exercise is continued long enough, it will become
gradually apparent to the soul that it has now become involved in
experiences that will separate it from all those processes of thinking
and ideation that are bound to the physical organs. A similar result
can be obtained from the activities of feeling and willing and even
for sensation, the perception of external things. One can only be
successful with this approach if one is not afraid to admit to oneself
that self-knowledge cannot be gained by mere introspection, but by
concentrating on the inner life that can be revealed only through
these exercises. Through continued practice of the soul, that is, by
holding the attention on the inner activity of thinking, feeling and
willing, it is possible for these "experiences" to become
"condensed." In this state of "condensation" they
reveal their inner nature, which cannot be perceived in the ordinary
consciousness. It is through such exercises that one discovers how our
soul forces must be so "attenuated" or weakened in producing
our ordinary form of consciousness, that they become imperceptible in
this state of "attenuation." The soul exercises referred to
consist in the unlimited increase of faculties that are also
known to the ordinary consciousness but never reach such a state of
concentration. The faculties are those of attention and of
loving surrender to the content of the soul's experience. To
attain the indicated aim, these abilities must be increased to such a
degree that they function as entirely new soul forces.
If one proceeds in this manner, one arrives at a real inner experience
that by its very nature is independent of bodily conditions. This is a
life of the spirit that must not be confused with what Dilthey and
Eucken call the spiritual world. For what they call the
spiritual world is, after all, experienced by man when he depends on
his physical organs. The spiritual life that is here referred to does
not exist for a soul that is bound to the body.
One of the first experiences that follows the attainment of this new
spiritual life is a true insight into the nature of the ordinary
mental life. This is actually not produced by the body but proceeds
outside the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I
experience the color and the sound not as a result of my body, but I
am connected with the color, with the sound, as a self-conscious ego,
outside my body. My body has the task to function in a way that can be
compared with the action of a mirror. If, in my ordinary
consciousness, I only have a mental connection with a color, I cannot
perceive it because of the nature of this consciousness, just as I
cannot see my own face when I look out into space. But if I look into
a mirror, I perceive this face as part of a body. Unless I stand in
front of the mirror, I am the body and experience myself as
such. Standing in front of the mirror, I perceive my body as a
reflection. It is like this also with our sense perceptions, although
we must, of course, be aware of the insufficiency of the analogy. I
live with a color outside my body; through the activity of my
body, that is, my eye and my nervous system, this color is transformed
for me into a conscious perception. The human body is not the producer
of perceptions and of mental life in general, but a mirroring device
of psychic and spiritual processes that take place outside the body.
Such a view places the theory of knowledge on a promising basis. In a
lecture called,
The Psychological Foundations and Epistemological Position of Spiritual Science,
delivered before the Philosophical
Congress in Bologna on April 18, 1911, the author of this book gave
the following account of a view that was then forming in his mind.
On the basis of epistemology one can reach a conception of the ego
only if one does not think of it as being inside the bodily
organization and as receiving impression "from outside." One
should conceive this "ego" as having its being within
the general order (Gesetzmässigkeit) of the things
themselves, and regard the organization of the body merely as a sort
of mirror through which the organic processes of the body reflect back
to the ego what this ego perceives outside the physical body as it
lives and weaves within the true essence of the world.
During sleep the mirror-like relation between body and soul is
interrupted; the "ego" lives only in the sphere of
the spirit. For the ordinary consciousness, however, mental life does
not exist as long as the body does not reflect the experiences. Sleep,
therefore, is an unconscious process. The exercises mentioned above
and other similar ones establish a consciousness that differs from the
ordinary consciousness. In this way, the faculty is developed not
merely to have purely spiritual experiences, but to
strengthen these experiences to such a degree that they become
spiritually perceptible without the aid of the body, and that they
become reflected within themselves. It is only in an experience of
this kind that the soul can obtain true self-knowledge and become
consciously aware of its own being. Real experiences that do not
belong to the sense world, but to one in which the soul weaves and has
its being, now rise in the manner in which memory brings back
experiences of the past. It is quite natural that the followers of
many modern philosophies will believe that the world that thus rises
up belongs in the realms of error, illusion, hallucination,
autosuggestion, etc. To this objection one can only answer that a
serious spiritual endeavor, working in the indicated way, will
discipline the mind to a point where it will clearly differentiate
illusion from spiritual reality, just as a healthy mind can
distinguish a product of fantasy from a concrete perception. It will
be futile to seek theoretical proofs for this spiritual world, but
such proofs also do not exist for the reality of the world of
perceptions. In both cases, actual experience is the only true
judge.
What keeps many men from undertaking the step that, according to this
view, can alone solve the riddles of philosophy, is the fear that they
might be led thereby into a realm of unclear mysticism. Unless one has
from the beginning an inclination toward unclear mysticism, one will,
in following the described path, gain access to a world of spiritual
experience that is as crystal clear as the structures of mathematical
ideas. If one is, however, inclined to seek the spiritual in the
"dark unknown," in the "inexplicable," one will
get nowhere, either as an adherent or as an opponent of the views
described here.
One can easily understand why these views will be rejected by
personalities who consider the methods used by natural science for
obtaining knowledge of the sense world as the only true ones. But
whoever overcomes such one-sidedness will be able to realize that the
genuinely scientific way of thinking constitutes the real basis for
the method that is here described. The ideas that have been shown in
this book to be those of the modern scientific method, present the
best subject matter for mental exercises in which the soul can immerse
itself, and on which it can concentrate in order to free itself from
its bondage to the body. Whoever uses these natural scientific ideas
in the manner that has been outlined above, will find that the
thoughts that first seem to be meant to depict only natural processes
will really set the soul free from the body. Therefore, the spiritual
science that is here referred to must be seen as a continuation of the
scientific way of thinking provided it is inwardly experienced in the
right way.
* * *
The true nature of the human soul can be experienced directly
if one seeks it in the characterized way. In the Greek era the
development of the philosophical outlook led to the birth of thought.
Later development led through the experience of thought to the
experience of the self-conscious ego. Goethe strove for experiences of
the self-conscious ego, which, although actively produced by the human
soul, at the same time place this soul in the realm of a reality that
is inaccessible to the senses. Goethe stands on this ground when he
strives for an idea of the plant that cannot be perceived by the
senses but that contains the supersensible nature of all plants,
making it possible, with the aid of this idea, to invent new plants
that would have their own life.
Hegel regarded the experience of thought as a "standing in the
true essence of the world;" for him the world of thoughts became
the inner essence of the world. An unbiased observation of
philosophical development shows that thought experience was, to be
sure, the element through which the self-conscious ego was to be
placed on its own foundation. But it shows also that it is necessary
to go beyond a life in mere thoughts in order to arrive at a form of
inner experience that leads beyond the ordinary consciousness. For
Hegel's thought experience still takes place within the field of this
ordinary consciousness.
In this way, a view of a reality is opened up for the soul that is
inaccessible to the senses. What is experienced in the soul through
the penetration into this reality, appears as the true entity
of the soul. How is it related to the external world that is
experienced by means of the body? The soul that has been thus freed
from its body feels itself to be weaving in an element of soul and
spirit. It knows that also in its ordinary life it is outside that
body, which merely acts like a mirror in making its experiences
perceptible. Through this experience the soul's spiritual experience
is heightened to a point where the reality of a new element is
revealed to the soul.
To Dilthey and Eucken the spiritual world is the sum total of the
cultural experiences of humanity. If this world is seen as the only
accessible spiritual world, one does not stand on a ground firm enough
to be comparable to the method of natural science. For the conception
of natural science, the world is so ordered that the physical human
being in his individual existence appears as a unit toward which all
other natural processes and beings point. The cultural world is what
is created by this human being. That world, however, is not an
individual entity of a higher nature than the individuality of the
human being.
The spiritual science that the author of this book has in mind points
to a form of experience that the soul can have independent from the
body, and in this experience an individual entity is revealed. It
emerges like a higher human nature for whom the physical man is like a
tool. The being that feels itself as set free, through spiritual
experience, from the physical body, is a spiritual human entity that
is as much at home in a spiritual world as the physical body in the
physical world. As the soul thus experiences its spiritual nature, it
is also aware of the fact that it stands in a certain relation to the
body. The body appears, on the one hand, as a cast of the spiritual
entity; it can be compared to the shell of a snail that is like a
counter-picture of the shape of the snail. On the other hand, the
spirit-soul entity appears in the body like the sum total of the
forces in the plant, which, after it has grown into leaf and blossom,
contract into the seed in order to prepare a new plant. One cannot
experience the inner spiritual man without knowing that he contains
something that will develop into a new physical man. This new human
being, while living within the physical organism, has collected forces
through experience that could not unfold as long as they were encased
in that organism. This body has, to be sure, enabled the soul to have
experiences in connection with the external world that make the inner
spiritual man different from what he was before he began life in the
physical body. But this body is, as it were, too rigidly organized
for being transformed by the inner spiritual man according to the
pattern of the new experiences. Thus there remains hidden in the human
shell a spiritual being that contains the disposition of a new man.
Thoughts such as these can only be briefly indicated here. They point
to a spiritual science that is essentially constructed after the model
of natural science. In elaborating this spiritual science one will
have to proceed more or less like the botanist when he observes a
plant, the formation of its root, the growth of its stem and its
leaves, and its development into blossom and fruit. In the fruit he
discovers the seed of the new plant-life. As he follows the
development of a plant he looks for its origin in the seed formed by
the previous plant. The investigator of spiritual science will trace
the process in which a human life, apart from its external
manifestation, develops also an inner being. He will find that
external experiences die off like the leaves and the flowers of a
plant. Within the inner being, however, he will discover a spiritual
kernel, which conceals within itself the potentiality of a new life.
In the infant entering life through birth he will see the return of a
soul that left the world previously through the gate of death. He will
learn to observe that what is handed down by heredity to the
individual man from his ancestors is merely the material that is
worked upon by the spiritual man in order to bring into physical
existence what has been prepared seedlike in a preceding life.
Seen from the viewpoint of this world conception, many facts of
psychology will appear in a new light. A great number of examples
could be mentioned here; it will suffice to point out only one. One
can observe how the human soul is transformed by experiences that
represent, in a certain sense, repetitions of earlier experiences. If
somebody has read an important book in his twentieth year and reads it
again in his fortieth, he experiences it as if he were a different
person. If he asks without bias for the reason for this fact, he will
find that what he learned from his reading twenty years previous has
continued to live in -him and has become a part of his nature. He has
within him the forces that live in the book, and he finds them again
when he rereads the book at the age of forty. The same holds true with
our life experiences. They become part of man himself. They live in
his "ego." But it is also apparent that within the limits of
one life this inner strengthening of the higher man must remain in the
realm of his spirit and soul nature. Yet one can also find that this
higher human being strives to become strong enough to find expression
in his physical nature. The rigidity of the body prevents this from
happening within a single life span. But in the central core of man
there lives the potential predisposition that, together with the
fruits of one life, will form a new human life in the same way that
the seed of a new plant lives in the plant.
Moreover, it must be realized that following the entry of the soul
into an independent spirit world the results of this world are raised
into consciousness in the same way that the past rises into memory.
But these realities are seen as extending beyond the span of an
individual life. The content of my present consciousness represents
the results of my earlier physical experiences; so, too, a soul that
has gone through the indicated exercises faces the whole of its
physical experience and the particular configuration of its body as
originating from the spirit-soul nature, whose existence preceded that
of the body. This existence appears as a life in a purely spiritual
world in which the soul lived before it could develop the germinal
capacities of a preceding life into a new one. Only by closing one's
mind to the obvious possibility that the faculties of the human soul
are capable of development can one refuse to recognize the
truthfulness of a person's testimony that shows that as a result of
inner work one can really know of a spiritual world beyond the realm
of ordinary consciousness. This knowledge leads to a spiritual
apprehension of a world through which it becomes evident that the true
being of the soul lies behind ordinary experiences. It also becomes
clear that this soul being survives death just as the plant seed
survives the decay of the plant. The insight is gained that the human
soul goes through repeated lives on earth and that in between these
earthly lives it leads a purely spiritual existence.
This point of view brings reality to the assumption of a spiritual
world. The human souls themselves carry into a later cultural epoch
what they acquired in a former. One can readily observe how the inner
dispositions of the soul develop if one refrains from arbitrarily
ascribing this development merely to the laws of physical heredity. In
the spiritual world of which Eucken and Dilthey speak the later phases
of development always follow from the immediately preceding ones. Into
this sequence of events are placed human souls who bring with them the
results of their preceding lives in the form of their inner soul
disposition. They must, however, acquire in a process of learning what
developed in the earthly world of culture and civilization while they
were in a purely spiritual state of existence.
A historical account cannot do full justice to the thoughts exposed
here. I would refer anyone who seeks more information to my writings
on spiritual science. These writings attempted to give, in a general
manner, the world conception that is outlined in the present
book. Even so, I believe that it is possible to recognize from it that
this world conception rests on a serious philosophical foundation. On
this basis it strives to gain access to a world that opens up to
sense-free observation acquired by inner work.
One of the teachers of this world conception is the history of
philosophy itself. It shows that the course of philosophical thought
tends toward a conception that cannot be acquired in a state of
ordinary consciousness. The accounts of many representative thinkers
show how they attempt in various ways to comprehend the self-conscious
ego with the help of the ordinary consciousness. A theoretical
exposition of why the means of this ordinary consciousness must lead
to unsatisfactory results does not belong to a historical account. But
the historical facts show distinctly that the ordinary consciousness,
however we may look at it, cannot solve the questions it nevertheless
must raise. This final chapter was written to show why the ordinary
consciousness and the usual scientific mind lack the means to solve
such questions. This chapter was meant to describe what the
characterized world conceptions were unconsciously striving for. From
one certain point of view this last chapter no longer belongs to the
history of philosophy, but from another point of view, its
justification is quite clear. The message of this book is that a world
conception based on spiritual science is virtually demanded by the
development of modern philosophy as an answer to the questions it
raises.
To become aware of this one must consider specific instances of this
philosophical development. Franz Brentano in his Psychology
points out how philosophy was deflected from the treatment of the
deeper riddles of the soul (compare page
of this volume).
He writes, "Apparent as the necessity for a restriction of the field
of investigation is in this direction, it is perhaps no more than only
apparent." David Hume was most emphatically opposed to the
metaphysicists who maintained that they had found within themselves a
carrier for all psychic conditions. He says:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I
always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or
cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never
catch myself at any time without a perception and never can
observe anything but perceptions. When my perceptions are removed for
any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself
and may truly be said not to exist. (Treatise of Human Nature,
Part IV, Sect. 6.)
Hume only knows the kind of psychological observation that would
approach the soul without any inner effort. An observation of this
kind simply cannot penetrate to the nature of the soul. Brentano takes
up Hume's statement and says, "This same man, Hume, nevertheless,
observes that all proofs for the immortality of the soul possess the
same power of persuasion as the opposing traditional views." But
here we must add that only faith, and not knowledge, can support
Hume's view that the soul contains nothing more than what he finds
there. For how could any continuity be guaranteed for what Hume finds
as the content of the soul? Brentano continues by saying:
Although it is obvious that a denial of a soul substance eliminates
the possibility to speak of an immortality in the proper sense of the
word, it is still not true that the question of immortality loses all
meaning if a supporting substance for psychic activity is denied.
This becomes immediately evident if one considers that, with or
without supporting substance, one cannot deny that our psychic life
here on earth has a certain continuity. If one rejects the idea of a
soul substance, one has the right to assume that this continuity does
not depend on a supporting substance. The question as to whether our
psychic life would continue after the destruction of our body will be
no less meaningful for such a thinker than it is for others. It is
really quite inconsistent if thinkers of this school reject the
essential question of immortality as meaningless also in this
important sense on the basis of the above-mentioned reason. It should
then, however, be referred to as the immortality of life rather than
that of the soul. (Brentano, Psychology from the Empirical
Standpoint, Bk. I, Chap. 1.)
This opinion of Brentano's, however, is without support if the world
conception outlined above is rejected. For where can we find grounds
for the survival of psychic phenomena after the dissolution of the
body if we want to restrict ourselves to the ordinary consciousness?
This consciousness can only last as long as its reflector, the
physical body, exists. What may survive the loss of the body cannot be
designated as substance; it must be another form of
consciousness. But this other consciousness can be discovered only
through the inner activity that frees the soul from the body. This
shows us that the soul can experience consciousness even without the
mediation of the body. Through such activity and with the help of
supersensible perception, the soul will experience the
condition of the complete loss of the body. It finds that it had been
the body, itself, that obscured that higher consciousness. While the
soul is incarnated, the body has such a strong effect on the soul that
this other consciousness cannot become active. This becomes a matter
of direct experience when the soul exercises indicated in this chapter
are successfully carried out. The soul must then consciously suppress
the forces that originate in the body and extinguish the body-free
consciousness. This extinction can no longer take place after the
dissolution of the body. It is the other consciousness, therefore,
that passes through successive lives and through the purely spiritual
existence between death and birth. From this point of view, there is
reference to a nebulous soul substance. In terms that are comparable
to ideas of natural science, the soul is shown how it continues its
existence because in one life the seed of the next is prepared, as the
seed is prepared in the plant. The present life is shown as the reason
for a future life, and the true essence of what continues when death
dissolves the body is brought to light.
Spiritual science as described here nowhere contradicts the methods of
modern natural science. But science has to admit that with its methods
one cannot gain insight into the realm of the spiritual. As soon as
the existence of a consciousness other than the ordinary one is
recognized, one will find that by it one is led to conceptions
concerning the spiritual world that will give to it a cohesion similar
to that that natural science gives to the physical world.
It will be of importance to eliminate the impression that this
spiritual science has borrowed its insights from any older form of
religion. One is easily misled to this view because the conception of
reincarnation, for instance, is a tenet of certain creeds. For the
modern investigator of spiritual science, there can be no borrowing
from such creeds. He finds that the devotion to the exercises
described above will lead to a consciousness that enters the spiritual
world. As a result of this consciousness he learns that the soul has
its standing in the spiritual world in the way previously described.
A study of the history of philosophy, beginning with the awakening of
thought in Greek civilization, indicates the way that leads to the
conviction that the true being of the soul can be found below the
surface of ordinary experience. Thinking has proved to be the educator
of the soul by leading it to the point at which it is alone with
itself. This experience of solitude strengthens the soul whereby it is
able to delve not only into its own being but also to reach into the
deeper realities of the world. The spiritual science described in this
chapter does not attempt to lead behind the world of the senses by
using the means of ordinary consciousness, such as reflection and
theorizing. It recognizes that the spiritual world must remain
concealed from that consciousness and that the soul must, through its
own inner transformation, rise into the supersensible world before it
can become conscious of it.
In this way, the insight is also gained that the origin of moral
impulses lies in the world that the soul perceives when it is free of
the body. From there also the driving forces originate that do not
stem from the physical nature of man but are meant to determine his
actions independent from this nature.
When one becomes acquainted with the fact that the "ego"
with its spiritual world lives outside the body and that it,
therefore, carries the experiences of the external world to the
physical body, one will find one's way to a truly spiritual
understanding of the riddle of human destiny. A man's inner life is
deeply connected with his experiences of destiny. Just consider the
state of a man at the age of thirty. The real content of his inner
being would be entirely different if he had lived a different kind of
life in his preceding years. His "ego" is inconceivable
without the experiences of these years. Even if they have struck him
serious blows of fate, he has become what he is through them. They
belong to the forces that are active in his "ego." They do
not merely strike him from outside. As man lives in his soul and
spirit with color that is perceptible only by means of its
mirror-effect of the body, so he lives in union with his destiny. With
color he is united in his soul life, but he can only perceive it when
the body reflects it. Similarly, he becomes one with the effect of a
stroke of destiny that results from a previous earth life, but he
experiences this blow only inasmuch as the soul plunges
unconsciously into events that spring from these causes. In his
ordinary consciousness man does not know that his will is bound
up with his destiny. In his newly acquired body-free consciousness he
finds that he would be deprived of all initiative if that part of his
soul that lives in the spiritual world had not willed its entire fate,
down to the smallest details. We see that the riddles of human destiny
cannot be solved merely by theorizing about them, but only by learning
to understand how the soul grows together with its fate in an
experience that proceeds beyond the ordinary consciousness.
Thus, one will gradually realize that the causes for this or that
stroke of destiny in the present life must be sought in a previous
one. To the ordinary consciousness our fate does not appear in its
true form. It takes its course as a result of previous earthly lives,
which are hidden from ordinary consciousness. To realize one's deep
connection with the events of former lives means at the same time that
one becomes reconciled with one's destiny.
For a fuller coverage of the philosophical riddles like these, the
author must refer to his other works on spiritual science. We can only
mention the more important results of this science but not the
specific ways and means by which it can become convincing.
Philosophy leads by its own paths to the insight that it must pass
from a study of the world to an experience of it, because mere
reflection cannot bring a satisfactory solution to all the riddles of
life. This method of cognition is comparable to the seed of a plant.
The seed can work in a twofold way when it becomes ripe. It can be
used as human food or as seed for a new plant. If it is examined with
respect to its usefulness, it must be looked at in a way different
from the observation that follows the cycle of reproducing a new
plant.
Similarly, man's spiritual experiences can choose either of two roads.
On the one hand, it serves the contemplation of the external world.
Examined from this point of view, one will be inclined to develop a
world conception that asks above all things: How does our knowledge
penetrate to the nature of things? What knowledge can we derive from a
study of the nature of things? To ask these questions is like
investigating the nutritional value of the seed. But it is also
possible to focus attention on the experiences of the soul that are
not diverted by outside impressions, but lead the soul from one level
of being on to another. These experiences are seen as an implanted
driving force in which one recognizes a higher man who uses this life
to prepare for the next. One arrives at the insight that this is the
fundamental impulse of all human soul experience and that knowledge
is related to it as the use of the seed of the plant for food is
comparable to the development of the grain into a new plant. If we
fail to understand this fact, we shall live under the illusion that we
could discover the nature of knowledge by merely observing the soul's
experiences. This procedure is as erroneous as it is to make only a
chemical analysis of the seed with respect to its food value and to
pretend that this represents its real essence. Spiritual science, as
it is meant here, tries to avoid this error by revealing the inner
nature of the soul's experience and by showing that it can also serve
the process of knowledge, although its true nature does not consist in
this contemplative knowledge.
The "body-free soul consciousness" here described must not
be confused with those enhanced mental conditions that are not
acquired by means of the characterized exercises but result from
states of lower consciousness such as unclear clairvoyance, hypnotism,
etc. In these conditions no body-free consciousness can be attained
but only an abnormal connection between body and soul that differs
from that of the ordinary life. Real spiritual science can be gained
only when the soul finds, in the course of its own disciplined
meditative work, the transition from the ordinary consciousness to one
with which it awakens in and becomes directly aware of the spiritual
world. This inner work consists in a heightening, not a lowering of
the ordinary consciousness.
Through such inner work the human soul can actually attain what
philosophy aims for. The latter should not be underestimated because
it has not attained its objective on the paths that are usually
followed by it. Far more important than the philosophical results are
the forces of the soul that can be developed in the course of
philosophical work. These forces must eventually lead to the point
where it becomes possible to recognize a "body-free soul
experience." Philosophers will then recognize that the
"world riddles" must not merely be considered scientifically
but need to be experienced by the human soul. But the soul must
first attain to the condition in which such an experience is possible.
This brings up an obvious question. Should ordinary knowledge and
scientific knowledge deny its own nature and recognize as a world
conception only what is offered from a realm lying outside its own
domain? As it is, the experiences of the characterized consciousness
are convincing at once also to this ordinary consciousness as long as
the latter does not insist upon locking itself up within its
own walls. The supersensible truths can be found only by a soul
that enters into the supersensible. Once they are found, however, they
can be fully understood by the ordinary consciousness. For they are in
complete and necessary agreement with the knowledge that can be gained
for the world of the senses.
It cannot be denied that, in the course of the history of philosophy,
viewpoints have repeatedly been advanced that are similar to those
described in this final chapter. But in former ages these tendencies
appeared only like byways of the philosophical inquiry. Its
first task was to work its way through everything that could be
regarded as a continuation of the awakening thought experience of the
Greeks. It then could point the way toward supersensible consciousness
on the strength of its own initiative and in awareness of what it can
and what it cannot attain. In former times this consciousness was
accepted, as it were, without philosophical justification. It was not
demanded by philosophy itself. But modern philosophy demands it in
response to what it has achieved already without the assistance
of this consciousness. Without this help it has succeeded in leading
the spiritual investigation into directions that will, if rightly
developed, lead to the recognition of supersensible consciousness.
That is why this final chapter did not start by describing the way in
which the soul speaks of the supersensible when it stands within its
realm. Quite to the contrary, an attempt was made to outline
philosophically the tendencies resulting from the modern world
conceptions, and it was shown how a pursuit of these innate
tendencies leads the soul to the recognition of its own
supersensible nature.
