New Perspectives
The purpose
of this book is to indicate germinal points in the world views of a
series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling. The contemplation of these
germinal points evokes a feeling that these thinkers drew from a source
of spiritual experience from which much more can flow than they brought
forth. What matters is not so much one's acceptance or rejection
of what they expressed, but rather one's understanding of the
character of their striving for knowledge and the direction
of their path. One can then arrive at the view that there is something
in this character and direction that is more promise than fulfillment.
And yet it is a promise with innate power, bearing the guarantee of
its fulfillment within itself.
Through this
one gains a relationship to these thinkers that is not one of adherence
to the dogmas of their world views, but rather one leading to the insight
that: Upon the paths they took, there lie living powers for seeking
knowledge that did not take effect in what they themselves recognized
but that can lead out of and beyond it.
This
need not mean returning to Fichte, Hegel, and the others in the hope
that, by taking better paths from their starting points, one will thus
arrive at better results.
No, that
cannot be the point for us — to be “motivated” by
these thinkers in this way — but rather to gain access to the
sources from which they drew and to recognize what still lies hidden
within these sources as motivating powers, in spite of the work of these
thinkers.
A look at the spirit
of the modern, natural-scientific way of picturing things
(Vorstellungsart) can make one feel how much the idealism in
world views living in the above thinkers is a promise awaiting
fulfillment.
Through its
results in a certain direction, this natural scientific way of picturing
things has demonstrated the efficacy of its cognitive means. One can
already find this way of picturing things essentially prefigured in
a thinker who was at work when its development began — in Galileo.
(In his vice-chancellor's address to the Vienna University in
1894, the Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Laurenz Müllner
discussed the significance of Galileo in the most beautiful way.) What
was already indicated by Galileo reappears, in an evolved state, in
the directions taken by the research of the adherents of the modern
natural-scientific way of thinking. This way of thinking has attained
its significance by letting the world phenomena arising in the field
of sens e observation speak purely for themselves, within their own
lawful interconnections, and by wishing to allow nothing of what the
human soul experiences from these phenomena to flow into what this way
of thinking admits as knowledge. No matter what view one might hold
about the natural-scientific picture of the world — whose fulfillment
of the above cognitive demand is already possible or even achieved today
— this cannot detract from one's recognition that this demand
provides a sound basis for a valid picture of natural existence. If
the adherent of an idealistic or spiritual-scientific world view takes
a negative stance toward this demand today, he shows by this either
that he does not understand the meanings of this demand, or that something
of a natural-scientific way of picturing things are under the misconception
that through such a world view something or other of the results of
natural science is called into question.
To anyone
who penetrates into the true meaning of modern natural science, it is
clear that this science does not undermine knowledge of the spiritual
world, but rather supports and ensures it. One will not be able to arrive
at this clarity, however, by imagining oneself, through all kinds of
theoretical arguments, to be an opponent of a knowledge of the spiritual
world, but rather by turning one's gaze upon what makes the
natural-scientific picture of the world sensible and meaningful.
The natural-scientific way of picturing things excludes everything
from what it studies that is experienced through the inner being
of the human soul. It investigates how things and processes relate
to each other. What the soul, through
its inner being, can experience about things serves only to reveal how
things are, irrespective of these inner experiences. This is how the
picture of purely natural occurrences comes about. This picture will
in fact fulfill its task all the better, the more it succeeds in excluding
this inner life. But one must now consider the characteristic traits
of this picture. What one presents to oneself in this way as a picture
of nature — precisely in the case where it fulfills the ideal
of natural-scientific knowledge — cannot bear within itself anything
that could ever be perceived by a human being nor any other soul being.
The natural-scientific way of picturing things must provide a picture
of the world that explains the relationship of natural facts but whose
content would have to remain unperceivable. If the world actually were
as pure natural science must picture it, then this world could never
arise within a consciousness as a content of mental pictures. Hamerling
is of the opinion: “Certain oscillations of the air produce sound
in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle
shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it.” Hamerling
is wrong, because he has not grasped the determining factors of the
natural-scientific picture of the world. If he did, he would say: When
a sound arises, natural science must picture something that would not
sound even if an ear were there ready to hear it sound. And natural
science is acting correctly in this. In his lecture, “The Limits
to Our Knowledge of Nature” (1872), the natural scientist, Du
Bois-Reymond expresses himself quite aptly on this subject: “Silent
and dark in itself, i.e., without any qualities” is the world
for the view — gained by natural-scientific study — which,
“instead of sound and light, knows only oscillations of a primal
substance, without qualities, that has turned into weigh able matter
here and into unweighable matter there”; but to this he adds the
statement: “God's words in Moses' depiction —
‘Let there be light’ — are physiologically incorrect.
Light first came into existence when the first red ‘eyespot’
of an infusorian [euglena] distinguished light from darkness for the
first time. Without optical and aural substance this world around us,
glowing with color and filled with sound, would be dark and silent.”
No, this second statement cannot be made by someone who in fact understands
the full implications of the first. For, this world, whose picture
is correctly sketched out by natural science, would remain “silent
and dark” even when confronted by optical and aural substance.
One fools oneself about this only because the real world, from which
one has gained the picture of a “silent and dark” world, does
not actually remain silent and dark when one perceives in it. But I should
no more expect this picture to correspond to the real world than I would
expect the portrait of a friend to step out of his picture as a real
person. Just look at the matter from all sides, without preconceptions,
and you will certainly find that if the world were as natural science
depicts it, no being would ever experience anything about it. To be
sure, the world pictured by natural science is there, in a
certain way, within the reality from which man perceives his sense world;
but lacking in this picture is everything by which it could be perceived
by some being. What this way of picturing things must posit as underlying
light, sound, warmth does not shine, sound, or warm. Only by experience
does one know that the pictures arrived at by this way of thinking were
drawn from something shining, sounding, warming; one therefore lives
in the belief that what one pictures is also something shining, sounding,
and warming. This mistaken belief is the most difficult to penetrate
when one is dealing with the sense of touch. There it seems
to be enough that something material — precisely as something
material — is spread out around us and, through its resistance,
stimulates a tactile perception. But something material-spatial can
also only exert pressure; the pressure, however, cannot be felt.
What seems to be the case deceives us here the most. But one
does have to do in fact only with what seems to be the case. What underlies
tactile sensations also cannot be felt by touch. Let it be expressly
stated here that we are not merely saying that the world lying behind
sense impressions is in fact different from what our senses make out
of it; we are emphasizing that the natural-scientific way of picturing
things must think of this underlying world in such a way that our senses
could make nothing out of it if it were in actuality as it was thought
to be. From observation, natural science draws forth a world picture
that through its own nature cannot be observed at all.
[1]
What
we are dealing with here came to light in a world historic moment of
spiritual evolution: When Goethe, out of the world view of German idealism
that lay in his whole nature, rejected Newton's color theory.
(For nearly three decades, the present writer has sought in various
writings to draw attention to this decisive point in the assessment
of Goethe's color theory. But what he said in an 1893 lecture
in Frankfurt's “Independent German Academy” still
holds good today: “The time will come when even for this question
the scientific prerequisites for an understanding among scientists will
be present. Today, precisely the investigations of physics are heading
in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking.”)
Goethe
understood that Newton's color theory could provide a picture
representing only a world that is not luminous and does not shine forth
in colors. Since Goethe did not involve himself in the demands of a
purely natural-scientific world picture, his actual opposition to Newton
went astray in many places. But the main thing is that he had a correct
feeling for the fundamental issue. When a person, by means of light,
observes colors, he is confronting a different world from the only one
Newton is able to describe. And Goethe does observe the real world of
colors. But if one enters a realm such as this — whether of colors
or of other natural phenomena — one needs other ideas than those
depicted in the “dark and silent world” imagined by the
natural-scientific way of picturing things. In this picture, no reality
is depicted that can be perceived. Real nature simply does
in fact already contain within itself something that cannot be included
in this picture. The “dark world” of the physicist could
not be perceived by any eye; light is already spiritual. Within the
sense-perceptible the spiritual holds sway.
[2]
To wish to grasp this spiritual with the means of natural science is
committing the same error as someone who demands of himself as a painter
that he paint a man who can walk around in the world. For Goethe, even
as a physicist, the ground on which he moved was the spiritual. The
world view for which he used the term “in accordance with the
spirit” (geistgemäss) made it impossible for him
to find in Newton's color theory anything in the way of ideas
about real light and real colors. But with the natural scientific way
of picturing things, one does not find the spirit in the sense world.
That the world view of German idealism had a correct feeling about this
is one of its essential characteristics. It may be that what one or
another personality has said out of this feeling is only a first germ
of a complete plant; but the germ is there and bears within itself the
power to unfold. But to this insight — that in the sense world
there is spirit which cannot be grasped by the natural-scientific way
of picturing things — another insight must be added: modern natural
science has already demonstrated, or is on its way to demonstrating,
the dependency of ordinary human soul life — running its course
in the sense world — upon the instrument of the body. One enters
a realm here in which, as though by entirely obvious objections, one
can seemingly be refuted in a crushing way if one declares one's
belief in the existence of an independent spiritual world. For what
could be clearer than that man's soul life, from childhood on,
unfolds as the physical organs develop and declines to the extent that
the organs age? What is clearer than that the crippling of certain parts
of the brain also causes the loss of certain spiritual abilities? What
seems clearer, therefore, than that everything of a soul-spiritual nature
is bound to matter and without it can have no continued existence, at
least not one about which man knows? One does not even need to take
counsel on this from the brilliant results of modern natural science;
De la Mettrie, in his book
Man: A Machine (L'homme Machine)
written in 1746, has already expressed in a sufficiently correct way
what is so self-evident in this assertion. This French thinker says:
“Since a feebleminded person, as one can usually observe, does
not lack brains, his problem must be due to the faulty nature of this
organ, its excessive softness, for example. The same applies to imbeciles;
the flaws in their brains do not always remain hidden to our investigation;
but if the causes of feeble-mindedness, imbecility, and so on are not
always recognizable, where should one seek the causes for differences
between all human spirits? These causes would escape lynx and Argus
eyes. A nothing, a tiny fiber, a thing that even the finest anatomy
cannot discover would have turned Erasmus and Fontenelle into two fools
— an observation that Fontenelle himself makes in one of his best
dialogues.” Now, the adherent of a world view in accordance with
the spirit would show little insight if he did not acknowledge the telling
and obvious force of such an assertion. He can take this assertion even
further and say: Would the world ever have received what Erasmus's spirit
accomplished if someone had killed him when he was still a child?
If a
world view in accordance with the spirit ever had to resort to denying
such obvious facts or even to belittling their significance, it would
be in a bad way. But such a world view can be rooted in ground that
no materialistic objection can take away from it.
Human
soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing,
is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes
shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however,
that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body
he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the
same error as someone who believes that his actual form is
brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror
possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image
appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent
upon the form of the mirror, etc; but what this image represents
has nothing to do with the mirror. In order fully to fulfill its essential
being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image
of its being. It must have this image in consciousness; otherwise
it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it.
This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of
the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these,
the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be
there without the mirror. But what appears through this image,
the soul element itself, is — in its essential being — no
more dependent upon the bodily instruments than the person standing
before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent
upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness
of the soul is so. The materialistic view of the human soul succumbs
to a deception caused by the fact that ordinary consciousness, which
is only there through the bodily instruments, is mistaken for the soul
itself. The essential being of the soul flows just as little into this
ordinary consciousness as my essential being flows into my mirror image.
This essential being of the soul, therefore, also cannot be found in
ordinary consciousness; it must be experienced outside
of this consciousness. And it can be experienced, for the human being
can develop a different consciousness within himself than the one
determined by the bodily instruments.
Eduard
von Hartmann, a thinker who has come forth from the world view of German
idealism, has clearly recognized that ordinary consciousness is an outcome
of the bodily instruments, and that the soul itself is not contained
within this consciousness. But he did not recognize that the soul can
develop a different consciousness, which is not dependent upon the bodily
instruments, and through which the soul can experience itself. Therefore
he believed that this soul-being lay within an unconscious element about
which one can only make mental pictures by drawing conclusions, from
ordinary consciousness, about a “thing-in-itself” —
that itself actually remains unknown — of the soul. But in this,
like many of his predecessors, Hartmann has stopped short before the
threshold that must be crossed if a well-founded knowledge of the spiritual
world is to be attained. One cannot cross this threshold, in fact, if
one is afraid to give one's soul forces a completely different
direction than they take under the influence of our ordinary consciousness.
The soul experiences its own essential being within this consciousness
only in the images produced for it by the bodily instruments. If the soul
could experience only in this way, it would be in a situation comparable
to that of a being who stands before a mirror and can see only its image,
but can experience nothing about itself. The moment this being became
livingly manifest to itself, however, it would enter into an entirely
different relationship to its mirror image than before.
A person
who cannot resolve to discover something different in his soul life
than is offered him by ordinary consciousness will either deny that
the essential being of the soul can be known, or will flatly declare
that this being is produced by the body.
One stands
here before another barrier that the natural-scientific way of picturing
things must erect, out of its own thoroughly justified demands. The
first barrier resulted from the fact that these demands must sketch
the picture of a world that could never enter a consciousness through
perception. The second barrier arises because natural-scientific thinking
must rightly declare that the experiences of ordinary consciousness
come about through the bodily instruments and therefore, in reality,
contain nothing of any soul. It is entirely understandable that modern
thinking feels itself placed between these two barriers, and out of
scientific conscientiousness, doubts the possibility of arriving at
a knowledge of a real spiritual world that can be attained neither through
the picture of a “silent and dark” nature, nor through the
phenomena of ordinary consciousness, which are dependent upon the body.
And whoever — merely from some dim feeling or out of a hazy mysticism
— believes himself able to be convinced of the existence of a
spiritual world would do better to acquaint himself with the difficult
situation of modern thinking than to rail against the “raw,
crude” mental pictures of natural science.
One gets beyond what the
natural-scientific way of picturing things can give only when one
experiences in the inner life of the soul that there is an awakening out
of ordinary consciousness; an awakening to a soul experience of a kind
and direction that relates to the world of ordinary consciousness the way
the latter relates to the picture-world of dreams. Goethe speaks in his
way about awakening out of ordinary consciousness and calls the soul
faculty thus acquired “the power to judge in beholding”.
(anschauende Urteilskraft).
[3]
In Goethe's
view, this power to judge in beholding grants the soul the ability to
behold that which, as the higher reality of things, conceals
itself from the cognition of ordinary consciousness. In his affirmation
of this human ability, Goethe placed himself in opposition to Kant,
who had denied to man any “power to judge in beholding,”
Goethe knew from the experience of his own soul life, however, that
an awakening of ordinary consciousness into one with the power to judge
in beholding is possible. Kant believed he had to designate
any such awakening as an “adventure of reason,” Goethe replied
to this ironically: “Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed
on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal
archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a
presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more
could keep me then from courageously undertaking the adventure of
reason, as the old man of Konigsberg himself calls it,” (The
“old man of Konigsberg” is Kant, For Goethe's view on this, see
my edition of Goethe's natural-scientific works.)
[4]
In what follows now the awakened consciousness will be called a seeing
consciousness (schauendes Bewusstsein). This kind of awakening can
occur only when one develops a different relationship to the world of
thoughts and will than is experienced in ordinary consciousness. It is
entirely understandable today that the significance of such an awakening
would be regarded with mistrust. For, what has made the natural-scientific
way of picturing things great is the fact that it has opposed the claims
of any dim mysticism. And although only that awakening in consciousness
has validity as spiritual-scientific research which leads into realms
of ideas of mathematical clarity and consistency, people who wish to
arrive in an easy way at convictions about the greatest questions of
world existence confuse this valid awakening with their own mystical
muddle-headedness, which they claim is based on true spiritual research.
Out of the fear that any pointing to an “awakening of the soul”
could lead to such mystical muddle-headedness, and through seeing the
knowledge often presented by such mystical illuminati, people acquainted
with the demands of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things
keep aloof from any research that wishes, by claiming an “awakened
consciousness,” to enter the spiritual world.
[5]
Now such an awakening is altogether possible, however, through one's
developing, in inner (soul) experience, a certain activation differing
from the usual — of the powers of one's soul being (thought
and will experiences). The indication that with the idea of the awakened
consciousness one is continuing in the direction taken by Goethe's
world view can show that our study here wishes to have nothing to do
with the mental pictures of any muddled mysticism. Through an inner
strengthening, one can lift oneself out of the state of ordinary
consciousness and in doing so experience something similar to the
transition from dreaming into wakeful mental picturing. Whoever passes
from dreaming into a waking state experiences how will penetrates into
the course of his mental pictures, whereas in dreaming he is given over
to the course of his dream pictures without his own will involvement. What
occurs through unconscious processes when one awakens from sleep can
be effected on a different level by conscious soul activity. The human
being can bring a stronger exercise of will into his ordinary conscious
thinking than is present there in his usual experience of the physical
world. Through this he can pass over from thinking to an experience
of thinking. In ordinary consciousness, thinking is not experienced;
rather, through thinking, one experiences what is thought. But there
is an inner work the soul can do that gradually brings one to the point
of living, not in what is thought, but rather in the very activity of
thinking itself. A thought that is not simply received from the ordinary
course of life but rather is placed into one's consciousness with
will in order that one experience it in its thought nature: such
a thought releases different forces in the soul than one that is evoked
by the presence of outer impressions or by the ordinary course of one's
soul life. And when, ever anew within itself, the soul rouses that devotion
[6] —
practiced only to a small degree, in fact, in ordinary life —
to thoughts as such, when the soul concentrates upon thoughts as thoughts:
then it discovers within itself powers that are not employed in ordinary
life but remain slumbering (latent), as it were. These are powers that
are discovered only through conscious use. But they predispose the soul
to an experience not present before their discovery. The thoughts fill
themselves with a life all their own, which the thinking (meditating)
person feels to be connected with his own soul being. (What is meant
here by “seeing consciousness” does not arise from ordinary
waking consciousness through bodily [physiological] processes the way
ordinary waking consciousness arises from dream consciousness. In the
awakening from this latter consciousness into day consciousness, one
has to do with a changing engagement [Einstellung] of the body
relative to outer reality. In the awakening from ordinary consciousness
into seeing consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement
of one's soul-spiritual way of picturing things relative to a
spiritual world.)
For this
discovery of the life in thoughts, however, the expenditure of conscious
will is necessary. But this cannot simply be that will which
appears in ordinary consciousness. The will must also become engaged
in a different way and in a different direction, so to speak, than for
experience in mere sense-perceptible existence. In ordinary life one
feels oneself to be at the center of what one wills or what one wants.
For even in wanting, a kind of held-back will is at work. The will streams
out from the “I” and down into desire, into bodily movement,
into one's action. A will in this direction is ineffective for
the soul's awakening out of ordinary consciousness. But there
is also a direction of will that in a certain sense is the opposite
of this. It is at work when, without any direct look at an outer result,
a person seeks to direct his own “I.” This direction of
the will manifests in a person's efforts to shape his thinking
into something meaningful and to improve upon his feelings, and in all
his impulses of self-education. In a gradual intensification of the
will forces present in a person in this direction there lies what he
needs in order to awaken out of his ordinary consciousness. One can
particularly help oneself in pursuit of this goal by observing the life
of nature with inner heart's (Gemüt) involvement.
One seeks, for example, to look at a plant in such a way that one not
only takes up its form into one's thoughts, but also, as it were,
feels along with its inner life, which stretches upward in the stem,
spreads out in the leaves, opens what is inside to what is outside with
its blossom, and so on. In such thinking the will is also present in
gentle resonance; and there, will is a will that is developed in devotion
and that guides the soul; a will that does not originate from the soul,
but rather directs its activity upon the soul. At first, one quite
naturally believes that this will originates in the soul. In experiencing
the process itself, however, one recognizes that through this reversal of
the will, a spiritual element, existing outside the soul, is grasped
by the soul.
When
will is strengthened in this direction and grasps a person's thought-life
in the way indicated, then, in actual fact, out of the circumference
of his ordinary consciousness, another consciousness arises that relates
to his ordinary one like this ordinary consciousness relates to a weaving
in dream pictures. And this kind of a seeing consciousness is in a position
to experience and know the spiritual world. (In a series of earlier
books, the author of this work has presented in a more detailed way what
is only indicated here briefly, as it were. In such a short presentation,
objections, misgivings, etc., cannot be taken up; this has been done
in my other books; and there one can find many things presented that
provide the deeper foundations for what is expressed here. The titles
of the relevant books are listed at the end of this book.
[7]
A will
that does not tend in the direction just indicated, but rather toward
everyday desiring, wishing, and so on, cannot — when this will
is brought to bear upon one's thought-life in the way described
— lead to the awakening of a seeing consciousness out of the ordinary
one; it can lead only to a dimming down of this ordinary consciousness
into waking dreams, phantasmagoria, visionary states, and such like.
The processes
that lead to what is meant here by a seeing consciousness are entirely
of a soul-spiritual nature; and their very description protects what
is attained by them from being confused with pathological states (visions,
mediumism, ecstasies, and so on). All these pathological states push
consciousness down beneath the level it assumes in the waking human
being who can fully employ his healthy physical soul organs.
[8]
It has
often been indicated in this book how the science of the soul developed
under the influence of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing
things has moved away entirely from the significant questions of soul
life. Eduard von Hartmann has written a book,
Modern Psychology,
in which he presents a history of the science of the soul in the second
half of the nineteenth century. He states there: “Modern
psychologists either leave aside the question of man's free will
(Freiheit) entirely, or occupy themselves with it, in fact,
only so far as is necessary to show that, on a strictly deterministic
basis, just that amount of practical freedom arises which suffices
for judicial and moral responsibility.
Only in the first half of the period under discussion do a few theistic
philosophers still adhere both to the immortality of a self-conscious
soul substance and also to a residue of undeterministic freedom; but
mostly they are content with wanting to found the scientific possibility
of their heart's wish.” Now, from the point of view of the
natural-scientific way of picturing things, one can actually speak neither
about the true freedom of the human soul nor about the question of human
immortality. With respect to this latter question, let us recall once
more the words of the significant psychologist Franz Brentano: “The
laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions,
and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything
but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of
a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part
after the dissolution of the body. ... And if the modern way of thinking
really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then
this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentous one
for psychology:” Now for the natural-scientific way of thinking,
only ordinary consciousness is present. This consciousness, however, in
its entirety, is dependent upon the bodily organs. When these fall away
at death, our ordinary kind of consciousness also falls away. But seeing
consciousness, which has awakened out of this ordinary consciousness,
can approach the question of immortality. Strange as this may seem to
a way of picturing things that wishes to remain merely within natural
science, this seeing consciousness experiences itself within a spiritual
world in which the soul has an existence outside the body. Just as
awakening from a dream gives one the consciousness that one is no longer
given over to a stream of pictures without one's own will involvement,
but now stands connected through one's senses with a real outer
world, so the awakening into seeing consciousness gives one the direct
and experienced certainty that one stands, with one's essential
being, within a spiritual world, and that one experiences and knows
oneself in something which is independent of the body, something which
actually is the soul organism inferred by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, which
belongs to a spiritual world and must still belong to it after the
destruction of the body.
And since,
ill seeing consciousness, one becomes familiar with a consciousness
rooted in the spiritual world and therefore different from ordinary
consciousness, one can no longer revert to the opinion — because
our ordinary kind of consciousness must indeed fall away along with
its bodily instruments — that with the destruction of the body
all consciousness must cease. In a spiritual science that regards the
seeing consciousness as a source of knowledge, something becomes reality
of which — out of the idealism of German world views — the
school director of Bloomberg, Johann Heinrich Reinhardt, had inklings
(see pages 54ff. of this book): that it is possible to know how the
soul, “in this life already, is elaborating the new body”
that it will then carry over the threshold of death into the spiritual
world. (To speak of a “body” in this connection sounds
materialistic; for, what is meant of course is precisely the
soul-spiritual element that is free of the body; but it is necessary
in such cases to apply to something spiritual names taken from what
is sense-perceptible, in order to indicate sharply that one means
something spiritually real, not just a conceptual abstraction.)
Relative to the question
of human freedom
[9],
a particular conflict in our
knowledge of the soul presents itself. Ordinary consciousness knows free
human resolve as an inwardly experienced fact. Faced with this experience,
ordinary consciousness cannot actually let any teaching take this freedom
away from it. And yet it seems as though the natural-scientific
way of picturing things could not acknowledge this experience. For every
effect it seeks the causes. What I do in this moment seems to it dependent
upon the impressions I have now, upon my memories, upon my inborn and
acquired inclinations, and so on. Many things are working together;
I cannot survey them all, therefore I appear free to myself. But the
truth is that I am determined in my action by the working together of
all these causes. Freedom would therefore appear to be an illusion.
One does not escape this conflict as long as, from the standpoint of
seeing consciousness, one does not regard ordinary consciousness as
only a mirroring — effected by the bodily organization —
of the true soul processes, and as long as one does not regard the soul
as a being rooted in the spiritual world and independent of the body.
Something that is merely a picture can, through itself, effect
nothing. If something is effected by a picture, then this must occur
through an entity that lets itself be determined by the picture. But
the human soul is in this situation when it does something for which
its only motivation is a thought present in ordinary consciousness.
The image of myself that I see in a mirror effects nothing that I, with
the image as motivation, do not effect. The matter is different when
a person does not act according to a conscious thought but rather is
driven, more or less unconsciously, by an emotion, or impulse of passion,
while his conscious mental life only looks on, as it were, at the blind
complex of driving forces.
Since
it is therefore the conscious thoughts in man's ordinary
consciousness that allow him to act freely, he could after all know
nothing through ordinary consciousness about his freedom. He would only
look at the picture that determines his action and would have to ascribe
to it a causal power. He does not do this, because instinctively, in
his experience of inner freedom, the true being of the soul shines into
ordinary consciousness. (The author of this book, in his
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Philosophie der Freiheit),
has sought to
shed light upon the question of human freedom in a detailed way out
of the observation of human soul experiences.) Spiritual science seeks,
from the point of view of seeing consciousness, to shed light into that
realm of the true soul life from which the instinctive certainty of
man's inner freedom streams into ordinary consciousness.
* * *
Man experiences
the picture-world of dreams through the fact that the level of life
possessed by him in the sense world is toned down. A person with healthy
thinking will not seek instruction from dreaming consciousness about
waking consciousness; rather, he will make waking consciousness the
judge over the world of his dream pictures. A spiritual science that
takes the point of view of seeing consciousness thinks in a similar way
about the relationship of seeing consciousness to ordinary consciousness.
Through a spiritual science such as this, one recognizes that the material
world and its processes are in truth only a part of a comprehensive
spiritual world, of a spiritual world that lies behind the sense world
in the same way the world of sense perceptible material processes and
substances lies behind the picture-world of dreams. And one recognizes
how the human being descends into sense existence out of a spiritual
world; and how this sense existence itself is a manifestation of spiritual
being and spiritual processes. It is understandable that many people,
out of their habitual thinking, scorn a world view such as this because
they consider it estranged from reality and because they believe it
makes them less fit for life. It frightens such people to hear that,
compared with a higher reality, ordinary reality has something dreamlike
about it. But does anything about dream consciousness change through
our seeking — from the vantage point of waking consciousness —
to understand its nature in reality? A person with a superstitious
relationship to his dream-pictures can cloud his judgment in waking
consciousness thereby. But our waking judgment can never damage our dreams.
In the same way, the adherent of a world view that does not wish to gain
entry into the spiritual world can cloud his judgment about the spiritual
world; but genuine insight into the spiritual world cannot adversely
affect our true assessment of the physical world. Seeing consciousness,
therefore, cannot reach disruptively into our life of ordinary
consciousness; seeing consciousness will affect it only in a
clarifying way.
Only a world view that
acknowledges the point of view of seeing consciousness will be able to
bring the same understanding both to the modern natural-scientific
way of picturing things and to the cognitive goals of modern idealism
in world views that works toward knowing the essential being of the
world as something spiritual. (Further elaborations on the subject of
knowledge of the spiritual world are not possible within the limits
of this book. The author must therefore refer the reader to his other
works. His purpose here is only to present the basic character of a
world view that acknowledges the viewpoint of seeing consciousness insofar
as is necessary to indicate the value for life of German idealism in
world views.)
The natural-scientific
way of picturing things is justified precisely through the fact that
the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is valid. The natural scientist
and thinker bases his cognitive work on the presupposition that this
viewpoint is possible, even though, as a theoretical observer of his
own world picture, he will not admit this. Only those theoreticians
fail to see this who declare the world picture of the natural-scientific
way of picturing things to be the only one justified in a world view.
Theoretician and scientist can of course be combined in one person.
For our seeing consciousness, sense-perceptions undergo something similar
to what dream-pictures undergo when a person wakes up out of sleep.
The working powers that bring about a world of pictures when he is dreaming
must give way, when he wakes up, to those working powers by which he makes
for himself pictures and mental pictures that he knows are conditional
upon the reality surrounding him. When seeing consciousness awakens,
a person ceases to think his mental pictures in terms of this reality;
he knows now that he pictures things in terms of the spiritual world
surrounding him. Just as dream consciousness regards its picture-world
as reality and knows nothing of the environment of waking consciousness,
so ordinary consciousness regards the material world as reality and
knows nothing of the spiritual world. The natural scientist, however,
seeks a picture of that world which manifests in the mental pictures
of ordinary consciousness. But this world cannot be contained in the
mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. To seek it there would be
like expecting one day to dream what a dream is in its essential nature.
(Thinkers like Ernst Mach and others, in fact, foundered on the obstacle
indicated here.) As soon as the natural scientist begins to understand
his own way of research, he cannot believe that his ordinary consciousness
can enter into a relationship with the world that he depicts. In actuality,
seeing consciousness enters into this kind of a relationship. But this
relationship is a spiritual one. And the sense perception of ordinary
consciousness is the revelation of a spiritual relationship
that plays itself out — beyond this ordinary consciousness —
between the soul and the world the natural scientist depicts. This
relationship can only first be seen by our seeing consciousness. If the
world depicted by the natural-scientific way of picturing things is
thought of as material, it remains incomprehensible; if it is thought of
in such a way that something spiritual is living in it which, as something
spiritual, speaks to the human spirit in a way that can be known only by
our seeing consciousness,
then this picture of the world becomes comprehensible in its full validity.
Ancient Indian mysticism is a kind of counterpart to the natural-scientific
way of picturing things. Whereas natural science depicts a world that
is unperceivable, Indian mysticism depicts one in which the knower does
indeed want to experience something spiritual, but does not want to
intensify this experience to the point of having the power to perceive.
The knower does not seek there, through the power of soul experiences,
to awaken out of ordinary consciousness into a seeing consciousness;
rather, he withdraws from all reality in order to be alone with his
knowing activity. He believes, in this way, to have overcome
the reality that disturbs him, whereas he has only withdrawn his
consciousness from it, and, as it were, let it stand outside himself
with its difficulties and riddles. He also believes himself to have
become free of his “I” and, through selfless devotion to
the spiritual world, to have become one with that world. The truth is
that he has only darkened his consciousness
of his “I” and is living unconsciously, in fact, altogether
in his “I.” Instead of awakening out of ordinary consciousness,
he falls back into a dreamlike consciousness. He believes himself to
have solved the riddles of existence, whereas he is only holding his
soul gaze averted from them. He has the contented feeling of knowledge,
because he no longer feels the riddles of knowledge weighing upon him.
What a knowing “perceiving” is can be experienced only in
knowing the sense world. If it has been experienced there,
then it can be further developed for spiritual perceiving. If a person
withdraws from this kind of perceiving, he robs himself entirely of
the experience of perception and takes himself back to a level of soul
experience that is less real than sense perception. He regards not-knowing
as a kind of deliverance from knowing and believes that, precisely through
this, he is living in a higher spiritual state. He falls into merely
living in the “I” and believes himself to have overcome
the “I” because he has dimmed down his consciousness that
he is weaving entirely within the “I.” Only the finding
of his “I” can free the human being from ensnarement by
his “I.” (See also the discussions on pages 117ff. of this
book [Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way: ...]) One can truly
have to say all this, and yet have no less understanding and admiration
for the magnificent creation of the Bhagavad-Gita and similar productions
of Indian mysticism than someone who regards what has been said here
as proof that the speaker has “no organ, in fact,” for the
sublimity of genuine mysticism. But one should not believe that only
the unreserved adherents of a world view know how to value
it. (I write this in spite of my awareness that I experience no less
from Indian mysticism than any of its unreserved adherents.)
What Johann Gottlieb
Fichte brings to expression lies in the direction of a knowledge relating
to the world in the way characterized here. This is clear from the way he
has to use the image of human dreaming in order to characterize the world
of ordinary consciousness. He says: “Pictures
exist: they are all that there is, and they know about themselves in
the manner of pictures — Pictures that float past; without anything
there for them to float past; pictures that relate to each other through
pictures of pictures ... All reality transforms itself into a strange
dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit who
is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a
dream about itself.” That is a description of the world of ordinary
consciousness; and it is the starting point for a recognition
of the seeing consciousness which brings an awakening out of the dream
of the physical world into the reality of the spiritual world.
Schelling
wishes to regard nature as a stage in the evolution of the spirit. He
demands that nature be known through an intellectual beholding, He
therefore takes a direction whose goal can be seen only from the point
of view of seeing consciousness. He takes note of the point where, in
his consciousness of inner freedom (Freiheit), the seeing
consciousness shines into ordinary consciousness. He seeks finally
to go beyond the mere idealism in his
Philosophy of Revelation
by recognizing that ideas themselves can only be pictures of something,
out of a spiritual world, that has a relationship with the human soul.
Hegel
senses that within man's thought-world there lies something through
which man expresses not only what he experiences from nature, but also
what the spirit of nature itself experiences in him and through
him. Hegel feels that man can become the spiritual onlooker of
a world process playing itself out within him. Lifting what he thus
senses and feels up to the point of view of seeing consciousness also
lifts man's world picture — which for Hegel is only a reflecting
upon the processes that occur in the physical world — up to the
beholding of a real spiritual world.
Karl
Christian Planck recognizes that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness
do not themselves participate in the working of the world, because,
correctly viewed, they are pictures of a life; they themselves
are not this life, Therefore, Planck is of the view that precisely the
person who rightly understands this pictorial nature of thinking can
find reality. Insofar as thinking wishes to be nothing itself but speaks
about something that is, thinking points to a true reality.
Thinkers
like Troxler and Immanuel Hennarm Fichte take up into themselves the
forces of German idealism in world views without limitlng themselves
to the views that this idealism brought forth in Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel. Troxler and I.H. Fichte point already to an
“inner man” within the “outer man,” to a
spirit-soul man, therefore, which the viewpoint of seeing consciousness
recognizes as an experienceable reality.
The significance
of the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is particularly clear when
one considers that tendency in world views which, as the modern teaching
of evolution, stretches from Lamarck, through Lyell and others, to Darwin
and the present-day view of life. This evolutionary teaching seeks to
portray the ascent of the higher life forms out of the lower ones. It
thereby fulfills a fundamentally valid task. But, in so doing, it must
act the same way the human soul does, in dreaming consciousness, when
dealing with dream experiences; it lets the later go forth from the
earlier. In actuality, however, the motive forces that conjure
a subsequent dream picture out of the previous one are to be sought
within the dreamer and not within the dream pictures. Only seeing
consciousness is in a position to sense this. Seeing consciousness,
therefore, can no more consent to seeking in a lower life form the
forces that cause a higher one to arise than waking consciousness can
consider one dream really to emerge from the preceding one without
considering the dreamer. While experiencing itself within true reality,
man's soul being observes the soul-spiritual element that it sees working
in present human nature as also working already in the evolutionary forms
that led up to the present human being. This soul being will not
anthropomorphically dream the present human entity into the phenomena of
nature; but it will know that the soul-spiritual element that seeing
consciousness experiences within present-day man is at work in all the
natural happenings that have led up to man. Its knowledge will be such
that the spiritual world becoming manifest to the human being also
contains the origins
of the natural configurations that preceded man. This represents a correct
development of what Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss — out of the motive
forces of German idealism — was striving for in his teaching which
“rescues the concept of species insofar as is factually possible,
but at the same time transfers the concept of evolution set up by Darwin
into its realm and seeks to make it fruitful.” From the point
of view of seeing consciousness, one cannot indeed say what Preuss said:
“Now the center of this new teaching is man: the species homo
sapiens that appears only once upon our planet”; rather,
the center of a world view that encompasses human reality is the spiritual
world that reveals itself within man. And seen in this way, what Preuss
believes seems true: “Strange that earlier observers started with
the objects of nature and then went so far astray that they did not
find the path to man, which even Darwin in fact achieved only in a most
sorry and thoroughly unsatisfactorily way by seeking the progenitor
of the lord of creation among the animals, — whereas, the natural
scientist would have to start with himself as human being in order,
proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, to return
again to mankind. ...”
The viewpoint
of seeing consciousness cannot lead to an anthropomorphical interpretation
of natural phenomena, for it recognizes a spiritual reality of which
what appears in man is just as much the revelation as what appears in
nature. This anthropomorphic dreaming of the human entity into nature was
a forbidding specter for Feuerbach and the Feuerbachians. This forbidding
specter became for them the obstacle to their recognition of a spiritual
reality.
This forbidding specter
worked on also in Carneri's activity as a thinker. It crept in
disruptively when he sought the relationship of his ethical view of life,
which was based upon the soul being of man, to the Darwinistically
tinged view of nature. But the motive forces of German idealism in world
views drowned out this disruption, and so it came about that he started
with the soul-spiritual element in man, which is ethically predisposed,
and, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, returned
again to a mankind that is perfecting itself ethically.
The direction
taken by German idealism in world views cannot flow into any acknowledgment
of a teaching that dreams unspiritual motive forces into the evolution
of higher forms of existence out of lower ones. For this reason, Hegel
already had to say: “Thinking observation must rid itself of these
nebulous mental pictures, which are basically taken from perception,
— especially such pictures as the so-called emergence of
plants and animals from the water, for example, and then the
emergence of more developed animal organizations out of lower
ones, and so on.”
And the
feelings with which Herman Grimm assigns the natural-scientific world
picture its place in man's larger world view are born from this
idealism in world views. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian,
the stimulating portrayer of great interrelationships in the history
of mankind, did not like to express himself on questions relative to
world views; he preferred to leave this realm to others. But when he
did speak about these things, he did so out of the direct sense of his
own personality. With respect to his judgments, he felt secure in that
field of judgment which encompassed the German idealistic world view
and upon which he knew he stood. And from foundations of his soul like
these there came the words he spoke in his twenty-third lecture on Goethe:
“Long before, already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great
Laplace-Kant fantasy about the rise and eventual downfall of our globe
had taken effect. Out of the rotating world mist-children already get
this in school — a central drop of gas takes shape from which the
earth afterwards arises and, as a solidifying globe, through inconceivable
ages of time, passes through all its phases — including the episode
of its habitation by the I human race — in order finally, as
burnt-out slag, to plunge back into the sun; a long process — but
fully comprehensible to the public — needing for its realization no
further I input from outside than the efforts of some external power or
other to maintain the sun at the same temperature. — A more barren
perspective for the future cannot be conceived than this expectation,
supposedly forced upon us today by scientific necessity. A carrion bone,
avoided even by a hungry dog, would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel
compared to this final excrement of creation, the earth, as they picture
it ultimately falling prey again to the sun; and the intellectual curiosity
with which our generation takes up such things and professes to believe
them is one sign of a sick imagination that scholars of future ages
will one day have to expend much keen thought to explain as a historical
phenomenon of our time. — Never did Goethe allow such bleak prospects
to enter ... Goethe would have taken good care not to draw the conclusions
of the Darwinian school from what he first discovered from nature in
this direction and then expressed.” (With respect to Goethe's
relationship to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, see my
introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's
“German National Literature” and my book Goethe's
World View.
[10]
* * *
Robert Hamerling's
reflections also move in a direction that finds its justification in the
viewpoint of seeing consciousness. From the human “I” that
thinks itself, he leads his observation over to the “I” that
experiences itself in thinking; from the will that works in man, he leads
his observation over to the world-will. But the “I” that
experiences itself can only be seen when, in soul experience, an
awakening within spiritual reality occurs; and the world-will
penetrates into our knowledge only when the human “I,”
in experience, grasps a willing in which the “I”, does not
make itself a point of departure but rather an end point, a goal, in
which it directs itself toward unfolding what occurs within the world
of one's inner life. Then the soul lives into the spiritual reality
in which the motive forces of nature's development can also be
experienced in their actual being, Passages from his
Atomism of Will
like the following show how Hamerling's reflections
lead to a sense that one is justified in speaking of this kind of awakening
of the “I” that knows itself to be within the spiritual
world: “In the half-light of bold mysticism and in the light of free
speculation, this riddle, this wonder, this mysterious ‘I,’
interprets and grasps itself as one of the countless forms of manifestation
in which infinite being (Sein) attains reality, and
without which the ‘I’ would be only a nothing, a shadow,”
And: “To want to trace a thought in the human brain back to the
activity of thoroughly lifeless, material atoms remains for all time
a vain and foolish undertaking. Material atoms could never become
the bearers of a thought if there did not already lie within them something
that is of the same nature as the thought. And this original something,
which is related in nature to living thinking, is also without a doubt the
atoms' true core, their true self, their true being (Sein),”
With this thought, Hamerling does confront the viewpoint of seeing
consciousness, but with mere inklings of it. Certainly, to want to
trace the thoughts of the human brain back to the activity of material
atoms does remain “for all time a vain and foolish
undertaking,” For
this is no better than wanting to trace back the mirror image of a person
merely to the activity of the mirror. But in ordinary consciousness
thoughts appear, after all, as the mirroring — determined by the
material element of the brain — of something living and full of
being that works with power in these thoughts. but unconsciously
as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Only from the viewpoint
of seeing consciousness does this “something” first become
comprehensible. It is that real element in which seeing consciousness
experiences itself, and to which also the material element of the brain
relates like a picture does to the being that is pictured. On the one
hand the viewpoint of seeing consciousness seeks to overcome the
“half-light of bold mysticism” by the clarity of a thinking
that is logically consistent in itself and that has full insight into
itself; on the other hand, it seeks to overcome the unreal (abstract)
thinking of philosophical “speculation” by a cognitive
activity that in thinking is at the same time the experiencing of
something real.
* * *
Understanding for the
experiences undergone by the human soul through the way of picturing things
that manifests in the series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling will
prevent a world view that regards the viewpoint of seeing consciousness
as justified from falling back into attitudes of soul that, like the
ancient Indian, seek an awakening into spiritual reality more through
a dimming down of ordinary consciousness than through an intensification
of it. (As the author of this book has indicated again and again in
his books and lectures: that belief has gone astray which maintains
that a modern person can gain anything for spiritual knowledge
by reviving such older directions in world views as the Indian one;
to be sure, this has not kept people from repeatedly confusing the
spiritual-scientific world view advocated by him with such fruitless,
anti-historical attempts at revival.)
German idealism
in world views does not strive for a dimming down of consciousness,
but rather, within this consciousness, seeks the roots of those soul
powers that are strong enough to penetrate, with full experience of
the “I,” into spiritual reality. In German idealism the
spiritual evolution of mankind has taken up into itself the striving,
through strengthening the powers of consciousness, to arrive at knowledge
of the world riddles. But the natural-scientific way of picturing things,
which has led many people into error about the carrying power of this
idealistic stream, can also acquire enough freedom from bias to recognize
the paths to knowledge of the real world that lie in the directions
sought by this idealistic world view. One will misunderstand both the
viewpoint of German idealism in world views and that of seeing
consciousness if one hopes through them to acquire a so-called
“knowledge” that, through a sum of mental pictures, will
lift the soul up out of all further questions and riddles and lead it
into possession of a “world view” in which it can rest from
all further seeking. The viewpoint of seeing consciousness does not
bring cognitive questions to a standstill; on the contrary, it brings
them into further movement, and in a certain sense increases them,
both in number and in liveliness. But it lifts these questions into
a sphere of reality in which they receive that meaning which man's
knowing activity is already seeking unconsciously
before it has even discovered this meaning. And in this unconscious
seeking is created what is unsatisfying about those standpoints in world
views which do not want to grant validity to seeing consciousness. From
this unconscious seeking there also arises the view — which thinks
itself to be Socratic but in actuality is sophistic — that that
knowledge is the highest which knows only one truth: that there
is no truth.
There
are people who worry when they think that man could lose his impulse
for progress in knowledge as soon as he believes himself equipped with
a solution to the riddles of the world. No one need have this concern
with respect either to German idealism or to the viewpoint of seeing
consciousness.
[11]
There
are also other ways for a rightful appreciation of modern idealism in
world views to root out the misunderstandings that confront it. Of course,
one cannot deny that many adherents of this idealism in world views,
through their own misunderstanding of what they believe, have given
cause for opposition, just as the adherents of the natural scientific
way of picturing things, by overestimating the carrying power of their
views for knowledge of reality, have evoked undeserved rejection of
their views, The significant Austrian philosopher (and Catholic priest)
Laurenz Müllner, in an essay about Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack,
has expressed himself in a forceful manner, from the standpoint of
Christianity, on modern natural science's thoughts about evolution. He
rejects the assertions of Schack that culminate in the words: “The
objections raised against the theory of evolution all stem from
superficiality.” And after this repudiation he says: “Positive
Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea of evolution
as such, if natural processes are not conceived merely as a causal
mechanism based from all eternity upon itself, and if man is not presented
as a product of such a mechanism.” These words came from the same
Christian spirit out of which Laurenz Müllner spoke in his
significant inaugural address, on Galileo, as president of the Vienna
University: “Thus the new world view (he means that of Copernicus
and Galileo) often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring
themselves, with very dubious justification. to be descendants of
Christian teachings, It was much more a matter of the antithesis between
the wider world consciousness of a new age and the more narrowly
limited consciousness of classical antiquity; it was a matter of
antithesis toward the Greek world view and not toward the rightly
understood Christian world view, which, in the newly discovered
world of the stars, could only have seen new wonders of divine wisdom
through which the wonders of divine love accomplished on the earth could
only attain greater significance.” Just as in Müllner we are
presented with a Christian thinker's beautiful freedom from bias relative
to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, so a similar freedom
from bias is certainly possible relative to German idealism in world
views. Such a freedom from bias would say: Positive Christianity has no
reason to act negatively toward the idea, as such, of a spiritual
experience in the soul, if this spiritual experience does not lead to
the death of the religious experience of devotion and moral edification,
and if the soul is not deified.
And the
other words of Laurenz Müllner, for an unbiased Christian thinker,
could take the form: The world view of German idealism often came to
appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious
justification, to be descendants of Christian teachings. It is far more
a matter of the antithesis between a world view that acknowledges the
spiritual being of the soul and a world view that can find no access to
this spiritual being; it is a matter of antithesis to a misunderstood
natural-scientific way of picturing things, and not toward the rightly
understood Christian world view, which, in the genuine spiritual
experiences of the human soul, could see only the revelations of divine
power and wisdom, through which the experiences of religious devotion
and moral edification — as well as the powers of human duty
sustained by love — could only attain further strength.
* * *
Robert
Hamerling felt the impulse toward idealism in world views to be the
basic impulse in the being of the German folk spirit (Volkstum).
The way he presented his search for knowledge in his
Atomism of Will
shows that for his age he is not thinking of a revival of
any ancient Indian stream in world views. But he does think of German
idealism as striving — out of the being of his folk spirit, in
the way demanded by a new age — toward the spiritual realities
that were sought in bygone ages by the strongest soul forces of Asiatic
humanity of that time. And he does not think of the cognitive striving
of this idealism in world views, with its direction toward spiritual
realities, as dimming man's gaze upward into divine heights, but
rather as strengthening it; he is filled with this belief because he
sees this cognitive striving itself to be merged with the roots of the
religious attitude. As Robert Hamerling is writing his German Migration
in 1864, he is filled with thoughts about his people's task, which
is an expression of this essential characteristic. This poem is like
the depiction of a vision. In primeval times, the Germans migrate from
Asia into Europe. The Caucasus is a resting place for the wandering
people.
The evening sinks away. Like golden landmarks
In twilight's final gleaming glow the summits
Of Caucasus, and as from distant worlds
They look down full of meaning on the groupings
Of people resting, filling up the valleys
With all their weapons, steeds, and canopies.
—
From out the glow of sun's self-sacrifice
At last like phoenix climbs the moon's full disk
And hovers high above the orient's plane.
—
But now the people rest. Yet Teut the youth,
Of kingly gaze and mien, has stayed awake,
His blond head deeply sunk in meditation.
—
And then, as from a brief dream wakening, upward
He turns his eye, a light, a clear one, falls
Like dew upon him. See! It seems to him
As though in heights above, the golden globes
Of heaven joined their shining rays together
Into a shimmering pair of starry eyes:
As though towards him a marvel,
A mild and earnest countenance inclined,
As though, before his proud and sun-like flights,
With noble features, primal mother Asia
Did eye to eye to her brave son appear.
And primal mother Asia
reveals to Teut his people's future; she
does not speak only hymns of praise; she speaks earnestly about the
people's shadow and light aspects. But she also speaks about that
essential trait of the people that shows cognitive striving to be in
complete unity with an upward gaze to the divine:
Your joy in dreams, divine inebriation,
Your ancient Asian homeland's blessed warmth
And heartiness will go on living in you.
Of peaceful permanence,
This holy ray will be a temple fire
Of mankind, free of smoke — with purest flame
Will glow on in your breast and will remain
Your soul nurse and the pilot at your helm!
Because you love, you strive: your boldest thinking
Will be the zeal to sink itself in God.
The introduction of
these words of Robert Hamerling is not meant to
indicate that the idealism in world views characterized in this book
nor the view put forward by the viewpoint of seeing consciousness could
in any way vie with the religious world view, let alone supersede it.
Both would misunderstand themselves entirely if they wished to create
religions or sects, or wished to impinge upon anyone's religious
beliefs.
Notes:
1.
Please see note on p. 164
2.
What one now calls the “theory of
relativity” must orient itself according to mental pictures
of this sort; otherwise it does not escape from logical theories
into ideas that are in accordance with reality in the sense
that this concept of “accordance with reality”
has been characterized in this book in describing Planck's
views.
3.
What you behold in this way is self-explanatory;
i.e., seeing it and understanding (“judging”) it are
synonymous. What you “see” is pure, self-evident
meaning. – Ed.
4.
Page 55ff., Rudolf Steiner's
Goethean Science,
Mercury Press, 1988. – Ed.
5.
Someone whose concern is for a real knowledge
of the spiritual world is very happy when a gifted artist like Hermann
Bahr, in his brilliant comedy “The Master,” portrays
the comedies of life that often attach themselves so insistently
to endeavors seeking a science of the spirit.
6.
Hingabe: literally "a giving
oneself over to" something. – Ed.
7.
Please see p. 167.
8.
What is meant here should not be confused
with the attitude of soul underlying ancient Indian striving for
knowledge, as will be indicated in what follows. See page 72 above.
9.
Freiheit. Please see footnote to
page 35. – Ed.
10.
Published in English as
Goethean Science
(1988) and
Goethe's World View
(1985) by the Mercury Press.
– Ed.
11.
Please see note on p. 166.
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