The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
GA 4
Appendix II
Remarks on the Opening Chapter to the First Edition
[ 1 ] The following is an essential reproduction of what was in the first edition of this book as a kind of "preface". Since it is more a reflection of the mood from which I wrote the book twenty-five years ago than anything directly related to its content, I have included it here as an "appendix". I do not wish to omit it completely for the reason that the view repeatedly arises that I have to suppress something of my earlier writings because of my later writings in the humanities.
[ 2 ] Our age can only want to draw truth from the depths of the human being. 1Only the very first opening sentences (of the first edition) of these remarks are omitted here, which seem quite insignificant to me today. But what is said in the rest of it seems to me to be necessary to say even today despite the scientific way of thinking of our contemporaries, indeed precisely because of it. Of Schiller's well-known two ways:
"We both seek truth, you outside in life, I inside
in the heart, and so each finds it for sure.
If the eye is healthy, it meets the Creator outside;
If it is the heart, then it certainly reflects the world inside"
the present is especially pious to the second. A truth that comes to us from the outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We may only believe in what appears to each of us as truth within ourselves.
[ 3 ] Only the truth can bring us security in the development of our individual powers. Those who are tormented by doubt are paralyzed. In a world that is mysterious to him, he cannot find a goal for his work.
[ 4 ] We no longer merely want to believe; we want to know. Faith demands recognition of truths that we do not fully understand. What we do not fully understand, however, resists the individual, who wants to live through everything with his deepest inner being. Only knowledge that does not submit to any external norm but arises from the inner life of the personality satisfies us.
[ 5 ] We also do not want such knowledge that has been formed once and for all in frozen school rules and preserved in compendia valid for all times. We believe we are each entitled to start from our closest experiences, our immediate experiences, and from there to ascend to knowledge of the whole universe. We strive for certain knowledge, but each in his own way.
[ 6 ] Our scientific teachings should also no longer take on such a form as if their recognition were a matter of unconditional compulsion. None of us would like to give a scientific treatise a title such as Fichte once gave it: "Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. An attempt to force the reader to understand." Today, no one should be forced to understand. We do not demand recognition or agreement from anyone who is not driven to an opinion by a special, individual need. Nor do we currently want to force knowledge on the immature human being, the child, but rather seek to develop his abilities so that he no longer needs to be forced to understand, but wants to understand.
[ 7 ] I am under no illusion with regard to this characteristic of my age. I know how much individuality-less templateism lives and spreads. But I know just as well that many of my contemporaries are trying to organize their lives along the lines I have indicated. I would like to dedicate this book to them. It is not intended to show "the only possible" path to the truth, but it is intended to tell of the path taken by someone who is concerned with the truth.
[ 8 ] The writing first leads into more abstract areas, where the thought must draw sharp contours in order to arrive at secure points. But the reader is also led out of the dry concepts into concrete life. I am of the opinion that one must also rise into the etheric realm of concepts if one wants to live through existence in all directions. He who knows how to enjoy only with the senses does not know the delicacies of life. Oriental scholars make their students spend years in a life of renunciation and asceticism before they tell them what they themselves know. The Occident no longer demands pious exercises and asceticism for science, but it does demand the good will to withdraw for a short time from the immediate impressions of life and to enter the realm of pure thought.
[ 9 ] There are many areas of life. Special sciences develop for each one. But life itself is a unity, and the more the sciences strive to delve into the individual areas, the more they distance themselves from the view of the living whole of the world. There must be a knowledge that seeks the elements in the individual sciences in order to bring man back to full life. The specialized scientific researcher wants to acquire an awareness of the world and its effects through his findings; in this writing the goal is a philosophical one: science itself should become organic and alive. The individual sciences are the precursors of the science we are striving for here. A similar relationship prevails in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. The latter is a sum of knowledge, the possession of which is a necessary precondition for composing. In composing, the laws of compositional theory serve life, real reality. In exactly the same sense, philosophy is an art. All real philosophers were conceptual artists. For them, human ideas became artistic material and the scientific method became an artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus gains concrete, individual life. Ideas become powers of life. We then not only have a knowledge of things, but we have turned knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has taken precedence over a merely passive assimilation of truths.
[ 10 ] How philosophy as an art relates to the freedom of man, what the latter is, and whether we are or can become partakers of it: that is the main question of my writing. All other scientific explanations are included here only because they ultimately shed light on what I believe to be the questions closest to man. A "philosophy of freedom" is to be given in these pages.
[ 11 ] All science would only be the satisfaction of idle curiosity if it did not strive to increase the value of existence of the human personality. The sciences only attain their true value by presenting the human significance of their results. It is not the ennoblement of a single faculty of the soul that can be the ultimate aim of the individual, but the development of all the faculties that lie dormant within us. Knowledge has value only in that it contributes to the all-round development of the entire human nature.
[ 12 ] This writing therefore understands the relationship between science and life not in such a way that man must bow to the idea and dedicate his powers to its service, but in the sense that he takes possession of the world of ideas in order to use them for his human goals, which go beyond the merely scientific ones.
[ 13 ] One must be able to confront the idea experientially; otherwise one falls under its bondage.