Riddles of Philosophy
Part I
GA 18
VIII. Reactionary World Conceptions
[ 1 ] “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 He does not attempt to penetrate into things but looks at them from the corner into which he has withdrawn as an isolated thinker.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.
[ 2 ] 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.
[ 3 ] 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.”
[ 4 ] 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.
[ 5 ] 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.
[ 6 ] “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.”
[ 7 ] 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.
[ 8 ] 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.
[ 9 ] 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.
[ 10 ] 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.
[ 11 ] 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.
[ 12 ] 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.
[ 13 ] 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.”
[ 14 ] 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.
[ 15 ] 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.
[ 16 ] 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.
[ 17 ] 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.
Reaktionäre Weltanschauungen
[ 1 ] «Die Knospe verschwindet in dem Hervorbrechen der Blüte, und man könnte sagen, daß jene von dieser widerlegt wird; ebenso wird durch die Frucht die Blüte für ein falsches Dasein der Pflanze erklärt, und als ihre Wahrheit tritt jene an die Stelle von dieser. Diese Formen unterscheiden sich nicht nur, sondern verdrängen sich auch als unverträglich miteinander. Aber ihre flüssige Natur macht sie zugleich zu Momenten der organischen Einheit, worin sie sich nicht nur nicht widerstreiten, sondern eins so notwendig als das andere ist, und diese gleiche Notwendigkeit macht erst das Leben des Ganzen aus.» In diesen Worten Hegels ist einer der wichtigsten Charakterzüge seiner Vorstellungsart ausgesprochen. Er glaubte daran, daß die Dinge der Wirklichkeit den Widerspruch in sich tragen, und daß grade darin der Antrieb zu ihrem Werden, zu ihrer lebendigen Bewegung liegt, daß sie diesen Widerspruch fortwährend zu überwinden suchen. Die Blüte würde niemals zur Frucht werden, wenn sie ohne Widerspruch wäre. Sie hätte dann keinen Anlaß, aus ihrem widerspruchslosen Dasein herauszugehen. Von einer genau entgegengesetzten Denkergesinnung ging Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) aus. Hegel ist ein scharfer Denker, aber zugleich ein wirklichkeitsdurstiger Geist. Er möchte nur Gedanken haben, die den reichen, gesättigten Gehalt der Welt in sich aufgenommen haben. Deshalb müssen seine Gedanken auch so in ewigem Flusse sein, in stetem Werden, in widerspruchvoller Fortbewegung wie die Wirklichkeit selbst. Herbart ist ganz abstrakter Denker; er sucht die Dinge nicht zu durchdringen, sondern er betrachtet sie von seiner Denkerecke aus. Den rein logischen Denker stört der Widerspruch; er verlangt klare Begriffe, die nebeneinander bestehen können. Der eine darf den anderen nicht beeinträchtigen. Der Denker sieht sich der Wirklichkeit gegenüber, die nun einmal widerspruchsvoll ist, in einer eigentümlichen Lage. Die Begriffe, die sie ihm liefert, befriedigen ihn nicht. Sie verstoßen gegen sein logisches Bedürfnis. Dieses Gefühl der Unzufriedenheit wird zum Ausgangspunkte seiner Weltanschauung. Herbart sagt sich; Wenn mir die vor meinen Sinnen und meinem Geiste ausgebreitete Wirklichkeit widerspruchsvolle Begriffe liefert, so kann sie nicht die wahre Wirklichkeit sein, nach der mein Denken strebt. Daraus entsteht ihm seine Aufgabe. Die widerspruchsvolle Wirklichkeit ist gar nicht wirkliches Sein, sondern nur Schein. In dieser Auffassung schließt sich Herbart bis zu einem gewissen Grade an Kant an. Während aber dieser das wahre Sein als ein dem denkenden Erkennen Unerreichbares erklärt, glaubt Herbart gerade dadurch von dem Schein zum Sein vorzudringen, daß er die widerspruchsvollen Begriffe des Scheins bearbeitet und in widerspruchslose verwandelt. Wie der Rauch auf das Feuer, so deutet der Schein auf ein ihm zugrunde liegendes Sein. Wenn wir aus dem widerspruchsvollen, unseren Sinnen und unserem Geiste gegebenen Weltbilde ein widerspruchsloses durch das logische Denken herausarbeiten, so haben wir in dem letzteren das, was wir suchen. Es erscheint uns zwar nicht in dieser seiner Widerspruchslosigkeit; aber es liegt hinter dem, was uns erscheint als die wahre, echte Wirklichkeit. Herbart geht also nicht darauf aus, die unmittelbar vorliegende Wirklichkeit als solche zu begreifen, sondern er schafft eine andere Wirklichkeit, durch die die erstere erst erklärlich werden soll. Er kommt dadurch zu einem abstrakten Gedankensystem, das sich gegenüber der reichen, vollen Wirklichkeit recht dürftig ausnimmt. Die wahre Wirklichkeit kann keine Einheit sein, denn eine solche müßte ja die unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit der wirklichen Dinge und Vorgänge mit allen ihren Widersprüchen in sich enthalten. Sie muß eine Vielheit von einfachen, sich ewig gleichen Wesen sein, in denen es kein Werden, keine Entwickelung gibt. Nur ein einfaches Wesen, das unveränderlich seine Merkmale bewahrt, ist widerspruchslos. Ein Wesen, das sich entwickelt, ist in einem Augenblicke etwas anderes als in dem anderen, das heißt, es widerspricht in einem Zeitpunkte der Eigenheit, die es in einem anderen hat. Eine Vielheit einfacher, sich nie ändernder Wesen ist also die wahre Welt. Und was wir wahrnehmen, sind nicht diese einfachen Wesen, sondern nur ihre Beziehungen zueinander. Diese Beziehungen haben mit dem wahren Wesen nichts zu tun. Wenn ein einfaches Wesen in eine Beziehung zu einem anderen tritt, so werden beide dadurch nicht verändert; ich aber nehme das Ergebnis ihrer Beziehung wahr. Unsere unmittelbare Wirklichkeit ist eine Summe von Beziehungen zwischen den wirklichen Wesen. Wenn ein Wesen aus seiner Beziehung zu einem andern Wesen heraustritt und dafür in eine solche zu einem dritten Wesen kommt, so ist etwas geschehen, ohne daß von diesem Geschehen das Sein der Wesen selbst berührt worden ist. Dieses Geschehen nehmen wir wahr. Es ist unsere scheinbare, widerspruchsvolle Wirklichkeit. Interessant ist, wie Herbart auf Grund dieser seiner Anschauung das Leben der Seele sich vorstellt. Diese ist ebenso wie alle anderen wirklichen Wesen ein Einfaches, in sich Unveränderliches. Es tritt nun in Beziehungen zu anderen seienden Wesen. Der Ausdruck dieser Beziehungen ist das Vorstellungsleben. Alles, was sich in uns abspielt: Vorstellen, Fühlen, Wollen, ist ein Beziehungsspiel zwischen der Seele und der übrigen Welt der einfachen Seienden. Man sieht, das Seelenleben ist dadurch zu einem Schein von Verhältnissen gemacht, in die das einfache Seelenwesen mit der Welt eingeht. Herbart ist ein mathematischer Kopf. Und im Grunde ist seine ganze Weltvorstellung aus mathematischen Vorstellungen heraus geboren. Eine Zahl ändert sich nicht, wenn sie das Glied einer Rechnungsoperation wird. Drei bleibt drei, ob es zu vier addiert, oder von sieben subtrahiert wird. Wie die Zahlen innerhalb der Rechnungsoperationen, so stehen die einfachen Wesen innerhalb der Beziehungen, die sich zwischen ihnen herausbilden. Und deshalb wird Herbart auch die Seelenkunde zu einem Rechenexempel. Er sucht die Mathematik auf die Psychologie anzuwenden. Wie sich die Vorstellungen gegenseitig bedingen, wie sie aufeinander wirken, was für Ergebnisse sie durch ihr Zusammensein liefern, das wird von ihm berechnet. Das «Ich» ist ihm nicht die geistige Wesenheit, die wir in unserem Selbstbewußtsein ergreifen, sondern es ist das Resultat des Zusammenwirkens aller Vorstellungen, somit nichts anderes als auch eine Summe, ein höchster Ausdruck von Beziehungen. Von dem einfachen Wesen, das unserem Seelenleben zugrunde liegt, wissen wir nichts, wohl aber erscheinen uns seine fortwährenden Beziehungen zu anderen Wesen. In dieses Spiel von Beziehungen ist also ein Wesen verstrickt. Dies drückt sich in der Tatsache aus, daß sie alle nach einem Mittelpunkt hinstreben, und dieser Mittelpunkt ist der Ichgedanke.
[ 2 ] Herbart ist in anderem Sinne ein Repräsentant der neueren Weltanschauungsentwickelung als Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel. Diese suchen nach einer Darstellung der selbstbewußten Seele in einem Weltbilde, das diese selbstbewußte Seele enthalten kann. Sie sprechen damit den geistigen Impuls ihres Zeitalters aus. Herbart steht vor diesem Impuls, er muß empfinden, daß der Impuls da ist. Er sucht ihn zu verstehen; aber er findet in dem Denken, wie er es sich als richtiges vorstellt, keine Möglichkeit, sich in das selbstbewußte Seelenwesen hineinzuleben. Er bleibt außerhalb desselben stehen. Man kann an Herbarts Weltanschauung sehen, welche Schwierigkeiten dem Denken erwachsen, wenn es begreifen will, wozu es seinem Wesen nach in der Menschheitsentwickelung geworden ist. Neben Hegel nimmt sich Herbart so aus wie jemand, der nach einem Ziele vergebens ringt, das der andere erreicht zu haben meint. Herbarts Gedankenkonstruktionen sind ein Versuch, von außen abzubilden, was Hegel im inneren Miterleben darstellen will. Für den Grundcharakter des neueren Weltanschauungslebens sind auch Denker wie Herbart bedeutsam. Sie deuten eben dadurch auf das Ziel hin, das zu erreichen ist, daß sie die ungeeigneten Mittel zu diesem Ziele zur Offenbarung bringen. Das geistige Ziel der Zeit ringt in Herbart; dessen geistige Kraft reicht nicht aus, um in genügender Art dieses Ringen zu verstehen und zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Der Fortgang der Weltanschauungsentwickelung zeigt, daß immer in diese Entwickelung neben den Persönlichkeiten, welche auf der Höhe der Zeitimpulse stehen, auch solche eingreifen, die aus dem Nichtverstehen dieser Impulse Weltanschauungen entfalten. Man kann solche Weltanschauungen als reaktionäre wohl bezeichnen.
[ 3 ] Herbart fällt zurück in die Leibnizsche Auffassung. Sein einfaches Seelenleben ist unveränderlich. Es entsteht nicht, es vergeht nicht. Es war vorhanden, als dies scheinbare Leben begann, das der Mensch mit seinem Ich umschließt; und es wird sich aus diesen Beziehungen wieder loslösen und fortbestehen, wenn ,dieses Leben aufhört. Zu einer Gottesvorstellung kommt Herbart durch sein Weltbild, das viele einfache Wesen enthält, die das Geschehen durch ihre Beziehungen hervorbringen. Wir nehmen innerhalb dieses Geschehens Zweckmäßigkeit wahr. Die Beziehungen könnten aber, wenn die Wesen, die, ihrem eigenen Sein nach, gar nichts miteinander zu tun haben, sich selbst überlassen wären, nur zufällige, chaotische sein. Daß sie zweckmäßig sind, deutet also auf einen weisen Weltenlenker, der ihre Beziehungen ordnet. «Das Wesen der Gottheit näher zu bestimmen, vermag niemand», sagt Herbart. «Die Anmaßungen der Systeme, die von Gott als einem bekannten, in scharfen Umrissen aufzufassenden Gegenstande reden, wodurch wir uns zu einem Wissen erheben könnten, für welches uns nun einmal die Data versagt sind», verurteilt er.
[ 4 ] Das Handeln des Menschen und seine Kunstschöpfungen hängen in diesem Weltbild vollständig in der Luft. Es fehlt jede Möglichkeit, sie demselben einzufügen. Denn welches Verhältnis soll bestehen zwischen einer Beziehung einfacher Wesen, denen alle Vorgänge gleichgültig sind, und zwischen den Taten der Menschen? Daher muß Herbart sowohl für die Ethik als für die Ästhetik eine selbständige Wurzel suchen. Er glaubt sie im menschlichen Gefühle zu finden. Wenn der Mensch Dinge oder Vorgänge wahrnimmt, so kann sich das Gefühl des Gefallens oder Mißfallens daran knüpfen. So gefällt es uns, wenn der Wille eines Menschen eine Richtung nimmt, die mit dessen Überzeugung übereinstimmt. Wenn wir das Gegenteil wahrnehmen, setzt sich in uns das Gefühl des Mißfallens fest. Wegen dieses Gefühles nennen wir den Einklang der Überzeugung mit dem Wollen sittlich gut, den Mißklang sittlich verwerflich. Ein solches Gefühl kann sich nur an ein Verhältniszwischen moralischen Elementen knüpfen. Der Wille als solcher ist uns moralisch gleichgültig. Die Überzeugung auch. Erst wenn sie zusammenwirken, kommt ethisches Wohlgefallen oder Mißfallen zum Vorschein. Herbart nennt ein Verhältnis moralischer Elemente eine praktische Idee. Er zählt fünf solcher praktisch-ethischen Ideen auf: die Idee der sittlichen Freiheit, bestehend in der Übereinstimmung von Willen und Überzeugung; die Idee der Vollkommenheit, die darauf beruht, daß das Starke im Vergleich mit dem Schwachen gefällt; die Idee des Rechtes, die aus dem Mißfallen an dem Streit entspringt; die Idee des WohIwollens, die das Gefallen ausdrückt, das man empfindet, wenn ein Wille den anderen fördert; und die Idee der Vergeltung, die fordert, daß alles Wohl und Wehe, das von einem Individuum ausgegangen ist, an diesem wieder ausgeglichen wird. Auf einem menschlichen Gefühle, auf der moralischen Empfindung baut Herbart die Ethik auf. Er sondert sie von der Weltanschauung, die es mit dem zu tun hat was ist, und macht sie zu einer Summe von Forderungen dessen, was sein soll Er verbindet sie mit der Ästhetik, ja macht sie zu einem Bestandteil derselben. Denn auch diese Wissenschaft enthält Forderungen über ein Seinsollendes. Auch sie hat es mit Verhältnissen zu tun, an die sich Gefühle knüpfen. Die einzelne Farbe läßt uns ästhetisch gleichgültig. Wenn eine andere neben sie tritt, so kann dies Zusammensein uns befriedigen oder mißfallen. Was in seinem Zusammensein gefällt, ist schön; was mißfällt, ist häßlich. Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898) hat auf diesen Grundsätzen eine Wissenschaft der Kunst in geistvoller Art auferbaut. Von ihr soll nur ein Teil die Ethik oder die Wissenschaft vom Guten sein, welche diejenigen schönen Verhältnisse betrachtet, die im Gebiete des Handelns in Betracht kommen. Die bedeutsamen Ausführungen Robert Zimmermanns über die Ästhetik (Kunstwissenschaft) bezeugen, daß auch von den Weltanschauungsversuchen, welche nicht bis zur Höhe der Zeitimpulse reichen, wichtige Anregungen für die Geistesentwickelung ausgehen können.
[ 5 ] Herbart hat, wegen seines auf das Mathematisch-Notwendige angelegten Geistes, mit Glück diejenigen Vorgänge des menschlichen Seelenlebens betrachtet, die wirklich bei allen Menschen in gleicher Weise sich mit einer gewissen Regelmäßigkeit abspielen. Die intimeren, individuelleren werden das natürlich nicht sein. Das Originelle und Eigenartige in jeder Persönlichkeit wird solch mathematischer Verstand übersehen. Er wird aber eine gewisse Einsicht in das Durchschnittsmäßige des Geistes erlangen und zugleich mit seiner rechnerischen Sicherheit eine Herrschaft über die Entwickelung des Geistes. Wie die mechanischen Gesetze es sind, die uns zur Technik befähigen, so die Gesetze des Seelenlebens zur Erziehung, zur Technik der Ausbildung der Seele. Deshalb ist Herbarts Arbeit auf dem Gebiete der Pädagogik fruchtbar geworden. Er hat unter Pädagogen eine reiche Anhängerschaft gefunden. Aber nicht nur unter diesen. Das scheint bei dieser Weltanschauung, die ein Bild dürftiger, grauer Allgemeinheiten bietet, nicht auf den ersten Blick einleuchtend. Es erklärt sich aber daraus, daß gerade die weltanschauungsbedürftigsten Naturen einen gewissen Hang nach solchen Allgemeinbegriffen haben, die sich mit starrer Notwendigkeit wie die Glieder eines Rechenexempels aneinanderreihen. Es hat etwas Bestrickendes, zu erleben, wie sich Gedankenglied an Gedankenglied wie von selbst kettet, weil es das Gefühl der Sicherheit erweckt. Man schätzt die mathematischen Wissenschaften wegen dieser Sicherheit so hoch. Sie bauen sich gleichsam von selbst auf; man gibt nur das Gedankenmaterial dazu her und überläßt das Weitere der selbsttätigen logischen Notwendigkeit. Bei dem Fortgang des Hegelschen Denkens, das mit Wirklichkeit gesättigt ist, muß man fortwährend eingreifen. Es ist mehr Wärme, mehr Unmittelbarkeit in diesem Denken; dafür aber bedarf sein Fortfließen immerwährend des Zutuns der Seele. Es ist ja die Wirklichkeit, die man in Gedanken einfängt; diese immer fließende, in jedem ihrer Punkte individuelle Wirklichkeit, die jeder logischen Starrheit widerstrebt. Auch Hegel hatte zahlreiche Schüler und Anhänger. Aber diese waren weit weniger treu als diejenigen Herbarts. So lange Hegels mächtige Persönlichkeit seine Gedanken belebte, so lange übte sie ihren Zauber; und überzeugend wirkte, worauf dieser Zauber lag. Nach seinem Tode gingen viele seiner Schüler die eigenen Wege. Und das ist nur natürlich. Denn wer selbständig ist, wird auch sein Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit auf selbständige Art gestalten. Bei Herbarts Schülern nehmen wir ein anderes wahr. Sie sind treu. Sie bilden die Lehren des Meisters fort; den Grundstock seiner Gedanken aber behalten sie in unveränderter Form bei. Wer sich in Hegels Denkweise einlebt, der vertieft sich in den Werdegang der Welt, der in unzähligen Entwickelungsstufen sich darlebt. Da kann der einzelne zwar angeregt werden, diesen Weg des Werdens zu gehen; er kann aber die einzelnen Stufen nach seiner individuellen Vorstellungsart gestalten. Bei Herbart hat man es mit einem fest in sich gefügten Gedankensystem zu tun, das durch seine solide Struktur Vertrauen einflößt. Man kann es ablehnen. Nimmt man es aber an, dann wird man es auch in seiner ursprünglichen Gestalt annehmen müssen. Denn das Individuelle, das Persönliche, das zwingt, sein eigenes Selbst dem fremden Selbst gegenüberzustellen: dieses fehlt gerade.
[ 6 ] «Das Leben ist eine mißliche Sache; ich habe mir vorgenommen, das meinige damit hinzubringen, über dasselbe nachzudenken.» Diese Worte äußerte Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) im Beginne seiner Universitätszeit einmal zu Wieland. Aus dieser Stimmung heraus ist seine Weltanschauung erwachsen. Harte eigene Erlebnisse und die Beobachtung trauriger Erfahrungen anderer hatte Schopenhauer hinter sich, als er in der philosophischen Gedankenarbeit ein neues Lebensziel ergriff. Der plötzliche Tod des Vaters, der durch einen Fall von einem Speicher herbeigeführt wurde, die schlimmen Erlebnisse innerhalb des kaufmännischen Berufes, der Anblick von Schauplätzen des menschlichen Elends auf den Reisen, die der Jüngling machte, und vieles andere hatten in ihm weniger das Bedürfnis hervorgerufen, die Welt zu erkennen, weil er sie für des Erkennens wert erachtete, als vielmehr das ganz andere, in der Betrachtung der Dinge sich ein Mittel zu schaffen, sie zu ertragen. Er brauchte eine Weltanschauung zur Beruhigung seiner düsteren Gemütsverfassung. Als er 1809 die Universität bezog, waren die Gedanken, die Kant, Fichte und Schelling der deutschen Weltanschauungsentwickelung einverleibt haben, in voller Nachwirkung. Hegels Stern war eben im Aufgehen. Dieser hatte 1806 sein erstes größeres Werk «Die Phänomenologie des Geistes» erscheinen lassen. In Göttingen hörte Schopenhauer die Lehren Gottlob Ernst Schulzes, des Verfassers des «Aenesidemus», der zwar in gewisser Beziehung Kants Gegner war, der aber dem Studenten doch Kant und Plato als die beiden großen Geister bezeichnete, an die er sich zu halten habe. Mit Feuereifer versenkte sich Schopenhauer in Kants Vorstellungsart. Er bezeichnet die Revolution, die dadurch in seinem Kopfe hervorgebracht wurde, als eine geistige Wiedergeburt. Er findet bei ihr um so mehr seine Befriedigung, als er sie in voller Übereinstimmung findet mit den Ansichten des anderen Philosophen, auf den ihn Schulze hingewiesen hatte, mit denen Platos. Sagt doch dieser: So lange wir uns zu den Dingen und Vorgängen bloß wahrnehmend verhalten, sind wir wie Menschen, die in einer finsteren Höhle festgebunden sitzen, so daß sie den Kopf nicht drehen können, und nichts sehen, als beim Lichte eines hinter ihnen brennenden Feuers, an der ihnen gegenüberliegenden Wand, die Schattenbilder wirklicher Dinge, die zwischen ihnen und dem Feuer vorübergeführt werden, ja auch voneinander und jeder von sich selbst nur die Schatten. Wie diese Schatten zu wirklichen Dingen, so verhalten sich unsere Wahrnehmungsdinge zu den Ideen, die das wahrhaft Wirkliche sind. Die Dinge der wahrnehmbaren Welt entstehen und vergehen, die Ideen sind ewig. Hat nicht Kant ein Gleiches gelehrt? Ist nicht auch für ihn die wahrnehmbare Welt nur Erscheinungswelt? Zwar den Ideen hat der Königsberger Weise nicht diese urewige Wirklichkeit zugeschrieben; aber in der Auffassung der in Raum und Zeit ausgebreiteten Wirklichkeit herrscht, für Schopenhauer, zwischen Plato und Kant völlige Übereinstimmung. Bald wurde diese Ansicht auch seine unumstößliche Wahrheit. Er sagte sich: Ich erhalte von den Dingen Kenntnis, insofern ich sie sehe, höre, fühle usw., mit einem Worte: insofern ich sie vorstelle. Ein Gegenstand ist für mich nur in meiner Vorstellung vorhanden. Himmel, Erde usw. sind also meine Vorstellungen, denn das «Ding an sich», das ihnen entspricht, ist nur dadurch mein Gegenstand geworden, daß es den Charakter der Vorstellung angenommen hat.
[ 7 ] So unbedingt richtig Schopenhauer nun alles fand, was Kant über den Vorstellungscharakter der Wahrnehmungswelt vorbrachte, so wenig befriedigt fühlte er sich durch dessen Bemerkungen über das «Ding an sich». Auch Schulze war ja ein Gegner dieser Ansichten Kants. Wie können wir von einem «Dinge an sich» etwas wissen, wie können wir überhaupt nur ein Wort über dasselbe aussprechen, wenn wir nur von Vorstellungen wissen, und das «Ding an sich» gänzlich außerhalb aller Vorstellung liegt? Schopenhauer mußte einen anderen Weg suchen, um zum «Ding an sich» zu kommen. Er wurde bei diesem Suchen viel mehr von den zeitgenössischen Weltanschauungen beeinflußt, als er je zugegeben hat. Das Element, das Schopenhauer zu seiner aus Kant ,und Plato gewonnenen Überzeugung hinzufügte, als «Ding an sich», das treffen wir bei Fichte, dessen Vorlesungen er 1811 in Berlin gehört hat. Und wir treffen es auch bei Schelling. Die reifste Form der Ansichten Fichtes konnte Schopenhauer in Berlin hören. Es ist diese Form in den nachgelassenen Schriften Fichtes überliefert. Dieser verkündet eindringlich, während ihm Schopenhauer nach eigenem Geständnis «aufmerksam zuhört», daß alles Sein zuletzt in einem Universalwillenbegründet ist. Sobald der Mensch den Willen in sich vorfindet, gewinnt er die Überzeugung, daß es eine von seinem Individuum unabhängige Welt gibt. Der Wille ist nicht Wissen des Individuums, sondern eine Form des wirklichen Seins. Fichte hätte diese seine Weltanschauung auch bezeichnen können: «Die Welt als Wissen und Wille». Und in Schellings Schrift: «Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände» steht doch der Satz: «Es gibt in der letzten und höchsten Instanz gar kein anderes Sein als Wollen. Wollen ist Ursein und auf dieses allein passen alle Prädikate desselben: Grundlosigkeit, Ewigkeit, Unabhängigkeit von der Zeit, Selbstbejahung. Die ganze Philosophie strebt nur dahin, diesen höchsten Ausdruck zu finden.» Daß Wollen Ursein ist, wird auch zu Schopenhauers Ansicht Wenn das Wissen ausgelöscht wird, bleibt der Wille übrig. Denn der Wille geht dem Wissen voran. Das Wissen hat seinen Ursprung in meinem Gehirn, sagt sich Schopenhauer. Dieses muß aber hervorgebracht sein durch eine tätige, schöpferische Kraft. Der Mensch kennt eine solche schöpferische Kraft in seinem eigenen Wollen. Schopenhauer sucht nun nachzuweisen, daß auch das, was in den übrigen Dingen wirksam ist, Wille ist. Der Wille liegt somit als «Ding an sich» der bloß vorgestellten Wirklichkeit zugrunde. Und von diesem «Ding an sich» können wir wissen. Es liegt nicht, wie das Kantische, jenseits unseres Vorstellens, wir erleben sein Wirken innerhalb unseres eigenen Organismus.
[ 8 ] Es schreitet die Weltanschauungsentwickelung der neueren Zeit durch Schopenhauer insofern weiter, als mit ihm einer der Versuche beginnt, eine der Grundkräfte des Selbstbewußtseins zum allgemeinen Weltprinzipe zu erheben. Im tätigen Selbstbewußtsein liegt das Rätsel des Zeitalters. Schopenhauer ist nicht in der Lage, ein Weltbild zu finden, das in sich die Wurzeln des Selbstbewußtseins enthält. Das haben Fichte, Schelling, Hegel versucht. Schopenhauer nimmt eine Kraft des Selbstbewußtseins heraus, den Willen, und behauptet von diesem, er sei nicht bloß in der Menschenseele, sondern in der ganzen Welt. So ist für ihn zwar der Mensch nicht mit seinem vollen Selbstbewußtsein in den Weltursprüngen gelegen, wohl aber mit einem Teil desselben, mit dem Willen. Schopenhauer stellt sich damit als einer derjenigen Repräsentanten der neueren Weltanschauungsentwickelung dar, welche das Grundrätsel der Zeit nur teilweise in ihr Bewußtsein zu fassen vermochten.
[ 9 ] Auch Goethe übte einen tiefgehenden Einfluß auf Schopenhauer aus. Vom Herbst 1813 bis zum Mai 1814 genoß dieser den Umgang mit dem Dichter. Goethe führte den Philosophen persönlich in die Lehre von den Farben ein. Die Anschauungsart des ersteren entsprach vollständig den Vorstellungen, die sich Schopenhauer über die Art gebildet hatte, wie unsere Sinnesorgane und unser Geist verfahren, wenn sie Dinge und Vorgänge wahrnehmen. Goethe hatte über die Wahrnehmungen des Auges, über Licht und Farben sorgfältige und ausgedehnte Untersuchungen angestellt und deren Ergebnis in seinem Werke «Zur Farbenlehre» verarbeitet. Er ist zu Ansichten gelangt, die von denen Newtons, des Begründers der modernen Farbenlehre, abweichen. Man kann den Gegensatz, der zwischen Newton und Goethe auf diesem Gebiete besteht, nicht von dem richtigen Gesichtspunkte aus beurteilen, wenn man nicht von dem Grundunterschied in den Weltauffassungen der beiden Persönlichkeiten ausgeht. Goethe betrachtet die Sinnesorgane des Menschen als die besten, die höchsten physikalischen Apparate. Für die Farbenwelt muß ihm daher das Auge die höchste Instanz sein zur Feststellung der gesetzmäßigen Zusammenhänge. Newton und die Physiker untersuchen die in Frage kommenden Erscheinungen in der Weise, die von Goethe als das größte Unheil der neueren Physik» bezeichnet wird und die, wie bereits im anderen Zusammenhang (S. 206) angeführt, darin besteht, daß «man die Experimente gleichsam vom Menschen abgesondert hat, und bloß in dem, was künstliche Instrumente zeigen, die Natur erkennen, ja, was sie leisten kann, dadurch beschränken und beweisen will». Das Auge nimmt Hell und Dunkel oder Licht und Finsternis und innerhalb des hell-dunklen Beobachtungsfeldes die Farben wahr. Goethe bleibt innerhalb dieses Feldes stehen und sucht nachzuweisen, wie Licht, Finsternis und Farbe zusammenhängen. Newton und seine Anhänger wollen die Licht- und Farbenvorgänge beobachten, wie sie sich außerhalb des menschlichen Organismus im Raum abspielen, wie sie also auch verlaufen müßten, wenn es kein Auge gäbe. Eine solche vom Menschen abgesonderte Außensphäre hat aber für die Goethesche Weltanschauung keine Berechtigung. Nicht dadurch gelangen wir zum Wesen eines Dinges, daß wir von den Wirkungen absehen, die wir gewahr werden, sondern in der genauen, mit dem Geiste erfaßten Gesetzmäßigkeit dieser Wirkungen haben wir dieses Wesen gegeben. Die Wirkungen, die das Auge wahrnimmt, in ihrer Gesamtheit erfaßt und in ihrem gesetzmäßigen Zusammenhange dargestellt, sind das Wesen des Lichtes und der Farben, nicht eine vom Auge abgesonderte Welt äußerer Vorgänge, die mit künstlichen Instrumenten festgestellt werden soll. «Denn eigentlich unternehmen wir es umsonst, das Wesen eines Dinges auszudrücken. Wirkungen werden wir gewahr und eine vollständige Geschichte dieser Wirkungen umfaßte allenfalls das Wesen jenes Dinges. Vergebens bemühen wir uns, den Charakter eines Menschen zu schildern; man stelle dagegen seine Taten, seine Handlungen zusammen, und ein Bild des Charakters wird uns entgegentreten. Die Farben sind Taten des Lichtes, Taten und Leiden. In diesem Sinne können wir von denselben Aufschlüsse über das Licht erwarten. Farben und Licht stehen zwar untereinander in dem genauesten Verhältnis, aber wir müssen uns beide als der ganzen Natur angehörig denken; denn sie ist es ganz, die sich dadurch dem Sinne des Auges besonders offenbaren will.» Man findet hier Goethes Weltansicht auf einen speziellen Fall angewendet. Im menschlichen Organismus, durch seine Sinne, durch seine Seele offenbart sich, was in der übrigen Natur verborgen liegt. Diese gelangt im Menschen auf ihren Gipfel. Wer daher die Wahrheit der Natur außer dem Menschen sucht, wie Newton, der kann sie, nach Goethes Grundansicht, nicht finden.
[ 10 ] Schopenhauer sieht in der Welt, die dem Geiste in Raum und Zeit gegeben ist, nur eine Vorstellung dieses Geistes. Das Wesen dieser Vorstellungswelt enthüllt sich uns in dem Willen, von dem wir unseren eigenen Organismus durchdrungen sehen. Er kann daher sich nicht einlassen auf eine physikalische Lehre, die das Wesen der Licht- und Farbenerscheinungen nicht in den dem Auge gegebenen Vorstellungen sieht, sondern in einer Welt, die abgesondert von dem Auge vorhanden sein soll. Goethes Vorstellungsart mußte ihm daher sympathisch sein, weil sie innerhalb der Vorstellungswelt des Auges stehen bleibt. Er fand in ihr eine Bestätigung dessen, was er selbst über diese Welt annehmen mußte. Der Kampf zwischen Goethe und Newton ist nicht etwa bloß eine physikalische Frage, sondern eine Angelegenheit der ganzen Weltanschauung. Wer der Ansicht ist, daß sich über die Natur etwas ausmachen läßt durch Experimente, die vom Menschen abgesondert sind, der muß auf dem Boden der Newtonschen Farbenlehre stehen bleiben. Die moderne Physik ist dieser Ansicht. Sie kann daher über Goethes Farbenlehre nur das Urteil fällen, das Hermann Helmholtz in seiner Abhandlung «Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen» ausgesprochen hat: «Wo es sich um Aufgaben handelt, die durch die in Anschauungsbildern sich ergehenden dichterischen Divinationen gelöst werden können, hat sich der Dichter der höchsten Leistungen fähig gezeigt, wo nur die bewußt durchgeführte induktive Methode hätte helfen können, ist er gescheitert.» Sieht man in den menschlichen Anschauungsbildern nur Produkte, die zu der Natur hinzukommen, so muß man feststellen, was in der Natur, abgesehen von diesen Anschauungsbildern, geschieht. Sieht man in ihnen, wie Goethe, Offenbarungen der in der Natur enthaltenen Wesenheiten, so wird man sich an sie halten, wenn man die Wahrheit erforschen will. Schopenhauer steht allerdings weder auf dem einen, noch auf dem anderen Standpunkte. Er will in den Wahrnehmungen der Sinne gar nicht das Wesen der Dinge erkennen; er lehnt die physikalische Methode ab, weil diese nicht bei dem stehen bleibt, was uns einzig und allein vorliegt, bei den Vorstellungen. Aber auch er hat die Frage aus einer rein physikalischen zu einer Weltanschauungsfrage gemacht. Und da er im Grunde doch auch bei seiner Weltanschauung von dem Menschen ausgegangen ist, nicht von einer vom Menschen abgesonderten Außenwelt, so mußte er sich für Goethe entscheiden. Denn dieser hat für die Farbenlehre die Konsequenz gezogen, die sich notwendig für den ergeben muß, der in dem Menschen mit seinen gesunden Sinnen den «größten und genauesten physikalischen Apparat» sieht. Hegel, der als Philosoph ganz auf dem Boden dieser Weltanschauung steht, muß daher energisch für Goethes Farbenlehre eintreten. Wir lesen in seiner Naturphilosophie: «Die dem Begriffe angemessene Darstellung der Farben verdanken wir Goethe, den die Farben und das Licht früh angezogen haben, sie zu betrachten, besonders dann von seiten der Malerei; und sein reiner, einfacher Natursinn, die erste Bedingung des Dichters, mußte solcher Barbarei der Reflexion, wie sie sich in Newton findet, widerstreben. Was von Plato. an über Licht und Farbe statuiert und experimentiert worden ist, hat er durchgenommen. Er hat das Phänomen einfach aufgefaßt; und der wahrhafte Instinkt der Vernunft besteht darin, das Phänomen von der Seite aufzufassen, wo es sich am einfachsten darstellt.»
[ 11 ] Der wesentliche Gründ aller Weltvorgänge ist für Schopenhauer der Wille. Er ist ein ewiges, dunkles Streben nach Dasein. Er enthält keine Vernunft. Denn die Vernunft entsteht erst in dem menschlichen Gehirn, das vom Willen geschaffen wird. Während Hegel die selbstbewußte Vernunft, den Geist zum Weltengrunde macht und in der menschlichen Vernunft nur eine individuelle Verwirklichung der allgemeinen Weltvernunft sieht, läßt Schopenhauer die Vernunft nur als Produkt des Gehirnes gelten, als eine Schaumblase, die zuletzt entsteht, wenn der vernunftlose, dunkle Drang, der Wille, alles andere geschaffen hat. Bei Hegel sind alle Dinge und Vorgänge vernünftig, denn sie werden ja von der Vernunft hervorgebracht; bei Schopenhauer ist alles unvernünftig, denn es ist von dem unvernünftigen Willen hervorgebracht. An Schopenhauer sieht man so deutlich wie nur irgend möglich das Wort Fichtes bestätigt: Was man für eine Weltanschauung wähle, das hängt davon ab, was für ein Mensch man ist. Schopenhauer hat böse Erfahrungen gemacht, er hat die Welt von ihrer schlechtesten Seite kennengelernt, bevor er sich entschlossen hat, über sie nachzudenken. Ihn befriedigt es daher, diese Welt als in ihrem Wesen unvernünftig vorzustellen, als das Ergebnis eines blinden Willens. Die Vernunft hat, nach seiner Denkweise, keine Macht über die Unvernunft. Denn sie entsteht selbst als das Ergebnis der Unvernunft, sie ist Schein und Traum, aus dem Willen herausgezeugt. Schopenhauers Weltanschauung ist die in Gedanken umgesetzte düstere Grundstimmung seines Gemütes. Sein Auge war nicht darauf eingestellt, die vernünftigen Einrichtungen des Daseins mit Freuden zu verfolgen; es sah nur die in Leiden und Schmerzen sich ausdrückende Unvernunft des blinden Willens. Seine Sittenlehre konnte sich daher auch nur auf die Wahrnehmung des Leidens gründen. Moralisch ist ihm eine Handlung nur, wenn sie auf dieser Wahrnehmung beruht. Das Mitleidmuß Quelle der menschlichen Taten sein. Was könnte der Besseres tun, der einsieht, daß alle Wesen leiden, als alle seine Handlungen von dem Mitgefühl leiten lassen? Da in dem Willen das Unvernünftige und Schlechte liegt, so wird der Mensch moralisch um so höher stehen, je mehr er das ungestüme Wollen in sich ertötet. Der Ausdruck des Willens in der einzelnen Person ist die Selbstsucht, der Egoismus. Wer sich dem Mitgefühl hingibt, also nicht für sich, sondern für andere will, der ist über den Willen Herr geworden. Ein Weg, um von dem Willen loszukommen, besteht in der Hingabe an das Kunstschaffen und an die Eindrücke, die von Kunstwerken ausgehen. Der Künstler schafft nicht, weil er etwas begehrt, nicht weil sein eigensüchtiges Wollen auf Dinge und Vorgänge gerichtet ist. Er schafft aus unegoistischer Freude. Er versenkt sich in das Wesen der Dinge als reiner Betrachter. Ebenso ist es bei dem Genießen der Kunstwerke. Wenn wir vor einem Kunstwerke stehen und sich die Begierde in uns regt, wir möchten es besitzen, dann sind wir noch in die niedrigen Gelüste des Willens verstrickt. Erst wenn wir die Schönheit bewundern, ohne sie zu begehren, haben wir uns auf den erhabenen Standpunkt erhoben, auf dem wir nicht mehr von dem blinden Willen abhängig sind. Dann aber ist die Kunst für uns etwas geworden, was uns für Augenblicke erlöst von der Unvernunft des blind wollenden Daseins. Am reinsten ist diese Erlösung im Genusse der musikalischen Kunstwerke. Denn die Musik spricht nicht durch die Vorstellung zu uns wie die anderen Kunstarten. Sie bildet nichts ab in der Natur. Da alle Naturdinge und Vorgänge nur Vorstellungen sind, so können die Künste, welche diese Dinge und Vorgänge zum Vorbild nehmen, auch nur als Verkörperungen und Vorstellungen an uns herankommen. Die Töne erzeugt der Mensch ohne natürliches Vorbild aus sich heraus. Weil er den Willen als sein Wesen in sich hat, so kann es auch nur der Wille sein, der die Welt der Musik aus sich ganz unmittelbar ausströmt. Deshalb spricht die Musik so stark zum menschlichen Gemüte, weil sie die Verkörperung dessen ist, was das innerste Wesen des Menschen, sein wahres Sein, den Willen, ausdrückt. Und es ist ein Triumph des Menschen, daß er eine Kunst hat, in der er willensfrei, selbstlos das genießt, was der Ursprung alles Begehrens, der Ursprung aller Unvernunft ist. Diese Anschauung Schopenhauers über die Musik ist wieder das Ergebnis seiner ganz persönlichen Eigenart. Schon als Hamburger Kaufmannslehrling schreibt er an seine Mutter: «Wie fand das himmlische Samenkorn Raum auf unserem harten Boden, auf welchem Notwendigkeit und Mängel um jedes Plätzchen streiten? Wir sind verbannt vom Urgeist und sollen nicht zu ihm empordringen. Und doch hat ein mitleidiger Engel die himmlische Blume für uns erfleht und sie prangt hoch in voller Herrlichkeit auf diesem Boden des Jammers gewurzelt. Die Pulsschläge der göttlichen Tonkunst haben nicht aufgehört zu schlagen durch die Jahrhunderte der Barbarei und ein unmittelbarer Widerhall des Ewigen ist uns in ihr geblieben, jedem Sinn verständlich und selbst über Laster und Tugend erhaben.»
[ 12 ] Man kann an der Stellung, welche die beiden Gegenfüßler der Weltanschauung, Hegel und Schopenhauer, zur Künst einnehmen, sehen, wie die Weltauffassung eingreift in das persönliche Verhältnis des Menschen zu den einzelnen Gebieten des Lebens. Hegel, der in der Vorstellungs- und Ideenwelt des Menschen das sah, worauf die ganze äußere Natur als zu ihrer Vollendung hinstrebt, kann als vollkommenste Kunst auch nur diejenige anerkennen, in welcher der Geist am höchsten, am vollendetsten erscheint, und wo er doch zugleich an demjenigen haftet, was fortwährend nach ihm hinstrebt. Jedes Gebilde der äußeren Natur will Geist sein; aber es erreicht ihn nicht. Wenn nun der Mensch ein solches äußeres, räumliches Gebilde schafft, dem er den Geist einprägt, den es sucht, aber durch sich selbst nicht erreichen kann, dann hat er ein vollkommenes Kunstwerk geschaffen. Das ist in der Plastik der Fall. Was sonst nur im Innern der menschlichen Seele als gestaltloser Geist, als Idee erscheint, das gestaltet der plastische Künstler aus dem rohen Stoff heraus. Die Seele, das Gemüt, die wir in unserem Bewußtsein ohne Gestalt wahrnehmen: sie sprechen aus der Statue, aus einem Gebilde des Raumes. In dieser Vermählung von Sinnenwelt und geistiger Welt liegt das Kunstideal einer Weltanschauung, die im Hervorbringen des Geistes den Zweck der Natur sieht, also das Schöne auch nur in einem Werke sehen kann, das als unmittelbarer Ausdruck des an der Natur zum Vorschein kommenden Geistes erscheint. Wer dagegen wie Schopenhauer in aller Natur nur Vorstellung sieht, der kann unmöglich dieses Ideal in einem Werke sehen, das die Natur nachahmt. Er muß zu einer Kunstart greifen, die frei von aller Natur ist: das ist die Musik.
[ 13 ] Alles, was zur Austilgung, ja Abtötung des Willens fährt, sah Schopenhauer folgerichtig für erstrebenswert an. Denn ein Vertilgen des Willens bedeutet Vertilgen des Unvernünftigen in der Welt. Der Mensch soll nicht wollen. Er soll alles Begehren in sich ertöten. Die Askese ist daher Schopenhauers moralisches Ideal. Der Weise wird alle Wünsche in sich auslöschen, seinen Willen vollständig verneinen. Er bringt es so weit, daß kein Motiv ihn noch zum Wollen nötigt. Sein Streben besteht nur noch in dem quietistischen Drange nach Erlösung von allem Leben. In den weltverneinenden Lebensansichten des Buddhismus sah Schopenhauer eine hohe Weisheitslehre. Man kann daher seine Weltansicht gegenüber der Hegelschen eine reaktionäre nennen. Hegel suchte den Menschen überall mit dem Leben auszusöhnen, er strebte danach, alles Handeln als die Mitarbeit an einer vernünftigen Ordnung der Welt darzustellen. Schopenhauer betrachtet die Lebens-Feindschaft, die Abkehr von der Wirklichkeit, die Weltflucht als Ideal des Weisen. In der Hegelschen Art der Welt- und Lebensanschauung liegt etwas, was Zweifel und Fragen hervortreiben kann. HegeIs Ausgangspunkt ist das reine Denken, die abstrakte Idee, die er selbst als «austernhaftes, graues oder ganz schwarzes» Wesen bezeichnet (Brief an Goethe vom 20. Februar 1821), von der er aber zugleich behauptet, daß sie aufzufassen sei als die «Darstellung Gottes, wie er in seinem ewigen Wesen vor der Erschaffung der Natur und eines endlichen Geistes ist.» Das Ziel, zu dem er kommt, ist der inhaltvolle, individuelle Menschengeist, durch den das erst zum Vorschein kommt, was in dem Grauen, Austernhaften nur ein schattenhaftes Dasein führt. Er kann leicht so verstanden werden, daß eine Persönlichkeit als lebendiges, selbstbewußtes Wesen außer dem menschlichen Geiste nicht vorhanden sei. Hegel leitet das Inhaltreiche, das wir in uns erleben, aus dem Ideellen ab, das wir erdenken müssen. Man kann es verstehen, daß Geister von einer gewissen Gemütsanlage sich von dieser Welt- und Lebensansicht abgestoßen fühlten. Nur Denker von solch selbstlos hingebungsvoller Art wie Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) waren imstande, sich ganz in den Gedankengang HegeIs einzuleben und in voller Übereinstimmung mit diesem selbst ein Ideengebäude zu schaffen, das wie eine Wiedergabe des Hegelschen aus einer weniger bedeutenden Natur heraus erscheint. Andere konnten nicht begreifen, wie sich der Mensch durch die reine Idee aufklären soll über die Unendlichkeit und Mannigfaltigkeit der Eindrücke, die auf ihn einstürmen, wenn er den Blick auf die farben- und formenreiche Natur richtet, und wie er dadurch etwas gewinnen soll, daß er von den Erlebnissen der Empfindungs-, Gefühls- und Vorstellungswelt seiner Seele den Blick erhebt zu der eisigen Höhe des reinen Gedankens. Man wird zwar Hegel mißverstehen, wenn man ihn so auslegt; doch ist dieses Mißverstehen begreiflich. Einen Ausdruck fand diese durch HegeIs Vorstellungsart unbefriedigte Stimmung in der Gedankenströmung, die ihre Vertreter hatte in Franz Xaver Baader (1765-1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781 bis 1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), Anton Günther (1783-1863), K. F. E. Thrahndorff (1782-1863), Martin Deutinger (1815-1864) und Hermann Ulrici (1806 bis 1884). Sie waren bestrebt, an die Stelle des grauen, austernhaften, reinen Gedankens Hegels ein lebenerfülltes, persönliches Urwesen, einen individuellen Gott zu setzen. Baader nannte es eine «gottesleugnerische Vorstellung», zu glauben, Gott erlange erst im Mensch sein vollkommenes Dasein. Gott muß eine Persönlichkeit sein; und die Welt darf nicht so, wie sich das Hegel vorstellt, als ein logischer Prozeß aus ihm hervorgehen, in dem mit Notwendigkeit immer ein Begriff einen anderen hervortreibt. Nein, die Welt muß Gottes freie Tat, eine Schöpfung seines allmächtigen Willens sein. Es nähern sich diese Denker der christlichen Offenbarungslehre. Sie zu rechtfertigen und wissenschaftlich zu begründen, wird der mehr oder weniger bewußte Zweck ihres Nachsinnens. Baader versenkte sich in die Mystik Jacob Böhmes, des Meisters Eckhart, Taulers und Paracelsus, in deren bilderreicher Spradie er ein viel geeigneteres Mittel fand, die tiefsten Wahrheiten auszusprechen, als in den reinen Gedanken der Hegelschen Lehre. Daß er auch Schelling veranlaßte, seine Gedanken durch Aufnahme Jacob Böhmescher Vorstellungen zu vertiefen, mit wärmerem Inhalt zu erfüllen, ist bereits ausgeführt worden (vgl. S. 221 f.). Bemerkenswerte Erscheinungen innerhalb der Weltanschauungsentwickelung werden immer Persönlichkeiten wie Krause sein. Er war Mathematiker. Er hat sich durch den stolzen, logisch-vollkommenen Charakter dieser Wissenschaft nicht bestimmen lassen, die Weltanschauungsfragen, die seine tiefsten Geistesbedürfnisse befriedigen sollten, nach dem Muster der Methode zu lösen, die ihm in dieser Wissenschaft geläufig war. Der Typus für solche Denker ist der große Mathematiker Newton, der die Erscheinungen des sichtbaren Weltalls wie ein Rechenexempel behandelte und daneben die Grundfragen der Weltanschauung für sich in einer dem Offenbarungsglauben nahestehenden Weise befriedigte. Eine Ansicht, die das Urwesen der Welt in den Dingen und Vorgängen sucht, kann Krause nicht anerkennen. Wer Gott in der Welt sucht, wie Hegel, kann ihn nicht finden. Denn zwar ist die Welt in Gott, Gott aber nicht in der Welt, sondern als selbständiges, in sich selig ruhendes Wesen vorhanden. Krauses Ideenwelt liegt zugrunde der «Gedanke eines unendlichen, selbständigen Wesens, welches außer sich nichts hat, an sich aber und in sich als der eine Grund alles ist, und welches wir mithin auch als den Grund denken von Vernunft, Natur und Menschheit». Er will nichts gemeinsam haben mit einer Anschauung, welche «das Endliche oder die Welt als den Inbegriff des Endlichen für Gott selbst hält, vergöttert, mit Gott verwechselt». Man möge sich in die unseren Sinnen und unserem Geiste gegebene Wirklichkeit noch so vertiefen, niemals wird man dadurch zum Urgrunde alles Seins kommen, von dem man nur dadurch eine Vorstellung erhalten kann, daß man die Beobachtung alles endlichen Daseins begleitet sein läßt von dem ahnenden Schauen eines Überweltlichen. Immanuel Hermann Fichte hielt in seinen Schriften «Sätze zur Vorschule der Theologie» (1826) und «Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie» (1829) eine scharfe Abredinung mit dem Hegelianismus. Er hat in zahlreichen Werken dann seine Auffassung, daß ein bewußtes, persönliches Wesen den Welterscheinungen zugrunde gelegt werden müsse, zu begründen und zu vertiefen gesucht. Um der Gegnerschaft gegen die von dem reinen Denken ausgehende Anschauung HegeIs eine nachdrückliche Wirkung zu verschaffen, verband er sich mit den gleichgesinnten Freunden Weiße, Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäus, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth und anderen im Jahre 1837 zur Herausgabe der «Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie». Nach I. H. Fichtes Überzeugung ist nur derjenige zu der höchsten Erkenntnis emporgestiegen, der begriffen hat, daß «der höchste, wahrhaft das Weltproblem lösende Gedanke die Idee des in seiner idealen wie realen Unendlichkeit sich wissenden, durchschauenden Ursubjekts oder der absoluten Persönlichkeit» ist. «Die WeItschöpfung und Erhaltung, was eben die Weltwirklichkeit ausmacht, besteht lediglich in der ununterbrochenen, vom Bewußtsein durchdrungenen Willenserweisung Gottes, so daß er nur Bewußtsein und Wille, beides aber in höchster Einheit, er allein mithin Person, oder sie im eminentesten Sinne ist.Chr. Hermann Weiße glaubte von der Hegelschen Weltanschauung zu einer vollkommen theologischen Betrachtungsweise aufsteigen zu müssen. In der christlichen Idee von den drei Persönlichkeiten in der einigen Gottheit sah er das Ziel seines Denkens. Diese Idee suchte er daher mit einem ungemeinen Aufwand von Scharfsinn als Ergebnis eines natürlichen, unbefangenen Denkens hinzustellen. Etwas unendlich Reicheres als Hegel mit seiner grauen Idee glaubte Weiße zu besitzen in seiner dreieinigen persönlichen Gottheit, der lebendiger Wille eigen ist. Dieser lebendige Wille «wird, mit einem Worte, der innergöttlichen Natur ausdrücklich die Gestalt und keine andere geben, welche in der Heiligen Schrift Alten und Neuen Testamentes allerorten vorausgesetzt wird, wenn sie Cott sowohl vor der Schöpfung der Welt, als auch bei und nach derselben in dem lichten Elemente seiner Herrlichkeit, als umgeben von einer unabsehbaren Heerschar dienender Geister mit einer flüssigen, immateriellen Leiblichkeit vorstellt, durch die ihm überall ausdrücklich auch sein Verkehr mit der geschaffenen Welt vermittelt wird».
[ 14 ] Anton Günther, der «Wiener Philosoph» und der unter seinem Einfluß stehende Martin Deutinger bewegen sich mit ihren Weltanschauungsgedanken ganz innerhalb des Rahmens der katholisch-theologischen Vorstellungsart. Der erstere sucht den Menschen dadurch von der natürlichen Weltordnung loszulösen, daß er ihn in zwei Stücke zertrennt, in ein Naturwesen, das der notwendigen Gesetzmäßigkeit wie die niedrigeren Dinge angehört, und in ein Geistwesen, das ein selbständiger Teil einer höheren Geisterwelt ist und ein Dasein hat wie ein «seiendes» Wesen bei Herbart. Er glaubte dadurch das Hegeltum, das im Geiste nur eine höhere Stufe des Naturdaseins sieht, zu überwinden und eine christliche Weltanschauung zu begründen. Die Kirche selbst war nicht dieser Ansicht, denn in Rom wurden Günthers Schriften auf den Index der verbotenen Bücher gesetzt. Deutinger kämpfte gegen HegeIs reines Denken, das, nach seiner Ansicht, das lebensvolle Sein nicht verschlingen dürfe. Der lebendige Wille gilt ihm höher als der reine Gedanke. Jener kann als schaffender wirklich etwas hervorbringen; dieser ist machtlos und abstrakt. Diesen lebendigen Willen macht auch Thrahndorff zu seinem Ausgangspunkte. Nicht aus dem Schattenreich der Ideen kann die Welt erklärt werden, sondern der kraftvolle Wille muß diese Ideen ergreifen, um wirkliches Dasein zu schaffen. Nicht im denkenden Begreifen der Welt erschließt sich dem Menschen deren tiefster Gehalt, sondern in einer Gemütserregung, in der Liebe, durch die sich der einzelne an die Gesamtheit, an den im All waltenden Willen hingibt. Man sieht es ganz deutlich: alle diese Denker sind bemüht, das Denken und seinen Gegenstand, die reine Idee, zu überwinden. Sie wollen dieses Denken nicht als die höchste Geistesäußerung des Menschen gelten lassen. Thrahndorff will, um das Urwesen der Welt zu begreifen, dieses nicht erkennen, sondern lieben. Es soll ein Gegenstand für das Gemüt, nicht für die Vernunft sein. Durch das klare, reine Denken, glauben diese Philosophen, werde die warme, religiöse Hingabe an die Urkräfte des Daseins zerstört.
[ 15 ] Dieser letzteren Vorstellung liegt eine mißverständliche Auffassung der Hegelschen Gedankenwelt zugrunde. Dieses Mißverständnis trat besonders in den Anschauungen zutage, die sich nach Hegels Tode über dessen Stellung zur Religion geltend machten. Die Unklarheit, die über diese Stellung herrschend wurde, spaltete die Anhängerschaft Hegels in eine Partei, die in seiner Weltanschauung eine feste Stütze des geoffenbarten Christentums erblickte, und in eine solche, die seine Lehre gerade dazu benutzte, die christlichen Anschauungen aufzulösen und durch eine radikal freigeistige Ansicht zu ersetzen.
[ 16 ] Weder die eine noch die andere Partei hätte sich auf Hegel berufen können, wenn sie ihn richtig verstanden hätten. Denn in Hegels Weltanschauung liegt nichts, was zur Stütze einer Religion dienen oder zu deren Auflösung führen kann. So wenig Hegel irgendeine Erscheinung der Natur aus dem reinen Gedanken heraus schaffen wollte, so wenig wollte er das mit einer Religion tun. Wie er aus den Vorgängen der Natur den reinen Gedanken herauslösen und sie dadurch begreifen wollte, so verfolgte er auch bei der Religion lediglich das Ziel, ihren Gedankengehalt an die Oberfläche zu bringen. Wie er alles in der Welt als vernünftig ansah, weil es wirklich ist, so auch die Religion. Sie muß da sein, geschaffen durch ganz andere Seelenkräfte als dem Denker zur Verfügung stehen, wenn dieser an sie herantritt, um sie zu begreifen. Es war auch der Irrtum der I. H. Fichte, Chr. H. Weiße, Deutinger und anderer, daß sie Hegel deshalb bekämpften, weil er nicht von der Sphäre des reinen Gedankens fortgeschritten sei zu dem religiösen Erfassen der persönlichen Gottheit. Eine solche Aufgabe hat sich aber Hegel nie gestellt. Sie betrachtete er als Sache des religiösen Bewußtseins. Fichte, Weiße, Krause, Deutinger und andere wollten aus der Weltanschauung heraus eine Religion schaffen. Hegel wäre eine solche Aufgabe ebenso absurd vorgekommen, wie wenn jemand aus der Idee des Lichtes heraus die Welt hätte erleuchten wollen, oder aus dem Gedanken des Magnetismus einen Magneten erschaffen. Allerdings stammt, nach seiner Ansicht, so wie die ganze Natur- und Geisteswelt, auch die Religion aus der Idee. Deshalb kann der menschliche Geist diese Idee in der Religion wiederfinden. Aber wie der Magnet aus dem Gedanken des Magnetismus geschaffen ist vor dem Entstehen des menschlichen Geistes und dieser hinterher diese Entstehung nur zu begreifen hat, so ist auch die Religion aus dem Gedanken geworden, bevor dieser Gedanke in der menschlichen Seele als ein Bestandteil der Weltanschauung aufleuchtete. Hegel würde, wenn er die Religionskritik seiner Schüler erlebt hätte, zu dem Ausspruche gedrängt worden sein: Lasset die Hände weg von aller Grundlegung einer Religion, von allem Schaffen religiöser Vorstellungen, solange ihr Denker bleiben wollt und nicht Messiasse werden wollt. Die Weltanschauung Hegels kann, richtig verstanden, nicht zurückwirken auf das religiöse. Bewußtsein. Wer über die Kunst nachdenkt, steht zu dieser in dem gleichen Verhältnisse wie derjenige zur Religion, der deren Wesen ergründen will.
[ 17 ] Dem Kampf der Weltanschauungen dienten die von Arnold Ruge und Theodor Echtermeyerin den Jahren 1838 bis 1843 herausgegebenen «Hallischen Jahrbücher». Von einer Verteidigung und Erklärung Hegels gingen sie bald zu einer selbständigen Fortbildung seiner Ideen weiter und führten auf diese Weise zu den Gesichtspunkten binüber, die wir im nächsten Aufsatz als diejenigen der «radikalen Weltanschauungen » kennzeichnen. Vom Jahre 1841 an nennen die Herausgeber ihre Zeitschrift «Deutsche Jahrbücher» und betrachten als eines ihrer Ziele den «Kampf gegen die politische Unfreiheit, gegen Feudalund Landgutstheorie». Sie griffen als radikale Politiker in die Zeitentwickelung ein, forderten einen Staat, in dem vollkommen'e Freiheit herrscht. Sie entfernten sich somit von dem Geiste Hegels, der nicht Geschichte machen, sondern Geschichte begreifen wollte.
Reactionary worldviews
[ 1 ] "The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the flower, and one could say that it is refuted by the flower; likewise, the flower is declared by the fruit to be a false existence of the plant, and as its truth the flower takes the place of the flower. These forms not only differ, but also displace each other as incompatible. But their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of organic unity, in which they not only do not contradict each other, but one is as necessary as the other, and this same necessity is what constitutes the life of the whole." In these words Hegel expresses one of the most important characteristics of his way of thinking. He believed that the things of reality carry contradiction within themselves, and that it is precisely in this that the impetus for their becoming, for their living movement, lies, that they continually seek to overcome this contradiction. The blossom would never become fruit if it were without contradiction. It would then have no reason to emerge from its contradiction-free existence. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) started out from the exact opposite mindset. Hegel is a sharp thinker, but at the same time a mind thirsty for reality. He only wants to have thoughts that have absorbed the rich, saturated content of the world. That is why his thoughts must be in perpetual flux, in constant development, in contradictory movement like reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker; he does not seek to penetrate things, but views them from the corner of his mind. The purely logical thinker is disturbed by contradiction; he demands clear concepts that can exist side by side. The one must not interfere with the other. The thinker faces reality, which is full of contradictions, in a peculiar position. The concepts it provides him with do not satisfy him. They violate his logical needs. This feeling of dissatisfaction becomes the starting point of his world view. Herbart says to himself: "If the reality spread out before my senses and my mind provides me with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the true reality to which my thinking aspires. His task arises from this. The contradictory reality is not real being at all, but only appearance. In this view, Herbart follows Kant to a certain extent. But while the latter declares true being to be unattainable for thinking cognition, Herbart believes that he can advance from appearance to being precisely by working through the contradictory concepts of appearance and transforming them into non-contradictory ones. Like smoke points to fire, appearance points to an underlying being. If we work out a non-contradictory picture of the world from the contradictory picture given to our senses and our mind by logical thinking, we have in the latter what we are looking for. It does not appear to us in this lack of contradiction; but it lies behind what appears to us as the true, genuine reality. Herbart therefore does not set out to understand the directly present reality as such, but creates another reality through which the former is to become explicable in the first place. He thus arrives at an abstract system of thought, which is quite meagre compared to the rich, full reality. True reality cannot be a unity, for such a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite diversity of real things and processes with all their contradictions. It must be a multiplicity of simple, eternally identical beings in which there is no becoming, no development. Only a simple being that unchangingly preserves its characteristics is without contradiction. A being that evolves is something different at one moment than at another, that is, it contradicts at one point in time the characteristics it has at another. A multiplicity of simple, never-changing beings is therefore the true world. And what we perceive are not these simple beings, but only their relationships to one another. These relationships have nothing to do with the true being. When one simple being enters into a relationship with another, neither is changed by it; but I perceive the result of their relationship. Our immediate reality is a sum of relationships between real beings. When a being leaves its relationship with another being and instead enters into a relationship with a third being, something has happened without the being of the beings themselves being affected by this event. We perceive this happening. It is our apparent, contradictory reality. It is interesting to see how Herbart imagines the life of the soul on the basis of this view. Like all other real beings, it is a simple, unchanging entity. It now enters into relations with other existing beings. The expression of these relationships is the life of imagination. Everything that takes place within us: Imagining, feeling, willing, is a play of relationships between the soul and the rest of the world of simple beings. You see, the life of the soul is thus made into a semblance of relationships into which the simple being of the soul enters with the world. Herbart is a mathematical mind. And basically his whole conception of the world is born out of mathematical ideas. A number does not change when it becomes the element of an arithmetical operation. Three remains three whether it is added to four or subtracted from seven. Just as the numbers stand within the arithmetical operations, so the simple beings stand within the relationships that develop between them. And this is why Herbart also turns the science of the soul into an example of arithmetic. He seeks to apply mathematics to psychology. He calculates how ideas are mutually dependent, how they interact, what results they produce through their interaction. For him, the "I" is not the spiritual entity that we grasp in our self-consciousness, but it is the result of the interaction of all ideas, thus nothing other than a sum, a supreme expression of relationships. We know nothing of the simple being that underlies our soul life, but its continuous relationships with other beings do appear to us. Thus, a being is entangled in this play of relationships. This is expressed in the fact that they all strive towards a center, and this center is the ego thought.
[ 2 ] Herbart is in a different sense a representative of the more recent development of the world view than Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. They seek a representation of the self-conscious soul in a world view that can contain this self-conscious soul. They thus express the spiritual impulse of their age. Herbart stands before this impulse; he must feel that the impulse is there. He seeks to understand it; but he finds no possibility of living into the self-conscious soul being in thinking as he imagines it to be correct. He remains outside it. One can see from Herbart's view of the world what difficulties arise for thinking when it wants to grasp what it has become in its essence in the development of humanity. Next to Hegel, Herbart looks like someone who struggles in vain for a goal that the other thinks he has achieved. Herbart's constructions of thought are an attempt to depict from the outside what Hegel wants to depict in his inner co-experience. Thinkers such as Herbart are also significant for the basic character of the modern worldview. They point to the goal to be achieved precisely by revealing the unsuitable means to this goal. The spiritual goal of the age struggles in Herbart; his spiritual power is not sufficient to understand and express this struggle in a sufficient way. The progress of the development of world-views shows that in addition to the personalities who stand at the height of the impulses of the time, there are always those who develop world-views out of a failure to understand these impulses. Such worldviews can be described as reactionary.
[ 3 ] Herbart falls back into the Leibnizian view. His simple soul life is unchanging. It does not arise, it does not pass away. It was present when this apparent life began, which man encloses with his ego; and it will detach itself again from these relationships and continue to exist when this life ceases. Herbart arrives at a concept of God through his view of the world, which contains many simple beings that bring about events through their relationships. We perceive purposefulness within these events. But the relationships could only be random, chaotic ones if the beings, which, according to their own being, have nothing to do with each other, were left to themselves. The fact that they are purposeful therefore points to a wise world ruler who orders their relationships. "No one is able to determine the nature of the deity more precisely," says Herbart. "He condemns the pretensions of systems that speak of God as a known object to be grasped in sharp outlines, through which we could elevate ourselves to a knowledge for which we are denied the data."
[ 4 ] Man's actions and his artistic creations are completely suspended in the air in this world view. There is no possibility of inserting them into it. For what relationship should exist between a relationship of simple beings who are indifferent to all processes and between the actions of human beings? Therefore Herbart must seek an independent root for both ethics and aesthetics. He believes to find it in human feeling. When man perceives things or processes, the feeling of liking or disliking can be attached to them. So we like it when a person's will takes a direction that agrees with their convictions. If we perceive the opposite, the feeling of displeasure settles in us. Because of this feeling, we call the harmony of the conviction with the will morally good, the discord morally reprehensible. Such a feeling can only be linked to a relationship between moral elements. The will as such is morally indifferent to us. So is conviction. Only when they work together does ethical pleasure or displeasure come to light. Herbart calls a relationship of moral elements a practical idea. He enumerates five such practical-ethical ideas: the idea of moral freedom, consisting in the agreement of will and conviction; the idea of perfection, which is based on the fact that the strong is pleasing in comparison with the weak; the idea of right, which arises from displeasure at the dispute; the idea of benevolence, which expresses the pleasure one feels when one will promotes the other; and the idea of retribution, which demands that all good and evil that has emanated from an individual be redressed to that individual. Herbart builds ethics on a human feeling, on moral sentiment. He separates it from the view of the world, which has to do with what is, and makes it a sum of demands of what ought to be. He connects it with aesthetics, indeed makes it a component of it. For this science also contains claims about what ought to be. It too has to do with relationships to which feelings are linked. The individual color leaves us aesthetically indifferent. If another color is placed next to it, we can either be satisfied or displeased by this combination. What is pleasing in its combination is beautiful; what is displeasing is ugly. Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898) built a science of art in a spiritual manner on these principles. Only one part of it is ethics or the science of the good, which considers those beautiful relationships that come into consideration in the field of action. Robert Zimmermann's significant remarks on aesthetics (the science of art) testify to the fact that important stimuli for the development of the spirit can also emanate from attempts at a world view that do not reach the height of contemporary impulses.
[ 5 ] Herbart, because of his mind, which is oriented towards the mathematically necessary, was fortunate in observing those processes of human mental life that really take place in the same way with a certain regularity in all people. The more intimate, more individual ones will of course not be. Such a mathematical mind will overlook what is original and peculiar in every personality. It will, however, gain a certain insight into the average nature of the spirit and at the same time, with its mathematical certainty, a dominion over the development of the spirit. Just as the mechanical laws enable us to develop technique, so the laws of the life of the soul enable us to educate, to develop the technique of training the soul. This is why Herbart's work has been fruitful in the field of pedagogy. He has found a rich following among pedagogues. But not only among them. This does not seem obvious at first glance in view of this world view, which presents a picture of meagre, gray generalities. But it can be explained by the fact that precisely those natures most in need of a world view have a certain inclination towards such general concepts, which line up with rigid necessity like the links of an arithmetical example. There is something captivating about experiencing how link after link of thought chains itself together as if by itself, because it awakens a feeling of certainty. The mathematical sciences are held in such high esteem because of this certainty. They build themselves up, as it were, of their own accord; one only provides the thought material and leaves the rest to automatic logical necessity. In the progress of Hegelian thought, which is saturated with reality, one must constantly intervene. There is more warmth, more immediacy in this thinking; but for this, its flowing forth requires the constant intervention of the soul. After all, it is reality that one captures in thought; this ever-flowing reality, individual in each of its points, which resists all logical rigidity. Hegel also had numerous students and followers. But these were far less loyal than those of Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality animated his thoughts, so long did it cast its spell; and the effect of this spell was convincing. After his death, many of his students went their own ways. And that is only natural. For those who are independent will also shape their relationship to reality in an independent way. With Herbart's students, we see something different. They are faithful. They continue the master's teachings; but they retain the basis of his thoughts in unchanged form. Anyone who immerses himself in Hegel's way of thinking immerses himself in the development of the world, which unfolds in countless stages of development. The individual can be inspired to follow this path of becoming, but he can shape the individual stages according to his individual way of thinking. With Herbart, we are dealing with a firmly integrated system of thought that inspires confidence through its solid structure. You can reject it. But if you accept it, then you will have to accept it in its original form. Because the individual, the personal, which forces you to confront your own self with the self of others: this is precisely what is missing.
[ 6 ] "Life is a miserable thing; I have resolved to spend mine thinking about it." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once said these words to Wieland at the beginning of his time at university. His world view grew out of this sentiment. Schopenhauer had gone through hard experiences of his own and the observation of the sad experiences of others when he took up philosophical thought as a new goal in life. The sudden death of his father, caused by a fall from an attic, the bad experiences in his commercial profession, the sight of scenes of human misery on the journeys the young man made, and many other things had not so much created in him the need to know the world because he considered it worth knowing, but rather the quite different need to create a means of bearing it in the contemplation of things. He needed a world view to calm his gloomy state of mind. When he entered the university in 1809, the ideas that Kant, Fichte and Schelling had incorporated into the development of the German world view were in full effect. Hegel's star was rising. Hegel had published his first major work "The Phenomenology of Spirit" in 1806. In Göttingen, Schopenhauer listened to the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of "Aenesidemus", who was in some respects an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless described Kant and Plato to the student as the two great minds to which he should adhere. Schopenhauer immersed himself enthusiastically in Kant's way of thinking. He described the revolution that this brought about in his mind as a spiritual rebirth. He finds it all the more satisfying because he finds it in full agreement with the views of the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him, those of Plato. The latter says: As long as we relate to things and processes merely perceptively, we are like people who are tied up in a dark cave, so that they cannot turn their heads, and see nothing but, by the light of a fire burning behind them, on the wall opposite them, the shadows of real things passing between them and the fire, and indeed of each other, and each of themselves only the shadows. Just as these shadows relate to real things, so our perceptual things relate to the ideas, which are the truly real. The things of the perceptible world come into being and pass away, the ideas are eternal. Did not Kant teach the same? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him too? Although the Königsberg sage did not ascribe this eternal reality to the Ideas, Schopenhauer found complete agreement between Plato and Kant in their view of the reality spread out in space and time. This view soon became his incontrovertible truth. He said to himself: I gain knowledge of things insofar as I see them, hear them, feel them, etc., in a word: insofar as I imagine them. An object exists for me only in my imagination. Heaven, earth, etc. are therefore my ideas, because the "thing in itself" that corresponds to them has only become my object by assuming the character of an idea.
[ 7 ] As absolutely correct as Schopenhauer found everything that Kant put forward about the imaginative character of the world of perception, he felt little satisfied by Kant's remarks about the "thing-in-itself". Schulze was also an opponent of Kant's views. How can we know anything about a "thing in itself", how can we even utter a word about it, if we only know about ideas, and the "thing in itself" lies completely outside all ideas? Schopenhauer had to look for another way to arrive at the "thing-in-itself". In this search he was much more influenced by contemporary world views than he ever admitted. The element that Schopenhauer added to the conviction he had gained from Kant and Plato, as a "thing in itself", we find in Fichte, whose lectures he heard in Berlin in 1811. And we also find it in Schelling. Schopenhauer was able to hear the most mature form of Fichte's views in Berlin. This form has been handed down in Fichte's posthumous writings. The latter proclaims emphatically, while Schopenhauer, by his own admission, "listens to him attentively", that all being is ultimately founded in a universal will. As soon as man finds the will within himself, he gains the conviction that there is a world independent of his individual. Will is not knowledge of the individual, but a form of real being. Fichte could also have described his world view as "The world as knowledge and will". And in Schelling's essay "On the nature of human freedom and the objects connected with it", there is the sentence: "In the last and highest instance, there is no other being than willing. Willing is primordial being and all its predicates fit this alone: groundlessness, eternity, independence from time, self-affirmation. The whole of philosophy strives only to find this highest expression." That willing is primordial being also becomes Schopenhauer's view When knowledge is extinguished, the will remains. For the will precedes knowledge. Knowledge has its origin in my brain, says Schopenhauer. But it must be produced by an active, creative force. Man knows such a creative power in his own will. Schopenhauer now seeks to prove that what is active in other things is also will. The will thus underlies the merely imagined reality as a "thing in itself". And we can know about this "thing in itself". It is not, like the Kantian, beyond our imagination; we experience its workings within our own organism.
[ 8 ] The development of the world-view in more recent times progresses through Schopenhauer insofar as with him begins one of the attempts to elevate one of the basic forces of self-consciousness to a general world-principle. The riddle of the age lies in active self-consciousness. Schopenhauer is unable to find a world view that contains the roots of self-consciousness. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have tried to do so. Schopenhauer singles out one force of self-consciousness, the will, and claims that it is not only in the human soul, but in the whole world. Thus, for him, man is not situated in the origins of the world with his full self-consciousness, but with a part of it, with the will. Schopenhauer thus presents himself as one of those representatives of the more recent development of the world view who were only partially able to grasp the basic riddle of the time in their consciousness.
[ 9 ] Goethe also exerted a profound influence on Schopenhauer. From the fall of 1813 to May 1814, Schopenhauer enjoyed the poet's company. Goethe personally introduced the philosopher to the doctrine of colors. The former's way of looking at things corresponded completely to the ideas Schopenhauer had formed about the way our sensory organs and our mind proceed when they perceive things and processes. Goethe had carried out careful and extensive investigations into the perceptions of the eye, light and colors, and had processed the results in his work "On the Theory of Colors". He arrived at views that differed from those of Newton, the founder of modern color theory. The contrast between Newton and Goethe in this field cannot be judged from the right point of view if one does not start from the fundamental difference in the two personalities' views of the world. Goethe regards man's sense organs as the best, the highest physical apparatuses. For him, the eye must therefore be the highest authority for determining the lawful relationships in the world of color. Newton and the physicists investigate the phenomena in question in the manner which Goethe calls "the greatest calamity of modern physics" and which, as already mentioned in another context (p. 206), consists in the fact that "one has, as it were, separated the experiments from man, and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can do. The eye perceives light and dark or light and darkness and, within the light-dark field of observation, the colors. Goethe remains within this field and seeks to prove how light, darkness and color are connected. Newton and his followers want to observe the processes of light and color as they take place outside the human organism in space, as they would have to take place if there were no eye. However, such an external sphere separated from man has no justification for Goethe's view of the world. We do not arrive at the essence of a thing by refraining from the effects which we perceive, but in the exact lawfulness of these effects, grasped by the spirit, we have given this essence. The effects which the eye perceives, grasped in their totality and represented in their lawful connection, are the essence of light and color, not a world of external processes separated from the eye, which is to be ascertained with artificial instruments. "For we actually undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects and a complete history of these effects at best encompasses the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his deeds, his actions, and a picture of character will confront us. The colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering. In this sense, we can expect information about the light from them. Colors and light are indeed in the most exact relation to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature; for it is the whole of nature that wants thereby to reveal itself especially to the sense of the eye." Here we find Goethe's view of the world applied to a special case. What lies hidden in the rest of nature is revealed in the human organism, through its senses, through its soul. This reaches its peak in man. Whoever therefore seeks the truth of nature apart from man, as Newton did, cannot find it, according to Goethe's basic view.
[ 10 ] Schopenhauer sees in the world, which is given to the spirit in space and time, only an imagination of this spirit. The essence of this imaginary world reveals itself to us in the will by which we see our own organism permeated. He can therefore not accept a physical doctrine which sees the essence of light and color phenomena not in the ideas given to the eye, but in a world which is supposed to exist separately from the eye. Goethe's way of imagining must therefore have been sympathetic to him because it remains within the imaginary world of the eye. He found in it a confirmation of what he himself had to assume about this world. The struggle between Goethe and Newton is not merely a physical question, but a matter of the whole world view. Whoever is of the opinion that something can be discovered about nature through experiments that are separate from man must remain on the ground of Newton's theory of color. Modern physics is of this opinion. It can therefore only pass the judgment on Goethe's theory of color that Hermann Helmholtz expressed in his treatise "Goethe's Premonitions of Coming Scientific Ideas": "Where it is a question of tasks that can be solved by poetic divinations arising in visual images, the poet has shown himself capable of the highest achievements; where only the consciously applied inductive method could have helped, he has failed." If one sees in human visual images only products that are added to nature, then one must determine what happens in nature apart from these visual images. If, like Goethe, one sees in them revelations of the entities contained in nature, then one will adhere to them if one wants to investigate the truth. Schopenhauer, however, takes neither the one nor the other standpoint. He does not want to recognize the essence of things in the perceptions of the senses; he rejects the physical method because it does not stop at what is solely available to us, at the ideas. But he also turned the question from a purely physical one into a question of worldview. And since he basically based his world view on man, not on an external world separate from man, he had to decide in favor of Goethe. For Goethe drew the conclusion for the theory of color that must necessarily follow for those who see in man with his healthy senses the "greatest and most exact physical apparatus". Hegel, who as a philosopher stands entirely on the ground of this world view, must therefore vigorously advocate Goethe's theory of color. We read in his Naturphilosophie: "We owe the representation of colors appropriate to the concept to Goethe, whom colors and light attracted early on to contemplate them, especially from the side of painting; and his pure, simple sense of nature, the first condition of the poet, had to resist such barbarism of reflection as is found in Newton. He went through everything that had been stated and experimented on light and color from Plato onwards. He conceived the phenomenon simply; and the true instinct of reason consists in conceiving the phenomenon from the side where it presents itself most simply."
[ 11 ] For Schopenhauer, the essential foundation of all world processes is the will. It is an eternal, dark striving for existence. It contains no reason. For reason only arises in the human brain, which is created by the will. While Hegel makes self-conscious reason, the spirit, the foundation of the world and sees in human reason only an individual realization of general world reason, Schopenhauer regards reason only as a product of the brain, as a bubble of foam that finally arises when the unreasoning, dark urge, the will, has created everything else. For Hegel, all things and processes are reasonable, because they are produced by reason; for Schopenhauer, everything is unreasonable, because it is produced by the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer confirms Fichte's words as clearly as possible: What one chooses for a world view depends on what kind of person one is. Schopenhauer had bad experiences, he got to know the world from its worst side before he decided to think about it. It therefore satisfies him to imagine this world as unreasonable in its essence, as the result of a blind will. According to his way of thinking, reason has no power over unreason. For it arises itself as the result of unreason, it is an illusion and a dream, generated by the will. Schopenhauer's world view is the gloomy mood of his mind translated into thought. His eye was not attuned to following the rational arrangements of existence with joy; it saw only the irrationality of the blind will expressed in suffering and pain. His moral doctrine could therefore only be based on the perception of suffering. For him, an action is only moral if it is based on this perception. The compassion must be the source of human deeds. What better could he do who realizes that all beings suffer than to let compassion guide all his actions? Since the unreasonable and evil lies in the will, the more man kills the impetuous will within himself, the higher he will stand morally. The expression of will in the individual person is selfishness, egoism. Whoever surrenders to compassion, i.e. does not want for himself but for others, has become master of the will. One way to get rid of the will is to devote oneself to the creation of art and to the impressions that emanate from works of art. The artist does not create because he desires something, not because his selfish will is directed towards things and processes. He creates out of egoistic joy. He immerses himself in the essence of things as a pure observer. It is the same with the enjoyment of works of art. When we stand before a work of art and the desire stirs in us to possess it, we are still entangled in the base desires of the will. Only when we admire beauty without desiring it have we risen to the sublime position where we are no longer dependent on the blind will. Then, however, art has become something for us that momentarily liberates us from the irrationality of blindly wanting existence. This redemption is purest in the enjoyment of musical works of art. For music does not speak to us through the imagination like other forms of art. It does not depict anything in nature. Since all natural things and processes are only representations, the arts that take these things and processes as models can also only come to us as embodiments and representations. Man produces sounds out of himself without a natural model. Because he has the will as his essence within himself, it can only be the will that directly emanates the world of music from within. This is why music speaks so strongly to the human mind, because it is the embodiment of that which expresses the innermost essence of man, his true being, the will. And it is a triumph of man that he has an art in which he enjoys, free of will, selflessly, that which is the origin of all desire, the origin of all unreason. Schopenhauer's view of music is again the result of his very personal idiosyncrasy. Even as a Hamburg merchant's apprentice, he wrote to his mother: "How did the heavenly seed find room on our hard soil, where necessity and shortcomings fight for every little spot? We are banished from the primal spirit and are not meant to reach it. And yet a compassionate angel has implored the heavenly flower for us and it is rooted high in full glory on this soil of misery. The pulsations of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the centuries of barbarism and an immediate echo of the Eternal has remained in it, comprehensible to every sense and sublime even above vice and virtue."
[ 12 ] In the position that the two opponents of the world view, Hegel and Schopenhauer, take towards art, one can see how the world view intervenes in the personal relationship of man to the individual areas of life. Hegel, who saw in man's world of imagination and ideas that towards which all external nature strives as towards its perfection, can recognize as the most perfect art only that in which the spirit appears highest, most perfect, and where it at the same time clings to that which continually strives towards it. Every form of external nature wants to be spirit, but it does not attain it. If man now creates such an external, three-dimensional structure, on which he imprints the spirit that it seeks but cannot attain through itself, then he has created a perfect work of art. This is the case with sculpture. What otherwise only appears inside the human soul as a formless spirit, as an idea, is shaped by the sculptural artist out of the raw material. The soul, the mind, which we perceive in our consciousness without form: they speak from the statue, from a structure of space. In this marriage of the world of the senses and the spiritual world lies the artistic ideal of a world view that sees the purpose of nature in the production of the spirit, i.e. that can only see beauty in a work that appears as the direct expression of the spirit coming to light in nature. On the other hand, he who, like Schopenhauer, sees only imagination in all nature, cannot possibly see this ideal in a work that imitates nature. He must resort to an art form that is free of all nature: that is music.
[ 13 ] All that leads to the eradication, indeed the destruction of the will, Schopenhauer logically regarded as desirable. For eradicating the will means eradicating the unreasonable in the world. Man should not want. He should kill all desire within himself. Ascesis is therefore Schopenhauer's moral ideal. The wise man will extinguish all desires within himself, completely negate his will. He goes so far that no motive compels him to will. His striving consists only in the quietistic urge for redemption from all life. Schopenhauer saw a high teaching of wisdom in Buddhism's world-denying views of life. One can therefore call his world view a reactionary one compared to Hegel's. Hegel sought to reconcile man everywhere with life; he strove to portray all action as cooperation in a rational ordering of the world. Schopenhauer regarded the hostility to life, the turning away from reality, the flight from the world as the ideal of the wise man. There is something in Hegel's way of viewing the world and life that can give rise to doubts and questions. Hegel's starting point is pure thought, the abstract idea, which he himself describes as an "oyster-like, gray or completely black" being (letter to Goethe dated February 20, 1821), but which he also claims should be understood as the "representation of God as he is in his eternal being before the creation of nature and a finite spirit." The goal he arrives at is the substantive, individual human spirit, through which that which leads only a shadowy existence in the gray, oyster-like world first comes to light. It can easily be understood to mean that a personality as a living, self-conscious being does not exist apart from the human spirit. Hegel derives the rich content that we experience in ourselves from the ideal that we must think. It is understandable that minds of a certain disposition felt repelled by this view of the world and of life. Only thinkers as selflessly devoted as Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) were able to fully immerse themselves in Hegel's train of thought and, in full agreement with it, to create a system of ideas that appears to be a reproduction of Hegel's from a lesser nature. Others could not comprehend how man is to enlighten himself through the pure idea about the infinity and multiplicity of impressions that assail him when he directs his gaze to nature, which is rich in color and form, and how he is to gain anything by raising his gaze from the experiences of the world of sensation, feeling and imagination of his soul to the icy height of pure thought. It is true that one will misunderstand Hegel if one interprets him in this way; but this misunderstanding is understandable. This mood, unsatisfied by Hegel's way of thinking, found an expression in the current of thought that had its representatives in Franz Xaver Baader (1765-1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781 to 1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), Anton Günther (1783-1863), K. F. E. Thrahndorff (1782-1863), Martin Deutinger (1815-1864) and Hermann Ulrici (1806 to 1884). They strove to replace Hegel's gray, oyster-like, pure thought with a life-filled, personal primordial being, an individual God. Baader called it a "God-denying idea" to believe that God only attains his perfect existence in man. God must be a personality; and the world must not, as Hegel imagines, emerge from him as a logical process in which one concept always necessarily drives out another. No, the world must be God's free act, a creation of his omnipotent will. These thinkers approach the Christian doctrine of revelation. Justifying and scientifically substantiating it becomes the more or less conscious purpose of their reflections. Baader immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, Master Eckhart, Tauler and Paracelsus, in whose imagery he found a much more suitable means of expressing the deepest truths than in the pure thoughts of Hegel's doctrine. That he also induced Schelling to deepen his thoughts by incorporating Jacob Boehm's ideas, to fill them with warmer content, has already been explained (cf. pp. 221 f.). Remarkable phenomena within the development of the world view will always be personalities such as Krause. He was a mathematician. He did not allow himself to be determined by the proud, logical and perfect character of this science to solve the worldview questions that were to satisfy his deepest spiritual needs according to the method he was familiar with in this science. The type for such thinkers is the great mathematician Newton, who treated the phenomena of the visible universe as an example of arithmetic and, in addition, satisfied the basic questions of worldview for himself in a manner close to the belief in revelation. Krause cannot accept a view that seeks the primordial nature of the world in things and processes. Those who seek God in the world, as Hegel does, cannot find him. For although the world is in God, God does not exist in the world, but as an independent being at peace in himself. Krause's world of ideas is based on the "thought of an infinite, independent being, which has nothing outside itself, but in itself and in itself as the one ground is everything, and which we therefore also think of as the ground of reason, nature and humanity". He wants to have nothing in common with a view that "takes the finite or the world as the epitome of the finite for God himself, idolizes it, confuses it with God". No matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in the reality given to our senses and our spirit, we will never thereby arrive at the primordial ground of all existence, of which we can only obtain an idea by allowing the observation of all finite existence to be accompanied by the foreboding vision of a supra-worldly being. Immanuel Hermann Fichte held a sharp disagreement with Hegelianism in his writings "Sätze zur Vorschule der Theologie" (1826) and "Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie" (1829). In numerous works he then sought to substantiate and deepen his view that a conscious, personal being must underlie world phenomena. In 1837, he joined forces with like-minded friends Weiße, Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäus, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth and others to publish the "Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie" (Journal of Philosophy and Speculative Theology) in order to make a strong impact against HegeI's view based on pure thinking. According to I. H. Fichte's conviction, only those who have grasped that "the highest thought that truly solves the problem of the world is the idea of the primordial subject or the absolute personality that knows and understands itself in its ideal and real infinity have ascended to the highest knowledge. "The creation and preservation of the world, which constitutes the reality of the world, consists only in the uninterrupted manifestation of God's will, permeated by consciousness, so that he is only consciousness and will, but both in highest unity, he alone is therefore person, or it in the most eminent sense. Chr. Hermann Weiße believed that he had to ascend from the Hegelian world view to a completely theological approach. He saw the goal of his thinking in the Christian idea of the three personalities in the one Godhead. He therefore sought to present this idea with an immense amount of ingenuity as the result of natural, unbiased thinking. Weisse believed that he possessed something infinitely richer than Hegel with his gray idea in his triune personal deity, which possesses a living will. This living will "will, in a word, expressly give the inner-divine nature the form and no other, which is everywhere presupposed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, when they present Cott both before the creation of the world, as well as during and after it in the light element of his glory, as surrounded by an incalculable host of ministering spirits with a fluid, immaterial corporeality, through which his intercourse with the created world is everywhere expressly mediated to him".
[ 14 ] Anton Günther, the "Viennese philosopher", and Martin Deutinger, who was influenced by him, move with their worldview ideas entirely within the framework of the Catholic theological mode of conception. The former seeks to detach man from the natural world order by separating him into two parts, into a natural being, which belongs to the necessary lawfulness like the lower things, and into a spiritual being, which is an independent part of a higher spirit world and has an existence like a "being" in Herbart. He believed that this would overcome Hegelianism, which sees the spirit as merely a higher level of natural existence, and establish a Christian world view. The Church itself did not share this view, as Günther's writings were placed on the index of banned books in Rome. Deutinger fought against HegeI's pure thinking, which, in his view, should not devour the living being. He considered the living will to be higher than pure thought. The latter can really produce something as a creator; the latter is powerless and abstract. Thrahndorff also makes this living will his starting point. The world cannot be explained from the shadowy realm of ideas, but the powerful will must grasp these ideas in order to create real existence. It is not in the thinking comprehension of the world that its deepest content is revealed to man, but in an emotion, in love, through which the individual surrenders himself to the totality, to the will that rules in the universe. It is quite clear: all these thinkers endeavor to overcome thinking and its object, the pure idea. They do not want to accept this thinking as the highest spiritual expression of man. Thrahndorff does not want to know, but love, in order to understand the primordial nature of the world. These philosophers believe that clear, pure thinking destroys the warm, religious devotion to the primal forces of existence.
[ 15 ] This latter idea is based on a misunderstanding of Hegel's world of thought. This misunderstanding was particularly evident in the views that emerged after Hegel's death concerning his position on religion. The ambiguity that prevailed about this position divided Hegel's followers into a party that saw in his worldview a firm support for revealed Christianity and one that used his teaching precisely to dissolve Christian views and replace them with a radically free-spirited view.
[ 16 ] Neither the one nor the other party could have invoked Hegel if they had understood him correctly. For there is nothing in Hegel's world view that can serve to support a religion or lead to its dissolution. As little as Hegel wanted to create any phenomenon of nature out of pure thought, so little did he want to do this with a religion. Just as he wanted to extract pure thought from the processes of nature and thereby comprehend them, so with religion he merely pursued the goal of bringing its thought content to the surface. Just as he regarded everything in the world as reasonable because it is real, so too religion. It must be there, created by completely different powers of the soul than are available to the thinker when he approaches it in order to comprehend it. It was also the mistake of I. H. Fichte, Chr. H. Weisse, Deutinger and others that they fought Hegel because he had not progressed from the sphere of pure thought to the religious comprehension of the personal Godhead. But Hegel never set himself such a task. He regarded it as a matter of religious consciousness. Fichte, Weiße, Krause, Deutinger and others wanted to create a religion out of the world view. Such a task would have seemed as absurd to Hegel as if someone had wanted to illuminate the world from the idea of light, or create a magnet from the idea of magnetism. However, in his view, just like the entire natural and spiritual world, religion also stems from the idea. Therefore, the human mind can find this idea in religion. But just as the magnet was created from the idea of magnetism before the human mind came into being and the latter only has to comprehend this emergence afterwards, so religion also came into being from the idea before this idea shone forth in the human soul as a component of the world view. If Hegel had experienced the criticism of religion by his students, he would have been urged to say: "Keep your hands off all foundations of religion, all creation of religious ideas, as long as you want to remain thinkers and do not want to become messiahs. Hegel's world view, properly understood, cannot have a retroactive effect on religious consciousness. Consciousness. Those who think about art have the same relationship to it as those who want to fathom the essence of religion.
[ 17 ] The "Hallische Jahrbücher", published by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer between 1838 and 1843, served the battle of world views. From a defense and explanation of Hegel, they soon moved on to an independent further development of his ideas and in this way led to the points of view that we characterize in the next essay as those of the "radical worldviews". From 1841 onwards, the editors called their journal "German Yearbooks" and considered one of their aims to be the "struggle against political unfreedom, against feudal and landed estate theory". As radical politicians, they intervened in the development of the times, calling for a state in which complete freedom reigned. They thus distanced themselves from the spirit of Hegel, who did not want to make history, but to understand history.