The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Age of Kant and Goethe

[ 1 ] At the end of the eighteenth century, those who struggled for clarity on the great questions of worldview and outlook on life looked up to two intellectual authorities, Kant and Goethe. One of those who struggled most mightily for such clarity was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he became acquainted with Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason", he wrote: "I live in a new world ... Things that I believed could never be proven to me, for example the concept of absolute freedom, of duty, etc., have been proven to me, and I feel all the happier for it. It is incomprehensible what respect for humanity, what strength this system gives us! ... What a blessing for an age in which morality had been destroyed from its foundations and the concept of duty had been crossed out of all dictionaries." And when he had built up his own view in his "Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre" on the basis of Kant's, he sent the book to Goethe with the words: "I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity. Philosophy rightly turns to you. Your feeling is the same touchstone." Schiller stood in a similar relationship to both spirits. He wrote about Kant on October 28, 1794: "It does not frighten me at all to think that the law of change, before which no human and no divine work finds grace, will also destroy the form of this (Kant's) philosophy as well as any other; but the foundations of it will not have to fear this fate, for as old as the human race is, and as long as there has been reason, it has been tacitly recognized and acted upon as a whole." Schiller described Goethe's view in a letter to him on August 23, 1794: "I have long watched the course of your mind, albeit from quite a distance, and have noted the path you have marked out for yourself with ever renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which every weaker force will probably be wary. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the ground of explanation for the individual. If you had been born as a Greek, indeed only as an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way."

[ 2 ] Kant and Goethe, seen from the present, can be regarded as spirits in whom the development of the worldview of modern times reveals itself, as in an important moment of its process of becoming, in that these spirits intensely perceive the riddles of existence that had previously prepared themselves more in the subsoil of the soul's life.

[ 3 ] In order to illustrate the effect of the former on his age, let us cite the statements of two men about him who were at the height of education in their time. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788: "For heaven's sake, buy yourself two books, Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Kant is not a light of the world, but a whole shining solar system at once." And Wilhelm von Humboldt says: "Kant undertook and accomplished the greatest work that philosophizing reason has perhaps ever owed to a single man... Three things remain unmistakably certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant brought to his nation, the benefit that he conferred on speculative thought: some of the things he shattered will never rise again, some of the things he founded will never sink again, and most importantly, he brought about a reform unlike any other in the entire history of human thought."

[ 4 ] You can see that his contemporaries saw in Kant's deed a shattering effect within the development of the world view. However, he himself considered it so important for this development that he equated its significance with that of Copernicus' discovery of planetary motion for the knowledge of nature.

[ 5 ] Some phenomena of the development of the world view in the preceding periods continue to have an effect on Kant's thinking and are transformed in it into puzzling questions that determine the character of his world view. Whoever perceives the characteristic peculiarities in Kant's writings that are most significant for this view will immediately recognize as one of them a special appreciation that Kant accords to the mathematical way of thinking. What is recognized as mathematical thinking recognizes, carries within itself the certainty of its truth, Kant feels. That man can have mathematics proves that he can have truth. Whatever one may doubt, one cannot doubt the truth of mathematics.

[ 6 ] With this appreciation of mathematics, the attitude of the more recent development of the worldview that shaped Spinoza's imaginative circles emerges in Kant's soul. Spinoza wants to construct his series of ideas in such a way that they develop strictly apart like the links of mathematical science. Nothing other than mathematical thought provides the firm foundation on which, in Spinoza's sense, the human ego, feeling itself in the spirit of the modern age, knows itself to be secure. Descartes, from whom Spinoza received much inspiration, thought in the same way. He had to draw support for his worldview from doubt. Descartes could not see such a support in the mere reception of a thought in the soul. This Greek way of approaching the world of thought is no longer possible for modern man. Something must be found in the self-conscious soul to support the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, it is the fulfillment of the requirement that the soul must relate to thought as it relates to the mathematical mode of representation. Descartes felt secure in all of this, because it seemed to him to have the same clarity that is inherent in mathematics. This same attitude led Spinoza to form a world view in which everything, like the mathematical laws, works with strict necessity. The one divine substance, which pours itself out with mathematical regularity into all world beings, only accepts the human ego if it loses itself completely in it, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed in its world-consciousness. This mathematical attitude, which arises from the longing of the "I" for a security that it needs for itself, leads this "I" to a world view in which it has lost itself, its independent existence in a spiritual world reason, its freedom and its hope for an independent eternal existence by striving for its security.

[ 7 ] Leibniz's thinking moved in the opposite direction. For him, the human soul is the independent, strictly self-contained monad. But this monad only experiences what is within it; the world order that presents itself "as if from outside" is only an illusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, and whose order is the predetermined (pre-stabilized) harmony that does not present itself in observation. This world view leaves the human soul its independence, its independent existence in the universe, its freedom and the hope of an eternal significance in the development of the world; but if it remains true to itself, it can basically do no other than assert that everything it recognizes is only itself, that it cannot emerge from the self-conscious ego, and that the universe in its truth cannot be revealed to it from outside.

[ 8 ] For Descartes and Leibniz, the convictions acquired by religious means were still so strongly effective that both adopted them into their world view for other reasons than those given to them by the supports of this world view itself. For Descartes, the view of the spiritual world, which he had acquired by religious means, crept into his world view; for him it unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order, and so he did not feel that his world view basically extinguished his "I". In the same way, Leibniz's religious impulses were at work, and he therefore failed to realize that he had no possibility of finding anything other than the content of his own soul in his view of the world. He did believe that he could accept the spiritual world outside the "I". Spinoza drew the consequences of his world view through a major move in his personality. In order to have the security for this world view that self-consciousness demanded, he resigned himself to the independence of this self-consciousness and found bliss in feeling himself to be a member of the one divine substance. Looking at Kant, one must raise the question: How must he have felt about the worldviews that had created their outstanding representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz? For all the soul impulses that had worked in these three were at work in him. And they acted on each other in his soul and brought about the mysteries of the world and of humanity that imposed themselves on him. A look at the intellectual life of Kant's age gives an indication of the way Kant felt about these riddles. This intellectual life appears in a significant symptom in Lessing's (1729-1781) position on worldview issues. Lessing summarized his creed in the words: "The development of revealed truths into rational truths is absolutely necessary if the human race is to be helped by them." The eighteenth century has been called the Enlightenment. The minds of Germany understood the Enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's saying. Kant explained the Enlightenment as the "exit of man from his self-inflicted immaturity" and described it as its motto: "Have the courage to use your own intellect." Now, even such outstanding thinkers as Lessing had initially not progressed any further through the Enlightenment than an intellectual transformation of the doctrines of faith handed down from the state of "self-imposed immaturity". They did not advance to a pure rational view like Spinoza. Spinoza's teaching must have made a deep impression on such minds when it became known in Germany. Spinoza had really tried to make use of his own reason, but had come to completely different conclusions than the German Enlightenment thinkers. His influence must have been all the more significant because his mathematically based conclusions were much more convincing than Leibniz's world view, which had an effect on the minds of that age in the way it had been "developed" by Wolff. Goethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit" (Poetry and Truth) gives us an idea of the effect of this school of thought, which worked through Wolff's ideas, on deeper minds. He tells of the impression that Professor Winkler's lectures in Leipzig, held in the spirit of Wolff, made on him: "At first I attended my collegia diligently and faithfully; philosophy, however, did not want to enlighten me at all. In logic it seemed strange to me that I should have to pull apart, separate and, as it were, destroy those mental operations which I had performed with the greatest comfort from my youth in order to understand the right use of them. I thought I knew about as much about things, about the world, about God, as the teacher himself, and it seemed to me that in more than one place there was a great lack." In contrast, the poet tells us about his occupation with Spinoza's writings: "I surrendered to this reading and believed, by looking at myself, that I had never seen the world so clearly." But only a few were able to surrender to Spinoza's way of thinking as unselfconsciously as Goethe. For most of them, it must have caused a deep conflict in their view of the world. Goethe's friend Fr. H. Jacobi is a representative of this. He believed that he had to admit that reason left to itself did not lead to the doctrines of faith, but to the view that Spinoza had arrived at, that the world is governed by eternal, necessary laws. Thus Jacobi was faced with a momentous decision: either he had to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of faith, or, in order to retain the latter, he had to deny reason itself the possibility of arriving at the highest insights. He chose the latter. He maintained that man had an immediate certainty in his innermost mind, a sure faith, by virtue of which he felt the truth of the idea of a personal God, of the freedom of the will and of immortality, so that this conviction was quite independent of the insights of reason based on logical deductions, which do not relate to these things at all, but only to the external processes of nature. In this way, Jacobi dismissed reasonable knowledge in order to make room for a faith that satisfies the needs of the heart. Goethe, who was not very pleased by this dethroning of knowledge, wrote to his friend: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, blessed me with physics. I adhere to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave to you whatever you may call religion. You hold to believing in God; I to seeing." The Enlightenment ultimately presented minds with the choice of either replacing revealed truths with the truths of reason in the Spinozist sense, or declaring war on rational knowledge itself.

[ 9 ] And Kant was also faced with this choice. How he approached it and decided on it can be seen from the clear statement in the preface to the second edition of his "Critique of Pure Reason": "Suppose now that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in the strictest sense) as a property of our will, by citing practical principles lying in our reason ... which would be utterly impossible without the presupposition of freedom, but speculative reason had proved that this could not be conceived at all, then that presupposition, namely the moral one, must necessarily give way to that whose opposite contains an obvious contradiction, consequently freedom and with it morality ... give way to the natural mechanism. But since I need nothing more for morality than that freedom does not contradict itself and can therefore at least be thought without needing to understand it further, that it therefore places no obstacle at all in the way of the natural mechanism of the same action (taken in another respect), the doctrine of morality claims its place, . ... which, however, would not have taken place if criticism had not first instructed us of our inevitable ignorance in regard to things in themselves, and restricted all that we can theoretically recognize to mere appearances. This very discussion of the positive utility of critical principles of pure reason can be shown with regard to the concept of God and the simple nature of our soul, which I shall pass over for the sake of brevity. I cannot therefore even accept God, freedom and immortality for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason, if I do not at the same time deprive speculative reason of its presumption of exuberant insights... I therefore had to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith ..." As you can see, Kant stands on similar ground to Jacobi with regard to knowledge and faith.

[ 10 ] The path by which Kant arrived at his results was through the world of thought of Hume. With him he found the view that the things and processes of the world do not reveal any mental connections to the human soul, that the human mind only habitually imagines such connections when it perceives the world things and world processes in space and time side by side and one after the other. That the human mind does not receive from the world what appears to be knowledge: this opinion of Hume's made an impression on Kant. The thought arose for him as a possibility: the knowledge of the human mind does not come from the reality of the world.

[ 11 ] Through Hume's explanations, Kant was awakened from the slumber into which, according to his own confession, the Wolffian school of thought had put him. How can reason make judgments about God, freedom and immortality if its statements about the simplest facts rest on such uncertain foundations? The onslaught that Kant now had to make against rational knowledge was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. The latter had at least been able to leave knowledge the possibility of comprehending nature in its necessary context. Now Kant accomplished an important deed in the field of knowledge of nature with his "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens", published in 1755. He believed that he had shown that our entire planetary system could be imagined to have arisen from a ball of gas moving around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematical and physical forces, the sun and planets condensed within this structure and assumed the movements they have in accordance with the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed that the fruitfulness of the Spinozistic way of thinking, according to which everything takes place with strict mathematical necessity, had been proven by his own great discovery in a special field. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that he exclaimed in the aforementioned work: "Give me matter, and I will build you a world out of it." And the unconditional certainty of mathematical truths was so firm for him that he asserted in his "The Foundations of Natural Science" that a real science is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, there could be no question of certainty in mathematical and scientific knowledge. For then these insights would be nothing but habits of thought that man has acquired because he has seen the course of the world play out in their sense. But there would not be the slightest certainty that these habits of thought have anything to do with the lawful connection of things. Hume draws the following conclusion from his premises: "Phenomena are continually changing in the world, and one follows another in uninterrupted succession; but the laws and forces which move the universe are entirely hidden from us, and do not manifest themselves in any perceptible property of bodies ..." Thus, if we place Spinoza's view of the world in the light of Hume's view, we must say: According to the perceived course of world processes, man has become accustomed to think of them in a necessary, lawful connection; but he must not claim that this connection is more than a mere habit of thought. If this were true, then it would only be a delusion of human reason that it could gain any insight into the nature of the world through itself. And Hume could not be contradicted when he says of any worldview derived from pure reason: "Cast it into the fire, for it is nothing but a delusion and a sham."

[ 12 ] It was impossible for Kant to adopt this conclusion of Hume's as his own. For him, as we have seen, the certainty of scientific and mathematical knowledge was absolutely certain. He did not want to allow this certainty to be touched, but nevertheless could not escape the realization that Hume was right when he said: "We gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and, on the basis of observation, forming ideas about their connection. If there is a lawful connection in things, then we must also extract it from them. But what we extract from things we know no more about than that it has been so up to now; but we do not know whether such a connection is really so interwoven with the nature of things that it cannot change at any time. If we form one view of the world on the basis of our observations today, phenomena may occur tomorrow that force us to adopt a completely different one. If we drew all our knowledge from things, there would be no certainty. But there is certainty, says Kant. Mathematics and natural science prove it. Kant wanted to accept from Hume the view that the world does not give the human mind its knowledge; he did not want to draw the conclusion that this knowledge does not contain certainty and truth. Thus Kant was faced with the shattering question: How is it possible for man to have true and certain knowledge and yet know nothing of the reality of the world itself? And Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the foundations of the world. Our reason could never claim that anything in a world that is spread out beyond us and that we only allow to affect us through observation is certain. Consequently, our world can only be one that we ourselves construct: a world that lies within our mind. I do not know what goes on outside me while a stone falls and hollows out the earth. The law of this whole process takes place within me. And it can only take place within me as dictated by the laws of my own spiritual organism. The constitution of my spirit demands that every effect has a cause, and that twice two is four. And according to this arrangement the spirit builds up a world. May the world outside us be built as it always has been, may it not even today resemble yesterday in any way: this cannot affect us; for our spirit creates its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind is the same, it will proceed in the same way when creating its world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain laws of the outside world, but those of our spiritual organism. Therefore, we only need to explore this if we want to know what is absolutely true. "The mind does not draw its laws from nature, but prescribes them to it." Kant summarizes his conviction in this sentence. However, the mind does not create its inner world without impulse or impression from outside. When I feel a red color, the "red" is indeed a state, a process within me; but I must have a cause for feeling "red". So there are "things in themselves". However, we know nothing about them except that they exist. Everything we observe are phenomena within us. In order to save the certainty of mathematical and scientific truths, Kant thus incorporated the entire world of observation into the human mind. In doing so, however, he also set insurmountable limits to the faculty of knowledge. For everything that we can recognize does not refer to things outside us, but to processes within us, to appearances, as he puts it. However, the objects of the highest questions of reason: God, freedom and immortality, can never appear. We see appearances within us; we cannot know whether they originate from a divine being outside us. We can perceive our own soul states. But these too are only appearances. Whether there is a free immortal soul behind them remains hidden from our knowledge. Our knowledge says nothing at all about these "things in themselves". It says nothing about whether the ideas about them are true or false. If we hear something about these things from another side, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming their existence. But we cannot know anything about them. There is now an access to these highest truths. And that is the voice of duty, which speaks loud and clear within us: Youshall do this and that. This "categorical imperative" imposes an obligation on us that we cannot escape. But how would we be able to fulfill such an obligation if we did not have free will? We cannot know the nature of our soul, but we must believe that it is free so that it can fulfill its inner voice of duty. We therefore have no certainty of knowledge about freedom as we do about the objects of mathematics and natural science; but we do have a moral certainty. Following the categorical imperative leads to virtue. Through virtue alone can man achieve his destiny. He becomes worthy of bliss. He must therefore also be able to achieve happiness. For otherwise his virtue would be without meaning and significance. But for bliss to be linked to virtue, there must be a being that makes this bliss a consequence of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, God, who determines the highest value of things. Through the existence of virtue, its effect, bliss, is guaranteed to us and through this again the existence of God. And because a sensual being, such as man is, cannot attain perfect bliss in this imperfect world, his existence must extend beyond this sensual existence, that is, the soul must be immortal. So what we cannot know, Kant conjures up from the moral belief in the voice of duty. Respect for the sense of duty was what re-established a real world for him when, under Hume's influence, the world of observation sank to a mere inner world. This respect is expressed in beautiful words in his "Critique of Practical Reason": "Duty! thou sublime, great name, who dost not hold in thyself anything popular that leads to ingratiation, but dost demand submission", who dost "lay down a law ... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it ..." Kant considered it his discovery that the highest truths are not cognitive truths, but moral truths. Man must forego insights into a supersensible world; his moral nature provides him with a substitute for knowledge. It is no wonder that Kant sees unconditional, unreserved devotion to duty as the highest demand on man. If duty did not offer him a view beyond the world of the senses, he would be enclosed in it for the rest of his life. Whatever the world of the senses demands, it must take a back seat to the demands of duty. And the world of the senses cannot of itself agree with duty. It wants the pleasant, the pleasure. Duty must confront them so that man can fulfill his destiny. What man accomplishes out of pleasure is not virtuous; only what he accomplishes in selfless devotion to duty is virtuous. Subdue your desires to duty: that is the strict task of Kant's moral doctrine. Want nothing that satisfies you in your selfishness, but act in such a way that the principles of your actions may become those of all men. Man achieves perfection in his devotion to the moral law. The belief that this moral law hovers in sublime heights above all other world events and is realized in the world by a divine being is, in Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from morality. Man should not be good because he believes in a God who wills the good; he should be good solely out of a sense of duty; but he should believe in God because duty is meaningless without God. This is "religion within the limits of mere reason"; this is what Kant calls his book on religious worldview.

[ 13 ] Since the rise of the natural sciences, the path they have taken has given rise to the feeling in many people that everything that does not bear the character of strict necessity must be removed from the image that thinking forms of nature. Kant also had this feeling. In his "Natural History of the Heavens" he even sketched such a picture for a certain area of nature that corresponds to this feeling. In such a picture there is no place for the idea of the self-conscious ego which eighteenth-century man had to make for himself. Platonic and Aristotelian thought could be regarded as the revelation both of nature, as it had to be taken in the age of its activity, and of the human soul. Nature and soul met in the life of thought. From the image of nature, as the research of the new age seems to demand, nothing leads to the idea of the self-conscious soul. Kant had the feeling that the image of nature offered him nothing on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This certainty had to be created. For modern times had presented the self-conscious ego to man as a fact. The possibility of recognizing this fact had to be created. But everything that the mind can recognize as knowledge devours the image of nature. Thus Kant feels compelled to create something for the self-conscious ego and also for the intellectual world associated with it that is not knowledge and yet gives certainty.

[ 14 ] Kant made selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit the foundation of morality. In the field of virtuous action, such devotion is not compatible with that to the world of the senses. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is so elevated that it appears as a direct expression of the spiritual. This is the field of beauty and art. In everyday life we desire the sensual because it arouses our desire, our selfish interest. We desire that which gives us pleasure. But we can also have a selfless interest in an object. We can stand before it in admiration, full of blissful pleasure, and this pleasure can be completely independent of the possession of the object. Whether I want to own a beautiful house that I pass by has nothing to do with a selfless interest in its beauty. If I exclude all desire from my feelings, something remains, a pleasure that is purely linked to the beautiful work of art. Such a pleasure is an aesthetic one. The beautiful differs from the pleasant and the good. The pleasant arouses my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be realized through me. I face the beautiful without any such interest connected with my person. How can beauty attract my selfless pleasure? A thing can only please me if it fulfills its purpose, if it is such that it serves a purpose. I must therefore perceive a purpose in the beautiful. Purposefulness is pleasing; purposelessness is displeasing. But since I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful object, but the mere contemplation of it satisfies me, the beautiful need not really serve a purpose. I am indifferent to the purpose, I only demand expediency. This is why Kant calls "beautiful" that in which we perceive purposefulness without thinking of a specific purpose.

[ 15 ] It is not only an explanation, it is also a justification of art that Kant has thus given. The best way to see this is to visualize how he expressed his feelings about his worldview. He expresses this in profound, beautiful words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe ... : the starry sky above me and the moral law within me... The former sight of an innumerable multitude of worlds destroys, as it were, my importance as an animal creature that must return the matter from which it was made to the planet (a mere point in space) after it has been endowed with life force for a short time (one does not know how). The second, on the other hand, raises my value as an intelligence infinitely through my (self-conscious and free) personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole world of the senses, at least as much as can be deduced from the purposeful determination of my existence by this law, which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but goes to infinity." The artist now implants this purposeful purpose, which in reality only reigns in the moral realm of the world, into the world of the senses. Thus the work of art stands between the realm of the world of observation, in which the eternal iron laws of necessity prevail, which the human spirit itself has first laid into it, and the realm of free sensuality, in which the commandments of duty, as the outflow of a wise divine world order, give direction and purpose. The artist enters between these two realms with his works. He takes his material from the realm of the real; but at the same time he reshapes this material in such a way that it is the bearer of a purposeful harmony, as it is found in the realm of freedom. The human spirit thus feels unsatisfied with the realm of external reality, which Kant means by the starry sky and the innumerable things of the world, and that of moral lawfulness. He therefore creates for himself a beautiful realm of appearance that combines rigid natural necessity with free expediency. Now beauty is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is a natural beauty alongside the artistic beauty. This natural beauty exists without human intervention. It therefore seems as if in reality not only the rigid lawful necessity, but a free wise activity could be observed. Beauty, however, does not compel such a view. For it offers expediency without one having to think of a real purpose. And it offers not only the purposeful-beautiful, but also the purposeful-ugly. One can therefore assume that among the abundance of natural phenomena, which are connected according to necessary laws, there are also, as if by chance, those in which the human mind perceives an analogy with its own works of art. Since there is no need to think of a real purpose, such a quasi-accidental purposefulness is sufficient for the aesthetic observation of nature.

[ 16 ] The matter becomes different when we encounter beings in nature that do not carry purpose merely by chance, but really within themselves. And according to Kant, there are also such beings. They are organic beings. The necessary, lawful connections, in which Spinoza's world view is exhausted and which Kant regards as those of the human mind, are not sufficient to explain them. For an "organism is a product of nature in which everything is end and reciprocally also means, cause and reciprocally also effect". Unlike inorganic nature, the organism cannot therefore be explained by merely necessary laws of nature. This is why Kant, who in his "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" himself attempted to "treat the constitution and mechanical origin of the whole structure of the world according to Newtonian principles", believes that the same attempt must fail for organic beings. In his "Critique of Judgment" he asserts: "For it is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, much less explain to ourselves, organized beings and their inner possibility according to merely mechanical principles of nature; so certain, indeed, that one may boldly say that it is unrighteous for man even to conceive of such a proposition, or to hope that some day a Newton might arise who will make intelligible even the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws, which no intention has ordered; but one must deny this insight to man as such. " With Kant's view that the human mind itself creates the laws it finds in nature, another opinion about a purposefully designed being cannot be reconciled. For the purpose points to the one who placed it in the beings, to the intelligent creator of the world. If the human mind could explain a purposive being in the same way as a merely natural being, then it would also have to place the laws of purpose into things out of itself. It would therefore not only have to give things laws that apply to them insofar as they are phenomena of its inner world; it would also have to be able to prescribe their own purpose, which is completely independent of it. He would therefore not only have to be a cognizing spirit, but also a creating spirit; his reason, like the divine, would have to create things.

[ 17 ] Whoever visualizes the structure of Kant's conception of the world as outlined here will understand the strong effect it had on his contemporaries and also on posterity. For it does not touch any of the ideas that have impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of Western cultural development. It leaves God, freedom and immortality to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge by delimiting an area within which it unconditionally recognizes certain truths. Indeed, it even accepts the opinion that human reason has a right to use not only the eternal, iron laws of nature to explain living beings, but also the concept of purpose, which points to a deliberate order in the world.

[ 18 ] But at what cost did Kant achieve all this! He has placed the whole of nature into the human spirit, and made its laws into those of this spirit itself. He expelled the higher world order entirely from nature and placed it on a purely moral basis. He drew a sharp line between the inorganic and the organic realms, and explained the former according to purely mechanical, strictly necessary laws, the latter according to purposeful ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality. For the purposefulness observed in beauty has nothing to do with real purposes. It does not matter how a beautiful object enters into the context of the world; it is enough that it arouses in us the idea of the purposeful and thereby evokes our pleasure.

[ 19 ] Kant not only holds the view that human knowledge is possible insofar as the lawfulness of this knowledge stems from the self-conscious soul itself, and that certainty about this soul comes from a source other than natural knowledge: he also suggests that human knowledge must stop short of nature where, as in the living organism, thought seems to reign in the natural beings themselves. Kant thus states that he cannot conceive of thoughts which are imagined as acting in the beings of nature itself. The recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul does not merely think, but thinkingly experiences the life of nature. If someone found that thoughts could not be received merely as perception, as is the case with the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that thoughts could be experienced by immersing oneself in the essence of nature, then an element would again be found which could be included both in the image of nature and in the idea of the self-conscious ego. The self-conscious ego for itself finds no place in the image of nature of modern times. If the self-conscious ego fills itself with the thought not only in such a way that it knows: I have formed this, but in such a way that it recognizes in it a life of which it can know: it is also capable of realizing itself outside of me, then it can say to itself: I carry something within me that I can also find outside of me. The more recent development of the world view thus urges us to take the step of finding the thought in the self-conscious ego that is perceived as alive. Kant did not take this step: Goethe did.

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[ 20 ] The contrast to Kant's view of the world was formed in all essential respects by Goethe's view. Around the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in the hymn in prose "Nature", in which he placed man entirely within nature and made it, which rules independently of him, both its own and his lawgiver. Kant took the whole of nature into the human spirit, Goethe saw everything human as a member of this nature; he added the human spirit to the natural world order. "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to enter deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we are weary and fall from her arms. ... People are all in her, and she in all of them. ... Even the most unnatural is nature, even the clumsiest philistinism has something of her genius. ... One obeys her laws, even if one resists them; one works with her, even if one wants to work against her. ... It is everything. She rewards herself and punishes herself, delights and tortures herself. ... She put me in, she will also lead me out. I trust myself to her. She may switch gears with me; she will not hate her work. I did not speak of her; no, what is true and what is false, she has spoken everything. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit." This is the antithesis of Kant's world view. For Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; for Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature, because nature itself is spirit. It is therefore only too understandable when Goethe says in the essay "Influence of Recent Philosophy": "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ... was completely outside my circle. However, I attended many a conversation about it, and with some attention I was able to notice that the old main question was renewing itself: how much does our self and how much does the outside world contribute to our spiritual existence? I had never separated the two, and when I philosophized in my own way about objects, I did so with unconscious naivety and really believed that I saw my opinions before my eyes." In this view of Goethe's position towards Kant, we need not be disturbed by the fact that the former passed many a favorable judgment on the Königsberg philosopher. For this contrast would only have become completely clear to him if he had engaged in a detailed study of Kant. But he did not. In the above-mentioned essay, he says: "It was the entrance that appealed to me; I could not venture into the labyrinth itself; sometimes the gift of poetry, sometimes common sense hindered me, and I felt nowhere bettered." However, he once expressed the contrast sharply in a note that was only published from his estate by the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2. Abteilung, Band XI, 5. 377). According to Goethe, Kant's fundamental error consisted in the fact that he "regards the subjective faculty of knowledge itself as an object and distinguishes the point where subjective and objective meet sharply, but not quite correctly". Goethe is precisely of the opinion that in the subjective human faculty of cognition it is not merely the spirit as such that expresses itself, but that it is spiritual nature itself that has created an organ in man through which it allows its secrets to be revealed. It is not man who speaks about nature, but nature speaks about itself in man. That is Goethe's conviction. Thus Goethe could say: As soon as the dispute about Kant's view of the world "came up, I was happy to take the side that did man the most honor, and gave complete approval to all friends who, with Kant, maintained that although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not therefore all spring from experience. For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit; but for him they were therefore not the subjective laws of this spirit, but the objective laws of the natural order itself. This is why he could not agree with Schiller when, under Kant's influence, he erected a harsh dividing wall between the realm of natural necessity and that of freedom. He speaks of this in the essay "First Acquaintance with Schiller": "Kant's philosophy, which elevates the subject so high by seeming to constrict it, he had gladly absorbed; it developed the extraordinary that nature had placed in his being, and he, in the highest feeling of freedom and self-determination, was ungrateful to the great mother, who certainly did not treat him like a stepmother. Instead of regarding her as independent, living, producing law from the deepest to the highest, he took her from the side of some empirical human naturalities." And in the essay "Influence of Recent Philosophy", he indicates the contrast to Schiller with the words: "He preached the gospel of freedom, I did not want the rights of nature to be abridged." There was something of Kant's way of thinking in Schiller; but for Goethe it is true what he says with regard to conversations he had with Kantians: "They heard me well, but could neither answer me nor be of any help. More than once I encountered one or the other admitting with smiling astonishment that it was, of course, an analog of Kant's way of thinking, but a strange one."

[ 21 ] In art and beauty, Goethe did not see a realm torn from its real context, but a higher level of natural lawfulness. On seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him, he wrote down the following words during his trip to Italy: "The high works of art, like the highest works of nature, were produced by human beings according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." If the artist proceeds in the sense of the Greeks, namely "according to the laws according to which nature itself proceeds", then his works contain the divine, which is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is "a manifestation of the secret laws of nature"; what the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human conclusion of nature, for "by placing himself at the summit of nature, man sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself must again produce a summit. To this end, he increases himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, calling upon choice, order, harmony and meaning and finally rising to the production of the work of art". Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest works of human art, and everything in this nature is governed by the same "eternal, necessary, so divine laws" that "the deity himself could not change anything". (Poetry and Truth, 16th book.)

[ 22 ] When Goethe read Jacobi's book "Von den göttlichen Dingen" in 1811, he was "not at ease". "How could I welcome the book of a friend so dear to me, in which I was to see the thesis realized that nature conceals God! With my pure, deep, innate and practiced way of seeing things, which had taught me to see God in nature, nature in God without fail, so that this way of seeing things was the basis of my entire existence, did not such a strange, one-sidedly limited statement have to distance me in spirit from the noblest man, whose heart I adoringly loved, forever? But I did not indulge in my painful chagrin; on the contrary, I rescued myself to my old asylum and found my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics, and since my education had increased, I was astonished to discover many new and different things in what I already knew, which had a fresh effect on me."

[ 23 ] For Kant, the realm of necessity in the sense of Spinoza is a realm of inner human lawfulness; for Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and doing is a link within this chain of necessities. Within this realm there is only one lawfulness, of which natural and moral lawfulness are the two sides of its essence.

"The sun shines
over evil and good; and the criminal
shine, like the best,
the moon and the stars."

[ 24 ] From one root, from the eternal driving forces of nature, Goethe lets everything spring forth: the inorganic, the organic beings, man with all the results of his spirit: his knowledge, his morality, his art.

What would a God be who only pushed from the outside,
To let the universe run in circles on his finger! It behoves him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never misses its spirit.

[ 25 ] In such words Goethe summarizes his confession. Against Haller, who spoke the words: "No created spirit penetrates into the interior of nature", Goethe turns with the sharpest words:

"Into the interior of nature
O, thou Philistine! -
"No created spirit penetrates."
Me and my brothers and sisters
May you only not remember such words;
We think: place by place we are within.
"Blessed is he to whom she only shows the outer shell,"
I have heard this repeated sixty years,
And curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand thousand times:
Everything she gives abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
Everything she is at once;
You only test yourself most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

[ 26 ] In line with this world view, Goethe was also unable to recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had established in his "Critique of Judgment". He strove to explain living organisms according to laws in the same way that inanimate nature is explained. The leading botanist of the time, Linne', said of the diverse species in the plant world that there are as many such species as "different forms have been created in principle". Anyone who holds such an opinion can only endeavor to study the characteristics of the individual forms and to distinguish them carefully from one another. Goethe could not agree with such a view of nature. "That which he (Liné) sought to keep apart by force must, according to the innermost need of my being, strive to unite." He sought out that which is common to all plant species. On his journey in Italy, this common archetype in all plant forms became increasingly clear to him: "The many plants that I was otherwise only used to seeing in tubs and pots, indeed for most of the year only behind glass windows, stand here happy and fresh in the open air, and by completely fulfilling their purpose, they become clearer to us. In the face of so many new and renewed formations, the old cricket came back to my mind, wondering if I could discover the original plant among this crowd. There must be one after all: how else would I recognize that this or that structure is a plant if they were not all formed according to one pattern?" Another time he expresses himself about this original plant: It "becomes the most wonderful creature from the world, which nature itself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, one can then invent plants into infinity, which must be consistent, that is, which, even if they do not exist, could still exist, and are not picturesque or poetic shadows and appearances, but have an inner truth and necessity." Just as Kant exclaims in his "Natural History and Theory of Heaven": "Give me matter; I will build you a world out of it", because he recognizes the lawful connection of this world, so Goethe says here: with the help of the primordial plant one can invent plants capable of existence into infinity, because one possesses the law of their origin and becoming. What Kant wanted to apply only to inorganic nature, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe also extended to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he informs Herder of his discovery of the primordial plant, he adds: "The same law can be applied to all other living things." And Goethe did apply it. His diligent studies of the animal world led him in 1795 to "unabashedly assert that all perfect organic natures, among which we see fish, amphibians, birds, mammals and, at the top of the latter, man, are all formed according to one archetype, which only in its constant parts inclines more or less back and forth and still forms and transforms itself daily through reproduction". Goethe is therefore also in complete opposition to Kant in his view of nature. The latter called it a daring "adventure of reason" if it wanted to attempt to explain the origin of living things. He considered the human cognitive faculty to be unsuitable for such an explanation. "It is infinitely important to reason not to abandon the mechanism of nature in its creations and not to bypass it in its explanation, because without it no insight into the nature of things can be gained. If we concede at once that a supreme architect has directly created the forms of nature as they have always existed, or has predetermined those which are continuously formed in their course according to the same pattern, our knowledge of nature is not in the least furthered by this; because we do not know at all that being's mode of action and the ideas of it, which are supposed to contain the principles of the possibility of natural beings, and cannot explain nature from the same as from above." To such Kantian remarks, Goethe replies: "If in the moral realm, through faith in God, virtue and immortality, we are to elevate ourselves to an upper region and approach the first being, then it should probably be the same case in the intellectual realm that we make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature. If I had first unconsciously and out of an inner urge restlessly pressed for that archetypal, typical thing, if I had even succeeded in constructing a natural representation, then nothing else could now prevent me from bravely passing the Aadventure of reason, as the old man from Königsberg himself calls it."

[ 27 ] Goethe had grasped an idea in the "Urpflanze", "with which one ... plants into infinity", which "must be consistent, that is, which, even if they do not exist, could exist, and are not painterly or poetic shadows and schemes, but have an inner truth and necessity". He is thus on the way to finding in the self-conscious ego not only the perceptible, the imagined, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences in itself a realm that proves to belong to itself as well as to the outside world, because its formations testify to themselves as images of the creative powers. In this way, the self-conscious ego has found that which makes it appear as a real being. Goethe developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels one with the creative beings of nature. The newer world views sought to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe places the living idea in this ego, and with this life force that rules in it, this ego itself proves to be a living reality. The Greek idea is related to the image; it is viewed like the image. The idea of modern times must be related to life, to the living being itself; it is experienced. And Goethe knew that there is such an experience of the idea. He heard the breath of the living idea in the self-conscious ego.

[ 28 ] Of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Goethe says that he owes it "a most joyful epoch of life". "The great main ideas of the work were entirely analogous to my previous work, actions and thinking. The inner life of art as well as of nature, their mutual working from within, was clearly expressed in the book." Even this statement by Goethe cannot conceal his opposition to Kant. For the essay from which it is taken also states: "Passionately inspired, I went on my way all the more quickly because I myself did not know where it was leading, and for what and how I had appropriated it, I found little favor with the Kantians. For I expressed what was stirring in me, but not what I had read."

[ 29 ] A strictly unified world view is characteristic of Goethe; He wants to gain one point of view from which the whole universe reveals its lawfulness, "from the brick that falls from the roof to the luminous flash of inspiration that comes to you and which you communicate" because "all effects, of whatever kind they may be, which we notice in experience, are connected in the most constant way, merge into one another". "A tile detaches itself from the roof: we call this accidental in the common sense; it strikes the shoulders of a passer-by, but certainly mechanically; but not quite mechanically, it follows the laws of gravity, and so it acts physically. The torn vessels of life immediately give up their function; in an instant the juices act chemically, the elementary properties emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and seeks to restore itself; meanwhile the human whole is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. The person who recognizes himself feels ethically deeply wounded; he laments his disturbed activity, whatever its nature, but reluctantly man surrenders to patience. Religiously, on the other hand, it becomes easy for him to ascribe this case to a higher destiny, to regard it as protection from greater evil, as an introduction to greater good. This is enough for the sufferer; but the convalescent rises genially, trusts God and himself and feels saved, seizes even the accidental, turns it to his advantage in order to begin an eternally fresh circle of life." This is how Goethe uses the example of a falling brick to explain the connection between all kinds of natural effects. It would be an explanation in his sense if one could also derive their strictly lawful connection from a root.

[ 30 ] Kant and Goethe stand like two spiritual antipodes at the most significant point in the development of the modern world view. And the way in which those who were interested in the highest questions approached them was fundamentally different. Kant built up his world view with all the means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, abandoning himself to his healthy nature. This is why Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that he could only turn to Goethe "as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity", whereas he was of the opinion of Kant that "no human intellect could penetrate further than the limit at which Kant, especially in his Critique of Judgment, stood". Anyone who penetrates Goethe's world view, given in a naïve guise, will, however, find in it a secure foundation that can be brought to clear ideas. Goethe himself, however, did not bring this foundation to consciousness. That is why his way of thinking only gradually found its way into the development of the world view; and at the beginning of the century it was Kant with whom the minds tried to come to terms.

[ 31 ] However great the effect that Kant had, it could not remain hidden from his contemporaries that a deeper need for knowledge could not be satisfied by him. Such a need for explanation insists on a unified view of the world, as was the case with Goethe. In Kant, the individual realms of existence stand side by side. For this reason, despite his unconditional admiration of Kant, Fichte could not hide the fact that "Kant merely hinted at the truth, but neither presented nor proved it". "This wonderful single man either has a divination of the truth without being aware of its reasons himself, or he did not esteem his age highly enough to communicate it to it, or he shied away from usurping in his lifetime the superhuman veneration that would sooner or later have to be accorded to him. No one has yet understood him, no one will who will not arrive at Kant's results on his own path, and only then will the world be astonished." "But I believe I know just as surely that Kant has conceived such a system; that everything he actually presents are fragments and results of this system, and that his assertions only have meaning and coherence under this condition." For if this were not the case, Fichte "would rather consider the Critique of Pure Reason to be the work of the strangest coincidence than that of a mind".

[ 32 ] Others also recognized the unsatisfactory nature of Kant's circles of thought. Lichtenberg, one of the most intellectual and at the same time most independent minds from the second half of the eighteenth century, who held Kant in high esteem, could not refrain from making weighty objections to his world view. On the one hand, he says: "What does it mean to think with Kant's mind? I believe it means to find out the relations of our being, be it what it may, to the things we call outside ourselves; that is, to determine the relations of the subjective to the objective. This, of course, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but the question is whether they have ever begun as truly philosophical as Mr. Kant. They have taken for objective what is and must be subjective." On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg remarks: "Should it then be so completely clear that our reason can know nothing at all of the supersensible? Should not man be able to weave his ideas of God as purposefully as the spider weaves its web to catch flies? Or in other words, shouldn't there be beings who admire us for our ideas of God and immortality as much as we admire the spider and the silkworm?" But one could make an even more weighty objection. If it is true that the laws of human reason refer only to the inner world of the mind, how do we come to speak of things outside ourselves at all? We would then have to spin ourselves completely into our inner world. Such an objection was raised by Gottlob Ernst Schulze in his anonymous essay "Aenesidemus", published in 1792. In it, he claims that all our knowledge is pure imagination and that we cannot go beyond our imaginary world in any way. This basically also refuted Kant's moral truths. For if we cannot even conceive of the possibility of going beyond the inner world, then no moral voice can guide us into a world that is impossible to conceive. Thus, Kant's view initially developed into a new doubt about all truth; criticism became skepticism. One of the most consistent followers of skepticism is Salomon Maimon, who, from 1790 onwards, wrote various works influenced by Kant and Schulze, in which he resolutely argued that the existence of external objects should not be spoken of at all because of the whole structure of our cognitive faculty. Another of Kant's students, Jacob Sigismund Beck, even went so far as to claim that Kant himself had in truth assumed no things apart from us, and that it was only based on a misunderstanding if such an idea was attributed to him.

[ 33 ] One thing is certain: Kant offered his contemporaries countless points of attack for interpretation and contradiction. It was precisely through his ambiguities and contradictions that he became the father of the classical German world views of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher. His ambiguities became new questions for them. As much as he had tried to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith, the human spirit can only be satisfied in the truest sense of the word through knowledge, through cognition. And so it was that Kant's successors wanted to restore knowledge to its full rights; they wanted to use it to satisfy man's highest spiritual needs. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who said: "The love of science, and especially of speculation, once it has taken hold of man, so captivates him that he has no other wish left than to occupy himself with it in peace." He was a perfect continuator of Kant in this direction. Fichte can be called an enthusiast of the world view. His enthusiasm must have had an enchanting effect on his contemporaries and his students. Let us listen to what one of the latter, Forberg, says about him: "His public lecture rushes along like a thunderstorm that discharges its fire in single blows; ... He lifts the soul." He does not just want to make good people, but great people. His "eye is punishing, his gait defiant, ... he wants to guide the spirit of the age through his philosophy. His imagination is not fertile, but energetic and powerful; his images are not charming, but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of the subject and operates in the realm of concepts with an impartiality that betrays the fact that he not only dwells in this invisible land, but rules over it." The most striking feature of Fichte's personality is the grand, serious style in his view of life. He applies the highest standards to everything. For example, he describes the profession of the writer: "The idea must speak for itself, not the writer. All arbitrariness of the latter, all his individuality, his own manner and art must be extinguished in his presentation, so that only the manner and art of his idea may live, the highest life which it can gain in this language and in this age. As he is free from the obligation of the oral teacher to submit to the receptivity of others, so he has no excuse for it. He has no set reader in view, but constructs his reader and gives him the law of how it should be. "The writer's work, however, is in itself a work for eternity. May future ages take a higher impetus in the science which he has laid down in his work; he has not only laid down the science, he has laid down the very definite and perfect character of an age in relation to science in his work, and this will retain its interest as long as there will be men in the world. Irrespective of changeability, his letter speaks in all ages to all men who are able to animate this letter, and inspires, elevates, ennobles until the end of days." Thus speaks a man who is aware of his vocation as the spiritual leader of his age and who was very serious when he said in the preface to his "Wissenschaftslehre": "Nothing lies in my person, but everything lies in the truth, for I am a priest of truth". From a man who lived in the realm of "truth" in this way, we understand that he did not merely want to guide others to understanding, but force them to do so. He was allowed to give one of his writings the title "Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. An attempt to force the reader to understand." Fichte is a personality who does not believe he needs reality and its facts in order to follow the path of life, but who keeps his eyes fixed on the world of ideas. He thinks little of those who do not understand such an ideal direction of the spirit. "While in the circle which ordinary experience has drawn around us, one thinks more generally and judges more correctly than perhaps ever before, the majority are completely deluded and blinded as soon as they should go even a little beyond it. If it is impossible to rekindle in them the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, they must remain quietly in that circle, and in so far as they are useful and indispensable in it, their value in and for it must be left undiminished. But if they therefore demand that everything should be brought down to them to which they cannot rise, if, for example, they demand that everything printed should be usable as a cook-book, or as a book of arithmetic, or as a set of official regulations, and decry everything that cannot be so used, they are themselves greatly mistaken. That ideals cannot be represented in the real world, the rest of us know perhaps as well as they do, perhaps better. We only maintain that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the power to do so. Supposing they could not convince themselves of this either, they lose very little in the process, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing in the process. This merely makes it clear that they alone are not reckoned with in the plan for the ennoblement of mankind. The latter will undoubtedly continue on their way; may kind nature rule over them and give them rain and sunshine, good food and undisturbed circulation of the juices, and wise thoughts at the right time!" He prefaced the printing of the lectures with these words, in which he explained the "Destiny of the Scholar" to the students in Jenens. Views such as Fichte's grew out of a great spiritual energy, which gives certainty for the knowledge of the world and for life. He had ruthless words for all those who did not feel the strength for such certainty within themselves. When the philosopher Reinhold said that the inner voice of man could also err, Fichte replied: "You say that the philosopher should think that he can err as an individual, that as such he can and must learn from others. Do you know what mood you are describing: that of a person who has never been convinced of anything in his entire life?"

[ 34 ] This powerful personality, whose gaze was directed entirely inwards, was reluctant to seek the highest that man can achieve, a world view, anywhere other than within himself. "All culture should be the exercise of all forces towards the one purpose of complete freedom, that is, complete independence from everything that is not ourselves, our pure self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours. ..." This is Fichte's verdict in the "Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution", published in 1793. And the most valuable power in man, the power of cognition, should not be directed towards this one purpose of being completely independent of everything that is not ourselves? Could we ever achieve complete independence if we were dependent on any being in our view of the world? If it were determined by such a being outside us what nature is, what our soul is, what our duties are, and we then obtained knowledge behind from such a ready-made fact? If we are independent, then we must also be independent with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has arisen without our intervention, then we are dependent on it. So we cannot receive the highest truth. We must create it; it must arise through us. Fichte can therefore only place at the top of the world view something that first attains its existence through us. When we say of any thing in the external world: It is, we do so because we perceive it. We know that we attribute existence to another being. What this other thing is does not depend on us. We can only recognize its nature if we direct our perceptive faculty towards it. We would never know what "red", "warm", "cold" is if we did not know it through perception. We can add nothing to these qualities of things, take nothing away from them. We say "They are".What they are: that is what they tell us. It is quite different with our own existence. Man does not say to himself: "It is", but: "I am". In doing so, however, he has not only said: that he is, but also: what he is, namely an "I". Only another being could say of me: "It is". Yes, it would have to say so. For even if this other being had created me, it could not say of my existence: I am. The statement: "I am" loses all meaning if the being that speaks of its existence does not do so itself. There is therefore nothing in the world that can address me as "I" other than myself. This recognition of myself as an "I" must therefore be my very own act. No being other than me can have any influence on it.

[ 35 ] Here Fichte found something where he saw himself completely independent of any foreign entity. A God could create me; but he would have to leave it up to me to recognize myself as an "I". I give my self-consciousness to myself. In it, therefore, I do not have a knowledge, a cognition that I have received, but one that I have made myself. Thus Fichte has created a fixed point for the world view, something where there is certainty. But what about the existence of other beings? I attribute an existence to them. But I do not have the same right to do so as I do for myself. They must become parts of my "I" if I am to attach an existence to them with the same right. And they become that by me perceiving them. Because as soon as that is the case, they are there for me. I can only say: my self feels "red", my self feels "warm". And as truly as I attribute an existence to myself, I can also attribute this to my feelings and my sensations. So if I understand myself correctly, I can only say: I am and I also attribute existence to an external world.

[ 36 ] In this way, for Fichte, the world lost its independent existence apart from the "I"; it only has an existence that is added to it by the I, an existence that is thus added to it. In his striving to give his own self the greatest possible independence, Fichte deprived the external world of all independence. Where such an independent external world is not thought to exist, it is also understandable that interest in knowledge, in recognizing this external world, ceases. Thus the interest in the actual knowledge itself is extinguished. For through such knowledge the ego basically experiences nothing but what it produces itself. In all knowledge, the human ego only holds monologues with itself, as it were. It does not go beyond itself. But the way in which it accomplishes the latter is through living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world: then it is no longer monologuing with itself alone. Then its actions flow out into the world. They attain an independent existence. I accomplish something; and when I have accomplished it, it continues to have an effect, even if I no longer participate in its effect. What I know has an existence only through me; what I do is part of a moral world order that is independent of me. But what does all the certainty that we draw from our own ego mean in relation to this supreme truth of a moral world order, which must be independent of us if existence is to have meaning? All knowledge is only something for one's own ego; this world order must be apart from the ego. It must be, even though we cannot know anything about it. We must therefore believe it. Thus Fichte also goes beyond knowledge to a belief. Like the dream in relation to reality, all knowledge is in relation to belief. The self, too, only has such a dream existence when it merely contemplates itself. It creates an image of itself, which need be nothing more than a floating image; only the action remains. Fichte describes this dream existence of the world with significant words in his "Determination of Man": "There is no permanence anywhere, neither outside me, nor in me, but only an incessant change. I know of no being anywhere, nor of my own. There is no being. I myself do not know at all, and am not. Images are: they are the only thing that is there, and they know of themselves in the manner of images: Images that float over; without there being anything that they float over, that are connected by images of images, images without anything depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I myself am one of these images; indeed, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of images. All reality is transformed into a marvelous dream, without a life that is dreamed of and without a spirit that dreams; into a dream that hangs together in a dream of itself. The looking is the dream; the thinking the source of all being and all reality that I imagine, my being, my power, my purposes is the dream of that dream. How different the moral world order, the world of faith, appears to Fichte: "My will should work absolutely through itself, without any tool weakening its expression, in a sphere completely similar to itself, as reason on reason, as the spiritual on the spiritual; in a sphere to which, however, it does not give the law of life, of activity, of continuity, but which has it in itself; thus on self-acting reason. But self-acting reason is will. The law of the supersensible world would therefore be a will... That sublime will therefore does not go its own way separately from the rest of the world of reason. There is a spiritual bond between it and all finite rational beings, and it itself is this spiritual bond of the world of reason.... I cover my face before you and put my hand over my mouth. How you are to yourself and appear to yourself I can never understand, just as I can never become yourself. After a thousand times a thousand spirit lives I will understand you just as little as I do now in this hut of earth. What I comprehend becomes finite through my mere comprehension; and this can never be transformed into the infinite even through infinite increase and elevation. You are not different from the finite in degree, but in kind. Through this increase they make you only a greater man and always a greater one; but never the God, the Infinite, who is incapable of any measure."

[ 37 ] Because knowledge is a dream, the moral world order the only truly real thing for Fichte, he also places life, through which man places himself in the moral world context, above mere cognition, above the observation of things. "Nothing," he says, "has unconditional value and meaning as life; everything else, thinking, poetry and knowledge, has value only insofar as it relates in some way to the living, emanates from it and intends to run back into it."

[ 38 ] It is the basic ethical trait in Fichte's personality that has erased everything in his worldview or reduced its significance that does not amount to the moral destiny of man. He wanted to set up the greatest, the purest demands for life; and in doing so he did not want to be misled by any cognition that might discover contradictions with the natural laws of the world in these goals. Goethe said: "The doer is always without conscience; no one has conscience but the beholder." By this he meant that the observer assesses everything according to its true, real value and understands and accepts every thing in its place. The doer's main aim is to see his demands fulfilled; whether he does injustice to things or not is all the same to him. Fichte's main concern was to act; however, he did not want to be accused by contemplation of lack of conscience. That is why he denied the value of contemplation.

[ 39 ] Fichte constantly endeavored to intervene in immediate life. Where he believed that his words could become action in others, that is where he felt most satisfied. It was out of this urge that he wrote "Reclaiming freedom of thought from the princes of Europe who had hitherto suppressed it. Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness 1792"; "Contributions to the correction of the judgments of the public on the French Revolution 1793. " Out of this urge, he delivered his enchanting speeches "The main features of the present age, presented in lectures, held in Berlin in 1804-1805"; "The instruction to the blessed life or also the doctrine of religion, in lectures, held in Berlin in 1806" and finally his "Speeches to the German nation 1808").

[ 40 ] Unconditional devotion to the moral world order, acting from the deepest core of man's ethical nature: these are the demands that give life value and meaning. This view runs through all these speeches and writings as a basic motif. In the "Fundamental Features of the Present Age", he reproached this age in flaming words for its selfishness. Everyone goes only the way that his lower instincts dictate. But these instincts lead away from the great whole that encompasses the human community as moral harmony. Such an age must lead those who live in its spirit towards destruction. Fichte wanted to revive duty in the human mind.

[ 41 ] Fichte wanted to intervene in the life of his time with his ideas in such a formative way, because he thought these ideas were powerfully lived through by the awareness that man receives the highest content of his soul life from a world which he reaches when he confronts his "I" all alone, and in this confrontation feels himself in his true destiny. Out of this awareness, Fichte coined words such as: "I myself and my necessary purpose are the supersensible."

[ 42 ] For Fichte, experiencing oneself in the supersensible is an experience that man can have. If he does it, he experiences the "I" in himself. And only then does he become a philosopher. This experience cannot be "proven" to those who do not want to have it. How little Fichte considers such a "proof" to be possible is demonstrated by statements such as this: "One must be born a philosopher, be educated to it, and educate oneself to it; but one cannot be made one through any human art. Therefore this science also promises itself few proselytes among the men already made. ... "

[ 43 ] Fichte is concerned with finding a state of soul through which the human ego can experience itself. Knowledge of nature seems to him incapable of revealing anything about the nature of the ego. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thinkers emerged for whom the question arose: What can be found in the image of nature in order to find an explanation of the human being within this image? Goethe did not feel this way about the question. He sensed a spiritual nature behind the outwardly revealed nature. In the human soul, experiences are possible for him through which this soul does not live in the externally manifest alone, but within the creative forces. Goethe sought the idea that the Greeks sought, but he did not seek it as a perceptible idea, but in a co-experience of the world processes, where these are no longer perceptible. He sought the life of nature in the soul. Fichte searched in the soul itself; but he did not search where nature lives in the soul, he searched directly where the soul feels its own life ignited, regardless of which other world processes and world beings this life is connected to. With Fichte, a worldview emerged that is completely absorbed in finding an inner life of the soul that relates to the thought life of the Greeks as this thought life relates to the pictorial imagination of prehistoric times. In Fichte's worldview, the thought becomes the ego experience, just as the image became the thought in the Greek thinkers. With Fichte, the worldview wants to experience self-consciousness; with Plato and Aristotle, it wanted to think the consciousness of the soul.

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[ 44 ] Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make room for faith, so Fichte declared cognition to be a mere appearance in order to have a clear path before him for living action, for moral deeds. Schiller also attempted something similar. Only in his case, beauty took the place of faith in Kant and action in Fichte. Schiller's importance for the development of the world view is usually underestimated. Just as Goethe had to complain that he was not accepted as a natural scientist because he was once used to being taken as a poet, so those who delve into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he is so little appreciated by those who deal with worldview histories, because his field is confined to the realm of poetry.

[ 45 ] As a thoroughly independent thinker, Schiller confronts his inspiration Kant. The poet, who held up a mirror to the depravity of his time in The Robbers and Cabal and Love, certainly did not hold the majesty of moral faith to which Kant sought to elevate mankind in low esteem. But he said to himself: Should it be absolutely necessary that man can only rise to the heights of the categorical imperative by fighting against his inclinations, desires and instincts? Kant wanted to attribute to man's sensual nature only the inclination to the base, to the selfish, to the sensually pleasing; and only whoever rises above this sensual nature, whoever kills it and lets the purely spiritual voice of duty speak within him: he can be virtuous. Thus Kant lowered the natural man in order to raise the moral man all the higher. To Schiller, this seemed to be something unworthy of man. Should it not be possible to ennoble man's instincts in such a way that they do the dutiful, the moral, of their own accord? Then they would not need to be suppressed in order to have a moral effect. Schiller therefore contrasted Kant's strict demand for duty with his own view in the following epigram:

Conscience scruples.

I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do so with reluctance,
And so it often grieves me that I am not virtuous.

Decision.

There is no other advice, you must seek to despise them,
And with loathing then do as duty bids you.

[ 46 ] Schiller sought to resolve these "scruples of conscience" in his own way. Two instincts actually rule in man: the sensual instinct and the rational instinct. If man abandons himself to the sensual instinct, he is a plaything of his desires and passions, in short of his selfishness. If he gives himself over completely to the rational instinct, he is a slave to his strict commandments, his relentless logic, his categorical imperative. A man who wants to live only the sensual impulse must silence reason within himself; one who wants to serve only reason must kill sensuality. If the former hears reason, he submits to it only involuntarily; if the latter hears the voice of his desires, he feels it as a burden on his path of virtue. The physical and spiritual nature of man thus seem to live in a fatal dichotomy. Is there not a state in man in which both instincts, the sensual and the spiritual, are in harmony? Schiller answers the question with "yes". It is the state in which the beauty is created and enjoyed. Anyone who creates a work of art is following a free natural instinct. They do it out of inclination. But it is not physical passions that drive him; it is the imagination, the spirit. It is the same with those who indulge in the pleasure of a work of art. It satisfies his spirit at the same time as it acts on his sensuality. Man can pursue his desires without heeding the higher laws of the spirit; he can fulfill his duty without worrying about sensuality; a beautiful work of art affects his pleasure without arousing his desire; and it transports him into a spiritual world in which he dwells out of inclination. In this state, man is like a child who follows his inclination in his actions and does not ask whether it contradicts the laws of reason: "Through beauty, the sensual man ... to thinking; through beauty the spiritual man is led back to matter and returned to the world of the senses." (18th letter on the aesthetic education of man.) "The high equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with strength and vigor, is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no surer touchstone of true aesthetic goodness. If, after an enjoyment of this kind, we find ourselves favorably disposed to any particular mode of feeling or action, but awkward and discontented to another, this serves as an unmistakable proof that we have not experienced a purely aesthetic effect, whether it was due to the object or to our mode of feeling, or (as is almost always the case) to both at the same time." (Letter 22.) Because through beauty man is neither a slave to sensuality nor to reason, but through it both work together in his soul, Schiller compares the impulse to beauty to that of the child, who in his play does not subject his mind to the laws of reason, but uses it freely according to his inclination. This is why he calls this instinct for beauty the play instinct: "Man is only serious about the pleasant, the good, the perfect; but he plays with beauty. Of course, we should not remember here the games that are going on in real life and which are usually only directed towards very material objects; but in real life we would also search in vain for the beauty we are talking about here. The really existing beauty is worthy of the really existing play instinct; but through the ideal of beauty, which reason sets up, an ideal of the play instinct is also given up, which man should have in mind in all his games." (Letter 15.) In the fulfillment of this ideal play instinct, man finds the reality of freedom. He no longer obeys reason; and he no longer follows sensual inclination. He acts out of inclination as if he were acting out of reason. "Man should only play with beauty, and he should only play with beauty ... Because, to put it bluntly ... man only plays where he is human in the full meaning of the word, and he is only fully human where he plays. " Schiller could also have said: In play man is free; in the fulfillment of duty and in devotion to sensuality he is unfree. If man now also wants to be man in the full meaning of the word in his moral actions, that is, if he wants to be free, he must have the same relationship to his virtues as to beauty. He must ennoble his inclinations into virtues; and he must so imbue himself with his virtues that, according to his whole nature, he has no other impulse than to follow them. A man who has established this harmony between inclination and duty can at every moment count on the goodness of his actions as a matter of course.

[ 47 ] The social coexistence of people can also be viewed from this point of view. The person who follows his sensual drives is selfish. He would only ever pursue his own welfare if the state did not regulate coexistence through rational laws. The free man accomplishes of his own accord what the state must demand of the selfish man. In a community of free people there is no need for coercive laws. "In the midst of the terrible realm of forces and in the midst of the sacred realm of laws, the aesthetic instinct of education is unmistakably building a third, happy realm of play and appearance, in which it removes the shackles of all relationships from man and frees him from everything that is called compulsion, both physically and morally." (Letter 27.) "This realm extends upwards to where reason rules with unconditional necessity and all 'matter' ceases; it extends downwards to where the natural instinct rules with blind compulsion." Schiller thus sees a moral realm as an ideal in which the virtuous mind rules with the same ease and freedom as taste in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty the model of a perfect moral social order that liberates man in every direction. He concludes the beautiful treatise in which he presents this ideal of his with the question of whether such an order exists anywhere, and answers it thus: "According to need, (it) exists in every finely-tuned soul; in fact, one would probably like to find it only like the pure church and the pure republic, in a few select circles, where not the mindless imitation of foreign customs, but one's own beautiful nature guides conduct, where man walks through the most intricate relationships with bold simplicity and calm innocence, and has no need to offend another's freedom in order to assert his own, nor to throw away his dignity in order to show grace."

[ 48 ] In this virtue ennobled to beauty, Schiller found a mediation between Kant's and Goethe's worldviews. No matter how great the spell that Kant cast on Schiller when he himself defended the ideal of pure humanity against the truly prevailing moral order, Schiller became an admirer of Goethe's view of the world and life when he got to know him better, and his mind, always striving for the purest clarity of thought, would not let him rest until he had succeeded in penetrating Goethe's wisdom conceptually. The great satisfaction that Goethe drew from his views on beauty and art, also for his way of life, led Schiller more and more to the former's way of thinking. When he thanked Goethe for sending him "Wilhelm Meister", he did so with the words: "I cannot express to you how embarrassed I often feel when I look from a product of this kind into the philosophical being. There everything is so cheerful, so lively, so harmoniously resolved and so humanly true; here everything is so strict, so rigid and abstract, and so highly unnatural, because all nature is only synthesis and all philosophy antithesis. It is true that I may testify to having remained as true to nature in my speculations as is compatible with the concept of analysis; indeed, perhaps I have remained more true to it than our Kantians thought permissible and possible. But nevertheless I feel no less vividly the infinite distance between life and reasoning, and cannot refrain from interpreting in such a melancholy moment for a defect in my nature what in a cheerful hour I must regard merely as a natural characteristic of the thing. This much, however, is certain: the poet is the only true man, and the best philosopher is only a caricature compared to him." Schiller's judgment can only refer to Kant's philosophy, on which Schiller gained his experience. It distances man from nature in many respects. It has no faith in nature, but only accepts as valid truth that which is taken from man's own spiritual organization. As a result, all its judgments lack that fresh, substantive colorfulness that we gain through direct observation of natural processes and things themselves. She moves in bloodless, gray, cold abstractions. It gives up the warmth that we gain from direct contact with things and beings in exchange for the coldness of their abstract concepts. And in the moral sphere, too, Kant's worldview shows the same antagonism to nature. The purely rational concept of duty is its highest aspiration. What man loves, what he is inclined to: everything that is directly natural in the human being must be subordinated to this ideal of duty. Even in the region of beauty, Kant eradicates the part that man must have according to his original sensations and feelings. The beautiful should evoke a completely "disinterested" pleasure. Let us hear how devoted, how "interested" Schiller is in the work in which he admires the highest level of the artistic. He says of "Wilhelm Meister": "I can express the feeling that pervades and possesses me when reading this work, and indeed to an increasing degree the further I get into it, no better than through a sweet and intimate comfort, through a feeling of spiritual and physical health, and I would vouch for the fact that it must be the same for all readers as a whole. I explain this feeling of well-being by the calm clarity, smoothness and transparency that prevails throughout, which leaves not the slightest thing behind that leaves the mind unsatisfied and restless, and does not drive the movement of the same further than is necessary to kindle and maintain a happy life in man." Thus speaks not one who believes in disinterested pleasure, but one who considers the pleasure of beauty capable of such ennoblement that it is no degradation to give oneself completely to this pleasure. Our interest should not be extinguished when we come face to face with the work of art; rather, we should be able to show our interest in that which is an emanation of the spirit. And the "true" human being should also have this kind of interest in the beautiful in relation to moral concepts. In a letter to Goethe, Schiller writes: "It is really worth noting that slackness about aesthetic things is always connected with moral slackness, and that the pure, strict striving for the high beauty, with the highest liberality towards everything that is nature, will lead to rigorism in moral matters."

[ 49 ] Schiller felt the alienation from nature in the world view, in the entire contemporary culture within which he lived, so strongly that he made it the subject of a consideration in the essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry". He compares the view of life of his time with that of the Greeks and asks himself: "How is it that we, who are so infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, ... pay homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to it with intimacy and can embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest feeling?" And he answers this question: "This is because nature has disappeared from humanity and we only encounter it again in its truth outside of it in the inanimate world. It is not our greater naturalness but, on the contrary, the natural un-naturalness of our circumstances, conditions and customs that drives us to provide the awakening instinct for truth and simplicity, which, like the moral disposition from which it flows, lies incorruptible and ineffaceable in all human hearts, with a satisfaction in the physical world that cannot be hoped for in the moral world. That is why the feeling with which we cling to nature is so closely related to the feeling with which we lament the fled age of childhood and childlike innocence. Our childhood is the only unmutilated nature that we still find in cultivated humanity, so it is no wonder that every footstep of nature apart from us leads us back to our childhood." It was quite different for the Greeks. They lived a life within the natural. Everything they did came from their natural imagination, feelings and sensibilities. They were intimately connected with nature. Modern man feels a contrast to nature in his being. But since the urge for this primordial mother of existence cannot be eradicated, it will transform itself in the modern soul into a longing for nature, into a search for it. The Greek had nature; the modern seeks nature. "As long as man is still pure, not raw, nature, he acts as an undivided sensual unity and as a harmonizing whole. Senses and reason, receptive and self-acting faculties, have not yet separated in their business, much less are they in contradiction with each other. His sensations are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the insubstantial play of imagination; those arise from the law of necessity, these arise from reality. When man has entered the state of culture and art has laid its hand on him, that sensual harmony is abolished in him, and he can only express himself as moral unity, that is, as striving for unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking, which in the first state was real, now exists merely ideally; it is no longer in him, but outside him, as a thought that is first to be realized, no longer as a fact of his life." The basic mood of the Greek mind was naïve, that of the modern is sentimental; the world view of the former could therefore be realistic. For he had not yet separated the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature still included the spirit. If he left himself to nature, he did so in the face of spirit-filled nature. Modernity is different. It has detached the spirit from nature and elevated it to the gray realm of abstraction. If it were to surrender to its nature, it would do so in the face of spirit-filled nature. Therefore, his highest striving must be directed towards the ideal; by striving for this, he will reconcile spirit and nature. In Goethe's way of thinking, Schiller found something akin to the Greek way. Goethe believed that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his eyes because he perceived reality as an undivided unity of spirit and nature. In Schiller's opinion, he had retained something to which the sentimental man only returns when he reaches the summit of his aspirations. And he climbs such a peak in the aesthetic state described by Schiller, in which sensuality and reason have found their harmony.

[ 50 ] The essence of the newer development of worldview is meaningfully characterized by the statement that Schiller made to Goethe in his letter of 23 August 1794: "If you had been born a Greek... and had you been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now ... since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withholds from your imagination with the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within, as it were, and in a rational way." Schiller feels that these sentences reveal the course of the development of the life of the soul from Greek times to his own. The life of the soul revealed itself to the Greek in the life of thought; and he could accept this revelation, for thought was for him a perception, as colors or sounds are. This thought has faded for modern man; he must experience within the soul that which creatively weaves through the world; and in order that the imperceptible life of thought may nevertheless have vividness, it must be filled with imagination. Such an imagination that feels at one with the creative powers of nature.

[ 51 ] Because in modern man the soul consciousness has changed into self-consciousness, the question of worldview arises: How does self-consciousness experience itself alive in such a way that its experience knows itself in the creation of the living forces of the world? Schiller answered this question in his own way by claiming life in artistic feeling as his ideal. In this feeling, human self-consciousness feels its kinship with that which lies beyond the mere image of nature. In it, man feels grasped by the spirit, in that he surrenders himself to the world as nature and a being of the senses. Leibniz seeks to comprehend the human soul as a monad; Fichte does not start from a great idea through which it should become clear what the human soul is; he seeks an experience in which this soul grasps itself in its essence; Schiller asks: Is there an experience of the human soul in which it can feel how it is rooted in the spiritual-real? Goethe experiences ideas within himself that are also ideas of nature for him. In Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, the experienced idea, one could also say the ideal experience, wrestles its way into the soul; in Greek thought, this took place with the perceived idea, the ideal perception.

[ 52 ] The view of the world and of life that was naively present in Goethe, and for which Schiller strove in all detours of thought, does not have the need for that generally valid truth that sees its ideal in mathematics; it is satisfied by the other truth that arises for our spirit from direct intercourse with the real world. The insights that Goethe drew from the contemplation of works of art in Italy were certainly not of the same absolute certainty as the theorems of mathematics. But they were also less abstract. But Goethe stood before them with the feeling "There is necessity, there is God. A truth in the sense that it is something other than that which is also revealed in the perfect work of art did not exist for Goethe. What art does with its technical means: Sound, marble, color, rhythm, etc., that is embodied is taken from the same source of truth from which the philosopher also draws, who, however, does not have the directly vivid means of representation, but who has only the thought, the idea itself, at his disposal. "Poetry points to the mysteries of nature and seeks to solve them through the image. Philosophy points to the mysteries of reason and seeks to solve them through words," says Goethe. But reason and nature are ultimately an inseparable unity for him, based on the same truth. A striving for knowledge that lives in an abstract world, detached from things, is not considered by him to be the highest. "The highest thing would be to realize that everything factual is already theory." The blueness of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color phenomena. "Just don't look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson." In his Anthropology, the psychologist Heinroth described the thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the natural formation of plants and animals as "representational thinking". By this he meant that this thinking was not separate from the objects; that the objects, the views, were intimately interpenetrated with the thinking, that Goethe's thinking was at the same time a viewing, his viewing at the same time a thinking. Schiller became a keen observer and depictor of this way of thinking. He writes about it in a letter to Goethe: "Your observant gaze, which rests so quietly and purely on things, never puts you in danger of going astray, into which both speculation and the arbitrary and merely self-obedient imagination so easily stray. In your correct intuition lies all and far more completely what analysis laboriously seeks, and it is only because it lies in you as a whole that your own wealth is hidden from you; for unfortunately we only know what we separate. Spirits of your kind therefore seldom know how far they have penetrated, and how little cause they have to borrow from philosophy, which can only learn from them. " For Goethe's and Schiller's view of the world, truth does not only exist within science, but also within art. Goethe's opinion is this: "I think science could be called the knowledge of the general, the deduced knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem." Goethe describes the interaction between scientific cognition and the artistic shaping of knowledge: "It is obvious that an ... artist must only become the greater and more decisive if, in addition to his talent, he is also an instructed botanist, if he recognizes from the root the influence of the various parts on the flourishing and growth of the plant, their purpose and reciprocal effects, if he understands and considers the successive development of the leaves, flowers, fertilization, fruit and the new germ. He will then not only show his taste by choosing from the appearances, but he will also astonish us at the same time by a correct representation of the characteristics." In this way, truth prevails in artistic creation, for according to this view, the style of art rests on "the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms". One consequence of this view of truth and its cognition is that the imagination was allowed its share in the creation of knowledge and the abstract mind was not seen as the only faculty of knowledge. The ideas that Goethe based his observations on plant and animal formation on were not gray, abstract thoughts, but rather sensory-supersensible images generated from the imagination. Only observation with imagination can really lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction: this is Goethe's conviction. This is why he emphasizes that Galileo observed as a genius to whom "one case counts for a thousand" by "developing the doctrine of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps". The imagination uses the one case to create a substantive image of the essential in the phenomena; the abstracting mind can only gain a general rule of their course from the combination, comparison and calculation of the phenomena. This belief of Goethe's in the cognitive capacity of the imagination, which rises to a co-experience of the creative forces of the world, rests on his entire conception of the world. Anyone who, like him, sees the workings of nature in everything, can also see nothing in the spiritual content of the human imagination but higher products of nature. Fantasy images are products of nature; and since they reproduce nature, they can only contain the truth, for otherwise nature would be lying to itself with these images that it creates of itself. Only people with imagination can reach the highest level of cognition. Goethe calls them the "comprehensive" and "contemplative" in contrast to the merely "inquisitive", who remain at a lower level of knowledge. "The inquisitive require a calm, disinterested gaze, a curious restlessness, a clear mind ...; they also only process what they find in a scientific sense." "The observers already behave productively, and knowledge, by increasing itself, demands, without realizing it, the observation and passes over to it; and as much as the knowers crucify and bless themselves before the imagination, they must, before they know it, call the productive imagination to their aid... The comprehensive, which in a prouder sense could be called the creative, behave productively in the highest sense; for by starting from ideas, they already express the unity of the whole, and it is to a certain extent afterwards the business of nature to fit itself into this idea." Anyone who believes in such a way of cognition cannot be helped by talking about the limitations of human cognition in the Kantian manner. For that which man needs as his truth, he experiences within himself. The core of nature lies within man. Goethe's and Schiller's view of the world does not demand of truth that it be a repetition of world phenomena in the imagination, that the latter, in the literal sense, agrees with something outside of man. That which appears in man is not present as such, as the ideal, as spiritual being, in any external world; but it is that which ultimately appears as the summit of all becoming. Therefore, for this world view, truth need not appear to all people in the same form. It can have an individual character in each individual. For those who seek truth in its correspondence with an exterior, there is only one form of it, and they will search with Kant for that "metaphysics" which alone "will be able to appear as science. Whoever sees in truth the highest fruit of all existence, that in which the "universe, if it could perceive itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being" (Goethe, in his essay on Winkelmann), can say with Goethe: "If I know my relationship to myself and to the outside world, then I call it truth. And so everyone can have their own truth, and yet it is always the same." The essence of being does not lie in what the outside world provides us with, but in what man produces within himself without it already being present in the outside world. Goethe therefore opposes those who want to penetrate the so-called "interior of nature through instruments and objective experiments, for "man in himself, insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest and most precise physical apparatus that can exist, and it is precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics that experiments have been separated from man, as it were, and that one wants to recognize nature merely in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can achieve." But "man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Yes, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must tame and modify them all in order to assimilate them to some extent."

[ 53 ] Goethe speaks to his view of the world neither of a mere conceptual cognition, nor of a belief, but of a seeing in the spirit. He writes to Jacobi: "You hold to faith in God; I to seeing." This seeing in the spirit, as it is meant here, enters into the development of the world-view as that power of the soul which corresponds to an age to which thought is no longer what it was to the Greek thinker; to which it rather reveals itself as a product of self-consciousness; but as such, which is won by the fact that this self-consciousness knows itself within the spiritually creative powers in nature. Goethe is the representative of an epoch of worldview that feels compelled to move from mere thinking to seeing. Schiller endeavors to justify this transition to Kant.

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[ 54 ] The intimate alliance that Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries forged between poetry and worldview has, at the beginning of our century, deprived the latter of the lifeless character that it must acquire if it moves solely in the region of the abstracting intellect. The result of this covenant was the belief that there is a personal, an individual element in the world view. It is possible for man to create his relationship to the world according to his own nature, and yet to immerse himself in reality, not in a merely fantastic world of schemes. His ideal need not be the Kantian, a once and for all completed theoretical view along the lines of mathematics. Only from the spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that elevates human individuality can an idea like that of Jean Paul (1763-1825) be born: "The heart of genius, to which all other brilliance and auxiliary powers only serve, has and gives a genuine characteristic, namely a new view of the world and of life." How could it be the hallmark of the most highly developed human being, the genius, to create a new view of the world and of life if there were only one true, universally valid view of the world, if the world of imagination had only one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences the highest form of existence within himself. He writes to Jacobi: "We do not actually believe in divine freedom, God, virtue, but we really see them as already given or giving themselves, and this seeing is precisely a knowledge, and a higher one, whereas the knowledge of the intellect merely refers to a lower seeing. Reason could be called the consciousness of the sole positive, for all the positive of sensuality ultimately dissolves into that of spirituality, and the intellect eternally drives its being only with the relative, which in itself is nothing, therefore before God the more or less and all levels of comparison fall away." Jean Paul does not want to let anything rob him of the right to experience the truth within himself and to set all the powers of the soul, not just the logical mind, in motion. "The heart, the living root of man, should not be torn from my breast by transcendental philosophy (Jean Paul means the world view that follows Kant) and replaced by a pure instinct of selfhood; I will not allow myself to be freed from the dependence on love in order to be saved by pride alone." Thus he rejects Kant's unworldly moral order. "I maintain that, as there are four last things, so there are four first things: Beauty, truth, morality and blessedness, and that the synthesis of these is not only necessary, but also already given, but only (and therefore it is precisely one) in incomprehensible spiritual-organic unity, without which we can find no understanding and no transition at all in these four evangelists or parts of the world." In Kant and Fichte, the critique of the intellect, proceeding with the utmost logical rigor, had come so far as to reduce the independent significance of the real, the vital, to a mere appearance, to a dream image. This view was unbearable for imaginative people who enriched life with the figures of their imagination. These people sensed reality, it was present in their perception, in their souls; and they were to have its mere dreamlike nature proven to them. "The windows of philosophical auditoriums are too high to allow a view of the alleys of real life," says Jean Paul.

[ 55 ] Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced all knowledge that did not arise from within himself, because only from this can certainty arise. The counter-current to his world view is Romanticism. Fichte only accepts the truth, and the inner being of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the Romantic world view only accepts the inner being and declares everything that springs from this inner being to be truly valuable. The ego should not be bound by anything external. Everything it creates has its justification.

[ 56 ] It can be said of Romanticism that it pursued Schiller's sentence: "Man only plays where he is man in the full meaning of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays" to its utmost consequences. She wants to turn the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed human being knows no other norm than the laws that he creates with his freely exercised imagination, just as the artist creates those that he imprints on his work. He rises above everything that determines him from the outside and lives entirely out of himself. The whole world is merely material for his aesthetic play. The seriousness of the everyday man is not rooted in truth. The cognizing soul cannot take things seriously in themselves, because they are not valuable to it in themselves. Rather, it is the soul itself that gives them value. The mood of the mind, which is aware of its sovereignty over things, is what the Romantics call the ironic. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819) gave the following explanation of Romantic irony: "The artist's mind must summarize all directions in an all-encompassing view, and we call this overarching, all-destroying view irony. "Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the leaders of the Romantic school of thought, says of the ironic mood that it "overlooks everything and rises infinitely above everything conditional, even above some art, virtue or genius". Those who live in this mood feel bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of their actions. He can "tune himself at will philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, anciently or modernly". The ironic spirit rises above a truth that wants to be shackled by logic; but it also rises above an eternal, moral world order. For nothing tells him what he should do but himself alone. The ironist should do what he likes, for his morality can only be an aesthetic one. The Romantics are the heirs of Fichte's idea of the uniqueness of the ego. However, they did not want to fill this ego with ideas of reason and moral faith as Fichte did, but relied above all on the freest power of the soul, the imagination, which is not bound by anything. For them, thought was completely absorbed by poetry. Novalis says: "It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that poets constitute a special guild. It is nothing special at all. It is the peculiar behavior of the human spirit. Does not every human being strive and strive every minute?" The ego, occupied with itself alone, can arrive at the highest truth: "It seems to man as if he is engaged in a conversation and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most evident thoughts in a wonderful way." Basically, the Romantics wanted nothing more than what Goethe and Schiller had also made their confession: a view of man that makes him appear as perfect and free as possible. Novalis experiences his poetry and reflections from a mood of the soul that relates to the image of the world like that of Fichte. But Fichte's spirit works in the sharp contours of pure concepts; Novalis' from the fullness of a mind that feels where others think, lives in love where others want to encompass the essence and processes of the world in ideas. The age seeks in its representatives the higher spiritual nature behind the outer world of the senses, that spiritual nature in which the self-conscious soul is rooted, which cannot be rooted in the outer reality of the senses. Novalis feels, experiences himself in the higher spiritual nature. What he expresses, he feels through his original genius like the revelations of this spiritual nature itself. He notes to himself:

"One man succeeded in lifting the veil of the goddess to Sais-
but what did he see? He saw the wonder of wonders himself."

Novalis gives himself as feeling the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and the human self-consciousness as the organ through which this mystery says: This is me, when he expresses his feeling thus: "The spirit world is indeed already open to us, it is always manifest. If we suddenly became as elastic as necessary, we would see ourselves in the midst of it."