A Forgotten Stream in
German Spiritual Life
Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel appear in their full significance quite
especially to someone who considers the far-reaching impetus they gave
to personalities possessed of far less spiritual vigor than they. Something
is moving and working in the souls of this trio of thinkers that could
not come fully to expression within themselves. And what is working
as the basic undertone in the souls of these thinkers works on in a
living way in their successors and brings them to world views —
in accordance with the spirit — that even the three great original
thinkers themselves could not achieve because they had to exhaust their
soul vigor, so to speak in making the first beginnings.
Thus, in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
there appears a thinker who tries to penetrate more deeply into the
spiritual than his father, Schelling, or Hegel. Whoever dares to make
such an attempt will not only hear from outside the opposition of all
those who are fearful about questions of world views; if he is a careful
thinker, he will clearly perceive this opposition coming also from his
own soul. Is there then actually a possibility of delivering the human
soul of cognitive powers that lead into regions of which the senses
give no view? What can guarantee the reality of such regions; what can
determine the difference between such reality and the creations of fantasy
and daydreaming? Whoever does not always have the spirit of this opposition
at his side, so to speak, as the true companion of his prudence will
easily blunder in his spiritual-scientific attempts; whoever has this
spirit will recognize in it something extremely valuable for life.
Whoever enters into the arguments of Immanuel Hermann Fichte will find
that a certain spiritual demeanor has passed over to him from his great
predecessors that both strengthens his steps into the spiritual region
and endows him with prudence in the sense just indicated.
The standpoint of the
Hegelian world view, which takes as its basic conviction the spiritual
nature of the world of ideas, was also able to be the point of departure
for Immanuel Hermann Fichte in the development of his thoughts.
Nevertheless, he felt it to be a weakness in Hegel's world view that,
from its supersensible vantage point, it still looks only at what is
revealed in the sense world. Whoever lives into Immanuel Hermann Fichte's
views can feel something like the following as its basic undertone.
The soul experiences itself in a supersensible way when it lifts itself
above sense perception to a weaving in the realm of ideas. Through this,
the soul has not only enabled itself to see the sense world differently
than the senses see it — which would correspond to the Hegelian
world view — ; but also, the soul has an experience of itself
through this that it cannot have through anything to be found within
the sense world. From now on the soul knows of something that itself
is supersensible about the soul. This “something” cannot
be merely the idea of the soul's sense-perceptible body. Rather,
this something must be a living, essential beingness that underlies
the sense-perceptible body in such a way that this body is formed according
to the idea of this something. Thus Immanuel Hermann Fichte is led
up above and beyond the sense-perceptible body to a supersensible body,
which, out of its life, forms the first body. Hegel advances from sense
observation to thinking about sense observation. Fichte seeks in man the
being that can experience thinking as something supersensible,
Hegel, if he wants to see in thinking something supersensible,
would have to ascribe to this thinking itself the ability to think.
Fichte cannot go along with this. He has to say to himself: If one is
not to regard the sense-perceptible body itself as the creator of thoughts,
then one is compelled to assume that there is something supersensible
above and beyond this body. Moved by this kind of a view, Fichte regards
the human sense-perceptible body in a natural-scientific way
(physiologically), and finds that such a study, if only it is unbiased
enough, is compelled to take a supersensible body as the basis of the
sense-perceptible one. In paragraphs 118 and 119 of his
Anthropology
(second edition 1860), he says about this: “Within the material
elements, therefore, one cannot find what is truly enduring, that
unifying form principle of the body which proves to be operative
our whole life long.” “Thus we are directed toward a second,
essentially different cause within the body.”
“Insofar as this [unifying form principle] contains what is
actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner
body-invisible, yet present in all visible materiality. That
other entity, the outer manifestation of this form principle, shaped
by continuous metabolism: let us call it ‘corporality’
from now on; it is truly not enduring and not whole; it is the mere
effect or copy of that inner bodily nature that throws it into the changing
world of matter in somewhat the same way a magnetic force puts together,
out of metal filing dust, a seemingly dense body that is then blown
away in all directions when the uniting force is withdrawn.” This
opens for Fichte the perspective of getting outside the sense world,
in which man works between birth and death, into a supersensible world
with which he is connected through Ws invisible body in the same way
he is connected with the sense world through his visible body, For,
his knowledge of this invisible body brings him to the view he expresses
in these words: “For one hardly need ask here how the human being,
in and for himself, conducts himself in this process of death. Man,
in and for himself — even after the last, to us invisible, act
of his life processes — remains, in his essential being,
completely the same one he was before with respect to his spirit
and power of organization. His integrity is preserved; for he has
lost absolutely nothing of what was his and belonged to his substance
during his visible life, He only returns in death into the invisible
world; or rather, since he has never left the invisible world, since
the invisible world is what actually endures within everything
visible, he has only stripped off a particular form of visibility.
‘To be dead’ simply means to remain no longer perceptible to
ordinary sense apprehension, in exactly the same way that what is actually
real, the ultimate foundations of bodily phenomena, are also imperceptible
to the senses.” And with such a thought Fichte feels himself to
be standing so surely in the supersensible world that he can say:
“With this concept of the continued existence of the soul,
therefore, we not only transcend outer experience and reach into an
unknown region of merely illusory existences; we also find ourselves,
with this concept, right in the midst of the graspable reality accessible
to thinking. To assert the opposite, that the soul ceases to exist, would
be against nature, would contradict all analogy to outer experience. The
soul that has ‘died,’ i.e., has become invisible to the
senses, continues to exist no less than before, and is unremoved from its
original life conditions. ... Another means of incarnation need only
present itself to the soul's power of organization for the soul to stand
there again in new bodily activity ...” (Paragraphs 133
Anthropology)
Starting
from such views there opens up for Immanuel Hermann Fichte the possibility
of a self-knowledge that man attains when he observes himself from the
point of view he gains through his experiences in his own supersensible
entity. Man's sense-perceptible entity brings him to the point of
thinking. But in thinking, after all, he grasps himself as a supersensible
being, If he lifts mere thinking up into an inner experiencing
— through which it is no longer mere thinking but rather a
supersensible beholding, — he then gains a way of knowing through
which he no longer looks only upon what is sense-perceptible, but also
upon what is supersensible. If anthropology is the science of the human
being by which he studies the part of himself to be found in the sense
world, then, through his view of the supersensible, another science makes
it appearance, about which Immanuel Hermann Fichte expresses himself in
this way (paragraph 270): to “... anthropology ends up
with the conclusion, established from the most varied sides, that man,
in accordance with the true nature of his being, as though in
the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible
world. Man's sense consciousness, on the other hand, and the phenomenal
world (world of appearances) arising at the point of his eye, along
with the whole life of the senses, including human senses: all this
has no significance other than merely being the place in which that
supersensible life of the human spirit occurs through the fact that
the human spirit, by its own, free, conscious activity, leads
the spiritual content of ideas from the beyond into the sense world
...” This fundamental apprehension of man's being now lifts
“anthropology” in its final conclusions up to
“anthroposophy.”
* * *
Through
Immanuel Hermann Fichte the cognitive impulse manifesting in the idealism
of German world views is brought to the point of undertaking the first
of those steps which can lead human insight to a science of the spiritual
world. Many other thinkers strove like Immanuel Hermann Fichte to carry
further the ideas of their predecessors: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. For, this German idealism points to the germinal power for
a real development of those cognitive powers of man that behold the
supersensible spiritual the way our senses behold the sense-perceptible
material. Let us just look at several of these thinkers. One can see
how fruitful the spiritual stream of German idealism proves to be in
this direction if one does not refer merely to those thinkers who are
discussed in the usual textbooks on the history of philosophy, but also
to those whose spiritual work was enclosed within narrower boundaries.
For example, there are the
Little Writings
(published 1869 in Leipzig) of Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in
Bromberg on August 16, 1867 as headmaster of a secondary school. His book
contains essays on “the antithesis between pantheism and deism in
pre-Christian religions,” on the “concept of religion,”
on “Kepler, his life and character,” etc. The basic undertone
of these treatises is altogether of a sort to show how the thought-life of
their author is rooted in the idealism of German world views. One of these
essays speaks about the “reasonable grounds for believing in the
immortality of the human soul.” This essay defends immortality at
first only with reasons that spring from our ordinary thinking. But at
the end, the following significant note is added by the publisher:
“According to a letter of August 14, 1866 to his publishers, the
author intended to expand this essay for the complete edition of his
collected ‘Little Writings’ with an observation about the new
body that the soul is working to develop for itself already in this life.
The author's death the following year prevented the carrying out of this
plan.” How a remark like this spotlights the effect upon thinkers of
the idealism of German world views, stimulating them to penetrate in a
scientific way into the spiritual realm! How many such attempts a person
would discover today, even by investigating only those thinkers still to
be found in literature! How many there must be that bore no fruit in
literature but a great deal in life! One is looking there really, in the
scientific consciousness ruling in our day, at a more or less forgotten
stream in German spiritual life.
One of
those thinkers, hardly ever heard of today, is Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler.
Let us mention only one of his numerous books,
Lectures on Philosophy,
published in 1835. A personality is expressing himself in this book
who is absolutely conscious of how a person using merely his senses
and the intellect that deals with the observations of his senses can
know only a part of the world. Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler
also feels himself in his thinking to be standing within a supersensible
world. But he also senses how the human being, when he removes himself
from the power that binds him to the senses, can do more than place
himself before a world that in the Hegelian sense is thought
by him; through this removal he can experience within his inner being
the blossoming of a purely spiritual means of knowledge through which
he spiritually beholds a spiritual world, like the senses behold the
sense world in sense perception. Troxler speaks of a “supra-spiritual
sense:” And one can form a picture of what he means by this in the
following way. The human being observes the things of the world through
his senses. He thereby receives sense-perceptible pictures of these
things. He then thinks about these pictures. Thoughts reveal themselves
to him thereby that no longer bear the sensible pictorial element in
themselves. Through the power of his spirit, therefore, man adds
supersensible thoughts to the sense-perceptible pictures. If he now
experiences himself in the entity that is thinking in him, in such a
way that he ascends above mere thinking to spiritual experiencing, then,
from out of this experiencing, an inner, purely spiritual power of
picture making takes hold of him. He then beholds a world in pictures
that can serve as a form of revelation for a supersensibly experienced
reality. These pictures are not received by the senses; but they are
full of life, just as sense-perceptible pictures are; they are not
dreamed up; they are experiences in the supersensible world held fast
by the soul in picture form. In ordinary cognitive activity,
the sense-perceptible picture is present first and then, in the process
of knowledge, the thought comes to join it — the thought, which
is not a picture for the senses. In the spiritual process of knowledge,
the supersensible experience is present; this experience as such could
not be beheld if it did not, through a power in accordance with the
nature of the spirit, pour itself into the picture that brings this
power to spiritually perceptible embodiment. For Troxler, the cognitive
activity of the “supra-spiritual sense” is of just such
a kind. And the pictures of this supra-spiritual sense are grasped by
the “supersensible spirit” of man in the same way that
sense-perceptible pictures are grasped by human reason in knowledge
of the sense world. In the working together of the supersensible
spirit with the supra-spiritual sense, there evolved, in Troxler's
view, our knowing of the spirit (see the sixth of his
Lectures on Philosophy).
Taking his start
from such presuppositions, Troxler has an inkling of a “higher
man” within the man that experiences himself in the sense world;
this “higher man” underlies the sense-perceptible man and
belongs to the supersensible world; and in this view Troxler feels himself
to be in harmony with what Friedrich Schlegel expressed. And thus, as
was already the case earlier with Friedrich Schlegel, the highest qualities
and activities manifested by the human being in the sense world become
for Troxler the expression of what the supersensible human being can
do. Through the fact that man stands within the sense world, his soul
is possessed of the power of belief. But this power after all is only
the manifestation, through the sense-perceptible body, of the supersensible
soul. In the supersensible realm a certain faculty of the soul underlies
our power of belief; if one wants to express it in a supersensibly
pictorial way, one must call this a faculty of the supersensible man to
hear. And it is the same with our power of hope. A faculty of the
supersensible man to see underlies this power; corresponding with our
activity of love, there is the faculty of the “higher man”
to feel, to “touch,” in spirit, just as the sense of touch
in the sense-perceptible world is the faculty to feel something. Troxler
expresses himself on this subject (page 107 of his
Lectures on Philosophy,
Bern, 1835) in the following way: “Our departed friend Friedrich
Schlegel has brought to light in a very beautiful and true way the
relationship of the sense-perceptible to the spiritual man. In his
lectures on the philosophy of language and the word, Schlegel says:
‘If one wants — in that alphabet of consciousness which
provides the individual elements for the individual syllables and
whole words — to refind the first beginnings of our higher
consciousness, after God Himself constitutes the keystone of highest
consciousness, then the feeling for the spirit must be accepted
as the living center of our whole consciousness and as the point of
union with the higher consciousness ...
One is often used to calling these fundamental feelings for the eternal:
‘belief, hope, and love.’ If one is to regard these three
fundamental feelings or characteristics or states of consciousness as
just so many organs of knowledge and perception of the divine —
or, if you will, at least organs that give inklings of the divine, —
then one can very well compare them to the outer senses and instruments
of sense perception, both in the above respect and in the characteristic
form of apprehension that each of them has, Then love corresponds in a
striking way — in the first stimulating soul touch, in the continuous
attraction, and in the final perfect union — to the outer sense
of touch; belief is the inner hearing of the spirit, uniting the given
word to its higher message, grasping it, and inwardly preserving it;
and hope is the eye, whose light can glimpse already in the distance
the objects it craves deeply and longingly.’” That Troxler
himself now goes above and beyond the meaning Schlegel gave these words
and thinks them absolutely in the sense indicated above is shown by
the words Troxler now adds: “Far loftier than intellect and will,
and their interaction, far loftier than reason and spiritual activity
(Freiheit), and their unity, are these ideas of our deeper
heart (Gerrütsideen) that unite in a consciousness
of spirit and of heart; and just as intellect and will, reason and
spiritual activity — and all the soul capacities and abilities of
a lower sort than they — represent an earthward directed reflection,
so these three are a heavenward directed consciousness that is illuminated
by a truly divine light.” The same thing is shown by the fact that
Troxler also expresses himself about the supersensible soul body in
exactly the same way one encounters in Immanuel Hermann Fichte:
“Earlier philosophers have already distinguished a fine and noble
soul body from the coarser body ... a soul that had about itself a
picture of the body that they called a schema and that was for them the
inner, higher man. ... In modern times even Kant, in
The Dreams of a Spirit Seer,
dreams up seriously as a joke a completely inward soul man that bears
all the members of its outer man upon his spiritual body; Lavater also
writes and thinks in this way; and even when Jean Paul jokes about Bonet's
slip and Platner's soul girdle, which are supposed to be hidden
inside the coarser outside skirt and martyr's smock, we also hear
him asking again, after all: ‘to what end and from where were
these extraordinary potentials and wishes laid in us, which, bare as
swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly covering to pieces? ...
Within the stony members (of man) there grow and mature his living members
according to a way of living unknown to us.’ We could,”
Troxler continues, “present innumerable further examples of similar
ways of thinking and writing that ultimately are only various views
and pictures in which ... the one true teaching is contained of
the individuality and immortality of man.”
Troxler too speaks of the
fact that upon the path of knowledge sought by him a science of man is
possible through which — to use his own expressions — the
“supra-spiritual sense” together with the “supersensible
spirit” apprehend the supersensible being of man in an
“anthroposophy,” On page 101 of his Lectures there is
the sentence: “While it is now highly encouraging that modern
philosophy, which ... must reveal itself ... in any anthroposophy, is
winding its way upward, still one must not overlook the fact that this
idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality
of man must not be confused either with what philosophy sets up as
subjective spirit or as finite ‘I,’ nor with what philosophy
lets this ‘I’ be confronted by as absolute spirit or absolute
personality.”
There is no doubt that Troxler sought the way out of and beyond Hegel's
thought-world more in dim feeling than in clear perception. One can
nevertheless observe in his cognitive life how the stimulus of the idealism
in the German world views of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel works in a
personality who cannot make the views of this trio of thinkers into
his own, but who finds his own way through the fact that he receives
this stimulus.
* * *
Karl
Christian Planck belongs to those personalities in the evolution of
German spiritual life who are forgotten now and were disregarded even
during their own lifetimes. He was born in 1819 in Stuttgart and died
in 1880; he was a professor in a secondary school in Ulm and later in a
college in Blaubeuren. In 1877 he still hoped to be given the professorship
in philosophy that became free then in Tübingen. This did not happen.
In a series of writings he seeks to draw near to the world view that
seems to him to express the spiritual approach of the German people.
In his book
Outline of a Science of Nature (1864)
he states how he wants, in his own thoughts. to present the thoughts of
the questing German folk soul: “The author is fully aware of the
power of the deep-rooted preconceptions from past views that confront his
book; nevertheless, just as the work itself has fought through to
completion and into public
view — in spite of all the adverse conditions confronting a work
of this kind as a result of the whole situation and professional
position of its author — so he is also certain that what must
now fight for recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most
obvious truth, and that through this, not merely its concerns
but also the truly German view of things will triumph over
any still unworthily external and un-German grasp of nature and spirit.
— What, in unconscious profound inklings, has already been prefigured
in our medieval literature will finally be fulfilled by our nation in
the fullness of time. Impractical, afflicted by injury and scorn, the
inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram von Eschenbach portrayed
this inwardness in his Parzival), in the power of its ceaseless striving,
finally attains the highest; this inwardness beholds the ultimate simple
laws of the things of this world and of human existence itself, in their
very foundations; and what literature has allegorized in a fanciful
medieval way as the wonders of the grail, whose rulership its hero attains,
receives, on the other hand, its purely natural fulfillment and reality
in a lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”
In the
last period of his life Karl Christian Planck drew his thought-world
together in a book published by the philosopher Karl Köstlin in
1881 under the title
Testament of a German.
One can absolutely
perceive in Planck's soul a similar kind of feeling for the riddle
of knowledge as that revealed in the other thinker personalities
characterized in this book. This riddle in its original form becomes
for Planck the point of departure for his investigations. Within the
circumference of the human thought-world can the strength be found by
which man can apprehend true reality, the reality that gives
his existence sense and meaning within world existence? Man sees himself
placed into and over against nature. He can certainly form thoughts
about what rules in nature's depths as powers of true being; but
where is his guarantee that his thoughts have any significance at all
other than that they are creations of his own soul, without kinship
to those depths? If his thoughts were like this, then it would in fact
remain unknown to man what he himself is and how he is rooted in the
true world. Planck was just as far as Hegel from wanting to approach
the world depths through any soul force other than thinking. He could
hold no other view than that genuine reality must yield itself somehow
to thinking. But no matter how far one reaches out with thinking, no
matter how one seeks to strengthen its inner power: one still remains
always only in thinking; in all the widths and depths of thinking one
does not encounter being (Sein). By virtue of its own nature,
thinking seems to exclude itself from any communion with being.
Nevertheless, this insight into thinking's alienation from being now
becomes for Planck precisely the ray of light that falls upon the world
riddle and solves it. If thinking makes absolutely no claim of bearing
within itself anything at all in the way of reality, if it actually is
true that thinking reveals itself to be something unreal, then precisely
through this fact it proves itself to be an instrument for expressing
reality. If it were itself something real, then the soul could weave
only in its reality, and could not leave it again; if thinking
itself is unreal, then it will not disturb the soul through any reality
of its own; by thinking, man is absolutely not within any thought-reality;
he is within a thought-unreality that precisely therefore does not force
itself upon him with its own reality but rather expresses that reality
of which it speaks. Whoever sees in thinking itself something real must,
in Planck's view, give up hope of arriving at reality; since,
for him, thinking must place itself between the soul and reality. If
thinking itself is nothing, it can therefore also not conceal
reality from our activity of knowing; then reality must be able to reveal
itself in thinking.
With
this view Planck has, to begin with, attained only the starting point
for his world view. For, in the thought-weaving immediately present
in the soul during life, that thinking is by no means operative which
is pure, self-renouncing, and even self-denying, There play
into this ordinary thought weaving what lives in the mental picturing,
feeling, willing, and wanting of the soul. Because this is so, the clouding
of world views occurs. And Planck's striving is to attain a kind
of world view in which everything it contains is the result of thinking,
yet nothing stems from thinking itself, In everything that is made into
a thought about the real world, one must look at what lives in thinking
but without itself being thought by us, Planck paints his picture of
the world with a thinking that gives itself up in order to allow the
world to shine from it.
As an example of the way Planck wants to arrive at a picture of the
world through such striving, let us characterize with a few strokes
how he thinks about the being of the earth.
If someone pictures the earth in the way advocated by purely physical
geology, then, for Planck's world view, there is no truth in this
picture. To picture the earth in this way would be the same as speaking
of a tree and fixing one's gaze only upon the trunk, without its
leaves, blossoms, and fruit. To the sight of our physical eyes, such
a tree trunk can be called reality. But in a higher sense it is no reality.
For, as a mere trunk, it cannot occur as such anywhere in our world.
It can be what it is only in so far as those growth forces arise in
it at the same time which unfold the leaves, blossoms, and fruits. In
the reality of the trunk one must think these forces in addition and
must be aware that the bare trunk gives a picture of reality deceiving
to the beholder, The fact that something or other is present to the
senses is not yet proof that in this form it is also a reality, The earth,
pictured as the totality of what it manifests in mineral configurations
and in the facts occurring within these configurations, is no reality,
Whoever wants to picture something real about the earth must picture
it in such a way that its mineral realm already contains within itself
the plant realm, Just as the trunk configuration of the tree includes
its leaves and blossoms; yes, that within the “true earth”
the animal realm and man are already present along with it. But do not
say that all this is obvious and that Planck, basically, is only deceiving
himself in thinking that not everyone sees it this way. Planck would
have to reply to this: Where is the person who sees it this way? Certainly,
everyone pictures the earth as a planetary body with plants, animals,
and man. But they in fact picture the mineral earth, constituted of
geological layers, with plants growing out of its surface, and with
animals and human beings moving around on it. But this earth as a sum,
added up out of minerals, plants. animals, and human beings, does not
exist at all. It is only a delusion of the senses. On the other hand
there is a true earth; it is a completely supersensible configuration,
an invisible being, which provides the mineral foundation from out of
itself; but it is not limited to this, for it manifests itself further
in the plant realm, then in the animal realm, then in the human realm.
Only that person has the right eye for the mineral, plant, animal, and
human realm who beholds the entirety of the earth in its supersensible
nature, and who feels, for example, how the picture of the material
mineral realm by itself, without the picture of the soul evolution of
mankind, is a delusion. Certainly, one can picture a material mineral
realm to oneself; but one is living in a world-lie and not in the
world-truth if, in doing so, one does not have the feeling that with a
mental picture like this, one is caught in the same madness as a person
who wanted to think that a man whose head has been struck off would
calmly go on with his life.
It might
be said: If true knowledge necessitates what is indicated here, then
such knowledge, after all, could never be achieved; for, whoever asserts
that the mineral earth is no reality because it must be viewed within
the entirety of the earth should say too that the entirety of the earth
must be viewed in the plant system and so on. Whoever raises this
objection, however, has not grasped the significance of what underlies
a world view that is in accordance with the spirit. In all human activity
of knowing, in fact, the issue is not merely that one think correctly,
but also that one think in accordance with reality. In speaking
of a painting one can certainly say that one is not thinking in accordance
with reality if one looks only at one person when there are three in
the painting; but this assertion, within its rightful scope,
cannot be refuted by the statement: No one understands this painting
who also does not know all the preceding paintings of the same artist.
A thinking both correct and in accordance with reality
is in fact necessary for knowing reality. To consider, on their own,
a mineral as a mineral, a plant as a plant, etc., can be in accordance
with reality; the mineral earth is not a real configuration, however;
it is a configuration of our imagination, even when one is aware of
the fact that the mineral earth is only a part of everything earthly.
That
is what is significant about a personality like Planck: he attains an
inner state in which he does not reflect upon but rather experiences
the truth of a thought; he unfolds a special power in his own soul by
which to experience when not to think a particular thought because,
through its own nature, it kills itself. To grasp the existence of a
reality that bears within itself its own life and its own death, this
belongs to the kind of soul attitude that does not depend upon the sense
world to tell it: this is or this is not.
From
this point of view Planck sought in thinking to grasp what lives in
natural phenomena and in human existence in historical, artistic, and
judicial life. In a brilliant book, he wrote on the
Truth and Banality of Darwinism.
He calls this work a “monument to the history
of modern (1872) German science.” There are people who experience
a personality like Planck as hovering in unworldly conceptual heights
and lacking a sense for practical life. Practical life requires people
who develop healthy judgment based on “real” life, as they
call it. Now, with respect to this way of experiencing Planck, one can
also hold the opinion: Many things would be different in real life if
this easy-going view of life and of living life were less widespread
in reality, and if on the other hand the opinion could grow somewhat
that thinkers like Planck — because they acquire for themselves
an attitude of soul through which they unite themselves with true reality
— also have a truer judgment about the relationships of life than
the people who call them “dreamers in concepts”
(Begriffsschwärmer) and impractical philosophers.
The opinion is also possible that those dullards who are averse
to such supposed “dreaming in concepts” and who think
themselves so very practical in life are losing their sense for the
true relationships of life, whereas the impractical philosophers
are developing it to the point that it can lead them right to their
goal. One can arrive at such an opinion when one considers Planck and
sees in him, combined with the acme of philosophical development of
ideas, a far-sighted accurate judgment about the needs of a genuine
conduct of life and about the events of outer life. Even if one holds
a different view about much of what Planck has developed in the way
of ideas about shaping outer life — which is also the case with
the present writer, — still one can acknowledge that his views
can provide, precisely in this area, a sound starting point in life
for solving practical problems; even if in proceeding from there one
arrives at something entirely different from one's starting point.
And one should assert: People who are “dreamers in concepts”
in this way and who, precisely because of this, can see what powers
are at work in real life are more competent to meet the needs of this
real life than many a person who believes himself to be imbued with
practical skill precisely through the fact that, in his view, he has
not let contact with any world of ideas “make him stupid.”
(In his book,
Nineteenth Century Views of the World and of Life,
published in 1900, the present author has written about Karl Christian
Planck's place in the evolution of modern world views. This book
was published in a new edition in 1914 under the title
Riddles of Philosophy.)
Someone
might maintain that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts
as significant for the motive forces of the German people since these
thoughts have not become widespread. Such an opinion misses the point
when speaking about the influence of the being of a people upon the views
of a thinker from that people. What is working there are the impersonal
(of ten unconscious) powers of a people, living in their activities
in the most varied realms of existence and shaping the ideas of a thinker
like Planck. These powers were there before he appeared and
will work on afterward; they live, even if they are
not spoken of; they live, even if they are not recognized. And it can
be the case that they work in a particularly strong way in an indigenous
thinker like this, who is not spoken of, because less of what these
powers contain streams into the opinions held about him than
into his thoughts. A thinker like this can of ten stand there
alone, and not only during his lifetime; even his thoughts can stand
there alone in the opinion of posterity. But if one has apprehended
the particular nature of his thoughts, then one has recognized an essential
trait of the folk soul, a trait that has become a thought in him and
will remain imperishably in his people, ready to reveal itself in ever
new impulses. Independent of the question: What effectiveness was granted
to his work? is the other question: What worked in him and will lead
again and again to accomplishments in the same direction? The
Testament of a German
by Karl Christian Planck was republished in a second
edition in 1912. It is a pity that many of those who were philosophically
minded and fond of writing at that time mustered up more enthusiasm
for the thoughts in Henri Bergson's world view — lightly woven and
therefore more easily comprehensible to undemanding souls — than
for the rigorously interrelated and far-reaching ideas of Planck. How
much has indeed been written about the “new configurating”
of world views by Bergson: written, particularly, by those who discover
the newness of a world view so easily because they lack understanding,
and of ten even knowledge, of what has already been there for a long
time. Relative to the “newness” of one of Bergson's
main ideas the present author has pointed in his book
Riddles of Philosophy
to the following significant situation. (And it should
be mentioned, by the way, that this indication was written before the
present war. See the foreword to the second volume of the above book.)
Bergson is led by his thoughts to a transformation of the widespread
idea of the evolution of organic entities. He does not set at the beginning
of this evolution the simplest organism and then think that, due to
outer forces, more complicated organisms emerge from it all the way
up to man; he pictures that, at the starting point of evolution, there
stands a being that in some form or other already contains the impulse
to become man. This being, however, can bring this impulse to realization
only by first expelling from itself other impulses that also lie within
it. By expelling the lower organisms, this being gains the strength
to realize the higher ones. Thus man, in his actual being, is not what
arose last, but rather what was at work first, before everything else.
He first expels the other entities from his formative powers in order
to gain by this preliminary work the strength to come forth himself
into outer sense-perceptible reality. Of course many will object: But
numbers of people have already thought that an inner evolutionary drive
was working in the evolution of organisms. And one can refer to the
long-present thought of purposefulness, or to views held by natural
scientists like Nageli and others. But such objections do not pertain
in a case like this one. For, with Bergson's thought it is not
a matter of starting from the general idea of an inner evolutionary
force, but rather from a specific mental picture of what man is in his
full scope; and of seeing from this picture that this man, thought of
as supersensible, has impulses within him to first set the other beings
of nature into sense-perceptible reality and then also to place himself
into this reality.
Now this
is the point. What can be read in Bergson in a scintillating lightly
draped configuration of ideas had already been expressed before
that by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss in a powerful
and strongly thought-through way. Preuss is also one of those personalities
belonging to the presentation here of a more or less forgotten stream
in the development of German world views that are in accordance with
the spirit. With a powerful sense for reality, Preuss brings together
natural-scientific views and world views — in his book
Spirit and Matter (1882),
for example. One finds the Bergsonian thought
we cited expressed by Preuss in the following way: “It should
... be time ... to present a teaching about the origins of organic species
that is founded not only upon principles set up in a one-sided way by
descriptive natural science, but that is also in full harmony with the
rest of natural laws (which are also the laws of human thinking). This
teaching should also be free of any hypothesizing and should
rest only upon rigorous conclusions drawn from scientific observation
in the broadest sense. This teaching should rescue the concept of species
as much as Is factually possible, but at the same time should take Darwin's
concept of evolution into its domain and seek to make It fruitful. —
The center of this new teaching is man, the species that recurs
only once on our planet: homo sapiens. Strange that older observers
started with objects of nature and then erred to such an extent that
they did not find the path to man, in which effort even Darwin Indeed
succeeded only in a most pitiful and utterly unsatisfying way by seeking
the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals. Actually, the
natural scientist would have to start with himself as a human being
and then, continuing on through the whole realm of existence and
of thinking return to mankind ... It was not by chance that human
nature arose out of earthly nature; It was by necessity. Man is the
goal of tellurian processes, and every other form arising besides him
has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the
whole cosmos. ... When the germs of his being had arisen, the remaining
organic element no longer had the necessary strength to engender further
human germs. What arose then was animal or plant. ...”
The idea, as it lives in the philosophy of German idealism's picture
of the being of man, also shines forth from the mental pictures of this
little-known thinker of Elsfleth, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. Out of this
view he knows how to make Darwinism — insofar as Darwinism looks
only at the evolution occurring in the sense world — into a part
of a world view that Is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes
to know the being of man In Its development out of the depths of the
world-all. As to how Bergson arrived at his thoughts — so glittering
in his depletion, but so powerfully shining in Preuss's —
let us emphasize that less here than the fact that in the writings of
the little-known Preuss the most fruitful seeds can be found, able to
give many a person a stronger impetus than that to be found in Bergson's
glittering version of these same thoughts. To be sure, one must also
meet Preuss with more ability to deepen one's thinking than was
shown by those who waxed so enthusiastic about the “new life”
instilled in our world view by Bergson. What is being said here about
Bergson and Preuss has absolutely nothing to do with national sympathies
and antipathies.
Recently,
H. Bönke has investigated Bergson's “original new philosophical
creation,” because Bergson has found it necessary in these fateful
times to speak such hate-filled words and to shower such contempt upon
German spiritual life (see Bönke's writing:
Plagiarizer Bergson, Membre de l'Institut.
Answer to the Disparagements of German Science by Edmond Perrier,
President de l'Academie des Sciences.
Charlottenburg, Huth, 1915). When one considers all that
Bönke presents about the way Bergson reproduces what he has gotten
from German thought-life, the statements will not seem exaggerated that
the philosopher Wundt makes in the “Central Literary Paper of
Germany,” number 46, of November 13, 1915: “... Bönke
shows no lack ... of incriminating material. The greater part of his
book consists of passages, taken from Bergson's and Schopenhauer's
works, in which the younger author repeats the thoughts of the older,
either verbatim or with slight variation. Even so, this alone is not
the decisive point. Therefore, let us be a little bit clearer and more
critical in ordering the examples advanced by Bönke. They then
fall definitely into three categories. The first contains sentences
from both authors that, except for minor differences, coincide exactly.
...” In the other categories the coincidence lies more in the
way their thoughts are formed.
Now it is perhaps really not so important to show how much Bergson,
who condemns German spiritual life so furiously, reveals himself to
be a right willing proponent of this German spiritual life; more important
is the fact that Bergson propounds this spiritual life in lightly woven,
easily attainable reflections, and that many a critic would have done
better to wait with his enthusiastic proclaiming of this “new
enlivener” of world views until, through better understanding
of those thinkers to whom Bergson owes his stimulus, the critic might
have refrained from his proclamation.
That
a person be stimulated by his predecessors is a natural thing in the
evolution of mankind; what matters, however, is whether the stimulus
leads to a process of further development or — and Bönke's
presentation also makes this quite clear — leads to a process
of regression as in Bergson's case.
A Side Glance
In 1912
The Lofty Goal of Knowledge
by Omar al Raschid Bey was published
in Munich. (Please note: The author is not Turkish; he is German; and
the view he advocates has nothing to do with Mohammedanism, but is an
ancient Indian world view appearing in modern dress.) The book appeared
after the author's death. If the author had had the wish to produce
in his soul the requirements needed for understanding the series of
thinkers depicted in this present book, a book like his would not have
appeared in our age, and its author would not have believed he should
show to himself and others, by what he said in his book, a path of
knowledge appropriate to the present day. But because of the way things
appear to him, the author of
The Lofty Goal
could have only a pitying
smile for the assertion just made here. He would not see that everything
he presents to our soul experience in his final chapter “Awakening
out of Appearances” on the basis of what preceded this chapter
and with this chapter, was, in fact, a correct path of knowledge for the
ancient Indian. One can understand this path completely as one belonging
to the past. The author would not see that this path of knowledge, however,
leads into another path if one does not stop prematurely on the first,
but rather travels on upon the path of reality in accordance with the
spirit as modern idealism has done.
The author would have
to have recognized that his “Awakening out of Appearances”
is only an apparent awakening; actually it is a drawing back of oneself
— effected by one's own soul experiences — from the
appearances, a kind of quaking when faced by the appearances, and therefore
not an “awakening out of appearances,” but rather a falling
asleep into delusion — a self-delusion that considers its world
of delusion to be reality because it cannot get to the point of taking
the path into a reality in accordance with the spirit. Planck's
self-denying thinking is a soul experience into which al Raschid's
deluded thinking cannot penetrate. In
The Lofty Goal
there is the statement: “Whoever seeks his salvation in this world
has fallen prey to this world and remains so; for him there is no escape
from unstilled desire; for him there is no escape from vain play; for
him there is no escape from the tight fetters of the ‘I’.
Whoever does not lift himself out of this world lives and dies with
his world.” Before these sentences stand these: “Whoever
seeks his salvation in the ‘I,’ for him egoism
(Selbstsucht)
is a commandment, for him egoism is God.” But whoever recognizes
in a living way the motive soul forces that hold sway in the series
of thinkers from Fichte up to Planck will see through the deception
manifesting in these statements from
The Lofty Goal.
For he recognizes how the obsession (Sucht) with oneself —
egoism — lies before the experience of the “I”
in Fichte's sense, and how a fleeing from an acknowledgment of the
“I” — in an ancient Indian sense — seemingly
leads arrogant cognitive striving farther into the spiritual world,
but actually throws one back into obsession with one's
“I.” For only the finding of the “I” lets the
“I” escape the fetters of obsession with the “I,”
the fetters of egoism. The point, in fact, really is whether, in
“awakening out of appearances,” one has experiences of
The Lofty Goal
that are produced by a falling back into an obsession with one's
“I,” or whether one has the kind of experiences to which
the following words can point. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing
from the “I” falls prey to obsession with the “I”;
whoever finds the “I” frees himself from obsession with
the “I”; for, obsession with the “I” makes the
“I” into its own idol; finding the “I” gives
the “I” to the world. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing
from the world will be thrown back from the world into his own delusions;
he is deluded by an arrogant illusion of knowledge, which lets a vain
playing with ideas appear to him as world truth; he looses the fetters
of the “I” in front and does not notice how, from behind,
the enemy of knowledge binds them all the faster. Whoever, scorning
the phenomena of the world, wants to lift himself above the world leads
himself into a delusion that holds him all the more securely because
it reveals itself to him as wisdom; he leads himself into a delusion
by which he holds himself and others back from the difficult awakening
in the idealism of modern world views, and dreams into an “awakening
out of appearances,” A supposed awakening, like that which
The Lofty Goal
wishes to indicate, is indeed a source of that experience which ever
and again makes the “awakened person” speak of the sublimity
of his knowledge; but it is also a hindrance for the experiencing
of this idealism in world views. Please do not take these remarks as
a wish on the author's part to disparage in any way al Raschid's
kind of cognitive striving; what the present author is saying here is
an objection that seems necessary for him to raise against
a world view that seems to him to live in the worst possible self-delusion.
Such an objection can certainly also be raised when one values, from
a certain point of view, a manifestation of the spirit; it can seem
most necessary precisely there, because that seriousness moves him to
do so which must hold sway in dealing with questions of knowledge.
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