| 255b. Anthroposophy and its Opponents: Religious Opponents III
05 Jun 1920, Dornach |
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| I opposed such a view because an ethics without a foundation seemed impossible to me. Today I can only report; the evidence will be found if one ever studies my writings historically in sequence. The essays to be mentioned today will soon be published in order, according to the year of publication, so that everyone can see how things are. |
| Well, my dear audience – yes, things are very strange – for example, a tidbit is served up, a few verses of mine that only have a meaning if you know them in their full context: It speaks to the universe, Forgetting itself And mindful of its origin... |
| 255b. Anthroposophy and its Opponents: Religious Opponents III
05 Jun 1920, Dornach |
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The Truth About Anthroposophy and How to Defend It Against Untruth Dear attendees, I would like to say at the outset that this lecture truly gives me no satisfaction. It is perhaps one of those that are least likely to give me satisfaction – none of those that I desire to hold – but it has been provoked in a certain way by events that have been taking place for quite some time here in the immediate vicinity. And I may also say that it has increasingly become the case in the movement in which I stand that I have been given the task of developing the spiritual current in question, and that I am fully occupied with this development in the most diverse directions. Therefore, I truly have neither the time nor the inclination to undertake these or those attacks against the outside world. On the other hand, the attacks that others are making on this movement have recently increased in a quite monstrous way, not only in number, but above all in content. I will endeavor to keep today's lecture as objective as possible. Unfortunately, the abundance of material will force me to proceed more or less aphoristically. But I would like to divide my remarks into two parts. In the first part, I would like to present, so to speak, the historical development of the spiritual movement that I call anthroposophical, and in doing so, I will only cast a few highlights on what has aggressively asserted itself against this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from here or there. In the second part of the lecture, I will then go into more detail, summarized more or less into types, and mention only very individual cases where it is absolutely necessary. First of all, I would like to note that there is truly the most perfect right to call the spiritual movement in question, of which this structure is supposed to be a representative, the “anthroposophically oriented” one. And not only is there every right to do so, but also to describe this spiritual movement as a completely independent one in relation to all other spiritual movements of the present day. Both, ladies and gentlemen, are being disputed. The justification of the term “Anthroposophy” is disputed in a way that is truly recognized immediately as impossible if one makes even the slightest effort to look at the whole matter historically. You must forgive me if today I have to pepper what is objective with all manner of seemingly personal observations. But in this case these seemingly personal observations are also objective and belong to the matter at hand. Anyone who wants to see the truth and follows my writings, who follows what I have written since the beginning of the 1880s in connection with Goethe's scientific writings, will find that the spiritual path is already hinted at everywhere in terms of its method, which then, as is natural, has been further developed over time (it has now been four decades since then). What from here on out will be called Anthroposophy can be distinguished in two directions. One is the way of presenting, the way of seeking, of researching; the other is the content, the results of this research, insofar as they have been able to be developed to date. It would, of course, be a poor testimony to the anthroposophical school of thought if, after four decades, we had to say that nothing had been achieved over this long period of time, but that we were merely repeating the same things that had been discussed in the publications of the 1980s. But, ladies and gentlemen, anyone who considers the direction of thought, the direction of research, or, if I want to express myself more eruditely, the method that is considered here, will find that everything that comes into consideration was already expressed as a preliminary stage in the 1880s; I would even go so far as to say that the basic nerve of what is called spiritual science here was already hinted at then. It was natural that this spiritual research, which I mentioned in the 1880s, should first deal with that which set the particular tone for the heights of modern spiritual development. And that was the scientific world view. I had nothing but a dispute with the scientific world view in mind, which of course also made a dispute with contemporary philosophy of the time necessary. Anyone who believes otherwise misunderstands the content of what I wrote until the 1890s. There they will find little consideration of any religious beliefs or the like; but they will find repeated efforts to spiritualize the prevailing scientific direction. Now it was self-evident that a critical examination of certain dominant factors of scientific thought at that time was necessary. But how was this examination carried out? I would like to present only the facts that, in my opinion, come into consideration. First of all, it was the case that, especially at the beginning of the 1880s, what could be called Darwinism, Haeckelism, or Darwinist Haeckelism, was, so to speak, the prevailing trend in certain scientifically minded circles. At that time, Haeckel was a factor that had to be reckoned with. Not long ago – I am now talking about the beginning of the 1890s – he had given a lecture that caused a sensation in educational circles at the time and had it published: “Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science”. Dear attendees, the following may serve to illustrate how I have engaged with such movements. I gave a speech in Vienna – which was the nearest platform to which I had access before I went to Weimar – which is, in the most eminent sense, the rectification I undertook of what at the time could be called Haeckelism. I opposed materialistic monism with spiritual monism. A few weeks before I delivered this speech, a movement was spreading across wide areas of the educated world that was then called the “Movement for Ethical Culture”. This movement aimed essentially to treat ethics separately from world-view, to spread moral views among people as something that should exist without religious or other world-views. I opposed such a view because an ethics without a foundation seemed impossible to me. Today I can only report; the evidence will be found if one ever studies my writings historically in sequence. The essays to be mentioned today will soon be published in order, according to the year of publication, so that everyone can see how things are. I objected because, according to my insights, I could not assume that ethics, the doctrine of morals, could be anything other than that which is based on a worldview. I discussed the subject in question at the time in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”, which was just being launched. It was then that Haeckel - I had been in Weimar for quite some time when I wrote this essay and had passed Haeckel by, had not concerned myself with Haeckel, who was in Jena in the immediate vicinity - turned to me after this essay on ethical culture. I answered him at the time and later sent him a copy of my lecture in Vienna, which essentially consisted of opposing spiritual monism to materialistic monism. I never made any attempt to offer myself to any contemporary direction in any way. And if there was any kind of rapprochement with Haeckelism, it was because Haeckel approached me first; and it was also natural that a discussion with natural science took place. Dear attendees, anyone who can read will see from all that is written in my “World and Life Views in the 19th Century”, which is dedicated to Ernst Haeckel, and from a certain reverent feelings for this courageous personality, who, despite all his downsides, was a man of great vision. It will be seen that I agreed to nothing more than could be agreed to on account of the scientific significance of Haeckel's findings. It can never be inferred from that book that I agreed with Haeckel philosophically or in terms of the highest worldview issues. On the contrary, I may relate a personal experience here. I was once in Leipzig with Haeckel and told him that it was actually a shame that he evoked in so many people the very thing he did not actually want, namely the opinion that he completely denied the spirit. He said: Do I do that? I just want to lead people to a retort and show them what happens in the retort when this and that occurs, how everything starts moving. One could see that Haeckel imagined nothing of the workings of the spirit other than the workings of movement; but in his naivety, he could not help it. He saw matter coming to life and called that “spiritual” manifestation. He was basically naive about everything that is called spirit and the like. This gives a judgment of what I wrote in the nineties up to the small writing “Haeckel and his opponents”. Anyone who can really read will have to find, in the face of this writing, how I insert at a crucial point what a scientific foundation can never offer. Everyone will see that at that time in the 1890s I was seeking nothing more than a discussion between what I had indicated in the general direction in my Goethe writings in the 1880s, which I then further expanded in the 1897 publication “Goethe's World View,” and the scientific direction of the time. Now, my dear audience, nothing less than a straightforward continuation of all that was at stake at the time is then given in the writing “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to Modern Worldviews”, which was written almost simultaneously with “World and Life Views”. It was simply a matter of the straightforward progress of serious research that the path had to lead from the natural scientific presuppositions to what was tackled in this writing. I believe that one cannot emphasize this orientation more strongly and clearly than it was done in the preface to this writing 'Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life'. One consequence of this writing was that it was translated into English in a short time. It appeared in an English journal. I had first presented the content of this writing in the form of lectures in Berlin, at the invitation of a group of Berlin Theosophists. That was in the winter of 1900 to 1901. Dear ladies and gentlemen, consider what it means when you now put two facts together: two facts that are, of course, put together quite differently today. I was invited in the winter of 1900 by a group of Theosophists to give them these lectures, which are now available in print. These lectures are delivered solely from the intentions that were mine, before a group of Theosophists, at whose invitation, after I had written three years earlier:
Now, my dear audience, it cannot be said that I predicted flattery to those who then invited me to speak before them. I once hinted at the fact at issue here in a lecture given here in the vicinity. I said at the time: When I gave my lectures in Berlin during the first years, and also in other places, I had not read any of Blavatsky and Besant's writings. I had not read them either. And above all, the lectures on “Mysticism in the East” were spoken and written before I had even decided to read anything by Blavatsky and Besant. And today, for example, it is said that I claimed not to have even known the names of Blavatsky and Besant fifteen years before the Liestal lecture. I had not read anything by them. It is a peculiar way in which polemics are conducted from some quarters. While I said – and it is important to draw attention to such things from time to time, because such things are used to throw dust in people's eyes – while I said that I had not read the writings of Besant and Blavatsky, and what is quoted is what I said, a few lines later it is said that I claimed that fifteen years ago I did not even know the name Blavatsky and Besant. — So my attackers are in stark contradiction to the facts, to their own statements made a few lines earlier. Indeed, I wonder how many readers of the attacks that appear here, for example, will not even notice that they are being fobbed off in this way. Of course I am familiar with Blavatsky and Besant by name and I have known enough of their followers personally. But, ladies and gentlemen, it is said with a certain leathern irony that I said on the one hand that I did not know Blavatsky and Besant by name, but would have nevertheless passed this damning judgment on the Theosophists; that would be a contradiction. — Well, my esteemed audience, I never passed judgment on Blavatsky and Besant, I passed judgment on Theosophists who were their followers and whom I knew all too well. You will admit that it was nothing more than that those people, whom I had addressed in such an unflattering way, invited me to lecture to them. The lectures were so successful that, as I said, they were translated into English and I was invited by the same group, which had now grown in number, to give them another series of lectures the following winter. I have to insert something here. In the meantime, I had also given another series of lectures to a different group, one that I had belonged to for a long time and that had been founded by my friend Ludwig Jacobowski. I had given a whole series of lectures to this circle, which called itself the “Kommende” (Upcoming), under the title “From Buddha to Christ”, in which I had already presented essentially the same main content as in my present talks: the tremendous upsurge that has taken place in the development of the earth from Buddha to Christ, and how Christ Jesus cannot be compared with anyone else who has appeared in the field of earth development. It was essentially an apology for Jesus Christ, in which sounded that which I then held before a society of worldlings, of worldlings who were more inclined to make fun of such a subject than to accept it with faith. For me, it was not a matter of whether people made fun of it or not, but rather a matter of saying what seemed true to me about something that I felt needed to be said. As I said, I was asked to give a second cycle before the circle of Theosophists, which in the meantime had grown to include all sorts of other people, and this second cycle was essentially the content that is now in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. It so happened that the first lectures I gave along the lines one might call theosophical or anthroposophical contain a vindication of Christianity. In my series of anthroposophical lectures, I started from a vindication of Christianity. From the very beginning, in answer to the accusation of oriental hypocrisy (for that is what it was), everything I have said and written on this theme has been that the whole ancient mystery religion was a preparation for the Christ event. I did not call my book “The Mysticism of Christianity”; I consciously called my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact” to suggest that no one can understand the fact of the event of Golgotha who does not - for my part call it mystical or call it spiritual or anthroposophical, it does not matter - who does not, in a spiritual way, in a kind of meta-history, meta-history, grasp the course of world history. And what has been emphasized as something radically different from the old mysteries is what I called the Mystery of Golgotha. And if it is said today that I have ever presented the matter as if the Mystery of Golgotha were a transformation of the old mysteries, then this is an objective untruth, a hair-raising objective untruth. The two lecture series led to me being asked by the Theosophical Society to represent within its ranks what I had to represent. No one there was left in any doubt that I would never say a word that had not arisen from my own research. I did not concern myself with any of the Theosophical Society's regulations, because I did not approach the Theosophical Society – it approached me. This must also be said, not out of immodesty, but because of today's untrue attacks. And I was faced with the fact that I had to present what I personally had to say to people who wanted to hear it, regardless of whether they were Theosophists or not. And when in Berlin the people who had, as it were, provided me with an audience from their ranks, founded the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I gave a lecture from my then cycle on 'Anthroposophy' on the same day that this German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded. That is to say, I spoke about anthroposophy on the day the German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded. And I gave a lecture at the Berlin Giordano Bruno Bund before the founding of this German Section, in which I said: there is no connection to all the stuff that existed in the Theosophical movement. But I said, one should read Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the definition of 'theosophy', which will give my efforts direction.1 So I have left no one in any doubt about the exact definition and exact objective involved, neither in relation to the examination of Christianity nor in relation to what else I want to present. And to anyone who claims that I have presented anything that is not based on my own research, I can say without hesitation: they are telling an objective untruth, a hair-raising objective untruth. This untruth is all the more hair-raising, dear attendees, since I may be the one who has truly told the Theosophical Society the densest truths, that is, who has given it the densest denials, even during the time when I was, so to speak, lecturing to it. Perhaps no one has had to take as much abuse as I have from the Theosophical movement that calls itself that. And not just before I became General Secretary, but also while I held the position. My dear attendees, is it then a possible approach to put together a selection of the most stupid things that can be found not in my writings but in the writings of theosophists, and to put that on my account today? Is that a fair and honest approach? Everyone should ask themselves that. And I ask that of every person who has a sense of truth. Dear attendees, I then wrote my “Theosophy”. I ask whether anyone who writes a book under any title and defines the title exactly, whether he can be named after a single title of a book. If someone writes a theory of cockchafers, for example, can he then only be called a cockchafer man for the rest of his life? I wrote a book about Theosophy because the content of this book corresponds to the title “Theosophy”. Just as one gives a book on chemistry a certain title and a book on physics another, so I gave the title 'Theosophy' to a book that was devoted to this particular part of general spiritual science. And anyone who says that there has been any change of flag is lying. So that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I have to say about assertions such as those recently made by the Protestant pastor and theologian Traub: that in 1897 I wrote against the Theosophists, and that in 1902 I myself was one of their number. No, ladies and gentlemen, the fact is this: in 1897 I wrote what I thought was right, and in 1902 I said exactly the same thing to those who wanted to hear it. I always said the same thing. And in 1902 I was not in the ranks of the Theosophists, but in 1902 the Theosophists were standing before me and wanted to hear what I had to say to them. On the other hand, I never reflected on anything the Theosophists had to say, which those who had joined the Theosophical movement glued together. Now, with the book “Theosophy”, I began to present the content of what I had to say in a spiritual scientific direction in a literary way. In this book, 'Theosophy', which was first published in 1904, I stated exactly why I called the book 'Theosophy', and no one is entitled to use the word 'Theosophy' in relation to me in any other sense than the one I defined at the time. For in this book from 1904 there is nothing about my wanting to use the word “theosophy” in the sense of the nonsensical theosophical movement, but it says: “The highest that man is able to look up to, he designates as the ‘divine’. And he must connect his highest destiny in some way with this divine. Therefore, the higher wisdom that reveals to him his nature and thus his destiny may well be called “divine wisdom or theosophy.” I would like to ask those who harp on about the word theosophy whether they do not know, for example, that Dante called his poem the “Commedia” and that “Divina” is an epithet. The “Divine Comedy” is merely intended to express how this poem is appreciated. From the definition I gave at the time, everyone can see how I took the word from the literary usage of the world. But I did not take it according to any complicated ideas that people here or there might have about it. But such complicated ideas arise everywhere. They arise here in a way that we will discuss in a moment, at least in a few examples. They do appear in a peculiar formulation. Regarding this formulation, ladies and gentlemen, I would just like to say the following right here. This formulation is such that I cannot decide for the time being to believe the rumor that is circulating here, that the man who is named is really the author of the Spectator articles. Until this rumor is proven to me, I do not want to believe it, because to me these articles appear to be devoid of any education, devoid of any moral conscience. And so I cannot assume anything other than that the “Katholisches Sonntagsblatt” had these articles written by a completely uneducated person who had never been touched by academia. As I said, I could never bring myself to believe that the man who would have to be academically educated to write these articles, which many people attribute to him, could have written them, because they make the most uneducated impression on me, I can actually only imagine.2 In my “Theosophy” of 1904, however, I also said:
I wanted to suggest at the time that I set myself the task – others may set themselves other tasks – that I set myself the task of saying nothing but what I myself could vouch for with my whole person as something I had investigated. When a mathematician presents a particular area of research, he occasionally has to repeat in his presentation what the ancient Euclid wrote, for example. Then those who are completely devoid of historical sense might come and say: he is not offering anything new, because he is just copying the ancient Euclid. It is quite natural that in the presentation one takes from history what has already been said; but nothing has been said by me that has not been carefully checked. Everything that I could not carefully check myself has been eliminated, so that all the talk of borrowing, whether it comes from Protestant or Catholic theologians, is nothing more than objective untruths. Not just errors, but objective untruths, ladies and gentlemen. For anyone can see that although a man like Leadbeater, who is often mentioned in theosophical circles, copied almost every line of his nonsensical book about Christianity from Iamblichus, no one who proceeds with real scientific conscientiousness can accuse my books of borrowing. Everything that refers to such is talk, albeit a talk that occurs in a strange way. It was mentioned, for example, among those things that were supposed to influence my anthroposophy: Buddhism, Nagazena, the Upanishads, the Egyptian Isis Mysteries, the Mysteries of Eleusis , Gnosticism, Manichaeism, “Apollinaris of Tyna” — literally —, Islam; and that from which I am said to have mainly copied is the Akasha Chronicle. Now, dear attendees, I do not know how the writer of the article found out that I had said before how strange it is to say that anthroposophy is copied from this Akashic Chronicle. This Akashic Chronicle does not exist as an external book. The Akasha Chronicle is something quite different from any external book. What is it? If we apply the methods, which I will say a few words about in a moment, but which I always discuss in all public lectures, we can acquire a kind of meta-historical picture of the processes not only of human development but also of the cosmos. One can spiritually survey in intuitions — in corresponding images, of course — what has happened and is happening on earth or in the cosmos. Today, of course, I cannot give you all the reasons for accepting such a view, because that would take hours, but these can be found in my books. I also mention them every time I talk about the principles of anthroposophy in public lectures. So this Akashic Chronicle is something that only exists in the spirit. This Akashic Chronicle does not exist as some old book that could be compared to the Upanishads or to the yoga philosophy literature of the Indians and so on. No, this Akasha Chronicle is something purely spiritual. The person who wrote these articles, which are distributed here in the area, has no idea that he is talking about something that only exists in the mind as if it were an actual book. Now the following has happened: I have not objected to this so far because I assumed that it was a printing error. The person in question, who is so well informed about the Akasha Chronicle, also writes or has printed or is printed instead of “Akasha” Chronicle “Akasha” Chronicle. That could be a printing error. But what happens? Isn't it true that the person who claims that anthroposophy copied from the Akasha Chronicle, since this Akasha Chronicle does not physically exist, has obviously lied, because he is leading people to believe that he has the Akasha Chronicle in his library or that other people have it in their library. Dr. Boos, in order to pick up the gauntlet, wrote: That is a deliberate untruth. — It is, of course, a deliberate untruth, because you have to know that you cannot find the Akasha Chronicle in any bookcase, because it cannot be had as a physical document. It does not exist as such. So if you claim that it is there like the Upanishads, you are telling a deliberate untruth. How is Dr. Boos now polemicized against? It is said: Dr. Boos has avoided the fact by harping on the misprint “Akasha” Chronicle. But the attacker does not indicate that Dr. Boos said that there was a deliberate untruth. And then the talk continues about the Akasha Chronicle as a real old writing that is said to have been found in a country called Atlantis. Strangely enough, according to the articles that are in circulation here, this country of Atlantis is said to have been situated between Australia and Asia and at the same time between Europe and America. Now, my dear audience, there are truly many reasons why the person who wrote these articles cannot really be considered an academically educated man; nor can he be considered a man who can think.3 The attacks that have come from a certain quarter in Munich, from a Jesuit priest born in Switzerland and living in Munich, are directed against the method, and I must, because I must speak about the whole character of the attacks, also go into these remarks about the method of spiritual research to some extent. I would just like to say this beforehand: the same man who undertook this attack on the method and later also on the content of anthroposophy claimed a few years ago that I was a runaway priest. Now this is, of course, an unscrupulous untruth, because I would never have been able to enter any monastery, which is clear from the fact that I never had a grammar school education, but only acquired the necessary grammar school education later, when I needed it. I attended a secondary modern school and did my studies at the Technical University in Vienna, so that my whole education naturally speaks against the fact that I could ever have been considered for a priestly career. So what is being said in this regard is also an unscrupulous untruth. What did the priest in question do when it was pointed out to him from some quarter – not from mine, because I cannot engage with someone who proceeds in such an unscrupulous manner unless it is necessary – what did the priest in question do when it was pointed out to him from some quarter that he had told an untruth? He could find no other way than to say in his newspaper: This is something that was claimed earlier, which can no longer be maintained today. Well, my dear audience, I was always somewhat impressed by what Deputy Walterskirchen threw in the face of an Austrian minister at a certain moment: Once a liar, never believed, even when telling the truth. One must understand what it means that there are people who spread such shameless untruths, built on nothing, plucked out of thin air, and then believe they are justified when they say: the matter can no longer be maintained. The same man – and I would not go into his arguments, for the reasons I have now sufficiently explained, but others take up things and spread them around, because today the public reads with a sleepy soul – he attacks the method and says that one must consider this method to be something that, from a Catholic point of view, must not be, and fights against the particular way in which I describe how, through a certain development of human thought, one comes to recognize a spiritual world alongside the physical-sensual one. Nor can I go into the special characteristics of this spiritual vision here. The necessary points have often been explained in my public lectures. I now have to deal only with the question: Does someone who takes the standpoint, and really takes it, of Catholic research methodology have the right to turn against this method of research in anthroposophy? Dear attendees, anyone who is familiar with Catholic philosophy knows that a distinction is made within it between two types of inner abilities. Every person can aspire to one type of inner ability if they organize their lives accordingly. Of course, in Catholic teaching, it is called a grace when the person in question rises to such a level. But what a person can rise to, to immerse themselves in a spiritual world, to the point of living with the deity – I am explicitly mentioning the latter – Catholic teaching calls this the “gratiae sanctificantes”. The Catholic Church carefully distinguishes these gratiae sanctificantes, as effects of grace within the soul of man, which can be granted to every man who rises to them through work, from the gratiae gratis datae. These are the effects of grace to which only individual people can rise through a special influence from the spiritual world. Such is the meaning of the matter in the writings of Catholic teachers of old. I remark this first, regardless of whether, because progress has taken place, things have to be described differently today. According to the writings of Catholic teachers such as John of the Cross or Thomas Aquinas, that is, according to the most orthodox Catholic theology, for the Catholic himself, if he does not contradict his Catholic teaching method, what is presented in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” should be presented as a special case of the ‘gratiae sanctificantes’, not of the ‘gratiae gratis datae’, so that from the Catholic point of view the matter is absolutely incontestable with regard to the method. You can read about it in John of the Cross and Thomas Aquinas, and you will find that they say that the one who wants to do spiritual research rises up into a spiritual world, so that he experiences something there that does not just arise from his inner being as a kind of haze, but that it is as objective an external reality in the world as the sensual world is in its own way. That is why Thomas Aquinas characterizes what is bestowed on man in this way with the words: “Inspiratio significat quandam motionem ab externo.” These inspirations do not come from within, but from without. There is no other fact here than that which has only been given in a correspondingly advanced form for the 20th century in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” What is the situation here? Simply this, my dear audience: that anyone who works towards what Thomas Aquinas defines as inspiratio is considered a heretic today. Read my Theosophy. You will find it written in such a way that no one who does not come into discord with his own Catholic method of teaching can dispute what is presented there as a method. What is presented there as a method in the sense of the present is what Catholic theologians have correspondingly recognized and called “contemplation” for earlier centuries. In this way one arrives at the results presented in this book “Theosophy”. And so exactly does this correspond to the correctly understood old description that in the whole book the Divine Being is not spoken of in such a way as to give a theory about the Divine. And now read the definitions that can be found in canonized Catholic theologians, and you will see: According to their view, one can come not only to a definition, but to a coexistence with the deity, if one really practices that which can be bestowed on every human being. That is, someone once dared to make real that which has been preached by the Catholic Church for so long until this Catholic Church has taken on a different character for the present time. Nothing else has happened. And anyone who today does not want to admit that through the special method of contemplation, man today comes to results that may be erroneous in the details, but which on the whole are correct, as I have presented them in my books, he must prohibit the method of Catholic contemplation; he must forbid his faithful by force of measures to do that which the fathers and theologians of earlier centuries have presented as something entirely in line with the Catholic Church. If I had ever needed to agree with anyone – which goes without saying, even today – I would be able to prove that, for example, what is referred to as the method of being oriented towards the present day does not contradict the teachings of Thomas Aquinas or John of the Cross in any way. It is not methods that the Catholic Church is entitled to dispute, for these methods are nothing other than a further development of something that the Catholic Church itself once held to be true. The fact that this method, when applied correctly, leads to different results from those of the scholastics today is what is causing offence. But then one should not claim to represent scholasticism, but to have left it within the church.4 Now, anyone who has the necessary seriousness and conscientiousness to deal with factual matters - but, ladies and gentlemen, in our time it is a strange thing about this objectivity and this conscientiousness - anyone who, for example, reads my little Truth and Science, written at the end of the 1980s and published at the beginning of the 1990s, anyone who reads it will see that it steers in an epistemological direction towards what later became anthroposophy. At the time, I had to do away with all the epistemological prejudices associated with Kantianism. And anyone who has followed my writing throughout the decades, insofar as it is philosophical, can see that the rejection of Kant's philosophy is an organic part of what I wanted. Everything I have to say is based on a rejection of Kant's philosophy. Such are the facts. Nevertheless, in our time it is possible that someone - because I, who have devoted my whole life, among other things, to refuting Kantian philosophy, had to discuss the contrast between Thomism and Kantianism in the Whitsun lectures on Thomas Aquinas that I gave here - that someone dares - I cannot use any other expression - to say that this was done for contrast. That characterizes the level of those bushes from which anthroposophy is viewed today. And how many people are inclined to examine things on the basis of the facts? How many people are inclined to look at how it was taken for granted that when absurdity triumphed within the Theosophical Society in 1912 and anthroposophy was declared a heresy – after all, things have been declared heresy before – that the long-prepared became a fait accompli, namely that all those who believed that I had something to say about these things turned their backs on the Theosophical Society. Nevertheless, it is possible that, for example, the following will be printed:
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what Annie Besant said during the war. What was said before: that anthroposophy was thrown out by the Theosophical Society, that was before these national events took place. Nevertheless, it continues here:
Dear attendees, the belief is created that the separation of the Anthroposophical and Theosophical Societies had something to do with these national sensitivities. So a smorgasbord of objective untruths is written up to refute Dr. Boos' claim that 23 lies have been spread; the lies are left behind, and the defense is conducted in such a way. 23 objective untruths about anthroposophy are stated. This fact is characterized by Dr. Boos in an appropriate way, although not very delicately – but it would truly have been a sin to be delicate in this case. Now, my dear audience, it has often been demanded by those who are attacked as anthroposophists that they should refute all the stuff that is hurled at them as untruths. I ask: Where in the world is there such a thing that it can be demanded that the one about whom untruths are asserted is obliged to provide the proof of truth? The attacker has to prove; otherwise one could throw anything at anyone and he would have to prove that the assertion was untrue. Those who have spread the 23 untruths have to prove them, not those to whom they have been thrown. What do these attackers do instead of proving? They write objective untruths again, and the 23 original untruths are not touched. That is the method of those who speak about anthroposophy here. Yes, as I said in the introduction, what I have to say today does not give me any satisfaction. I would much rather be working on the building than compiling these things, and basically I don't have time to follow all these absurdities and defamations. For, you see, my dear ladies and gentlemen, even when people of some intelligence come up with such things – and Professor Traub is certainly more intelligent than certain others – then one has to say: strange views indeed! This Professor Traub, who wrote the book 'Rudolf Steiner as Philosopher and Theosophist', who – I will not touch on the rest – finds it appropriate to say: Yes, Steiner claims things that cannot be verified. – But, ladies and gentlemen, Steiner does not claim any different things from those that can be verified by someone who uses the same methods as he does and who has publicly stated them. That is to say, anyone who procures the means to do so – although he must be diligent and have good will – can verify the matter. But what does Professor Traub say? He says:
He admits that if he doesn't understand a thing about chemistry, then of course he can't talk about chemistry, and if he doesn't understand a thing about history, then of course he can't talk about history. He admits all of this. But now, my dear audience, he continues:
But I cannot verify the chemical truths either if I am not a chemist. Yet Traub says:
— that is, he can only say that he does not know them —
It is interesting that anthroposophy is supposed to be different from physics, history and so on. For chemistry, Professor Traub claims that you have to be a chemist to test what it says; for history, he claims, you have to be a historian, and so on. For anthroposophy, he claims that he has to be able to test it, even though he has never bothered with its methods. He then says quite naively:
— he prints this in bold letters —
I believe that he cannot verify them! But it does not mean anything if some person who has never sniffed around a chemical laboratory and has not studied a chemical book cannot verify chemical truths. But you see what is being demanded and what people are saying about formal logic when they use such logic. Some time ago, there were attacks from the Protestant side, and as a result of these attacks, some Protestant pastors and theologians became aware of anthroposophy. Now, if I wanted to talk in detail about the matters at hand here, I would have to characterize the development of the entire Protestant theological movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. But it is well known that within Protestant theology, not only a strong skepticism but also a strong nihilism has taken hold. And one day things were so that a whole number of Protestant theologians said to themselves: From the side of anthroposophy, a fertilization can come for theology. Something could come that would lead people back to Jesus Christ in a way that theology can no longer do today. And so it came about that a number of followers emerged among Protestant theologians, which of course terribly annoyed the majority of Protestant theologians. Then, gradually, those who approach it from today's Catholic theological perspective came forward. This was despite the fact that for a long time, and out of a certain prejudiced notion, it has been said that anthroposophy is Catholic and that therefore those who think in an evangelical way cannot find any favor in it. I have already dealt with some of the ways in which people approach it. But first I would like to highlight two examples as really quite interesting details. Everything that I have presented since 1900, since my lectures 'From Buddha to Christ' to the 'Kommenden' in Berlin, was such that no one can say that there is no fundamental difference between what emerged as the culmination of earthly development in the Mystery of Golgotha and what is a teaching for many other people, Buddhism. At the time, I characterized the current from Buddha to Christ and pointed out that no one who stands on an anthroposophical point of view must confuse what appeared in Christ and what only allows for a single appearance in the world with what is seen as the ever-recurring Buddhas. I then repeatedly pointed this out in lectures given only to members. Nevertheless, the following is asserted today:
- I have never spoken of transmigration of souls, but always of repeated lives on earth.
Dear attendees, transmigration and repeated earthly lives, as I represent them, are as different as black and white. It is further said:
So please, now consider the logic that prevails here. First it is said that transmigration of souls and reincarnation, repeated lives on earth, are the same. Transmigration of souls is understood to mean that after death, human souls migrate into various animals. I have never even hinted at such nonsense in any way. The repeated lives on earth mean something quite different. They are what follows from spiritual-scientific foundations, just as the theory of evolution in the physical world follows from physical research foundations.
- it is said - ... Christ is nothing more than a reincarnated Buddha or a re-appeared Buddha. A blatant objective untruth of the boldest kind, because every time I have spoken about Christ and Buddha, I have said the opposite, and because anyone who wanted to listen must clearly have known that what I am being imputed here was rejected every time, firmly rejected.
Now I would like to know where the sophistry is. Admittedly, the sophistry that is revealed on that page is already one of the moral evils, not just one of the logical ones. Furthermore, in those lectures that were only given to members - for a very simple reason, which I will discuss in a moment - it is expressly emphasized from all the sources that are only accessible to me that a certain forerunner of Christ Jesus was Jeshu ben Pandira. It is pointed out there as clearly as possible that the physical earth personality, spirit and soul, is also something quite different with that Jeshu ben Pandira than with the Christ Jesus. Nevertheless, my dear attendees, we read in that attacker:
So the opposite of what I have said countless times is trumpeted out into the world as my opinion. My dear attendees, when teaching elementary school students, you call every child into the elementary school; when teaching at the gymnasium, those who are to come to the gymnasium must have attained a certain level of maturity. When people are accepted into the medical or philosophical faculties, they are required to pass the school-leaving examination. No other principle underlay the fact that certain lecture cycles were printed only for a narrower circle of people who were sufficiently prepared, just as those who listen to higher mathematics must be prepared by lower mathematics. Anyone who wanted to listen to a lecture on elliptic functions without knowing the lower mathematics would naturally understand nothing of it and would have to mistake the whole thing for cabbages if he wanted to judge it according to what he could think. Nothing else was the basis for this selection of the one for a limited circle, which presupposed the foregoing. All that was presupposed has been presented by me again and again in public lectures for decades, and has been presented almost every year since 1907 in Basel. I ask you: could anyone have expected that the Basel lectures, which have been held publicly in Basel for this same world view since 1907, would be discontinued after the construction in Dornach began, or that something other than anthroposophy would be done here in this building? What is it other than foolish talk when it is claimed that propaganda is now being done when it was said that no propaganda would be done? Nothing else is being done than what has been done in Basel since 1907, of course on a smaller scale. Nor has anyone been attacked in the way that I am now. Go through everything I have ever said or written – I was never the first to attack anyone in this way. Everything I have ever written against anyone was always provoked. Check the facts. And it must be said that the attack that is taking place here, for example, was provoked. For no one here has attacked these attackers. Nevertheless, one of the articles is emblazoned with the title: “Defense and reply to the omissions of the theosophist lawyer Dr. Boos,” in order to throw dust in people's eyes in bold letters, to awaken in them the belief that the other side is defending itself, while we are truly being showered with buckets of foul-smelling objective untruths here, to our great dissatisfaction. We are not to make a sound, while we know full well what these objective untruths are intended for. And, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that they do not just mean that they want to refute something with honest weapons – the last statement from the side of these attackers can prove that to you. From the statement that has just appeared, I would like to read you just a few sentences that begin:
Dear attendees, yesterday I read a new encyclical of the current Pope, where he calls for love and unity, where he says that the church strives to reconcile people and not to quarrel. Here we read:
But then it is said – so the Church is a militant Church:
— and so on and so on. And further it is said:
Yes, let yourself be instructed, my dear audience, as one does when disregarding any factual material. That one wants something completely different than merely fighting against insights or supposed insights for my sake, you can see from such an omission. Well, I have presented you with some examples of what the “spirit” of these attacks is: the polar opposite of what one can hear here at the Goetheanum at least once a week is claimed outside that it is being said here. That is the fact. The polar opposite of what is actually said here is presented to the people in the local area as the opinion held here, as an explanation of Theosophy or Anthroposophy – the name is not important. For example, they talk about an interpretation I have given of the Lord's Prayer. Well, my dear audience – yes, things are very strange – for example, a tidbit is served up, a few verses of mine that only have a meaning if you know them in their full context:
- but the article of attack says “his emergency”. My dear audience, this continues line by line in terms of truth and accuracy. What is said with regard to my interpretation of the Lord's Prayer goes beyond anything imaginable in this direction.
The person who wrote the following and the following, namely, counts on the fact that no one from his readership will pick up my little booklet about the Lord's Prayer, because everything he writes here is not in it, because I give the text that Catholics pray every day for themselves - I hope at least - at home and every Sunday in church. No other text is interpreted than this. They are counting on the fact that this little booklet will not be picked up, that this check will not even be carried out. The fact that they are not dealing with a highly educated person can be seen from another sentence. For example,
This “Hear!” is a phrase we read again and again in these articles. We know why. It is fair to say that even people who have read my booklet on the Lord's Prayer but have only superficially thought about it do not immediately realize how subtly the objective untruth is expressed here. For it is clever to say that I had claimed that the seven-part nature of man is expressed in the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer. That is simply not true. I stated something quite different. I tried to show that seven qualities of feeling arise in one who experiences the seven petitions one after the other, and that these point to seven nuances of feeling in the soul. And in these seven nuances of the soul there is a certain indication of the seven-part nature of man. So I did not say that the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer indicate the seven parts of man's nature, but that the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer represent seven nuances of feeling, and these seven nuances of feeling point to the seven-part nature of man. If the article of attack had been written by a Catholic theologian – and I can tell you, I know Catholic theology very well, and I appreciate the strict logic that it used to have and still retains to some extent – he would have had to notice what the insertion of a link in the conclusion means. I cannot believe that a real theologian would write such a thing, unless I am proved wrong.5 Only someone who deals with my Father Our Exegesis with very clumsy logic can write something like that. We must focus on how it has come about in recent times that such things have become possible at all. What is emerging here is basically only an imitation of what can be observed in many circles today. I avoid it, even though it is an absolute objective untruth to lump me together with all the excesses and aberrations of the Rosicrucians and the like, that it is nonsense to forge the sentence that I am dependent on Blavatsky and to prove it with the words:
– all in the same breath! –
– now my words are quoted –
This is quoted as my words, as proof that I am bringing what Blavatsky brought! They claim that Blavatsky brought it, and as proof they quote a line from it that I want to bring what was closed to Blavatsky. Such is the logic of the attackers. One would like to understand, from a certain larger context, how such things are even possible. Now I can only talk about this in aphorisms. I can only point out that around the middle of the 19th century, but especially at the beginning of the last third of this century, Catholic theology did absorb genuine spiritual-scientific seeds which, if they had been further developed, could have worked to the benefit of humanity. Perhaps, if such things as Möhler attempted in his Symbolik had met with progress instead of retrogression, something might have come of it that would have resembled the emergence of a spiritual-scientific school. Even if it had not come to the recognition of the truths of repeated earth-lives and of the fate of man's life conditioned by repeated earth-lives, which, objectively and scientifically, can be proved (as you can see in my books), there might still have been a certain progress in the direction of spiritual science. But no, Catholicism has broken with a very well-known world policy for the sake of what was moving in the indicated direction. These are things that have become very clear to me, who have had a lot of contact with Catholic theologians and have come to know the ways of thinking of tolerant and educated Catholic theologians very well. It means a lot, for example, that the philosopher Franz Brentano was a Catholic priest before taking off the cassock and leaving the Catholic Church just after the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility.6 He examined — and those who are familiar with this remarkable work will know this — certain truths concerning the Incarnation and the Trinity. He came up with quite different things that did not correspond to the infallibility dogma, as they are, on which one must indeed come, at least if one does not consider very specific formulations, for example that in 1773 a Pope has abolished the Jesuit order as harmful to humanity and in 1814 another Pope has reinstated it. Well, these are the things that lie on the surface. But also the very subtle things about the Trinity and the Incarnation, which 19th-century minds were also very much concerned with, they remained a mystery to someone like Brentano in the version of certain Catholic theologians. And in particular, it remained a mystery to him how the most diverse dogmas on these matters could have been established and recognized by the popes. It has always been a Catholic principle that only that which is generally recognized in Catholic Christendom may be established as a dogma. The Immaculate Conception was not, yet it was made into a dogma. And it is a straight ascent from the Immaculate Conception to the encyclical of 1864 and the Syllabus and further to the declaration of the infallibility dogma. Then it was natural for a man as great and in some respects as important as Leo XII to issue the encyclical Aeterni Patris. This then led with logical consistency to the demand for the anti-modernist oath from all those who were allowed to teach in Catholicism. All you have to do, dear attendees, is go through the literature that has been published as a result of this anti-modernist oath and you will soon come across some amazing things, of which I can only mention a very few today, as time is running out. The following is characteristic, for example. There is a very learned doctor, the theology professor Simon Weber at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He has to justify that the freedom of science is perfectly compatible with swearing the anti-modernist oath, which, for example, also contains a paragraph stating that anyone who represents Catholic doctrine, whether as a theologian or as a pulpit orator, should never believe that anything can be proven through history that has not been recognized by the Church as correct doctrine. He does not merely have to swear that he has not yet recognized anything that testifies to such a contradiction, but he must swear that it is his opinion that he will never be able to come to studies that could somehow represent a contradiction to what has been established by the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to justify the fact that there is a given body of teaching, a body of teaching that is simply commanded to be believed and that must be sworn to be believed, and in order to reconcile this with the freedom of scientific teaching, very strange views had to be put forward. Among other things, a view had to be adopted that is very strangely presented in the book “Theology as a Free Science” by Weber. If one proceeds conscientiously, one can conduct strange examinations of these things. There is now the Catholic scholar theologian who is obliged to prove that, as a mathematician, one must also teach the correct mathematics and yet not violate the freedom of science; so one must also be able to teach the teaching material ordered by Rome. He writes that it would not violate the freedom of science if a scholar were expected to test his new findings by refuting conflicting findings and not expecting any indefinite acceptance of his findings without this refutation, nor claiming them to be absolutely true. We will deal with this first sentence less now. But now comes the other sentence:
That is what it said in this book. Now, my dear audience, let us read the second question again:
That is to say: is it contrary to the freedom of science to make a theologian swear that he may only teach a very specific body of doctrine? Then he can do whatever he wants, but he must always come back to this body of doctrine. The author then says:
One could now believe that this is the case. But you see, the good Professor Simon Weber wrote these two questions one after the other, and he got so tangled up in a knot that he then wrote with a single logical thread:
People are very happy to grant him that you can't say no to the second. He just couldn't hold on to the thread – he only noticed that once the book had already been published, which is why there's a thick, black line stamped over the second “not”! You see, these sentences are written in such a way that they are not very consistent or logically coherent. Only when perhaps a friend of his came afterwards and said: Hey, what have you written there! All modernists agree on the “not”, and you have sworn the anti-modernist oath! - Now a thick line had to be printed over the “not” in every copy here with the stamp. You see, you have to be more conscientious than our opponents are if you want to get at the facts of the matter. But the general public does not go in for such things; you can throw a lot of dust in their eyes. One of the sentences in which the freedom of science is justified as compatible with the fact that one has to teach a very specific, firmly and dogmatically defined body of teaching is the following. It says: Does it violate the freedom of the soldier, who has sworn to be with his regiment at a certain point in time, if he is given the freedom to choose whether to travel by coach or by passenger train or by express train? That is entirely up to him. It is the same with the Catholic theologian. He has sworn to arrive at his teaching material. He must prove it, no matter how he proves it, he must prove it, because whether he travels by express train or by passenger train or by coach is irrelevant. And this is the style in which the whole of “Theology as Free Science” is written. Dear attendees, I have tried hard in my lecture, which I gave in Liestal, “Human Life from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”, to prove that it is impossible, if one really further development of Thomism, not to extend what Thomas Aquinas regards as the Präambula fidei to what is asserted through anthroposophy on the basis of truly attainable human spiritual powers. But what use is all that? Such matters are not taken into account. And what is compiled column by column is such that it runs directly counter to objective facts everywhere. Summarizing what has been presented here today in aphoristic form, I may say: Catholic teaching, if it engages with its own method, has no right to say anything against anthroposophy, because it has no right to oppose the method of contemplation. But if it has no right to oppose the method of contemplation, then it must also leave untouched that which, from the points of view offered by today's human development, results from this method of contemplation. Furthermore, I must summarize some of what has been said in such a way that for decades I have been careful to create something that should stand alongside scientific knowledge as spiritual-scientific knowledge. Everything I have envisaged has been envisaged with a view to elevating natural science to the spirit. Whatever has been done in this way has always been done with the intention that people who want to be enlightened about Christianity from a point of view that corresponds to the present day should be able to receive such enlightenment from the sources that spiritual science can provide. Therefore, everything that is undertaken by the attackers of Anthroposophy is merely rash. No cause has been given for it. When I hear these attacks, a word that Cardinal Rauscher, one of the first church princes in Europe, spoke to me about some progress resounds again. This word sounded to me when I came to Vienna as a very young student. It was still at that time, in which the great Catholic reaction had not yet fully taken effect, but was just beginning to assert itself. Then I heard the word that Cardinal Rauscher spoke in the Austrian House of Lords through his virile voice in the face of some progress that was also being attempted at the time by Catholic theology: The Church knows no progress. No matter how hard I try, I cannot find anything other than the facts that I described here at Pentecost in my Thomas lectures: that in the time of high scholasticism, in the time of the scholastic realism of an Albertus Magnus and a Thomas Aquinas, a magnificent logic was present, but that nothing remains of it - as with many modern philosophers, so also within Catholic thought. The training that one can have, if one knows how to carefully distinguish between substance, hypothesis, essence, nature, person and so on, has also escaped from Catholic theology. More recent philosophers, such as Wundt, for example, polemicize against the substance of the soul because they know nothing of a substance. Therefore, they say, it does not exist at all – according to the principle: What I know nothing about does not exist. But precise thinking, which was highly developed in scholasticism, has not been resurrected from the encyclical Aeterni Patris either. Instead, there was the contortion of thought that was necessary to prove the anti-modernist oath. If one must prove such a thing, my dear audience, then one cannot have much time for what one can learn through the strict logic of high scholasticism. And then it may well be said, as I have said here in the Whitsun lectures: Yes, in spiritual science there is a real continuation of what high scholasticism strove for in the 13th century. But is it not the case that Thomas Aquinas could not, of course, deal with natural science? It did not exist at that time. But anthroposophy wanted to engage with natural science. If one were to enter into such an engagement, a truly fruitful work would unfold from a spiritual scientific treatment of nature. I attempted such a thing here in the physicians' course, which wanted to carry methodically into the medical, into the therapeutic science, what can be carried in from the anthroposophical point of view. In Stuttgart, when the Waldorf School was founded, an attempt was made to illuminate education from an anthroposophical point of view. My dear audience, anthroposophy wants to do positive work; it has never wanted to attack anyone. Anyone who says otherwise is objectively speaking untruthfully. And anyone who acts as if they had been attacked and needed to defend themselves against any attacks is telling an objective untruth. Anyone who acts as if this were the case, as is happening now, against anthroposophy, anyone must start the reasons for attacks. I was obliged to speak some harsh words today. Now, I believe that, in view of the attacks in question, the words I have spoken are not too harsh, for among the various attacks that have been made here, there are some that do not even address what I have said, but instead achieve the incredible feat of attributing to me the Theosophical nonsense that has been put forward here and there, and which I myself have always opposed. But my attackers lack the courage to discuss my views; they only have the courage to defame the person who champions anthroposophy. And among the many things that have come up, there is, for example, the claim that I am demonstrably Jewish. Well, ladies and gentlemen, here sits the man who presented the photograph of my baptism certificate from the lectern in Stuttgart, which shows how I was baptized immediately after my birth, out of a Catholic family, was baptized Catholic; and everyone was invited to see for themselves when the baptism certificate was shown. What was done about it? Just one example of the way they are fighting at present: they wrote all kinds of letters to my Austrian hometown to find out whether I really was a Jew or not. And after even the pastor of that Austrian hometown testified that I was an “Aryan,” as he put it, they did indeed find the objection that Jews are also Aryans. But leaving that aside, ladies and gentlemen, they did not shy away from having the following printed: Yes, of course, the baptismal certificate is available, the siblings also testify and the people of the hometown that he is descended from Catholic parents, but what prevents us from assuming that he is an illegitimate child, that he a Jewish father, who was unknown to his real father, was born out of wedlock to the mother, which neither his siblings nor the local pastor need know. My dear attendees, today even such things are not shunned. Such things have become possible in the world in which we have come so gloriously far. I ask you: can we still hope to achieve anything by revealing the opponent's facts? — No. It is precisely the facts that are most unpleasant to the opponents. Therefore, they do not rely on the facts, but on what is objective untruth in every line they themselves have invented. And that is what they call “enlightenment of the people”. Never would anyone have heard me say a word of attack, as I had to say today – seemingly attacking, however, only if each of these words were not challenged ten times as a defense. I would never have used such words in my defense if they had not been challenged in such an outrageous way. Because, ladies and gentlemen, what I am supposed to represent, what I have tried to explain to you today in a positive way through the historical events, what I have tried to explain to you in the spirit in which it arose from the underground from which it really emerged, as the polar opposite of what is being served up by the attackers, is something that I believe I have recognized as the truth that is appropriate for our present era. And anyone who has grown together in his soul with the search for truth will not let anything stop him from this search, but he also feels obliged to express this truth to everyone who wants to hear it from him. Therefore, when those people whom I characterized in 1897 as I have repeated to you today demanded the truth from me in 1902, I was obliged to present it to them. That is what matters: the inner connection with a real, honest striving for truth. Anyone who, after having put forward such arguments as have been characterized today, can still find words like these:
- and so on, he may perhaps achieve something for some time. It may be that when those who are friendly towards Anthroposophy sleep, such opponents, who do not shy away from such outrageousness, may achieve much of what they want to achieve. But I have often said, as the words of a deceased Catholic theologian friend of mine, who was a professor of Christian philosophy at the University of Vienna, still ring in my ears - I have also had quite dogmatic discussions with many theologians, right down to the most intimate details - that a Christian never has to fear that the glory of God or of Christ will be diminished by gaining more knowledge about their creation. I have often said that those who admit this show more courage for Christianity than those who, at every opportunity, when new truths arise, even if only supposed ones for my sake, complain about the endangerment of Christianity – and now even about the endangerment of being Swiss. I have always said that to me a Christian and Catholic who speaks constantly of dangers seems a pusillanimous person, while to me a true Christian seems to be someone who says: No matter how many billions of new insights are gained, Christianity stands so firmly - and this has been said countless times on anthroposophical ground - that it cannot be shaken by anything. I would like to know who in truth is the better Christian. But as I said, those who boldly dare to tell humanity that what they pass off as Theosophy and what has nothing to do with Anthroposophy is a greater danger than Bolshevism, in order to frighten people, and who speak many objective untruths to do so, may achieve something in the short term. But untruthfulness cannot be effective in the long run. My dear audience, from here, as long as it is possible, the truth that is meant as anthroposophy will be sought and taught. But nothing will be taught that is presented by those attackers as the view taught here through defamation. No matter what success may be achieved on their side, I shall at least see to it that an Anthroposophy be taught here that is in keeping with the demands of the present time. I have repeatedly endeavored to characterize such an Anthroposophy in my public lectures. I declare it to be an objective and very audacious untruth that I would ever have referred to Mahatmas for that which I personally stand for; this, like everything else in the attacks that have prompted today's words, is also untrue. This anthroposophy is, of course, also a human work. And even if it were a mistake, which would be incomprehensible to me, I know that in the universe only truth will ultimately triumph. Then the opposite truth will triumph over the error here, and then anthroposophy would meet the fate it deserves, for errors can never achieve lasting victories. Therefore, if it were an error, anthroposophy could not harm the truth, it would be refuted. But if it is the truth, then for some time and perhaps quite a long time, those who dare to pursue it, as I have had to characterize today, may achieve their goal through the persecution of individuals. But in the long run, my dear audience, the laws of the world will not speak differently than that in the end truth must triumph, not untruth.
Rudolf Steiner: That is a strange way to behave. Just when one has said that one has no reason to go down to Arlesheim, then to say that we should come. But I would like to say the following in conclusion: Just consider that it has been said again that we should go down to Arlesheim to do I know what. From that side, twenty-three objective untruths have been spread in the world. These objective untruths were identified as such by us. This was done very much in public. In response, four articles have been published to date. None of these articles addressed any of the twenty-three points, but new untruths were added to the old ones. This is how things develop, this is how they progress. Now, my dear audience, in almost every article you will find the phrase that has just been spoken again: we should just wait until the last article comes. Well, ladies and gentlemen, until the last one comes! But it is not possible for anyone to demand that those to whom twenty-three lies have been thrown in the face should run after the other, so that the other can say new untruths in his own way before an audience that is willing to listen. Everyone is free to come up here and hear the truth from us. We only want to spread the truth from here. Dear attendees, just think about the logic behind this. We are told: you said you don't do propaganda. — We have, I said this evening, not built this building to merely stage musical comedies in it, but to do anthroposophy. We did not agree to somehow carry down to Arlesheim what we have to say here, what we want to say here, but we said it here. What has been attacked has been presented here. And I must describe it as an outrageous audacity when what has only been presented here is embellished with lies. They demand that we should now go down to Arlesheim to clear up the untruth there. Or is this perhaps another cunning trick, so that they can later say: Now they are even starting their propaganda down in Arlesheim!
Rudolf Steiner: The questions that have been asked, my dear attendees, were asked before the lecture. First:
Well, my dear attendees, that means positing a proposition that is, to begin with, extremely vague, because it is said: How is it that your science ascribes so much power to evil? — how much, then? But then the question here is only in the sense of how far one can comprehend evil, which after all represents a power, despite the fact that certain creeds speak of the omnipotence of God. I would like to hear someone who ascribes sole power to God and recognizes no other power besides him and who then identifies God only with what is not evil, I would like to hear that person explain how he reconciles the existence of evil with the existence of God. From our point of view, from what is advocated here at the Goetheanum, one can only say that the obligation is felt to explain the existence of evil despite the divinity of the world. Secondly:
Now, dear assembled ladies and gentlemen, I actually spoke about the sentence, “Many are called, but few are chosen” – in its most abrupt form, in the form in which Augustine advocated it in his Whitsun lectures. And what is said here can now be linked to another question that was asked here, even before the lecture:
Now, my dear audience, you must bear in mind that the Christ, the Christ-act, the event of Golgotha, has to do with humanity, with humanity as such, and you must above all consider what is said here about St. Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. By understanding these two things together: that the Christ died for humanity and that the Christ in me – not me – is what is actually effective in the world process, lies the possibility of gaining insight into the difference that exists between the fate of humanity and the fate of the individual human being. Just imagine the consequences if it were proposed that man could remain purely passive and still be redeemed by Christ. But all these things are not at issue; rather, the issue is that spiritual science investigates repeated earthly lives quite independently of everything else, just as, for all I care, the physical sciences investigate mutation or some other process, and that spiritual science simply conquers this knowledge of repeated earthly lives. The question then is to investigate what power the Christ impulse has within world evolution, into which the repeated earthly lives are placed. The way of thinking that leads to such questions is related to what now arises as a further question:
Dear attendees, just consider that the Bible also does not say that America exists - or is it said? I don't think so. Nevertheless, no one will be deterred from recognizing America's existence, even though they stand on the ground of the Bible. There is a big difference between really standing on the ground of the Bible and standing on the ground of people who imagine that they alone are allowed to represent the content of the Bible identically. You see, my dear attendees, in the Catholic Church it was forbidden for a long time to even give the Bible to the faithful to read. And one could tell a lot about what then led to the Bible now also being given to Catholic believers. But all the results of conscientious research would lead nowhere if the discussion were always to be based on the same principles as those we are discussing with. For someone need only glance through my writings to find what I said in my lecture: that a good part of my life has been spent refuting Kant's theory of knowledge. If someone then objects that I have introduced Kant into the lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas merely as a contrast for the sake of contrast, then, my dear audience, it must also be said: Everyone is free to think and express their thoughts as they please in their own circles, but anyone who goes public with their ideas must first convince themselves that they are allowed to make such an assertion before doing so. And one certainly cannot make such an assertion to someone who has been fighting against Kantianism for forty years. Another question was asked:
Well, I have already said a good deal about this in my lectures. In my writings, especially in my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”, you will find a great deal about this, as the literature that comes from me says a great deal about these questions in particular. You see, it has been said that the lectures on Thomism have remained without discussion. Now, my dear audience, if I were to speak again, say, about Scotus Eriugena or, say, about Augustine or, say, about the later nominalism, about the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Kant, or if I were to speak about Schelling or Hegel or about Lessing, then, ladies and gentlemen, it must be up to me whether I want to express what I have acquired through decades of research or not, and whether or not a discussion can follow from it. That must be entirely up to me, and I will not allow anyone to take away my right to give lectures in the future, even if no discussion can follow from them. One could really lose all interest in discussions if one had to make the experience of being confronted with such a level in the discussion, as it is when someone says - I don't know from which side it was said, but it was said - when someone who has spent forty years trying to determine the relationship between Kant and other worldviews is told that he is only doing it for the sake of contrast. That is indeed difficult to discuss. When one has fought for every word one utters with one's heart's blood, then, ladies and gentlemen, one also thinks somewhat differently about the value of discussions than those who enter into discussions out of such motives, as I have just characterized them, can think - can I say emphatically. And so I must say once more: I find it at least very strange when someone who takes the side of those who have spoken twenty-three objective untruths against us, who has not yet made even a start at justifying anything of these twenty-three lies, despite four articles - not in the “Bayerischer Vaterland”, one could mistake it for that based on the style confused with it, no, in the “Katholischen Sonntagsblatt” it says - despite these four articles has not even made an attempt to somehow justify any of these twenty-three lies, if this someone says: Just wait and see, the matter will come up. Well, my dear attendees, the twenty-three assertions that were made at the time are simply untrue, and no subsequent discussion will be able to prove them true. What do you want to discuss? Prove, try to prove, if you want to discuss, a single one of those twenty-three points! Start sometime and don't keep referring us to the end, otherwise you might end up coming to that end only when the matter has actually become too boring for us or when the matter has taken a different turn in some way. I find it very strange, and others probably do too, that people are being asked to wait for the end when the beginning was done in such a way as it was done. What end should do anything differently from the twenty-three lies at the beginning, which can never be proven as truth? Is the discussion over when someone says, “Wait for the end”? The discussion would at least attempt to justify any of the twenty-three untruths. It would not be successful in any case, because they are untruths.
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| 18. The Riddles of Philosophy: The Age of Kant and Goethe
Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln |
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| From his presupposition Hume draws the conclusion: The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession, but the power of force which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed from us and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body. (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. VII, part 1.) If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of Hume's view, we must say, “In accordance with the perceived course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but he is not entitled to maintain that this ‘connection’ is anything but a mere thought habit.” |
| Thus, he could give one of his writings the title, A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to Understand. |
| 18. The Riddles of Philosophy: The Age of Kant and Goethe
Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln |
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[ 1 ] Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of world and life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Kant and Goethe. Another person who strove for such a clarity in the most forceful way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted with Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote:
And when, on the basis of Kant's conception, he had built his own Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to Goethe with the words:
A similar attitude to both representative spirits was taken by Schiller. He writes about Kant on October 28, 1794:
Schiller describes Goethe's conception in a letter addressed to him on August 23, 1794:
[ 2 ] Seen from the present age, Kant and Goethe can be considered spirits in whom the evolution of world conception of modern times reveals itself as in an important moment of its development. These spirits experience intensely the enigmatic problems of existence, which have formerly, in a more preparatory stage, been latent in the substrata of the life of the soul. [ 3 ] To illustrate the effect that Kant exerted on his age, the statements of two men who stood at the full height of their time's culture may be quoted. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788:
Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement:
[ 4 ] This shows how Kant's contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself considered it so important for this development that he judged its significance equal to that which Copernicus's discovery of the planetary motion holds for natural science. [ 5 ] Various currents of philosophical development of previous times continue their effect in Kant's thinking and are transformed in his thought into questions that determine the character of his world conception. The reader who feels the characteristic traits in those of Kant's writings that are most significant for his view is aware of a special appreciation of Kant for the mathematical mode of thinking as one of these traits. Kant feels that what is known in the way mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of mathematics cannot be doubted. [ 6 ] With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on Spinoza's realm of thoughts, appears in Kant's mind. Spinoza wants to construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science. Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere passive reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize such a support yielding force. This Greek attitude toward the world of thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied by the fulfillment of the postulate that the soul should deal with thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception. As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to his conclusion, “I think, therefore I am,” and the statements connected with it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance, which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the “ego” for the security it needs, leads this “ego” to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent existence. [ 7 ] Leibniz's thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed off in itself. But this monad experiences only what it contains within itself; the world order, which presents itself “from without, as it were,” is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, the order of which is the predetermined (pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to the human soul, the self-dependent existence in the universe, its freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world's evolution. If, however, it means to remain consistent with its basic principle, it cannot avoid maintaining that everything known by the soul is only the soul itself, that it is incapable of going outside the self-conscious ego and that the universe cannot become revealed to the soul in its truth from without. [ 8 ] For Descartes and for Leibniz, the convictions they had acquired in their religious education were still effective enough that they adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of their world pictures. Into Descartes's world picture there crept the conception of a spiritual world that he had obtained through religious channels. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture tended to extinguish his “ego.” In Leibniz, religious impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself. Leibniz believed, nevertheless, that he could assume the existence of the spiritual world outside the “ego.” Spinoza, through a certain courageous trait of his personality, actually drew the consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for this world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced the self-dependence of this self-consciousness and found his supreme happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance. With regard to Kant we must raise the question of how he was compelled to feel with respect to the currents of world conception, which had produced its prominent representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. For all soul impulses that had been at work in these three were also active in him, and in his soul these impulses effected each other and caused the riddles of world and mankind with which Kant found himself confronted. A glance at the life of the spirit in the Age of Kant informs us of the general trend of Kant's feeling with respect to these riddles. Significantly, Lessing's (1729–1781) attitude toward the questions of world conception is symptomatic of this intellectual life. Lessing sums up his credo in the words, “The transformation of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if the human race is to derive any help from them.” The eighteenth century has been called the century of the Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's remark. Kant declared the enlightenment to be “man's departure from his self-caused bondage of mind,” and as its motto he chose the words, “Have courage to use your own mind.” Even thinkers as prominent as Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of the “self-caused bondage of mind.” They did not penetrate to a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza's doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep impression on such spirits. Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in the course of this process he had arrived at results that were entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significant since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the current of Leibniz's philosophy, which effected the spirits of that age in the form “developed” by Wolff. From Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth, we receive an idea of how this school of thought impressed deeper spirits as it reached them through the channels of Wolff's conceptions. Goethe tells of the impressions the lectures of Professor Winckler in Leipzig, given in the spirit of Wolff, had made on him.
About his occupation with Spinoza's writings, however, the poet tells us, “I surrendered to this reading and, inspecting myself, I believed never to have seen the world so distinctly.” There were, however, only a few people who could surrender to Spinoza's mode of thought as frankly as Goethe. Most readers were led into deep conflicts of world conception by this philosophy. Goethe's friend, F. H. Jacobi, is typical of them. He believed that he had to admit that reason, left to its own resources, would not lead to the doctrines of belief, but to the view at which Spinoza had arrived—that the world is ruled by eternal, necessary laws. Thus, Jacobi found himself confronted with an important decision: Either to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of his creed or to deny reason the possibility to lead to the highest insights in order to be able to retain his belief. He chose the latter. He maintained that man possessed a direct certainty in his innermost soul, a secure belief by virtue of which he was capable of feeling the truth of the conception of a personal God, of the freedom of will and of immortality, so that these convictions were entirely independent of the insights of reason that were leaning on logical conclusions, and had no reference to these things but only to the external things of nature. In this way, Jacobi deposed the knowledge of reason to make room for a belief that satisfied the needs of the heart. Goethe who was not at all pleased by this dethronement of reason, wrote to his friend, “God has punished you with metaphysics and placed a thorn in your flesh; he has blessed me with physics. I cling to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave everything to you that you call, and may continue to call, religion. Your trust rests in belief in God; mine in seeing.” The philosophy of the enlightenment ended by confronting the spirits with the alternative, either to supplant the revealed truths by truths of reason in the sense of Spinoza, or to declare war on the knowledge of reason itself. [ 9 ] Kant also found himself confronted with this choice. The attitude he took and how he made his decision is apparent from the clear account in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.
We see here how Kant stands on a similar ground as Jacobi in regard to knowledge and belief. [ 10 ] The way in which Kant had arrived at his results had led through the thought world of Hume. In Hume he had found the view that the things and events of the world in no way reveal connections of thought to the human soul, that the human mind imagined such connections only through habit while it is perceiving the things and events of the world simultaneously in space and successively in time. Kant was impressed by Hume's opinion according to which the human mind does not receive from the world what appears to it as knowledge. For Kant, the thought emerged as a possibility: What is knowledge for the human mind does not come from the reality of the world. [ 11 ] Through Hume's arguments, Kant was, according to his own confession, awakened out of the slumber into which he had fallen in following Wolff's train of ideas. How can reason produce judgments about God, freedom and immortality if its statement about the simplest events rests on such insecure foundation? The attack that Kant now had to undertake against the knowledge of reason was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. He had at least left to knowledge the possibility of comprehending nature in its necessary connection. Now Kant had produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and planets to have consolidated, and to have assumed the motions in which they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the fruitfulness of Spinoza's mode of thought, according to which everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that in the above-mentioned work he went so far as to exclaim, “Give me matter, and I will build you a universe!” The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths was so firmly established for him that he maintains in his Basic Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper sense of the word is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, it would be out of the question to assume such a certainty for the knowledge of mathematical natural science, for, in that case, this knowledge would consist of nothing but thought habits that man had developed because he had seen the course of the world along certain lines. But there would not be the slightest guarantee that these thought habits had anything to do with the law-ordered connection of the things of the world. From his presupposition Hume draws the conclusion:
If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of Hume's view, we must say, “In accordance with the perceived course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but he is not entitled to maintain that this ‘connection’ is anything but a mere thought habit.” Now if this were the case, then it would be a mere deception of the human reason to imagine that it could, through itself, gain any insight into the nature of the world, and Hume could not be contradicted when he says about every world conception that is gained out of pure reason, “Throw it into the fire, for it is nothing but deception and illusion.” [ 12 ] Kant could not possibly adopt this conclusion of Hume as his own. For him, the certainty of the knowledge of mathematical natural science was irrevocably established. He would not allow this certainty to be touched but was unable to deny that Hume was justified in saying that we gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and by forming for ourselves thoughts about their connection that are based on this observation. If a law-ordered connection is inherent in things, then we must also extract this connection out of them, but what we really derive from the things is such that we know no more about it than that it has been so up to the present time. We do not know, however, whether such a connection is really so linked up with the nature of things that it cannot change in any moment. If we form for ourselves today a world conception based on our observations, events can happen tomorrow that compel us to form an entirely different one. If we received all our knowledge from things, there would be no certainty. Mathematics and natural sciences are a proof of this. That the world does not give its knowledge to the human mind was a view Kant was ready to adopt from Hume. That this knowledge does not contain certainty and truth, however, is a conclusion he was not willing to draw. Thus, Kant was confronted with the question that disturbed him deeply: How is it possible that man is in possession of true and certain knowledge and that he is, nevertheless, incapable of knowing anything of the reality of the world in itself? Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world. Our reason could never claim certainty about anything in a world lying spread out around us so that we would be affected by it through observation only. Therefore, our world can only be one that is constructed by ourselves: A world that lies within the limits of our minds. What is going on outside myself as a stone falls and causes a hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs a world for itself. No matter how the world outside ourselves might be constructed, today's world may not coincide in even a single trait with that of yesterday. This can never concern us for our mind produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this organization if we want to know what is unconditionally true. “Reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature.” Kant sums up his conviction in this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without an impetus or impression from without. When I perceive the color red, the perception, “red,” is, to be sure, a state, a process within me, but it is necessary for me to have an occasion to perceive “red.” There are, therefore, “things in themselves,” but we know nothing about them but the fact that they exist. Everything we observe belongs to the appearances within us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of observation in the human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything that we can know refers merely to processes within ourselves, to appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant expresses it. But the objects of the highest questions of reason—God, Freedom and Immortality—can never become phenomena. We see the appearances within ourselves; whether or not these have their origin in a divine being we cannot know. We can observe our own psychic conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to our knowledge. About the “things in themselves,” our knowledge cannot produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas concerning these “things in themselves” are true or false. If they are announced to us from another direction, there is no objection to assume their existence, but a knowledge concerning them is impossible for us. There is only one access to these highest truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within us emphatically and distinctly, “You are morally obliged to do this and that.” This “Categorical Imperative” imposes on us an obligation we are incapable of avoiding. But how could we comply with this obligation if we were not in the possession of a free will? We are, to be sure, incapable of knowledge concerning this quality of our soul, but we must believe that it is free in order to be capable of following its inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, we have, therefore, no certainty of knowledge as we possess it with respect to the objects of mathematics and natural science, but we have moral certainty for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. Without this possibility his virtue would be void of meaning and significance. In order that virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists who secures this happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: God. Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through this guarantee, in turn, the existence of God. Because man is a sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which we are denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by Kant out of the moral belief in the voice of duty. It was respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully expressed in his Critique of Practical Reason:
That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths is what Kant considered as his discovery. Man has to renounce all insight into a supersensible world, but from his moral nature springs a compensation for this knowledge. No wonder Kant sees the highest demand on man in the unconditional surrender to duty. If it were not for duty to open a vista for him beyond the sensual world, man would be enclosed for his whole life in the world of the senses. No matter, therefore, what the sensual world demands; it has to give way before the peremptory claims of duty, and the sensual world cannot, out of its own initiative, agree with duty. Its own inclination is directed toward the agreeable, toward pleasure. These aims have to be opposed by duty in order to enable man to reach his destination. What man does for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is the rigorous task that is taught by Kant's moral philosophy. Do not allow your will to be directed toward what satisfies you in your egotism, but so act that the principles of your action can become those of all men. In surrendering to the moral law, man attains his perfection. The belief that this moral law has its being above all other events of the world and is made real within the world by a divine being is, in Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from the moral life. Man is to be good, not because of his belief in a God whose will demands the good; he is to be good only because of his feeling for duty. He is to believe in God, however, because duty without God would be meaningless. This is religion within the Limits of Mere Reason. It is thus that Kant entitles his book on religious world conception. [ 13 ] The course that the development of the natural sciences took since they began to flourish has produced in many people the feeling that every element that does not carry the character of strict necessity should be eliminated from our thought picture of nature. Kant had this feeling also. In his Natural History of the Heavens, he had even outlined such a picture for a certain realm of nature that was in accordance with this feeling. In a thought picture of this kind, there is no place for the conception of the self-conscious ego that the man of the eighteenth century felt necessary. The Platonic and the Aristotelian thought could be considered as the revelation of nature in the form in which that idea was accepted in the earlier age, and as that of the human soul as well. In thought life, nature and the soul met. From the picture of nature as it seems to be demanded by modern science, nothing leads to the conception of the self-conscious soul. Kant had the feeling that the conception of nature offered nothing to him on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This certainty had to be created for the modern age had presented the self-conscious ego as a fact. The possibility had to be created to acknowledge this fact, but everything that can be recognized as knowledge by our understanding is devoured by the conception of nature. Thus, Kant feels himself compelled to provide for the self-conscious ego as well as for the spiritual world connected with it, something that is not knowledge but nevertheless supplies certainty. [ 14 ] Kant established selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit as the foundation of moral life. In the realm of virtuous action, such a devotion is not compatible with a surrender to the sensual world. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is elevated in such a way that it appears as the immediate expression of the spirit. That is the field of beauty and art. In our ordinary life we want the sensual because it excites our desire, our self-seeking interest. We desire what gives us pleasure, but it is also possible to take a selfless interest in an object. We can look at it in admiration, filled by a heavenly delight and this delight can be quite independent of the possession of the thing. Whether or not I should like to own a beautiful house that I pass has nothing to do with the “disinterested pleasure” that I may take in its beauty. If I eliminate all desire from my feeling, there may still be found as a remaining element a pleasure that is clearly and exclusively linked to the beautiful work of art. A pleasure of this kind is an “esthetic pleasure.” The beautiful is to be distinguished from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable excites my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be made real by me. In confronting the beautiful I have no such interest that is connected with my person. What is it then, by means of which my selfless delight is attracted? I can be pleased by a thing only when its purpose is fulfilled, when it is so organized that it serves an end. Fitness to purpose pleases; incongruity displeases, but as I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful thing, as the mere sight of it satisfies me, it is also not necessary that the beautiful object really serves a purpose. The purpose is of no importance to me; what I demand is only the appropriateness. For this reason, Kant calls an object “beautiful” in which we perceive fitness to purpose without thinking at the same time of a definite purpose. [ 15 ] What Kant gives in this exposition is not merely an explanation but also a justification of art. This is best seen if one remembers Kant's feeling in regard to his world conception. He expresses his feeling in profound, beautiful words: Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing admiration and awe: The starred heaven above me and the moral law within me. At first, the sight of an innumerable world quantity annihilates, as it were, my importance as a living creature, which must give back to the planet that is a mere dot in the universe the matter out of which it became what it is, after having been for a short while (one does not know how) provided with the energy of life. On second consideration, however, this spectacle infinitely raises my value as an intelligent being, through my (conscious and free) personality in which the moral law reveals to me a life that is independent of the whole world of the senses, at least insofar as this can be concluded from the purpose-directed destination of my existence, which is not hemmed in by the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite. The artist now transplants this purpose-directed destination, which, in reality, rules in the realm of the moral world, into the world of the senses. Thus, the world of art stands between the realm of the world of observation that is dominated by the eternal stern laws of necessity, which the human mind itself has previously laid into this world, and the realm of free morality in which commands of duty, as the result of a wise, divine world-order, set out direction and aim. Between both realms the artist enters with his works. Out of the realm of the real he takes his material, but he reshapes this material at the same time in such a fashion that it becomes the bearer of a purpose-directed harmony as it is found in the realm of freedom. That is to say, the human spirit feels dissatisfied both with the realms of external reality, which Kant has in mind when he speaks of the starred heaven and the innumerable things of the world, and also with the realm of moral law. Man, therefore, creates a beautiful realm of “semblance,” which combines the rigid necessity of nature with the element of a free purpose. The beautiful now is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is nature-beauty as well as art-beauty. This beauty of nature is there without man's activity. It seems, therefore, as if there were observable in the world of reality, not merely the rigid law-ordered necessity, but a free wisdom-revealing activity as well. The phenomenon of the beautiful, nevertheless, does not force us to accept a conception of this kind, for what it offers is the form of a purpose-directed activity without implying also the thought of a real purpose. Furthermore, there is not only the phenomenon of integrated beauty but also that of integrated ugliness. It is, therefore, possible to assume that in the multitude of natural events, which are interconnected according to necessary laws, some happen to occur—accidentally, as it were—in which the human mind observes an analogy with man's own works of art. As it is not necessary to assume a real purpose, this element of free purpose, which appears as it were by accident, is quite sufficient for the esthetic contemplation of nature. [ 16 ] The situation is different when we meet the entities in nature to which the purpose concept is not merely to be attributed as accidental but that carry this purpose really within themselves. There are also entities of this kind according to Kant's opinion. They are the organic beings. The necessary law-determined connections are insufficient to explain them; these, in Spinoza's world conception are considered not only necessary but sufficient, and by Kant are considered as those of the human mind itself. For an “organism is a product of nature in which everything is, at the same time, purpose, just as it is cause and also effect.” An organism, therefore, cannot be explained merely through rigid laws that operate with necessity, as is the case with inorganic nature. It is for this reason that, although Kant himself had, in his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, undertaken the attempt to “discuss the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire world structure according to Newtonian principles,” he is of the opinion that a similar attempt, applied to the world of organic beings, would necessarily fail. In his Critique of Judgment, he advances the following statement: It is, namely, absolutely certain that in following merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even become sufficiently acquainted with organisms and their inner possibility, much less explain them. This is so certain that one can boldly say that it would be absurd for man to set out on any such attempt or to hope that at some future time a Newton could arise who would explain as much as the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws into which no purpose had brought order and direction. Such a knowledge must, on the contrary, be altogether denied to man. Kant's view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with another opinion concerning a purpose-directed entity, for a purpose points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an entity, that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind could explain a teleological being in the same way as an entity that is merely constituted according to natural necessity, it would also have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely independent of the mind. The human mind would, therefore, have to be not merely a cognitive, but a creative, spirit; its reason would, like that of God, have to create the things. [ 17 ] Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as it has been outlined here will understand its strong effect on Kant's contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This world conception leaves God, freedom and immortality, to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that suggests a designed order in the world. [ 18 ] But at what price did Kant obtain all this! He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be observed in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is sufficient that it stimulates in us the conception of the purposeful and thereby produces our delight. [ 19 ] Kant not only presents the view that man's knowledge is possible so far as the law-structure of this knowledge has its origin in the self-conscious soul, and the certainty concerning this soul comes out of a source that is different from the one out of which our knowledge of nature springs. He also points out that our human knowledge has to resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which thought itself seems to reign in nature. In taking this position, Kant confesses by implication that he cannot imagine thoughts that are conceived as active in the entities of nature themselves. The recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul not merely thinks, but in thinking shares the life of nature in its inner experience. If somebody discovered that thoughts are capable not merely of being received as perceptions, as is the case with the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that it is possible to experience thoughts by penetrating into the entities of nature, then this would mean that again a new element had been found that could enter the picture of nature as well as the conception of the self-conscious ego. The self-conscious ego by itself does not find a place in the nature picture of modern times. If the self-conscious ego, in filling itself with thought, is not merely aware that it forms this thought, but recognizes in thought a life of which it can know, “This life can realize itself also outside myself,” then this self-conscious ego can arrive at the insight, “I hold within myself something that can also be found without.” The evolution of modern world conception thus urges man on to the step: To find the thought in the self-conscious ego that is felt to be alive. This step Kant did not take; Goethe did. [ 20 ] In all essential points, Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant's conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man's lawgiver as well. Kant drew all nature into the human mind. Goethe considered everything as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the natural world order: Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms... All men are in her and she is in them... Even the most unnatural is Nature; even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius ... We obey her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even when we mean to work against her... Nature is everything... She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself... She has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it all, true and false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the merit. This is the polar opposite to Kant's world conception. According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy:
We need not waver in this estimate of Goethe's attitude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favorable judgment about the philosopher of Koenigsberg. This opposition between Kant and himself would only then have become quite clear to him if he had engaged himself in a thorough study of Kant, but this he did not do. In the above-mentioned essay he says, “It was the introductory passages that I liked; into the labyrinth itself, however, I could not venture to go; I was kept from it now by my poetic imagination, now by my common sense, and nowhere did I feel myself furthered.” Goethe has, nevertheless, expressed his opposition distinctly on one occasion in a passage that has been published only from the papers of the residuary estate in the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2; Abteilung, Band XI, page 377). The fundamental error of Kant was, as here expressed by Goethe, that he “considers the subjective faculty of knowledge as an object and discriminates the point where the subjective and the objective meet with great penetration but not quite correctly.” Goethe just happens to be convinced that it is not only the spirit as such that speaks in the subjective human faculty of cognition, but that it is the spirit of nature that has created for itself an organ in man through which it reveals its secrets. It is not man at all who speaks about nature, but it is nature who speaks in man about itself. This is Goethe's conviction. Thus, he could say that whenever the controversy concerning Kant's world view “was brought up, I liked to take the side that gave most honor to man, and I completely agreed with all those friends who maintained with Kant that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it nevertheless does not originate from experience.” For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit, but for this reason, they were not merely the subjective laws of the spirit for him, but the objective laws of the order of nature itself. It is for this reason also that Goethe could not agree when Schiller, under the influence of Kant, erected a forbidding wall of separation between the realms of natural necessity and of freedom. Goethe expressed himself on this point in his essay, First Acquaintance with Schiller: Schiller and some friends had absorbed the Kantian philosophy, which elevates the subject to such height while apparently narrowing it. It developed the extraordinary traits that nature had laid into his character and he, in his highest feeling of freedom and self determination, tended to be ungrateful to the great mother who had certainly not treated him stingily. Instead of considering nature as self-supporting, alive and productively spreading order and law from the lowest to the highest point, Schiller took notice of it only in the shape of a few empirical human natural inclinations. In his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy, Goethe points to his difference with Schiller in these words. “He preached the gospel of freedom; I was unwilling to see the rights of nature infringed upon.” There was, indeed, an element of Kant's mode of conception in Schiller, but so far as Goethe is concerned, we are right in accepting what he himself said with regard to some conversations he had with the followers of Kant. “They heard what I had to say but they could not answer me or further me in any way. More than once it happened that one or the other of them admitted to me with a surprised smile that my conception was, to be sure, analogous to that of Kant, but in a curious fashion indeed.” [ 21 ] Goethe did not consider art and beauty as a realm that was torn out of the interconnection of reality, but as a higher stage of nature's order. At the sight of artistic creations that especially interested him during his Italian journey he wrote, “Like the highest works of nature, the lofty works of art have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything that is arbitrary and merely imagined fades away before them. Here is necessity; here is God.” When the artist proceeds as the Greeks did, namely, “according to the laws that Nature herself follows,” then his works contain the same godly element that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is “a manifestation of secret natural laws.” What the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human completion of nature, for “as man finds himself placed at the highest point of nature, he again considers himself a whole nature and as such has again to produce a peak in himself. For this purpose he raises his own existence by penetrating himself with all perfections and virtues, produces choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally lifts himself as far as to the production of the work of art.” Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest of man's works of art, and everything in this nature is ruled by the same “eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws,” such that “the godhead itself could not change anything about it” (Poetry and Truth, Book XVI). [ 22 ] When, in 1811, Goethe read Jacobi's book, On Things Divine, it made him “uneasy.”
[ 23 ] The realm of necessity in Spinoza's sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. “The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine brightly.” [ 24 ] Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.
[ 25 ] In these words Goethe summed up his credo. Against Hailer, who had written the lines, “Into nature's sacred center, no created spirits enter,” Goethe turns with his sharpest words:
[ 26 ] In following this world conception Goethe could also not recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had ascertained in his Critique of Judgment. Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained. Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Linné, states that there were as many species as there “have been created fundamentally different forms.” A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. “What Linnaeus wanted with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as striving into union.” Goethe searched for an entity that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step.
On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying, “It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity.” As Kant, in his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, exclaims, “Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it,” because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe pronounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development. What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he tells Herder about his discovery of the archetypal plant, he adds, “The same law will be applicable to all other living beings,” and Goethe applies it, indeed. In 1795, his persevering studies of the animal world led him to “feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation.” In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a risky “adventure of reason,” should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.
Against Kantian arguments of this kind, Goethe answers:
[ 27 ] In his archetypal plant, Goethe had seized upon an idea “with which one can ... invent plants to infinity, but they must be consistent, that is to say, even if they do not exist, nevertheless they could exist and are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination but have an inner truth and necessity.” Thus, Goethe shows that he is about to find not merely the perceptible idea, the idea that is thought, in the self-conscious ego, but the living idea. The self-conscious ego experiences a realm in itself that manifests itself as both self-contained and at the same time appertaining to the external world, because the forms of the latter prove to be moulded after the models of the creative powers. With this step the self-conscious ego can appear as a real being. Goethe has developed a conception through which the self-conscious ego can feel itself enlivened because it feels itself in union with the creative entities of nature. The world conception of modern times attempted to master the riddle of the self-conscious ego; Goethe plants the living idea into this ego, and with this force of life pulsating in it, it proves to be a life-saturated reality. The Greek idea is akin to the picture; it is contemplated like a picture. The idea of modern times must be akin to life, to the living being; it is inwardly experienced. Goethe was aware of the fact that there is such an inward experience of the idea. In the self-conscious ego he perceived the breath of the living idea. [ 28 ] Goethe says of Kant's Critique of Judgment that he “owed a most happy period of his life to this book.” “The great leading thoughts of this work were quite analogous to my previous creations, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, the unfolding of the activity in both cases from within, was distinctly expressed in this book.” Yet, this statement of Goethe must not deceive us concerning his opposition to Kant, for in the essay in which it occurs, we also read, “Passionately stimulated, I proceeded on my own paths so much the quicker because I, myself, did not know where they led, and because I found little resonance with the Kantians for what I had conquered for myself and for the methods in which I had arrived at my results. For I expressed what had been stirred up in me and not what I had read.” [ 29 ] A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure—“from the brick that falls from the roof to the brilliant flash of inspiration that dawns on you and that you convey.” For “all effects of whatever kind they may be that we observe in experience are interconnected in the most continuous fashion and flow into one another.”
Thus, with the example of a fallen brick Goethe illustrates the interconnection of all kinds of natural effects. It would be an explanation in Goethe's sense if one could also derive their strictly law-determined interconnection out of one root. [ 30 ] Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at the most significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that in Goethe he could only turn “to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time.” But he had the opinion of Kant “that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood, especially in his Critique of Judgment.” Whoever penetrates into the world conception of Goethe, however, which is presented in the cloak of naiveté, will, nevertheless, find a firm foundation that can be expressed in the form of clear ideas. Goethe himself did not raise this foundation into the full light of consciousness. For this reason, his mode of conception finds entrance only slowly into the evolution of philosophy, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it is Kant's position with which the spirits first attempt to come to clarity and with whom they begin to settle their account. [ 31 ] No matter how great Kant's influence was, his contemporaries could not help feeling that their deeper need for knowledge could not become satisfied by him. Such a demand for enlightenment urgently seeks after a unitary world conception as it is given in Goethe's case. With Kant, the individual realms of existence are standing side by side without transition. For this reason, Fichte, in spite of his unconditional veneration for Kant, could not conceal from himself the fact “that Kant had only hinted at the truth, but had neither presented nor proved it.” And further: This wonderful, unique man had either a divination for the truth without being aware of the reasons for it, or he estimated his contemporaries as insufficient to have these reasons conveyed to them, or, again, he was reluctant during his lifetime to attract the superhuman veneration that sooner or later would have been bestowed upon him. No one has understood him as yet, and nobody will succeed in doing so who does not arrive at Kant's results in following his own ways; when it does happen, the world really will be astonished. But I know just as certainly that Kant had such a system in mind, that all statements that he actually did express are fragments and results of this system, and have meaning and consistence only under this presupposition. For, if this were not the case, Fichte would “be more inclined to consider the Critique of Pure Reason the product of the strangest accident than as the work of a mind.” [ 32 ] Other contemporaries also judged Kant's world of ideas to be insufficient. Lichtenberg, one of the most brilliant and at the same time most independent minds of the second half of the eighteenth century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says, “What does it mean to think in Kant's spirit? I believe it means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What is and must be subjective was taken as objective.” On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, “Should it really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our ideas of God and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves his net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who admire us because of our ideas of God and immortality just as we admire the spider and silkworm?” One could, however, raise a much more significant objection. If it is correct that the law of human reason refers only to the inner worlds of the mind, how do we then manage even to speak of things outside ourselves at all? In that case, we should have to be completely caught in the cobweb of our inner world. An objection of this kind is raised by G. E. Schulze (1761–1833) in his book, Aenesidemus, which appeared anonymously in 1792. In it he maintains that all our knowledge is nothing but mere conceptions and we could in no way go beyond the world of our inner thought pictures. Kant's moral truths are also finally refuted with this step, for if not even the possibility to go beyond the inner world is thinkable, then it is also impossible that a moral voice could lead us into such a world that is impossible to think. In this way, a new doubt with regard to all truths develops out of Kant's view, and the philosophy of criticism is turned into scepticism. One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is S. Maimon (1753–1800), who, from 1790 on, wrote several books that were under the influence of Kant and Schulze. In them he defended with complete determination the view that, because of the very nature of our cognitive faculty, we are not permitted to speak of the existence of external objects. Another disciple of Kant, Jacob Sigismund Beck, went even so far as to maintain that Kant himself had really not assumed things outside ourselves and that it was nothing but a misunderstanding if such a conception was ascribed to him. [ 33 ] One thing is certain; Kant offered his contemporaries innumerable points for attack and interpretations. Precisely through his unclarities and contradictions, he became the father of the classical German world conceptions of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher. His unclarities became new questions for them. No matter how he endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make place for belief, the human spirit can confess to be satisfied in the true sense of the word only through knowledge, through cognition. So it came to pass that Kant's successors strove to restore knowledge to its full rights again, that they attempted to settle through knowledge the highest needs of man. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) seemed to be chosen by nature to continue Kant's work in this direction. Fichte confessed, “The love of knowledge and especially speculative knowledge, when it has laid hold on man, occupies him to such an extent that no other wish is left in him but that to pursue it with complete calm and concentration.” Fichte can be called an enthusiast of world conception. Through this enthusiasm he must have laid a charm on his contemporaries and especially on his students. Forberg, who was one of his disciples, tells us: In his public addresses his speech rushes powerfully on like a thunderstorm that unloads its fire in individual strokes of lightning; he lifts the soul up; he means to produce not only good men but great men; his eye is stern; his step bold; through his philosophy he intends to lead the spirit of the age; his imagination is not flowery, but strong and powerful; his pictures are not graceful but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of his object and he moves in the realm of concepts with an ease that betrays that he not only lives in this invisible land, but rules there. The most outstanding trait in Fichte's personality is the grand, serious style of his life conception. He measures everything by the highest standards. In describing the calling of the writer, for instance, he says:
A man speaks in these words who is aware of his call as a spiritual leader of his age, and who seriously means what he says in the preface to his Doctrine of Science: “My person is of no importance at all, but Truth is of all importance for ‘I am a priest of Truth’.” We can understand that a man who, like him, lives “in the Kingdom of Truth” does not merely mean to guide others to an understanding, but that he intended to force them to it. Thus, he could give one of his writings the title, A Radiantly Clear Report to the Larger Public Concerning the Real Essence of the Newest Philosophy. An Attempt to Force the Readers to Understand. Fichte is a personality who believes that, in order to walk life's course, he has no need of the real world and its facts; rather, he keeps his eyes riveted on the world of idea. He holds those in low esteem who do not understand such an idealistic attitude of spirit.
Fichte wrote these words in the preface to the publication of the lectures in which he had spoken to the students of Jena on the Destination of the Scholar. Views like those of Fichte have their origin in a great energy of the soul, giving sureness for knowledge of world and life. Fichte had blunt words for all those who did not feel the strength in themselves for such a sureness. When the philosopher, Reinhold, ventured the statement that the inner voice of man could also be in error, Fichte replied, “You say the philosopher should entertain the thought that he, as an individual, could also be mistaken and that he, therefore, could and should learn from others. Do you know whose thought mood you are describing with these words? That of a man who has never in his whole life been really convinced of something.” [ 34 ] To this vigorous personality, whose eyes were entirely directed to the inner life, it was repugnant to search anywhere else for a world conception, the highest aim man can obtain, except in his inner life. “All culture should be the exercise of all faculties toward the one purpose of complete freedom, that is to say, of the complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves, our pure Self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours. . . .” This is Fichte's judgment in his Contributions Toward the Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution, which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this one purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our soul and our duties are, and that we thereby procured a knowledge afterwards out of such an accomplished fact? If we are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something. For this reason, we cannot receive the highest truths. We must create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can only place something at the summit of his world conception that obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of the external world, “It is,” we are doing so because we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of another being. What this other being is does not depend on us. We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of perception toward it. We should never know what “red,” “warm,” “cold” is, if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing, nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, “They are.” What they are is what they tell us. This is entirely different in regard to our own existence. Man does not say to himself, “It is,” but, “I am.” He says, thereby, not only that he is, but also what he is, namely, an “I.” Only another being could say concerning me, “It is.” This is, in fact, what another being would have to say, for even in the case that this other being should have created me, it could not say concerning my existence, “I am.” The statement, “I am,” loses all meaning if it is not uttered by the being itself that speaks about its own existence. There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as “I” except myself. This recognition of myself as an “I,” therefore, must be my own original action. No being outside myself can have influence on this. [ 35 ] At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw himself completely independent of every “foreign” entity. A God could create me, but he would have to leave it to myself to recognize myself as an “I.” I give my ego-consciousness to myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with myself. They must become part of my “I” if I am to recognize an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are there for me. What I can say is only, my “self” feels “red,” my “self' feels “warm.” Just as truly as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external world. [ 36 ] For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego, projected by the ego's imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own “self” the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing through its knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world. They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect, even if I no longer participate in its action. What I know has being only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a moral world order independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is something only for the ego, but this world order must be something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, believe it. In this manner Fichte also goes beyond knowledge and arrives at a belief. Compared to this belief, all knowledge is as dream to reality. The ego itself has only such a dream existence as long as it contemplates itself. It makes itself a picture of itself, which does not have to be anything but a passing picture; it is action alone that remains. Fichte describes this dream life of the world with significant words in his Vocation of Man:
In what a different light the moral world order, the world of belief, appears to Fichte:
[ 37 ] Because knowledge is a dream and the moral world order is the only true reality for Fichte, he places the life through which man participates in the moral world order higher than knowledge, the contemplation of things. “Nothing,” so Fichte maintains, “has unconditional value and significance except life; everything else, for instance thinking, poetic imagination and knowledge, has value only insofar as it refers in some way to the living, insofar as it proceeds from it or means to turn back into it.” [ 38 ] This is the fundamental ethical trait in Fichte's personality, which extinguished or reduced in significance everything in his world conception that does not directly tend toward the moral destination of man. He meant to establish the highest, the purest aims and standards for life, and for this purpose he refused to be distracted by any process of knowledge that might discover contradictions with the natural world order in these aims. Goethe made the statement, “The active person is always without conscience; no one has conscience except the onlooker.” He means to say that the contemplative man estimates everything in its true, real value, understanding and recognizing everything in its own proper place. The active man, however, is, above everything else, bent on seeing his demands fulfilled; he is not concerned with the question of whether or not he thereby encroaches upon the rights of things. Fichte was, above all, concerned with action; he was, however, unwilling to be charged by contemplation with lack of conscience. He, therefore, denied the value of contemplation. [ 39 ] To effect life immediately—this was Fichte's continuous endeavor. He felt most satisfied when he believed that his words could become action in others. It is under the influence of this ardent desire that he composed the following works. Demand to the Princess of Europe to Return the Freedom of Thought, Which They Have Heretofore Suppressed. Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness 1792; Contributions Toward the Correction of the Public Judgment Concerning the French Revolution 1793. This ardent desire also caused him to give his powerful speeches, Outline of the Present Age Presented in Lectures in Berlin in 1804–5; Direction Toward the Beatific Life or Doctrine of Religion, Lectures given in Berlin in 1806; finally, his Speeches to the German Nation, 1808. [ 40 ] Unconditional surrender to the moral world order, action that springs out of the deepest core of man's nature: These are the demands through which life obtains value and meaning. This view runs through all of Fichte's speeches and writings as the basic theme. In his Outline of the Present Age, he reprimands this age with flaming words for its egotism. He claims that everybody is only following the path prescribed by his lower desires, but these desires lead him away from the great totality that comprises the human community in moral harmony. Such an age must needs lead those who live in its tendency into decline and destruction. What Fichte meant to enliven in the human soul was the sense of duty and obligation. [ 41 ] In this fashion, Fichte attempted to exert a formative influence on the life of his time with his ideas because he saw these ideas as vigorously enlivened by the consciousness that man derives the highest content of his soul life from a world to which he can obtain access by settling his account with his “ego” all by himself. In so doing man feels himself in his true vocation. From such a conviction, Fichte coins the words, “I, myself, and my necessary purpose are the supersensible.” [ 42 ] To be aware of himself as consciously living in the supersensible is, according to Fichte, an experience of which man is capable. When he arrives at this experience, he then knows the “I” within himself, and it is only through this act that he becomes a philosopher. This experience, to be sure, cannot be “proven” to somebody who is unwilling to undergo it himself. How little Fichte considers such a “proof” possible is documented by expressions like, “The gift of a philosopher is inborn, furthered through education and then obtained by self-education, but there is no human art to make philosophers. For this reason, philosophy expects few proselytes among those men who are already formed, polished and perfected. . . .” [ 43 ] Fichte is intent on finding a soul constitution through which the human “ego” can experience itself. The knowledge of nature seems unsuitable to him to reveal anything of the essence of the “ego.” From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, thinkers arose who were concerned with the question: What element could be found in the picture of nature by means of which the human being could become explainable in this picture? Goethe did not see the question in this way. He felt a spiritual nature behind the externally manifested one. For him, the human soul is capable of experiences through which it lives not only in the externally manifested, but within the creative forces. Goethe was in quest of the idea, as were the Greeks, but he did not look for it as perceptible idea. He meant to find it in participating in the world processes through inner experience where these can no longer be perceived. Goethe searched in the soul for the life of nature. Fichte also searched in the soul itself, but he did not focus his search where nature lives in the soul but immediately where the soul feels its own life kindled without regard to any other world processes and world entities with which this life might be connected. With Fichte, a world conception arose that exhausted all its endeavor in the attempt to find an inner soul life that compared to the thought life of the Greeks, as did their thought life to the picture conception of the age before them. In Fichte, thought becomes an experience of the ego as the picture had become thought with the Greek thinkers. With Fichte, world conception is ready to experience self-consciousness; with Plato and Aristotle, it had arrived at the point to think soul consciousness. [ 44 ] Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make place for belief, so Fichte declared knowledge to be mere appearance in order to open the gates for living action, for moral activity. A similar attempt was also made by Schiller. Only in his case, the part that was claimed by belief in Kant's philosophy, and by action in that of Fichte, was now occupied by beauty. Schiller's significance in the development of world conception is usually underestimated. Goethe had to complain that he was not recognized as a natural scientist just because people had become accustomed to take him as a poet, and those who penetrate into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he is appreciated so little by the scholars who deal with the history of world conception, because Schiller's field is considered to be limited to the realm of poetry. [ 45 ] As a thoroughly self-dependent thinker, Schiller takes his attitude toward Kant, who had been so stimulating and thought-provoking to him. The loftiness of the moral belief to which Kant meant to lift man was highly appreciated by the poet who, in his Robbers, and Cabal and Love, had held a mirror to the corruption of his time. But he asked himself the question: Should it indeed be a necessary truth that man can be lifted to the height of “the categorical imperative” only through the struggle against his desires and urges? Kant wanted to ascribe to the sensual nature of man only the inclination toward the low, the self-seeking, the gratification of the senses, and only he who lifted himself above the sensual nature, who mortified the flesh and who alone allowed the pure spiritual voice of duty to speak within him: Only he could be virtuous. Thus, Kant debased the natural man in order to be able to elevate the moral man so much the higher. To Schiller this judgment seemed to contain something that was unworthy of man. Should it not be possible to ennoble the impulses of man to become in themselves inclined toward the life of duty and morality? They would then not have to be suppressed to become morally effective. Schiller, therefore, opposes Kant's rigorous demand of duty in the epigram:
[ 46 ] Schiller attempted to dissolve these “scruples of conscience” in his own fashion. There are actually two impulses ruling in man: The impulses of the sensual desire and the impulse of reason. If man surrenders to the sensual impulse, he is a plaything of his desires and passions, in short, of his egoism. If he gives himself completely up to the impulses of reason, he is a slave of its rigorous commands, its inexorable logic, its categorical imperative. A man who wants to live exclusively for the sensual impulse must silence reason; a man who wants to serve reason only must mortify sensuality. If the former, nevertheless, listens to the voice of reason, he will yield to it only reluctantly against his own will; if the latter observes the call of his desires, he feels them as a burden on his path of virtue. The physical nature of man and his spiritual character then seem to live in a fateful discord. Is there no state in man in which both the impulses, the sensual and the spiritual, live in harmony? Schiller's answer to this question is positive. There is, indeed, such a state in man. It is the state in which the beautiful is created and enjoyed. He who creates a work of art follows a free impulse of nature. He follows an inclination in doing so, but it is not physical passion that drives him. It is imagination; it is the spirit. This also holds for a man who surrenders to the enjoyment of a work of art. The work of art, while it affects his sensuality, satisfies his spirit at the same time. Man can yield to his desires without observing the higher laws of the spirit; he can comply with his duties without paying attention to sensuality. A beautiful work of art affects his delight without awakening his desires, and it transports him into a world in which he abides by virtue of his own disposition. Man is comparable to a child in this state, following his inclinations in his actions without asking if they run counter to the laws of reason. “The sensual man is led through beauty . . . into thinking; through beauty, the spiritual man is led back to matter, returned to the world of the senses” (Letters on the Esthetic Education of Man; Letter 18).
As man is, through beauty, neither the slave of sensuality nor of reason, but because through its mediation both factors contribute their effect in a balanced cooperation in man's soul, Schiller compares the instinct for beauty with the child's impulse who, in his play, does not submit his spirit to the laws of reason, but employs it freely according to his inclination. It is for this reason that Schiller calls the impulse for beauty, play-impulse:
In the realization of this ideal play-impulse, man finds the reality of freedom. Now, he no longer obeys reason, nor does he follow sensual inclinations any longer. He now acts from inclination as if the spring of his action were reason. “Man shall only play with beauty and it is only with beauty that he shall play. . To state it without further reserve, man plays only when he is human in the full sense of the word and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Schiller could also have said: In play man is free; in following the command of duty, and in yielding to sensuality, he is unfree. If man wants to be human in the full meaning of the word, and also with regard to his moral actions, that is to say, if he really wants to be free, then he must live in the same relation to his virtues as he does to beauty. He must ennoble his inclinations into virtues and must be so permeated by his virtues that he feels no other inclination than that of following them. A man who has established this harmony between inclination and duty can, in every moment, count on the morality of his actions as a matter of course. [ 47 ] From this viewpoint, one can also look at man's social life. A man who follows his sensual desires is self-seeking. He would always be bent on his own well-being if the state did not regulate the social intercourse through laws of reason. The free man accomplishes through his own impulse what the state must demand of the self-seeking. In a community of free men no compulsory laws are necessary.
Thus, Schiller considers a moral realm as an ideal in which the temper of virtue rules with the same ease and freedom as the esthetic taste governs in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty the model of a perfect moral social order in which man is liberated in every direction. Schiller closes the beautiful essay in which he proclaims this ideal with the question of whether such an order had anywhere been realized. He answers with the words:
[ 48 ] In this virtue refined into beauty, Schiller found a mediation between the world conceptions of Kant and Goethe. No matter how great the attraction that Schiller had found in Kant when the latter had defended the ideal of a pure humanity against the prevailing moral order, when Schiller became more intimately acquainted with Goethe, he became an admirer of Goethe's view of world and life. Schiller's mind, always relentlessly striving for the purest clarity of thought, was not satisfied before he had succeeded in penetrating also conceptually into this wisdom of Goethe. The high satisfaction Goethe derived from his view of beauty and art, and also for his conduct of life, attracted Schiller more and more to the mode of Goethe's conception. In the letter in which Schiller thanks Goethe for sending him his Wilhelm Meister, he says:
This judgment of Schiller can only refer to the Kantian philosophy with which he had had his experiences. In many respects, it estranges man from nature. It approaches nature with no confidence in it but recognizes as valid truth only what is derived from man's own mental organization. Through this trait all judgments of that philosophy seem to lack the lively content and color so characteristic of everything that has its source in the immediate experience of nature's events and things themselves. This philosophy moves in bloodless, gray and cold abstractions. It has sacrificed the warmth we derive from the immediate touch with things and beings and has exchanged the frigidity of its abstract concepts for it. In the field of morality, also, Kant's world conception presents the same antagonism to nature. The duty-concept of pure reason is regarded as its highest aims. What man loves, what his inclinations tend to, everything in man's being that is immediately rooted in man's nature, must be subordinated to this ideal of duty. Kant goes even as far as the realm of beauty to extinguish the share that man must have in it according to his original sensations and feelings. The beautiful is to produce a delight that is completely “free from interest.” Compare that with how devoted, how really interested Schiller approaches a work in which he admires the highest stage of artistic production. He says concerning Wilhelm Meister:
These are not the words of somebody who believes in delight without interest, but of a man who is convinced that the pleasure in the beautiful is capable of being so refined that a complete surrender to this pleasure does not involve degradation. Interest is not to be extinguished as we approach the work of art; rather are we to become capable of including in our interest what has its source in the spirit. The “true” man is to develop this kind of interest for the beautiful also with respect to his moral conceptions. Schiller writes in a letter to Goethe, “It is really worth observing that the slackness with regard to esthetic things appears always to be connected with moral slackness, and that a pure rigorous striving for high beauty with the highest degree of liberality concerning everything that is nature will contain in itself rigorism in moral life.” [ 49 ] The estrangement from nature in the world conception and in all of the culture of the time in which he lived was felt so strongly by Schiller that he made it the subject of his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. He compares the life conception of his time with that of the Greeks and raises the question, “How is it that we, who are infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, can render homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to her with fervour and can embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest sentiments.” He answers this question by saying:
This was entirely different with the Greeks. They lived their lives within the bounds of the natural. Everything they did sprang from their natural conception, feeling and sentiment. They were intimately bound to nature. Modern man feels himself in his own being placed in contrast to nature. As the urge toward this primeval mother of being cannot be extinguished, it transforms itself in the modern soul into a yearning for nature, into a search for it. The Greek had nature; modern man searches for nature.
The fundamental mood of the Greek spirit was naive, that of modern man is sentimental. The Greeks' world conception could, for this reason, be rightly realistic, for he had not yet separated the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature included the spirit. If he surrendered to nature, it was to a spirit-saturated nature. This is not so with modern man. He has detached the spirit from nature; he has lifted the spirit into the realm of gray abstractions. If he were to surrender to his nature, he would yield to a nature deprived of all spirit. Therefore, his loftiest striving must be directed toward the ideal; through the striving for this goal, spirit and nature are to be reconciled again. In Goethe's mode of spirit, however, Schiller found something that was akin to the Greek spirit. Goethe felt that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his eyes because he felt reality as an undivided unity of spirit and nature. According to Schiller, Goethe had preserved something in himself that will be attained again by the “sentimental man” when he has reached the climax of his striving. Modern man arrives at such a summit in the esthetic mood as Schiller describes it in the state of soul in which sensuality and reason are harmonized again. [ 50 ] The nature of the development of modern world conception is significantly characterized in the observation Schiller made to Goethe in his letter of August 23, 1794:
Schiller, as these sentences show, is aware of the course that the development of soul life has taken from the age of the ancient Greeks until his own time, for the Greek soul life disclosed itself in the life of thought and he could accept this unveiling because thought was for him a perception like the perception of color and sounds. This kind of thought life has faded away for modern man. The powers that weave creatively through the world must be experienced by him as an inner soul experience, and in order to render this imperceptible thought life inwardly visible, it nevertheless must be filled by imagination. This imagination must be such that it is felt as one with the creative powers of nature. [ 51 ] Because soul consciousness has been transformed into self-consciousness in modern man, the question of world conception arises: How can self-consciousness experience itself so vividly that it feels its conscious process as permeating the creative process of the living world forces? Schiller answered this question for himself in his own fashion when he claimed the life in the artistic experience as his ideal. In this experience the human self-consciousness feels its kinship with an element that transcends the mere nature picture. In it, man feels himself seized by the spirit as he surrenders as a natural and sensual being to the world. Leibniz had attempted to understand the human soul as a monad. Fichte had not proceeded from a mere idea to gain clarity of the nature of the human soul; he searched for a form of experience in which this soul lays hold on its own being. Schiller raises the question: Is there a form of experience for the human soul in which it can feel how it has its roots in spiritual reality? Goethe experiences ideas in himself that present themselves to him at the same time as ideas of nature. In Goethe, Fichte and Schiller, the experienced idea—one could also say, the idea-experience—forces its way into the soul. Such a process had previously happened in the world of the Greeks with the perceived idea, the idea-perception. [ 52 ] The world and life conception that lived in Goethe in a natural (naive) way, and toward which Schiller strove on all detours of his thought development, does not feel the need for the kind of universally valid truth that sees its ideal in the mathematical form. It is satisfied by another truth, which our spirit derives from the immediate intercourse with the real world. The insights Goethe derived from the contemplation of the works of art in Italy were, to be sure, not of the unconditional certainty as are the theorems of mathematics, but they also were less abstract. Goethe approached them with the feeling, “Here is necessity, here is God.” A truth that could not also be revealed in a perfect work of art did not exist for Goethe. What art makes manifest with its technical means of tone, marble, color, rhythm, etc., springs from the same source from which the philosopher also draws who does not avail himself of visual means of presentation but who uses as his means of expression only thought, the idea itself. “Poetry points at the mysteries of nature and attempts to solve them through the picture,” says Goethe. “Philosophy points at the mysteries of reason and attempts to solve them through the word.” In the final analysis, however, reason and nature are, for him, inseparably one; the same truth is the foundation of both. An endeavor for knowledge, which lives in detachment from things in an abstract world, does not seem to him to be the highest form of cognitive life. “It would be the highest attainment to understand that all factual knowledge is already theory.” The blueness of the sky reveals the fundamental law of color phenomena to us. “One should not search for anything behind the phenomena; they, themselves, are the message.” The psychologist, Heinroth, in his Anthology, called the mode of thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the natural formation of plants and animals, an “object-related thinking” (Gegenstaendliches Denken). What he means is that this mode of thinking does not detach itself from its objects, but that the objects of observation are intimately permeated with this thinking, that Goethe's mode of thinking is at the same time a form of observation, and his mode of observation a form of thinking. Schiller becomes a subtle observer as he describes this mode of spirit. He writes on this subject in a letter to Goethe:
For the world conception of Goethe and Schiller, truth is not only contained in science, but also in art. Goethe expresses his opinion as follows, “I think science could be called the knowledge of the general art. Art would be science turned into action. Science would be reason, and art its mechanism, wherefore one could also call it practical science. Thus, finally, science would be the theorem and art the problem.” Goethe describes the interdependence of scientific cognition and artistic expression of knowledge thus:
Thus, truth rules in the process of artistic creation for the artistic style depends, according to this view, “. . . on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as it is permissible to know it in visible and touchable forms.” The fact that creative imagination is granted a share in the process of knowledge and that the abstract intellect is no longer considered to be the only cognitive faculty is a consequence of this view concerning truth. The conceptions on which Goethe based his contemplation's on plant and animal formations were not gray and abstract thoughts but sensual-supersensual pictures, created by spontaneous imagination. Only observation combined with imagination can really lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction; this is Goethe's conviction. For this reason, Goethe said about Galileo that he made his observations as a genius “for whom one case represents a thousand cases . . . when he developed the doctrine of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.” Imagination uses the one case in order to produce a content-saturated picture of what is essential in the appearances; the intellect that operates by means of abstractions can, through combination, comparison and calculation of the appearances, gain no more than a general rule of their course. This belief in the possible cognitive function of an imagination that rises into a conscious participation in the creative world process is supported by Goethe's entire world conception. Whoever, like him, sees nature's activity in everything, can also see in the spiritual content of the human imagination nothing but higher products of nature. The pictures of fantasy are products of nature and, as they represent nature, they can only contain truth, for otherwise nature would lie to herself in these afterimages that she creates of herself. Only men with imagination can attain to the highest stages of knowledge. Goethe calls these men the “comprehensive” and the “contemplative” in contrast to the merely “intellectual-inquisitive,” who have remained on a lower stage of cognitive life.
It cannot occur to the believer in such a form of cognition to speak of limitations of human knowledge in a Kantian fashion, for he experiences within himself what man needs as his truth. The core of nature is in the inner life of man. The world conception of Goethe and Schiller does not demand of its truth that it should be a repetition of the world phenomena in conceptual form. It does not demand that its conception should literally correspond to something outside man. What appears in man's inner life as an ideal element, as something spiritual, is as such not to be found in any external world; it appears as the climax of the whole development. For this reason, it does not, according to this philosophy, have to appear in all human beings in the same shape. It can take on an individual form in any individual. Whoever expects to find the truth in the agreement with something external can acknowledge only one form of it, and he will look for it, with Kant, in the type of metaphysics that alone “will be able to present itself as science.” Whoever sees the element in which, as Goethe states in his essay on Winckelmann, “the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice as having arrived at its aim in which it could admire the climax of its own becoming and being,” such a thinker can say with Goethe, “If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call this truth; in this way everybody can have his own truth and it is yet the same.” For “man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact apparatus of physics that is possible. Yet, that the experiments separated, as it were, from man, and that one wants to know nature only according to the indications of artificial instruments, even intending to limit and prove in this way what nature is capable of, is the greatest misfortune of modern physics.” Man, however, “stands so high that in him is represented what cannot be represented otherwise. What is the string and all mechanical division of it compared to the ear of the musician? One can even say, ‘What are all elementary phenomena of nature themselves compared to man who must master and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to himself to a tolerable degree.’ ” [ 53 ] Concerning his world picture, Goethe speaks neither of a mere knowledge of intellectual concepts nor of belief; he speaks of a contemplative perception in the spirit. He writes to Jacobi, “You trust in belief in God; I, in seeing.” This seeing in the spirit as it is meant here thus enters into the development of world conception as the soul force that is appropriate to an age to which thought is no longer what it had been to the Greek thinkers, but in which thought had revealed itself as a product of self-consciousness, a product, however, that is arrived at through the fact that this self-consciousness is aware of itself as having its being within the spiritually creative forces of nature. Goethe is the representative of an epoch of world conception in which the need is felt to make the transition from mere thinking to spiritual seeing. Schiller strives to justify this transition against Kant's position. [ 54 ] The close alliance that was formed by Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries between poetic imagination and world conception has freed this conception from the lifeless expression that it must take on when it exclusively moves in the region of the abstract intellect. This alliance has resulted in the belief that there is a personal element in world conception. It is possible for man to work out an approach to the world for himself that is in accordance with his own specific nature and enter thereby into the world of reality, not merely into a world of fantastic schemes. His ideal no longer needs to be that of Kant, which is formed after the model of mathematics and arrives at a world picture that is once and for all finished and completed. Only from a spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that has an inspiring effect on the human individuality can a conception like that of Jean Paul (1763 – 1825) arise. “The heart of a genius, to whom all other splendor and help-giving energies are subordinated, has one genuine symptom, namely, a new outlook on world and life.” How could it be the mark of the highest developed man, of genius, to create a new world and life conception if the conceived world consisted only in one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences inside his own self the ultimate existence. He writes to Jacobi:
Jean Paul will not allow anything to deprive him of the right to experience truth inwardly and to employ all forces of the soul for this purpose. He will not be restricted to the use of logical intellect.
With these words he rejects the world-estranged moral order of Kant.
The critical analysis of the intellect, which proceeded with an extreme logical rigor, had, in Kant and Fichte, come to the point of reducing the self-dependent significance of the real life-saturated world to a mere shadow, to a dream picture. This view was unbearable to men gifted with spontaneous imagination, who enriched life by the creation of their imaginative power. These men felt the reality; it was there in their perception, present in their souls, and now it was attempted to prove to them its mere dreamlike quality. “The windows of the philosophical academic halls are too high to allow a view into the alleys of real life,” was the answer of Jean Paul. [ 55 ] Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced all knowledge that does not spring from our own inner source. The counter movement to his world conception is formed by the Romantic Movement. Fichte acknowledges only the truth, and the inner life of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the world conception of the romanticists acknowledges only the inner life, and it declares as valuable everything that springs from this inner life. The ego is not to be chained by anything external. Whatever it produces is justified. [ 56 ] One may say about the romantic movement that it carries Schiller's statement to its extreme consequence, “Man plays only where he is human in the full sense of the word, and he is only wholly human when he is playing.” Romanticism wants to make the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed man knows no other norms than the laws he creates through his freely ruling imaginative power, in the same way as the artist creates those laws he impresses into his works. He rises above everything that determines him from without and lives entirely through the springs of his own self. The whole world is for him nothing but a material for his esthetic play. The seriousness of man in his everyday life is not rooted in truth. The soul that arrives at true knowledge cannot take seriously the things by themselves; for such a soul they are not in themselves valuable. They are endowed with value only by the soul. The mood of a spirit that is aware of his sovereignty over things is called by the romanticists, the ironical mood of spirit. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819) gave the following explanation of the term “romantic irony”: The spirit of the artist must comprise all directions in one sweeping glance and this glance, hovering above everything, looking down on everything and annihilating it, we call “irony.” Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), one of the leading spokesmen for the romantic turn of spirit, states concerning this mood of irony that it takes everything in at a glance and rises infinitely above everything that is limited, also above some form of art, virtue or genius. Whoever lives in this mood feels bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of his activity for him. He can “at his own pleasure tune himself to be either philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, antique or modern.” The ironical spirit rises above an eternal moral world order, for this spirit is not told what to do by anything except himself. The ironist is to do what he pleases, for his morality can only be an esthetic morality. The romanticists are the heirs of Fichte's thought of the uniqueness of the ego. They were, however, unwilling to fill this ego with a moral belief, as Fichte did, but stood above all on the right of fantasy and of the unrestrained power of the soul. With them, thinking was entirely absorbed by poetic imagination. Novalis says, “It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that the poet represents a special profession. It is not anything special by itself. It is the mode of activity proper to the human spirit. Are not the imaginations of man's heart at work every minute?” The ego, exclusively concerned with itself, can arrive at the highest truth: “It seems to man that he is engaged in a conversation, and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most evident thoughts in a miraculous fashion. Fundamentally, what the romanticists aimed at did not differ from what Goethe and Schiller had also made their credo: A conception of man through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible. Novalis experiences his poems and contemplation's in a soul mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that of Fichte. Fichte's spirit, however, works the sharp contours of pure concepts, while that of Novalis springs from a richness of soul, feeling where others think, living in the element of love where others aim to embrace what is and what goes on in the world with ideas. It is the tendency of this age, as can be seen in its representative thinkers, to search for the higher spirit nature in which the self-conscious soul is rooted because it cannot have its roots in the world of sense reality. Novalis feels and experiences himself as having his being within the higher spirit nature. What he expresses he feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit nature. He writes:
Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words: The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should see ourselves in the midst of it. |