The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The readers of the German original of this book (Philosophie der Freiheit, second edition, 1918) will know that the author's argument is largely based upon a distinction between the different elements making up the act of Knowledge. English philosophical terms are rarely exact equivalents of German philosophical terms, and the translator's standing problem is to avoid, or at least to minimize, the ambiguities resulting therefrom. The aim of the present revision of the original translation has been to help the reader to understand the analysis of the act of Knowledge and to enable him to follow the subsequent chapters without being troubled by ambiguous terms.

“Wahrnehmung” has been rendered as “percept,” and “Begriff” as “concept,” in accordance with general use. There has been, however, a difficulty in finding any satisfactory means of making clear in English, by choice of words, the distinction which exists in German between “Vorstellung” and “Idee.” Both are covered in English philosophical usage by one and the same word: “idea.” Here a definite decision had to be made to which, we trust, the reader will soon become accustomed.

The mental picture which the thinker forms to represent the concept in an individual way (“Vorstellung”) is here called a “representation.” This word, however clumsy it may seem at the first glance, is justified, because the mental picture indeed stands for the concept and represents it Coleridge has used the term representation in this sense. Recent writers on psychology have adopted it with the obvious aim of avoiding confusion.

The German term “Idee,” on the other hand, means more than an ordinary concept. It is a “fuller, more saturated, more comprehensive concept.” The philosophic systems of Kant, Schelling, Hegel and indeed the whole of German philosophy are quite unthinkable without this term. Chapter IX of this book gives an outstanding example in its title: “Die Idee der Freiheit.” In order to indicate this reference with the German term “Idee” we have translated it as “Idea,” printed with a capital “ I ” throughout the book.

Thus, the ambiguous English term “idea” had to be altogether avoided and to be replaced by “representation,” whenever the German text has “Vorstellung,” and by “Idea” when the text has “Idee.”

The point is that a distinction had to be made without which vital passages of this book remain obscure.

It goes without saying that the merits of the previous translation are fully recognized in this revision. Alterations, therefore, have been made only where a greater truth towards the original seemed desirable and could be achieved without spoiling the style, which gave such an excellent reflection of the beauties of the original.

I should like to thank the many friends who contributed to this revision from almost all English-speaking countries.

H. POPPELBAUM.
London, Whitsun, 1939.

Today's lecture is intended to be just one episode in the series of lectures I have given, an insertion, in fact, for the reason that it is necessary for anthroposophists to be alert people, that is, to form an opinion by looking at the world in a certain way. And so it is necessary from time to time to insert one or other of these into lectures that otherwise deal with anthroposophical material, in order to open up a view of the other events, of the other state of our civilization. And today I would like to expand on what I briefly mentioned in the last article in the “Goetheanum”, where I talked about a publication that has just been released: “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer. It describes itself as the first part of a philosophy of culture and is essentially concerned with a kind of critique of contemporary culture. However, in order to support some of the characteristics that Albert Schweitzer gives of the present, I would like to start by presenting the existence of the culture that Albert Schweitzer wants to address through a single, but perhaps characteristic example. I could have chosen thousands. You can only pick and choose from the full cultural life of the present, but rather from the full cultural death of the present, and you will always find enough. That is precisely the point, as I also noted in the pedagogical lectures yesterday and today, that we are getting used to looking at such things with an honestly alert eye. And so, to establish a kind of foundation, I have selected something from the series that can always be considered a representation of contemporary intellectual culture. I have chosen a rector's speech that was delivered in Berlin on October 15, 1910. I chose this speech because it was given by a medical doctor, a person who is not one-sidedly immersed in some kind of philosophical cultural observation, but who, from a scientific point of view, wanted to give a kind of contemporary tableau.

Now I do not want to trouble you with the first part of this rectorate speech, which is mainly about the Berlin University, but I would like to familiarize you more with the general world view that the physician Rubner – because that is who it is – expressed on a solemn occasion at the time. It is perhaps a characteristic example because it dates back to 1910, when everyone in Europe and far beyond was optimistically convinced that there was a tremendous intellectual upturn and that great things had been achieved. The passage I want to select is a kind of apostrophe to the student body, but one that allows us to see into the heart of a representative figure of the present age and understand what is really going on there. First of all, the student body is addressed as follows: “We all have to learn. We bring nothing into the world but our instrument for intellectual work, a blank page, the brain, differently predisposed, differently capable of development; we receive everything from the outside world.”

Well, if you have gone through this materialistic culture of the present day, you can indeed have this view. There is no need to be narrow-minded. You have to be clear about the power that materialistic culture exerts on contemporary personalities, and then you can understand when someone says that you come into the world with a blank sheet, the brain, and that you receive everything from the outside world. But let us continue to listen to what this address to students has to say. It begins by explaining, apparently somewhat more clearly, how we are a blank slate, how the child of the most important mathematician must learn the multiplication table again, because, unfortunately, he has not inherited advanced mathematics from his father, how the child of the greatest linguist must learn his mother tongue again, and so on. No brain can grasp everything that its ancestors have experienced and learned. But now these brains are being advised what they, as completely blank slates, should do in the world in order to be written on. It goes on to say: “What billions of brains have considered and matured in the course of human history, what our spiritual heroes have helped create...” — not true, that is said for two pages in a row, it is inculcated into people: they are born with their brains as a blank slate and should just be careful to absorb what the spiritual heroes have created.

Yes, if these intellectual heroes were all blank slates, where did it all come from, what they created, and what the other blank slates are supposed to absorb? A strange train of thought, isn't it! - So: “What our spiritual heroes have helped to create is received” by this blank sheet of brain “in short sentences through education, and from this its uniqueness and individual life can now unfold.”

On the next page, these blank pages, these brains, are now presented with a strange sentence: “What has been learned provides the basic material for productive thinking.” So now, all at once, productive thinking appears on the blank pages, these brains. It would be natural, though, for someone who speaks of brains as blank pages not to speak of productive thinking.

Now a sentence that shows quite clearly how solidly materialistic the best of them gradually came to think. For Rubner is not one of the worst. He is a physician and has even read the philosopher Zeller, which is saying something. So he is not narrow-minded at all, you see. But how does he think? He wants to present the refreshing side of life, so he says: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” So when a student has studied something for a while and now moves on to a different subject, it means that he is now tilling a new field of the brain. As you can see, the thought patterns have gradually taken on a very characteristic materialistic note. “Because,” he continues, “some fields of the brain only yield results when they are repeatedly plowed, but eventually bear the same good fruit as others that open up more effortlessly.”

It is extremely difficult to follow this train of thought, because the brain is supposed to be a blank slate, and now it is supposed to learn everything from the written pages, which must also have been blank when they were born. Now this brain is supposed to be plowed. But now at least one farmer should be there. The more one would go into such completely incredible, impossible thinking, the more confused one would become. But Max Rubner is very concerned about his students, and so he advises them to work the brain properly. So they should work the brain. Now he cannot help but say that thinking works the brain. But now he wants to recommend thinking. His materialistic way of thinking strikes him in the neck again, and then he comes up with an extraordinarily pretty sentence: “Thinking strengthens the brain, the latter increases in performance through exercise just like any other organ, like our muscle strength through work and sport. Studying is brain sport.

Well, now the Berlin students in 1910 knew what to think: “Thinking is brain sport.” Yes, it does not occur to the representative personality of the present what is much more interesting in sport than what is happening externally. What is actually going on in the limbs of the human being during the various sporting movements, what inner processes are taking place, would be much more interesting to consider in sport. Then one would even come across something very interesting. If one were to consider this interesting aspect of sport, one would come to the conclusion that sport is one of those activities that belong to the human being with limbs, the human being with a metabolism. Thinking belongs to the nervous-sensory human being. There the relationship is reversed. What is turned inward in the human being, the processes within the human being, come to the outside in thinking. And what comes to the outside in sport comes to the inside. So one would have to consider the more interesting thing in thinking. But the representative personality has simply forgotten how to think, cannot bring any thought to an end at all.

Our entire modern culture has emerged from such thinking, which is actually incomplete in itself and always remains incomplete. You only catch a glimpse of the thinking that has produced our culture on such representative occasions. You catch it, as it were. But unfortunately, those who make such discoveries are not all that common. Because in a Berlin rectorate speech, a university speech on a festive occasion: “Our goals for the future” - if you are a real person of the present, you are taken seriously. That's what science says, that's what the invincible authority of science says, it knows everything. And if it is proven that thinking is brain sport, well, then you just have to accept it; then after millennia and millennia, people have become so clever that they have finally come to the conclusion that thinking is brain sport.

I could continue these reflections now into the most diverse areas, and we would see everywhere that I cannot say the same spirit, that the same evil spirit prevails, but that it is naturally admired. Well, some insightful people saw what had become of it even before the outwardly visible decline occurred. And one must say, for example: Albert Schweitzer, the excellent author of the book “History of Life-Jesus Research, from Reimarus to Wrede,” who, after all, was able to advance in life-Jesus research to the apocalyptic through careful, thorough, penetrating and sharp thinking, could be trusted to also get a clear view of the symptoms of decay in contemporary culture. Now he assured us that this writing of his, “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture,” was not written after the war, but that the first draft was conceived as early as 1900, and that it was then elaborated from 1914 to 1917. Now it has been published. And it must be said that here is someone who sees the decline of culture with open eyes. And it is interesting to visualize what such an observer of the decline of culture has to say about what has been wrought on this culture, as if with sharp critical knives. The phrases with which contemporary culture is characterized come across like cutting knives. Let us let a few of these phrases sink in. The first sentence of the book is: “We are in the throes of the decline of culture. The war did not create this situation. It is only one manifestation of it. What was given spiritually has been transformed into facts, which in turn now have a deteriorating effect on the spiritual in every respect.” - “We lost our culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.” — “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.” — “Now it is obvious to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”

Albert Schweitzer also sees it in his own way – I would say, somewhat forcefully – that this decline of culture began around the middle of the 19th century, around that middle of the 19th century that I have so often referred to here as an important point in time that must be considered if one wants to understand the present in some kind of awareness. Schweitzer says about this: “But around the middle of the 19th century, this confrontation between ethical ideals of reason and reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it came more and more to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound. Its thoughts lagged behind the times, as if they were too exhausted to keep pace with it.” - And Schweitzer brings up something else that is actually surprising, but which we can understand well because it has been discussed here often in a much deeper sense than Schweitzer is able to present. He is clear about one thing: in earlier times there was a total worldview. All phenomena of life, from the stone below to the highest human ideals, were a totality of life. In this totality of life, the divine-spiritual being was at work. If one wanted to know how the laws of nature work in nature, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. If one wanted to know how the moral laws worked, how religious impulses worked, one turned to the divine-spiritual being. There was a total world view that had anchored morality in objectivity just as the laws of nature are anchored in objectivity. The last world view that emerged and still had some knowledge of such a total world view was the Enlightenment, which wanted to get everything out of the intellect, but which still brought the moral world into a certain inner connection with what the natural world is.

Consider how often I have said it here: If someone today honestly believes in the laws of nature as they are presented, they can only believe in a beginning of the world, similar to how the Kant-Laplacean theory presents it, and an end of the world, as it will one day be in the heat death. But then one must imagine that all moral ideals have been boiled out of the swirling particles of the cosmic fog, which have gradually coalesced into crystals and organisms and finally into humans, and out of humans the idealistic ethical view swirls. But these ethical ideals, being only illusions, born out of the swirling atoms of man, will have vanished when the earth has disappeared in heat death. That is to say, a world view has emerged that refers only to the natural and has not anchored moral ideals in it. And only because the man of the present is dishonest and does not admit it to himself, does not want to look at these facts, does he believe that the moral ideals are still somehow anchored. But anyone who believes in today's natural science and is honest must not believe in the eternity of moral ideals. He does it out of cowardly dishonesty if he does. We must look into the present with this seriousness.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees this in his own way, and he seeks to find out where the blame lies for this state of affairs. He says: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” Now one can have one's own particular thoughts about this matter. One can believe that philosophers are the hermits of the world, that other people have nothing to do with philosophers. But Albert Schweitzer says quite correctly at a later point in his writing: “Kant and Hegel ruled millions who never read a line of theirs and did not even know that they obeyed them.” The paths that the world's thoughts take are not at all as one usually imagines. I know very well, because I have often experienced it, that until the end of the 19th century the most important works of Hegel lay in the libraries and were not even cut open. They were not studied. But the few copies that were studied by a few have passed into the whole of educational life. And there is hardly a single one of you whose thinking does not involve Kant and Hegel, because the paths are, I would say, mysterious. And if people in the most remote mountain villages have come to read newspapers, it also applies to them, to these people in the mountain villages, that they are dominated by Kant and Hegel, not only to this illustrious and enlightened society sitting here in the hall.

So you can say, like Albert Schweitzer: “The decisive factor was the failure of philosophy.” In the 18th and early 19th centuries, philosophy was the leader of public opinion. She had dealt with the questions that arose for people and the time, and kept a reflection on them alive in the sense of culture. In philosophy at that time, there was an elementary philosophizing about man, society, people, humanity and culture, which naturally produced a lively popular philosophy that often dominated opinion and maintained cultural enthusiasm.

And now Albert Schweitzer comments on the further progress: “It was not clear to philosophy that the energy of the cultural ideas entrusted to it was beginning to be questioned. At the end of one of the most outstanding works on the history of philosophy published at the end of the 19th century, the same work that I once criticized in a public lecture, this work on the history of philosophy, “this is defined as the process in which,” and now he quotes the other historian of philosophy, ”with ever clearer and more certain consciousness, the reflection on cultural values has taken place, the universality of which is the subject of philosophy itself.” Schweitzer now says: “In doing so, the author forgot the essential point: that in the past, philosophy not only reflected on cultural values, but also allowed them to emerge as active ideas in public opinion, whereas from the second half of the 19th century onwards they increasingly became a guarded, unproductive capital for it.”

People have not realized what has actually happened to the thinking of humanity. Just read most of these century reflections that appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. If one did it differently, as I did in my book, which was later called “The Riddles of Philosophy”, then of course it was considered unhistorical. And one of these noble philosophers reproached me because the book was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century” for saying nothing about Bismarck in it. Yes, a philosopher reproached this book for that. Many other similar accusations have been made against this book because it tried to extract from the past that which has an effect on the future. But what did these critics usually do? They reflected. They reflected on what culture is, on what already exists. These thinkers no longer had any idea that earlier centuries had created culture.

But now Albert Schweitzer comes along and I would like to say that he seems to have resigned himself to the future of philosophy. He says: It is actually not the fault of philosophy that it no longer plays an actual productive role in thinking. It was more the fate of philosophy. For the world in general has forgotten how to think, and philosophy has forgotten it along with the rest. In a certain respect, Schweitzer is even very indulgent, because one could also think: If the whole world has forgotten how to think, then at least the philosophers could have maintained it. But Schweitzer finds it quite natural that the philosophers have simply forgotten how to think along with all the other people. He says: “That thinking did not manage to create a world view of an optimistic-ethical character and to base the ideals that make up culture in such a world view was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thought.” - So that was the case with all people. —- “But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it really maintained a progress of culture.”

So, with the other people, the philosophers have, as Albert Schweitzer says with his razor-sharp criticism, forgotten how to think; but that is not really their fault, that is just a fact, they have just forgotten how to think with the other people. But their real fault is that they haven't even noticed that. They should have noticed it at least and should have talked about it. That is the only thing Schweitzer accuses the philosophers of. “According to its ultimate destiny, philosophy is the leader and guardian of general reason. It would have been its duty to admit to our world that the ethical ideals of reason no longer found support in a total world view, as they used to, but were left to their own devices for the time being and had to assert themselves in the world through their inner strength alone.” And then he concludes this first chapter by saying: “So little philosophy was made about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the times with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. So it happened that we did not struggle for our culture.”

Now, however, I ask you not to do this with these sentences of Albert Schweitzer, for example, by saying to yourself or a part of you: Well, that is just a criticism of German culture, and it does not apply to England, to America, and least of all to France, of course! Albert Schweitzer has written a great number of works. Among these are the following, written in English: “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God”; then another work: “The Question of the Historical Jesus”; then a third; and he has written some others in French. So the man is international and certainly does not just speak of German culture, but of the culture of the present day. Therefore it would not be very nice if this view were to be treated the way we experienced something in Berlin once. We had an anthroposophical meeting and there was a member who had a dog. I always had to explain that people have repeated lives on earth, reincarnation, but not animals, because it is the generic souls, the group souls, that are in the same stage, not the individual animal. But this personality loved her dog so much that she thought, even though she admitted that other animals, even other dogs, do not have repeated lives, her dog does have repeated lives, she knows that for sure. There was a little discussion about this matter – discussions are sometimes stimulating, as you know, and one could now think that this personality could never be convinced and that the others were convinced. This also became clear immediately when we were sitting in a coffee house. This other member said that it was actually terribly foolish of this personality to think that her dog had repeated earthly lives; she had realized this immediately, it was quite clear from anthroposophy that this was an impossibility. Yes, if it were my parrot! That's what it applies to! — I would not want that this thought form would be transferred by the different nationalities in such a way that they say: Yes, for the people for whom Albert Schweitzer speaks, it is true that culture is in decline, that philosophers have not realized it themselves, but — our parrot has repeated lives on earth!

In the second chapter, Albert Schweitzer talks about “circumstances that inhibit culture in our economic and intellectual life,” and here, too, he is extremely sharp. Of course, there are also trivialities, I would say, of what is quite obvious. But then Albert Schweitzer sees through a shortcoming of modern man, this cultureless modern man, by finding that modern man, because he has lost his culture, has become unfree, and is unsettled. Well, I have read sentences to you by Max Rubner – they do not, however, indicate a strong collection of thoughts. The representative modern man is unsettled.

Then Albert Schweitzer adds a cute epithet to this modern man. He is, in addition to being unfree and uncollected, also “incomplete”. Now imagine that these modern people all believe that they are walking around the world as complete specimens of humanity. But Albert Schweitzer believes that today, due to modern education, everyone is put into a very one-sided professional life, developing only one side of their abilities while allowing the others to wither away, and thus becoming an incomplete human being in reality. And in connection with this lack of freedom, incompleteness and lack of focus in modern man, Albert Schweitzer asserts that modern man is becoming somewhat inhumane: “In fact, thoughts of complete inhumanity have been moving among us with the ugly clarity of words and the authority of logical principles for two generations. A mentality has emerged in society that alienates individuals from humanity. The courtesy of natural feeling is fading.” - I recall the Annual General Meeting we had here, where courtesy was discussed! — ”In its place comes behavior of absolute indifference, with more or less formality. The aloofness and apathy emphasized in every way possible towards strangers is no longer felt as inner coarseness at all, but is considered to be a sign of sophistication. Our society has also ceased to recognize all people as having human value and dignity. Parts of humanity have become human material and human things for us. If for decades it has been possible to talk about war and conquest among us with increasing carelessness, as if it were a matter of operating on a chessboard, this was only possible because an overall attitude had been created in which the fate of the individual was no longer imagined, but only present as figures and objects. When war came, the inhumanity that was in us had free rein. And what fine and coarse rudeness has appeared in our colonial literature and in our parliaments over the past decades as a rational truth about people of color, and passed into public opinion! Twenty years ago, in one of the parliaments of continental Europe, it was even accepted that, with regard to deported blacks who had been left to die of hunger and disease, it was said from the rostrum that they had “died as if they were animals.

Now Albert Schweitzer also discusses the role of over-organization in our cultural decline. He believes that public conditions also have a culture-inhibiting effect due to the fact that over-organization is occurring everywhere. After all, organizing decrees, ordinances, laws are being created everywhere today. You are in an organization for everything. People experience this thoughtlessly. They also act thoughtlessly. They are always organized in something, so Albert Schweitzer finds that this “over-organization” has also had a culture-inhibiting effect.

“The terrible truth that with the progress of history and economic development, culture does not become easier, but more difficult, was not addressed.” — “The bankruptcy of the cultural state, which is becoming more apparent from decade to decade, is destroying modern man. The demoralization of the individual by the whole is in full swing.

A person who is unfree, uncollected, incomplete, and lost in a lack of humanity, who has surrendered his intellectual independence and moral judgment to organized society, and who experiences inhibitions of cultural awareness in every respect: this is how modern man trod his dark path in dark times. Philosophy had no understanding for the danger in which he found himself. So she made no attempt to help him. Not even to reflect on what was happening to him did she stop him."

In the third chapter, Albert Schweitzer then talks about how a real culture would have to have an ethical character. Earlier worldviews gave birth to ethical values; since the mid-19th century, people have continued to live with the old ethical values without somehow anchoring them in a total worldview, and they didn't even notice: “They in the situation created by the ethical cultural movement, without realizing that it had now become untenable, and without looking ahead to what was preparing between and within nations. So our time, thoughtless as it was, came to the conclusion that culture consists primarily of scientific, technical and artistic achievements and can do without ethics or with a minimum of ethics. This externalized conception of culture gained authority in public opinion in that it was universally held even by persons whose social position and scientific education seemed to indicate that they were competent in matters of intellectual life.” — ”Our sense of reality, then, consists in our allowing the next most obvious fact to arise from one fact through passions and short-sighted considerations of utility, and so on and on. Since we lack the purposeful intention of a whole to be realized, our activity falls under the concept of natural events.

And Albert Schweitzer also sees with full clarity that because people no longer had anything creative, they turned to nationalism.

"It was characteristic of the morbid nature of the realpolitik of nationalism that it sought in every way to adorn itself with the trappings of the ideal. The struggle for power became the struggle for law and culture. The selfish communities of interests that nations entered into with each other against others presented themselves as friendships and affinities. As such, they were backdated to the past, even when history knew more of hereditary enmity than of inner kinship.

Ultimately, it was not enough for nationalism to set aside any intention of realizing a cultural humanity in its politics. It even destroyed the very notion of culture by proclaiming national culture.

You see, Albert Schweitzer sees quite clearly in the most diverse areas of life, it must be said. And he finds words to express this negative aspect of our time. So, I would say, it is also quite clear to him what our time has become through the great influence of science. But since he also realizes that our time is incapable of thinking – I have shown you this with the example of Max Rubner – Albert Schweitzer also knows that science has become thoughtless and therefore cannot have the vocation to lead humanity in culture in our time.

"Today, thinking has nothing more to do with science because science has become independent and indifferent to it. The most advanced knowledge now goes hand in hand with the most thoughtless world view. It claims to deal only with individual findings, since only these preserve objective science. It is not its business to summarize knowledge and assert its consequences for world view. In the past, every scientific person was, as Albert Schweitzer says, at the same time a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science anymore.

You see, Schweitzer sees the negative side extremely clearly, and he also knows how to say what is important: that it is important to bring the spirit back into culture. He knows that culture has become spiritless. But this morning in my lecture on education I explained how only the words remain of what people knew about the soul in earlier times. People talk about the soul in words, but they no longer associate anything real with those words. And so it is with the spirit. That is why there is no awareness of the spirit today. One has only the word. And then, when someone has so astutely characterized the negative of modern culture, then at most he can still come to it, according to certain traditional feelings that one has when one speaks of spirit today – but because no one knows anything about spirit – then at most one can come to say: the spirit is necessary.

But if you are supposed to say how the spirit is to enter into culture, then it becomes so - forgive me: when I was a very young boy, I lived near a village, and chickens were stolen from a person who was one of the village's most important residents. Now it came to a lawsuit. It came to a court hearing. The judge wanted to gauge how severe the punishment should be, and to do that it was necessary to get an idea of what kind of chickens they were. So he asked the village dignitary to describe the chickens. “Tell us something more about what kind of chickens they were. Describe them to us a little!” Yes, Mr. Judge, they were beautiful chickens. — You can't do anything with that if you can't tell us anything more precise! You had these chickens, describe these chickens to us a little. — Yes, Mr. Judge, they were just beautiful chickens! - And so this personality continued. Nothing more could be brought out of her than: They were beautiful chickens.

And you see, in the next chapter Albert Schweitzer also comes to the point of saying how he thinks a total world view should be: “But what kind of thinking world view must there be for cultural ideas and cultural attitudes to be grounded in it?” He says, “Optimistic and ethical.” They were just beautiful chickens! It must be optimistic and ethical. Yes, but how should it be? Just imagine that an architect is building a house for someone and wants to find out what the house should be like. The person in question simply replies: “The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful, and it should be pleasant to live in.” Now you can make the plan and know how he wants it! But that is exactly what happens when someone tells you that a worldview should be optimistic and ethical. If you want to build a house, you have to design the plan; it has to be a concretely designed plan. But the ever-so-shrewd Albert Schweitzer has nothing to say except: “There were just beautiful chickens.” Or: “The house should be beautiful, that is, it should be optimistic and ethical.

He even goes a little further, but it doesn't come out much differently than the beautiful chickens. He says, for example, that because thinking has gone so much out of fashion, because thinking is no longer possible at all and the philosophers themselves do not notice that it is no longer there, but still believe that they can think, so many people have come to mysticism who want to work free of thought, who want to arrive at a world view without thinking. Now he says: Yes, but why should one not enter mysticism with thinking? So the worldview that is to come must enter mysticism with thinking. Yes, but what will it be like then? The house should be solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so that one can live comfortably inside. The worldview should be such that it enters mysticism through thinking. That is exactly the same. A real content is not even hinted at anywhere. It does not exist.

So how does anthroposophy differ from such cultural criticism? It can certainly agree with the negative aspects, but it is not satisfied with describing the house in terms of what it should be: solid and weatherproof and beautiful and such that it is comfortable to live in. Instead, it draws up plans for the house, it really sketches out the image of a culture. Now, Albert Schweitzer does object to this to some extent, saying, “The great revision of the convictions and ideals in and for which we live cannot be achieved by talking other, better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have. It can only be achieved by the many reflecting on the meaning of life...” So that's not possible, talking better thoughts into the people of our time than those they already have, that's not possible! Yes, what should one do then in the sense of Albert Schweitzer? He admonishes people to go within themselves, to get out of themselves what they have out of themselves, so that one does not need to talk into them thoughts that are somehow different from those they already have.

Yes, but by searching within themselves for what they already have, people have brought about the situation that we are now in: “We are in the throes of the decline of civilization.” “We lost our way culturally because there was no thinking about culture among us,” and so on. Yes, all this has come about - and this is what Schweitzer hits so hard and with such intense thinking - because people have neglected any real, concrete planning of culture. And now he says: It is not enough for people to absorb something; they have to go within themselves. You see, you can say that not only Max Rubner, who cannot cope with his thinking everywhere, but even a thinker as sharp as Albert Schweitzer is not able to make the transition from a negative critique of culture to an acknowledgment of what must enter this culture as a new spiritual life. Anthroposophy has been around for just as long as Albert Schweitzer, who admittedly wrote this book from 1900 onwards. But he failed to notice that Anthroposophy positively seeks to achieve what he merely criticizes in negative terms: to bring spirit into culture. In this regard, he even gets very facetious. Because towards the end of the last part of his writing he says:

“In itself, reflecting on the meaning of life has a significance. If such reflection arises again among us” – it is the conditional sentence, only worsened, because it should actually read: If such reflection arose again among us! - “then the ideals of vanity and passion, which now proliferate like evil weeds in the convictions of the masses, will wither away without hope. How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just spent three minutes each evening looking up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky...” he comes to the conclusion that it would be good for people if they looked up at the starry sky for three minutes every evening! If you tell them so, they will certainly not do it; but read how these things should be done in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. One does not understand why the step from the negative to the positive cannot be taken here, one does not understand it! “and when attending a funeral, we would devote ourselves to the riddle of life and death, instead of walking thoughtlessly behind the coffin in conversation.”

You see, when you are so negative, you conclude such a reflection on culture in such a way that you say: “Previous thinking thought to understand the meaning of life from the meaning of the world. It may be that we have to resign ourselves to leaving the meaning of the world open to question and to give our lives a meaning from the will to live, as it is in us. Even if the paths by which we have to strive towards the goal still lie in darkness, the direction in which we have to go is clear.

As clear as it was that his chickens were beautiful chickens, and as clear as it is that someone says about the plan of his house: The house should be solid, weatherproof, and beautiful. Most people in the present see it as clear when they characterize something in this way, and do not even notice how unclear it is.

"We have to think about the meaning of life together, to struggle together to arrive at a world- and life-affirming worldview in which our drive, which we experience as necessary and valuable, finds justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening... ” - The house should be beautiful and solid and weatherproof and in such a way that one can live well in it. In regard to a house one says so, in regard to a Weltanschhauung one says: The Weltanschhauung should be such that it can work justification, orientation, clarification, deepening, moralization and strengthening! - “and thereupon become capable of setting up and realizing definite cultural ideals inspired by the spirit of true humanity.”

Now we have it. The sharpest, fully recognizable thinking about the negative, absolute powerlessness to see anything positive. Those people who deserve the most praise today – and Albert Schweitzer is one of them – are in such a position. Anthroposophists in particular should develop a keen awareness of this, so that they know what to expect when one of those who are “philosophers” in the sense of this astute Albert Schweitzer comes along, for example a neo-Kantian, as these people call themselves, and who now do not even realize that they have not only overslept thinking, but that they have not even noticed how they have overslept thinking. Of course, one cannot expect them to understand anthroposophy. But one should still keep a watchful eye on the way in which such people, who are rightly described by Schweitzer as the sleepy philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries, now speak of anthroposophy. We should look into the present with an alert eye on all sides.

A newspaper article begins by saying how ineffective Bergson seems in comparison to Kant. But then it goes on to say: Steiner's wild speculations and great spiritual tirades stand even less up to an epistemological test based on Kant. Steiner also believes that he can go beyond Kant and the neo-Kantians to higher insights. In fact, he falls far short of them and, as can easily be proven from his writings, has misunderstood them completely at crucial points.

This is of course trumpeted out without any justification whatsoever in the world's newspapers. And then these people, who can think in this way, or who are far from being able to think the way Rubner can, say: You only have to ask contemporary science and you know very well what these supposed insights - these brain bubbles, as he calls them - actually mean.

We have to pay attention to these things, and we must not oversleep them. Because this - as Albert Schweitzer calls it - thoughtless science can assert itself, it can assert itself in the world, and for the time being it has power. Today many people say that one should not look at power but at the law; but unfortunately they then call the power they have the law. Well, I will spare you the rest of the gibberish he presents, because it now goes into spiritual phenomena, which must also be examined by science today, and so on.

But if the poor students do get hold of anthroposophy and absorb the “brain bubbles”, then Max Rubner gives them this advice: “But there is always something refreshing about working in a new, previously untilled field of the brain.” Some fields have been plowed over and over again! Now, when the poor students in anthroposophy get “brain bubbles” and then plow these brains, the bubbles in front of the plowshare will certainly disappear. So in this respect, the story is true again. To understand that which wants to enter our culture, which, according to the best minds, is admittedly disintegrating, indeed has already disintegrated, that is not really given to the best minds of the present either, insofar as they are involved in the present cultural industry. So it remains the case that when they are supposed to say what the house should be like, they do not take the pencil or the model substance to design the house – which is what anthroposophy does – but then they say: The house should be beautiful and strong and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it. With the house one says so. With a worldview, one says that it should be optimistic, it should be ethical, one should be able to orient oneself in it, and now how all the things have been called, but which mean nothing other than what I have told you.

You can see that it is necessary – and you will recognize it from the matter itself that this is necessary – to sometimes go a little beyond what is happening in civilization. That is why I have presented today's episodic reflection. Next Friday we want to talk further about these things, not say any more that the house should be beautiful and firm and weatherproof and so that one can live comfortably in it, the world view should be optimistic and ethical and so that one can orient oneself in it, and so on, but we really want to point to the real anthroposophy, to the spiritual life that our culture needs.

The reader of Albert Schweitzer's “History of the Life-Jesu Research” (from Reimarus to Wrede, 1906) and other writings by the same author must consider him to be a very sharp thinker. For someone who wants to use his thoughts to penetrate into areas of intellectual life that many others consider inaccessible to thought and only reachable through emotional, mystical or religious experience.

One therefore eagerly seizes upon the recently published first part of a “Philosophy of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer, entitled “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” (Paul Haupt, Academic Bookshop Bern, 1923).

Right from the first pages, we encounter a description of the feelings evoked by the signs of decay in today's “culture”. The lack of a way of thinking that takes hold of the spirituality of the world is thoroughly felt and characterized with cutting sharpness. The words of criticism fall like cutting knives on the entire face of contemporary life.

The first sentence is: “We are under the sign of the decline of culture.” This sets the tone. And from its continuation we hear: “We abandoned culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.”... “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.”... “Now it is clear to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”... “The Enlightenment and rationalism had established ethical rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks...” ... ”But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this confrontation of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it increasingly came to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound...

Schweitzer believes he sees the reason for this. In earlier worldviews, ethical ideals of reason lay in the same sources as thoughts about nature. These worldviews saw a spiritual world behind nature. And from this spiritual world, impulses flowed into the facts of nature; but so did ethical ideals of reason into the human soul. There was a “total worldview.” This does not exist today. The thoughts of the new worldview can only speak of forces in natural phenomena, but not of ethical goals of the human soul.

Schweitzer sees only a powerless philosophy within this situation, and this is to blame for the decline. “That thinking did not manage to create a worldview of optimistic-ethical character and to found the ideals that make up culture in such a worldview was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thinking. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it was really maintaining a progress of culture.” ... ”So little philosophy philosophized about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the time with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. And so it came about that we did not struggle for our culture."

Schweitzer points out that institutions in the external world, on which modern humanity relies, cannot stop the decay of culture. He is clear that all material life, if it is to develop into culture, must radiate from the independent creations of spiritual life. He finds that people of the present time, because they have lost themselves in the material world around them, have become unfree, unsummoned in their thinking, incomplete in the development of their full humanity, and humanitarian in their ethical behavior. The institutions of life appear to him to be over-organized, because the initiative of the individual is inhibited by the harnessing into the organizations, which everywhere want to absorb the individual into an abstract, impersonal general.

The fact that trust in the creative power of the thinking mind has vanished is characterized by Schweitzer in the most diverse ways. “In the past, every scientist was also a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science.” In the souls of thinkers, in Schweitzer's sense, the impulses must arise that have an effect on all material cultural events. ”Kant and Hegel have ruled millions who have never read a line from them and did not even know that they were obeying them.” ... “That the Roman Empire, despite the many outstanding rulers it had, perished, was ultimately because ancient philosophy produced no worldview with empire-preserving ideas.” ... “For the whole as well as for the individual, life without a worldview is a pathological disturbance of the higher sense of orientation.”

I must now shape the rest of these remarks in such a way that I expose myself to the danger of being considered an imagined drip by many. But in view of my conviction about the things that Albert Schweitzer discusses, there is no other way.

Let us assume that someone wants to build a house and one asks them: how should it be designed? He answers: solid, weatherproof, beautiful and such that one can live comfortably in it. You won't be able to do much with this answer. You will have to design a concrete plan and well-founded forms. Albert Schweitzer sees through the dilapidation of “contemporary culture”. He asks himself: what should the structure of a new one be like? He answers: “The great task of the mind is to create a worldview.” “The future of culture thus depends on whether thought is capable of arriving at a worldview that embraces optimism, that is, an affirmation of the world and of life, and that possesses ethics more securely and more fundamentally than those that have existed to date.” Well, you can't do much with this answer either. Anthroposophy perceives the negative in ‘contemporary culture’ in a similar way to Schweitzer. She may express this less loudly and less forcefully; but she answers the observed with a spiritual insight that leads human thinking from the legitimate demands of the view of nature to a rootedness in the living spiritual world. In this spiritual world, ethical ideals have a force effect again, as in the field of nature, the forces of nature.

Schweitzer believes that modern thinking shies away from penetrating into the spiritual and leaves this field to thought-free mysticism. “But why,” he says, “assume that the path of thinking ends before mysticism?” He wants a thinking that is so alive that it can penetrate into the regions that many assign to mysticism. Now, anthroposophy lives entirely in such thinking and in such a relationship to mysticism. Schweitzer finds: “How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just looked up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky for three minutes every evening and, when attending a funeral, would surrender to the mystery of death and life...” One can see how anthroposophy relates to this.

Schweitzer characterizes all this as someone who says: I want a house that is solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so on that one can live comfortably in it. Anthroposophy does not want to remain in these abstractions, but to design the concrete building plan.

In philosophical circles one often hears complaints about the decline in interest in philosophy among the educated of the present day. However, the opinion expressed in this complaint cannot be upheld in general. A number of phenomena speak against it. Just think of the influence that Eduard von Hartmann, currently Germany's greatest thinker, has exerted on our contemporaries. His "Philosophy of the Unconscious", first published in 1868, has gone through ten editions to date. And the literature dealing with this philosopher's world view has grown immeasurably. Furthermore, what an impact Richard Wagner's aesthetic treatises have had on the contemporary view of art! The teachings presented here were enthusiastically received, especially by the younger generation. The eagerness with which Friedrich Albert Lange's "History of Materialism" was read for a time must also be mentioned here. No less important is the way in which very shallow writings, which nonetheless dealt with basic philosophical problems, such as Ludwig Büchner's "Kraft und Stoff" ("Force and Substance") and Carl Vogt's "Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft" ("Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft"), were devoured. Darwin's and Haeckel's writings on the history of development found a large audience. Finally, Friedrich Nietzsche, this tragic hero of thought, who approaches the highest problems of the human spirit, but without a logical conscience, without discipline of thought, merely rummages in the realm of ideas, as it were, is causing a tremendous stir in our time. On the one hand, he has aroused enthusiasm, which is, of course, as unclear as possible about its actual content, and on the other, he has annoyed, outraged and challenged to the sharpest contradiction. However, he has probably left few of the large number of people who have engaged with his bold thoughts cold; a clear indication that philosophical interest in our time is nevertheless conducive to stimulation on a large scale.

In one broad area, however, philosophy seems to have lost its power and influence. This is that of the individual sciences: cultural and, in particular, literary history, history and the natural sciences. This is most noticeable in the history of literature and the natural sciences. The way in which the creations of our classical poets are treated in literary-historical monographs, especially those of the Scherer school, is truly deplorable. They often lack the slightest knowledge of philosophical concepts and views. And how erroneous is the belief that the latter can be dispensed with when judging the artistic achievements of our classical period! Above all other things, it is necessary to have a complete command of the circle of views and ideas of the person whose artistic creations one wishes to appreciate. The works of our classics, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, Schlegel and others, reflect the philosophical content of the great age in which they lived. And anyone who has no understanding of this element of content in their works is also unsuited to an aesthetic appreciation of their form. But even when dealing with other epochs of our literature, we can observe that scholars are truly horrified by philosophical treatment.

The situation is almost worse in the natural sciences. Here we find an accumulation of infinite details that are almost nowhere accompanied by guiding points of view or broad perspectives. Anyone who wants to exploit a characteristic individual experience in order to penetrate deeper into the context of natural things is immediately regarded as an enthusiast. The most thoughtless registration work is prevalent here. And when Richard Falckenberg says in his witty inaugural address "On the Present State of German Philosophy" (Leipzig 1890,.6) that "the time has yet to come when the character of an unphilosophical mind will be counted among the titles of honor", we would like to claim that in some scientific circles, this time has already come.

The above-mentioned phenomena show that the accusation of a lack of interest in the philosophical approach can be made against the representatives of the individual disciplines, but not against the educated reading public in general.

In view of these phenomena, the question is probably justified: what are the reasons for this emancipation of the individual sciences from philosophy?

Not in the slightest part do they lie in the historical development of philosophy in Germany. There is no doubt that the great philosophers of our people: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, for all their genius and the truly admirable tendency towards greatness that was characteristic of all of them, lacked one thing: the gift of making themselves easily understandable. It requires either an unusual dexterity in the execution of thought operations, so that thinking happens with the ease of playing, or else a great self-conquest in order to rise to the spheres into which those philosophers lead us. For those who are not capable of the one and do not have enough good will for the other, penetration into the teachings of our actual philosophical age is an impossibility. In this we must also seek the cause of the misunderstanding of Hegel. This philosopher who was hostile to metaphysics, who strove with an insatiable thirst for knowledge of the real, this most resolute of all representatives of positivism and empiricism, is strangely enough usually portrayed as a thinker of empty conceptual schemes who, denying all empirical knowledge, lose themselves in an insubstantial philosophical cloud-cuckoo land. One does not realize that Hegel's aim is to take everything that is to be used to explain a phenomenon completely from reality. Nowhere does he want to call upon elements to help him explain our world. Everything that constitutes it must lie within it. Thus his view is a strict objectivism. The mind should not draw anything from itself in order to graft it onto phenomena for the purpose of deciphering them. Hegel would vigorously reject scientific tendencies such as modern aromatism, which presupposes a whole world behind our world of appearances.

What lies objectively in the world process should, according to Hegel, become the content of philosophy, nothing above it. And because he could not merely recognize something material as the objective content of the world, but rather counted the laws of existence and events, which are also truly present in reality, as part of the content of the world, his teaching is idealism. What distinguishes Hegel from the modern positivists is not the type of research, not the belief that only the real can be the object of science. In this he is in complete agreement with them. He differs from them, however, in the view that for him the idea is also real, or conversely, that the real is real and ideal at the same time. This character of Hegel's philosophy was first understood again by Eduard von Hartmann, and he carried out the treatment corresponding to it in his exemplary historical works: "Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness" and "The Religious Consciousness of Mankind in the Stages of its Development". However, Hartmann has also understood how to avoid the difficulties of understanding Hegel in wider circles, which we mentioned above, and how to unite Hegelian sentiment with a comprehensible style of presentation that is also accessible to the less philosophically trained. In his historical works, Hartmann seeks the real with the same rigor as his contemporaries who call themselves historians, but unlike them he does not only find the bare facts, but also the ideal context of historical phenomena. And it is very regrettable that he did not gain a similarly authoritative influence on literary historians and historians from this side as he did on educated laymen through his "Philosophy of the Unconscious". Hartmann is to be regarded as the real continuator of that philosophy of great style which, through Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, has powerfully gripped the whole nation.

But why was he also able to have so little influence on the actual discipline? In our opinion, this question can be answered quite simply. The reason lies in the mistrust and lack of understanding that was shown to him by the officially appointed representatives of his science and which has only recently and only very slowly given way to better relations.

This lamentable relationship between the official philosophy on the one hand and Hartmann on the other has a deeper reason. As soon as Hartmann embarked on his philosophical studies, he tackled the central problem: how does consciousness relate to the unconscious in the world, and what role does the unconscious play in nature and the mind? From there, his thinking extends to all the more important questions of philosophy, so that he appears before the public with a self-contained circle of views from his very first appearance. School philosophy, however, does not like this - with some notable exceptions. It only likes to deal with individual problems and even prefers that timid skepticism which behaves as cautiously as possible towards the great questions naturally posed by every human being. For the most part it is rather contrived and self-made problems to which professional science adheres, while in contrast to what everyone wants to know, it regards only the expression of the doubter as that due to the true researcher and immediately has the accusation of dilettantism at hand when it sees a bold approach to such things, Thus school philosophy has gradually isolated itself completely from the other scientific enterprise, its results are no longer important and interesting enough to gain power over the individual sciences. While it would be right for the philosopher to characterize the general points of view, the leading ideas for the individual sciences and to take up the results of the latter in order to use them further in the sense of an overall view of things, the present philosophical specialist sees himself as an individual researcher alongside others. He walks alongside the specialists instead of engaging in lively interaction with them. Only Hartmann understood his profession as a philosopher in the ideal sense described above. He was not taken seriously for this for a long time and is still not taken seriously by many school philosophers today.

As we can see, the position that philosophy occupies in contemporary life and culture is by no means the one we would wish for. It is therefore with great pleasure that we welcome a book that has just been published and which seems destined to spread clarity about the tasks and goals of philosophy. We are referring to Johannes Volkelt's "Lectures as an Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy". Held in Frankfurt a.M. in February and March 1891, the book is suitable for reaching the widest circle of readers and showing what philosophy actually wants and is capable of achieving for life and culture. Volkelt, although a scientific philosopher in the best sense of the word - he and Johannes Rehmke have written the best books on epistemology. He and Johannes Rehmke wrote the best books on epistemology - has always had a free, open eye both for the far-reaching tasks of human life and for its most intimate phenomena. The former is demonstrated by his speech in Vienna: "Kant's Categorical Imperative and the Present" and his inaugural speech in Basel: "On the Possibility of Metaphysics", the latter by his book on "The Dream Fantasy" and his presentation: "Franz Grillparzer as a Poet of the Tragic". In these lectures Volkelt first presents the contrast between the philosophy of the present and that of the beginning of the century. He shows how everything intuitive, personal and bold has disappeared from this science and has given way to an intellectual, impersonal, skeptical approach. Whereas in the past people fearlessly inquired into the causes of phenomena, they are now anxious to first test our cognitive faculty to see to what extent it is capable of penetrating the secrets of the world. Philosophy has taken on a predominantly epistemological character. It has become hostile to all metaphysical activity. The author, however, emphasizes both the necessity and the possibility of metaphysics. He only thinks that it will not be able to go for its goal with the boldness and certainty that was previously believed. He is of the opinion that, instead of showing off with real solutions, it will often have to be content with indicating the direction in which certain problems are to be pursued, formulating the questions precisely, bringing forth the material that can lead to the results, indeed in some cases it will be able to do nothing more than indicate the various possible solutions. Volkelt also proves the necessity of those branches of philosophy that are usually referred to as natural philosophy and philosophy of mind, and to which he includes psychology, ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of religion. In all individual sciences, one ultimately arrives at the highest principles, ultimate results, which cannot be pursued further within the science in which they are obtained. They form the content of these particular philosophical sciences, from which they are combined to form a whole world view. Furthermore, Volkelt shows in the most beautiful way how, even if not scientific philosophy, at least the attitude that springs from a philosophical mental disposition permeates the entire human personality and becomes the ethical, religious basis of life, especially for those people for whom the positive religions have lost their compelling power of faith. Finally, in Volkelt's view, philosophy will be the power which, by transforming revealed religion into a religion of reason, will bring about a development of Christianity which will enable it to become a truly culturally friendly element in the life of modern peoples. Finally, the author devotes his consideration to the influence that philosophy will have on the modern progress of our culture. It must play an important role in the present and the future, if only because we have passed the stage where all culture springs only from a quasi unconscious working of temperament and feeling. We are consciously striving towards our cultural goals out of rational deliberation. Philosophy is particularly well-suited to serve this purpose.

The author of these lines does not agree with Volkelt on everything. In particular, he takes a different position on epistemology. He may perhaps refer to his own writing on epistemology. Nevertheless, he would like to recommend Volkelt's book to the attention of all circles.

We are undoubtedly facing some upheavals in the way we think about and value human actions. Philosophy will have a strong say in the reorganization of the situation. Writings such as Volkelt's are particularly suitable as preparation. I will deal with the second part of my topic in a future article.

A turn for the better will only occur in philosophical life when the urge to test the power of thought on the central problems of existence awakens again. This drive is currently paralyzed. We suffer from cowardice of thought. We cannot believe that our ability to think is sufficient to answer the deepest questions of life. I have often heard it said that our task at present is to collect building block after building block. The time is over when we proudly and arrogantly put together philosophical doctrines without having the materials at hand. Once we have collected enough of this material, the right genius will emerge and carry out the construction. Now is not the time to build systems. This view arises from a regrettable lack of clarity about the nature of science. If the latter had the task of collecting the facts of the world, registering them and organizing them systematically and expediently according to certain points of view, then one could speak like this. But then we would have to renounce all knowledge altogether; for we would probably only finish collecting the facts at the end of days, and then we would lack the necessary time to carry out the required scholarly registration work.

If you only once realize what you actually want to achieve through science, you will soon see the fallacy of this demand, which requires an infinite amount of work. When we confront nature, it initially stands before us like a profound mystery, it stretches out before our senses like an enigma. A mute being looks out at us. How can we bring light into the mystical darkness? How can we solve the riddle?

The blind man who enters a room can only feel darkness in it. No matter how long he wanders around and touches all the objects: Brightness will never fill the room for him. Just as this blind man faces the furnishings of the room, so in a higher sense man faces nature, who expects the solution to the riddle from the contemplation of an infinite number of facts. There is something in nature which a thousand facts do not reveal to us if we lack the power of sight to see it, and which one single fact reveals to us if we possess this faculty. Every thing has two sides. One is the outside. We perceive it with our senses. But then there is also an inner side, which presents itself to the spirit when it knows how to look. No one will believe in his own inability in any matter. Whoever lacks the ability to perceive this inner side would prefer to deny it to man altogether, or to disparage as fantasists those who pretend to possess it. Nothing can be done about an absolute inability, and one could only pity those who, because of it, can never gain insight into the depths of the world. The psychologist, however, does not believe in this inability. Every person with normal spiritual development has the ability to descend to those depths up to a certain point. But the convenience of thinking prevents many from doing so. Their spiritual weapons are not blunt, but the bearers are too lazy to wield them. It is infinitely more convenient to pile fact upon fact than to seek out the reasons for them by thinking. Above all, such an accumulation of facts rules out the possibility of someone else coming along and overturning what we have advocated. In this way we never find ourselves in the position of having to defend our intellectual positions; we need not be upset that tomorrow someone will advocate the opposite of our current positions. If you only deal with actual truth, you can lull yourself into the belief that no one can dispute this truth, that we are creating for eternity. Yes, we also create for eternity, but we only create zeros. We lack the courage of thought to give these zeros a value by placing a meaningful number in front of them in the form of an idea.

Few people today have any idea that something can be true, even if the opposite can be asserted with no less right. There are no unconditional truths. We drill deep into a thing of nature, we bring up the most mysterious wisdom from the most hidden shafts, we turn around, drill in a second place: and the opposite shows itself to be just as justified. That every truth is only valid in its place, that it is only true as long as it is asserted under the conditions under which it was originally fathomed, that is what Hegel's genius taught the world. Little has been understood.

Who today does not cringe respectfully when the name Friedr. Theod. Vischer is mentioned. But not many people know that this man considered it the greatest achievement of his life to have learned from Hegel the above-mentioned conviction about the nature of truth. If they knew, then a completely different air would flow towards them from Vischer's magnificent works, and one would encounter less ceremonial praise, but more unconstrained understanding of this writer.

Where are the days when Schiller found deep understanding when he praised the philosophical mind over the bread scholar! The one who digs unreservedly for the treasures of truth, even if he is exposed to the danger that a second treasure digger will immediately devalue everything for him with a new find, compared to the one who only ever repeats the banal, but absolutely "true": "Two times two is four".

We must have the courage to boldly enter the realm of ideas, even at the risk of error. Those who are too cowardly to err cannot be fighters for the truth. An error that springs from the mind is worth more than a truth that comes from platitude. He who has never asserted anything that is in a sense untrue is not fit to be a scientific thinker.

For cowardly fear of error, our science has fallen victim to bareness.

It is almost hair-raising which character traits are extolled today as virtues of the scientific researcher. If you were to translate them into the area of practical living, the result would be the opposite of a firm, decisive, energetic character.

A recent book has attempted to expose these shortcomings in our intellectual life: "Rembrandt als Erzieher. From a German." It is bad enough that this book has been so widely read. It is not difficult to see shortcomings and attack them, but it is difficult to find their origin. Go to an inn every evening for two weeks, where educated German beer-philistines are sitting, sit aside and listen to their critical remarks. Then you go home, carefully note down what you have heard and add a quotation from a well-known writer to each sentence. After a fortnight, send this "collective work" to the printers and a second book will grace the German book market, which will be in no way inferior in value to "Rembrandt as Educator".

The author of this book fights specialism in science. This is his fundamental error. The mistake is not that researchers devote themselves to special tasks, but that they cannot work the universal spirit into the world of details. It would be a bad thing if we were to replace the study of individual entities with the spinning out of abstract generalities and gray theories. Study the grain of sand, but find out to what extent it is part of the spirit.

It is not mysticism that we want to advocate here. Anyone who seeks the spirit of the things of this world in clear, transparent ideas is by no means a mystic. There is nothing that excludes mystical chiaroscuro more than the crystal-clear world of ideas, with its sharp contours down to the last ramifications. He who enters into this world with human acuity, with strict logic, will have nothing in common with the mystic, who sees nothing, but only suspects, who does not think out the world of reasons, but only conjures it up, in the awareness that he sees through his spiritual realm in all directions. The mathematician is the model for the mystic-free thinker.

So our task is not to endlessly collect individual facts, but to sharpen our mental faculties for seeing the depths of nature.

Our reason must once again become aware of its absoluteness; and an end must be put to its cowardly, slavish subordination to the oppressive power of facts. It is unworthy that a higher being, which reason is after all, should yield itself to a mere collector of things of lower value. If the world consisted only of sensually perceptible things, then reason would have to abdicate. It only has a task if there is something in the world that it is able to grasp. And that is the spirit.

To deny it is to retire reason.

Is there now any prospect that this legitimate ruler on the throne in the realm of science will soon be restored to his innate rights? The answer to this question will be the subject of the next installment of this article.

At this point, we would like to give the floor to one of the best German thinkers of the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1872, at the age of only thirty, he was snatched from a promising life. Two of his writings have been printed: “The Ego and the Thing in Itself” and “The Indo-European Religions”. These are treasures of German intellectual life. If we can see the development of this intellectual life in its true light since 1870, it is only too understandable that Paul Asmus, who died so young, could find only a few readers. This period was devoted to the development of knowledge directed towards the sensual and factual. People wanted to process the results of experiments, of the microscope and the telescope, etc., as the basis of their world view. And Paul Asmus was one of those who wanted to explore the secrets of existence in the ethereal heights of pure thought. He is a true and noble disciple of the great philosophical idealists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Today, only a few are trained in the field of pure thought to ascend to these luminous heights. Few know the significance of these regions themselves and know that it is here, and not where mere sensory observation and experimentation is carried out, that the riddles of life are revealed. — In this magazine, which serves a worldview that is supposed to lead to the spirit, some of the estate of the prematurely deceased is certainly in place. The sister of the thinker, Martha Asmus, who has herself emerged in recent years with three small volumes of stories, has provided me with her brother's manuscript “Die Willkür”. From this, what can be published is that which can give an idea of the way in which Paul Asmus approached one of the most important human problems.

In the next issue, I will give a brief description of the direction of Paul Asmus' ideas. I know that the flight of thought that this researcher has taken is one that few today are inclined to follow. Today, thinking demands convenience, and understanding Paul Asmus' ideas requires full working dedication. Yet the Theosophist knows that it is not research that must be adapted to man, but man to research; and that only complete devotion to its demands can lead to realization.

Few works have been written about Kant that match the quality of what Paul Asmus has written about him in his essay “The Ego and the Thing in Itself”. He does full justice to Kant; but at the same time he shows how impossible it is to stop at Kant, and how the great impetus given by the Königsberg philosopher to German thought must necessarily have led to the conceptions of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others. Kant had shown, and this fact is one of the most significant in the history of modern thought, that the ordinary scientific methods of thinking never lead to a knowledge of the “thing in itself,” but always only to a knowledgeably dominating the world of the appearances given to man. But Kant pointed to the “thing in itself” in a very peculiar way. He assumed that in the categorical imperative, which speaks to man in the imperative of duty, a call sounds from the world of the “thing in itself.” But this call does not provide any knowledge of the Supreme, but only a belief in it, which gives man direction in the moral life. If man wants to consider himself a moral being and develop further and further in the direction of morality, he must believe in the reality of what the categorical imperative sends to him. But he cannot recognize what carries him so morally.

Now Fichte has tried to examine this call that sounds within man, and so he came to his “I-philosophy”. In the “I”, according to Fichte, a higher world opens up to man, which is just as real, indeed much more real, than the outer world of appearances. For this outer world of appearances only acquires meaning and significance when the human ego allows its own light to shine on it. Paul Asmus presents this process of Fichte's thinking emerging from Kant's in a very astute way. And in the same way that Hegel and Schelling then seek answers to the great riddles of existence from the “I”, from the human spirit, which no external sensory perception can solve.

And from here, Paul Asmus then found access to an understanding of religions, these manifold attempts by humanity to grasp the active spiritual forces of the universe from the depths of the human soul. It is not easy for many to follow Paul Asmus's significant discussions of “Indo-European Religions” because he is operating at the pinnacle of human thought. But anyone who learns to read the book by training their thinking will receive the purest possible enlightenment about the forms of human striving for truth. Our philosopher sees through to the spiritual core of religious thought everywhere through the imagery of religions and shows the connection and relationship between these cores. His book is therefore an interpretation of a great primal thought of the Indo-European peoples. No one will study it without being deeply impressed and realizing what the development of religious life is. But this puts Paul Asmus among those who, in the sense of Theosophy, pursue the essence of religions and philosophies of humanity.

The following is the conclusion of Paul Asmus' introductory discussions of “arbitrariness”. His manuscript then continues with further discussions of the subject. We will also present the essentials of these in the following issues. What we have printed so far shows the path that the strong, sharp-sighted thinker has sought to take to the important problem of human freedom. Those who cannot move freely in the element of thought will call these discussions “abstract” and shadowy, and may even think that they are far removed from “real life” and that they contribute nothing to an understanding of the facts. But such a person has only not yet struggled through to life in the pure element of thought; he has not yet learned to dwell far from all sensuality, from all sensual imagining, in the ether region, where true life pulsates in the depths of man, which is a spark from the sea of light of eternal being. But anyone who has struggled to do so feels united with the divine world spirit in such a thought life; he lives in God at the same time as he lives in himself. Communion takes place with him in the spiritual realm. Thinkers like Asmus, who have developed out of the stream that German philosophical idealism gave from the first half of the nineteenth century: such thinkers understood to live in thought. In German intellectual life, historically speaking, what the theosophical mystic knows as a very specific inner life fact has taken place. The Kamic-Manasic thinking, in which the man of everyday life is caught, and in which, in particular, the European man of culture lives: this thinking throws off the Kamic veils and becomes pure Manasic thinking.

Whoever wants to go beyond a certain level in the field of knowledge must get to know this experience within themselves and let it become a fact. Those who cannot attain this stage either remain entangled in the fetters of a dim mysticism that only enables them to see the facts of the astral plane without understanding, or they have to content themselves with mere belief in the theosophical dogmas. Therefore, I consider it one of the tasks of this journal to present these samples of pure etheric thinking. Such thinking alone can provide inner, self-assured firmness and certainty for the researcher, guiding the theosophist between the Scylla of nebulous enthusiasm and the Charybdis of blind belief in dogma into the bright halls of wisdom. Those who not only think through what is given in pure thoughts, but bring it to the point of direct experience, will convince themselves of the truth of what has been said. But for the time being, only a few people in our culture can achieve what is called “living in thought”. And most people cannot even “think” the right thing when they hear the words “living in thought”. The theosophical movement, which is supposed to bring us back to spiritual life, will also have the task of understanding the spiritual thoughts of German idealism. And Paul Asmus, whose physical shell was appropriated by the earth so early, may well also make an impact with his wonderful thought-germs on the karma of the theosophical movement in Germany.

If you take the concept of Jesus from the Koran, for example, and consult from 19th Surah, you will see that it specifically mentions that the Nathan Jesus Child actually spoke immediately at his birth. This is what the Koran says: “Jesus spoke and said:‘See, I am the servant of God. He has given me the book and He has made me to a prophet and He has blessed me wherever I am, and He has given me His blessings so long as I live, and love to my mother and peace upon the day of my birth and the day when I die and the day when I am resurrected again to life. This is Jesus, the son of Mary, the Word of truth’ ”. This actually appears in the Koran.

In the ancient Jewish teachings as they are contained in the Talmud and other writings apart from the Old Testament, you learn that which is more of a conceptual nature, but on the other hand the Haggadah is the name given to that which modern people would call legends and tales. However, these legends and tales in the Haggadah refer more to actual perception in the spiritual world; they go back to imaginative knowledge.

I am going to share a portion from the Haggadah about Solomon with you. It says: “Rabbi Joachin says: The feet of man guarantee for him that they bring him to that place where he is supposed to go. And they tell about those Moors who are the sons of Shesher named Elacoraf and Akia who are the scribes of Solomon. One day Solomon saw the Angel of Death who was very sad and he asked: Why are you sad? The Angel of Death replied: Because I require these two Moors. As a result of that Solomon gave his Moors to the Seherem (Seherem are those demons who for imaginative vision look like goats and fly through the air) and sent them into the City of Loos. When these two Moors arrived there, they died. A few days afterwards, Solomon again saw the Angel of Death and this time the Angel was laughing. And Solomon said to the Angel: Why do you laugh? The Angel of Death replied: You sent them precisely to the place where I wanted them to go. So at that time Solomon said the following: The feet of the human being guarantee for him that they bring him to the place where he is supposed to be. Thus Solomon had an experience with the Angel of Death, an experience which confirmed the truth of that which Rabbi Joachin said, namely, the feet of man guarantee for him that he is taken to the place where he needs to be.”

Now, my dear friends, you will see that a number of questions are raised in this story from the Haggadah. The feet of the man guarantee that he is brought to the place where he is supposed to go. Why are the feet spoken of so precisely? In such ancient imaginative legends, nothing of an arbitrary nature is there, everything has its definite deep significance. So we have the first question which one can ask. Then we also have another: Why was the Angel of Death sad when he appeared before Solomon with the statement that he is going to take the two scribes away? It seems ridiculously trivial to say that the Angel was sad; he was going to do his job. Then Solomon asks him: “Why are you sad?” What is the significance of this question? The Angel of Death says he is sad because he demands the two scribes. But Solomon gives them to the demons who carry them into the City of Loos.

Now, you see the question about the city of Loos can be more easily answered. The city of Loos was so organized that no one was allowed to die within the city, hence those people who were ready to die were carried outside the city. It was the only city which had this organization. Therefore when Solomon heard that the Angel of Death was going to take his scribes, he sent them to the city because he believed that if they were in the city, the Angel of Death could not get hold of them. This is the story given in the Haggadah. However, these stories are found in many other places in Jewish tradition. There it is related in this way: They had only arrived at the gates of the city because they fell down during their flight. And because they were not able to enter the city, the Angel was able to get hold of them. However, the next day you have the Angel of Death standing before Solomon and laughing. This is very strange; the Angel is laughing because he was able to get hold of these two scribes for death. Solomon recognizes the truth of Rabbi Joachin when he says: “The feet of human beings are a guarantee that he is brought to the place where he is supposed to be.”

Now, it is important to understand that both scribes, both Moors, are the sons of Shesher, who himself was the scribe for David. Thus, this indicates that these two scribes of King Solomon were very special. we must put all these things together if we want to perceive the whole significance of the questions which surface when we speak about this very significant cognitive moment in the life of King Solomon. Now, remember that King Solomon was not wise because he was clever in the sense that modern man is clever, he was called the wise Solomon because he was able to have real vision into the spiritual world; the spiritual world was open to him. Therefore Solomon was to experience that truth which Rabbi Joachin imparted, namely, the truth in connection with the feet of human beings.

When you consider the human being in comparison with the animal, then you see a very important difference. Through the fact that man has a vertical spine, he is at right angles to the surface of the earth. The spine of the animal, however, is parallel to the surface of the earth. Now I hope that no one here is going by object to telling us about the kangaroo. These are exceptions which can be explained if we go into the details of the situation. But let us put that on the side for the moment. We know man has an upright spine and the spine of the animal is horizontal. Now, when we draw a line through the spine of the animal—it is not a straight line, but a curved one—then we have a line curving parallel to the curvature of the earth which means when we draw a circle parallel to the earth then that passes through the spine of the animal. However, when we draw the same curve for the human being, then we find that this curve has a middle point. In the case of the animal we have seen the middle point of the curve was the middle point of the earth. However in the middle point of the curve that we draw through the spinal column of man, there you have the middle point of the moon. Why? Because that particular stage of development which the animal is going through at present, man already went through in the ancient Moon period. Therefore, at the present time man still has a connection with the moon insofar as the curve passing through his spine has its center point in the moon, just as the curve passing through the animal has its center point in the earth. Therefore man is connected with the moon in a similar descriptive way as the animal is connected with the earth.

Now, man has torn himself away from the earth; man is not as united with the earth as is the animal kingdom. As far as his external physical nature is concerned, man has torn himself loose from his earth planet. However, he has only torn himself loose in one aspect of his nature; he has another aspect through which he is attached to the earth, and that is with his feet. Man has to stand upon the earth with his feet. However, passing over from the Moon development to the earth development, he has torn himself away from the earth with his hands. His feet, however, are still connected with the earth. If you understand the human form as it has developed itself in the transition from the Moon evolution to the Earth evolution, so you must say: In so far as man belongs to the earth, the earth has been able to attach itself to him in his feet. What guarantees does man have to come to the earth? This is guaranteed by man's foot situation. Hence we have the explanation in the Hebrew: The feet guarantee him. The word ‘guarantee’ in the Hebrew is the same as the word you use in reference to guaranteeing someone an amount of capital, the word guarantee indicates that as far as his feet are concerned, it is guaranteed that he has a connection with the earth. That does not mean that the feet of the human being carry him to the place of his death, but the whole secret of the human form lies in this sentence as Solomon has recognized it through the fact that he is able to look into the spiritual world.

Now, I have yet to describe that which Solomon revealed when he had words with the Angel of Death. We will see this from the example of how we have a wisdom present in humanity which we previously called the primal wisdom. This primal wisdom passed away in order that man could have an opportunity during the Earth evolution to develop this wisdom again, but to develop it out of himself in complete freedom.

Now, there is another riddle in this story about the Angel of Death. At one time he is sad and at another time he is laughing. We can just think about the true nature of laughing and weeping. You know very well that if you see a person walking along the street who is laughing to himself, you would say that he is crazy. You see that laughing is something which you expect one to participate in with other people. On the other hand, when it comes to crying, you know that usually you cry when you are alone. To explain this phenomenon of weeping and laughing, we have to remember that we generally think that what we are as human beings is only enclosed within our skin and we forget the fact that the air is outside us and when we breathe it in, it becomes part of us and then we breathe it out again. Therefore we are part of our whole environment. And when we go to sleep, we breathe out our ego and astral body, we breathe it in again when we wake up. So we see that there is a flowing life between us and the spiritual world. Actually when we laugh, we spread out our ego and astral body outside us. You stretch out, you expand your astral body and your ego when you laugh. And this expansion of the astral body goes out to the ether body. The invisible man spreads himself out elastically. That is the process when you laugh. The reverse process takes place when you weep. There you have the astral body contracting together with the ether body and pressing itself an the physical body which then presses out tears.

Now we go back to Solomon. When Solomon looked at the Angel of Death, he did not see a physical body, but he saw a spiritual being. What he really saw when the Angel laughed was the Angel spreading himself out. The first time he saw the Angel, he was weeping, that means the Angel was drawing himself together. Here we see how spiritual beings fulfil their activities. Laughing and weeping is an accompaniment of life with us human beings through which we only express our inner being; we show how our inner being is constituted. In the case of spiritual beings, they show their actions. As far as we are concerned, when we laugh and cry, it has very little significance for other people. We do not produce activities through our laughing and crying. These are accompaniments of our life. However, in the moment when we approach certain spiritual beings who with their actual self are occupied more in working than we are, there you have the significance of the expanding out and the contracting in. The Angel of Death, because he was in the position of having to fetch these two Moors to death, had to hold his forces together, he had to condense himself in order to give support for his forces because he was about to perform some activity which expressed itself in the fact that he was sad. That is only an indication of how he is drawing himself together. The next day when he had accomplished his task, then the elasticity expressed itself again, he spread himself out and you had the appearance of laughter.

Now we come to the next question: Why were they led to the City of Loos and what is the meaning of this whole process with Solomon? In the first place we must contemplate the fact that Solomon was a person who stands in connection with the spiritual world. I told you that it is very significant that both scribes were the sons of Shesher who had been the scribe of King David. Thus they are very valuable personalities and scribes at that ancient time signified something different from what it means today. Scribes in Egypt, for example, were people who were able with all sorts of inner fervor to paint letters in the sense of the ancient Egyptian script, and when someone painted a false letter, he stood under the penalty of death, because he was dealing with something of a holy nature. There was something of a holy nature in the letters; this applied to the scribes of King Solomon who also stood in connection with the spiritual world. They stood in communion with Solomon who imparted his knowledge of the spiritual world to them. And the City of Loos points out the fact to us that there was something in these scribes which enabled them to have a feeling of their immortality even during their life, they had this connection with the spiritual world. We ought to bring our attention to the fact that they knew of their soul-spiritual kernel which passes through the portal of death. They knew this not only theoretically, but they belonged to those who, as it were, were initiated in a certain degree into these mysteries.

Hence the Angel of Death had some difficulty here, because it was necessary to put himself in a certain connection with King Solomon, which means that both scribes, as well as King Solomon, lived in the consciousness of their immortality. Therefore it was necessary for the Angel of Death to enter into the whole process which he had to execute because a consciousness was present of the death which was involved here. This did not mean that King Solomon wanted to protect his scribes from death and therefore sent then to the City of Loos, but it was supposed to indicate that here we are dealing with death which was completely conscious, that the knowledge of death was part of their knowledge. Here the main emphasis was that Solomon was conscious of the death of his scribes and when it is said that he sent then to the city of Loos, that should only indicate to us how the Ahrimanic force represented by the Angel of Death is represented by its agent as the demonic goat which enters into the situation. Thus the whole process which occurs consciously is supposed to be explained to us through the story in the following way: A death once occurred in such a way that a wise man was conscious of it. That is what Rabbi Joachin wanted to indicate. The whole process is connected with the spiritual world. This arising of knowledge of the super-sensible world in King Solomon is indicated by this story. Rabbi Joachin said: “Man is bound to the earth through the form of the feet and its relationship to the earth, and it is expressed that man is connected to the earth in a one-sided way, that only his feet are guarantee for the fact that man belongs to the earth. The upright posture of man is a guarantee for the fact that he is given over to the spiritual world with his essential kernel. And because Solomon was able to believe him, he was able to be made consciously aware of the death of his scribes who were dear to him.

Therefore we see that the idea of these ancient traditions can only be understood with the aid of spiritual science. You learn from that that Solomon's wisdom is connected with the fact that he was able to look into the spiritual world and discover the mystery of death. In the line of the generations which descends from King Solomon, you have the physical preparation, as it were, for this clairvoyance in so far as it is able to enter the portal of death. Therefore we see the body of Jesus descending from the Solomon line of the House of David, but the soul is that of Zarathustra. We have to be clear about the soul being that of Zarathustra and why it had to enter into a body which descended from someone who was permeated with clairvoyance.

Now, I have often spoken about that which came with the soul of Zarathustra. Today I only want to emphasize the fact that that which came later was mostly removed from the teaching of Zarathustra and then passed over into the teaching of Mani, and further on into the teaching of Manichaeisn. We know the deepest questions of the riddle of man belongs to the question of the relationship of good and evil, and we know that we can understand it when we have insight into the working of Lucifer and Ahriman. But this working of Lucifer and Ahriman leads us back to Zarathustra. Lucifer and Ahriman are already present as a fact of the spiritual world in the teaching of Zarathustra. And let us try to bring the Zarathustrian teaching of the good and evil into connection with the teaching of predestination which is connected with the Islamic religion.

Let us consider the import of this teaching of predestination. On the one side it says: Everything which occurs has been predetermined, so that even taking a step in front of my door was predetermined. Even when I die that was predestined. Everything is strongly predestined, which means that for the consciousness of the Islamic person, everything that occurs was already previously written in the Book of God. However, every time this Islamic person is confronted with something, he says: “If it is the will of God.” He is completely convinced of the fact that everything is written in the Book of God; however, he says: “I will only do this thing if it is the will of God”. A Westerner would say to this Islamic person: “If you say that everything is predestined, then it does not make any sense to say I will do it if God wills it. Why do you say: ‘I will do it if God wills it?’ There is no doubt about it since everything is already determined from the beginning.” Here we have an insoluble contradiction; it really is an insoluble contradiction. Look at Western philosophy, at Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and so on, and you will find the after-working of this insoluble contradiction, but it appears in a particularly crass way in the teaching of Kismet, of everything being predestined. Here we have a teaching which, in this connection, is different from the teaching of Zarathustra, that the people who know Zarathustra know about Lucifer and Ahriman. At first we have the teaching of primal wisdom which did not contain any contradictions and this transforms itself into teaching which does carry a contradiction. A person who does not recognize that life is filled with contradictions will really never understand life. Life, when it is only approached with the human understanding is bound to give many contradictions.

First we have the age of Zarathustra and then this is followed by a time when man is confronted by contradictions. But through these contradictions he should be stimulated to develop his real inner life. Now, you have something happening in the earth evolution where something which did not belong to the earth evolution comes in in order that man can resolve these contradictions. Here we have the Nathan Jesus coming into earth evolution and with this Nathan Jesus you have something which helps to solve all the earth contradictions, because the Nathan Jesus comes from the spiritual world and is not attached to the earth. In the Nathan Jesus we have a healing of the contradictions which occurs in human beings during the earth sojourn. So we find where you have this contradiction of the predestination and the idea ‘If God wills it’ in the Koran, and you have in this very same Koran the allusion to the Nathan Jesus which I quoted earlier, who spoke immediately at birth. You see, all these things are very complicated.

It requires courage, courage in order to think things toward the end. And this is the sort of courage that we get from spiritual science. Too often today people are apathetic, but in spiritual science we want to replace apathy with calmness. With apathy you do not care; with calmness you are able to absorb these things in a mood of equanimity.

Tomorrow I would like to briefly return to the spiritual side of the early days of Christianity and its lasting impact. This will lead to some deeper insights into the public lectures of the last few days. Today I would like to give a kind of philosophical introduction to this, to familiarize you with some history, because it is good if we, within the spiritual science movement, also know something of how people strive in the rest of the world to get to the bottom of the world's mysteries, how they think and feel about these mysteries in the world.

If you look at the history of philosophy from the beginning to the present day, you will basically only find certain philosophical currents discussed, philosophical currents that are close to most contemporary philosophers. However, one would be quite wrong to see everything that exists in the present in terms of such more philosophical research paths in what is usually found. For example, most of you are unaware that during the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and especially towards the end of the 19th century, there was a lively philosophical life within the Catholic Church that continues to this day. that within the Catholic Church, a very peculiar philosophical direction, differing from the other philosophy of the world, was cultivated by the learned priesthood and is cultivated by many, so that in this field one has a rich literature, at least as rich a literature as on other directions of philosophical activity. And this literature is called the literature of Neuscholastik.

A curious circumstance has led to the fact that the school, which flourished in the middle of the Middle Ages, which basically began with Scotus Erigena and then continued through Thomas Aquinas to the times of Duns Scotus, reappeared in the 19th century, and indeed out of a very specific need for knowledge, albeit one colored by religious belief. Particularly from the second third of the 19th century onwards, we see this direction of neo-scholasticism emerging in Catholic circles. In all Central and Western European languages, books upon books are being written in an attempt to understand anew what was lived in scholasticism. And if one tries to explore the inner reason why scholasticism is reviving, one must actually open up a broad view. And this is what we want to point out today.

In the lectures I have given in the last few days, I have repeatedly emphasized that one way to spiritual-scientific knowledge is through a very special treatment of thinking, of concepts, of logic; that through the influence of the exercises that lead to this development of thinking, the human being no longer thinks in his physical body, but in his ether body. Thus he not only thinks dead conceptual logic, but he lives in the activity of thinking, that is, he lives and moves in his ether body, as we can express it technically. It is a living into the etheric body when logic itself comes to life, when — as I have put it in popular terms — the statue, through which one can visualize the logic at work in ordinary life, comes to life, when the human being becomes alive in his ether body, that is, the concepts are no longer dead concepts, but those living concepts begin, of which I have said for years that the concept gains life, as if one were with one's soul in a living being. For many centuries, humanity has basically known nothing of this liveliness as the truth of concepts and ideas in external philosophy. I have tried to point out this fact in the first chapter of my “Riddles of Philosophy” that was added to the new edition.

Even in the last philosophical periods of Greek civilization, humanity actually no longer knew anything philosophically about the possible liveliness of concepts and ideas. Let us keep that in mind. Initially, the Greeks — you can read about this in my “Riddles of Philosophy” — had concepts and ideas in the same way that people today have sensory perceptions, a color, a sound or a smell. The great Plato, up to Aristotle, and even more so the older philosophers, did not believe that they had formed the concept, the thought, internally, but that they received it from things, just as one receives red or blue, that is, the sensory perceptions.

Then came the time - and I have described how this continues in cycles - when one no longer felt inwardly that the things had given one the concept, but one only felt that the concept arose in the soul. And now one did not know what to do with the concept, with the inner idea, which the Greek had still believed he received from things. Hence arose those scholastic problems, those scholastic puzzles: What does the concept mean at all in relation to things? — The Greek could not ask it that way, because he had the consciousness that things give him the concepts, so the concepts belong to things as colors belong to things. — That ceased when the Middle Ages came. Then one had to ask: What kind of relationship does something that arises in our mind have to things? And besides: the things out there are many and varied and individual, but the concepts are general, a unity. We go through the world and encounter many horses; we form the unified concept of horse out of these many horses. Every horse coincides with the concept of horse.

Today, many people, who are even less familiar with the concept than the medieval philosophers, who saw it as a sharp problem, say: Well, the concept is just not in the things themselves.

I have repeatedly mentioned a comparison that my friend, the late Vincenz Knauer, a great connoisseur of medieval philosophy, often used for those people who say: Out there is only the material of the animal, the soul makes the concept. Old Knauer would always say: People claim: The lamb is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The wolf is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The soul creates the concept of the lamb, and the soul creates the concept of the wolf. And old Knauer said: If only matter were really present, and you locked up a wolf that ate nothing but lambs, then when it had discarded its old matter it would finally be only lamb, because it would have only lamb matter in itself. But one would notice with amazement that it would still have remained the wolf, that something else must therefore be present in addition to matter.

For medieval scholasticism, this presented a significant problem, a significant enigma. The scholastics said to themselves: the concepts are the universals because they encompass many individual things. And they could not say, as today's man likes to say, that these universals are only something that has arisen in the mind of man, that has nothing to do with things. These medieval philosophers distinguished three types of universals. First, they said, universals are ante rem, before the thing, before what you see out there, so the universal “horse” is thought of before all possible sensual horses, as a thought in the deity. So said medieval scholasticism.

Then there are universals in re, in things, and specifically as essence in things, precisely what matters. The universal “wolf” is what matters, and the universal “lamb” is what matters. They are what ensures that the wolf does not become a lamb, even if it eats nothing but lambs.

And then there is a third form in which the universals exist, that is: post rem, after the things as they are in our minds, when we have considered the world and subtracted them from the things. The medieval scholastics attached great importance to this distinction, and it was this distinction that protected them from that skepticism, from that dissection, which cannot get to the essence of things, for the reason that they consider the concepts and ideas that man in his soul gains from things to be only a product of the soul and do not imagine anything about them that could have any significance for things themselves.

The particular form of this skepticism can be found in one form with Hume and in another form with Cart. There, concepts and ideas are only that which the human mind forms as ideas. Through concepts and ideas, man can no longer approach things.

For theologians who want to be philosophers at the same time, who thus want to penetrate theology philosophically, a very special difficulty has arisen and will always arise. For the theologian is dependent not only on seeing the things in the world, but also on thinking them in a certain relationship to the divine essence, and he gets into difficulties when he and which form the content of the only ideal knowledge – if one does not ascend to spiritual science – cannot himself bring these into any relationship with the Godhead, that is, think as universals ante rem, as universal concepts before the things.

Now there is something very significant connected with what I have said. There will always be people who cannot see anything in the concept that has to do with things, who only see the material in things outside, and on the other hand, there are those who can see something real in the concepts that has to do with the things themselves, that is, what is in the things and what the human mind draws out of the things, what the human mind makes out of universals in re into universals post rem.

Those who recognize that the concepts have a reality outside the human mind were called realists in the Middle Ages and later, especially in Catholic philosophy. And the view that the concepts and ideas have a real significance in the world is called realism. The other view, which assumes that concepts and ideas are fabricated only in the human mind, as it were, as words, is called nominalism, and its representatives are called nominalists.

You will easily see that the nominalists can actually see the real only in the manifold, in the multitude. Only the realists can see something real in the comprehensive, in the universal. And here we come to the point where a particular difficulty arose for the philosophizing theologians. These Catholic theologians had to defend the dogma of the Trinity, of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the three persons in the Godhead. After the development of ecclesiastical theology, they could not help saying: the three persons are individual, complete entities, but at the same time they are supposed to be one unity! If they had been nominalists, the divinity would always have fallen apart into three persons for them. Only the realists could still think of the three persons under one universal. But for that, the universal concept had to have a reality; for that, one had to be a realist. Therefore, the realists got along better with the Trinity than the nominalists, who had great difficulties and who, in the end, when scholasticism was already coming to an end and had degenerated into skepticism, could only hide behind the fact that they said: You cannot understand how the three persons are to be one divinity; but that is precisely why you have to believe it, you have to give up understanding; something like that can only be revealed. The human mind can only lead to nominalism, it cannot lead to any kind of realism. And basically it is the Hume-Kantian doctrine that has become pure nominalism by way of phenomenalism.

The central dogma of the Trinity, of the three divine persons, thus depended on realism or nominalism, on one or the other conception of the essence of universals. You will therefore understand that when Kant's philosophy increasingly became the philosophy of Protestant circles in Europe, a reaction took hold in Catholic circles. And this reaction consisted in saying to oneself on this ground that one must now again take a close look at the old scholasticism, one must fathom what scholasticism actually meant. In short, because they could not arrive at a new way of understanding the spiritual world, they tried to reconstruct scholasticism. And a rich literature arose that set itself the sole task of making scholasticism accessible to people again.

Of course, this literature was only read by Catholic theologians, but on a large scale. And for those who are interested in everything that is going on in the intellectual culture of humanity, it is by no means useless to take a brief look at the extensive literature that has come to light. It is useful to take a look at this neoscholastic literature if only because it allows us to see how black and white can coexist in the world – please note that the word has no negative connotation here! The whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at the world, is different in the progressive current of philosophy, which follows Kant, Fichte, Hegel, or earlier Cartesius, Malebranche, Hume, up to Mill and Spencer. It is a completely different kind of intellectual research, a completely different way of thinking about the world, than that which emerged, for example, in Gratry and the numerous neoscholastics who wrote everywhere, in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, England, and Germany; for there is a wealth of neoscholastic literature in all countries. And all the orders of the Catholic priesthood have taken part in the discussions. The study of scholasticism became particularly lively from 1879 onwards, when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical “Aeterni patris” was published. In this encyclical, Catholic theologians were made to study Thomas Aquinas as a matter of duty. Since that time, a rich literature has emerged in the tradition of Thomism, and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has been thoroughly studied and interpreted. However, the whole movement had already begun earlier, so that today libraries can be filled with the many brilliant works that have emerged from this renewal of Thomism.

You can educate yourself, for example, from a book like “The Origin of Human Reason” or from many French books or, if you prefer, from numerous works by Italian Jesuits and Dominicans, with which this philosophy has been driven again. Much ingenuity has been applied to the study of scholasticism in all countries – an ingenuity that people, even those who study philosophy today, usually have no idea of, because they do not have the necessary interest to pay attention to all sides of human endeavor. The need to take a stand against Kantianism arose from this side, which, by becoming pure nominalism, especially in the second half of the 19th century, removed the ground from under Catholic theology.

I am now speaking purely historically, not to evaluate anything, not even to refute anything, or to agree with anything, but purely historically. And then one can see that basically, to this day, people are still endeavoring to understand what the concept and the thinking are actually about. In the modern age, people can no longer achieve anything with the concept in its old sense. It must be revitalized if we are to make progress. Long-term attempts must be made to understand, theoretically, with the mere concept of the image, what significance thinking has for divinity.

Others have endeavored in other ways. For example, a very significant current has emerged that is even very close to Catholicism and has been pursued by priests within Catholicism, but it has not found the favor of Catholic authority to the extent that scholasticism did. In the encyclical “Aeterni patris”, Catholic theologians were even dutifully encouraged to renew the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, to resurrect it. Another direction has not received as much favor from the Catholic authorities: that is the direction of Rosmini-Serbati and Gioberti. Rosmini, who was born in Rovereto near Trento and died in nearby Stresa in 1855, expressed his aspirations particularly in works that were not actually published until after his death. And it is interesting to see how Rosmini wanted to work his way up by examining the real value of the concept. Rosmini came to understand that man has the concept present in his inner experience. A person who is only a nominalist stops at the fact that he experiences the concept internally and passes over the question of where the concept is present in reality. Rosmini, however, was ingenious enough to know that even if something reveals itself within the soul, this does not mean that it has reality only within the soul. And so he knew, in particular, by starting from the concept of being, that the soul, by experiencing the concepts, at the same time experiences the inner essence of things as they live in the concepts. And so Rosmini's philosophy consisted in seeking inner experiences, which for him were experiences of concepts, but in doing so he did not arrive at the liveliness of the concepts, only at the diversity of the concepts. And now he sought to specify how the concept lives simultaneously in the soul and in things. This is very clearly expressed in the work by Rosmini that was left behind and is entitled “Teosofia”. Within Catholicism, others also held a similar point of view, but Rosmini is one of the most ingenious.

Now, however, Catholic theology finds such a direction as Rosminian somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable, because it is very difficult for this side to reconcile the concept of revelation with this theory of concepts. For the concept of revelation amounts to the fact that the highest truths must be revealed. They cannot be experienced inwardly in the soul, but must be revealed outwardly in the course of human history. Man can only approach reality with his concepts to a certain degree, and the sphere of revelations rises above this sphere of concepts. From this point of view, the scholastics had to stand. This is also compatible with what Catholicism still regards as its core today, better than the Rosminian experienced concepts. Because when you have experienced concepts, it is actually God who lives in you. And basically, Catholic theology is horrified when people claim that God lives in man. That is why Leo XIII declared Rosmini's philosophy heretical in the 1880s by a decree of his own and forbade Catholic theologians to study and teach Rosmini's philosophy unless they had permission from their superiors. For in this way, strict measures are taken within the operations of Catholic theologians. I do not know whether this is always the case without exception. In the publications of Catholic theologians of all camps, one will in any case always find the seal of the superior episcopal authority. This then means that Catholic theologians are allowed to study such a work. There are certain exceptions for those who are university teachers, but things are handled very strictly, at least in theory.

In this way, one also sees the attempt to work one's way into an understanding of the relationship between thinking and the world.

I would like to make an interjection here that is of a completely different nature. Such interjections are sometimes necessary. Many of our friends believe that they are doing our movement a great favor when they explain to Catholic theologians, for example, that we are not at all anti-Christian and that we are in fact seeking an honest concept of Christ. And in their good faith, our friends go so far as to tell this or that Catholic theologian about the way we characterize Christianity. For our friends then believe, in their – forgive me – naivety, that they can make these theologians see that we are good Christians. But they can never admit that as Catholic theologians! My dear friends, we will be much more agreeable to them if we do not seek the Christ, if we do not care about the Christ! For it is not a matter for them – this must always be borne in mind – that someone is seeking this or that concept of Christ, but for them it is a matter of the supremacy of the Church. And precisely if one had an equally good or better concept of Christ outside the Church, then one would be fought against most of all. Thus, those of our friends who are most gullible do us the greatest harm, who go to Catholic theologians and try to convince them that we are not anti-Christian. For they will say: It is even worse if a concept of Christ could take root outside the church. One must judge the things of life according to one's circumstances and not according to one's naive opinion. We will be fought against particularly sharply if the theologians should make the discovery that we understand something of the inner existence of Christianity that could make a convincing impression on a larger circle of humanity.

But it can be seen that it had become necessary to work one's way into an understanding of the concept and its relationship to reality. And here it must be said: what is contained in the writings of Rosminis is among the most brilliant things that have been accomplished in this direction in modern times. He has worked through this for all areas, and it could be of very special value if one studied Rosmini's concepts of beauty, his aesthetic concepts. Rosmini's theory of beauty, his aesthetics, is something particularly valuable that one should engage with in order to see how a modern mind works its way up to standing at the gateway to spiritual science and just not being able to enter into spiritual science. This can be studied to such an outstanding degree in Rosmini.

Thus we find that there are really spiritual currents that want to work towards an understanding of the concept, but do not come to realize that we are now living in a time when the concept must become alive if one wants to enter into reality.

So the concept has gone through a certain history. I have dealt with this history in part in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” in that first chapter of which I spoke. But here I would like to point out something further. We can say, then, that the concept continues to develop. There was a time when the concept was a perceived concept, as color or sound was perceived. This was the case with the Greeks. Plato is just the last one to speak so realistically about the concepts that one can see how something of the understanding for such a grasp of the concepts resonates in him. With Aristotle it is already different. Then comes the Middle Ages, where one has the concept purely rationally, and where one seeks how it relates to things as a universal, and where one reaches for bridges and comes to the structure: ante rem, in re, post rem – before, in, after things.

Then comes the time when the concept is fully understood in a nominalistic way. This extends into our time. But the reaction is asserting itself, the side currents that seek the concept as an inner experience, as with Rosmini. From here (see diagram: Rosmini) one would come to the life or experience of the concept. So the concept would be chained, so to speak, to the physical body in this time (see diagram: before Plato to the Middle Ages), and now pass over to the etheric body. The concept would lead to the clairvoyant experience of the concept. But then one would have to say that the entire earlier perceived concept and the nominalistic and rational concept have developed out of an atavistic clairvoyance of the concept, and that now the way in which the concept is to be experienced is a conscious one, whereas in earlier times it was more subconscious. And indeed, if you go from Plato, from the Greek philosophers, who had the concept as a perceived one, to the echoes of Zarathustrianism, you have this atavistically grasped – or perhaps one does not need to say “atavistic” because this expression is only valid today – so dream-like, clairvoyantly experienced concept.

Thus the Near Eastern philosophies presented the concept as something that they experienced pictorially. Persian philosophy sees in the “horse in general” a being in general that is specified and differentiated from the individual horse, still something living. The Persians called this “Feruer”. This is abstracted and becomes the Platonic idea. The Persians' Feruer becomes the Platonic idea.

Abstraction is gaining more and more ground because thinking is only experienced in the physical body. We must return to the consciously experienced concept. In this field you see a wonderful cycle taking place from the old clairvoyance of the concept through what the concept had to become in the age of physical experience: the merely rational concept, the merely conceptualized concept, the merely logical concept.

I have often emphasized that logic only came into being through Aristotle, when one had the concept only as a concept. Before that, for the experienced concept, one did not need logic. And now logic comes to life, the statue of logic comes to life.

This example of the concept shows once again what can be seen in general and on a large scale. We also have to work our way into the whole course of human development in the individual, because then we understand more and more clearly the meaning underlying the spiritual current to which we belong. And we really do become more and more objective through these things, but that is also necessary. Where would we end up if objectivity were not understood at all and our dear friends were to drag everything more and more into the personal sphere! Our task must be to work objectively, and the purely personal must recede more and more.

German philosophy before Schopenhauer

[ 1 ] The years 1781 and 1807 mark an era of fierce battles within the development of German science. In 1781, Kant woke his contemporaries from their philosophical slumber with his "Critique of Pure Reason" and presented them with riddles which the cognitive power of the nation's best minds endeavored to solve over the next quarter of a century. A philosophical excitement of the highest order can be observed among those involved in these intellectual battles. In rapid succession, one school of thought replaced another. The shallow intellectual clarity that had prevailed in the books of philosophical literature before Kant was replaced by scientific warmth, which gradually grew into the captivating eloquence of Fichte and the poetic verve with which Schelling was able to express scientific ideas. An examination of this intellectual movement reveals an incomparable intellectual wealth, but also a restless, hasty rush forward. Some ideas entered the public domain prematurely. The thinkers did not have the patience to allow their ideas to mature. This restless development ended with the publication of Georg Wilh. Friedr. Hegel's first major work, the "Phenomenology of Spirit", in 1807. Hegel did the last work on this book in Jena in the days when the terrible turmoil of war in 1806 broke over the city. The events of the following years were not conducive to philosophical battles. Hegel's book did not immediately make such a strong impression, challenging the minds to cooperate, as Fichte and Schelling did when they first appeared. But even their influence gradually waned. For both of them, the period of their activity at the University of Jenens was the most brilliant of their lives. Fichte taught at this university from 1794 to 1799, Schelling from 1798 to 1803. The former moved from Jena to Berlin because the accusation of atheism brought against him by envious and unreasonable people had brought him into conflict with the Weimar government. In the winter of 1804/s he gave his lectures on the "Fundamentals of the Present Age" in Berlin, in which he effectively advocated idealistic thinking, and in the winter of 1807/8 his famous "Speeches to the German Nation", which exerted a powerful influence on the strengthening of national sentiment. As a champion of national and liberal ideas, in the service of which he placed his thinking and his eloquence, he achieved a more powerful effect during this period than through the philosophical lectures he gave at the University of Berlin from its establishment in 1810 until his death in 1814. Schelling, who did not make the transition from philosophical to political activity, was soon completely forgotten after his time in Jenens. He moved to Würzburg in 1803 and then to Munich in 1806, where he worked on expanding his ideas, which few people were still interested in. At the end of the first decade of our century, there was no longer any sign of the lively philosophical debate that Kant's revolutionary act had provoked: Fichte and Schelling's time was over, Hegel's era had not yet dawned. Hegel led a quiet existence from 1806 to 1808 as editor of a Bamberg newspaper and then until 1816 as principal of the Nuremberg grammar school. His enormous influence on German intellectual life only began with his appointment to Berlin in 1818.

[ 2 ] This characterizes the circumstances that Arthur Schopenhauer found himself in when, after an eventful youth, he began his philosophical apprenticeship in 1810. He heard echoes of Fichte's, Schelling's and above all Kant's views from the pulpits and from the works of contemporary philosophers. The way in which Schopenhauer turned the views of his great predecessors, especially Kant and Fichte, into elements of his own system of ideas can be understood by examining the period of his life that preceded his preoccupation with philosophy.

Schopenhauer's youthful life

[ 3 ] Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig on February 22, 1788. His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, lived in this city as a wealthy merchant. He was a man of thorough professional training, great worldly experience, rare strength of character and a sense of independence that nothing could overcome. His mother Johanna Henriette, née Trosiener, was a fun-loving, artistic woman who was extremely open to intellectual pleasures and had a strong penchant for socializing, which she could easily satisfy with her intelligence and intellectual alertness. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer was 41 and Johanna 22 years old when Arthur, their first child, was born from their marriage in 1785. He was followed in 1797 by the second and last, Adele. The philosopher's parents had not been driven to marry by rapturous passion. But the relationship, based on mutual respect, must have been a very happy one. Johanna speaks about it with the words: "I could be proud to belong to this man, and I was. I feigned ardent love for him just as little as he laid claim to it."

[ 4 ] In 1793, the previously free city of Danzig was incorporated into the Prussian state. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer did not like the idea of becoming a Prussian subject. He therefore emigrated to Hamburg with his wife and child. In the years that followed, the small family traveled frequently. The reason for this was Johanna's longing for a change in living conditions, for ever new impressions, and her husband's intention to give his son the widest possible knowledge of the world based on his own experience. Arthur's father had decided that he should become a capable merchant and a man of the world. All educational measures were undertaken with this in mind. The boy received his first lessons at a private institute in Hamburg. At the age of ten, he embarked on a long journey with his father to France, where he spent the next two years of his life. After Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer had shown his son Paris, he took him to Havre to leave him with a business friend, Grégoire de Blésimaire. The latter had the young Schopenhauer educated together with his own son. The result of this education was that Arthur returned, to his father's great delight, as a perfect young Frenchman who had acquired a great deal of appropriate knowledge and had forgotten his mother tongue to such an extent that he could only make himself understood with difficulty in it. But the twelve-year-old boy also brought back the most pleasant memories from France. In his 31st year, he said of this stay: "I spent by far the happiest part of my childhood in that friendly town on the Seine estuary and the sea coast." After returning to his parents' home, Arthur Schopenhauer attended a private educational establishment run by Dr. Runge and attended by the sons of wealthy Hamburgers. At this school, pupils were taught what was needed to turn them into capable and socially educated businessmen. Latin was taught for one hour a week, just for the sake of appearances. Arthur Schopenhauer enjoyed these lessons for almost four years. What he was taught here in the sciences was presented to him in a form appropriate to the practical goals of the future merchant. But it was enough to awaken in him a powerful inclination towards a scholarly career. His father did not like this at all. In his opinion, he found himself in the embarrassing position of having to choose between two things: the present wishes of his beloved son and his future happiness. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer thought that the academic profession could only bring a man poverty and worry, not happiness and contentment. Forcing his son into a profession was contrary to the nature of his father, who considered freedom to be one of man's greatest possessions. However, he considered a ruse to be appropriate and expedient to dissuade the young man from his inclination. Arthur had to decide quickly: either to go on a long pleasure trip through a large part of Europe, which his parents wanted to undertake, and on his return to devote himself definitively to the mercantile profession, or to stay behind in Hamburg to begin his Latin studies immediately and prepare himself for the learned profession. The wonderful expectations that the thought of the journey aroused in the young Schopenhauer caused him to repress his love of science and choose the profession that appealed to his father. This was a decision that his father foresaw, as he was well aware of his son's desire to see the world. Arthur Schopenhauer left Hamburg with his parents in the spring of 1803. The next destination was Holland, then the journey continued to England. After a stay of six weeks in London, Arthur was left behind in Wimbledon for three months to learn the English language thoroughly with Mr. Lancaster. During this time, his parents traveled to England and Scotland. The stay in England engendered in Schopenhauer the hatred of English bigotry that remained with the philosopher throughout his life, but it also laid the foundation for the thorough mastery of the English language that later made him appear as such in conversation with Englishmen. Life in Lancaster's boarding house did not suit Schopenhauer very well. In letters to his parents, he complained of boredom and the stiff, ceremonial nature of the English. He was overcome by a general mood which, it seems, could only be dispelled by a preoccupation with fine literature, especially the works of Schiller. We can see from his mother's letters that she was worried that her son's fondness for poetic reading might blunt him to the seriousness of life. "Believe me," she wrote to him on July 19, 1803, "Schiller himself would never be what he is if he had only read poets in his youth." From England, the Schopenhauer family traveled to France via Holland and Belgium. They visited Havre again and spent some time in Paris. In January 1804, the journey continued to the south of France. Schopenhauer got to know Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nimes, Marseille, Toulon, the Hyeric Islands and Lyon. From Lyon, the travelers turned to Switzerland, then to Swabia, Bavaria, Vienna, Dresden and Berlin. The impressions that Schopenhauer received during the course of the journey were profound. In Paris, he saw Napoleon shortly before he forced his way to the imperial crown (May 18, 1804). In Lyon, his mind was stirred by the sight of several places that recalled the atrocities of the Revolution. And everywhere it was especially the scenes of human misery that he viewed with deep sympathy for the unfortunate and oppressed. For example, he was seized with an unnameable sense of pain when he saw the terrible fate of six thousand galley slaves in the Bagno of Toulon. He thought he was looking into an abyss of human misfortune. But he was also filled with joy when he saw the magnificent works of nature during his journey, a feeling that increased in Switzerland at the sight of Mont Blanc or the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen to the point of rapture at the sublimity of nature's workings. Later, in Book 3 of Volume II of his main work, he compared genius to the mighty Alpine mountain, because the frequently noted gloomy mood of highly gifted spirits reminded him of the summit, which is usually shrouded in a veil of clouds, and the peculiar cheerfulness that occasionally emerges from the general gloomy mood of genius reminds him of the magical glow of light that becomes visible when the veil of clouds breaks early in the morning and the summit becomes clear. The Krkonoše Mountains in Bohemia, which were visited on the way from Vienna to Dresden, also made a significant impression on Schopenhauer. Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer started his journey home from Berlin, while Arthur traveled with his mother to his native city of Danzig, where he was confirmed. In the early days of 1805, the now seventeen-year-old young man arrived back in Hamburg. He now had to keep his father's word and dedicate himself to the commercial profession without refusal. He was apprenticed to Senator Jenisch in Hamburg. Once awakened, his love of the sciences could not be stifled. The merchant's apprentice felt unhappy. After the long journey, on which new images had been presented to the onlooker's eye every day, he could not bear the monotony of his professional work; after the relaxed lifestyle of the past years, the necessary regularity in his 'activities seemed like servitude to him. Without any inner involvement in the duties of his profession, he only did the bare minimum. On the other hand, he used every free moment to read or to indulge in his own thoughts and reveries. He even resorted to cunning pretenses towards his teacher when he wanted to have a few free hours to attend the lectures on craniology given by Doctor Gall, who was in Hamburg at the time.

[ 5 ] This was Arthur Schopenhauer's situation in April 1805, when his father's life ended suddenly when he fell from a loft. Whether the man, who was suffering from memory loss in his final weeks, sought 'death' himself or found it by chance is still unclear today. The son's gloomy mood was heightened by this event to such an extent that it was little short of true melancholy. The mother moved to Weimar with her daughter in 1806, after the business had been liquidated. She thirsted for the intellectual stimuli of this city of art. Arthur's striving for liberation from torturous circumstances now met with no external resistance. He was his own master. His mother exercised no coercion. Nevertheless, there were reasons that prevented him from throwing off the hated shackles immediately after his father's death. He loved his father dearly. It was contrary to his feelings to take a step that the deceased would never have approved of. Also, the overwhelming pain of the sudden loss had so paralyzed his energy that he could not make a quick decision. To all this was added the fact that he believed himself too old to be able to undertake the preliminary studies necessary for the scholarly profession. His ever-increasing aversion to the commercial profession and the belief that he was wasting his life's energies in vain filled his letters to his mother in Weimar with miserable complaints, so that she considered it her duty to ask her friend, the famous art writer Fernow, for advice on what to do in the interests of her son's future happiness. Fernow wrote to her friend with his opinion. He considered the age of eighteen to be no obstacle to devoting oneself to the sciences; indeed, he claimed that it was at this happy age that "memory and judgment unite in the maturing power of the mind, so that what is undertaken with firm resolution can be carried out more easily and quickly, and knowledge can be acquired sooner than in an earlier or later period of life". Schopenhauer, to whom his mother sent Fernow's letter, was so shocked by its contents that he burst into tears after reading it. Fernow's lines brought about what was otherwise not in his nature: to make a decision quickly. The time from the spring of 1807 to the fall of 1809 was enough for Schopenhauer to acquire the knowledge he needed to attend university. He lived in Gotha until the beginning of 1808, where Döring taught him Latin and Jacobs German. He spent the rest of his time in Weimar, where Fernow introduced him to Italian literature. In addition to the old languages, in which the philologist Passow and the grammar school director Lenz were his teachers, he studied mathematics and history. On October 9, he entered the University of Göttingen to study medicine. A year later, he swapped medicine for philosophy.

The student years. Relationship with Kant and Fichte

[ 6 ] As a personality whose character traits were already sharply defined, who had already formed firm opinions on many things on the basis of substantial experiences and a rich knowledge of the world, Schopenhauer entered the study of philosophy. At the beginning of his time at university, he once said to Wieland: "Life is a miserable thing; I have resolved to do mine by thinking about it." Life made him a philosopher. It also determined the philosophical tasks he devoted himself to solving. In this he differs from his predecessors: Kant, Fichte and Schelling, as well as from his antipode Hegel. These were philosophers for whom their tasks arose from the consideration of other people's views. Kant's thinking was given a decisive impetus by delving into Hume's writings, Fichte's and Schelling's work was given direction by Kant's critiques, Hegel's thoughts also developed from those of his predecessors. The ideas of these thinkers are therefore links in a continuous series of developments. Even if each of the philosophers mentioned sought in the foreign systems of thought that inspired him those germs whose further development corresponded precisely to his individuality, it is still possible to trace the series of developments described purely logically, without taking into account the personal bearers of the ideas. It is as if one thought had brought forth another without any human being having been active in the process. For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, a large number of individual doubts and puzzles arose from his experiences, from the direct observation of human conditions and natural events, to which his travels gave him the opportunity, before he knew what others thought about the life of the spirit and the workings of nature. The questions posed to him by his experiences had a thoroughly individual and often coincidental character. This is why he occupies an isolated position in German philosophy. He took the elements for solving his tasks from everywhere: from contemporaries and from philosophers of the past. The question as to why these elements have become elements of a body of thought can only be answered by examining Schopenhauer's individual personality. Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's philosophical systems arouse the feeling that they had to follow Kant's because they were logically demanded by it; of Schopenhauer's, on the other hand, it is quite easy to imagine that we would have missed it entirely in the history of philosophy if the creator's life had taken a different turn by some accident before his productive period. The peculiar charm of Schopenhauer's world of ideas is due to this character. Because it has its sources in individual life, it corresponds to the philosophical needs of many people who, without seeking special expertise, nevertheless want to hear an opinion on the most important questions of life.

[ 7 ] Some of Schopenhauer's philosophical statements are merely views wrapped in a scientific garment, which life before his philosophical studies had produced in him. His starting point is not a principle from which all philosophical science can be derived, but rather individual basic views on various aspects of world events emerge from the whole of his personality, which only later coalesce into a unity. Schopenhauer therefore compares his world of thought to a crystal whose parts shoot together from all sides to form a whole.

[ 8 ] One of these basic views developed in Schopenhauer as a result of the influence that his Göttingen teacher Gottlob Ernst Schulze had on him. The latter described Kant and Plato to the young philosopher as the thinkers he should adhere to first and foremost. Schulze himself had appeared as an opponent of Kant in his 1792 publication "Aenesidemus". Schopenhauer had the good fortune to have Kant pointed out to him by a man who also had the ability to draw attention to the philosopher's contradictions.

[ 9 ] Kant endeavored to seek out the conditions under which the human striving for knowledge can arrive at truths of unconditional and necessary certainty. The Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, of which Kant was a follower until his in-depth study of Hume's writings, believed that such truths could be spun out of pure reason through purely conceptual thinking. It contrasted these pure rational truths with the knowledge of experience gained through observation of the outer life of nature and the inner life of the soul. According to this view, the latter are not made up of clear, transparent concepts, but of confused and dark ideas. Therefore, this philosophical way of thinking wanted to develop the most valuable insights into the deeper connection of natural events, the nature of the soul and the existence of God from pure concepts of reason. Kant professed these views until he was completely shaken in his convictions by Hume's remarks on the concepts of cause and effect. Hume (1711 to 1776) sought to prove that we can never gain insight into the connection between cause and effect through mere reason. According to Hume, the concept of causation comes from experience. We perceive the emergence of fire and then the heating of the air surrounding it. We have observed the same sequence of these perceptions countless times. We get used to it and assume that we will always observe the same thing as soon as the same conditions are met. But we can never gain an objective certainty about this, for it is impossible to see with the help of mere concepts that something must necessarily follow because something else precedes it. Experience only tells us that up to a certain point in time a certain event has always resulted in a certain other event, but not that the one must result in the other, i.e. that it will not be different in the future. All our knowledge about nature and about the life of our soul is made up of complexes of ideas that have formed in our soul on the basis of observed connections between things and events. Reason can find nothing in itself that gives it the right to connect one idea with another, i.e. to make a cognitive judgment. From the moment Kant recognized the significance of Hume's investigations, his thinking took on a completely new direction. But he arrived at different conclusions from Hume himself as a result of Hume's considerations. He agreed with Hume that we cannot gain any information about a connection lying in things from mere reason. What laws things have in themselves, our reason cannot decide; only the things themselves can teach us. He also agreed with Hume that there is no unconditional and necessary certainty in the information that experience gives us about the connection between things. But on this, Kant maintained, we have perfect certainty that things must stand in the relation of cause and effect and in other similar relations. Kant did not lose his belief in absolutely necessary knowledge about reality as a result of Hume's statements. The question arose for him: How can we know something absolutely certain about the connection between things and events in reality, even though reason cannot decide how things relate to each other by their very nature and experience does not provide any absolutely certain information? Kant's answer to this question was: The necessary connection in which we see the things and phenomena we perceive does not lie in these things themselves, but in our organization. It is not because one event necessarily follows from another that we notice such a connection, but because our mind is so organized that it must connect things according to the concepts of cause and effect. Thus it does not depend on the things at all, but on us, in what relations they appear to us. Kant allows only sensations to be given by an external power. Their arrangement in space and time and their connection through concepts such as cause and effect, unity and multiplicity, possibility and reality, is, in his view, only accomplished by our mental organism. Our sensuality is such that it can only look at sensations in space and time, our intellect such that it can only think of them in certain conceptual relationships. Kant is therefore of the opinion that our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of their connection to things and events. Whatever is to become the object of our experience must obey these laws. An examination of our organization reveals the conditions under which all objects of experience must necessarily appear. From this view arose for Kant the necessity of attributing to experience a character dependent on the human faculty of cognition. We do not know things as they are in themselves, but as our organization makes them appear to us. Our experience therefore contains only appearances, not things in themselves. Kant was led to this conviction by the train of ideas that Hume stimulated in him.

[ 10 ] Schopenhauer describes the change brought about in his mind by these thoughts as a spiritual rebirth. They fill him with all the greater satisfaction as he finds them in full agreement with the views of the other philosopher to whom Schulze had pointed him, those of Plato. The latter says: "As long as we relate to the world merely perceptively, we are like people who sit in a dark cave so tightly bound 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 shadowy images 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 the real things, so our objects of perception, according to Plato's conviction, relate to the Ideas, which are the objects of perception. The objects of perception arise and pass away, the ideas are eternal. Schopenhauer found the same view in Kant as in Plato: that the visible world has no true being. Schopenhauer soon regarded this as an incontrovertible, indeed as the first and most universal truth. For him it took the following form: 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 becomes my object of knowledge means: it becomes my imagination. Heaven, earth, etc., are therefore my conceptions, for the thing in itself that corresponds to them has become my object only because it has assumed the character of conception. Schopenhauer took from the thought worlds of Kant and Plato the germ of those parts of his philosophical system in which he treats the world as imagination.

[ 11 ] Schopenhauer considered the distinction between appearance and "thing-in-itself" to be Kant's greatest merit; however, he found Kant's remarks on the "thing-in-itself" itself to be completely misguided. This error also gave rise to Schulze's fight against Kant. According to Kant, things in themselves are the external causes of the sensations that occur in our sensory organs. But how do we arrive at the assumption of such causes, asks Schulze and with him Schopenhauer. Cause and effect are connected merely because our organization demands it, and yet are these concepts to be applied to a realm that is beyond our organism? Can the laws of our organism also be decisive beyond it? These considerations led Schopenhauer to seek a different path to the "thing-in-itself" than the one taken by Kant.

[ 12 ] Such a path is outlined in J. G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It took its most mature form in the lectures that Fichte gave at the University of Berlin between 1810 and 1814. Schopenhauer went to Berlin in the fall of 1811 to continue his studies. "He listened very attentively to Fichte lecturing on his philosophy," he later said in the description of his curriculum vitae, which he submitted to the Faculty of Philosophy in Berlin when he wanted to become a private lecturer. We learn the content of Fichte's lectures from his "Sämtliche Werke Vol. 2 und aus seinem Nachlaß Vol. i". The doctrine of science is based on the concept of knowledge, not that of being. For man can only learn something about being through his knowledge. Knowledge is not something 'dead, finished, but a living becoming. The objects of knowledge arise through its activity. It is characteristic of everyday consciousness that it notices the objects of knowledge, but not their emergence. Insight into this emergence comes to those who reflect on their own activity. Such a person sees how he himself creates the entire world existing in space and time. According to Fichte, this creation is a fact that one notices as soon as one pays attention to it. However, one must have an organ that is capable of overhearing knowledge as it is produced, just as one must have an eye in order to see colors. To him who has this organ, the perceptible world appears as a creature of knowledge, arising and passing away with knowledge. Its objects are not permanent beings, but passing images. Everyone can only observe the production of these images in themselves. Through self-perception, each person recognizes in the things given to his knowledge a world of images created by himself. This is only a subjective appearance whose meaning does not extend beyond the individual human being. The question arises: Are these images the only thing that exists? Are we ourselves nothing but this activity that creates the appearance? The question can be answered by reflecting on man's moral ideals. Of these it is clear without further ado that they are to be realized. And it is also absolutely certain that they must be realized not only by this or that human individual, but by all men. This necessity is inherent in the content of these ideals. They are a unity that embraces all individuals. Every human being perceives them as ought. They can only be realized through the will. But if the expressions of the will of the individuals are to harmonize into a unified world order, they must be founded in a single universal will. What wills in any individual is in essence the same as what wills in all others. What the will accomplishes must appear in the corporeal world; it is the scene of its activity. This is only possible if its laws are such that it can absorb the activity of the will into itself. There must be an original correspondence between the driving forces of the corporeal world and the will. The doctrine of science thus leads to a unified world principle, which manifests itself in the physical world as force and in the moral order as will. As soon as man finds the will within himself, he gains the conviction that there is a world independent of his individual. The will is not the knowledge of the individual, but the form of being. The world is knowledge and will. In the realization of moral ideals, the will has a content, and insofar as human life participates in this realization, it acquires an absolute value that it would not have if it existed merely in the images of knowledge. Fichte sees the will as the "thing in itself" independent of knowledge. All we recognize of the world of being is that it is will.

[ 13 ] The view that the will that man encounters in himself is a "thing in itself" is also Schopenhauer's view. He, too, is of the opinion that in our knowledge we have given only the images produced by us, but in our will we have given a being independent of us. The will must remain when knowledge is extinguished. The active will shows itself through the actions of my body. When the organism does something, it is the will that drives it to do it. Now I also learn about the actions of my body through my knowledge, which creates a picture of it for me. Schopenhauer says, according to the expression into which he has put Kant's basic view (cf. p. 245): I imagine these actions. This imagination of mine corresponds to a being independent of me, which is will. What we know of the activity in our own bodies, Schopenhauer also seeks to prove of that of the rest of nature: that it is, according to its being, will. This view of the will is the second of the links that make up Schopenhauer's philosophy.

[ 14 ] In the absence of historical evidence, it is impossible to determine how much of Schopenhauer's doctrine of will was influenced by Fichte. Schopenhauer himself denied any influence on the part of his Berlin teacher. He disliked the way Fichte taught and wrote. Given the striking agreement between the views of the two philosophers and the fact that Schopenhauer listened "attentively" to Fichte's lectures and even once had a lively discussion with him during a consultation, it is difficult to reject the idea of such influence. It was therefore in Göttingen and Berlin that Schopenhauer was first inspired when he based his system of thought on the two principles: "The world is my imagination" and "The world is will."

The influence of Goethe

[ 15 ] In the spring of 1813, Schopenhauer left Berlin due to the unrest of the war and went to Weimar via Dresden. He did not like the conditions in his mother's house, so he initially settled in Rudolstadt. In the summer of 1813, he worked on part of his theory of ideas. All our ideas are objects of our cognizing subject. But nothing existing and independent on its own, nor anything separate and torn off, can become an object for us. The ideas stand in a lawful connection which is given to them by our cognitive faculty and which can be recognized in form from its nature. The ideas must stand in such a relation to each other that we can say: one is grounded in the other. Reason and consequence is the general form of the connection between all ideas. There are four kinds of grounding: the ground of becoming, of cognition, of being and of volition. In becoming, one change is justified by another in time; in cognizing, one judgment by another, or by an experience; in being, the position of one part of time or space by another; in willing, an action by a motive. Schopenhauer gave a detailed account of what he had to say about these propositions in his essay "On the Fourfold Root of the Theorem of the Sufficient Ground", which earned him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Jena on October 2, 1813. In November of that year he returned to Weimar, where he remained until May 1814 and lived in close contact with Goethe. Goethe had read Schopenhauer's first work and was so interested in the author that he personally introduced him to the theory of colors. Schopenhauer found that his philosophical convictions and Goethe's Theory of Colors were in perfect agreement. He decided to justify this in a special treatise, which he began to write after moving to Dresden in May 1814. His thoughts on the nature of sensory perception also developed in the process. Kant was of the opinion that sensations arise from the excitation of the senses by "things in themselves"; these are the simple impressions of color, light, sound, etc. As these come from outside, they are not yet arranged in space and time. For this order is based on an arrangement of the senses. The outer senses arrange the sensations in space, the inner sense in time. This gives rise to perception. According to its nature, the intellect then arranges the perceptions according to the concepts of cause and effect, unity and multiplicity: Cause and effect, unity, multiplicity, etc. In this way a coherent experience is formed from the individual perceptions. Schopenhauer finds the senses quite unsuitable for the production of perception. The senses contain nothing but sensation. The sensations of color, for example, arise through an effect on the retina in the eye. They are processes within the organism. They can therefore only be perceived directly as states of the body and within it. The inner sense initially arranges the sensations in time so that they gradually enter consciousness. They only acquire spatial relationships when they are perceived as effects and an external cause is inferred from them. The arrangement according to cause and effect is a matter for the intellect. It regards sensations as effects and transfers their causes into space. It takes possession of the material of sensation and constructs the views in space from it. These are therefore the work of the intellect and not of the senses*. Since the objects that are seen and felt in space are derived from the senses ¹ Since the colors are first built up from the semantic perceptions, they cannot be derived from them. Therefore, colors, which are sensations, cannot be derived from objects, as Newton does. They are created by the eye and must be explained by the eye's equipment. It must be shown how the retina produces colors. Only the cause of colors, light, which is still entirely uncolored, can be transferred to the outside. Goethe also assumes the uncolored light in his Theory of Colors. Schopenhauer's work "On Sight and Colors" was published in 1816. Goethe had already received the manuscript from the author for review in 1815.

The main work

[ 16 ] Schopenhauer stayed in Dresden until September 1818, a period dedicated to the completion of his main work "The World as Will and Representation". New ideas were added to those developed in Göttingen, Berlin and Weimar and initially recorded in short aphorisms. Frauenstädt published a number of these aphorisms in his book "Aus Schopenhauers Nachlaß". Schopenhauer lived in particularly happy circumstances while he was writing them. His creative energy was stimulated by his contact with men of letters, who held him in high esteem for his abilities. The picture gallery and the collection of antique statues satisfied his aesthetic needs. They stimulated his thinking about art and artistic creation. From March 1817 to March 1818, he summarized the individual ideas of his philosophy into a whole. The remarks on perception, which were already contained in the work on colors, also form the beginning of "The World as Will and Representation". The intellect creates the external world and brings its phenomena into a context according to the law of cause and consequence, which has the four forms indicated. Kant ascribed twelve modes of connection (categories) to the intellect; Schopenhauer can only recognize those of reason and consequence (causality). Through the intellect we have given the vivid world. In addition to the intellect, reason is also active in man. It forms concepts from the views. It seeks out what different views have in common and forms abstract units from them. In this way it brings larger parts of experience under one thought. As a result, man does not merely live in his immediate present view, but can draw conclusions about the future from past and present events. He gains an overview of life and can also organize his actions accordingly. This distinguishes him from the animal. The latter has views, but no concepts of reason. Its actions are determined by the impressions of the immediate present. Man is guided by his reason. But reason cannot generate content on its own. It is only the reflection of the visual world. Therefore, it cannot produce moral ideals that are independent of experience and that shine before action as an unconditionally commanding ought, as Kant and Fichte claim. The rules according to which man organizes his actions are taken from his life experiences. Understanding and reason have their organ in the brain. Without the brain there are no views and no concepts. The whole world of imagination is a phenomenon of the brain. In itself there is only the will. This contains no moral ideals; we know it only as a dark urge, as an eternal striving. It gives rise to the brain and thus to understanding and reason. The brain creates the objective world, which man surveys as experience subject to the law of reason. The ideas are arranged spatially and temporally. They form nature in this order. The will is non-spatial and non-temporal, for space and time are created by the cognizing consciousness. The will is therefore a unity in itself; it is one and the same in all phenomena. As an appearance, the world consists of a multiplicity of things or individuals. As a thing in itself it is a wholeness. The individuals arise when consciousness confronts the object as subject and observes it according to the law of the ground. But there is another way of looking at it. Man can go beyond the mere individual. He can seek in the individual thing that which is independent of space, time and causality. In every individual there is something permanent that is not limited to the individual object. A particular horse is conditioned by the causes from which it emerged. But there is something in the horse that remains, even if the horse is destroyed again. This something that remains is not only contained in this particular horse, but in every horse. It cannot be produced by the causes which only bring about the creation of this one particular horse. That which remains is the idea of the horse. The causes embody this idea only in a single individual. The idea is therefore not subject to space, time and causality. It is therefore closer to the will than the individual. The idea is not directly contained anywhere in nature. Man only sees it when he looks away from the individual nature of things. This happens through the imagination. The material embodiment of ideas is art. The artist does not copy nature, but imprints on matter what his imagination sees. Music is an exception. It does not embody ideas. For even if ideas are not directly contained in nature, the imagination can only extract them from nature by searching for what remains in individuals. These are the models of art. Music, however, has no model in nature. Musical works of art do not depict anything in nature. Man creates them out of himself. But since there is nothing in him, apart from ideas and concepts, that he could represent other than the will, music is the direct image of the will. It speaks so much to the human mind because it is the embodiment of that which constitutes the innermost essence, the true being of man. This view of music is rooted in ideas that we find in Schopenhauer long before he became involved in philosophy. As a Hamburg merchant's apprentice, he wrote to his mother: "How did the heavenly seed find room on our hard soil, on which necessity and shortcomings fight for every little place? 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 a direct echo of the eternal has remained in it, comprehensible to every sense and elevated even above vice and virtue." This idea of youth confronts us in philosophical form in Schopenhauer's main work.

[ 17 ] The same passage in the letter also contains a thought that took on a scientific form in the last section of the book "The World as Will and Representation": that of a general end of the world and of the nothingness of existence. The will is an eternal striving. It is in its nature that it can never be satisfied. For when it reaches a goal, it must immediately continue on to a new one. If it ceased to strive, it would no longer be will. Since human life is by its very nature will, there is no satisfaction in it, but only eternal longing for such satisfaction. Deprivation causes pain. This is therefore necessarily connected with life. All joy and happiness can only be based on illusion. Satisfaction is only possible through illusion, which is destroyed by reflecting on the true nature of the world. The world is void. Only those who fully realize this are wise. The contemplation of eternal ideas and their embodiment in art can for a moment take us beyond the misery of the world, for the aesthetically pleasurable person immerses himself in the eternal ideas and knows nothing of the particular sufferings of his individual. He behaves in a purely recognizing way, not wanting, and therefore not suffering. Suffering, however, returns immediately when he is thrown back into everyday life. The only salvation from misery is not to will at all, to kill the will within oneself. This is done by suppressing all desires, by asceticism. The wise man will extinguish all desires within himself, completely negate his will. He knows no motive that could compel him to will. His striving is directed towards only one thing: redemption from life. This is no longer a motive, but a quest. Every individual will is determined by the general will and is therefore unfree; only the universal will is not determined by anything and is therefore free. Only the negation of the will is an act of freedom, because it cannot be brought about by an individual act of will, but by the one will itself. All individual willing is the willing of a motive, hence the affirmation of the will.

[ 18 ] Suicide does not bring about a negation of the will. The suicide destroys only his particular individual; not the will, but only a manifestation of the will. Asceticism, however, does not merely annihilate the individual, but the will itself within the individual. It must ultimately lead to the complete extinction of all being, to redemption from all suffering. If the will disappears, then every appearance is also destroyed. The world has then entered into eternal rest, into nothingness, in which alone there is no suffering, thus bliss.

[ 19 ] The will is a unity. It is one and the same in all beings. Man is only an individual in appearance, in being only the expression of the general will of the world. One human being is not in truth separate from the other. What the latter suffers, the latter must also regard as his own suffering, he must suffer with it. Compassion is the expression of the fact that no one has a particular suffering, but that everyone feels the general suffering. Compassion is the basis of morality. It destroys egoism, which only seeks to alleviate one's own suffering. Compassion causes people to act in a way that is aimed at eliminating the suffering of others. Morality is not based on the principles of reason, but on compassion, i.e. on a feeling. Schopenhauer rejects all rational morality. Its principles are abstractions that only lead to moral, non-egoistic action through connection with a real driving force: compassion.

[ 20 ] Schopenhauer's doctrine of salvation and compassion emerged from his doctrine of the will under the influence of Indian views: Brahmanism and Buddhism. Schopenhauer studied Indian religious ideas as early as 1813 in Weimar under the guidance of the Orientalist Friedrich Majer. He continued these studies in Dresden. He read the work "Oupnek' hat", which a Persian prince translated from Indian into Persian in 1640 and of which a Latin translation was published by the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron between 1801 and 1802. According to Brahmanism, all individual beings have emerged from a primordial being to which they return in the course of the world process. Through individualization, the evils and the end of the world have arisen, which will be destroyed as soon as the existence of the individual beings has ceased and only the primordial being will still exist. According to Buddhism, all existence is linked to pain. This would not be destroyed even if there were only one single primordial being. Only the destruction of all existence through renunciation and suppression of the passions can lead to salvation, to nirvana, that is, to the destruction of all existence.

[ 21 ] At the end of 1818 (with the date 1819), "The World as Will and Representation" was published by Brockhaus in Leipzig. In the same year, Hegel was appointed to Berlin. Hegel held a completely opposite view to that of Schopenhauer. What for Schopenhauer could only create a reflection of the real, reason, was for Hegel the source of all knowledge. Through reason, man grasps being in its true form, the content of reason is the content of being; the world is the appearance of the rational, and life is therefore infinitely valuable because it is the representation of reason. This doctrine soon became the philosophy of the age and remained so until it had to give way to the rule of the natural sciences around the middle of the century. The latter did not want to justify anything from reason, but everything from experience. The flourishing of Hegelian philosophy prevented any influence of Scho penhauer's philosophy. It remained completely unnoticed. In 1835, Schopenhauer received the following information from Brockhaus in response to an inquiry about the sales of his main work: the work had not been distributed at all. A large part of it had had to be turned into waste paper.

Stay in Berlin

[ 22 ] After completing "The World as Will and Representation", Schopenhauer left Dresden and went to Italy. He saw Florence, Bologna, Rome and Naples. On his return journey, he received news from his sister in Milan that the Hamburg trading house in which his mother and sister had invested their entire fortune, and Schopenhauer himself only part of his fortune, had stopped making payments. This experience made it seem advisable for him to look for a new source of income, as he did not want to depend on his uncertain fortune. He returned to Germany and habilitated at the University of Berlin. He announced the following lecture for the summer semester of 1820: "The whole of philosophy, that is the doctrine of the nature of the world and of the human spirit". He was unable to exert any influence as an academic teacher or as a writer alongside Hegel. For this reason, he did not give any more lectures in the following years, although he continued to announce such lectures in his catalog until 1831. He felt unhappy in Berlin; the location, climate, surroundings, way of life, social conditions: he disliked everything. In addition, he was completely disintegrating due to the property issue with his mother and sister. He himself had lost nothing through his skillful appearance; his mother and sister, on the other hand, had lost 70 percent of their fortune. Embittered by the lack of recognition, loneliness and the rift with his relatives, he left Berlin in May 1822 and spent several years traveling. He went through Switzerland to Italy, spent a winter in Trier, a whole year in Munich and only returned to Berlin in May 1825. In 1831 he moved to Frankfurt am Main. He fled from the cholera that prevailed in Berlin at the time and which he was particularly afraid of because he had a dream on New Year's night from 1830 to 1831 that seemed to point to his imminent death.

The creation of the last writings and the growing Rubm

[ 23 ] With the exception of the period from July 1832 to June 1833, when Schopenhauer sought recovery from an illness in Mannheim, he spent the rest of his life in Frankfurt in complete solitude, filled with deep resentment at his age, which showed so little understanding for his creations. He lived only for his thoughts and his work, aware that he was not working for his contemporaries, but for a future generation. In 1333 he wrote in his manuscript book: "My contemporaries must not believe that I am now working for them: we have nothing to do with each other; we do not know each other; we pass each other by as strangers. - I write for the individuals who are like me, who live and think here and there in the course of time, communicate with each other only through the works they have left behind and are thus each the consolation of the other."

[ 24 ] The publication of "The World as Will and Representation" marked the end of Schopenhauer's production of ideas. What he published later does not contain any new basic ideas, but only expansions of what is already contained in the main work, as well as arguments about his position towards other philosophers and views on particular questions of science and life, from the standpoint of his world view.

[ 25 ] Schopenhauer believed he recognized an ally in the battle for his ideas in the natural sciences. At the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, in addition to his philosophical education, he acquired a thorough education in the natural sciences and later informed himself in detail about all advances in the knowledge of nature. On the basis of these studies, he formed the opinion that natural science was moving in such a direction that it must one day arrive at the results that he himself had found through philosophical thinking. He attempted to provide proof of this in his work "The Will in Nature", published in 1836. All research into nature consists of two parts, the description of the forces of nature and the explanation of the laws of nature. The laws of nature, however, are nothing other than the rules that the imagination gives to phenomena. These laws can be explained because they are nothing but the forms of space, time and causality, which stem from the nature of the cognizing subject.The forces of nature cannot be explained, but only described as they present themselves to observation. If we follow the descriptions that natural scientists give of the forces of nature: gravity, magnetism, heat, electricity, etc., we see that these forces are nothing more than the forms of action of the will at various levels.

[ 26 ] In the same sense as Schopenhauer gave a more detailed exposition of the doctrine of the will in "Will in Nature", so in "The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics" he expanded the views contained in the main work on the freedom of the will and the basis of morality. The book is composed of two prize papers: one on the "Freedom of the Will", which was crowned by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 1839, and the other on the "Foundation of Morals", which was carried out at the instigation of the Danish Academy, but was not crowned by it.

[ 27 ] What Schopenhauer still had to say to the world is contained in his last book, "Parerga und Paralipomena", which appeared in 1851. It contained a series of treatises on philosophy, psychology, anthropology, religion and wisdom in a presentation that captivates the reader, because he does not merely read assertions and abstract proofs, but sees through to a personality whose thoughts arise not only from the head, but from the whole person, and who seeks to prove his views not only through logic, but also through feeling and passion. This character of Schopenhauer's last work and the work of some of his followers, whom the philosopher had already won in the forties, made it possible for him to say of himself in the evening of his life: My time has come. Unnoticed for decades, he became a widely read writer in the second half of the century. As early as 1843, F. Dorguth published a pamphlet entitled "The False Root of Ideal Realism", in which he called Schopenhauer "the first real systematic thinker in the entire history of literature". This was followed in 1845 by another by the same author: "Schopenhauer in his truth". Frauenstädt also worked as a writer to spread Schopenhauer's teachings. He had "Letters on Schopenhauer's Philosophy" published in 1854. However, an article by John Oxenford in the "Westminster Review" from April 1853, which Otto Lindner had translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung under the title "Deutsche Philosophie im Auslande", made a particular impression. In it, Schopenhauer is described as a philosophical genius of the first rank; his depth and wealth of ideas are sought to be proven by reprinting individual passages from his works. Lindner himself became an enthusiastic apostle of Schopenhauer's teachings through the "Parerga und Paralipomena", to which he was able to render great service through his position as editor of the Vossische Zeitung. David Asher in particular promoted the understanding of Schopenhauer's ideas on music through essays in German and English journals. And it was these ideas about music that made one of Schopenhauer's most ardent admirers, Richard Wagner, the man who showed the art of music new paths. For him, these ideas were like a new gospel. He saw them as the most profound philosophy of music. The artist, who wanted to express the deepest secrets of existence in musical language, felt a spiritual affinity with the philosopher who declared music to be the image of the will of the world. In December 1854, the sound poet sent the thinker in Frankfurt the text of his "Ring der Nibelungen" with the handwritten dedication: "Out of admiration and gratitude", shortly after Schopenhauer had refused to visit Wagner in Zurich.

[ 28 ] Schopenhauer was able to watch his fame grow for about a decade. On September 21, 1860, he died suddenly as a result of a lung attack.

Bibliography and text treatment

[ 29 ] The last editions of his works published during Schopenhauer's lifetime are: Die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 2nd edition 1847; Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3rd edition 1859; Der Wille in der Natur, 2nd edition 1854; Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, 2nd edition 1860; Parerga und Paralipomena, i. edition 1851; Das Sehn und die Farben, 2nd edition 1854. Schopenhauer produced a Latin translation of the latter work in 1829 for the "Scriptores ophthalmologici minores", which was published in the third volume of this journal in 1830 under the title "'Theoria colorum physiologica". After Schopenhauer's death, Julius Frauenstädt, in accordance with the philosopher's last will and testament, produced new editions of the works, for which he used the manuscript bequest. This consists of manuscript books and hand-copies of the works. The manuscript books are Reisebuch (begun September 1818), Foliant (begun January 1821), Brieftasche (begun May 1822), Quartant (begun November 1824), Adversaria (begun March 1828), Cholerabuch (written while fleeing from cholera, begun September 1831), Cogitata (begun February 1830), Pandektä (begun September 1832), Spicilegia (begun April 1837), Senilia (begun April 1852) and the lectures Schopenhauer gave in Berlin. In these manuscript books, as well as on the pages pasted through the manuscript copies, are Schopenhauer's additions which he intended to include in later editions of his works, as well as remarks on philosophical works, aphorisms, etc.. Frauenstädt published what could not be used for the new editions of the works in 1864 under the title: "Aus Arthur Schopenhauers handschriftlichem Nachlaß. Treatises, Notes, Aphorisms and Fragments". After Frauenstadt's death in 1879, the manuscript books passed into the possession of the Royal Library in Berlin, while the hand-copied copies were passed into private hands. For any complete edition of Schopenhauer's works, Frauenstadt's principle must generally be followed: "I have ... I have proceeded in such a way that I have only included the additions in the text, whether they were written down or quoted from the manuscript books, when, after careful consideration, I found a place for them where they fit in without constraint, not only in terms of content but also in terms of form, i.e. diction; in all other cases, however, where either the strict sequence of thought or the pleasing sentence structure of the text did not permit their inclusion in the same, I have placed them in the most appropriate place either as notes below or as appendices after the text. " However, Frauenstädt sometimes did not apply this principle strictly enough. Therefore, in the present complete edition, all those additions that Frauenstädt included in the text have been removed from the text and relegated to the notes, of which it can be assumed that Schopenhauer, in accordance with the strict demands he placed on style, would never have added them to his works in the first version, but only after a complete reworking. As far as the arrangement of the writings in a complete edition is concerned, several statements by Schopenhauer should be taken into consideration: A letter to Brockhaus dated August 8, 1858, in which, should a complete edition become necessary, he speaks of the following order: i. World as will and imagination. 2. parerga. 3. fourfold root; will in nature; basic problems of ethics; sight and colors. On September 22 of the same year, he was already of a different opinion. He wanted to place the Parerga at the end and let the writings listed earlier under 3. precede it. As you can see, Schopenhauer was vacillating with regard to the order. The present Complete Edition therefore follows the statement he made in the draft of a preface to the Complete Edition about the order in which his works should be read. The following arrangement corresponds to this statement: i. Fourfold root of the proposition of the sufficient ground. 2 World as will and imagination. 3. will in nature. 4. basic problems of ethics. 5. parerga and paralipomena. These writings are followed by the work on "Sight and Colors", which Schopenhauer says in the same passage "goes for itself". Next is the aforementioned Latin translation of this work, followed by what has been published from his estate. The four short descriptions of his life written by Schopenhauer himself form the end of the edition: i. The one attached to his application for the doctorate. 2. the Curriculum vitae, which he sent to Berlin for the purpose of his habilitation. 3. the biography he sent to Eduard Erdmann in April 1851 for use in his History of Philosophy, 4. the one he provided for the Meyersche Konversationslexikon in May of the same year.

[ 30 ] A biography of the philosopher was provided by Gwinner in 1862: "Arthur Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgange", which was published in 1878 under the title "Schopenhauers Leben" in a second, revised and much enlarged edition. This biography is an invaluable monument to Schopenhauer's personality due to the wealth of material it contains and its vivid portrayal of Schopenhauer's personality, despite the obvious differences in Gwinner's and Schopenhauer's views. In 1893, Kuno Fischer published an account of Schopenhauer's life, character and teachings as the eighth volume of his "History of Modern Philosophy".

• 1. I have provided a critique of this view in my book "Die Philosophie der Freiheit. Outlines of a modern world view". 1894.

[ 1 ] Present day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy faith in Kant. This essay is intended to be a contribution toward overcoming this. It would be wrong to belittle this man's lasting contributions toward the development of German philosophy and science. But the time has come to recognize that the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life can be laid only by adopting a position which contrasts strongly with Kant's. What did he achieve? He showed that the foundation of things lying beyond the world of our senses and our reason, and which his predecessors sought to find by means of stereotyped concepts, is inaccessible to our faculty of knowledge. From this he concluded that our scientific efforts must be limited to what is within reach of experience, and that we cannot attain knowledge of the supersensible foundation, of the “thing-in-itself.” But suppose the “thing-in-itself” and a transcendental ultimate foundation of things are nothing but illusions! It is easy to see that this is the case. It is an instinctive urge, inseparable from human nature, to search for the fundamental nature of things and their ultimate principles. This is the basis of all scientific activity.

[ 2 ] There is, however, not the slightest reason for seeking the foundation of things outside the given physical and spiritual world, as long as a comprehensive investigation of this world does not lead to the discovery of elements within it that clearly point to an influence coming from beyond it.

[ 3 ] The aim of this essay is to show that everything necessary to explain and account for the world is within the reach of our thinking. The assumption that there are principles which belong to our world, but lying outside it, is revealed as the prejudice of an out-dated philosophy living in vain and illusory dogmas. Kant himself would have come to this conclusion had he really investigated the powers inherent in our thinking. Instead of this, he shows in the most complicated way that we cannot reach the ultimate principles existing beyond our direct experience, because of the way our faculty of knowledge functions. There is, however, no reason for transferring these principles into another world. Kant did indeed refute “dogmatic” philosophy, but he put nothing in its place. This is why Kant was opposed by the German philosophy which followed. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did not worry in the least about the limits to cognition erected by Kant, but sought the ultimate principles within the world accessible to human reason. Even Schopenhauer, though he maintained that the conclusions of Kant's criticism of reason were eternal and irrefutable truths, found himself compelled to search for the ultimate cause along paths very different from those of Kant. The mistake of these thinkers was that they sought knowledge of the highest truths without having first laid a foundation by investigating the nature of knowledge itself. This is why the imposing edifice of thought erected by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel stands there, so to speak, without foundations. This had a bad effect on the direction taken by the thought of these philosophers. Because they did not understand the significance of the sphere of pure ideas and its relationship to the realm of sense-perceptions, they added mistake to mistake, one-sidedness to one-sidedness. It is no wonder that their all too daring systems could not withstand the fierce opposition of an epoch so ill-disposed toward philosophy; consequently, along with the errors much of real value in their thought was mercilessly swept away.

[ 4 ] The aim of the following inquiry is to remedy the lack described above. Unlike Kant, the purpose here is not to show what our faculty of knowledge cannot do, but rather to show what it is really able to achieve.

[ 5 ] The outcome of what follows is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, an ideal reflection of something real, but is a product of the human spirit, created by an activity which is free; this product would exist nowhere if we did not create it ourselves. The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus man's highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] This insight has the most significant consequences for the laws that underlie our deeds, that is, our moral ideals; these, too, are to be considered not as copies of something existing outside us, but as being present solely within us. This also means rejecting the “categorical imperative,” an external power whose commandments we have to accept as moral laws, comparable to a voice from the Beyond that tells us what to do or leave undone. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We have to fulfill only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. Thus the insight that truth is the outcome of a free deed also establishes a philosophy of morality, the foundation of which is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] This, of course, is valid only when our power of thinking penetrates—with complete insight—into the motivating impulses of our deeds. As long as we are not clear about the reasons—either natural or conceptual—for our conduct, we shall experience our motives as something compelling us from outside, even though someone on a higher level of spiritual development could recognize the extent to which our motives originated within our own individuality. Every time we succeed in penetrating a motive with clear understanding, we win a victory in the realm of freedom.

[ 8 ] The reader will come to see how this view—especially in its epistemological aspects—is related to that of the most significant philosophical work of our time, the world-view of Eduard von Hartmann.

[ 9 ] This essay constitutes a prologue to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, a work which will appear shortly.

[ 10 ] Clearly, the ultimate goal of all knowledge is to enhance the value of human existence. He who does not consider this to be his ultimate goal, only works as he learned from those who taught him; he “investigates” because that happens to be what he has learned to do. He can never be called “an independent thinker.”

[ 11 ] The true value of learning lies in the philosophical demonstration of the significance of its results for humanity. It is my aim to contribute to this. But perhaps modern science does not ask for justification! If so, two things are certain. first, that I shall have written a superfluous work; second, that modern scholars are striving in vain, and do not know their own aims.

[ 12 ] In concluding this preface, I cannot omit a personal remark. Until now, I have always presented my philosophical views in connection with Goethe's world-view. I was first introduced to this by my revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer who, in my view, reached such heights as a scholar of Goethe's work because he always looked beyond the particular to the Idea.

[ 13 ] In this work, however, I hope to have shown that the edifice of my thought is a whole that rests upon its own foundation, and need not be derived from Goethe's world-view. My thoughts, as here set forth, and as they will be further amplified in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, have been developed over many years. And it is with a feeling of deep gratitude that I here acknowledge how the friendliness of the Specht family in Vienna, while I was engaged in the education of their children, provided me with an ideal environment for developing these ideas; to this should be added that I owe the final shape of many thoughts now to be found in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” to the stimulating talks with my deeply appreciated friend, Rosa Mayreder in Vienna; her own literary works, which spring from a sensitive, noble, artistic nature, presumably will soon be published.

Written in Vienna in the beginning of December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

[ 1 ] Present⁵ day philosophy suffers from an unhealthy belief ⁶ in Kant. This work is intended to be a contribution toward overcoming this. It would be wrong to belittle this man's lasting contributions to the development of German scholarship. But the time has come to recognize that the foundation for a truly satisfying view of the world and of life can be laid only by adopting a position which contrasts strongly with Kant's. What did he achieve? He showed that the foundation of things lying beyond the world of our senses and our reason, and which his predecessors sought to find by means of stereotyped concepts, cannot be known, is inaccessible. From this he concluded that our scientific efforts must be limited to what is within reach of experience, and that we cannot attain knowledge of any supersensible primal grounds, of the “thing-in-itself”. But suppose the “thing-in-itself” and something’s transcendental primeval grounds are nothing but illusions! It is easy to see that this is the case. It is an instinctive urge, inseparable from human nature, to search for the deep nature of things and their primal principles. This is the basis of all scientific activity. [ 2 ] There is, however, not the slightest reason for seeking these primal grounds outside the given physical and spiritual world, so long as a comprehensive investigation of this world does not lead to the discovery of elements within it that clearly point to an influence coming from beyond it.

[ 3 ] Our discussion therefore seeks to show that everything necessary to explain and account for the world is within the reach of our thinking. The adoption of principles lying outside of our world shows merely the prejudiced preconception of a dead philosophy living in ingeniously contrived dogmatic illusions. Kant himself would have come to this conclusion had he really investigated the powers inherent in our thinking. Instead of this, he shows in the most complicated way that we cannot reach the ultimate principles existing beyond our direct experience, because of the way our knowing faculties are set up. There is, however, no reason for transferring these principles into another world. Kant did indeed refute “dogmatic” philosophy, but he put nothing in its place. This is why Kant was opposed by the German philosophers who followed. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel did not worry in the least about the limits to knowing erected by Kant, but sought the ultimate principles within the world accessible to human common sense and reason (Vernunft). Though he maintained as eternal and irrefutable the truths Kant concluded in his critique of sense and reason, even Schopenhauer found himself compelled to search for primal world causes along paths very different from those of his master. The mistake of these thinkers was in seeking an inner familiarity with the highest truths without having first laid a groundwork by investigating the nature of knowing itself. Therefore, the proud thought-structures of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand without a foundation, the lack of which had a damaging effect on their thought-process. Without familiarity with how the pure world of ideas is connected to the realm of sensory perception, they built error on error, bias upon bias. It is no wonder that their all too daring systems could not withstand the fierce opposition of an epoch so ill-disposed toward philosophy, so that much of good quality was swept away with the pitiful bad.

[ 4 ] The aim of the following inquiry is to remedy the lack described above. Unlike Kant, the purpose here is not to show what our faculty of knowing cannot do, but rather to show what it can do.

[ 5 ] The outcome of this investigation into what is generally taken as truth is not merely an ideal reflection of something real, but rather is a free production of the human spirit, in that nothing at all can exist unless brought forth by ourselves. The object of knowing is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new arena, which when combined with the world given by our senses constitutes complete reality. Engaging in this spiritual creativity is a person’s most noble activity, and is organically connected to general world happenings. Without this activity, world events could not be thought of as a self-contained whole. Concerning the course of world events, a person is not a passive onlooker, merely replicating pictures within his spirit of what takes place in the cosmos without his own activity, but rather is the active co-producer of world processes, and inner knowing is the consummate arm within the organism of the universe.

[ 6 ] For the laws of our actions, for our moral ideals, this viewpoint has the important consequence that these also cannot be viewed as the image of something external to us, but rather as something that only exists within us. A powerful entity, whose commandments we must regard as our moral laws, is in this way also rejected. We do not know any “categorical imperative”,⁷ which similarly is a voice external to us, that stipulates what we are to do, or what we are to allow to happen. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We must carry out only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. The viewpoint of truth grounded on free activity is therefore also a moral teaching, whose foundation is the completely free personality.

[ 7 ] Of course, these sentences only apply to that part of our actions whose laws we infuse with idealism in complete consciousness. So long as motives are still innate, conceptually unclear, or unconscious, someone of a higher spiritual level can probably recognize to what extent these laws of our actions are founded merely on individuality and circumstance, even though we ourselves perceive them to be affecting us from outside, compelling us. Every time we succeed in infusing our motives with clarity, with conscious awareness, we make a conquest in the field of freedom.

[ 8 ] How our outlook is related to the most significant philosophical work of the present, for instance the world-view of Eduard von Hartmann, the reader will learn in detail in our discussion, insofar as the problem of knowing ⁸ comes into consideration. [ 9 ] It is a philosophy of freedom, made as a prologue to a more detailed work soon to follow.⁹

[ 10 ] Increasing the fullness of existence-awareness of human beings is clearly the real goal of science (Wissenschaft). Anyone who does not pursue this intentionally is only following the work of whomever his master is; he is “researching” just by chance. He can never be called “an independent thinker”.

[ 11 ] What gives the development of science its true value is the philosophical presentation of the meaning and value of its results for humankind. It is my aim to contribute to this. But perhaps modern science does not ask for justification! If so, two things are certain. First, that I shall have written a superfluous work, and second, that modern scholars are striving in vain, and do not know their own aims.

[ 12 ] In concluding this preface, I cannot omit a personal remark. Until now, I have always presented my philosophical views in connection with Goethe's world-view. I was first introduced to this by my honored teacher Karl Julius Schröer,¹⁰ who in my view reached the heights as a Goethe-scholar because he always looked beyond the particular to the idea.

[ 13 ] In this work, however, I hope to have shown that the whole structure of my thought rests on its own foundation, and need not be derived from Goethe's world-view. My thoughts set forth here, and further amplified in my forthcoming book Philosophy of Freedom, have been developed over many years. And it is with a feeling of deep gratitude that I here acknowledge how the friendliness of the Specht family in Vienna, while I was engaged in the education of their children,¹¹ provided me with an ideal environment for developing these ideas. To this should be added that I owe the final shape of many thoughts now found in my Philosophy of Freedom to some stimulating talks with my deeply appreciated friend, Rosa Mayreder ¹² in Vienna. Her own literary works, which spring from a sensitive noble artistic nature, presumably will soon be published.

Written in Vienna in the beginning of December 1891.
Dr. Rudolf Steiner

• 5. t/n Known also as Truth and Knowledge
• 6. t/n Glauben. Belief, of Anglo-Saxon derivation, suggests intellectual assent, whereas faith, of PIE derivation, (Vertrauen in German), involves trust in a direct perception of truth, and is not used here. .
• 7. t/n Categorical imperatives for Kant are actions that are imperative due to their belonging to a category of actions that we ought to hold as universal law due to their nature.
• 8. t/n Erkenntnisproblem, AKA epistomology
• 9. t/n The Philosophy of Freedom, originally known in English as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 10. t/n Schröer was Steiner’s professor at the Technical College of Vienna, a German language professor, who lectured on Goethe, Schiller, and Walther von der Vogelweide, and who recommended Steiner to be the editor of Goethe’s natural scientific writings.
• 11. t/n From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner tutored the 4 Specht sons. This was reviewed in Steiner’s autobiography.
• 12. t/n Rosa Mayreder 1858–1938, an author, painter, musician, and feminist, circled in a plethora of artists, writers, and philosophers, including Rudolf Steiner. Her husband became rector of the Technical University of Vienna where Steiner was a student.