Modern Man
and His World Conception
The Austrian thinker, Bartholomaeus Carneri (1871 – 1909) attempted to
open wide perspectives of world conception and ethics on the ground of
Darwinism. Eleven years after the appearance of Darwin's Origin of
Species, he published his work, Morality and Darwinism
(1871), in which he used the new world of ideas as the basis of an
ethical world conception in a comprehensive way. (Compare his books,
Foundation of Ethics, 1881, Man as His Own Purpose,
1878, and Modern Man, Essays on Life Conduct, 1891.)
Carneri tries to find in the picture of nature the elements through
which self-conscious ego is conceivable within this picture. He would
like to think this world picture so wide and so comprehensive as to
contain the human soul within its scope. He aims at the reunion of the
ego with the mother ground of nature, from which it has become
separated. He represents in his world conception the opposite tendency
to the philosophy for which the world becomes an illusion of the
imagination and which, for that reason, renounces all connection with
the reality of the world so far as knowledge is concerned.
Carneri rejects all moral philosophy that intends to proclaim for man
other moral commandments than those that result from his own nature.
We must remember that man is not to be understood as a special being
beside all other things of nature but that he is a being that has
gradually developed from lower entities according to purely natural
laws. Carneri is convinced that all life is like a chemical process.
“The digestion in man is such a process as well as the nutrition
of the plant.” At the same time, he emphasizes that the chemical
process must be raised to a higher form of evolution if it is to
become plant or animal.
Life is a chemical process of a special kind; it is the individualized
chemical process, for the chemical process can reach a point where it
can maintain itself without certain conditions . . . that it formerly
needed.
It is apparent that Carneri observes that lower processes are
transformed into higher ones, that matter takes on higher forms of
existence through the perfection of its functions.
As matter, we conceive the substance insofar as the properties that
result from its divisibility and its motion effect our senses
physically, that is to say, as mass. If this division or
differentiation goes so far as to produce phenomena that are no longer
sensually perceptible but only perceptible to our thinking, we say the
effect of the substance is spiritual.
Also, morality does not exist as a special form of reality; it is a
process of nature on a higher level. Therefore, the question cannot be
raised: What is man to do to comply with some special moral
commandment that is valid for him? We can only ask: What appears as
morality when the lower processes develop into the higher spiritual
ones?
While moral philosophy proclaims certain moral laws and commands that
they are to be kept so that man may be what he ought to be, our ethics
develops man as he is. It wants to do no more than to show him what he
may at some time become. While the former moralizing philosophy knows
of duties to be enforced by punishments, our ethics uphold an ideal
from which any compulsion would merely distract because it can be
approached only on the path of knowledge and of freedom.
As the chemical process individualizes itself into a living being on a
higher level, so on a still higher level life is transformed into
self-consciousness. The entity that has become self-conscious no
longer merely looks out into nature; it looks back into itself.
The awakened self-consciousness constituted, if conceived
dualistically, a break with nature, and man felt himself separated
from nature. This breach existed only for him, but for him it was
complete. It had not developed as suddenly as it is taught in Genesis,
just as the days of creation must not be taken literally as days. But
with the completion of self-consciousness, the breach was a fact and
with the feeling of boundless lonesomeness that overcame man in this
state, his ethical development began.
Up to a certain point nature leads life. At this point,
self-consciousness arises, man comes into existence. “His further
development is his own work and what keeps him on the course of
progress is the power and the gradual clarification of his
wishes.” Nature takes care of a11 other beings, but it endows man
with desires and expects him to take care of their fulfillment. Man
has within himself the impulse to arrange his existence in agreement
with his wishes. This impulse is his desire for happiness:
This impulse is unknown to the animal. It knows only the instinct for
self-preservation; to develop that instinct into the desire for
happiness, the human self-consciousness is necessary as a fundamental
condition.
The striving for happiness is the basis of all action:
The martyr who sacrifices his life, be it for his scientific
conviction or for his belief in God, aims for nothing but his
happiness. He finds it in the first case in his loyalty of conviction,
and in the second case he expects it in a better world. To everyone
happiness is the last aim and no matter how different the picture may
be that the individual has of this happiness, it is to every sentient
living being the beginning and the end of all his thinking and
feeling.
As nature gives man only the need for happiness, this image of
happiness must have its origin within man himself. Man creates for
himself the pictures of his happiness. They spring from his ethical
fantasy. Carneri finds in this fantasy the new concept that prescribes
the ideals of our action to our thinking. The “good” is, for
Carneri, “identical with progressive evolution, and since
evolution is pleasure . . . happiness not merely constituted the aim
but also the moving element that drives toward that aim.”
Carneri attempted to find the way that leads from the natural order to
the sources of morality. He believed he had found the ideal power that
propels the ethical world order as spontaneously from one moral event
to the next as the material forces on the physical level develop
formation after formation and fact after fact.
Carneri's mode of conception is entirely in agreement with the idea of
evolution that does not permit the notion that a later phase of
development is already pre-formed in an earlier one, but considers it
as a really new formation. The chemical process does not contain
implicitly animal life, and happiness develops as an entirely new
element on the ground of the animal's instinct for self-preservation.
The difficulty that lies in this thought caused a penetrating thinker,
W. H. Rolph, to develop the line of reasoning that he set down in his
book, Biological Problems, an Attempt at the Development of a
Rational Ethics (1884). Rolph asks himself, “What is the
reason that a form of life does not remain at a given stage but
develops progressively and becomes more perfect?” This problem
presents no difficulty for a thinker who maintains that the later form
is already implicitly contained in the earlier one. For him, it is
quite clear that what is at first implicit will become explicit at a
certain time. But Rolph was not willing to accept this answer. On the
other hand, however, he was also not satisfied with the “struggle
for existence” as a solution of the problem. If a living being
fights only for the satisfaction of its necessary needs, it will, to
be sure, overpower its weaker competitors, but it will itself remain
what it is. If one does not want to attribute a mysterious, mystical
tendency toward perfection to this being, one must seek the cause of
this perfection in external, natural circumstances. Rolph tries to
give an explanation by stating that, whenever possible, every being
satisfies its needs to a greater extent than is necessary.
Only by introducing the idea of insatiability does the Darwinian
principle of perfection in the struggle for life become acceptable,
for it is only thus that we have an explanation for the fact that the
creature acquires, whenever it can do so, more than it needs for
maintaining its status quo, and that it grows excessively whenever the
occasion is given for it. (Biological Problems)
What takes place in this realm of living beings is, in Rolph's
opinion, not a struggle for acquisition of the necessary means of life
but a “struggle for surplus acquisition.” “While
the Darwinist knows of no life struggle as long as the existence of
the creature is not threatened, I consider this struggle as ever
present. It is simply primarily a struggle for life, a struggle for
the increase of life, not a struggle for existence.” Rolph draws
from these natural scientific presuppositions the conclusions for his
ethics:
Expansion of life, not its mere preservation, struggle for advantage,
not for existence, is the rallying cry. The mere acquisition of life's
necessities and sustenance is not sufficient; what must also be gained
is comfort, if not wealth, power and influence. The search and
striving for continuous improvement of the condition of life is the
characteristic impulse of animal and man. (Biological Problems)
Rolph's thoughts stimulated Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
to produce his own ideas of evolution after having gone through other
phases of his soul life. At the beginning of his career as an author,
the idea of evolution and natural science in general had been far from
his thoughts. He was at first deeply impressed by the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer, and from him he adopted the conception of pain as
lying at the bottom of all existence. Unlike Schopenhauer and Eduard
van Hartmann, Nietzsche did not seek the redemption from this pain in
the fulfillment of moral tasks. It was his belief rather that the
transformation of life into a work of art that leads beyond the pain
of existence. Thus, the Greeks created a world of beauty and
appearance in order to make this painful existence bearable. In
Richard Wagner's musical drama he believed he found a world in which
beauty lifts man beyond pain. It was in a certain sense a world of
illusion that was quite consciously sought by Nietzsche in order to
overcome the misery of the world. He was of the opinion that, at the
root of the oldest Greek culture, there had been the will of man to
forget the real world through a state of intoxication.
Singing and dancing man manifests himself as a member of a higher
community. He has forgotten to walk and to speak and, in his dance, he
is about to fly up into the air. (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)
With these words Nietzsche describes and explains the cult of the
ancient worshippers of Dionysos, in which he saw the root of all art.
Nietzsche maintained of Socrates that he had overpowered this
Dionysian impulse by placing reason as judge over them. The statement,
“Virtue is teachable,” meant, according to Nietzsche, the
end of a comprehensive, impulsive culture and the beginning of a much
feebler phase dominated by thinking. Such an idea arose in Nietzsche
under the influence of Schopenhauer, who placed the untamed, restless
will higher than the systematizing thought life, and under the
influence of Richard Wagner who, both as a man and as an artist,
followed Schopenhauer. But Nietzsche was, by his own inclination, also
a contemplative nature. After having surrendered for awhile to the
idea of the redemption of the world through beauty as mere appearance,
he felt this conception as a foreign element to his own nature,
something that had been implanted in him through the influence of
Richard Wagner, with whom he had been connected by friendship.
Nietzsche tried to free himself from this trend of ideas and to come
to terms with a conception of reality that was more in agreement with
his own nature. The fundamental trait of his character compelled him
to experience the ideas and impulses of the development of a modern
world conception as a direct personal fate. Other thinkers formed
pictures of a world conception and the process of this formative
description constituted their philosophic activity. Nietzsche is
confronted with the world conceptions of the second half of the
nineteenth century, and it becomes his destiny to experience
personally all the delight but also all the sorrows that these world
conceptions can cause if they affect the very substance of the human
soul. Not only theoretically but with his entire individuality at
stake, Nietzsche's philosophical life developed in such a way that
representative world conceptions of modern times would completely take
hold of him, forcing him to work himself through to his own solutions
in the most personal experiences of life.
How can one live if one must think that the world is as
Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner imagine it to be? This became the
disturbing riddle for him. It was not, however, a riddle for which
he sought a solution by means of thinking and knowledge. He had to
experience the solution of this problem with every fibre of his
nature. Others think philosophy; Nietzsche had to live
philosophy. The modern life of world conception becomes completely
personal in Nietzsche. When an observer meets the philosophies of
other thinkers, he feels inclined to judge; this is one-sided, that
is incorrect, etc. With Nietzsche such an observer finds himself
confronted with a ,world conception within the life of a human being,
and he sees that one idea makes this human being healthy while another
makes him ill. For this reason, Nietzsche becomes more and more a poet
as he presents his picture of world and life. It is also for this
reason that a reader who cannot agree with Nietzsche's presentation
insofar as his philosophy is concerned, can still admire it because
of its poetic power.
What an entirely different tone comes into the modern history of
philosophy through Nietzsche as compared to Hamerling, Wundt and even
Schopenhauer! These thinkers search contemplatively for the ground of
existence and they arrive at the will, which they find in the depths
of the human soul. In Nietzsche this will is alive. He absorbs the
philosophical ideas, sets them aglow with his ardent will-nature and
then makes something entirely new out of them: A life through which
will-inspired ideas and idea-illumined will pulsate. This happens in
Nietzsche's first creative period, which began with his Birth of
Tragedy (1870), and had its full expression in his four
Untimely Meditations: David Strauss Confessor and Author; On the
Use and Disadvantage of History for Life; Schopenhauer as Educator;
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. In the second phase of his life, it
was Nietzsche's destiny to experience deeply what a life and world
conception based exclusively on the thought habits of natural science
can be to the human soul. This period is expressed in his works,
Human, All Too Human (1878), The Dawn of Day (1881), and
Gay Science (1882).
Now the ideals that inspired Nietzsche in his first period have
cooled; they appear to him as bubbles of thought. His soul now wants
to gain strength, to be invigorated in its feeling by the
“reality” of the content that can be derived from the mode
of conception of natural science. But Nietzsche's soul is full of
life; the vigor of this inner life strives beyond anything that it
could owe to the contemplative observation of nature. The
contemplation of nature shows that the animal becomes man. As the soul
feels its inner power of life, the conception arises: The animal bore
man in itself; must not man bear within himself a higher being, the
superman? Nietzsche's soul experiences in itself the superman
wresting himself free from man. His soul revels in lifting the modern
idea of evolution that was based on the world of the senses to the
realm that the senses do not perceive, a realm that is felt when the
soul experiences the meaning of evolution within itself. “The
mere acquisition of life's necessities and sustenance is not
sufficient; what must also be gained is comfort, if not wealth, power
and influence. The search and striving for a continuous improvement of
the condition of life is the characteristic impulse of animal and
man.” This conviction, which in Rolph was the result of
contemplative observation, becomes in Nietzsche an inner experience,
expressed in a grandiose hymn of philosophic vision. The knowledge
that represents the external world is insufficient to him; it must
become inwardly increasingly fruitful. Self-observation is poverty. A
creation of a new inner life that outshines everything so far in
existence, everything man is already, arises in Nietzsche's soul. In
man, the superman is born for the first time as the meaning of
existence. Knowledge itself grows beyond what it formerly had been; it
becomes a creative power. As man creates, he takes his stand in
the midst of the meaning of life. With lyrical ardor Nietzsche
expresses in his Zarathustra (1884) the bliss that his soul
experiences in creating “superman” out of man. A knowledge
that feels itself as creative perceives more in the ego of man than
can be lived through in a single course of life; it contains more than
can be exhausted in such a single life. It will again and again return
to a new life. In this way the idea of “eternal recurrence”
of the human soul thrusts itself on Nietzsche to join his idea of
“superman.”
Rolph's idea of the “enhancement of life” grows in Nietzsche
into the conception of the “Will to Power,” which he
attributes to all being and life in the world of animal and of man.
This “Will to Power” sees in life “an appropriation,
violation, overpowering of the alien and weaker being, its annexation
or at least, in the mildest case, its exploitation.” In his book,
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche sang his hymn of praise to
his faith in the reality and the development of man into
“superman.” In his unfinished work, Will to Power,
Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values, he wanted to reshape all
conceptions from the viewpoint that no other will in man held higher
sway than the will for power.
The striving for knowledge becomes in Nietzsche a real force that
comes to life in the soul of man. As Nietzsche feels this animation
within himself, life assumes in him such an importance that he places
it above all knowledge and truth that has not been stirred into life.
This again led him to renounce all truth and to seek in the will for
power a substitute for the will for truth. He no longer asks, “Is
what we know true?” but rather, “Is it sustaining and
furthering life?”
“What matters in all philosophizing is never ‘the truth’ but
something entirely different, let us call it health, the future,
power, life . . .” What man really strives for is always power;
he only indulged himself in the illusion that he wanted
“truth.” He confused the means with the end. Truth is merely
a means for the purpose. “The fact that a judgment is wrong is no
objection to it.” What is important is not whether a judgment is
true or not, but “the question to what degree it advances and
preserves life, preserves a race, perhaps even breeds a race.”
“Most thinking of a philosopher is done secretly by his instincts
and thus forced into certain channels.” Nietzsche's world
conception is the expression of a personal feeling as an individual
experience and destiny.
In Goethe the deep impulse of modern philosophical life became
apparent; he felt the idea come to life within the self-conscious ego
so that with this enlivened idea this ego can know itself in the core
of the world. In Nietzsche the desire exists to let man develop his
life beyond himself; he feels that then the meaning of life must be
revealed in what is inwardly self-created being, but he does not
penetrate essentially to what man creates beyond himself as the
meaning of life. He sings a grandiose hymn of praise to the superman,
but he does not form his picture; he feels his growing reality
but he does not see him. Nietzsche speaks of an “eternal
recurrence,” but he does not describe what it is that recurs. He
speaks of raising the form of life through the will to power, but
where is the description of the heightened form of life? Nietzsche
speaks of something that must be there in the realm of the unknown,
but he does not succeed in going further than pointing at the unknown.
The forces that are unfolded in the self-conscious ego are also not
sufficiently strong in Nietzsche to outline distinctly a reality that
he knows as weaving and breathing in human nature.
We have a contrast to Nietzsche's world conception in the
materialistic conception of history and life that was given its most
pregnant expression by Karl Marx (1818 – 83). Marx denied that
the idea had any share in historical evolution. For him, the real
factors of life constituted the actual basis of this evolution, and
from them are derived opinions concerning the world that men have been
able to form according to the various situations of life in which they
find themselves. The man who is working physically and under the power
of somebody else has a world conception that differs from that of the
intellectual worker. An age that replaces an older economic form with
a new one brings also different conceptions of life to the surface of
history. If one wants to understand a historical age, one must, for
its explanation, go back to its social conditions and its economic
processes. All political and cultural currents are only
surface-reflectings of these deeper processes. They are essentially
ideal effects of real facts, but they have no share in those facts. A
world conception, therefore, that is caused by ideal factors can have
no share in the progressive evolution of our present conduct of life.
It is rather our task to take up the real conflicts of life at the
point at which they have arrived, and to continue their development in
the same direction.
This conception evolved from a materialistic reversal of Hegelianism.
In Hegel, the ideas are in a continuous progress of evolution and the
results of this evolution are the actual events of life. What Auguste
Comte derived from natural scientific conceptions as a conception of
society based on the actual events of life, Karl Marx wants to attain
from the direct observation of the economic evolution. Marxism is the
boldest form of an intellectual current that starts from the
historical phenomena as they appear to external observation, in order
to understand the spiritual life and the entire cultural development
of man. This is modern “sociology.” It in no way accepts man
as an individual but rather as a member of social evolution. Man's
conceptions, knowledge, action and feeling are all considered to be
the result of social powers under the influence of which the
individual stands.
Hippolyte Taine (1828 – 93) calls the sum total of the forces
determining every cultural event the “milieu.” Every work of
art, every institution, every action is to be explained from preceding
and simultaneous circumstances. If we know the race, the milieu and the
moment through and in which a human achievement comes into being, we
have explained this work. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 – 65),
in his System of Acquired Rights (1861), showed how conditions
of rights and laws, such as property, contract, family, inheritance,
etc., arise and develop. The mode of conception of the Romans created a
kind of law that differed from that of the Germans. In none of these
thoughts is the question raised as to what arises in the human individual,
what does he produce through his own inner nature? The question that
is always asked is: What are the causes in the general social conditions
for the life of the individual? One can observe in this thought tendency
an opposite inclination to the one prevailing at the beginning of the
nineteenth century with regard to the question of man's relation to the
world. It was then customary to ask: What rights can man claim through
his own nature (natural rights), or in what way does man obtain knowledge
in accordance with his own power of reason as an individual? The
sociological trend of thought, however, asks: What are the legal and
intellectual concepts that the various social groupings cause to arise
in the individual?
The fact that I form certain conceptions concerning things does not
depend on my power of reasoning but is the result of the historical
development that produced me. In Marxism the self-conscious ego is
entirely deprived of its own nature; it finds itself drifting in the
ocean of facts. These facts develop according to the laws of natural
science and of social conditions. In this world conception the
impotence of modern philosophy with regard to the human soul
approaches a maximum. The “ego,” the self-conscious human
soul, wants to find in itself the entity through which it can assert
its own significance within the existence of the world, but it is
unwilling to dive into its own depths. It is afraid it will not
find in its own depths the support of its own existence and essence.
It wants to derive its own being from an entity that lies outside
its own domain. To do this, the ego follows the thought habits
developed in modern times under the influence of natural science, and
turns either to the world of material events or to that of social
evolution. It believes it understands its own nature in the totality
of life if it can say to itself, “I am, in a certain way,
conditioned by these events, by this evolution.”
Such philosophical tendencies show that there are forces at work in
the souls of which they are dimly aware, but which cannot at first be
satisfied by the modern habits of thought and research. Concealed from
consciousness, spiritual life works in human souls. It drives these
souls to go so deep into the self-conscious ego that this ego can find
in its depths what leads to the source of world existence. In this
source the human soul feels its kinship with a world entity that is
not manifested in the mere phenomena and entities of nature.
With respect to these phenomena and entities modern times have arrived
at an ideal of research with which the scientist feels secure in his
endeavor. One would now also like to feel this security in the
investigation of the nature of the human soul. It has been shown above
that, in leading thinkers, the striving for such security resulted in
world pictures that no longer contain any elements from which
satisfactory conceptions of the human soul could be derived. The
attempt is made to treat philosophy according to the method of natural
science, but in the process of this treatment the meaning of the
philosophical question itself is lost. The task with which the human
soul is charged from the very depth of its nature goes far beyond
anything that the thinkers are willing to recognize as safe methods of
investigation according to the modern habits of thought.
In appraising the situation of the development of modern world
conception thus characterized, one finds as the most outstanding
feature the pressure that the mode of thought of natural
science has exerted on the minds of people ever since it attained its
full stature. One recognizes as the reason for this pressure the
fruitfulness, the efficiency of this mode of thinking. An affirmation
of this is to be found in the work of a natural scientist like T.
H. Huxley (1825 – 95). He does not believe that one could find
anything in the knowledge of natural science that would answer the
last questions concerning the human soul. But he is convinced that our
search for knowledge must confine itself to the limits of the mode of
conception of natural science and we must admit that man simply has no
means by which to acquire a knowledge of what lies behind nature. The
result of this opinion is that natural science contains no insight
concerning man's highest hopes for knowledge, but it allows him to
feel that in this mode of conception the investigation is placed on
secure ground. One should, therefore, abandon all concern for
everything that does not lie within the realm of natural science, or
one should consider it as a matter of belief.
The effect of this pressure caused by the method of natural science is
clearly expressed in a thought current called pragmatism that appeared
at the turn of the century and intended to place all striving for
truth on a secure basis. The name “pragmatism” goes back to
an essay that Charles Pierce published in the American journal,
Popular Science, in 1878. The most influential representatives
of this mode of conception are William James (1842 – 1910) in
America and F. C. Schiller (1864 – 1937) in England, who uses
the word “humanism.” Pragmatism can be called disbelief in
the power of thought. It denies that thinking that would remain within
its own domain is capable of producing anything that can be proved as
truth and knowledge justifiable by itself. Man is confronted with
processes of the world and must act. To accomplish this, thinking
serves him in an auxiliary function. It sums up the facts of the
external world into ideas and combines them. The best ideas are those
that help him to achieve the right kind of action so that he can
attain his purpose in accordance with the facts of the world. These
ideas man recognizes as his truth. Will is the ruler of man's relation
to the world, not thinking. James deals with this matter in his book,
The Will to Believe. The will determines life; this is its
undeniable right. Therefore, will is also justified in influencing
thought. It is, to be sure, not to exert its influence in determining
what the facts are in a particular case; here the intellect is to
follow the facts themselves. But it will influence the understanding
and interpretation of reality as a whole. “If our scientific
knowledge extended as far as to the end of things, we might be able to
live by science alone. But since it only dimly lights up the edges of
the dark continent that we call the universe, and since we must form,
at our own risk, some sort of thought of this universe to which we
belong with our lives, we shall be justified if we form such thoughts
as agree with our nature — thoughts that enable us to act, hope and
live.”
According to this conception, our thought has no life that could
possibly concentrate and deepen in itself and, in Hegel's sense, for
example, penetrate to the source of existence. It merely emerges in
the human soul to serve the ego when it takes an active part in the
world with its will and life. Pragmatism deprives thought of the power
it possessed from the rise of the Greek world conception. Knowledge is
thus made into a product of the human will. In the last analysis, it
can no longer be the element into which man plunges in order to find
himself in his true nature. The self-conscious ego no longer
penetrates into its own entity with the power of thinking. It loses
itself in the dark recesses of the will in which thought sheds no
light on anything except the aims of life. But these, as such, do not
spring from thought. The power exerted by external facts on man has
become excessively strong. The conscious ability to find a light in
the inner life of thought that could illumine the last questions of
existence has reached the zero point. In pragmatism, the development
of modern philosophy falls shortest of what the spirit of this
development really demands: that man may find himself as a thinking
and self-conscious ego in the depths of the world in which this ego
feels itself as deeply connected with the wellspring of existence, as
the Greek truth-seeker did through his perceived thought. That the
spirit of modern times demands this becomes especially clear through
pragmatism. It places man in the focal point of his world picture. In
man, it was to be seen how reality rules in existence. Thus,
the chief question was directed toward the element in which the
self-conscious ego rests. But the power of thought was not sufficient
to carry light into this element. Thought remained behind in the upper
layers of the soul when the ego wanted to take the path into its own
depth.
In Germany Hans Vaihinger (1852 – 1933) developed his
Philosophy of As-If (1911) along the same lines as pragmatism.
This philosopher regards the leading ideas that man forms about the
phenomena of the world not as thought images through which, in the
cognitive process, the soul places itself into a spiritual reality,
but as fictions that lead him to find his way in the world. The
“atom,” for instance, is imperceptible. Man forms the
thought of the “atom.” He cannot form it in order to know
something of a reality, but merely “as if' the external
phenomena of nature had come to pass through compound actions of
atoms. If one imagines that there are atoms, there will be order in
the chaos of perceived natural phenomena. It is the same with all
leading ideas. They are assumed, not in order to depict facts that are
given solely by perception. They are invented, and reality is then
interpreted “as if” the content of these imagined concepts
really were the basis of reality. The impotence of thought is thus
consciously made the center of this philosophy. The power of the
external facts impresses the mind of the thinker so overwhelmingly
that he does not dare to penetrate with his “mere thought”
into those regions from which the external reality springs. But as we
can only hope to gain an insight into the nature of man if we have
spiritual means to penetrate into the characterized regions, there can
be no possibility of approaching the highest riddles of the universe
through the “As-If Philosophy.”
We must now realize that both “pragmatism” and the
“As-If Philosophy” have grown out of the thought practice of
the age that is dominated by the method of natural science. Natural
science can only be concerned with the investigation of the connection
of external facts, of facts that can be observed in the field of sense
perception. In natural science it cannot be a question of making the
connections themselves, at which its investigation aims, sensually
perceptible, but merely of establishing these connections in
the indicated field. By following this basic principle, modern natural
science became the model for all scientific cognition and, in
approaching the present time, it has gradually been drawn into a
thought practice that operates in the sense of “pragmatism”
and the “As-If Philosophy.” Darwinism, for instance, was at
first driven to proclaim a line of evolution of living beings from the
most imperfect to the most perfect and thus to conceive man as a
higher form in the evolution of the anthropoid apes. But the
anatomist, Carl Gegenbaur, pointed out as early as 1870 that it is
the method of investigation applied to such an idea of
evolution that constitutes the fruitful part of it. The use of this
method of investigation has continued to more recent times, and one is
quite justified in saying that, while it remained faithful to its
original principle, it has led beyond the views with which it was
originally connected. The investigation proceeded “as if”
man had to be sought within the line of descent of the anthropoid
apes. At the present time, one is not far from recognizing that this
cannot be so, but that there must have been a being in earlier times
whose true descendants are to be found in man, while the anthropoid
apes developed away from this being into a less perfect species. In
this way the original modern idea of evolution has proved to be only
an auxiliary step in the process of investigation.
While such a thought practice holds sway in natural science, it seems
quite justified for natural science to deny that, in order to solve
world riddles, there is any scientific cognitive value in an
investigation of pure thought carried out by means of a thought
contemplation in the self-conscious ego. The natural scientist feels
that he stands on secure ground when he considers thinking only as a
means to secure his orientation in the world of external facts. The
great accomplishments to which natural science can point at the turn
of the twentieth century agree well with such a thought practice. In
the method of investigation of natural science, “pragmatism”
and the “As-If Philosophy” are actually at work. If these
modes of conception now appear to be special philosophical thought
tendencies also, we see in this fact that modern philosophy has
basically taken on the form of natural science.
For this reason, thinkers who instinctively feel how the demand of the
spirit of modern world conception is secretly at work will quite
understandably be confronted with the question: How can we uphold a
conception of the self-conscious ego in the face of the perfection
of the natural scientific method? It may be said that natural
science is about to produce a world picture in which the
self-conscious ego does not find a place, for what natural science can
give as a picture of the external man contains the self-conscious soul
only in the manner in which the magnet contains its energy. There are
now two possibilities. We either delude ourselves into believing that
we produce a serious statement when we say, “Our brain
thinks,” and then accept the verdict that “the spiritual
man” is merely the surface expression of material reality, or we
recognize in this “spiritual man” a self-dependent essential
reality and are thus driven out of the field of natural science with
our knowledge of man. The French philosophers, Emile Boutroux
(1845 – 1921) and Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941), are thinkers
who accept the latter possibility.
Boutroux proceeds from a criticism of the modern mode of conception
that intends to reduce all world processes to the laws of natural
science. We understand the course of his thought if we consider that a
plant, for example, contains processes that, to be sure, are regulated
by laws effective also in the mineral world, but that it is quite
impossible to imagine that these mineral laws themselves cause this
plant life through their own content. If we want to recognize that
plant life develops on the basis of mineral activity, we must
presuppose that it is a matter of perfect indifference to the mineral
forces if plant life develops from this basis. There must be a
spontaneously creative element added to the mineral agencies if plant
life is to be produced. There is, therefore, a creative element
everywhere in nature. The mineral realm is there but a creative
element stands behind it. The latter produces the plant life based on
the ground of the mineral world. So it is in all the spheres of
natural order up to the conscious human soul, indeed, including all
sociological processes. The human soul does not spring from mere
biological laws, but directly from the fundamental creative element
and it assimilates the biological processes and laws to its own
entity. The fundamental creative element is also at work in the
sociological realm. This brings human souls into the appropriate
connections and interdependence. Thus, in Boutroux's book, On the
Concept of Natural Laws in the Science and Philosophy of Today
(1895), we find:
Science shows us a hierarchy of laws, which we can, to be sure, bring
closer and closer together but which we cannot blend into a single
law. It shows us, furthermore, besides this relative dissimilarity of
the laws, a mutual influence of these laws on each other. The physical
laws affect the living being, but the biological laws are at work at
the same time.
Boutroux turns his attention from the natural laws represented in the
thinking of natural science to the creative process behind these laws.
Emerging directly from this process are the entities that fill the
world. The behavior of these entities to one another, their mutual
effect on each other, can be expressed in laws that are conceivable in
thought. What is thus conceived becomes, as it were, a basis of the
natural laws for this mode of conception. The entities are real and
manifest their natures according to laws. The sum total of these laws,
which in the final analysis constitute the unreal and are attached to
an intellectually conceived existence, constitutes matter. Thus,
Boutroux can say:
Motion (what he means is the totality of everything that happens
between entities according to natural laws) is, in itself, obviously
as much an abstraction as thinking in itself. Actually, there are only
living entities, their nature being halfway between the pure concepts
of thinking and motion. These living entities form a hierarchy and
activity circulates in them from above to below and from below to
above. The spirit moves matter neither directly nor indirectly, for
there is no raw matter and what constitutes the nature of matter is
closely connected with what constitutes the nature of the spirit.
But if natural laws are only the sum total of the interrelation of the
entities, then the human soul also does not stand in the world as a
whole in such a way that it could be explained from natural laws; from
its own nature it adds its manifestations to the other laws. With this
step, freedom, the spontaneous self-revelation, is secured for the
soul. One can see in this philosophical mode of thinking the attempt
to gain clarity concerning the true essence of nature in order to
acquire an insight into the relation of the human soul to it. Boutroux
arrives at a conception of the human soul that can only spring from
its self-manifestation. In former times, according to Boutroux, one
saw in the mutual influences of the entities, the manifestation of the
“capriciousness and arbitrariness” of spiritual beings.
Modern thinking has been freed from this belief by the knowledge of
natural laws. As these laws exist only in the cooperative processes of
the entities, they cannot contain anything that might determine the
entities.
The mechanical natural laws that have been discovered by modern
science are, in fact, the bond that connects the external world with
the inner realm. Far from constituting a necessity, they are our
liberators; they allow us to add to the contemplation in which the
ancients were locked up, a science of action.
These words point to the demand of the spirit of modern world
conception that has repeatedly been mentioned in this book. The
ancients were limited to contemplation. To them, the soul was in the
element of its true nature when it was in thought contemplation. The
modern development demands a “science of action.” This
science, however, could only come into being if the soul could, in
thinking, lay hold of its own nature in the self-conscious ego, and if
it could arrive, through a spiritual experience, at inner activities
of the self with which it could see itself as being grounded in its
own entity.
Henri Bergson tries to penetrate to the nature of the self-conscious
ego in a different way so that the mode of conception of natural
science does not become an obstacle in this process. The nature of
thinking itself has become a world riddle through the development
of the world conceptions from the time of the Greeks to the present
age. Thought has lifted the human soul out of the world as a whole.
Thus, the soul lives with the thought element and must direct the
question to thought: How will you lead me again to an element in which
I can feel myself really sheltered in the world as whole? Bergson
considers the scientific mode of thinking. He does not find in it the
power through which it could swing itself into a true reality. The
thinking soul is confronted with reality and gains thought images from
it. It combines these images, but what the soul acquires in this
manner is not rooted within reality; it stands outside reality.
Bergson speaks of thinking as follows:
It is understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thoughts
from the mobile reality, but there is no means whatever of
reconstituting the mobility of the real with the fixity of concepts.
(Introduction to Metaphysics)
Proceeding from thoughts of this kind, Bergson finds that all attempts
to penetrate reality by means of thinking had to fail because they
undertook something of which thinking, as it occurs in life and
science, is quite incapable to enter into true reality. If, in this
way, Bergson believes he recognizes the impotence of thinking, he does
not mean to say that there is no way by means of which the right kind
of experience in the self-conscious ego may reach true reality. For
the ego, there is a way outside of thinking — the way of immediate
experience, of intuition.
To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings
of thought . . . Symbolic knowledge is relative through preexisting
concepts, which goes from the fixed to the moving, but not so
intuitive knowledge, which establishes itself in the moving reality
and adopts the life itself of things. (Introduction to
Metaphysics)
Bergson believes that a transformation of our usual mode of thinking
is possible so that the soul, through this transformation, will
experience itself in an activity, in an intuitive perception, in which
it unites with a reality that is deeper than the one that is
perceived in ordinary knowledge. In such an intuitive perception the
soul experiences itself as an entity that is not conditioned by the
physical processes, which produce sensation and movement. When man
perceives through his senses, and when he moves his limbs, a corporeal
entity is at work in him, but as soon as he remembers something
a purely psychic-spiritual process takes place that is not
conditioned by corresponding physical processes. Thus, the whole
inner life of the soul is a specific life of a psychic-spiritual
nature that takes place in the body and in connection with it, but not
through the body. Bergson investigated in detail those results of
natural science that seemed to oppose his view. The thought indeed
seems justified that our physical functions are rooted in bodily
processes when one remembers how, for instance, the disease of a part
of the brain causes an impediment of speech. A great many facts of
this kind can be enumerated. Bergson discusses them in his book,
Matter and Memory, and he decides that all these facts do not
constitute any proof against the view of an independent
spiritual-psychical life.
In this way, modern philosophy seems through Bergson to take up its
task that is demanded by the time, the task of a concentration of the
experience of the self-conscious ego, but it accomplishes this step by
declaring thought as impotent. Where the ego is to experience itself
in its own nature, it cannot make use of the power of thinking. The
same holds for Bergson insofar as the investigation of life is
concerned. What must be considered as the driving element in the
evolution of the living being, what places these beings in the world
in a series from the imperfect to the perfect, we cannot know through
a thoughtful contemplation of the various forms of the living beings.
But if man experiences himself in himself as psychical life, he stands
in the element of life that lives in those beings and knows itself in
him. This element of life first had to pour itself out in innumerable
forms to prepare itself for what it later becomes in man. The effusion
of life (elan vital), which arouses itself into a thinking
being in man, is there already manifested in the simple living entity.
In the creation of all living beings it has so spent itself that it
retains only a part of its entire nature, the part, to be sure, that
reveals itself as the fruit of all previous creations of life. In this
way, the entity of man exists before all other living beings,
but it can live its life as man only after having ejected all other
forms of life, which man then can observe from without as one
form among all others. Through his intuitive knowledge Bergson
wants to vitalize the results of natural science so that he can say:
It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will,
man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had
succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses
are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the
vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and
above the accidents of evolution. (Creative Evolution)
From lightly woven and easily attainable thoughts like this, Bergson
produces an idea of evolution that had been expressed previously in a
profound mode of thought by W. H. Preuss in his book,
Spirit and Matter (1882). Preuss also held that man has not
developed from the other natural beings but is, from the beginning the
fundamental entity, which had first to eject his preliminary stages
into the other living beings before he could give himself the form
appropriate for him on earth. We read in the above-mentioned book:
The time should have come . . . to establish a theory of origin of
organic species that is not based solely on one-sidedly proclaimed
theorems from descriptive natural science, but is also in agreement
with the other natural laws that are at the same time the laws of
human thinking. What is necessary is a theory that is free from all
hypothesizing and that rests solely on strict conclusions from
natural scientific observations in the widest sense of the
word; a theory that saves the concept of the species according to the
actual possibility, but at the same time adapts Darwin's concept of
evolution to its own field and tries to make it fruitful. The center
of this new theory is man, the species unique on our planet: Homo
sapiens. It is strange that the older observers began with the
objects of nature and then went astray to such an extent that they did
not find the way that leads to the human being. This aim had been
attained by Darwin only in an insufficient and unsatisfactory way as
he sought the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals,
while the naturalist should begin with himself as a human being in
order to proceed through the entire realm of existence and of thinking
and to return finally to humanity. . . . It was not by accident
that the human nature resulted from the entire terrestrial evolution,
but by necessity. Man is the aim of all telluric processes and every
other form that occurs beside him has borrowed its traits from him.
Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos. . . . When his
germinating state (man in his potentiality) had come into being, the
remaining organic substance no longer had the power to produce further
human possibilities. What developed thereafter became animal or plan.
. . .
Such a view attempts to recognize man as placed on his ground by the
development of modern world conception, that is to say, outside
nature, in order to find something in such a knowledge of man that
throws light on the world surrounding him. In the little known thinker
from Elsfleth, W. H. Preuss, the ardent wish arises to gain a
knowledge of the world at once through an insight into man.
His forceful and significant ideas are immediately directed to the
human being. He sees how this being struggles its way into existence.
What it must leave behind on its way, what it must slough off, remains
as nature with its entities on a lower stage of evolution surrounding
man as his environment. The way toward the riddles of the world in
modern philosophy must go through an investigation of the human entity
manifested in the self-conscious ego. This becomes apparent through
the development of this philosophy. The more one tries to enter into
its striving and its search, the more one becomes aware of the fact
that this search aims at such experiences in the human soul that do
not only produce an insight into the human soul itself, but also
kindles a light by means of which a certain knowledge concerning the
world outside man can be secured. In looking at the views of Hegel and
related thinkers, more recent philosophers came to doubt that there
could be the power in the life of thought to spread its light
beyond the realm of the soul itself. The element of thought seemed not
strong enough to engender an activity that could explain the being and
the meaning of the world. By contrast, the natural scientific mode of
conception demanded a penetration into the core of the soul that
rested on a firmer ground than thought can supply.
Within this search and striving the attempts of Wilhelm Dilthey
(1833 – 1911) take a significant position. In writings like his
Introduction to the Cultural Sciences, and his Berlin Academy
treatise, Contributions to the Solution of the Problem of Our
Belief in the Reality of the External World and Its Right (1890),
he offered expositions that are filled with all the philosophical
riddles that weigh on the modern development of world conception. To
be sure, the form of his presentation, which is given in the modern
terminology used by scholars, prevents a more general impression being
created by what he has to say. It is Dilthey's view that through the
thoughts and imaginations that appear in his soul man cannot even
arrive at the certainty that the perceptions of the senses correspond
to a reality independent of man. Everything that is of the nature of
thought, ideation and sense perception is picture. The world that
surrounds man could be a dream without a reality independent of him if
he were exclusively dependent on such pictures in his awareness of the
real world. But not only these pictures present themselves in the
soul. In the process of life the soul is filled with will, activity
and feeling, all of which stream forth from it and are recognized as
an immediate experience rather than intellectually. In willing and
feeling the soul experiences itself as reality, but if it experienced
itself only in this manner, it would have to believe that its
own reality were the only one in the world. This assumption could be
justified only if the will could radiate in all directions without
finding any resistance. But that is not the case. The
intentions of the will cannot unfold their life in that way. There is
something obtruding itself in their path that they have not produced
but that must nevertheless be accepted by them.
To “common sense” such a thought development of a
philosopher can appear as hairsplitting. The historical account must
not be deflected by such judgment. It is important to gain an insight
into the difficulty that modern philosophy had to create for itself in
regard to a question that seems so simple and in fact superfluous to
“common sense,” that is, if the world man sees, hears, etc.,
may rightly be called real. The “ego” that had, as
shown above in our historical account of the development of
philosophical world riddles, separated itself from the world, strives
to find its way back into the world from what appears in its own
consciousness as a state of loneliness. It is Dilthey's opinion that
this way cannot be found back into the world by saying that the soul
experiences pictures (thoughts, ideas, sensations), and since these
pictures appear in our consciousness they must have their causes in a
real external world. A conclusion of this kind would not, according to
Dilthey, give us the right to speak of a real external world, for such
a conclusion is drawn within the soul according to the needs of
this soul, and there is no guarantee that there really is in
the external world what the soul believes in following its own
needs. Therefore, the soul cannot infer an external world; it
would expose itself to the danger that its conclusion might have a
life only within the soul but without any significance for an external
world. Certainty concerning an outer world can be gained by the soul
only if this external world penetrates into the inner life of the
“ego,” so that within this “ego” not only
the “ego” but also the external world itself unfolds its
life. This happens, according to Dilthey, when the soul experiences in
its will and its feeling something that does not spring
from within. Dilthey attempts to decide from the most self-evident
facts a question that is for him a fundamental problem of all world
conception. A passage like the following may illustrate this:
As a child presses his hand against a chair in order to move it, he
measures his power against the resistance; his own life and the object
are experienced together. But now let the child be locked up. It is in
vain that he rattles against the door; now his entire excited will
becomes aware of the compulsion of an overwhelming powerful external
world that hinders and restricts, and compresses, as it were, his own
self-willed life. The desire to escape from the displeasure and to
gratify his impulses is followed by the consciousness of obstruction,
displeasure and dissatisfaction. What the child thus experiences
follows him through his entire adult life. The resistance becomes
pressure. We seem to be everywhere surrounded by walls of actual facts
through which we cannot break. The impressions remain, no matter how
much we would like to change them; they vanish although we strive to
cling to them; impulses of motion directed by the idea of avoiding
something that causes pain are, under certain circumstances always
followed by emotions that hold us within the realm of pain. Thus, the
reality of the external world grows, so to speak, progressively more
dense around us.
Why is such a reflection, which seems unimportant for many people,
developed in connection with the highest problems of philosophy? It
seems hopeless to gain an insight into man's position in the world as
a whole from such points of departure. What is essential, however, is
the fact that philosophy arrived at reflections of this kind on its
way, to use Brentano's words once more, to “gain certainty for
the hopes of Plato and Aristotle concerning the continued life of our
better part after the dissolution of our body.” To attain sure
knowledge of this kind seems to become more difficult the more the
intellectual development advances. The “self-conscious ego”
feels itself more and more ejected from the world; it seems to find in
itself less and less the elements that connect it with the world in a
way different from that of our “body,” which is subject to
“dissolution.” While this “self-conscious ego”
searched for a certain knowledge concerning its connection with an
eternal world of the spirit, it lost the certainty of an insight in
its connection with the world as revealed through the perception of
the senses. In our discussion of Goethe's world conception, it was
shown how Goethe searched for such experiences of the soul that carry
it into a reality lying behind sense perception as a spiritual world.
In this world conception the attempt is made to experience something
within the soul through which it no longer lives exclusively
within its own confines in spite of the fact that it feels the
experienced content as its own. The soul searches for world
experiences in itself through which it participates with its
experience in an element that it cannot reach through the mediation of
the mere physical organs. Although Dilthey's mode of reflection may
appear to be quite unnecessary, his efforts must be considered as
belonging to the same current of the philosophical development. He is
intent on finding an element within the soul that does not
spring from the soul but belongs to an independent realm. He
would like to prove that the world enters the experience of the soul.
Dilthey does not believe that such an entrance can be accomplished by
the thought element. For him, the soul can assimilate in its entire
life content, in will, striving and feeling, something that is not
only soul but part of the real external world. We recognize a human
being in our soul as real not by forming a representative thought
picture of the person we see before us, but by allowing his will and
his feeling to enter into our own will and sentiment. Thus, a human
soul, in Dilthey's opinion, acknowledges a real external world not
because this outer world conveys its reality through the thought
element, but because the soul as a self-conscious ego, experiences
inwardly in itself the external world. In this manner he is led to
acknowledge the spiritual life as something of a higher significance
than the mere natural existence. He produces a counterbalance to the
natural scientific mode of conception with his view, and he even
thinks that nature as a real external world can be acknowledged only
because it can be experienced by the spiritual part of our soul. The
experience of the natural is a subdivision of our general soul
experience, which is of a spiritual nature, and spiritually our soul
is part of a general spiritual development on earth. A great spiritual
organism develops and unfolds in cultural systems in the spiritual
experience and creative achievement of the various peoples and ages.
What develops its forces in this spiritual organism permeates the
individual human souls. They are embedded in the spiritual organism.
What they experience, accomplish and produce receives its impulses not
from the stimulation's of nature, but from the comprehensive spiritual
life. Dilthey's mode of conception is full of understanding for that
of natural science. He often speaks in his discussions of the results
of the natural scientists, but, as a counterbalance to his recognition
of natural development, he insists on the independent existence of a
spiritual world. Dilthey finds the content of a science of the
spiritual in the contemplation of the cultures of different peoples
and ages.
Rudolf Eucken (1864 – 1926) arrives at a similar recognition
of an independent spiritual world. He finds that the natural scientific
mode of thought becomes self-contradictory if it intends to be more
than a one-sided approach to reality, if it wants to proclaim
what it finds within the possible grasp of its own knowledge as the
only reality. If one only observed nature as it offers itself to the
senses, one could never obtain a comprehensive conception of it. In
order to explain nature, one must draw on what the spirit can experience
only through itself, what it can never derive from external observation.
Eucken proceeds from the vivid feeling that the soul has of its own
spontaneous work and creation when it is occupied in the contemplation
of external nature. He does not fail to recognize in which way the soul
is dependent on what it perceives through its sense organs and how it
is determined through everything that has its natural basis in the body.
But he directs his attention to the autonomous regulating and life-inspiring
activity of the soul that is independent of the body. The soul gives
direction and conclusive connection to the world of sensations and
perceptions. It is not only determined by stimuli that are derived
from the physical world but it experiences purely spiritual impulses
in itself. Through these impulses the soul is aware that it has its
being in a real spiritual world. Into its experiences and creations
flow the forces from a spiritual world to which it belongs. This
spiritual world is directly experienced as real in the soul that knows
itself as one with that world. In this way, the soul sees itself,
according to Eucken, supported by a living and creative spiritual
world. It is his opinion that the thought element, the intellectual
forces, are not powerful enough to fathom the depths of this spiritual
world. What streams from the spiritual world into man pours itself into
his entire comprehensive soul life, not only into his intellect. This
world of the spirit is endowed with the character of personality of
a substantial nature. It also impregnates the thought element but it
is not confined to it. The entire soul may feel itself in a substantial
spiritual connection.
Eucken, in his numerous writings, knows how to describe in a lofty and
emphatic way this spiritual world as it weaves and has its being:
The Struggle for a Spiritual Content of Life (1896), Truth
Content of Religion (1901), Basic Outlines of a New Life
Conception, Spiritual Currents of the Present Time, Life Conceptions
of the Great Thinkers, and Knowledge and Life. In these
books he tries to show from different points of view how the human
soul, as it experiences itself and as it understands itself in this
experience, is aware of being permeated and animated by a creative,
living spiritual substance of which it is a part and a member. Like
Dilthey, Eucken describes, as the content of the independent spiritual
life, what unfolds in the civilizations of humanity in the moral,
technical, social and artistic creations of the various peoples and
ages.
In a historical presentation as is herein attempted, there is no place
for criticism of the described world conceptions. But it is not
criticism to point out how a world conception develops new questions
through its own character, for it is thus that it becomes a part of
the historical development. Dilthey and Eucken speak of an independent
spiritual world in which the individual human soul is embedded. Their
theory of this spiritual world, however, leaves the following
questions open: What is this spiritual world and in what way does the
human soul belong to it? Does the individual soul vanish with the
dissolution of the body after it participated within that body in the
development of the spiritual life manifested in the cultural creations
of the different peoples and ages? One can, to be sure, answer these
questions from Dilthey's and Eucken's point of view by saying that
what the human soul can know in its own life does not lead to results
with respect to these questions. But this is precisely what can be
said to characterize such world conceptions that they lead, through
their mode of conception, to no means of cognition that could
guide the soul or the self-conscious ego beyond what can be
experienced in connection with the body. In spite of the intensity
with which Eucken stresses the independence and reality of the
spiritual world, what the soul experiences according to his world
conception of this spiritual world, and in connection with it, is
experienced through the body. The hopes of Plato and Aristotle, so
often referred to in this book, with regard to the nature of the soul
and its independent relation to the spiritual world are not touched by
such a world conception. No more is shown than that the soul, as long
as it appears within the body, participates in a spiritual world that
is quite rightly called real. What it is in the spiritual world as an
independent spiritual entity cannot be discussed within this
philosophy. It is characteristic of these modes of conception that
they do, to be sure, arrive at a recognition of a spiritual world and
also of the spiritual nature of the human soul. But no knowledge
results from this recognition concerning the position of the soul, the
self-conscious ego, in the reality of the world, apart from the fact
that it acquires a consciousness of the spiritual world through the
life of the body.
The historical position of these modes of conception in the
development of philosophy appears in its right light if one recognizes
that they produce questions that they cannot answer with their own
means. They maintain emphatically that the soul becomes in itself
conscious of a spiritual world that is independent of itself. But how
is this consciousness acquired? Only through the means of cognition
that the soul has in and through its existence in the body. Within
this form of existence a certainty of a real spiritual world
arises. But the soul finds no way to experience its own self-contained
entity in the spirit outside the body. What the spirit
manifests, stimulates and creates within the soul is perceived
by it as far as the physical existence enables it to do so. What it is
as a spirit in the spiritual world and, in fact, whether or not
it is a separate entity within that world, is a question that cannot
be answered by the mere recognition of the fact that the soul
within the body can be conscious of its connection with a
living and creative spiritual world. To obtain an answer of this kind
it would be necessary for the self-conscious human soul, while it
advances to a knowledge of the spiritual world, to become aware of its
own mode of life in the world of the spirit, independent of the
conditions of its bodily existence. The spiritual world would not only
have to enable the soul entity to recognize its reality but it would
have to convey something of its own nature to the soul. It would have
to reveal to the soul in what way it is different from the world of
the senses and in what manner it allows the soul entity to participate
in this different mode of existence.
A feeling for this question lives in those philosophers who want to
contemplate the spiritual world by directing their attention toward
something that cannot, according to their opinion, be found
within the mere observation of nature. If it could be shown that there
is something with regard to which the natural scientific mode of
conception would prove to be powerless, then this could be considered
to guarantee the justification of assuming a spiritual world. A mode
of thought of this kind had already been indicated by Lotze (compare
in Part II Chapter VI
of this volume). It found forceful representatives later
in Wilhelm Windelband (1848 – 1915), Heinrich Rickert
(1863 – 1936) and others. These thinkers are of the opinion that
there is an element entering into the world conception that is
inaccessible to the natural scientific mode of thought. They consider
this element to be the “values” that are of decisive
importance in human life. The world is no dream but a reality if it
can be shown that certain experiences of the soul contain something
that is independent of this soul. The actions, endeavors and will
impulses of the soul are no longer sparks that light up and vanish in
the ocean of existence, if one must recognize that there is something
that endows them with values independent of the soul. Such
values, however, the soul must acknowledge for its will
impulses and its actions just as much as it must recognize that its
perceptions are not merely produced by its own effort. Action and will
impulses of man do not simply occur like facts of nature; they must be
considered from the point of view of a legal, moral, social, esthetic
or scientific value. It is quite right to insist that during
the evolution of civilizations in different ages and of different
peoples, man's views concerning the values of right, morality, beauty
and truth have undergone changes. If Nietzsche could speak of a
“revaluation of all values,” it must be acknowledged that
the value of actions, thoughts and will intentions is determined from
without in a similar way to the way perceptual ideation receives the
character of reality from without. In the sense of the
“philosophy of values” one can say: As the pressure
or resistance of the natural external world make the
difference between an idea that is a mere picture of fantasy or one
that represents reality, so the light and approbation that fall on the
soul life from an external spiritual world decide whether or not an
impulse of the will, an action and a thought endeavor have a value
in the world as a whole or are only arbitrary products of the
soul. As a stream of values, the spiritual world flows through the
lives of men in the course of history. While the human soul feels
itself as living in a world determined by values, it experiences
itself in a spiritual element. If this mode of conception were
seriously carried out, all statements that man could make concerning
the spiritual would have to take on the form of value judgments. The
only thing one could then say about anything not revealed in nature
and therefore not to be known through the natural scientific mode of
conception, would be in which way and in what respect it possessed an
independent value in the whole of the world. The question would then
arise: If one disregards everything in the human soul that natural
science has to say about it, is it then valuable as a member of the
spiritual world, and does it have a significant independent value? Can
the riddles of philosophy concerning the soul be solved if one cannot
speak of its existence but only of its value? Will not the
philosophy of values always be forced to adopt a language similar to
that of Lotze when he speaks of the continuation of the soul?
Since we consider every being only as a creature of God, there
is no fundamentally valid right on which the individual soul,
for instance as a “substance,” could base its claim in order
to demand an eternal, individual, continued existence. Perhaps we can
only maintain that every being will be preserved by God as long
as its existence is of a valuable significance for the whole of
His world plan. . . . (Compare page
in Part II Chapter VI).
of this volume.)
Here the “value” of the soul is spoken of as its
decisive character. Some attention, however, is also paid to the
question of how this value may be connected with the preservation
of existence. One can understand the position of the philosophy of
value in the course of the development of philosophy if one considers
that the natural scientific mode of conception is inclined to claim
all knowledge of existence for itself. If that is granted,
philosophy can do nothing but resign itself to the investigation of
something else, and such a “something else” is seen in these
“values.” The following question, as an unsolved problem,
can be found in Lotze's statement: Is it at all possible to go no
further than to define and characterize values and to renounce all
knowledge concerning the form of existence of the values?
Many of the most recent schools of thought prove to be attempts to
search within the self-conscious ego, which in the course of the
philosophical development feels itself more and more separated from
the world, for an element that leads back to a reunion with the world.
The conceptions of Dilthey, Eucken, Windelband, Rickert and others are
such attempts. They want to do justice both to the demands of natural
science and to the contemplation of the experience of the soul so that
a science of the spirit appears as a possibility beside the science of
nature. The same aims are followed by the thought tendencies of
Herman Cohen (1842 – 1918) (compare
in Part II Chapter IV
of this volume),
Paul Natorp (1854 – 1924), August Stadler (1850 – 1910),
Ernst Cassirer (1874 – 1945), Walter Kinkel (born 1871)
and others who share their philosophical convictions. In directing
their attention to the processes of thinking itself, they believe that
in this highest activity of the self-conscious ego the soul gains hold
on an inner possession that allows it to penetrate into reality. They
turn their attention to what appears to them as the highest fruit of
thinking. A simple example of this would be the thinking of a circle
in which specific representative thought pictures of any circle are
disregarded entirely. As much can be embraced in this way by pure
thinking as can be encompassed by the power of our soul through
which we can penetrate into reality. For what we can think in this way
manifests its own nature through thinking in the consciousness of man.
The sciences strive to arrive, by means of their observations,
experiments and methods, at such results concerning the world as can
be seized in pure thinking. They will have to leave the fulfillment of
this aim to a far distant future, but one can nevertheless say that
insofar as they endeavor to have pure thought, they also strive to
convey the true essence of things to the possession of the
self-conscious ego. When man makes an observation in the sensual
external world, or in the course of historical life, he has, according
to this conception, no true reality before him. What the observation
of the senses offers is merely the challenge to search for a reality,
not a reality in itself. Only when, through the activity of the soul,
a thought appears, so to speak, to reveal itself at the very place
where the observation has been made, is the living reality of the
observed object integrated into real knowledge. The progressively
developing knowledge replaces with thought what has been observed in
the world. What the observation showed in the beginning was there only
because man with his senses, with his everyday imagination, realizes
at first for himself the nature of things in his own limited way. What
he has at his disposal in this way has significance only for himself.
What he substitutes as thought for the observation is no longer
troubled by his own limitation. It is as it is thought, for thought
determines its own nature and reveals itself according to its own
character in the self-conscious ego. Thought does not allow the ego to
determine its character in any way.
There lives in this world conception a subtle feeling for the
development of thought life since its first philosophical flowering
within Greek intellectual life. It was the thought experience that
gave to the self-conscious ego the power to be vigorously conscious of
its own self-dependent entity. In the present age this power of
thought can be experienced in the soul as the impulse that, seized
within the self-conscious ego, endows this ego with the awareness that
it is not a mere external observer of things but that it lives
essentially in an intimate connection with their reality. It is in
thought itself that the soul can feel it contains a true and
self-dependent reality. As the soul thus feels itself interwoven with
thought as a content of life that breathes reality, it can again
experience the supporting power of the thought element as this was
experienced in Greek philosophy. It can be experienced again as
strongly as it was felt in the philosophy that took thought as a
perception. It is true that in the world conception of Cohen and
kindred spirits, thought cannot be considered as a perception in the
sense of Greek philosophy. But in this conception the inner permeation
of the ego with the thought world, which the ego acquired through its
own work, is such that this experience includes, at the same time, the
awareness of its reality.
The connection with Greek philosophy is emphasized by these thinkers.
Cohen expresses himself on this point as follows. “The relation
that Parmenides forged as the identity of thinking and being must
persist.” Another thinker who also accepts this conception,
Walter Kinkel, is convinced that “only thinking can know being,
for both thinking and being are, fundamentally understood, one and the
same.” It is through this doctrine that Parmenides became the
real creator of scientific idealism (Idealism and Realism).
It is also apparent from the presentations of these thinkers how
the formulation of their thoughts presupposes the century-long
effect of the thought evolution since the Greek civilization. In spite
of the fact that these thinkers start from Kant, which could have
fostered in them the opinion that thought lives only within the soul,
outside true reality, the supporting power of thought exerts itself in
them. This thought has gone beyond the Kantian limitation and it
forces these thinkers who contemplate its nature to become convinced
that thought itself is reality, and that it also leads the soul into
reality if it acquires this element rightly in inner work and,
equipped with it, seeks the way into the external world. In this
philosophical mode of thinking thought proves intimately connected
with the world contemplation of the self-conscious ego. The
fundamental impulse of this thought tendency appears like a discovery
of the possible service that the thought element can accomplish for
the ego. We find in the followers of this philosophy views like these:
“Only thinking itself can produce what may be accepted as
being.” “Being is the being of thinking” (Cohen).
Now the question arises: Can these philosophers expect of their
thought experience, which is produced through the conscious work in
the self-conscious ego, what the Greek philosopher expected of it when
he accepted thought as a perception? If one believes to perceive
thought, one can be of the opinion that it is the real world that
reveals it. As the soul feels itself connected with thought as a
perception, it can consider itself as belonging to the element of the
world that is thought, indestructible thought, while the sense
perception reveals only destructible entities. The part of the human
being that is perceptible to the senses can then be supposed to be
perishable, but what emerges in the human soul as thought makes it
appear as a member of the spiritual, the true reality. Through such a
view the soul can conceive that it belongs to a truly real world. This
could be achieved by a modern world conception only if it could show
that the thought experience not only leads knowledge into a
true reality, but also develops the power to free the soul from the
world of the senses and to place it into true reality. The doubts that
arise in regard to this question cannot be counteracted by the insight
into the reality of the thought element if the latter is considered as
acquired by perception actively produced through the work of the soul.
For, from what could the certainty be derived that what the soul
produces actively in the world of the senses, can also give it a real
significance in a world that is not perceived by senses? It could be
that the soul, to be sure, could procure a knowledge of reality
through its actively produced thoughts, but that nevertheless the soul
itself was not rooted in this reality. Also, this world conception
merely points to a spiritual life, but it cannot prevent the unbiased
observer from finding philosophical riddles at its end that demand
answers and call for soul experiences for which this philosophy does
not supply the foundations. It can arrive at the conviction that
thought is real, but it cannot find through thought a guarantee for
the reality of the soul.
The philosophical thinking at which A. v. Leclaire (born 1848),
Wilhelm Schuppe (1836 – 1913), Johannes Rehmke (1848 –
1930), von Schubert-Soldern (born 1852), and others arrived,
shows how philosophical inquiry can remain confined to the narrow
circle of the self-conscious ego without finding a possibility to make
the transition from this region into the world where this ego could
link its own existence to a world reality. There are certain
differences among these philosophies, but what is characteristic of
all of them is that they all stress that everything man can count as
belonging to his world must manifest itself within the realm of his
consciousness. On the ground of their philosophy the thought
cannot be conceived that would even presuppose anything about a
territory of the world if the soul wanted to transcend with its
conceptions beyond the realm of consciousness. Because the
“ego” must comprise everything to which its knowledge
extends within the folds of its consciousness, because it holds it
within the consciousness, it therefore appears necessary to this view
that the entire world is within the limits of this awareness.
That the soul should ask itself: How do I stand with the possession of
my consciousness in a world that is independent of this consciousness,
is an impossibility for this philosophy. From its point of view, one
would have to decide to give up all questions of this kind. One would
have to become blind to the fact that there are inducements
within the realm of the conscious soul life to look beyond that realm,
just as in reading one does not look for the meaning in the
forms that are visible on the paper, but to the significance that is
expressed by them. As in reading, it is a question not of
studying the forms of the letters as it is of no importance for
the conveyed meaning to consider the nature of these forms themselves,
so it could be irrelevant for an insight into true reality that within
the sphere of the “ego” everything capable of being known
has the character of consciousness.
The philosophy of Carl du Prel (1839 – 99) stands as an
opposite pole to this philosophical opinion. He is one of the spirits
who have deeply felt the insufficiency of the opinion that considers
the natural scientific mode of conception to which so many people have
grown accustomed to be the only possible form of world explanation. He
points out that this mode of conception unconsciously sins against its
own statements, for natural science must admit on the basis of its own
results
that we never perceive the objective processes of nature but rather
their effect on us, not vibrations of the ether but light, not air
vibrations but sounds. We have then, so to speak, a subjectively
falsified world picture, but this does not interfere with our
practical orientation because this falsification shows no individual
differences and proceeds in a constant manner and according to law. .
. . Materialism itself has proved through natural science that the
world transcends beyond our senses. It has undermined its own
foundation and it has sawed off the branch on which it had been
sitting. As a philosophy, however, it still continues to sit on that
branch. Materialism, therefore, has no right at all to call itself a
philosophy … . It has only the justification of a branch of
knowledge; furthermore, the world, the object of its study, is a world
of mere appearance. To try to build a world conception on this
foundation is an obvious self-contradiction. The real world is
entirely different, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, from the
one that is known to materialism, and only the real world can be the
object of a philosophy. (Carl du Prel, The Riddle of Man.)
Such objections are necessarily caused by the materialistically
colored mode of thought of natural science. Its weakness is noticed by
many people who share the point of view of du Prel. The latter can be
considered as a representative of a pronounced trend of modern
philosophy. What is characteristic of this trend is the way in which
it tries to penetrate into the realm of the real world. This
way still shows the aftereffect of the natural scientific mode of
conception, although the latter is at the same time most violently
criticized. Natural science starts from the facts that are accessible
to the sensory consciousness. It finds itself forced to refer to a
supersensible element, for only the light is sensually perceptible,
not the vibrations of the ether. The vibrations then belong to a realm
that is, at least, extrasensory in its nature. But has natural science
the right to speak of an extrasensory element? It means to limit
its investigations to the realm of sense perceptions. Is anyone
justified to speak of supersensible elements who restricts his
scientific endeavors to the results of the consciousness that is bound
to the senses and therefore to the body?
Du Prel wants to grant this right of investigating the supersensible
only to a thinker who seeks the nature of the human soul outside the
realm of the senses. What he considers as the chief demand in this
direction is the necessity to demonstrate manifestations of the soul
that prove the soul is also active when it is not bound to the body.
Through the body the soul develops its sensual consciousness.
In the phenomena of hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and
somnambulism, it becomes apparent that the soul is active when the
sensual consciousness is eliminated. The soul life, therefore, extends
further than the realm of consciousness. It is here that du Prel
arrives at the diametrically opposite position to those of the
characterized philosophers of the all-embracing consciousness who
believe that the limits of consciousness define at the same time the
entire realm of philosophy. For du Prel, the nature of the soul is to
be sought outside the circle of this consciousness. If,
according to him, we observe the soul when it is active without the
usual means of the senses, we have the proof that it is of a
supersensible nature.
Among the means through which this can be done, du Prel and many
others count, besides the observation of the above-mentioned
“abnormal” psychic phenomena, also the phenomena of
spiritualism. It is not necessary to dwell here on du Prel's opinion
concerning this field, for what constitutes the mainspring of his view
becomes apparent also if one considers only his attitude toward
hypnotism, hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism. Whoever wants to
prove the spiritual nature of the human soul cannot limit himself to
showing that the soul has to refer to a supersensible world in its
cognitive process. For natural science could answer that it does not
follow that the soul is itself rooted in the supersensible
realm because it has a knowledge of a supersensible world. It
could very well be that knowledge of the supersensible could also be
dependent on the activity of the body and thus be of significance
only for a soul that is bound to a body. It is for this reason
that du Prel feels it necessary to show that the soul not only
knows the supersensible while it is itself bound to the body,
but that it experiences the supersensible while it is outside
the body. With this view, he also arms himself against objections that
can be raised from the viewpoint of the natural scientific mode of
thinking against the conceptions of Eucken, Dilthey, Cohen, Kinkel and
other defenders of a knowledge of a spiritual world. He is, however,
not protected against the doubts that must be raised against his own
procedure.
Although it is true that the soul can find an access to the
supersensible only if it can show how it is itself active outside
the sensual realm, the emancipation of the soul from the sensual
world is not assured by the phenomena of hypnotism, somnambulism and
hypnotic suggestion, nor by all other processes to which du Prel
refers for this purpose. In regard to all these phenomena it can be
said that the philosopher who wants to explain them still proceeds
only with the means of his ordinary consciousness. If this
consciousness is to be useless for a real explanation of the world,
how can its explanations, which are applied to the phenomena
according to the conditions of this consciousness, be of any
decisive significance for these phenomena? What is peculiar in du Prel
is the fact that he directs his attention to certain facts that point
to a supersensible element, but that he, nevertheless, wants to remain
entirely on the ground of the natural scientific mode of thought when
he explains those facts. But should it not be necessary for the soul
to enter the supersensible in its mode of thinking when the
supersensible becomes the object of its interest? Du Prel looks
at the supersensible, but as an observer he remains within the
realm of the sensual world. If he did not want to do this, he would
have to demand that only a hypnotized person can say the right things
concerning his experiences under hypnosis, that only in the state of
somnambulism could knowledge concerning the supersensible be acquired
and that what the not-hypnotized, the non-somnambulist must think
concerning these phenomena is of no validity. If we follow this
thought consistently, we arrive at an impossibility. If one speaks of
a transposition of the soul outside the realm of the senses into
another form of existence, one must intend to acquire the knowledge of
this existence within that other region. Du Prel points at a
path that must be taken in order to gain access to the supersensible.
But he leaves the question open regarding the means that are to be
used on this path.
A new thought current has been stimulated through the transformation
of fundamental physical concepts that has been attempted by Albert
Einstein (1879 – 1955). The attempt is of significance also for
the development of philosophy. Physics previously followed its given
phenomena by thinking of them as being spread out in empty three
dimensional space and in one dimensional time. Space and time were
supposed to exist outside things and events. They were, so to speak,
self-dependent, rigid quantities. For things, distances were measured
in space. For events, duration was determined in time. Distance and
duration belong, according to this conception, to space and time, not
to things and events. This conception is opposed by the theory of
relativity introduced by Einstein. For this theory, the distance
between two things is something that belongs to those things
themselves. As a thing has other properties it has also the property
of being at a certain distance from a second thing. Besides these
relations that are given by the nature of things there is no such
thing as space. The assumption of space makes a geometry that is
thought for this space, but this same geometry can be applied to the
world of things. It arises in a mere thought world. Things have to
obey the laws of this geometry. One can say that the events and
situations of the world must follow the laws that are established
before the observation of things. This geometry now is
dethroned by the theory of relativity. What exists are only things and
they stand in relations to one another that present themselves
geometrically. Geometry thus becomes a part of physics, but then one
can no longer maintain that their laws can be established before
the observation of the things. No thing has any place in
space but only distances relative to other things.
The same is assumed for time. No process takes place at a definite
time; it happens in a time-distance relative to another event. In this
way, temporal distances in the relation of things and spatial
intervals become homogenous and flow together. Time becomes a fourth
dimension that is of the same nature as the three dimensions of space.
A process in a thing can be determined only as something that takes
place in a temporal and spatial distance relative to other events. The
motion of a thing becomes something that can be thought only in
relation to other things.
It is now expected that only this conception will produce
unobjectionable explanations of certain physical processes while such
processes lead to contradictory thoughts if one assumes the existence
of an independent space and independent time.
If one considers that for many thinkers a science of nature was
previously considered to be something that can be mathematically
demonstrated, one finds in the theory of relativity nothing less than
an attempt to declare any real science of nature null and void. For
just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it
could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the
observation of nature. Contrary to this view, it is now maintained
that the things and processes of nature themselves determine
the relations of space and time. They are to supply the mathematical
element. The only certain element is surrendered to the uncertainty of
space and time observations.
According to this view, every thought of an essential reality that
manifests its nature in existence is precluded. Everything is only in
relation to something else.
Insofar as man considers himself within the world of natural things
and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of
this theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in
mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner
life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what
is “substantial in itself' in the realm of nature but in
transcending nature, in the realm of the spirit.
It will not be possible to evade the theory of relativity for the
physical world, but precisely this fact will drive us to a knowledge
of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is
the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that
is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of the observation of
nature. That the theory of relativity forces us to think in
this way constitutes its value within the development of world
conception.
It was the intention of this book to describe the development of what
may be called philosophical activity in the proper sense of the word.
The endeavor of such spirits as Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoi and others
had for this reason to be left unconsidered, significant as discussion
of their contribution must appear when it is a question of following
the currents that lead from philosophy into our general spiritual
culture.
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