The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Reactionary Worldviews

[ 1 ] "The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the flower, and one could say that it is refuted by the flower; likewise, the flower is declared by the fruit to be a false existence of the plant, and as its truth the flower takes the place of the flower. These forms not only differ, but also displace each other as incompatible. But their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of organic unity, in which they not only do not contradict each other, but one is as necessary as the other, and this same necessity is what constitutes the life of the whole." In these words Hegel expresses one of the most important characteristics of his way of thinking. He believed that the things of reality carry contradiction within themselves, and that it is precisely in this that the impetus for their becoming, for their living movement, lies, that they continually seek to overcome this contradiction. The blossom would never become fruit if it were without contradiction. It would then have no reason to emerge from its contradiction-free existence. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) started out from the exact opposite mindset. Hegel is a sharp thinker, but at the same time a mind thirsty for reality. He only wants to have thoughts that have absorbed the rich, saturated content of the world. That is why his thoughts must be in perpetual flux, in constant development, in contradictory movement like reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker; he does not seek to penetrate things, but views them from the corner of his mind. The purely logical thinker is disturbed by contradiction; he demands clear concepts that can exist side by side. The one must not interfere with the other. The thinker faces reality, which is full of contradictions, in a peculiar position. The concepts it provides him with do not satisfy him. They violate his logical needs. This feeling of dissatisfaction becomes the starting point of his world view. Herbart says to himself: "If the reality spread out before my senses and my mind provides me with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the true reality to which my thinking aspires. His task arises from this. The contradictory reality is not real being at all, but only appearance. In this view, Herbart follows Kant to a certain extent. But while the latter declares true being to be unattainable for thinking cognition, Herbart believes that he can advance from appearance to being precisely by working through the contradictory concepts of appearance and transforming them into non-contradictory ones. Like smoke points to fire, appearance points to an underlying being. If we work out a non-contradictory picture of the world from the contradictory picture given to our senses and our mind by logical thinking, we have in the latter what we are looking for. It does not appear to us in this lack of contradiction; but it lies behind what appears to us as the true, genuine reality. Herbart therefore does not set out to understand the directly present reality as such, but creates another reality through which the former is to become explicable in the first place. He thus arrives at an abstract system of thought, which is quite meagre compared to the rich, full reality. True reality cannot be a unity, for such a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite diversity of real things and processes with all their contradictions. It must be a multiplicity of simple, eternally identical beings in which there is no becoming, no development. Only a simple being that unchangingly preserves its characteristics is without contradiction. A being that evolves is something different at one moment than at another, that is, it contradicts at one point in time the characteristics it has at another. A multiplicity of simple, never-changing beings is therefore the true world. And what we perceive are not these simple beings, but only their relationships to one another. These relationships have nothing to do with the true being. When one simple being enters into a relationship with another, neither is changed by it; but I perceive the result of their relationship. Our immediate reality is a sum of relationships between real beings. When a being leaves its relationship with another being and instead enters into a relationship with a third being, something has happened without the being of the beings themselves being affected by this event. We perceive this happening. It is our apparent, contradictory reality. It is interesting to see how Herbart imagines the life of the soul on the basis of this view. Like all other real beings, it is a simple, unchanging entity. It now enters into relations with other existing beings. The expression of these relationships is the life of imagination. Everything that takes place within us: Imagining, feeling, willing, is a play of relationships between the soul and the rest of the world of simple beings. You see, the life of the soul is thus made into a semblance of relationships into which the simple being of the soul enters with the world. Herbart is a mathematical mind. And basically his whole conception of the world is born out of mathematical ideas. A number does not change when it becomes the element of an arithmetical operation. Three remains three whether it is added to four or subtracted from seven. Just as the numbers stand within the arithmetical operations, so the simple beings stand within the relationships that develop between them. And this is why Herbart also turns the science of the soul into an example of arithmetic. He seeks to apply mathematics to psychology. He calculates how ideas are mutually dependent, how they interact, what results they produce through their interaction. For him, the "I" is not the spiritual entity that we grasp in our self-consciousness, but it is the result of the interaction of all ideas, thus nothing other than a sum, a supreme expression of relationships. We know nothing of the simple being that underlies our soul life, but its continuous relationships with other beings do appear to us. Thus, a being is entangled in this play of relationships. This is expressed in the fact that they all strive towards a center, and this center is the ego thought.

[ 2 ] Herbart is in a different sense a representative of the more recent development of the world view than Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. They seek a representation of the self-conscious soul in a world view that can contain this self-conscious soul. They thus express the spiritual impulse of their age. Herbart stands before this impulse; he must feel that the impulse is there. He seeks to understand it; but he finds no possibility of living into the self-conscious soul being in thinking as he imagines it to be correct. He remains outside it. One can see from Herbart's view of the world what difficulties arise for thinking when it wants to grasp what it has become in its essence in the development of humanity. Next to Hegel, Herbart looks like someone who struggles in vain for a goal that the other thinks he has achieved. Herbart's constructions of thought are an attempt to depict from the outside what Hegel wants to depict in his inner co-experience. Thinkers such as Herbart are also significant for the basic character of the modern worldview. They point to the goal to be achieved precisely by revealing the unsuitable means to this goal. The spiritual goal of the age struggles in Herbart; his spiritual power is not sufficient to understand and express this struggle in a sufficient way. The progress of the development of world-views shows that in addition to the personalities who stand at the height of the impulses of the time, there are always those who develop world-views out of a failure to understand these impulses. Such worldviews can be described as reactionary.

[ 3 ] Herbart falls back into the Leibnizian view. His simple soul life is unchanging. It does not arise, it does not pass away. It was present when this apparent life began, which man encloses with his ego; and it will detach itself again from these relationships and continue to exist when this life ceases. Herbart arrives at a concept of God through his view of the world, which contains many simple beings that bring about events through their relationships. We perceive purposefulness within these events. But the relationships could only be random, chaotic ones if the beings, which, according to their own being, have nothing to do with each other, were left to themselves. The fact that they are purposeful therefore points to a wise world ruler who orders their relationships. "No one is able to determine the nature of the deity more precisely," says Herbart. "He condemns the pretensions of systems that speak of God as a known object to be grasped in sharp outlines, through which we could elevate ourselves to a knowledge for which we are denied the data."

[ 4 ] Man's actions and his artistic creations are completely suspended in the air in this world view. There is no possibility of inserting them into it. For what relationship should exist between a relationship of simple beings who are indifferent to all processes and between the actions of human beings? Therefore Herbart must seek an independent root for both ethics and aesthetics. He believes to find it in human feeling. When man perceives things or processes, the feeling of liking or disliking can be attached to them. So we like it when a person's will takes a direction that agrees with their convictions. If we perceive the opposite, the feeling of displeasure settles in us. Because of this feeling, we call the harmony of the conviction with the will morally good, the discord morally reprehensible. Such a feeling can only be linked to a relationship between moral elements. The will as such is morally indifferent to us. So is conviction. Only when they work together does ethical pleasure or displeasure come to light. Herbart calls a relationship of moral elements a practical idea. He enumerates five such practical-ethical ideas: the idea of moral freedom, consisting in the agreement of will and conviction; the idea of perfection, which is based on the fact that the strong is pleasing in comparison with the weak; the idea of right, which arises from displeasure at the dispute; the idea of benevolence, which expresses the pleasure one feels when one will promotes the other; and the idea of retribution, which demands that all good and evil that has emanated from an individual be redressed to that individual. Herbart builds ethics on a human feeling, on moral sentiment. He separates it from the view of the world, which has to do with what is, and makes it a sum of demands of what ought to be. He connects it with aesthetics, indeed makes it a component of it. For this science also contains claims about what ought to be. It too has to do with relationships to which feelings are linked. The individual color leaves us aesthetically indifferent. If another color is placed next to it, we can either be satisfied or displeased by this combination. What is pleasing in its combination is beautiful; what is displeasing is ugly. Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898) built a science of art in a spiritual manner on these principles. Only one part of it is ethics or the science of the good, which considers those beautiful relationships that come into consideration in the field of action. Robert Zimmermann's significant remarks on aesthetics (the science of art) testify to the fact that important stimuli for the development of the spirit can also emanate from attempts at a world view that do not reach the height of contemporary impulses.

[ 5 ] Herbart, because of his mind, which is oriented towards the mathematically necessary, was fortunate in observing those processes of human mental life that really take place in the same way with a certain regularity in all people. The more intimate, more individual ones will of course not be. Such a mathematical mind will overlook what is original and peculiar in every personality. It will, however, gain a certain insight into the average nature of the spirit and at the same time, with its mathematical certainty, a dominion over the development of the spirit. Just as the mechanical laws enable us to develop technique, so the laws of the life of the soul enable us to educate, to develop the technique of training the soul. This is why Herbart's work has been fruitful in the field of pedagogy. He has found a rich following among pedagogues. But not only among them. This does not seem obvious at first glance in view of this world view, which presents a picture of meagre, gray generalities. But it can be explained by the fact that precisely those natures most in need of a world view have a certain inclination towards such general concepts, which line up with rigid necessity like the links of an arithmetical example. There is something captivating about experiencing how link after link of thought chains itself together as if by itself, because it awakens a feeling of certainty. The mathematical sciences are held in such high esteem because of this certainty. They build themselves up, as it were, of their own accord; one only provides the thought material and leaves the rest to automatic logical necessity. In the progress of Hegelian thought, which is saturated with reality, one must constantly intervene. There is more warmth, more immediacy in this thinking; but for this, its flowing forth requires the constant intervention of the soul. After all, it is reality that one captures in thought; this ever-flowing reality, individual in each of its points, which resists all logical rigidity. Hegel also had numerous students and followers. But these were far less loyal than those of Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality animated his thoughts, so long did it cast its spell; and the effect of this spell was convincing. After his death, many of his students went their own ways. And that is only natural. For those who are independent will also shape their relationship to reality in an independent way. With Herbart's students, we see something different. They are faithful. They continue the master's teachings; but they retain the basis of his thoughts in unchanged form. Anyone who immerses himself in Hegel's way of thinking immerses himself in the development of the world, which unfolds in countless stages of development. The individual can be inspired to follow this path of becoming, but he can shape the individual stages according to his individual way of thinking. With Herbart, we are dealing with a firmly integrated system of thought that inspires confidence through its solid structure. You can reject it. But if you accept it, then you will have to accept it in its original form. Because the individual, the personal, which forces you to confront your own self with the self of others: this is precisely what is missing.

[ 6 ] "Life is a miserable thing; I have resolved to spend mine thinking about it." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once said these words to Wieland at the beginning of his time at university. His world view grew out of this sentiment. Schopenhauer had gone through hard experiences of his own and the observation of the sad experiences of others when he took up philosophical thought as a new goal in life. The sudden death of his father, caused by a fall from an attic, the bad experiences in his commercial profession, the sight of scenes of human misery on the journeys the young man made, and many other things had not so much created in him the need to know the world because he considered it worth knowing, but rather the quite different need to create a means of bearing it in the contemplation of things. He needed a world view to calm his gloomy state of mind. When he entered the university in 1809, the ideas that Kant, Fichte and Schelling had incorporated into the development of the German world view were in full effect. Hegel's star was rising. Hegel had published his first major work "The Phenomenology of Spirit" in 1806. In Göttingen, Schopenhauer listened to the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of "Aenesidemus", who was in some respects an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless described Kant and Plato to the student as the two great minds to which he should adhere. Schopenhauer immersed himself enthusiastically in Kant's way of thinking. He described the revolution that this brought about in his mind as a spiritual rebirth. He finds it all the more satisfying because he finds it in full agreement with the views of the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him, those of Plato. The latter says: As long as we relate to things and processes merely perceptively, we are like people who are tied up in a dark cave, so that they cannot turn their heads, and see nothing but, by the light of a fire burning behind them, on the wall opposite them, the shadows of real things passing between them and the fire, and indeed of each other, and each of themselves only the shadows. Just as these shadows relate to real things, so our perceptual things relate to the ideas, which are the truly real. The things of the perceptible world come into being and pass away, the ideas are eternal. Did not Kant teach the same? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him too? Although the Königsberg sage did not ascribe this eternal reality to the Ideas, Schopenhauer found complete agreement between Plato and Kant in their view of the reality spread out in space and time. This view soon became his incontrovertible truth. He said to himself: I gain knowledge of things insofar as I see them, hear them, feel them, etc., in a word: insofar as I imagine them. An object exists for me only in my imagination. Heaven, earth, etc. are therefore my ideas, because the "thing in itself" that corresponds to them has only become my object by assuming the character of an idea.

[ 7 ] As absolutely correct as Schopenhauer found everything that Kant put forward about the imaginative character of the world of perception, he felt little satisfied by Kant's remarks about the "thing-in-itself". Schulze was also an opponent of Kant's views. How can we know anything about a "thing in itself", how can we even utter a word about it, if we only know about ideas, and the "thing in itself" lies completely outside all ideas? Schopenhauer had to look for another way to arrive at the "thing-in-itself". In this search he was much more influenced by contemporary world views than he ever admitted. The element that Schopenhauer added to the conviction he had gained from Kant and Plato, as a "thing in itself", we find in Fichte, whose lectures he heard in Berlin in 1811. And we also find it in Schelling. Schopenhauer was able to hear the most mature form of Fichte's views in Berlin. This form has been handed down in Fichte's posthumous writings. The latter proclaims emphatically, while Schopenhauer, by his own admission, "listens to him attentively", that all being is ultimately founded in a universal will. As soon as man finds the will within himself, he gains the conviction that there is a world independent of his individual. Will is not knowledge of the individual, but a form of real being. Fichte could also have described his world view as "The world as knowledge and will". And in Schelling's essay "On the nature of human freedom and the objects connected with it", there is the sentence: "In the last and highest instance, there is no other being than willing. Willing is primordial being and all its predicates fit this alone: groundlessness, eternity, independence from time, self-affirmation. The whole of philosophy strives only to find this highest expression." That willing is primordial being also becomes Schopenhauer's view When knowledge is extinguished, the will remains. For the will precedes knowledge. Knowledge has its origin in my brain, says Schopenhauer. But it must be produced by an active, creative force. Man knows such a creative power in his own will. Schopenhauer now seeks to prove that what is active in other things is also will. The will thus underlies the merely imagined reality as a "thing in itself". And we can know about this "thing in itself". It is not, like the Kantian, beyond our imagination; we experience its workings within our own organism.

[ 8 ] The development of the world-view in more recent times progresses through Schopenhauer insofar as with him begins one of the attempts to elevate one of the basic forces of self-consciousness to a general world-principle. The riddle of the age lies in active self-consciousness. Schopenhauer is unable to find a world view that contains the roots of self-consciousness. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have tried to do so. Schopenhauer singles out one force of self-consciousness, the will, and claims that it is not only in the human soul, but in the whole world. Thus, for him, man is not situated in the origins of the world with his full self-consciousness, but with a part of it, with the will. Schopenhauer thus presents himself as one of those representatives of the more recent development of the world view who were only partially able to grasp the basic riddle of the time in their consciousness.

[ 9 ] Goethe also exerted a profound influence on Schopenhauer. From the fall of 1813 to May 1814, Schopenhauer enjoyed the poet's company. Goethe personally introduced the philosopher to the doctrine of colors. The former's way of looking at things corresponded completely to the ideas Schopenhauer had formed about the way our sensory organs and our mind proceed when they perceive things and processes. Goethe had carried out careful and extensive investigations into the perceptions of the eye, light and colors, and had processed the results in his work "On the Theory of Colors". He arrived at views that differed from those of Newton, the founder of modern color theory. The contrast between Newton and Goethe in this field cannot be judged from the right point of view if one does not start from the fundamental difference in the two personalities' views of the world. Goethe regards man's sense organs as the best, the highest physical apparatuses. For him, the eye must therefore be the highest authority for determining the lawful relationships in the world of color. Newton and the physicists investigate the phenomena in question in the manner which Goethe calls "the greatest calamity of modern physics" and which, as already mentioned in another context (p. 206), consists in the fact that "one has, as it were, separated the experiments from man, and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can do. The eye perceives light and dark or light and darkness and, within the light-dark field of observation, the colors. Goethe remains within this field and seeks to prove how light, darkness and color are connected. Newton and his followers want to observe the processes of light and color as they take place outside the human organism in space, as they would have to take place if there were no eye. However, such an external sphere separated from man has no justification for Goethe's view of the world. We do not arrive at the essence of a thing by refraining from the effects which we perceive, but in the exact lawfulness of these effects, grasped by the spirit, we have given this essence. The effects which the eye perceives, grasped in their totality and represented in their lawful connection, are the essence of light and color, not a world of external processes separated from the eye, which is to be ascertained with artificial instruments. "For we actually undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects and a complete history of these effects at best encompasses the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his deeds, his actions, and a picture of character will confront us. The colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering. In this sense, we can expect information about the light from them. Colors and light are indeed in the most exact relation to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature; for it is the whole of nature that wants thereby to reveal itself especially to the sense of the eye." Here we find Goethe's view of the world applied to a special case. What lies hidden in the rest of nature is revealed in the human organism, through its senses, through its soul. This reaches its peak in man. Whoever therefore seeks the truth of nature apart from man, as Newton did, cannot find it, according to Goethe's basic view.

[ 10 ] Schopenhauer sees in the world, which is given to the spirit in space and time, only an imagination of this spirit. The essence of this imaginary world reveals itself to us in the will by which we see our own organism permeated. He can therefore not accept a physical doctrine which sees the essence of light and color phenomena not in the ideas given to the eye, but in a world which is supposed to exist separately from the eye. Goethe's way of imagining must therefore have been sympathetic to him because it remains within the imaginary world of the eye. He found in it a confirmation of what he himself had to assume about this world. The struggle between Goethe and Newton is not merely a physical question, but a matter of the whole world view. Whoever is of the opinion that something can be discovered about nature through experiments that are separate from man must remain on the ground of Newton's theory of color. Modern physics is of this opinion. It can therefore only pass the judgment on Goethe's theory of color that Hermann Helmholtz expressed in his treatise "Goethe's Premonitions of Coming Scientific Ideas": "Where it is a question of tasks that can be solved by poetic divinations arising in visual images, the poet has shown himself capable of the highest achievements; where only the consciously applied inductive method could have helped, he has failed." If one sees in human visual images only products that are added to nature, then one must determine what happens in nature apart from these visual images. If, like Goethe, one sees in them revelations of the entities contained in nature, then one will adhere to them if one wants to investigate the truth. Schopenhauer, however, takes neither the one nor the other standpoint. He does not want to recognize the essence of things in the perceptions of the senses; he rejects the physical method because it does not stop at what is solely available to us, at the ideas. But he also turned the question from a purely physical one into a question of worldview. And since he basically based his world view on man, not on an external world separate from man, he had to decide in favor of Goethe. For Goethe drew the conclusion for the theory of color that must necessarily follow for those who see in man with his healthy senses the "greatest and most exact physical apparatus". Hegel, who as a philosopher stands entirely on the ground of this world view, must therefore vigorously advocate Goethe's theory of color. We read in his Naturphilosophie: "We owe the representation of colors appropriate to the concept to Goethe, whom colors and light attracted early on to contemplate them, especially from the side of painting; and his pure, simple sense of nature, the first condition of the poet, had to resist such barbarism of reflection as is found in Newton. He went through everything that had been stated and experimented on light and color from Plato onwards. He conceived the phenomenon simply; and the true instinct of reason consists in conceiving the phenomenon from the side where it presents itself most simply."

[ 11 ] For Schopenhauer, the essential foundation of all world processes is the will. It is an eternal, dark striving for existence. It contains no reason. For reason only arises in the human brain, which is created by the will. While Hegel makes self-conscious reason, the spirit, the foundation of the world and sees in human reason only an individual realization of general world reason, Schopenhauer regards reason only as a product of the brain, as a bubble of foam that finally arises when the unreasoning, dark urge, the will, has created everything else. For Hegel, all things and processes are reasonable, because they are produced by reason; for Schopenhauer, everything is unreasonable, because it is produced by the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer confirms Fichte's words as clearly as possible: What one chooses for a world view depends on what kind of person one is. Schopenhauer had bad experiences, he got to know the world from its worst side before he decided to think about it. It therefore satisfies him to imagine this world as unreasonable in its essence, as the result of a blind will. According to his way of thinking, reason has no power over unreason. For it arises itself as the result of unreason, it is an illusion and a dream, generated by the will. Schopenhauer's world view is the gloomy mood of his mind translated into thought. His eye was not attuned to following the rational arrangements of existence with joy; it saw only the irrationality of the blind will expressed in suffering and pain. His moral doctrine could therefore only be based on the perception of suffering. For him, an action is only moral if it is based on this perception. The compassion must be the source of human deeds. What better could he do who realizes that all beings suffer than to let compassion guide all his actions? Since the unreasonable and evil lies in the will, the more man kills the impetuous will within himself, the higher he will stand morally. The expression of will in the individual person is selfishness, egoism. Whoever surrenders to compassion, i.e. does not want for himself but for others, has become master of the will. One way to get rid of the will is to devote oneself to the creation of art and to the impressions that emanate from works of art. The artist does not create because he desires something, not because his selfish will is directed towards things and processes. He creates out of egoistic joy. He immerses himself in the essence of things as a pure observer. It is the same with the enjoyment of works of art. When we stand before a work of art and the desire stirs in us to possess it, we are still entangled in the base desires of the will. Only when we admire beauty without desiring it have we risen to the sublime position where we are no longer dependent on the blind will. Then, however, art has become something for us that momentarily liberates us from the irrationality of blindly wanting existence. This redemption is purest in the enjoyment of musical works of art. For music does not speak to us through the imagination like other forms of art. It does not depict anything in nature. Since all natural things and processes are only representations, the arts that take these things and processes as models can also only come to us as embodiments and representations. Man produces sounds out of himself without a natural model. Because he has the will as his essence within himself, it can only be the will that directly emanates the world of music from within. This is why music speaks so strongly to the human mind, because it is the embodiment of that which expresses the innermost essence of man, his true being, the will. And it is a triumph of man that he has an art in which he enjoys, free of will, selflessly, that which is the origin of all desire, the origin of all unreason. Schopenhauer's view of music is again the result of his very personal idiosyncrasy. Even as a Hamburg merchant's apprentice, he wrote to his mother: "How did the heavenly seed find room on our hard soil, where necessity and shortcomings fight for every little spot? We are banished from the primal spirit and are not meant to reach it. And yet a compassionate angel has implored the heavenly flower for us and it is rooted high in full glory on this soil of misery. The pulsations of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the centuries of barbarism and an immediate echo of the Eternal has remained in it, comprehensible to every sense and sublime even above vice and virtue."

[ 12 ] In the position that the two opponents of the world view, Hegel and Schopenhauer, take towards art, one can see how the world view intervenes in the personal relationship of man to the individual areas of life. Hegel, who saw in man's world of imagination and ideas that towards which all external nature strives as towards its perfection, can recognize as the most perfect art only that in which the spirit appears highest, most perfect, and where it at the same time clings to that which continually strives towards it. Every form of external nature wants to be spirit, but it does not attain it. If man now creates such an external, three-dimensional structure, on which he imprints the spirit that it seeks but cannot attain through itself, then he has created a perfect work of art. This is the case with sculpture. What otherwise only appears inside the human soul as a formless spirit, as an idea, is shaped by the sculptural artist out of the raw material. The soul, the mind, which we perceive in our consciousness without form: they speak from the statue, from a structure of space. In this marriage of the world of the senses and the spiritual world lies the artistic ideal of a world view that sees the purpose of nature in the production of the spirit, i.e. that can only see beauty in a work that appears as the direct expression of the spirit coming to light in nature. On the other hand, he who, like Schopenhauer, sees only imagination in all nature, cannot possibly see this ideal in a work that imitates nature. He must resort to an art form that is free of all nature: that is music.

[ 13 ] All that leads to the eradication, indeed the destruction of the will, Schopenhauer logically regarded as desirable. For eradicating the will means eradicating the unreasonable in the world. Man should not want. He should kill all desire within himself. Ascesis is therefore Schopenhauer's moral ideal. The wise man will extinguish all desires within himself, completely negate his will. He goes so far that no motive compels him to will. His striving consists only in the quietistic urge for redemption from all life. Schopenhauer saw a high teaching of wisdom in Buddhism's world-denying views of life. One can therefore call his world view a reactionary one compared to Hegel's. Hegel sought to reconcile man everywhere with life; he strove to portray all action as cooperation in a rational ordering of the world. Schopenhauer regarded the hostility to life, the turning away from reality, the flight from the world as the ideal of the wise man. There is something in Hegel's way of viewing the world and life that can give rise to doubts and questions. Hegel's starting point is pure thought, the abstract idea, which he himself describes as an "oyster-like, gray or completely black" being (letter to Goethe dated February 20, 1821), but which he also claims should be understood as the "representation of God as he is in his eternal being before the creation of nature and a finite spirit." The goal he arrives at is the substantive, individual human spirit, through which that which leads only a shadowy existence in the gray, oyster-like world first comes to light. It can easily be understood to mean that a personality as a living, self-conscious being does not exist apart from the human spirit. Hegel derives the rich content that we experience in ourselves from the ideal that we must think. It is understandable that minds of a certain disposition felt repelled by this view of the world and of life. Only thinkers as selflessly devoted as Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) were able to fully immerse themselves in Hegel's train of thought and, in full agreement with it, to create a system of ideas that appears to be a reproduction of Hegel's from a lesser nature. Others could not comprehend how man is to enlighten himself through the pure idea about the infinity and multiplicity of impressions that assail him when he directs his gaze to nature, which is rich in color and form, and how he is to gain anything by raising his gaze from the experiences of the world of sensation, feeling and imagination of his soul to the icy height of pure thought. It is true that one will misunderstand Hegel if one interprets him in this way; but this misunderstanding is understandable. This mood, unsatisfied by Hegel's way of thinking, found an expression in the current of thought that had its representatives in Franz Xaver Baader (1765-1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781 to 1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), Anton Günther (1783-1863), K. F. E. Thrahndorff (1782-1863), Martin Deutinger (1815-1864) and Hermann Ulrici (1806 to 1884). They strove to replace Hegel's gray, oyster-like, pure thought with a life-filled, personal primordial being, an individual God. Baader called it a "God-denying idea" to believe that God only attains his perfect existence in man. God must be a personality; and the world must not, as Hegel imagines, emerge from him as a logical process in which one concept always necessarily drives out another. No, the world must be God's free act, a creation of his omnipotent will. These thinkers approach the Christian doctrine of revelation. Justifying and scientifically substantiating it becomes the more or less conscious purpose of their reflections. Baader immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, Master Eckhart, Tauler and Paracelsus, in whose imagery he found a much more suitable means of expressing the deepest truths than in the pure thoughts of Hegel's doctrine. That he also induced Schelling to deepen his thoughts by incorporating Jacob Boehm's ideas, to fill them with warmer content, has already been explained (cf. pp. 221 f.). Remarkable phenomena within the development of the world view will always be personalities such as Krause. He was a mathematician. He did not allow himself to be determined by the proud, logical and perfect character of this science to solve the worldview questions that were to satisfy his deepest spiritual needs according to the method he was familiar with in this science. The type for such thinkers is the great mathematician Newton, who treated the phenomena of the visible universe as an example of arithmetic and, in addition, satisfied the basic questions of worldview for himself in a manner close to the belief in revelation. Krause cannot accept a view that seeks the primordial nature of the world in things and processes. Those who seek God in the world, as Hegel does, cannot find him. For although the world is in God, God does not exist in the world, but as an independent being at peace in himself. Krause's world of ideas is based on the "thought of an infinite, independent being, which has nothing outside itself, but in itself and in itself as the one ground is everything, and which we therefore also think of as the ground of reason, nature and humanity". He wants to have nothing in common with a view that "takes the finite or the world as the epitome of the finite for God himself, idolizes it, confuses it with God". No matter how deeply we immerse ourselves in the reality given to our senses and our spirit, we will never thereby arrive at the primordial ground of all existence, of which we can only obtain an idea by allowing the observation of all finite existence to be accompanied by the foreboding vision of a supra-worldly being. Immanuel Hermann Fichte held a sharp disagreement with Hegelianism in his writings "Sätze zur Vorschule der Theologie" (1826) and "Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie" (1829). In numerous works he then sought to substantiate and deepen his view that a conscious, personal being must underlie world phenomena. In 1837, he joined forces with like-minded friends Weiße, Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäus, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth and others to publish the "Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie" (Journal of Philosophy and Speculative Theology) in order to make a strong impact against HegeI's view based on pure thinking. According to I. H. Fichte's conviction, only those who have grasped that "the highest thought that truly solves the problem of the world is the idea of the primordial subject or the absolute personality that knows and understands itself in its ideal and real infinity have ascended to the highest knowledge. "The creation and preservation of the world, which constitutes the reality of the world, consists only in the uninterrupted manifestation of God's will, permeated by consciousness, so that he is only consciousness and will, but both in highest unity, he alone is therefore person, or it in the most eminent sense. Chr. Hermann Weiße believed that he had to ascend from the Hegelian world view to a completely theological approach. He saw the goal of his thinking in the Christian idea of the three personalities in the one Godhead. He therefore sought to present this idea with an immense amount of ingenuity as the result of natural, unbiased thinking. Weisse believed that he possessed something infinitely richer than Hegel with his gray idea in his triune personal deity, which possesses a living will. This living will "will, in a word, expressly give the inner-divine nature the form and no other, which is everywhere presupposed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, when they present Cott both before the creation of the world, as well as during and after it in the light element of his glory, as surrounded by an incalculable host of ministering spirits with a fluid, immaterial corporeality, through which his intercourse with the created world is everywhere expressly mediated to him".

[ 14 ] Anton Günther, the "Viennese philosopher", and Martin Deutinger, who was influenced by him, move with their worldview ideas entirely within the framework of the Catholic theological mode of conception. The former seeks to detach man from the natural world order by separating him into two parts, into a natural being, which belongs to the necessary lawfulness like the lower things, and into a spiritual being, which is an independent part of a higher spirit world and has an existence like a "being" in Herbart. He believed that this would overcome Hegelianism, which sees the spirit as merely a higher level of natural existence, and establish a Christian world view. The Church itself did not share this view, as Günther's writings were placed on the index of banned books in Rome. Deutinger fought against HegeI's pure thinking, which, in his view, should not devour the living being. He considered the living will to be higher than pure thought. The latter can really produce something as a creator; the latter is powerless and abstract. Thrahndorff also makes this living will his starting point. The world cannot be explained from the shadowy realm of ideas, but the powerful will must grasp these ideas in order to create real existence. It is not in the thinking comprehension of the world that its deepest content is revealed to man, but in an emotion, in love, through which the individual surrenders himself to the totality, to the will that rules in the universe. It is quite clear: all these thinkers endeavor to overcome thinking and its object, the pure idea. They do not want to accept this thinking as the highest spiritual expression of man. Thrahndorff does not want to know, but love, in order to understand the primordial nature of the world. These philosophers believe that clear, pure thinking destroys the warm, religious devotion to the primal forces of existence.

[ 15 ] This latter idea is based on a misunderstanding of Hegel's world of thought. This misunderstanding was particularly evident in the views that emerged after Hegel's death concerning his position on religion. The ambiguity that prevailed about this position divided Hegel's followers into a party that saw in his worldview a firm support for revealed Christianity and one that used his teaching precisely to dissolve Christian views and replace them with a radically free-spirited view.

[ 16 ] Neither the one nor the other party could have invoked Hegel if they had understood him correctly. For there is nothing in Hegel's world view that can serve to support a religion or lead to its dissolution. As little as Hegel wanted to create any phenomenon of nature out of pure thought, so little did he want to do this with a religion. Just as he wanted to extract pure thought from the processes of nature and thereby comprehend them, so with religion he merely pursued the goal of bringing its thought content to the surface. Just as he regarded everything in the world as reasonable because it is real, so too religion. It must be there, created by completely different powers of the soul than are available to the thinker when he approaches it in order to comprehend it. It was also the mistake of I. H. Fichte, Chr. H. Weisse, Deutinger and others that they fought Hegel because he had not progressed from the sphere of pure thought to the religious comprehension of the personal Godhead. But Hegel never set himself such a task. He regarded it as a matter of religious consciousness. Fichte, Weiße, Krause, Deutinger and others wanted to create a religion out of the world view. Such a task would have seemed as absurd to Hegel as if someone had wanted to illuminate the world from the idea of light, or create a magnet from the idea of magnetism. However, in his view, just like the entire natural and spiritual world, religion also stems from the idea. Therefore, the human mind can find this idea in religion. But just as the magnet was created from the idea of magnetism before the human mind came into being and the latter only has to comprehend this emergence afterwards, so religion also came into being from the idea before this idea shone forth in the human soul as a component of the world view. If Hegel had experienced the criticism of religion by his students, he would have been urged to say: "Keep your hands off all foundations of religion, all creation of religious ideas, as long as you want to remain thinkers and do not want to become messiahs. Hegel's world view, properly understood, cannot have a retroactive effect on religious consciousness. Consciousness. Those who think about art have the same relationship to it as those who want to fathom the essence of religion.

[ 17 ] The "Hallische Jahrbücher", published by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer between 1838 and 1843, served the battle of world views. From a defense and explanation of Hegel, they soon moved on to an independent further development of his ideas and in this way led to the points of view that we characterize in the next essay as those of the "radical worldviews". From 1841 onwards, the editors called their journal "German Yearbooks" and considered one of their aims to be the "struggle against political unfreedom, against feudal and landed estate theory". As radical politicians, they intervened in the development of the times, calling for a state in which complete freedom reigned. They thus distanced themselves from the spirit of Hegel, who did not want to make history, but to understand history.