The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Radical Worldviews

[ 1 ] At the beginning of the 1940s, a man who had previously familiarized himself thoroughly and intimately with Hegel's worldview struck a powerful blow against it. It was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872). The declaration of war against the worldview from which he had grown out of is given in radical form in his writings "Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy" (1842) and in the "Principles of the Philosophy of the Future" (1843). We can follow the further development of his thoughts in his other writings "Das Wesen des Christentums" (1841), "Das Wesen der Religion" (1845) and in the "Theogonie" (1857). In Ludwig Feuerbach's work, a process was repeated in the field of spiritual science that had taken place almost a century earlier in the field of natural science (1759) with the appearance of Caspar Friedrich Wolff. Wolff's act signifies a reform of the idea of development in the field of the science of living beings. How development was understood before Wolff can be seen most clearly from the views of the man who opposed the transformation of this idea most vehemently: Albrecht von Haller. This man, in whom physiologists rightly venerate one of the most important spirits of their science, could not conceive of the development of a living being in any other way than that the germ already contains all the parts that appear during the course of life, in a small but completely pre-formed state. Development is thus supposed to be the unfolding of something that already existed, which was initially hidden from perception because of its small size or for other reasons. If this view is consistently adhered to, then nothing new arises in the course of development, but something hidden, nested, is continually brought into the light of day. Haller held this view quite harshly. In the primordial mother Eve, the whole human race was already present in a small, hidden form. These human germs were only developed in the course of world history. See how the philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716) expresses the same idea: "Thus I should think that the souls, which will one day be human souls, have existed in the seed, like those of other species, that they have always existed in the form of organized things in the foreparents up to Adam, that is, since the beginning of things." In his "Theoria generationis", published in 1759, Wolff contrasted this idea of development with another, which is based on the assumption that limbs that appear in the course of an organism's life were not previously present in any way, but only arise as real new formations at the point in time at which they become perceptible. Wolff showed that nothing of the form of the formed organism is present in the egg, but that its development is a chain of new formations. This view makes the idea of a real becoming possible. For it explains that something comes into being that has not yet existed, i.e. "becomes" in the true sense.

[ 2 ] Haller's view denies becoming, as it only admits a continuous becoming visible of something that has already existed. This natural scientist therefore countered Wolff's idea with the powerful statement: "There is no becoming". (Nulla est epigenesis!) In doing so, he did indeed ensure that Wolff's view was completely ignored for decades. Goethe blames the resistance to his efforts to explain living beings on the theory of epigenesis. He endeavored to understand the formations within organic nature from their becoming, entirely in the sense of a true developmental view, according to which that which comes to light in a living being is not already hidden, but really only emerges when it appears. He wrote in 1817 that this attempt, which formed the basis of his 1790 essay on the metamorphosis of plants, met with a "cold, almost unfriendly encounter. Such aversion, however, was quite natural: the doctrine of nesting, the concept of preformation, of successive development of what had already existed since Adam's time, had generally taken hold of even the best minds." Even in Hegel's world view, one could still see a remnant of the old nesting doctrine. The pure thought that appears in the human spirit: it should lie nested in all phenomena before it comes to perceptible existence in the human being. Hegel places this pure thought before nature and the individual spirit, which should be, as it were, the "representation of God as he was in his eternal being before the creation" of the world. The development of the world thus presents itself as an unfolding of pure thought. This was Feuerbach's attitude towards Hegel. Ludwig Feuerbach's protest against Hegel's world view is based on the fact that he could no more recognize the existence of the spirit before its actual appearance in man than Wolff was able to admit that the parts of the living organism were already pre-formed in the egg. Just as Wolff saw new formations in the organs of the living being, so Feuerbach saw them in the individual spirit of man. This is in no way present before its perceptible existence; it emerges only at the point in time when it actually appears. It is therefore unjustified for Feuerbach to speak of an all-spirit, of a being in which the individual spirit has its origin. There is no rational being before its actual appearance in the world that shapes the material, the perceptible world, in such a way that its image finally appears in man, but before the emergence of the human spirit there are only unreasoning substances and forces that shape a nervous system out of themselves, which concentrates in the brain; and in this, as a perfect new formation, something that has not yet existed arises: the human, rational soul. For such a world view there is no possibility of deriving the processes and things from a spiritual primordial being because a spiritual being is a new formation as a result of the organization of the brain. And when the human being transfers spiritual things into the outside world, he imagines completely arbitrarily that a being, as it underlies his own actions, exists outside of him and rules the world. Man must first create any spiritual primordial being out of his imagination; the things and processes of the world give no reason to assume such a being. It is not the spiritual primal being in which things are nested that has created man in its image, but man has formed the fantasy image of such a primal being according to his own nature. This is Feuerbach's conviction. "Man's knowledge of God is man's knowledge of himself, of his own being. Only the unity of being and consciousness is truth. Where there is the consciousness of God, there is also the essence of God thus in man." Man did not feel strong enough to rely entirely on himself; therefore he created an infinite being in his own image, which he worships and adores. The Hegelian world view has indeed removed all other qualities from the primordial being; but it has retained reasonableness for it. Feuerbach also removes this; and in doing so he has eliminated the primordial being itself. He completely replaces the wisdom of God with the wisdom of the world. Feuerbach describes the "open confession and admission that the consciousness of God is nothing other than the consciousness" of mankind, that man cannot "think, suspect, imagine, feel, believe, want, love and worship any other being as an absolute, as a divine being than the human being", as a necessary turning point in the development of the world view. There is a view of nature and a view of the human spirit, but none of the essence of God. Nothing is real but the actual. "The real in its reality or as the real is the real as the object of sense, is the sensuous. Truth, reality, sensuality are identical. Only a sensual being is a true, a real being. Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense, not through thinking for itself. The object given or identical with thought is only thought." This means nothing other than that thought appears in the human organism as a new formation, and one is not entitled to imagine that thought was already hidden in some form in the world before its appearance. One should not try to explain the nature of what actually exists by deducing it from something that already existed. Only that which is factual is true and divine which "is immediately certain of itself, speaks directly for itself and takes it in, immediately entails the affirmation that it is, the absolutely definite, the absolutely indubitable, the sun-clear. But only the sensual is sun-clear; only where sensuality begins does all doubt and dispute cease. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensuality." Feuerbach's confession culminates in the words: "To make philosophy the cause of humanity, that was my first endeavor. But whoever embarks on this path will necessarily end up making man the subject of philosophy." "The new philosophy makes man, including nature as the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest subject of philosophy - anthropology, including physiology, the universal science." Feuerbach demands that reason should not be placed as the starting point at the head of the world view, as Hegel does, but that it should be regarded as a product of development, as a new formation in the human organism in which it actually appears. And he is opposed to any separation of the spiritual from the physical, because it cannot be understood in any other way than as the result of the development of the physical. "When the psychologist says: 'I distinguish myself from my body', he is saying as much as when the philosopher says in logic or in the metaphysics of morals: 'I abstract from human nature'. Is it possible for you to abstract from your nature? Do you not abstract as a human being? Do you think without a head? Thoughts are isolated souls. Good; but is not the separated soul still a faithful image of the once incarnate man? Do not even the most general metaphysical concepts of being and essence change, just as the real being and essence of man changes? So what does that mean? I abstract from human nature? Nothing more than I abstract from man as he is the object of my consciousness and thought, but never again from the man who lies behind my consciousness, that is, from my nature, to which, nolens volens, my abstraction is indissolubly bound. Thus, as a psychologist, you also abstract from your body in thought, but nevertheless you are intimately connected with it in essence, that is, you think yourself distinct from it, but you are by no means really distinct from it. ... Is not Lichtenberg also right when he claims: one should not actually say, I think, but it thinks. So if I think is different from the body, it follows that It thinks, the involuntary in our thinking, is also the root and basis of I think: I think, is distinct from the body? Where does it come from that we cannot think at all times, that thoughts are not at our disposal at will, that we often in the midst of mental work, despite the most strenuous efforts of the will, do not move from the spot until some external cause, often only a change in the weather, makes the thoughts afloat again? Therefore, the activity of thinking is also an organic activity. Why do we often have to carry thoughts around with us for years before they become clear and distinct? Because thoughts, too, are subject to organic development, thoughts, too, must ripen and mature, as well as the fruits of the field and the children in the womb."

[ 3 ] Feuerbach refers to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the thinker who died in 1799 and who, with some of his ideas, must be regarded as a forerunner of the world view that found expression in minds like Feuerbach and who, with his stimulating ideas, probably only did not become so stimulating for the nineteenth century, because the powerful thought structures of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which overshadowed everything, so absorbed the development of thought that aphoristic flashes of ideas, even if they were as illuminating as Lichtenberg's, could be overlooked. One need only recall individual sayings of this important man to show how his spirit was revived in the movement of thought initiated by Feuerbach. "God created man in his own image, which presumably means that man created God in his own image." "Our world will become so fine that it will be as ridiculous to believe in a God as ghosts are today." "Is our concept of God anything other than personified incomprehensibility?" "The idea we have of a soul is very similar to that of a magnet in the earth. It is merely an image. It is an innate human invention to think of everything under this form." "Instead of the world being reflected in us, we should rather say that our reason is reflected in the world. We can do nothing else; we must recognize order and wise government in the world; this follows from the arrangement of our reasoning power. But it is not yet a consequence that something which we must necessarily think is really so ... therefore no God can be proved from it." "We become conscious of certain ideas that do not depend on us; others, at least we believe, depend on us; where is the limit? We only know the existence of our sensations, ideas and thoughts. It thinks, one should say, just as one says: it flashes." If Lichtenberg had had the ability to form an intrinsically harmonious view of the world with such thought approaches: he could not have remained unconsidered to the degree to which this happened. The formation of a world view requires not only superiority of mind, which he possessed, but also the ability to form ideas in context and to round them out vividly. He lacked this ability. His superiority is expressed in an excellent judgment on Kant's relationship with his contemporaries: "I believe that, just as the followers of Mr. Kant always accuse their opponents of not understanding him, so also some believe that Mr. Kant is right because they understand him. His way of thinking is new and very different from the usual one; and when one suddenly gains insight into it, one is also very inclined to believe it to be true, especially since he has so many zealous followers. But one should always bear in mind that this understanding is no reason to believe it to be true. I believe that most people, in the joy of understanding a very abstract and obscure system, have at the same time believed that it has been demonstrated." Just how kindred spirits Ludwig Feuerbach must have felt with Lichtenberg is particularly evident when one compares the points of view on which both thinkers stood when they considered the relationship of their world view to practical life. Feuerbach concluded the lectures he gave to a number of students in the winter of 1848 on the "Essence of Religion" with the words: "I only wish that I have not failed in the task set me, which was expressed in one of the first lessons, namely, the task of turning you from friends of God into friends of man, from believers into thinkers, from prayers into workers, from candidates of the hereafter into students of this world, from Christians, who according to their own confession and admission are 'half animal, half angel', into men, into whole men. " Whoever, as Feuerbach did, places all worldview on the basis of the knowledge of nature and man, must also reject all tasks, all duties in the field of morality that originate from a field other than the natural dispositions of man, or that have a goal other than one that relates entirely to the perceptible world. "My right is my legally recognized instinct of happiness; my duty is the instinct of happiness of others that compels me to recognize it." It is not the prospect of a hereafter that tells me what I should do, but the contemplation of this world. As much strength as I use to fulfill any tasks that relate to the hereafter, so much of my abilities I withdraw from this world, for which I am only destined. "Concentration on the this world" is therefore what Ludwig Feuerbach calls for. We can read similar words in Lichtenberg's writings. But precisely these are at the same time mixed with elements that show how little a thinker who does not have the ability to form his ideas harmoniously within himself succeeds in pursuing an idea to its utmost consequences. Lichtenberg already demands concentration on the here and now, but he still intersperses this demand with ideas that aim at a hereafter. "I think very many people forget about their education for heaven, that for earth. I should think man would act most wisely if he let the former be entirely placed in its place, for if we have been placed in that place by a wise Being, of which there is no doubt, let us do the best we can in this station, and not blind ourselves by revelations. What man needs to know for his happiness, he certainly knows without any other revelation than that which he possesses according to his nature." Comparisons such as the one between Lichtenberg and Feuerbach are significant for the history of the development of worldviews. They show the progress of the spirits most vividly, because one recognizes from them what the time gap that lies between them has done to this progress. Feuerbach went through Hegel's world view; he drew from it the strength to develop his opposing view of everything. He was no longer disturbed by Kant's question: do we really have a right to ascribe reality to the world we perceive or does this world only exist in our imagination? Whoever claims the latter can transfer all possible driving forces for human beings to the true world that lies beyond our imagination. He can accept a supernatural world order alongside the natural one, as Kant did. But anyone who, in Feuerbach's sense, declares the perceptible to be the real must reject all supernatural world order. For him, there is no categorical imperative originating from somewhere beyond; for him, there are only duties that arise from the natural drives and goals of man.

[ 4 ] In order to form a world view that was as opposed to Hegel's as Feuerbach did, however, a personality was needed that was as different from Hegel's as his own. Hegel felt well in the midst of the hustle and bustle of his present life. Mastering the immediate hustle and bustle of the world with his philosophical spirit was a beautiful task for him. When he wanted to be relieved of his teaching duties in Heidelberg in order to move to Prussia, he made it clear in his resignation letter that he was attracted by the prospect of finding a sphere of activity that would not limit him to mere teaching, but would enable him to intervene in practice. "For him, the prospect of switching from the precarious function of teaching philosophy at a university to another activity and being needed at a later age must be of the greatest importance." He who has such a thinking mind must live in peace with the form that practical life has taken in his time. He must find the ideas with which it is imbued reasonable. Only from this can he draw the enthusiasm to participate in its development. Feuerbach was not friendly to the life of his time. He preferred the silence of a secluded place to the hustle and bustle of "modern" life in his time. He speaks clearly about this: "I will never reconcile myself with city life. After the impressions I have already gained here, I consider it a good thing, indeed my duty, to go to the city from time to time to teach; but then I must return to rural solitude to study and rest in the bosom of nature. My next task is to prepare my lectures, as my listeners wish, or to prepare father's papers for printing." From his solitude, Feuerbach believed he could best judge what was not natural about the form that real life had taken, but had only been brought into it by human illusion. He regarded the purification of life from illusions as his task. To do this, he had to be as far away as possible from life in these illusions. He was looking for true life; he could not find it in the form that life had taken through the culture of the times. A statement he made about the March Revolution shows how sincere he was about "concentrating on this world". It seemed unfruitful to him because the old belief in the hereafter still lived on in the ideas on which it was based: "The March Revolution was still a child of the Christian faith, albeit an illegitimate one. The constitutionalists believed that the Lord only needed to say: Let there be liberty! let there be justice! so there is already justice and liberty; and the republicans believed that one only needed to want a republic in order to call it into being; thus they believed in the creation of a republic out of nothing. The former transferred the Christian wonders of the world, the latter the Christian wonders of action to the field of politics." Only a personality who believes to carry within himself the harmony of life, which man needs, can speak the hymns to reality that he spoke, despite the deep discord in which Feuerbach lived with reality. We can hear this in words such as these: "In the absence of any prospect of the hereafter, I can only keep myself alive and sane in this world, in the vale of tears of German, indeed European politics in general, by turning the present into an object of Aristophanic laughter." But only such a personality could seek all the power that others derive from an external force in man himself.

[ 5 ] The birth of thought in the Greek view of the world meant that man could no longer feel so integrated with the world as he could with the old pictorial imagination. This was the first stage in the formation of an abyss between man and the world. A further stage was given with the development of the newer scientific way of thinking. This development tore nature and the human soul completely apart. On the one hand an image of nature had to arise in which man, according to his spiritual-soul nature, could not be found; and on the other hand an idea of the human soul which found no bridge to nature. Lawful necessity was found in nature. Within it there was no place for what is found in the human soul: The impulse of freedom, the sense of a life that is rooted in a spiritual world and is not exhausted by the existence of sense. Spirits like Kant only found a way out by completely separating the two worlds: in the one they found knowledge of nature, in the other faith. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel thought the idea of the self-conscious soul so comprehensively that it seemed to be rooted in a higher spiritual nature that stands above nature and the human soul. With Feuerbach, a spirit appears which, through the image of the world that the new scientific conception can give, believes itself compelled to deny the human soul everything that contradicts the image of nature. He turns the human soul into a member of nature. He can only do this because he first thinks everything out of this human soul that disturbs him from recognizing it as a member of nature. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel took the self-conscious soul for what it is; Feuerbach makes it into what he needs for his view of the world. With him emerges a mode of conception that feels overwhelmed by the image of nature. It cannot come to terms with the two parts of the modern world view, the image of nature and the image of the soul; that is why it completely bypasses the one, the image of the soul. Wolff's idea of new formation provides the image of nature with fruitful impulses; Feuerbach uses these impulses for a spiritual science that can only exist by not engaging with the spirit at all. He establishes a worldview current that is helpless in the face of the most powerful impulse of modern soul life, living self-consciousness. In this worldview current, this impulse manifests itself in such a way that it is not only taken as incomprehensible, but that because it seems incomprehensible, its true form is ignored and it is made into something - a natural factor that it is not before unbiased observation.

[ 6 ] "God was my first thought, reason my second, man my third and last thought." This is how Feuerbach describes the path he took from believer to follower of Hegel and then to his own world view. The thinker who, in 1834, delivered one of the most effective books of the century, the "Life of Jesus", could have said the same of himself. It was David Friedrich Strauß (1808 to 1874). Feuerbach began by examining the human soul and found that it had the desire to project its own being into the world and to worship it as a divine primordial being. He attempted a psychological explanation of how the concept of God arises. Strauss' views were based on a similar goal, but he did not follow the path of the psychologist like Feuerbach, but that of the historian. And he did not place the concept of God in general, in the comprehensive sense that Feuerbach did, at the center of his reflections, but rather the Christian concept of the God-man Jesus. He wanted to show how humanity has arrived at this concept in the course of history. It was the conviction of Hegel's world view that the divine primal being is revealed in the human spirit. Strauss had also adopted this. But in his opinion, the divine idea cannot be realized in its entire perfection in a single human being. The individual human being is always only an imperfect reflection of the divine spirit. What one person lacks for perfection, another has. If you look at the entire human race, you will find all the perfections inherent in divinity distributed among countless individuals. The human race as a whole is thus God incarnate, the God-man. According to Strauss, this is the thinker's concept of Jesus. Strauß approaches the criticism of the Christian concept of the God-man from this point of view. Christianity ascribes to a personality that is supposed to have really existed once in the course of history what is thought to be distributed among the entire human race. "Conceived in an individual, a God-man, the characteristics and functions that church doctrine ascribes to Christ contradict each other: in the idea of the human species they coincide. Based on careful studies of the historical foundations of the Gospels, Strauss seeks to prove that the ideas of Christianity are the results of religious imagination. The religious truth that the human species is the God-man was indeed darkly suspected, but was not expressed in clear terms, but in a poetic form, in a myth. The story of the Son of God thus becomes a myth for Strauss, in which the idea of humanity was formed poetically long before it was recognized by thinkers in the form of pure thought. From this point of view, everything miraculous in Christian history gains an explanation, without one being forced to resort to the trivial view often previously adopted of seeing in the miracles deliberate deceptions or frauds, which the founder of the religion is either supposed to have resorted to himself in order to make as great an impression as possible with his teaching, or which the apostles are supposed to have devised for this purpose. Another view, which wanted to see all kinds of natural processes in the miracles, was also eliminated. The miracles presented themselves as poetic garments for real truths. How humanity rises from its finite interests, the life of everyday life, to its infinite interests, to the realization of divine truth and reason: this is what the myth depicts in the image of the dying and rising Saviour. The finite dies in order to rise again as the infinite.

[ 7 ] In the myths of the ancient peoples we can see the precipitation of the pictorial imagination of primeval times, from which the experience of thought has developed. In the nineteenth century, a feeling of this fact came to life in a personality like Strauss. He wanted to find out about the progress and significance of the life of thought by immersing himself in the connection between the world view and mythical thinking in historical times. He wants to know how the myth-forming mode of imagination still influences the newer world view. And at the same time he wants to anchor human self-consciousness in an entity that lies outside the individual personality by imagining the whole of humanity as an embodiment of the God-being. In this way, he gains a support for the individual human soul in the all-human soul, which finds its unfolding in the course of historical becoming.

[ 8 ] Strauß is even more radical in his book "Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft", published between 1840 and 1841. Here he deals with the dissolution of Christian dogmas from their poetic form into the truths of thought on which they are based. He now emphasizes the incompatibility of modern consciousness with that which adheres to the old figurative-mythical representations of truth. "So let the believer let the knower, like the latter, go his way quietly; we leave them their faith, so they leave us our philosophy; and if the super-pious should succeed in excluding us from their church, we shall regard this as a gain. False attempts at mediation have now been made enough; only the separation of opposites can lead further." Strauss' views had caused a tremendous stir. It was bitterly felt that the modern view of the world was no longer content to meet the basic religious ideas in general, but that it wanted to eliminate the "inconsistency", of which Lichtenherg had once said that it consisted in the fact that "human nature has even nestled under the yoke of a book. Nothing more horrible can be imagined," he continues, "and this example alone shows what a helpless creature man is in concreto, I mean enclosed in this two-legged vial of earth, water and salt. If it were possible for reason ever to build itself a despotic throne, a man who seriously wanted to refute the Copernican system by the authority of a book would have to be hanged. The fact that a book says it is from God is no proof that it is from God; but that our reason is from God is certain, one may take the word God as one pleases. Reason, where it reigns, punishes merely with the natural consequences of the offense or with instruction, if instruction can be called punishment." Strauß was dismissed from his position as a repetent at the Tübingen monastery as a result of the "Life of Jesus"; and when he then took up a professorship of theology at the University of Zurich, the country folk came with flails to make the dissolution of the myth impossible and force his retirement.

[ 9 ] Another thinker went far beyond the goal that Strauß set himself in his critique of the old world view from the standpoint of the new: Bruno Bauer. The view held by Feuerbach that the essence of man is also his highest essence and that every other higher being is only an illusion that he has created in his own image and placed above himself is also found in Bruno Bauer, but in a grotesque form. He describes how the human ego came to create an illusory counter-image for itself, in expressions that show that they did not arise from the need for a loving understanding of religious consciousness, as in Strauss, but from the joy of destruction. He says that the "all-devouring ego dreaded itself; it did not dare to grasp itself as everything and as the most general power, that is, it still remained the religious spirit and completed its alienation by confronting its general power as a foreign one and working towards this power in fear and trembling for its preservation and bliss". Bruno Bauer is a personality who sets out to critically test his spirited thinking on everything that exists. His conviction that thinking is called upon to penetrate to the essence of things was taken from Hegel's world view. But, like Hegel, he is not predisposed to allow thinking to live itself out in a result, in an edifice of thought. His thinking is not productive, but critical. He would have felt limited by a certain thought, by a positive idea. He does not want to define the critical power of thought by starting from a thought as a certain point of view, as Hegel did. "Criticism is, on the one hand, the last act of a particular philosophy, which in it must free itself from a positive definiteness that still limits its true generality, and therefore, on the other hand, the precondition without which it cannot rise to the ultimate generality of self-consciousness." This is the creed of the "Critique of Worldview" to which Bruno Bauer professed. The "critique" does not believe in thoughts, ideas, but only in thinking. "Man has only just been found", Bauer triumphs. For man is now bound by nothing more than his thinking. What is human is not to surrender to anything extra-human, but to process everything in the crucible of thought. Man should not be the image of another being, but above all "man", and he can only do this by making himself so through his thinking. The thinking human being is the true human being. Not anything external, not religion, justice, state, law, etc. can make man a man, but only his thinking. In Bauer, the powerlessness of thinking appears, which wants to reach self-consciousness but cannot.

[ 10 ] What Feuerbach declared to be man's highest essence, which Bruno Bauer claimed had only been found through criticism as a worldview: "man", to look at him completely impartially and without presuppositions, is the task that Max Stirner (1806-1856) set himself in his book "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" (The Only One and His Property), published in 1845. Stirner finds: "With the power of despair Feuerbach reaches for the entire content of Christianity, not to throw it away, no, to seize it, to pull it, the long-awaited one that has always remained far away, out of his heaven with a final effort and to keep it with him forever. Is this not a grasp of ultimate despair, a grasp of life and death, and is it not at the same time the Christian longing and desire for the hereafter? The hero does not want to enter the hereafter, but to draw the hereafter to himself and force it to become this world! And has not the whole world been crying out ever since, with more or less awareness, that it is the 'hereafter' that matters, and that heaven must come to earth and be experienced here already?" Stirner contrasts Feuerbach's view with a fierce contradiction: "The highest essence is indeed the 'essence' of man, but precisely because it is his essence and not he himself, it remains quite the same whether we see it outside of him and regard it as 'God', or find it in him and call it 'the essence of man' or 'man'. I am neither God nor man, neither the highest being nor my being, and therefore it is in the main no matter whether I think the being in me or outside me. Yes, we also really always think the highest being in both otherworldliness, in the inner and outer, at the same time, because the 'spirit of God' is according to Christian view also 'our spirit' and 'dwells in us'. He dwells in heaven and dwells in us; we poor things are only his 'dwelling place', and if Feuerbach destroys his heavenly dwelling place and forces him to move to us with sackcloth and pack, we, his earthly lodgings, will become very crowded." As long as the individual human ego still places any power on which it feels dependent, it sees itself not from its own point of view, but from that of this foreign power. It does not possess itself, it is possessed by this power. The religious says: There is a divine primal being, and its image is man. He is possessed by the divine primal image. The Hegelian says: There is a general world reason, and this realizes itself in the world in order to reach its summit in the human ego. The ego is thus possessed by world reason. Feuerbach says that there is an essence of man, and each individual is an individual image of this essence. Each individual is therefore possessed by the "essence of humanity". For only the individual human being actually exists, not the "generic concept of humanity", which Feuerbach puts in the place of the divine essence. So if the individual human being places the "genus human being" above himself, he loses himself to an illusion just as much as if he feels dependent on a personal God. For Feuerbach, therefore, the commandments that the Christian believes to be instituted by God and therefore considers binding become commandments that exist because they correspond to the general idea of humanity. Man judges himself morally in such a way that he asks himself: Do my actions as an individual correspond to what is appropriate to the essence of the universal human? For Feuerbach says: "If the essence of man is the highest essence of man, then in practice the highest and first law must also be man's love for man. Homo homini deus est. Ethics is in and of itself a divine power. Moral conditions are in themselves truly religious conditions. Life in general is of a divine nature in its essential substantial relationships. Everything that is right, true and good has its reason for sanctification everywhere in itself, in its qualities. Sacred is and shall be friendship, sacred property, sacred marriage, sacred the well-being of every human being, but sacred in and for itself." So there are universal human powers; ethics is one of them. It is sacred in and of itself; the individual must submit to it. This individual should not want what he wants of his own accord, but what is in the spirit of sacred ethics. It is possessed by ethics. Stirner characterizes this view: "For the God of the individual, the God of all, namely 'man', has now been elevated: 'it is after all the highest of all of us to be man'. But since no one can fully become what the idea of 'man' implies, man remains for the individual a sublime beyond, an unattained supreme being, a god." However, such a supreme being is also the thinking that has made critique as a worldview into a god. Stirner therefore cannot stop at it either. "The critic is afraid of becoming 'dogmatic' or setting up dogmas. Of course, this would make him the antithesis of the critic, a dogmatist; he would become evil, just as he is good as a critic. 'Just no dogma' is his dogma. For the critic remains on one and the same ground with the dogmatist, that of thought. Like the latter, he always proceeds from a thought, but he differs in that he does not give up preserving the principle thought in the thought process, thus does not allow it to become stable. He only asserts the thinking process against the belief in thinking, the progress in thinking against the standstill in it. No thought is safe from criticism, since it is thinking or the thinking mind itself ... I am not an opponent of criticism, that is to say, I am not a dogmatist, and I do not feel that I have been struck by the critic's tooth with which he tears the dogmatist to pieces. If I were a 'dogmatist', I would place a dogma, that is, a thought, an idea, a principle at the top, and complete it as a 'systematist' by spinning it out into a system, that is, into a structure of thought. Conversely, if I were a critic, namely an opponent of the dogmatist, I would be fighting the battle of free thought against subjugating thought, defending thought against thought. But I am neither the champion of a thought, nor the champion of thought ..." Every thought is also generated by the individual ego of an individual, even if it is the thought of one's own being. And if a person believes he recognizes his own ego, wants to describe it somehow according to its essence, he already makes it dependent on this essence. I may think up what I want: as soon as I conceptualize, define myself, I make myself a slave to what the concept, the definition provides me with. Hegel made the ego an appearance of reason, that is, he made it dependent on it. But all such dependencies cannot apply to the ego; for they are all taken from it itself. They are therefore based on the fact that the ego is deceiving itself. In truth it is not dependent. For everything on which it is supposed to be dependent must first be produced by itself. It must take something from itself in order to place it above itself as a "haunting". "Man, your head is haunted; you have one rafter too many! You are imagining great things and painting a whole world of gods for yourself, a realm of spirits to which you are called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea!" In truth, no thinking can come close to what lives in me as an ego. I can reach everything with my thinking, but I have to stop at my ego. I cannot think that, I can only experience it. I am not will; I am not an idea, just as little as I am the image of a deity. I make all other things comprehensible to me through my thinking. I live the I. I do not need to define or describe myself any further, for I experience myself in every moment. I only need to describe to myself what I do not experience directly, what is outside of me. It is absurd that I should want to grasp myself as a thought, as an idea, since I always have myself as a thing. If I have a stone in front of me, I try to explain to myself through my thinking what this stone is. I don't need to explain to myself what I am, because I am living it. Stirner responds to an attack on his book: "The only one is a word, and with a word one should be able to think something, a word should have a thought content. But the only one is a thoughtless word, it has no thought content. But then what is its content if the thought is not? One that cannot be there a second time, consequently also cannot be expressed; for if it could be expressed, really and completely expressed, it would be there a second time, would be there in 'expression'. Because the content of the unique is not a content of thought, therefore it is also unthinkable and unspeakable, but because it is unspeakable, therefore it, this complete phrase, is at the same time not a phrase. Only then, when nothing is said about you and you are only named, are you recognized as you. As long as something is said about you, you are only recognized as this something (human, spirit, Christian and so on). But the only one says nothing, because it is only a name, only this says that you are you, and nothing other than you, that you are a single 'you' and yourself. In this way you are predicate-less, but at the same time you are undetermined, professionless, lawless and so on." (Compare Stirner's Kleine Schriften, edited by J. H. Mackay, p. 116). As early as 1842, in an essay in the "Rheinische Zeitung" on the "untrue principle of our education or humanism and realism" (see Kleine Schriften, p. 5 ff.), Stirner stated that for him thinking and knowledge cannot penetrate to the core of the personality. He therefore regards it as an untrue educational principle if this core of the personality is not made the focus, but rather knowledge in a one-sided manner. "A knowledge which does not purify and concentrate itself in such a way that it carries away to the will' or, in other words, which only weighs me down as a possession, instead of having gone completely together with me, so that the freely moving ego, not distracted by any trailing possessions, wanders through the world with a fresh mind, a knowledge that has not become personal, is a pitiful preparation for life... If it is the urge of our time, after the freedom of thought has been achieved, to pursue it to perfection, through which it turns into freedom of will, in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new epoch, then the ultimate goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born of knowledge, and the eloquent expression of what it has to strive for is: the personal or free man ... As in certain other spheres, freedom is not allowed to break through in the pedagogical sphere, the power of opposition is not given a voice: submissiveness is desired. Only a formal and material training is intended, and only scholars emerge from the menageries of the humanists, only 'useful citizens' from those of the realists, both of whom are nothing but submissive people ... Knowledge must die in order to rise again as will and to create itself anew every day as a free person. " In the person of the individual can only lie the source of what he does. Moral duties cannot be commandments given to man from somewhere, but goals that he sets for himself. It is a deception if a person believes that he is doing something because he is following a commandment of a general sacred ethic. He does it because the life of his ego drives him to do so. I do not love my neighbor because I follow a holy commandment to love my neighbor, but because my ego draws me to my neighbor. I should not love him; I will love him. What men have willed, they have set as commandments upon themselves. On this point Stirner is the easiest to misunderstand. He does not deny moral action. He merely denies the moral precept. How man acts, if he only understands himself correctly, will automatically result in a moral world order. For Stirner, moral rules are a spook, a fixed idea. They establish something that man comes to of his own accord when he leaves himself completely to his nature. The abstract thinkers naturally object: Aren't there criminals? Are they allowed to act according to what their nature dictates? These abstract thinkers foresee general chaos if people do not hold moral rules sacred. Stirner could answer them: Are there not also diseases in nature? Are they not produced according to eternal, iron laws just like everything healthy? But is it not therefore possible to distinguish the sick from the healthy? As little as it will ever occur to a reasonable person to count the sick as healthy, because it is produced by natural laws just like the healthy, Stirner would just as little like to count the immoral as moral, because it arises just like the healthy when the individual is left to his own devices. What distinguishes Stirner from the abstract thinkers, however, is his conviction that in human life, when individuals are left to their own devices, the moral will be as dominant as the healthy is in nature. He believes in the moral nobility of human nature, in the free development of morality out of the individual; the abstract thinkers do not seem to him to believe in this nobility; therefore he thinks they degrade the nature of the individual to the slave of general commandments, the means of discipline of human action. These "moral men" must have much evil and nefariousness at the bottom of their souls, says Stirner, because they absolutely demand moral rules; they must be quite loveless, because they want to have love, which should arise in them as a free instinct, commanded by a commandment. Twenty years ago, in a serious essay, it could still be said reprovingly: "Max Stirner's essay 'Der Einzige und sein Eigentum' ('The One and Only and His Property') shatters spirit and humanity, law and state, truth and virtue as idols of thought bondage and freely confesses: 'Nothing is above me'! ' (Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte, 5th part, 5. 424), this is only proof of how easily Stirner can be misunderstood by the radical form of expression, for whom the human individual stood before his eyes as something so noble, sublime, unique and free that not even the high flight of thought should be able to reach it. In the second half of the century, Max Stirner was as good as forgotten. It is thanks to the efforts of John Henry Mackay that we now have a picture of his life and character. In his book "Max Stirner, sein Leben und sein Werk" (Berlin 1898), he has processed everything that years of research have provided as material for the characterization of what he considered to be the "boldest and most consistent thinker".

[ 11 ] Stirner, like other thinkers of more recent times, is faced with the fact of the self-conscious ego to be grasped. Others seek the means to grasp this ego. This comprehension encounters difficulties because a wide gulf has formed between the image of nature and the image of spiritual life. Stirner ignores all this. He places himself before the fact of the self-conscious ego and uses everything he can express solely to point to this fact. He wants to speak of the ego in such a way that everyone looks at this ego itself, and no one spares himself this looking by saying that the ego is this or that. Stirner does not want to point to an idea, a thought of the I, but to the living I itself, which the personality finds within itself.

[ 12 ] Stirner's mode of conception, as the opposite pole to that of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, is a phenomenon that had to appear with a certain necessity in the more recent development of worldviews. The fact of the self-conscious ego came glaringly before his mind. Every creation of thought appeared to him as the mythical world of images can appear to a thinker who only wants to grasp the world in thought. Before this fact, all other world content disappeared for him, insofar as this shows a connection with the self-conscious ego. He placed the self-conscious ego in complete isolation.

[ 13 ] Stirner did not feel that there could be difficulties in presenting the ego in this way. The following decades could not gain any relationship to this isolated position of the ego. For these decades are primarily concerned with gaining an image of nature under the influence of the scientific way of thinking. After Stirner has presented one side of the newer consciousness, the fact of the self-conscious ego, the age initially diverts attention away from this ego and turns it to where this "ego" is not to be found, to the image of nature.

[ 14 ] The first half of the nineteenth century gave birth to its worldviews from idealism. When a bridge is drawn to natural science, as with Schelling, Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), Henrik Steffens (1773 to 1845), it is done from the point of view of the idealistic world view and in the interest of the same. The time is so little ripe for making scientific ideas fruitful for the world view that Jean Lamarck's ingenious view of the development of the most perfect organisms from the simplest, which came to light in 1809, has remained completely unconsidered, and that when Geoffroy de St. Hilaire advocated the idea of a general natural relationship of all forms of organisms in 1830 in the fight against Cuvier, Goethe's genius was needed to recognize the scope of this idea. The numerous scientific results that the first half of the century also brought only became new world puzzles for the development of world views, especially after Charles Darwin opened up new prospects for the understanding of the living world in 1859.