Riddles of Philosophy
Part II
GA 18
V. World Conceptions of Scientific Factuality
[ 1 ] An attempt to derive a general view of world and life from the basis of strict science was undertaken in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798–1857). This enterprise, which was presented as a comprehensive world picture in his Cours de Philosophic Positive (6 vols., 1830–42), was sharply antagonistic to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel of the first half of the nineteenth century. It also opposed, although not to the same degree, all those thought structures that were derived from the ideas of evolution along the lines of Lamarck and Darwin. What occupied the central position of all world conception in Hegel, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, was completely rejected by Comte. He argues: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would actually have to divide into two personalities; it would have to slip outside itself and place itself opposite its own being. Even a psychology that does not confine itself to the mere physiological view but intends to preserve the processes of the mind by themselves is not recognized by Comte. Anything that is to become an object of knowledge must belong to the objective interconnections of facts, must be presented objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. From this position there follows Comte's objection to the attempts of Spencer and other thinkers whose world pictures followed the approach of scientific thinking adapted by Lamarck and Darwin. So far as Comte is concerned, the human species is given as a fixed and unchangeable fact; he refuses to pay any attention to Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent natural laws as physics uses them for its phenomena are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory as knowledge for Comte. He has a mathematical bent of mind. If it cannot be treated clearly and simply like a mathematical problem, he considers it to be not ready for science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that one needs ideas that become increasingly more life-saturated as one rises from the purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher formations of nature and to man. His world conception owed a certain lifeless and rigid quality to this fact. The whole world appears to him like the mechanics of a machine. What escapes Comte everywhere is the element of life; he expels life and spirit from things and explains merely what is mechanical and machinelike. The concrete historical life of man appears in his presentation like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Comte constructed a scale of the sciences. Mathematics represents the lowest stage; it is followed by physics and chemistry and these again by the science of organisms; the last and concluding science in this sequence is sociology, the knowledge of human society. Comte strives to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics. The phenomena with which the individual sciences deal are supposed to be different in every case but the laws are considered to be fundamentally always the same.
The reverberations of the thought of Holbach, Condillac and others are still distinctly perceptible in the lectures on the relation between soul and body (Les Rapports du Physique et du Moral de L'homme) that Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) gave in 1797 and 1798 in the medical school founded by the National Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be called the beginning of the development of the world conception of the nineteenth century in France. They express a distinct awareness of the fact that Condillac's mode of conception for the phenomena of the soul life had been too closely modeled after the conception of the mechanical processes of inorganic nature and their operation. Cabanis investigates the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's intellectual and emotional disposition. He develops the conception that the physical and the spiritual are not two separated entities that have nothing in common but that they constitute an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not his fundamental view but the way in which he elaborates it. His predecessors simply carry into the spiritual the views they have derived from the inorganic world. Cabanis is convinced that if we start by observing the world of the spiritual as open-mindedly as we observe the inorganic, it will reveal its relation to the rest of the natural phenomena.
Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) proceeded in a similar way. He also wanted first to observe the processes of the spirit without bias as they appear when we approach them without philosophical or scientific prejudice. According to this thinker, one is in error if one conceives the soul as a mechanism as Condillac and his followers had done. This mechanistic character cannot be upheld any longer if one honestly observes oneself. We do not find in us an automaton, a being that is directed from without. We always find within us spontaneous activity and an inner self. We should actually not know anything of the effects of the external world if we did not experience a disturbance in our inner life caused by a collision with the external world. We experience our own being. We develop our activity out of ourselves, but as we do this we meet with opposition. We realize not only our own existence but also an external world that resists us.
[ 2 ] Although they started from de Tracy, two thinkers—Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and André-Marie Ampè re (1775–1826) were led by the self-observation of the soul in entirely different directions. Biran is a subtle observer of the human spirit. What in Rousseau seems to emerge as a chaotic mode of thought motivated by an arbitrary mood, we find in Biran in the form of clear and concrete thinking. Two factors of man's inner life are made the objects of observation by Biran who is a profoundly thoughtful psychologist: What man is through the nature of his being, his temperament, and what he makes out of himself through active work, his character. He follows the ramifications and changes of the inner life, and he finds the source of knowledge in man's inner life. The forces of which we learn through introspection are intimately known in our life, and we learn of an external world only insofar as it presents itself as more or less similar and akin to our inner world. What should we know of forces outside in nature if we did not experience within our self-active soul a similar force and consequently could compare this with what corresponds to it in the external world? For this reason, Biran is untiring in his search for the processes in man's soul. He pays special attention to the involuntary and the unconscious element in the inner life processes that exist long before the light of consciousness emerges in the soul. Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him to a peculiar form of mysticism in later years. In the process of deriving the profoundest wisdom from the soul, we come closest to the foundation of existence when we dig down into our own being. The experience of the deepest soul processes then is an immersion in the wellspring of existence, into the God within us.
[ 3 ] The attraction of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He could have found no more appropriate form of presentation than that of a journal intime, a form of diary. The writings of Biran that allow the deepest insight into his thought world were published after his death by E. Naville (compare Naville's book, Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées, 1857, and his edition, Oeuvres inédités de Maine de Biran). As old men, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy belonged to a small circle of philosophers; Biran was a younger member among them. Ampè re was among those who were acquainted with Biran's views. As a natural scientist, he became prominent through the extension of Oersted's observation concerning the relation of electricity to magnetism (compare above in Part II Chapter I). Biran's mode of conception is more intimate, that of Ampè re more scientific-methodical. Ampè re follows with interest the interrelationship of sensations and conceptions in the soul, and also the process through which the spirit arrives at a science of the world phenomena with the aid of thinking.
[ 4 ] What is significant in this current of world conception, which chronologically represents the continuation of the teachings of Condillac, is the circumstance that the life of the soul itself is decidedly emphasized, that the self-activity of the inner personality of the human being is brought into the foreground of the investigation, and that all these thinkers are striving nevertheless for knowledge in the strict sense of natural science. Initially, they investigate the spirit with the methods of natural science, but they do not want to treat its phenomena as homogeneous with the other processes of nature. From these more materialistic beginnings there emerges finally a tendency toward a world conception that leans distinctly toward the spirit.
[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792–1867) traveled through Germany several times and thus became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic period. The deepest impression was made on him by Hegel and Goethe. He brought their idealism to France. As a professor at the école normale (1814), and later at the Sorbonne, he was able to do a great deal for this idealism through his powerful and fascinating eloquence that always produced a deep impression. Cousin received from the idealistic life of the spirit the conviction that it is not through the observation of the external world but through that of the human spirit that a satisfactory viewpoint for a world conception can be obtained. He based what he wanted to say on the self observation of the soul. He adopted the view of Hegel that spirit, idea and thought do not merely rule in man's inner life but also outside in nature and in the progress of the historical life, and that reason is contained in reality. Cousin taught that the character of a people of an age was not merely influenced by random happenings, arbitrary decisions of human individuals, but that a real idea is manifested in them and that a great man appears in the world merely as a messenger of a great idea, in order to realize it in the course of history. This produced a profound impression on Cousin's French audience, which in its most recent history had had to comprehend world historical upheavals without precedent, when they heard such a splendid speaker expound the role that reason played in the historical evolution in accordance with some great and fundamental ideas.
[ 6 ] Comte, with energy and resolution, found his place in the development of French philosophy with his principle: only in the method of science, which proceeds from strict mathematical and directly observed truths as in physics and chemistry can the point of departure for a world conception be found. The only approach he considered mature was the one that fought its way through to this view. To arrive at this stage, humanity had to go through two phases of immaturity—one in which it believed in gods, and subsequently, one in which it surrendered to abstract ideas. Comte sees the evolution of mankind in the progression from theological thinking to idealistic thinking, and from there to the scientific world conception. In the first stage, man's thinking projected anthropomorphic gods into the processes of nature, which produce these processes in the same arbitrary manner in which man proceeds in his actions. Later, he replaces the gods with abstract ideas as, for instance, life force, general world reason, world purpose, and so forth. But this phase of development must give way to a higher one in which it must be understood that an explanation of the phenomena of the world can be found only in the method of observation and a strictly mathematical and logical treatment of the facts. For the purpose of a world conception, thinking must merely combine what physics, chemistry and the science of living organisms obtain through their investigation. Thinking must not add anything to the results of the individual sciences as theology had done with its divine beings and the idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Also, the conceptions concerning the course of the evolution of mankind, the social life of men in the state, in society, etc., will become clear only when the attempt is made to find in them laws like those found in the exact natural sciences. The causes that bring families, associations, legal views and state institutions into existence must be investigated in the same way as the causes that make bodies fall to the ground and that allow the digestive organs to operate. The science of human social life, of human development, sociology, is therefore what Comte is especially concerned with, and he tries to give it the exactness that the other sciences have gradually acquired.
In this respect he has a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). Saint-Simon had presented the view that man would only learn to guide his own fate completely when he conceived of his own life in the state, in society and in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense, and when he arranged it like a process following a natural law. For awhile, Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon. He parted ways with him when it seemed to him that Saint-Simon's views turned into all sorts of groundless dreams and utopias. Comte continued to work with a rare zeal in his original direction. His Cours de Philosophic Positive is an attempt to elaborate, in a style of spirit-alienation, the scientific accomplishments of his time into a world conception by presenting them merely in a systematized survey, and by developing sociology in the same way without the aid of theological and idealistic thoughts. Comte saw no other task for the philosopher than that of such a mere systematized survey. The philosopher would add nothing of his own to the picture that the sciences have presented as the connection of facts. Comte expressed thereby, in the most pointed manner, his view that the sciences alone, with their methods of observing reality, have a voice in the formulation of a world conception.
[ 7 ] Within German spirit-life Eugen Dühring (1833–1921) appeared as a forceful champion of Comte's thought. This was expressed in 1865 in his Natural Dialectic. As a further exposition, he expounded his views in his book, Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World Conception and Art of Life (1875), and in numerous other writings in the fields of mathematics, natural science, philosophy, history of science and social economy. All of Dühring's work proceeds, in the strictest sense of the word, from a mathematical and mechanistic mode of thought. Dühring is outstanding in his endeavor to analyze his observations of nature in accordance with mathematical law, but where this kind of thinking is insufficient, he loses all possibility of finding his way through life. It is from this characteristic of his spirit that the arbitrariness and bias is to be explained with which Dühring judges so many things. Where it is necessary to judge the conflicts of life in accordance with higher ideas, he has, therefore, no other criterion than his sympathies and antipathies that have been aroused in him through accidental personal circumstances. This man, with his mathematically objective mind, becomes completely arbitrary when he undertakes to evaluate human accomplishments of the historical past or of the present. His rather unimaginative mathematical mode of conception led him to denounce a personality like Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance consisted, in Dühring's opinion, in a few poetical achievements. It is impossible to surpass Dühring in his under-valuation of everything that lies beyond a drab reality as he does in his book, The Highlights of Modern Literature. In spite of this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most stimulating figures in the development of modern world conception. No one who has penetrated his thought-saturated books can help but confess that he has been profoundly affected by them.
[ 8 ] Dühring uses rude language for all world conceptions that do not proceed from strictly scientific basic views. All such unscientific modes of thought “found themselves in the state of childish immaturity or feverish fits, or in the decadence of senility, no matter whether they infest entire epochs and parts of humanity under these circumstances or just occasionally individual elements or degenerated layers of society, but they always belong to the category of the immature, the pathological or that of over-ripeness that is already decomposed by putrefaction,” (Course of Philosophy). What Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel achieved, Dühring condemns as the outflow of a professorial wisdom of mountebanks; idealism as a world conception is for him a theory of insanity. He means to create a philosophy of reality that is alone adequate to nature because it “does away with all artificial and unnatural fictions, and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions”; reality is conceived in this philosophy “in a manner that excludes all tendencies toward a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited world conception.” (Course of Philosophy)
[ 9 ] One should think like a real expert in mechanics, a real physicist who confines himself to the results of sense perception, of the logical combinations of the intellect and the operations of calculations. Anything that goes beyond this is idle playing with empty concepts. This is Dühring's verdict. Dühring means to raise this form of thinking, however, to its justified position. Whoever depends exclusively on that form of thinking can be sure that it supplies him with insight concerning reality. All brooding over the question of whether or not we actually can penetrate into the mysteries of the world process, all investigations, which, like Kant's, want to limit the faculty of knowledge, are caused by logical distortion. One should not yield to the temptation of a self-sacrificing self-denial of the mind that does not dare to make a positive statement about the world. What we can know is a real and untarnished presentation of the real.
“The totality of things has a systematic order and an inner logically consistent structure. Nature and history have a constitution and a development that correspond to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general qualities and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic deals must also be valid for the special case, that its object is the totality of being, together with its chief forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a large extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and the main forms of logic must set the standard for all reality and its forms.” (Course of Philosophy)
Reality has produced for itself an organ in human thinking in which it can reproduce itself mentally in the form of thought in an ideal picture. Nature is everywhere ruled by an all-penetrating law that carries its own justification within itself and cannot be criticized. How could there be any meaning in an attempt to criticize the relevance of thinking, the organ of nature? It is mere foolishness to suppose that nature would create an organ through which it would reflect itself only imperfectly or incompletely. Therefore, order and law in this world must correspond to the logical order and law in human thinking. “The ideal system of our thought is the picture of the real system of objective reality; the completed knowledge has, in the form of thoughts, the same structure that the things possess in the form of real existence.”
In spite of this general agreement between thinking and reality, there exists for the former the possibility to go beyond the latter. In the element of the idea, thinking continues the operations that reality has suggested to it. In reality all bodies are divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thinking does not stop at this limit but continues to divide in the realm of the idea. Thought sweeps beyond reality; for thought, the body is divisible into infinity. Accordingly, to thought it consists of infinitely small parts. In reality, this body consists only of a definite, finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality come into existence. From every event we proceed to another event that is its cause; from this cause we go again to the cause of that cause and so forth. As soon as our thinking abandons the firm ground of reality, it sweeps on into a vague infinity. It imagines that for every cause a cause has to be sought in turn so that the world is without a beginning in time. In allotting matter to space, thinking proceeds in a similar way. In transversing the sky it always finds beyond the most distant stars still other stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space as infinite and filled with an infinite number of heavenly bodies. According to Dühring, one ought to realize that all such conceptions of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only occur through the fact that thinking, with the methods that are perfectly appropriate within the realm of reality, rises above this realm and thereby gets lost in the indefinite.
[ 10 ] If in our thinking, however, we remain aware of this separation from reality, we need no longer refrain from applying our concepts borrowed from human action, to nature. Dühring, as he proceeds from such presuppositions, does not even hesitate to attribute to nature in its production an imagination any more than he does to man in his creation. “Imagination extends . . . into nature itself; it has its roots, as does all thinking in general, in the processes that precede the developed consciousness but do not produce any elements of subjective feelings” (Course of Philosophy). The thought upheld by Comte, that all world conception should be confined to a mere rearrangement of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he projects the faculty of imagination into the external world because he believes that he would simply have to reject it if it occurred merely in the human mind. Proceeding from these conceptions he arrives at other projections of such concepts as are derived from human activities. He thinks, for instance, that not only man could, in his actions, undertake fruitless attempts, which he then gives up because they do not lead to the intended aim, but that such attempts could also be observed in nature.
The character of the tentative in the formations of nature is not at all alien to reality itself, and one cannot see why one should allow only one half of the parallelism between nature outside man and nature in man, just for the sake of pleasing a shallow philosophy. If subjective error of thinking and imagining springs from the relative separation and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or blunder of the objective and non-thinking nature be possibly the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy that is not intimidated by common prejudices will finally recognize the perfect parallelism and the all-pervading unity of the constitution in both directions. (Course of Philosophy)
[ 11 ] Dühring is not in the least shy when it is a question of applying the concepts to reality that thinking produces in itself. But since he has, because of his disposition, only a sense for mathematical conceptions, the picture he sketches of the world has a mathematical-schematic character. He rejects the mode of thought that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel and does not understand what motivates them to search for a reason to explain why one being develops from another. The mathematician places the forms of a triangle, square, circle and ellipse side by side; why should one not be satisfied with a similar schematic coordination in nature as well? Dühring does not aim at the genesis of nature but at the fixed formations that nature produces through the combinations of its energies, just as the mathematician studies the definite, strictly delineated forms of space. He finds nothing inappropriate in attributing to nature a purposeful striving toward such definite formations. Dühring does not interpret this purposeful tendency of nature as the conscious activity that develops in man, but he supposes it to be just as distinctly manifested in the operation of nature as every other natural manifestation. In this respect, Dühring's view is, therefore, the opposite pole of the one upheld by Friedrich Albert Lange. Lange declares the higher concepts, especially all those in which imagination has a share, to be justifiable poetic fiction; Dühring rejects all poetic imagination in concepts, but he attributes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. Thus, it seems quite consistent for Lange to separate the foundation of the moral life entirely from all ideas that are rooted in reality (compare above, to Part II Chapter III). It is also consistent if Dühring wants to extend the ideas that he sees as valid in the realm of morality to nature as well. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man belongs to the natural events as much as do the inanimate processes. What in human life is right cannot be wrong in nature.
Such considerations contributed to making Dühring an energetic opponent to Darwin's doctrine of the struggle for existence. f the fight of all against all were the condition of perfection in nature, it would have to be the same with man's life:
Such a conception that claims to be scientific is the most immoral thing thinkable. The character of nature is in this way conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is not merely indifferent to the better morality of man but it is actually in agreement and in alliance with the bad moral principles that are followed by scoundrels. (Course of Philosophy)
According to Dühring's life-conception, what man feels as moral impulses must have its origin in nature. It is possible to observe in nature a tendency toward morality. As nature produces various forces that purposefully combine into stable formations, so it also plants into man instincts of sympathy. By them he allows himself to be determined in his social life with his fellow men. In man, the activity of nature is continued on an elevated level. Dühring attributes the faculty to produce sensations automatically out of themselves to the inanimate mechanical forces.
The mechanical causality of the forces of nature becomes, so to peak, subjectified in the fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectification is evidently incapable of any further explanation, for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanism of the world must develop a feeling of itself. (Course of Philosophy)
But when the world arrives at this stage, it is not that a new law begins, a realm of the spirit, but merely a continuation occurs of what had already been there in the unconscious mechanism. This mechanism, to be sure, is unconscious, but it is nevertheless wise, for “the earth with all it produces, as well as all causes of life's maintenance that lie outside, especially in the sun and all influences that come from the whole surrounding world in general—this entire organization and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, which is to say, in agreement with his well-being.” (Course of Philosophy)
[ 12 ] Dühring ascribes thought and even aims and moral tendencies to nature without admitting that he thereby idealizes nature. But, for an explanation of nature, higher ideas are necessary that transcend the real. According to Dühring, however, there must be nothing like that; he therefore changes their meaning by interpreting them as facts. Something similar happened in the world conception of Julius Hermann von Kirchmann (1802–84), who published his Philosophy of Knowledge in 1864 at about the same time Dühring's Natural Dialectic appeared. Kirchmann proceeds from the supposition that only what is perceived is real. Man is connected with reality through his perception. Everything that he does not derive from perception he must eliminate from his knowledge of reality. He succeeds in doing this if he rejects everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not,” is Kirchmann's second principle, which follows his first principle, “The perceived is.”
[ 13 ] Kirchmann admits only feelings and desires as the states of the soul of man that have an existence by themselves.
Knowing forms a contrast to the other two states, to feeling and desire. . . . It is possible that there is in knowing something underlying, perhaps something similar to, pressure and tension, but if it is conceived in this way it cannot be grasped in its essence. As knowing, and it is only as such that it is to be investigated here, it merely makes itself into a mirror of another being. There is no better parable for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is the more perfect the less it shows of itself and the more it reflects another being, so it is also with knowing. Its essence is the pure reflection of a being other than itself, without mixing in its own state of being. (Philosophy of Knowledge, 1864)
One cannot imagine a greater contrast to Hegel's mode of conception than this view of knowledge. While with Hegel the essence of a thing appears in thinking, in the element that the soul adds in spontaneous activity to the percept, Kirchmann's ideal of knowledge consists of a mirror picture of percepts from which all additions by the soul itself have been eliminated.
[ 14 ] To judge Kirchmann's position in the intellectual life correctly, one must consider the great difficulty with which somebody who had the will to erect an independent structure of world conception was met in his time. The results of natural science, which were to produce a profound influence on the development of world conceptions, were still young. They were just sufficient to shake the belief in the classical idealistic world conception that had had to erect its proud structure without the aid of modern natural science. In the face of the wealth of detailed knowledge, it became difficult to reconstruct fundamental philosophical thoughts. The thread that led from the scientific knowledge of facts to a satisfactory total conception of the world was gradually lost in the general consciousness. A certain perplexity took hold of many. An understanding for the lofty flight of thought that had inspired the world conception of Hegel was scarcely to be found anywhere.
Weltanschauungen der wissenschaftlichen Tatsächlichkeit
[ 1 ] Ein Versuch, von der bloßen Grundlage der strengen Wissenschaft aus eine Gesamtansicht über die Welt und das Leben zu gewinnen, wurde im Verlaufe des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in Frankreich durch Auguste Comte (1798 bis 1857) unternommen. Dieses Unternehmen, das in Comtes «Cours de philosophie positive» (6 Bände, 1830-1842) ein umfassendes Weltbild gezeigt hat, steht in schroffem Gegensatze zu den idealistischen Ansichten Fichtes, Schellings, Hegels in der ersten Jahrhunderthälfte, wie auch in einem, zwar minder starken, aber doch deutlichen zu allen Gedankengebäuden, die aus den Lamarck-Darwinschen Entwickelungsideen ihre Ergebnisse nehmen. Was bei Hegel im Mittelpunkt aller Weltanschauung steht, die Betrachtung und Erfassung des eigenen Geistes im Menschen: sie lehnt Comte vollständig ab. Er sagt sich: Wollte der menschliche Geist sich selbst betrachten, so müßte er sich ja geradezu in zwei Persönlichkeiten teilen; er müßte aus sich herausschlüpfen, und sich sich selbst gegenüberstellen. Schon die Psychologie, die sich nicht in der physiologischen Betrachtung erschöpft, sondern die geistigen Vorgänge für sich betrachten will, läßt Comte nicht gelten. Alles, was Gegenstand der Erkenntnis werden will, muß sich auf objektive Zusammenhänge der Tatsachen beziehen, muß sich so objektiv darstellen wie die Gesetze der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Und hieraus ergibt sich auch der Gegensatz Comtes zu dem, was Spencer und die auf Lamarck und Darwin bauenden naturwissenschaftlichen Denker mit ihren Weltbildern versucht haben. Für Comte ist die menschliche Art als feststehend und unveränderlich gegeben; er will von der Theorie Lamarcks nichts wissen. Einfache, durchsichtige Naturgesetze, wie sie die Physik bei ihren Erscheinungen anwendet, sind ihm Ideale der Erkenntnis. Solange eine Wissenschaft noch nicht mit solchen einfachen Gesetzen arbeitet, ist sie für Comte als Erkenntnis unbefriedigend. Er ist ein mathematischer Kopf. Und was sich nicht durchsichtig und einfach wie ein mathematisches Problem behandeln läßt, ist ihm noch unreif für die Wissenschaft. Comte hat keine Empfindung dafür, daß man um so lebensvollere Ideen braucht, je mehr man von den rein mechanischen und physikalischen Vorgängen zu den höheren Naturgebilden und zum Menschen heraufsteigt. Seine Weltanschauung gewinnt dadurch etwas Totes, Starres. Die ganze Welt stellt sich wie das Räderwerk einer Maschine dar. Comte sieht überall am Lebendigen vorbei; er treibt das Leben und den Geist aus den Dingen heraus und erklärt dann lediglich, was an ihnen mechanisch, maschinenmäßig ist. Das inhaltvolle geschichtliche Leben des Menschen nimmt sich in seiner Darstellung aus wie das Begriffsbild, das der Astronom von den Bewegungen der Himmelskörper entwirft. Comte hat eine Stufenleiter der Wissenschaften aufgebaut. Mathematik ist die unterste Stufe; dann folgen Physik, Chemie, dann die Wissenschaft der Lebewesen; den Abschluß bildet die Soziologie, die Erkenntnis der menschlichen Gesellschaft. Sein Bestreben geht dahin, alle diese Wissenschaften so einfach zu machen, wie die Mathematik ist. Die Erscheinungen, mit denen sich die einzelnen Wissenschaften beschäftigen, seien immer andere; die Gesetze seien im Grunde immer dieselben. Die Wellen, die Holbachs, Condillacs und anderer Gedanken geschlagen, sind noch deutlich vernehmbar in den Vorlesungen über das «Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper», die Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808) 1797 bis 1798 an der vom Konvent errichteten Hochschule zu Paris hielt. Dennoch dürften diese Vorträge als der Anfang der Weltanschauungsentwickelung Frankreichs im neunzehnten Jahrhundert bezeichnet werden. Es spricht sich in ihnen ein deutliches Bewußtsein davon aus, daß die Betrachtungsweise Condillacs für die Erscheinungen des Seelenlebens doch zu stark den Anschauungen nachgebildet sei, die man von dem Zustandekommen rein mechanischer Vorgänge der unorganischen Natur hat. Cabanis untersucht den Einfluß des Lebensalters, des Geschlechts, der Lebensweise, des Temperamentes auf die Denk- und Empfindungsweise des Menschen. Er bildet die Vorstellung aus, daß sich Geistiges und Körperliches nicht wie zwei Wesenheiten gegenüberstehen, die nichts miteinander gemein haben, sondern daß sie ein untrennbares Ganzes ausmachen. Was ihn von seinen Vorgängern unterscheidet, ist nicht die Grundanschauung, sondern die Art, wie er diese ausbaut. Jene tragen die Anschauungen, die in der unorganischen Welt gewonnen sind, einfach in die geistige hinein; Cabanis sagt sich: Betrachten wir zunächst so unbefangen, wie wir das Unorganische ansehen, auch die Geisteswelt; dann wird sie uns sagen, wie sie sich zu den übrigen Naturerscheinungen stellt. - In ähnlicher Weise verfuhr Destutt de Tracy (1754 bis 1836). Auch er wollte die geistigen Vorgänge zunächst unbefangen betrachten, wie sie sich darstellen, wenn man ohne philosophisches, aber auch ohne naturwissenschaftliches Vorurteil an sie herantritt. Man gibt sich, nach der Meinung dieses Denkers, einem Irrtum hin, wenn man die Seele sich so automatisch vorstellt, wie das Condillac und seine Anhänger getan haben. Man kann diese Automatenhaftigkeit nicht mehr aufrecht erhalten, wenn man sich aufrichtig selbst betrachtet. Wir finden in uns keinen Automaten, nicht ein Wesen, das bloß von außen her am Gängelbande geführt wird. Wir finden in uns stets Selbsttätigkeit und Eigenwesen. Ja, wir wüßten von Wirkungen der Außenwelt gar nichts, wenn wir nicht in unserem Eigenleben eine Störung durch Zusammenstöße mit der Außenwelt empfänden. Wir erleben uns selbst; wir entwickeln aus uns unsere Tätigkeit; aber indem wir dieses tun, stoßen wir auf Widerstand; wir merken, daß nicht nur wir da sind, sondern auch noch etwas, das sich uns widersetzt, eine Außenwelt.
[ 2 ] Obgleich ausgehend von Destutt de Tracy führte die Selbstbeobachtung der Seele auf ganz andere Wege zweier Denker: Maine de Biran (1766-1824) und André-Marie Ampére (1775-1836). Biran ist ein feinsinniger Beobachter des menschlichen Geistes. Was bei Rousseau wie eine tumultuarisch auftretende, nur von einer willkürlichen Laune hervorgerufene Betrachtungsweise erscheint, das tritt uns bei ihm als klares, inhaltsvolles Denken entgegen. Was in dem Menschen durch die Natur seiner Wesenheit, durch sein Temperament ist, und was er durch sein tätiges Eingreifen aus sich macht, seinen Charakter: diese beiden Faktoren seines Innenlebens macht Biran als tief denkender Psychologe zum Gegenstand seiner Betrachtungen. Er sucht die Verzweigungen und Wandlungen des Innenlebens auf; im Innern des Menschen findet er den Quell der Erkenntnis. Die Kräfte, die wir in unserm Innern kennenlernen, sind die intimen Bekannten unseres Lebens; und eine Außenwelt kennen wir doch nur insofern, als sie sich mehr oder weniger ähnlich und verwandt mit unserer Innenwelt darstellt. Was wüßten wir von Kräften in der Natur draußen, wenn wir nicht in der selbsttätigen Seele eine Kraft wirklich als Erlebnis kennenlernten und mit dieser daher vergleichen könnten, was uns in der Außenwelt Kraft-Ähnliches entgegentritt. Unermüdlich ist Biran daher in dem Aufsuchen der Vorgänge in der eigenen Seele des Menschen. Auf das Unwillkürliche, Unbewußte im Innenleben richtet er sein Augenmerk, auf die geistigen Vorgänge, die in der Seele schon da sind, wenn in ihr das Licht des Bewußtseins auftritt. - Birans Suchen nach Weisheit im Innern der Seele führte ihn in späteren Jahren zu einer eigenartigen Mystik. Wenn wir die tiefste Weisheit aus der Seele schöpfen, so müssen wir auch den Urgründen des Daseins dann am nächsten kommen, wenn wir uns in uns selbst vertiefen. Das Erleben der tiefsten Seelenvorgänge ist also ein Hineinleben in den Urquell des Daseins, in den Gott in uns.
[ 3 ] Das Anziehende der Biranschen Weisheit liegt in der intimen Art, mit der er sie vorträgt. Er fand auch keine geeignetere Darstellungsform als die eines «Journal intime», eine tagebuchartige. Die Schriften Birans, die am tiefsten in seine Gedankenwelt führen, sind erst nach seinem Tode durch E. Naville herausgegeben worden. (Vgl. dessen «Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées», 1857, und die von Naville herausgegebenen «Oeuvres inédites de M. de Biran».) Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy gehörten als ältere Männer einem engeren Kreise von Philosophen an, Biran lebte als jüngerer unter ihnen. - Zu denen, die schon bei Birans Lebzeiten vollständig in dessen Anschauungen eingeweiht waren, gehörte Ampére, der als Naturforscher durch seine Erweiterung der Oerstedschen Beobachtungen über das Verhältnis von Elektrizität und Magnetismus bedeutend ist (vgl. oben S. 358). Birans Betrachtungsweise ist intimer, diejenige Ampéres wissenschaftlich-methodischer. Dieser verfolgt einerseits, wie sich Empfindungen und Vorstellungen in der Seele verketten, und anderseits, wie der Geist mit Hilfe seines Denkens zu einer Wissenschaft von den Welterscheinungen gelangt.
[ 4 ] Das Bedeutungsvolle dieser Weltanschauungsströmung, die sich zeitlich als eine Fortsetzung der Condillacschen Lehren darstellt, ist darin zu suchen, daß das Eigenleben der Seele entschieden betont wird, daß die Selbsttätigkeit der menschlichen Innenpersönlichkeit in den Vordergrund der Betrachtung rückt, und daß dabei dennoch alle die hier in Betracht kommenden Geister auf Erkenntnisse im streng naturwissenschaftlichen Sinne losarbeiten. Sie untersuchen den Geist naturwissenschaftlich; aber sie wollen seine Erscheinungen nicht von vornherein gleichstellen den anderen Vorgängen in der Natur. Und aus ihren mehr materialistischen Anfängen wird zuletzt ein Streben nach einer ausgesprochen zum Geiste neigenden Weltanschauung.
[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792-1867) unternahm mehrere Reisen durch Deutschland und lernte durch dieselben die führenden Geister der idealistischen Epoche persönlich kennen. Den tiefsten Eindruck haben auf ihn Hegel und Goethe gemacht. Ihren Idealismus brachte er nach Frankreich. Er konnte für ihn wirken durch seine hinreißende Rednergabe, mit der er tiefen Eindruck machte, erst als Professor an der Ecole Normale (von 1814 ab), dann an der Sorbonne. Daß nicht durch die Betrachtung der Außenwelt, sondern durch diejenige des Menschengeistes ein befriedigender Weltanschauungsstandpunkt zu gewinnen ist, das hatte Cousin aus dem idealistischen Geistesleben herübergenommen. Auf die Selbstbeobachtung der Seele gründete er, was er sagen wollte. Und von Hegel hat er sich angeeignet, daß Geist, Idee, Gedanke nicht nur im Innern des Menschen, sondern auch draußen in der Natur und im Fortgange des geschichtlichen Lebens walten, daß Vernunft in der Wirklichkeit vorhanden ist. Er lehrte, daß in dem Charakter eines Volkes, eines Zeitalters nicht das blinde Ohngefähr, die Willkür einzelner Menschen herrschen, sondern daß sich ein notwendiger Gedanke, eine wirkliche Idee darinnen aussprechen, ja, daß ein großer Mann in der Welt nur als der Sendbote einer großen Idee erscheint, um sie innerhalb des Werdeganges der Geschichte zu verwirklichen. Es mußte auf seine französischen Zuhörer, die weltgeschichtliche Stürme ohnegleichen in den jüngsten Entwickelungsphasen ihres Volkes zu begreifen hatten, einen tiefen Eindruck machen, von einem glanzvollen Redner die Vernünftigkeit des geschichtlichen Werdens auf Grund großer Weltanschauungsgedanken dargelegt zu hören.
[ 6 ] Energisch, zielbewußt stellt sich Comte in diesen Gang der französischen Weltanschauungsentwickelung hinein mit seinem Grundsatze: Nur in der Wissenschaftlichkeit, die von so strengen mathematischen und beobachteten Wahrheiten ausgeht wie die Physik oder die Chemie kann der Ausgangspunkt für eine Weltanschauung gesucht werden. Er kann nur ein solches menschliches Denken für reif gelten lassen, das sich zu dieser Anschauung durchgerungen hat. Um dahin zu kommen, mußte die Menschheit zwei Epochen der Unreife durchmachen, eine solche, in der sie an Götter glaubte, und eine folgende, in der sie sich abstrakten Ideen hingegeben hat. In dem Aufsteigen von der theologischen durch die idealistische zu der wissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung sieht Comte den notwendigen Entwickelungsgang der Menschheit. Im ersten Stadium dachte sich der Mensch in die Naturvorgänge menschenähnliche Götter hinein, welche diese Vorgänge so willkürlich zustandebringen wie der Mensch seine Verrichtungen. Später setzte er an die Stelle der Götter abstrakte Ideen, wie Lebenskraft, allgemeine Weltvernunft, Weltzweck und so weiter. Auch diese Entwickelungsphase muß einer höheren Platz machen. Es muß eingesehen werden, daß nur in der Beobachtung und in der streng mathematischen und logischen Betrachtung der Tatsachen eine Erklärung der Welterscheinungen gefunden werden kann. Nur was auf diesem Wege die Physik, die Chemie und die Wissenschaft von den Lebewesen (die Biologie) erforschen, hat das Denken zum Zwecke einer Weltanschauung zu verbinden. Es hat zu dem, was die einzelnen Wissenschaften erforscht haben, nichts hinzuzufügen, wie es die Theologie mit ihren göttlichen Wesenheiten, die idealistische Philosophie mit ihren abstrakten Gedanken tun. Auch die Anschauungen über den Gang der Menschheitsentwickelung, über das Zusammenleben der Menschen im Staate, in der Gesellschaft usw. werden erst dann vollständig klar werden, wenn sie solche Gesetze suchen wie die strengen Naturwissenschaften. Die Ursachen, warum Familien, Verbände, Rechtsanschauungen, Staatseinrichtungen entstehen, müssen ebenso gesucht werden wie diejenigen, warum Körper zur Erde fallen, oder warum die Verdauungswerkzeuge des Tieres ihre Arbeit tun. Die Wissenschaft vom menschlichen Zusammenleben, von der menschlichen Entwickelung, die Soziologie, liegt daher Comte besonders auf der Seele. Ihr sucht er den strengen Charakter zu geben, den andere Wissenschaften allmählich angenommen haben. In dieser Richtung hat er an Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) einen Vorgänger. Dieser schon stellte die Ansicht hin, daß der Mensch nur dann ein vollkommener Lenker seiner eigenen Geschicke sein werde, wenn er sein eigenes Leben im Staate, in der Gesellschaft, im Verlaufe der Geschichte im streng wissenschaftlichen Sinne auffasse und im Sinne eines naturgesetzlichen Werdens einrichte. Comte stand eine Zeitlang in vertraulichem Umgang mit Saint-Simon Er trennte sich von ihm, als dieser sich mit seinen Ansichten in allerlei bodenlose Träumereien und Utopien zu verlieren schien. In der einmal eingeschlagenen Richtung arbeitete Comte mit seltenem Eifer weiter. Sein «Cours de philosophie positive» ist ein Versuch, im geistfremden Stil die wissenschaftlichen Errungenschaften seiner Zeit durch bloße orientierende Zusammenstellung und durch Ausbau der Soziologie in ihrem Geiste, ohne Zuhilfenahme theologischer oder idealistischer Gedanken zu einer Weltanschauung auszubauen. Dem Philosophen stellte Comte keine andere Aufgabe als die einer solchen orientierenden Zusammenstellung. Zu dem, was die Wissenschaften über den Zusammenhang der Tatsachen festgestellt haben, hat er aus Eigenem nichts hinzuzutun. Damit war in schärfster Art die Meinung zum Ausdruck gekommen, daß allein die Wissenschaften mit ihrer Beobachtung der Wirklichkeit, mit ihren Methoden mitzusprechen haben, wenn es sich um den Ausbau der Weltanschauung handelt.
[ 7 ] Innerhalb des deutschen Geisteslebens trat als tatkräftiger Verfechter dieses Gedankens von einer Alleinberechtigung des wissenschaftlichen Denkens Eugen Dühring (1833 bis 1921) im Jahre 1865 mit seiner «Natürlichen Dialektik» auf. In weiterer Ausführung legte er dann 1875 der Welt seine Ansichten in seinem Buche: «Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung», und in zahlreichen anderen mathematischen, naturwissenschaftlichen, philosophischen, wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen und national-ökonomischen Schriften dar. Dührings ganzes Schaffen geht aus einer im strengsten Sinne mathematischen und mechanistischen Denkweise hervor. In dem Durchdenken alles dessen, was sich in den Welterscheinungen mit mathematischer Gesetzmäßigkeit erreichen läßt, ist Dühring bewundernswert. Wo aber ein solches Denken nicht hinreicht, da verliert er jede Möglichkeit, sich im Leben zurechtzufinden. Aus diesem seinem geistigen Charakter heraus ist die Willkür, die Voreingenommenheit zu erklären, mit der Dühring so vieles beurteilt. Wo man nach höheren Ideen urteilen muß, wie in den komplizierten Verhältnissen des menschlichen Zusammenlebens, da hat er deshalb keinen anderen Anhaltspunkt als seine durch zufällige persönliche Verhältnisse in ihn gepflanzten Sympathien und Antipathien. Er, der mathematisch-objektive Kopf, verfällt in die völlige Willkür, wenn er menschliche Leistungen der geschichtlichen Vergangenheit oder der Gegenwart zu bewerten unternimmt. Seine nüchterne mathematische Vorstellungsart hat ihn dazu gebracht, eine Persönlichkeit, wie Goethe eine ist, als den unwissenschaftlichsten Kopf der neueren Zeit zu verketzern, dessen ganze Bedeutung sich, seiner Meinung nach, in einigen lyrischen Leistungen erschöpft. Man kann in der Unterschätzung alles dessen, was die nüchterne Wirklichkeit überschreitet, nicht weiter gehen, als dies Dühring in seinem Buche «Die Größen der modernen Literatur» getan hat. Trotz dieser Einseitigkeit ist Dühring eine der anregendsten Gestalten der modernen Weltanschauungsentwickelung. Keiner, der sich in seine gedankenvollen Bücher vertieft hat, kann sich etwas anderes als dieses gestehen, daß er von ihnen tiefe Wirkungen empfangen hat.
[ 8 ] Mit den derbsten Ausdrücken belegt Dühring alle Weltanschauungen, die von anderen als streng wissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten ausgehen. Alle solche unwissenschaftlichen Denkungsarten «begreifen sich im Stadium der kindischen Unreife oder der fieberhaften Anwandlungen, oder in den Rückbildungen der Greisenhaftigkeit, sie mögen unter diesen Voraussetzungen ganze Epochen und Teile der Menschheit oder gelegentlich einzelne Elemente oder verkommene Schichten der Gesellschaft heimsuchen, aber sie gehören stets in das Gebiet des Unreifen, des Pathologischen oder der bereits von der Fäulnis zersetzten Überreife» (Kursus der Philosophie S 44). Was Kant, was Fichte, Schelling, Hegel geleistet haben, verurteilt er als Ausfluß charlatanhafter Professorenweisheit; der Idealismus als Weltanschauung ist ihm eine Theorie des Wahnsinns. Er will eine Wirklichkeitsphilosophie schaffen, die allein naturgemäß ist, weil sie «die künstlichen und naturwidrigen Erdichtungen beseitigt und zum erstenmal den Begriff der Wirklichkeit zum Maß aller ideellen Konzeptionen macht»; die Wirklichkeit wird von ihr «in einer Weise gedacht, die jede Anwandlung zu einer traumhaften und subjektivistisch beschränkten Weltvorstellung ausschließt». (Kursus der Philosophie S. 13.)
[ 9 ] Man denke wie der richtige Mechaniker, der richtige Physiker denkt, der sich an das hält, was die Sinne wahrnehmen, der Verstand logisch kombinieren und die Rechnung feststellen können. Alles, was darüber hinausgeht, ist müßige Spielerei mit Begriffen. So sagt sich Dühring. Aber diesem Denken will er auch zu seinem vollkommenen Rechte verhelfen. Wer sich ausschließlich an dieses Denken hält, der kann sicher sein, daß es ihm Aufschlüsse über die Wirklichkeit gibt. Alles Nachsinnen darüber, ob wir mit unserem Denken auch tatsächlich in die Geheimnisse des Weltgeschehens dringen können, alle Forschungen, die wie die Kantschen das Erkenntnisvermögen begrenzen wollen, entspringen einer logischen Verkehrtheit. Man soll nicht in die aufopfernde Selbstverleugnung des Verstandes verfallen, die sich nicht wagt, etwas Positives über die Welt auszumachen. Was wir wissen können, ist eine wirkliche ungetrübte Darstellung des Wirklichen. «Das Ganze der Dinge hat eine systematische Gliederung und innere logische Konsequenz. Natur und Geschichte haben eine Verfassung und Entwickelung, deren Wesen zu einem großen Teil den allgemeinen logischen Beziehungen aller Begriffe entspricht. Die allgemeinen Eigenschaften und Verhältnisse der Denkbegriffe, mit denen sich die Logik beschäftigt, müssen auch für den besonders auszuzeichnenden Fall gelten, daß ihr Gegenstand die Gesamtheit des Seins nebst dessen Hauptgestalten ist. Da das allgemeinste Denken in einem weiten Umfange über das entscheidet, was sein und wie es sein kann, so müssen die obersten Grundsätze und Hauptformen der Logik auch für alle Wirklichkeit und deren Formen die maßgebende Bedeutung erhalten» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 11). Die Wirklichkeit hat sich in dem menschlichen Denken ein Organ geschaffen, durch das sie sich gedankenmäßig in einem ideellen Bilde wiedererzeugen, geistig nachschaffen kann. Die Natur ist überall von einer durchgängigen Gesetzmäßigkeit beherrscht, die durch sich selbst im Rechte ist, an der keine Kritik geübt werden kann. Wie sollte es einen Sinn haben, an der Tragweite des Denkens, des Organes der Natur, Kritik zu üben. Es ist eine Torheit, der Natur zuzumuten, daß sie sich ein Organ schafft, durch das sie sich nur unvollkommen oder lückenhaft spiegelte. Die Ordnung und Gesetzmäßigkeit draußen in der Wirklichkeit müssen daher der logischen Ordnung und Gesetzmäßigkeit im menschlichen Denken entsprechen. «Das ideelle System unserer Gedanken ist das Bild des realen Systems der objektiven Wirklichkeit; das vollendete Wissen hat in Form von Gedanken dieselbe Gestalt, welche die Dinge in der Form des wirklichen Daseins haben.» - Trotz dieser allgemeinen Übereinstimmung zwischen Denken und Wirklichkeit gibt es für das erstere doch die Möglichkeit, über die letztere hinauszugehen. Das Denken setzt in der Idee die Verrichtungen fort, die ihm von der Wirklichkeit aufgedrängt werden. In der Wirklichkeit ist jeder Körper teilbar, aber nur bis zu einer gewissen Grenze. Das Denken bleibt bei dieser Grenze nicht stehen, sondern teilt in der Idee noch weiter. Der Gedanke schweift über die Wirklichkeit hinaus; er läßt den Körper ins Unendliche teilbar sein, aus unendlich kleinen Teilen bestehen. In Wirklichkeit besteht dieser Körper nur aus einer ganz bestimmten endlichen Anzahl kleiner, aber nicht unendlich kleiner Teile. - Auf solche Art entstehen alle die Wirklichkeit überschreitenden Unendlichkeitsbegriffe. Man schreitet von jedem Ereignisse fort zu einem anderen, das dessen Ursache ist; von dieser Ursache wieder zu deren Ursache und so fort. Sogleich, wenn das Denken den Boden der Wirklichkeit verläßt, schweift es in eine Unendlichkeit. Es stellt sich vor, daß zu jeder Ursache wieder eine Ursache gesucht werden müsse, daß also die Welt ohne einen Anfang in der Zeit sei. Auch mit der Raumerfüllung verfährt das Denken auf ähnliche Weise. Es findet, wenn es den Himmelsraum durchmißt, außerhalb der fernsten Sterne immer noch andere; es geht über diese wirkliche Tatsache hinaus und stellt sich den Raum unendlich und erfüllt mit einer endlosen Zahl von Weltkörpern vor. Man müsse sich, meint Dühring, klar darüber sein, daß alle solche Unendlichkeitsvorstellungen mit der Wirklichkeit nichts zu tun haben. Sie entstehen nur dadurch, daß das Denken mit den Methoden, die innerhalb der Wirklichkeit dieser völlig entsprechen, diese überfliegt und dadurch ins Uferlose kommt.
[ 10 ] Wenn das Denken sich dieses seines Auseinandergehens mit der Wirklichkeit bewußt bleibt, dann braucht es im übrigen, nach Dührings Ansicht, nicht zurückhaltend zu sein in der Übertragung von Begriffen, die dem menschlichen Tun entlehnt sind, auf die Natur. Dühring schreckt, von solchen Gesichtspunkten ausgehend, nicht einmal davor zurück, der Natur ebenso bei ihrem Schaffen Phantasie zuzuerkennen wie dem Menschen bei dem seinigen. «Die Phantasie reicht ... in die Natur selbst hinab, sie wurzelt, wie überhaupt alles Denken, in Regungen, die dem fertigen Bewußtsein vorausgehen, und selbst gar keine Elemente des subjektiv Empfundenen bilden» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 50). Der von Comte verteidigte Gedanke, daß alle Weltanschauung nichts weiter sein dürfe, als eine Zurechtlegung des rein Tatsächlichen, beherrscht Dühring so vollständig, daß er die Phantasie in die Tatsachenwelt verlegt, weil er glaubt, sie einfach ablehnen zu müssen, wenn sie nur im Gebiete des menschlichen Geistes auftrete. Von diesen Vorstellungen ausgehend, gelangt er auch noch zu anderen Übertragungen solcher Begriffe, die dem menschlichen Wirken entnommen sind, auf die Natur. Er denkt zum Beispiel nicht nur, der Mensch könne bei seinem Tun erfolglose Versuche machen, von denen er ab-läßt, weil sie nicht zum Ziel führen, sondern auch in den Verrichtungen der Natur sähe man Versuche nach dieser oder jener Richtung. «Der Charakter des Versuchsartigen in den Gestaltungen ist der Wirklichkeit nichts weniger als fremd, und man sieht nicht ein, warum man aus Gefälligkeit für eine oberflächliche Philosophie die Parallele der Natur außer dem Menschen und der Natur im Menschen nur zur Hälfte gelten lassen soll. Wenn der subjektive Irrtum des Denkens und Imaginierens aus der relativen Getrenntheit und Selbständigkeit dieser Sphäre hervorgeht, warum soll nicht auch ein praktischer Irrtum oder Fehlgriff der objektiven und nicht denkenden Natur die Folge einer verhältnismäßigen Absonderung und gegenseitigen Entfremdung ihrer verschiedenen Teile und Triebkräfte sein können? Eine wahre und nicht vor den gemeinen Vorurteilen zurückschreckende Philosophie wird schließlich den vollständigen Parallelismus und die durchgängige Einheit der Konstitution nach beiden Seiten hin erkennen» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 51).
[ 11 ] Dühring ist also nicht spröde, wenn es sich darum handelt, die Begriffe, die das Denken in sich erzeugt, auf die Wirklichkeit zu übertragen. Weil er aber, seiner ganzen Veranlagung nach, nur Sinn für mathematische Vorstellungen hat, so gewinnt auch das Bild, das er von der Welt entwirft, ein mathematisch-schematisches Gepräge. Der Betrachtungsweise, die sich durch Darwin und Haeckel ausgebildet hat, steht er ablehnend gegenüber. Für die Aufsuchung der Gründe, warum sich ein Wesen aus dem anderen entwickelt, hat er kein Verständnis. Der Mathematiker stellt doch auch die Gebilde: Dreieck, Viereck, Kreis, Ellipse nebeneinander; warum sollte man sich nicht bei einem ähnlichen schematischen Nebeneinander in der Natur beruhigen? Nicht auf das Werden in der Natur, sondern auf die festen Gestaltungen, welche die Natur herausarbeitet durch Kombinationen ihrer Kräfte, geht Dühring los, wie der Mathematiker die bestimmten, streng umrissenen Raumgebilde betrachtet. Und Dühring findet es nicht unangemessen, der Natur auch ein zweckvolles Hinarbeiten auf solche feste Gebilde zuzuschreiben. Nicht als bewußtes Wirken, wie es sich beim Menschen ausbildet, stellt sich Dühring dieses zweckvolle Naturstreben vor; aber doch ist es ebenso deutlich in dem Tun der Natur ausgeprägt, wie die übrige Naturgesetzmäßigkeit. - Dührings Ansicht ist also in dieser Beziehung der entgegengesetzte Pol der von Friedrich Albert Lange vertretenen. Dieser erklärt die höheren Begriffe, namentlich alle, an denen die Phantasie einen Anteil hat, für berechtigte Dichtung; Dühring lehnt alle Dichtung in Begriffen ab, schreibt aber dafür gewissen, ihm unentbehrlichen höheren Ideen tatsächliche Wirklichkeit zu. Ganz folgerichtig erscheint es daher, wenn Lange die Grundlage der Moral allen in der Wirklichkeit wurzelnden Ideen entziehen will (vgl. oben S. 434), und auch, wenn Dühring Ideen, die er im Gebiete der Sittlichkeit für geltend hält, auch auf die Natur ausdehnt. Er ist eben vollkommen davon überzeugt, daß sich das, was im Menschen und durch den Menschen geschieht, ebenso natürlich abspielt wie die leblosen Vorgänge. Was also im Menschenleben richtig ist, kann in der Natur nicht falsch sein. Solche Erwägungen wirkten mit, um Dühring zum energischen Gegner der Darwinschen Lehre vom «Kampf ums Dasein» zu machen. Wenn in der Natur der Kampf aller gegen alle die Bedingung der Vervollkommnung wäre, so müßte er es auch im Menschenleben sein. «Eine solche Vorstellung, die sich obenein den Anstrich der Wissenschaftlichkeit gibt, ist das erdenklich Moralwidrigste von allem. Der Charakter der Natur wird auf diese Weise im antimoralischen Sinne gefaßt. Er gilt nicht bloß als gleichgültig gegen die bessere Menschenmoral, sondern geradezu als übereinstimmend und im Bunde mit derjenigen schlechten Moral, der auch die Gauner huldigen» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 164). - Was der Mensch als moralische Antriebe empfindet, muß, im Sinne der Dühringschen Lebensanschauung, schon in der Natur veranlagt sein. In der Natur muß ein Hinzielen auf das Moralische beobachtet werden. Wie die Natur andere Kräfte schafft, die sich zweckmäßig zu festen Gebilden kombinieren, so legt sie in den Menschen sympathische Instinkte. Durch sie läßt er sich in seinem Zusammenleben mit den Nebenmenschen bestimmen. Im Menschen setzt sich also auf hoher Stufe die Tätigkeit der Natur fort. Den leblosen mechanischen Kräften schreibt Dühring das Vermögen zu, aus sich selbst, maschinenartig, die Empfindung zu erzeugen. «Die mechanische Kausalität der Naturkräfte wird in der Fundamentalempfindung sozusagen subjektiviert. Die Tatsache dieses elementaren Subjektivierungsvorgangs kann offenbar nicht weiter erklärt werden; denn irgendwo und unter irgendwelchen Bedingungen muß die bewußtlose Mechanik der Welt zum Gefühl ihrer selbst gelangen» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 147). Wenn sie aber dazu gelangt, dann beginnt nicht eine neue Gesetzmäßigkeit, ein Reich des Geistes, sondern es setzt sich nur fort, was schon in der bewußtlosen Mechanik vorhanden war. Diese Mechanik ist somit zwar bewußtlos, aber doch weise, denn «die Erde mit allem, was sie hervorbringt, nebst den außerhalb, namentlich in der Sonne liegenden Ursachen der Lebenserhaltung, sowie überhaupt einschließlich aller Einflüsse, die aus der umgebenden Gesamtwelt stammen, diese ganze Anlage und Einrichtung muß als wesentlich für den Menschen hergestellt, das heißt, als mit seinem Wohl in Übereinstimmung gedacht werden» (Kursus der Philosophie S. 177)
[ 12 ] Dühring schreibt der Natur Gedanken zu, ja sogar Ziel und moralische Tendenzen, ohne zuzugeben, daß er sie damit idealisiert. Zur Naturerklärung gehören höhere, über das Wirkliche hinausgehende Ideen; solche darf es aber nach Dühring nicht geben; folglich deutet er sie zu Tatsachen um. Etwas Ähnliches lebte sich in der Weltanschauung Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmanns aus, der mit seiner «Philosophie des Wissens» um dieselbe Zeit auftrat (1864) wie Dühring mit seiner «Natürlichen Dialektik». Nur das ist wirklich, was wahrgenommen wird: davon geht Kirchmann aus. Durch seine Wahrnehmung steht der Mensch mit dem Dasein in Verbindung. Alles, was der Mensch nicht aus der Wahrnehmung gewinnt, muß er aus seiner Erkenntnis des Wirklichen ausscheiden. Dies erreicht er, wenn er alles Widerspruchsvolle ablehnt. «Der Widerspruch ist nicht»; dies ist Kirchmanns zweiter Grundsatz neben dem ersten: «Das Wahrgenommene ist.»
[ 13 ] Kirchmann läßt nur die Gefühle und die Begierden als solche Seelenzustände des Menschen gelten, die ein Dasein für sich haben. Das Wissen setzt er in Gegensatz zu diesen seienden Zuständen der Seele. «Das Wissen bildet zu den zwei andern Zuständen, zu dem Fühlen und Begehren, einen Gegensatz ... Es mag dem Wissen irgendein geistiger Vorgang, ja vielleicht ein Ähnliches, wie Druck, Spannung, zugrunde liegen; aber so aufgefaßt ist das Wissen nicht in seinem Wesen gefaßt. Als Wissen, und nur als solches ist es hier zu untersuchen, verbirgt es sein eigenes Sein und macht sich nur zu dem Spiegel eines fremden Seins. Es gibt kein besseres Gleichnis dafür, wie den Spiegel. So wie dieser um so vollkommener ist, je mehr er nicht sich selbst sehen läßt, sondern nur fremdes Sein abspiegelt, so auch das Wissen. Sein Wesen ist dieses reine Spiegeln eines fremden Seins, ohne Beimischung des eigenen seienden Zustandes.» Man kann sich allerdings keinen stärkeren Gegensatz gegen die Vorstellungsweise Hegels denken, als diese Anschauung vom Wissen. Während bei Hegel in dem Gedanken, also in dem, was die Seele durch ihre eigene Tätigkeit zu der Wahrnehmung hinzubringt, das Wesen einer Sache zum Vorschein kommt, stellt Kirchmann ein Ideal vom Wissen hin, in dem dieses ein von allen eigenen Zutaten der Seele befreites Spiegelbild der Wahrnehmung ist.
[ 14 ] Will man Kirchmanns Stellung im Geistesleben richtig beurteilen, so muß man die großen Schwierigkeiten in Betracht ziehen, die zur Zeit seines Auftretens jemand fand, der den Trieb in sich hatte, ein selbständiges Weltanschauungsgebäude aufzurichten. Die naturwissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse, die einen tiefgehenden Einfluß auf die Weltanschauungsentwickelung haben mußten, waren noch jung. Ihr Zustand reichte gerade hin, um den Glauben an die klassische, idealistische Weltanschauung zu erschüttern, die ihr stolzes Gebäude ohne die Hilfe der neueren Naturwissenschaft hatte aufführen müssen. Nicht leicht aber war es, der Fülle der Einzelergebnisse gegenüber in neuer Form zu orientierenden Grundgedanken zu kommen. Man verlor in weiten Kreisen den Faden, der von der wissenschaftlichen Tatsachenkenntnis zu einer befriedigenden Gesamtanschauung der Welt führte. Eine gewisse Ratlosigkeit in Weltanschauungsfragen bemächtigte sich vieler. Das Verständnis für einen Gedankenschwung, wie sich ein solcher in der Anschauung Hegels ausgelebt hatte, war kaum mehr zu finden.
Worldviews of scientific fact
[ 1 ] An attempt to gain an overall view of the world and life from the mere basis of strict science was undertaken in France in the course of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte (1798 to 1857). This undertaking, which in Comte's "Cours de philosophie positive" (6 volumes, 1830-1842) showed a comprehensive view of the world, stands in stark contrast to the idealistic views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the first half of the century, as well as in a less strong, but nevertheless clear contrast to all thought constructs that take their results from the Lamarck-Darwinian ideas of development. What is at the center of Hegel's worldview, the contemplation and comprehension of man's own spirit, is completely rejected by Comte. He says to himself: If the human spirit wanted to contemplate itself, it would have to divide itself into two personalities; it would have to slip out of itself and confront itself. Even psychology, which does not exhaust itself in physiological observation but wants to consider mental processes for themselves, is not accepted by Comte. Everything that wants to become an object of knowledge must refer to objective connections of facts, must present itself as objectively as the laws of the mathematical sciences. And this is also the source of Comte's opposition to what Spencer and the scientific thinkers based on Lamarck and Darwin attempted with their world views. For Comte, the human species is given as fixed and unchangeable; he wants nothing to do with Lamarck's theory. Simple, transparent laws of nature, as applied by physics to its phenomena, are ideals of knowledge for him. As long as a science does not work with such simple laws, it is unsatisfactory for Comte as knowledge. He is a mathematical mind. And anything that cannot be treated transparently and simply as a mathematical problem is still immature for him as a science. Comte has no feeling for the fact that the more one ascends from purely mechanical and physical processes to the higher forms of nature and to man, the more vital ideas are needed. His view of the world thus acquires something dead and rigid. The whole world presents itself like the gears of a machine. Comte sees past the living everywhere; he drives life and spirit out of things and then merely explains what is mechanical, machine-like about them. In his depiction, the rich historical life of man is like the conceptual picture that the astronomer draws of the movements of the heavenly bodies. Comte has constructed a ladder of the sciences. Mathematics is the lowest level, followed by physics, chemistry, then the science of living beings, and finally sociology, the knowledge of human society. His aim is to make all these sciences as simple as mathematics is. The phenomena that the individual sciences deal with are always different; the laws are basically always the same. The waves made by Holbach, Condillac and other ideas are still clearly audible in the lectures on the "Relationship of the Soul to the Body", which Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808) gave from 1797 to 1798 at the college established by the Convention in Paris. Nevertheless, these lectures can be described as the beginning of the development of France's worldview in the nineteenth century. They express a clear awareness that Condillac's way of looking at the phenomena of mental life was too closely modeled on the views one has of the occurrence of purely mechanical processes in inorganic nature. Cabanis examines the influence of age, sex, way of life and temperament on man's way of thinking and feeling. He develops the idea that the spiritual and the physical are not like two entities that have nothing in common, but that they form an inseparable whole. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is not the basic view, but the way in which he develops it. Those simply carry the views gained in the inorganic world into the spiritual world; Cabanis says to himself: Let us first look at the spiritual world as impartially as we look at the inorganic; then it will tell us how it relates to the other natural phenomena. - Destutt de Tracy (1754 to 1836) proceeded in a similar way. He, too, initially wanted to look at spiritual processes impartially, as they appear when one approaches them without philosophical, but also without scientific prejudice. In the opinion of this thinker, we are committing an error if we imagine the soul to be as automatic as Condillac and his followers did. We can no longer maintain this automatism if we look at ourselves honestly. We do not find in ourselves an automaton, not a being that is merely led by the reins from the outside. We always find in ourselves self-activity and self-being. Indeed, we would know nothing of the effects of the outside world if we did not experience a disturbance in our own life through collisions with the outside world. We experience ourselves; we develop our activity out of ourselves; but in doing so, we encounter resistance; we realize that not only we are there, but also something else that resists us, an outside world.
[ 2 ] Although based on Destutt de Tracy, the introspection of the soul led to completely different paths of two thinkers: Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and André-Marie Ampére (1775-1836). Biran is a subtle observer of the human mind. What in Rousseau appears to be a tumultuous way of looking at things, caused only by an arbitrary whim, appears to us in him as clear, substantive thinking. What is in man through the nature of his being, through his temperament, and what he makes of himself through his active intervention, his character: Biran, as a deeply thinking psychologist, makes these two factors of his inner life the subject of his observations. He seeks out the ramifications and transformations of the inner life; he finds the source of knowledge within the human being. The forces that we come to know within ourselves are the intimate acquaintances of our lives; and we only know an outer world insofar as it is more or less similar and related to our inner world. What would we know of forces in nature outside if we did not really get to know a force in the self-acting soul as an experience and could therefore compare with it what we encounter in the outside world that is similar to a force. Biran is therefore tireless in his search for the processes in man's own soul. He focuses his attention on the involuntary, the unconscious in the inner life, on the spiritual processes that are already present in the soul when the light of consciousness appears in it. - Biran's search for wisdom within the soul led him in later years to a peculiar mysticism. If we draw the deepest wisdom from the soul, then we must also come closest to the primal grounds of existence when we delve into ourselves. Experiencing the deepest processes of the soul is therefore a way of living into the primal source of existence, into the God within us.
[ 3 ] The appeal of Biran's wisdom lies in the intimate way in which he presents it. He also found no more suitable form of presentation than that of a "journal intime", a diary-like form. Biran's writings, which lead most deeply into his world of thought, were only published after his death by E. Naville. (Cf. his "Maine de Biran. Sa vie et ses pensées", 1857, and the "Oeuvres inédites de M. de Biran" published by Naville). Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy were older men who belonged to a close circle of philosophers, while Biran was younger. - Among those who were already fully initiated into Biran's views during his lifetime was Ampére, who as a natural scientist is significant for his expansion of Oersted's observations on the relationship between electricity and magnetism (cf. p. 358 above). Biran's approach is more intimate, Ampére's more scientific and methodical. On the one hand, the latter pursues how sensations and ideas are linked in the soul, and on the other, how the mind arrives at a science of world phenomena with the help of its thinking.
[ 4 ] The significance of this worldview current, which is a continuation of Condillac's teachings, lies in the fact that the independent life of the soul is decisively emphasized, that the self-activity of the human inner personality moves to the forefront of consideration, and that all the minds under consideration here nevertheless work towards knowledge in a strictly scientific sense. They investigate the spirit scientifically, but they do not want to equate its phenomena with other processes in nature from the outset. And from their more materialistic beginnings, they ultimately strive for a world view that is decidedly inclined towards the spirit.
[ 5 ] Victor Cousin (1792-1867) undertook several journeys through Germany and became personally acquainted with the leading spirits of the idealistic epoch. Hegel and Goethe made the deepest impression on him. He brought their idealism to France. He was able to work for them through his captivating oratory, with which he made a deep impression, first as a professor at the Ecole Normale (from 1814), then at the Sorbonne. Cousin had learned from the idealistic spiritual life that a satisfactory world view could be gained not by observing the outside world, but by observing the human spirit. He based what he wanted to say on the self-observation of the soul. And from Hegel he adopted the idea that spirit, idea and thought not only reign within man, but also outside in nature and in the progress of historical life, that reason is present in reality. He taught that the character of a people, of an age, is not governed by the blind folly and caprice of individuals, but that a necessary thought, a real idea is expressed in it, indeed, that a great man appears in the world only as the messenger of a great idea in order to realize it within the course of history. It must have made a deep impression on his French listeners, who had to comprehend unparalleled world-historical storms in the most recent phases of their nation's development, to hear a brilliant speaker explain the rationality of historical development on the basis of great worldview ideas.
[ 6 ] Energistically and purposefully, Comte placed himself in the midst of this development of the French worldview with his basic principle: the starting point for a worldview can only be sought in science, which is based on such strict mathematical and observed truths as physics or chemistry. He can only accept human thinking as mature when it has come to this view. To get there, mankind had to go through two epochs of immaturity, one in which it believed in gods, and a subsequent one in which it gave itself over to abstract ideas. In the ascent from the theological through the idealistic to the scientific view of the world, Comte sees the necessary course of mankind's development. In the first stage, man imagined human-like gods in the processes of nature, who bring about these processes as arbitrarily as man brings about his activities. Later he replaced the gods with abstract ideas such as life force, general world reason, world purpose and so on. This phase of development must also make way for a higher one. It must be recognized that an explanation of world phenomena can only be found in observation and in the strictly mathematical and logical consideration of facts. Only what physics, chemistry and the science of living beings (biology) investigate in this way can be combined by thinking for the purpose of a world view. It has nothing to add to what the individual sciences have researched, as theology does with its divine entities and idealistic philosophy with its abstract thoughts. Even the views on the course of human development, on the coexistence of people in the state, in society, etc., will only become completely clear when they seek such laws as the strict natural sciences. The reasons why families, associations, legal systems and state institutions come into being must be sought in the same way as those why bodies fall to earth or why the digestive organs of animals do their work. The science of human coexistence, of human development, sociology, is therefore particularly close to Comte's heart. He seeks to give it the rigorous character that other sciences have gradually assumed. In this direction, he had a predecessor in Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825). The latter already held the view that man would only be a perfect controller of his own destiny if he understood his own life in the state, in society, in the course of history in a strictly scientific sense and organized it in terms of a natural law of development. Comte was on intimate terms with Saint-Simon for a time and parted company with him when the latter's views seemed to be lost in all kinds of bottomless reveries and utopias. Comte continued to work in the direction he had taken with rare zeal. His "Cours de philosophie positive" is an attempt to develop the scientific achievements of his time into a world view in an uninspired style by merely compiling them for orientation and by expanding sociology in their spirit, without the aid of theological or idealistic ideas. Comte set the philosopher no other task than that of such an orienting compilation. He has nothing of his own to add to what the sciences have established about the connection between facts. This was the sharpest expression of the opinion that only the sciences, with their observation of reality and their methods, have a say when it comes to the development of worldviews.
[ 7 ] Within German intellectual life, Eugen Dühring (1833 to 1921) emerged in 1865 with his "Natural Dialectics" as an energetic advocate of this idea of the sole authority of scientific thought. In 1875, he presented his views to the world in further detail in his book "Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftliche Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung", and in numerous other mathematical, scientific, philosophical, scientific-historical and national-economic writings. Dühring's entire oeuvre emerges from a strictly mathematical and mechanistic way of thinking. Dühring is admirable in his ability to think through everything that can be achieved in world phenomena using mathematical laws. But where such thinking does not suffice, he loses all possibility of finding his way in life. His intellectual character explains the arbitrariness, the bias with which Dühring judges so many things. Where one has to judge according to higher ideas, as in the complicated relationships of human coexistence, he therefore has no other point of reference than the sympathies and antipathies planted in him by chance personal relationships. He, the mathematical-objective mind, falls into complete arbitrariness when he undertakes to evaluate human achievements of the historical past or the present. His sober mathematical way of thinking has led him to denounce a personality such as Goethe as the most unscientific mind of modern times, whose entire significance, in his opinion, is exhausted in a few lyrical achievements. One cannot go further in underestimating everything that transcends sober reality than Dühring did in his book "The Greats of Modern Literature". Despite this one-sidedness, Dühring is one of the most inspiring figures in the development of the modern world view. No one who has immersed himself in his thoughtful books can admit to anything other than this, that he has received profound effects from them.
[ 8 ] Dühring uses the crudest expressions to describe all world views that are based on anything other than strictly scientific points of view. All such unscientific ways of thinking "understand themselves in the stage of childish immaturity or feverish impulses, or in the regressions of senility; under these conditions they may afflict entire epochs and parts of humanity or occasionally individual elements or degenerate strata of society, but they always belong to the realm of the immature, the pathological or the over-mature already decomposed by decay" (Kursus der Philosophie p 44). He condemns what Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have achieved as an outgrowth of charlatanic professorial wisdom; idealism as a world view is for him a theory of madness. He wants to create a philosophy of reality that is solely natural because it "eliminates the artificial and unnatural fabrications and for the first time makes the concept of reality the measure of all ideal conceptions"; reality is conceived by it "in a way that excludes any tendency towards a dreamlike and subjectivistically limited conception of the world". (Course in Philosophy p. 13.)
[ 9 ] Think like the right mechanic, the right physicist thinks, who sticks to what the senses can perceive, the mind can logically combine and the calculation can determine. Anything that goes beyond that is idle play with concepts. So says Dühring to himself. But he also wants to give this way of thinking its full rights. Whoever adheres exclusively to this way of thinking can be sure that it will give him insights into reality. All pondering as to whether we can actually penetrate the secrets of world events with our thinking, all research which, like Kant's, seeks to limit the faculty of knowledge, springs from a logical fallacy. We should not fall into the self-sacrificing self-denial of the intellect, which does not dare to say anything positive about the world. What we can know is a true unclouded representation of the real. "The whole of things has a systematic structure and inner logical consistency. Nature and history have a constitution and development whose essence corresponds to a large extent to the general logical relations of all concepts. The general properties and relations of the concepts of thought with which logic is concerned must also apply to the special case in which its object is the totality of being together with its principal forms. Since the most general thinking decides to a wide extent what can be and how it can be, the highest principles and main forms of logic must also have the decisive meaning for all reality and its forms" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 11). Reality has created an organ in human thought through which it can mentally recreate itself in an ideal image. Nature is everywhere governed by a consistent lawfulness that is right in itself and cannot be criticized. How could it make sense to criticize the scope of thought, the organ of nature? It is folly to expect nature to create an organ through which it reflects itself only imperfectly or incompletely. The order and regularity outside in reality must therefore correspond to the logical order and regularity in human thought. "The ideal system of our thoughts is the image of the real system of objective reality; perfect knowledge has the same form in the form of thoughts that things have in the form of real existence." - Despite this general correspondence between thought and reality, there is nevertheless the possibility for the former to go beyond the latter. Thought continues in the idea the operations that are imposed on it by reality. In reality, every body is divisible, but only up to a certain limit. Thought does not stop at this limit, but divides even further in the idea. Thought goes beyond reality; it allows the body to be infinitely divisible, to consist of infinitely small parts. In reality this body consists only of a very definite finite number of small, but not infinitely small parts. - In this way all concepts of infinity that transcend reality arise. One proceeds from each event to another which is its cause; from this cause again to its cause, and so on. As soon as thought leaves the ground of reality, it wanders into infinity. It imagines that for every cause another cause must be sought, that the world is without a beginning in time. Thinking also proceeds in a similar way with the fulfillment of space. When it traverses celestial space, it always finds others beyond the most distant stars; it goes beyond this real fact and imagines space to be infinite and filled with an endless number of world bodies. According to Dühring, one must be clear about the fact that all such ideas of infinity have nothing to do with reality. They only arise from the fact that thinking, using the methods that correspond completely to reality, skims over it and thus reaches infinity.
[ 10 ] If thinking remains aware of its divergence from reality, then, in Dühring's view, it need not be reticent in transferring concepts borrowed from human activity to nature. Starting from such points of view, Dühring does not even shy away from attributing imagination to nature in its creation, just as he does to man in his own. "The imagination reaches ... into nature itself; it is rooted, like all thought in general, in impulses that precede the finished consciousness and do not themselves form any elements of the subjectively perceived" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 50). The idea defended by Comte, that all world-view must be nothing more than an attribution of the purely factual, dominates Dühring so completely that he transfers the imagination to the world of facts, because he believes he must simply reject it if it only occurs in the realm of the human mind. Starting from these ideas, he also arrives at other transfers of such concepts, which are taken from human activity, to nature. He thinks, for example, not only that man can make unsuccessful attempts in his activities, which he abandons because they do not lead to the goal, but also that one sees attempts in this or that direction in the activities of nature. "The experimental character of formations is nothing less than alien to reality, and one does not see why the parallel of nature apart from man and nature in man should only be half valid out of favor for a superficial philosophy. If the subjective error of thinking and imagining arises from the relative separateness and independence of this sphere, why should not a practical error or misconception of objective and non-thinking nature also be the result of a relative separation and mutual alienation of its various parts and driving forces? A true philosophy, which does not shrink from common prejudices, will finally recognize the complete parallelism and the continuous unity of the constitution on both sides" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 51).
[ 11 ] Dühring is thus not brittle when it comes to transferring the concepts that thinking generates within itself to reality. But because his whole disposition is such that he only has a sense for mathematical concepts, the picture he creates of the world also takes on a mathematical-schematic character. He is opposed to the way of looking at the world that was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. He has no understanding for the search for the reasons why one being develops from another. The mathematician also juxtaposes the shapes: triangle, square, circle, ellipse; why should we not be reassured by a similar schematic juxtaposition in nature? Dühring does not focus on becoming in nature, but on the fixed shapes that nature works out through combinations of its forces, just as the mathematician looks at the specific, strictly outlined spatial shapes. And Dühring does not find it inappropriate to ascribe to nature a purposeful working towards such solid formations. Dühring does not conceive of this purposeful natural striving as a conscious activity, as it develops in man; but it is nevertheless just as clearly expressed in the actions of nature as the rest of the laws of nature. - In this respect, Dühring's view is therefore the opposite pole to that held by Friedrich Albert Lange. The latter declares the higher concepts, namely all those in which the imagination has a share, to be legitimate poetry; Dühring rejects all poetry in concepts, but instead ascribes actual reality to certain higher ideas that are indispensable to him. It therefore seems quite logical when Lange wants to withdraw the basis of morality from all ideas rooted in reality (cf. p. 434 above), and also when Dühring extends ideas that he considers valid in the realm of morality to nature. He is completely convinced that what happens in man and through man takes place just as naturally as inanimate processes. So what is right in human life cannot be wrong in nature. Such considerations helped to make Dühring an energetic opponent of Darwin's doctrine of the "struggle for existence". If the struggle of all against all was the condition of perfection in nature, it would also have to be the case in human life. "Such an idea, which above all gives itself the appearance of scientificity, is the most morally unconceivable of all. The character of nature is thus conceived in an anti-moral sense. It is regarded not merely as indifferent to the better morality of man, but as being in agreement and in alliance with that bad morality to which the crooks also pay homage" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 164). - What man perceives as moral impulses must, in the sense of Dühring's view of life, already be predisposed in nature. In nature an aim towards the moral must be observed. Just as nature creates other forces that combine purposefully to form solid entities, so it places sympathetic instincts in man. Through them he allows himself to be determined in his coexistence with others. Thus the activity of nature is continued in man at a high level. Dühring ascribes to the lifeless mechanical forces the ability to generate feeling from themselves, like a machine. "The mechanical causality of the forces of nature is, so to speak, subjectivized in fundamental sensation. The fact of this elementary process of subjectivation can obviously not be further explained; for somewhere and under some conditions the unconscious mechanics of the world must arrive at the feeling of itself" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 147). But when it arrives at this, then a new lawfulness, a realm of the spirit, does not begin, but only continues what was already present in the unconscious mechanics. This mechanics is thus unconscious, but nevertheless wise, for "the earth with all that it produces, together with the causes of life-support lying outside, namely in the sun, as well as generally including all influences that come from the surrounding world as a whole, this whole system and arrangement must be thought of as essentially produced for man, that is, as being in accordance with his welfare" (Kursus der Philosophie p. 177)
[ 12 ] Dühring attributes thoughts to nature, even goals and moral tendencies, without admitting that he is idealizing it. Explaining nature involves higher ideas that go beyond the real; however, according to Dühring, such ideas must not exist; consequently, he reinterprets them as facts. Something similar was expressed in the world view of Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann, who appeared with his "Philosophy of Knowledge" around the same time (1864) as Dühring with his "Natural Dialectic". Only that which is perceived is real: this is Kirchmann's assumption. Through his perception, man is in contact with existence. Everything that man does not gain from perception, he must eliminate from his knowledge of the real. He achieves this by rejecting everything that is contradictory. "Contradiction is not"; this is Kirchmann's second principle alongside the first: "The perceived is."
[ 13 ] Kirchmann only accepts feelings and desires as states of the human soul that have an existence of their own. He contrasts knowledge with these existential states of the soul. "Knowledge forms a contrast to the two other states, to feeling and desire ... Knowledge may be based on some mental process, perhaps even something similar, such as pressure, tension; but understood in this way, knowledge is not grasped in its essence. As knowledge, and only as such is it to be examined here, it conceals its own being and makes itself only the mirror of an alien being. There is no better simile for this than the mirror. Just as the mirror is all the more perfect the more it does not allow itself to be seen, but only reflects another being, so too is knowledge. Its essence is this pure reflection of another's being, without any admixture of its own being." However, it is impossible to imagine a stronger contrast to Hegel's conception than this view of knowledge. Whereas in Hegel the essence of a thing comes to light in the thought, i.e. in what the soul brings to the perception through its own activity, Kirchmann presents an ideal of knowledge in which this is a mirror image of the perception freed from all of the soul's own ingredients.
[ 14 ] If you want to judge Kirchmann's position in intellectual life correctly, you have to take into account the great difficulties encountered at the time of his appearance by someone who had the drive within himself to establish an independent worldview. The results of natural science, which were bound to have a profound influence on the development of the world view, were still young. They were just enough to shake the belief in the classical, idealistic world view, which had had to build its proud edifice without the help of the newer natural sciences. However, it was not easy to come up with new basic ideas to guide the wealth of individual results. In many circles, the thread that led from scientific knowledge of the facts to a satisfactory overall view of the world was lost. A certain helplessness in questions of worldview took hold of many. There was hardly any understanding left for the kind of momentum of thought that had been expressed in Hegel's view.