Knowledge
of Freedom
CHAPTER TWO
The
Fundamental Desire for Knowledge
Two souls reside, alas, within my breast,
And each one from the other would be parted.
The one holds fast, in sturdy lust for love,
With clutching organs clinging to the world;
The other strongly rises from the gloom
To lofty fields of ancient heritage.
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In these words
Goethe
expresses a characteristic feature
which is deeply rooted in human nature. Man is not organized
as a self-consistent unity. He always demands more than the
world, of its own accord, gives him. Nature has endowed us
with needs; among them are some that she leaves to our own
activity to satisfy. Abundant as are the gifts she has bestowed
upon us, still more abundant are our desires. We seem born
to be dissatisfied. And our thirst for knowledge is but a
special instance of this dissatisfaction. We look twice at a
tree. The first time we see its branches at rest, the second
time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation.
Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at rest, now in
motion? Every glance at Nature evokes in us a multitude of
questions. Every phenomenon we meet sets us a new problem.
Every experience is a riddle. We see that from the egg
there emerges a creature like the mother animal, and we ask
the reason for the likeness. We observe a living being grow
and develop to a certain degree of perfection, and we seek the
underlying conditions for this experience. Nowhere are we
satisfied with what Nature spreads out before our senses.
Everywhere we seek what we call the explanation of the
facts.
The something more which we seek in things, over and
above what is immediately given to us in them, splits our
whole being into two parts. We become conscious of our
antithesis to the world. We confront the world as independent
beings. The universe appears to us in two opposite parts:
I and World.
We erect this barrier between ourselves and the world as
soon as consciousness first dawns in us. But we never cease to
feel that, in spite of all, we belong to the world, that there
is a connecting link between it and us, and that we are beings
within, and not without, the universe.
This feeling makes us strive to bridge over this antithesis,
and in this bridging lies ultimately the whole spiritual
striving of mankind. The history of our spiritual life is a
continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the
world. Religion, art and science follow, one and all, this
aim. The religious believer seeks in the revelation which
God grants him the solution to the universal riddle which
his I, dissatisfied with the world of mere appearance, sets
before him. The artist seeks to embody in his material the
ideas that are in his I, in order to reconcile what lives in him
with the world outside. He too feels dissatisfied with the
world of mere appearance and seeks to mould into it that
something more which his I, transcending it, contains.
The thinker seeks the laws of phenomena, and strives to
penetrate by thinking what he experiences by observing.
Only when we have made the world-content into our
thought-content
do we again find the unity out of which we had
separated ourselves. We shall see later that this goal can be
reached only if the task of the research scientist is conceived
at a much deeper level than is often the case. The whole
situation I have described here presents itself to us on the
stage of history in the conflict between the one-world theory,
or monism, and the two-world theory, or dualism.
Dualism pays attention only to the separation between I
and World which the consciousness of man has brought
about. All its efforts consist in a vain struggle to reconcile
these opposites, which it calls now spirit and matter, now
subject and object, now thinking and appearance.
It feels that
there must be a bridge between the two worlds but is not in
a position to find it. In that man is aware of himself as “I”,
he cannot but think of this “I” as being on the side of the
spirit; and in contrasting this “I” with the world, he is
bound to put on the world's side the realm of percepts given
to the senses, that is, the world of matter. In doing so, man
puts himself right into the middle of this antithesis of spirit
and matter. He is the more compelled to do so because his
own body belongs to the material world. Thus the “I”, or
Ego, belongs to the realm of spirit as a part of it; the material
objects and events which are perceived by the senses belong
to the “World”. All the riddles which relate to spirit and
matter, man must inevitably rediscover in the fundamental
riddle of his own nature.
Monism pays attention only to the unity and tries either
to deny or to slur over the opposites, present though they
are. Neither of these two points of view can satisfy us, for
they do not do justice to the facts. Dualism sees in spirit (I)
and matter (World) two fundamentally different entities, and
cannot, therefore, understand how they can interact with one
another. How should spirit be aware of what goes on in
matter, seeing that the essential nature of matter is quite
alien to spirit? Or how in these circumstances should spirit
act upon matter, so as to translate its intentions into actions?
The most ingenious and the most absurd hypotheses have
been propounded to answer these questions. Up to the present,
however, monism is not in a much better position. It
has tried three different ways of meeting the difficulty.
Either it denies spirit and becomes materialism; or it denies
matter in order to seek its salvation in spiritualism
(see fn 1); or it
asserts that even in the simplest entities in the world, spirit
and matter are indissolubly bound together so that there is
no need to marvel at the appearance in man of these two
modes of existence, seeing that they are never found apart.
Materialism can never offer a satisfactory explanation of
the world. For every attempt at an explanation must begin
with the formation of thoughts about the phenomena of the
world.
Materialism thus begins with the thought of matter
or material processes. But, in doing so, it is already
confronted by two different sets of facts: the material world,
and the thoughts about it. The materialist seeks to make
these latter intelligible by regarding them as purely material
processes. He believes that thinking takes place in the brain,
much in the same way that digestion takes place in the
animal organs. Just as he attributes mechanical and organic
effects to matter, so he credits matter in certain circumstances
with the capacity to think. He overlooks that, in doing so, he
is merely shifting the problem from one place to another. He
ascribes the power of thinking to matter instead of to himself.
And thus he is back again at his starting point. How
does matter come to think about its own nature? Why is it
not simply satisfied with itself and content just to exist? The
materialist has turned his attention away from the definite
subject, his own I, and has arrived at an image of something
quite vague and indefinite. Here the old riddle meets him
again. The materialistic conception cannot solve the problem;
it can only shift it from one place to another.
What of the spiritualistic theory? The genuine spiritualist
denies to matter all independent existence and regards it
merely as a product of spirit. But when he tries to use this
theory to solve the riddle of his own human nature, he finds
himself driven into a corner. Over against the “I” or Ego,
which can be ranged on the side of spirit, there stands directly
the world of the senses. No spiritual approach to it seems
open. Only with the help of material processes can it be perceived
and experienced by the “I”. Such material processes
the “I” does not discover in itself so long as it regards its
own nature as exclusively spiritual. In what it achieves
spiritually by its own effort, the sense-perceptible world is
never to be found. It seems as if the “I” had to concede that
the world would be a closed book to it unless it could establish
a non-spiritual relation to the world. Similarly, when it
comes to action, we have to translate our purposes into
realities with the help of material things and forces. We are,
therefore, referred back to the outer world.
The most
extreme spiritualist — or rather, the thinker who through his
absolute idealism appears as extreme spiritualist — is Johann
Gottlieb Fichte. He attempts to derive the whole edifice of
the world from the “I”. What he has actually accomplished
is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any
content of experience. As little as it is possible for the
materialist to argue the spirit away, just as little is it possible
for the spiritualist to argue away the outer world of matter.
When man reflects upon the “I”, he perceives in the first
instance the work of this “I” in the conceptual elaboration
of the world of ideas. Hence a world-conception that inclines
towards spiritualism may feel tempted, in looking at man's
own essential nature, to acknowledge nothing of spirit except
this world of ideas. In this way spiritualism becomes one-sided
idealism. Instead of going on to penetrate through the
world of ideas to the spiritual world, idealism identifies the
spiritual world with the world of ideas itself. As a result, it
is compelled to remain fixed with its world-outlook in the
circle of activity of the Ego, as if bewitched.
A curious variant of idealism is to be found in the view
which
Friedrich Albert Lange
has put forward in his widely read
History of Materialism.
He holds that the materialists
are quite right in declaring all phenomena, including our
thinking, to be the product of purely material processes, but,
conversely, matter and its processes are for him themselves
the product of our thinking.
The senses give us only the effects of things, not true copies,
much less the things themselves. But among these mere effects
we must include the senses themselves together with the brain
and the molecular vibrations which we assume to go on there.
That is, our thinking is produced by the material processes,
and these by the thinking of our I. Lange's philosophy is
thus nothing more than the story, in philosophical terms, of
the intrepid Baron Münchhausen, who holds himself up in
the air by his own pigtail.
The third form of monism is the one which finds even in
the simplest entity (the atom) both matter and spirit already
united. But nothing is gained by this either, except that the
question, which really originates in our consciousness, is
shifted to another place. How comes it that the simple entity
manifests itself in a two-fold manner, if it is an indivisible
unity?
Against all these theories we must urge the fact that we
meet with the basic and primary opposition first in our own
consciousness. It is we ourselves who break away from the
bosom of Nature and contrast ourselves as “I” with the
“World”. Goethe has given classic expression to this in his
essay Nature, although his manner may at first sight be considered
quite unscientific: “Living in the midst of her
(Nature) we are strangers to her. Ceaselessly she speaks to
us, yet betrays none of her secrets.” But Goethe knows the
reverse side too: “Men are all in her and she in all.”
However true it may be that we have estranged ourselves
from Nature, it is none the less true that we feel we are in her
and belong to her. It can be only her own working which
pulsates also in us.
We must find the way back to her again. A simple reflection
can point this way out to us. We have, it is true, torn
ourselves away from Nature, but we must none the less have
taken something of her with us into our own being. This
element of Nature in us we must seek out, and then we shall
find the connection with her once more. Dualism fails to do
this. It considers human inwardness as a spiritual entity
utterly alien to Nature, and then attempts somehow to hitch
it on to Nature. No wonder that it cannot find the connecting
link. We can find Nature outside us only if we have first
learned to know her within us. What is akin to her within us
must be our guide. This marks out our path of enquiry. We
shall attempt no speculations concerning the interaction of
Nature and spirit. Rather shall we probe into the depths of
our own being, to find there those elements which we saved
in our flight from Nature.
Investigation of our own being must give us the answer
to the riddle. We must reach a point where we can say to
ourselves, “Here we are no longer merely ‘I’, here is
something which is more than ‘I’.”
I am well aware
that many who have read thus far will not
find my discussion “scientific”, as this term is used today.
To this I can only reply that I have so far been concerned
not with scientific results of any kind, but with the simple
description of what every one of us experiences in his own
consciousness. The inclusion of a few phrases about attempts
to reconcile man's consciousness and the world serves solely
to elucidate the actual facts. I have therefore made no
attempt to use the various expressions “I”, “Spirit”,
“World”, “Nature”, in the precise way that is usual in
psychology and philosophy. The ordinary consciousness is
unaware of the sharp distinctions made by the sciences, and
my purpose so far has been solely to record the facts of
everyday experience. I am concerned, not with the way in
which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with
the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives.
Footnotes:
- The author refers to philosophical
“spiritualism” as opposed to philosophical
“materialism”. See reference to
Fichte
that follows. — Translator's Footnote.
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