The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Age of Kant and Goethe

[ 1 ] At the end of the last century, those who wanted to gain clarity on the great questions of worldview and outlook on life looked to two intellectual authorities: Kant and Goethe. One of those who struggled most mightily for such clarity was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he became acquainted with Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason", he wrote: "I live in a new world... Things that I thought could never be proven to me, e.g. the concept of absolute freedom and duty, have been proven to me, and I feel all the happier for it. It is incomprehensible what respect for humanity, what strength this philosophy gives us, what a blessing it is for an age in which morality was destroyed in its foundations and the concept of duty was crossed out in all dictionaries." And when he had built up his own view on the basis of Kant's in his "Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre", he sent the book to Goethe with the words: "I regard you, and have always regarded you, as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity. Philosophy rightly turns to you. Your feeling is the same touchstone." Schiller stood in a similar relationship to both spirits. He wrote about Kant on 28 October 1794: "It does not frighten me at all to think that the law of change, before which no human and no divine work finds grace, will also destroy the form of Kant's philosophy as well as any other; but the foundations of it will not have to fear this fate, for as old as the human race is, and as long as there is reason, it has been tacitly recognized and acted upon as a whole." Schiller described Goethe's view in a letter to him on August 23, 1794: "I have long watched the course of your mind, although from quite a distance, and have noted the path you have marked out with ever renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which any weaker power would be wary. You take the whole of nature together in order to shed light on the individual; you seek the reason for explaining the individual in all its manifestations." "If you had been born a Greek, or even just an Italian, and had been surrounded from the cradle by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. Already in your first view of things you would then have absorbed the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, since you were born a German, since your Greek spirit was thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but either to become a Nordic artist yourself, or to replace your imagination with what reality withheld from it through the help of the power of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way."

[ 2 ] A history of worldviews in the nineteenth century will therefore have to take Kant and Goethe as its starting point. In order to illustrate the effect of the former on his age, let us cite the statements of two men about him who were at the height of education in their time. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788: "For heaven's sake, buy two books, Kant's Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals and Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Kant is not a light of the world, but a whole shining solar system at once." And Wilhelm von Humboldt says: "Kant undertook and accomplished the greatest work that philosophizing reason has perhaps ever owed to a single man." "Three things remain unmistakably certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant brought to his nation, the benefit that he conferred on speculative thought: some of the things that he shattered will never rise again, some of the things that he founded will never sink again, and most importantly, he brought about a reform unlike any other in the entire history of human thought."

[ 3 ] You can see that his contemporaries saw in Kant's deed a shattering effect within the development of the world view. However, he himself considered it so important for this development that he equated its significance with that of Copernicus' discovery of planetary motion for the knowledge of nature.

[ 4 ] It is necessary to look at the sources from which the educated of the previous century drew their world view in order to understand the revolution that emanated from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. Descartes (1596-1650) had overcome the medieval way of looking at things, which believed that the highest truths could only be attributed to divine revelation and that human reason only had the gift of finding these truths comprehensible. His view was that we must doubt everything that cannot be understood by reason through clear and distinct concepts. Mathematical knowledge formed the model of a clear and distinct conceptual structure. And according to this model, Descartes created a world view for which the concepts of God, freedom of the human will and the immortality of the soul contained absolutely certain truth. Through this kind of conception, human reason was granted the ability to decide the highest questions of worldview by its own power, just as it judges numerical and dimensional relationships with the help of mathematics. In this process, Descartes arrived at the same truths on which religious tradition was based: God, freedom and immortality. Spinoza (1632-1677) came to a different conclusion when he pursued Descartes' line of thought further. For him, the entire universe became a unified system whose individual elements were just as necessarily and lawfully connected to one another as the individual concepts of the mathematical doctrine. Everything that happens within this system happens with iron necessity. When I stretch out my arm, it is just as necessary as a cavity is created when a stone falls into loose soil. God is only the epitome of this system of cold, rigid necessities. There can be no question of freedom of will within it. Nor is there any question of the immortality of the soul, for this is not a being in itself, but only an expression of the general, lawful world events. If Descartes believed he could show that the highest religious truths of faith were also truths of reason, Spinoza had shown the truth to which reason really comes when it is left to itself. In Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716) founded a world view which, however, was not as sharply opposed to the content of faith as the Spinozistic one. In his view, the world does not consist of a single all-being, but of a multiplicity of independent individual beings that act on their own. These beings are simple and indestructible, and the harmony in their actions is predetermined once and for all by a divine primordial being. As you can see: Leibniz was concerned with presenting the essentials of the traditional doctrines of faith as the results of pure reason. And Christian Wolff (1679-1754), whose views set the tone in the previous century and to which Kant also subscribed, continued along this path until he was made to waver in his convictions from another side. There are two different truths for this view of the world. One is gained from the observation of facts; the other is seen by reason through mere reflection. The highest realizations belong to the latter: God, freedom and immortality. Nothing shows us more clearly how deeply rooted Wolff's way of thinking was in the German intellectual life of the last century than Lessing's position within the development of the world view. He summarized his creed in the words: "The development of revealed truths into rational truths is absolutely necessary if the human race is to be helped by them." The eighteenth century has been called the Enlightenment. The minds of Germany understood the Enlightenment in the sense of Lessing's saying. Kant explained the Enlightenment as the "exit of man from his self-inflicted immaturity" and described it as its motto: "Have the courage to use your own intellect." Now, even such outstanding thinkers as Lessing had not progressed through the Enlightenment beyond an intellectual transformation of the doctrines of faith handed down from the state of "self-imposed immaturity". They did not advance to a pure rational view like Spinoza. Spinoza's teachings must have made a deep impression on such minds when they became known in Germany. He really had attempted to use his own intellect, but had come to completely different conclusions than the German Enlightenment thinkers. His influence must have been all the more significant because his mathematically based conclusions had a much greater persuasive power than Wolff's lightly abbreviated chains of thought. Goethe's "Dichtung und Wahrheit" (Poetry and Truth) gives us an idea of the effect these had on deeper minds. He tells of the impression that Professor Winckler's lectures in Leipzig, held in the spirit of Wolff, made on him: "At first I attended my collegia diligently and faithfully; philosophy, however, did not want to enlighten me at all. In logic, it seemed strange to me that I should have to pull apart, separate and, as it were, destroy those mental operations that I had performed with the greatest comfort from my youth in order to understand their proper use. I thought I knew about as much about things, about the world, about God, as the teacher himself, and it seemed to me that in more than one place there was a great lack." In contrast, the poet tells us about his occupation with Spinoza's writings: "I surrendered to this reading and believed, by looking at myself, that I had never seen the world so clearly." But only a few were able to surrender to Spinoza's way of thinking as unselfconsciously as Goethe. For most of them, he must have caused a deep conflict in their view of the world. Goethe's friend Fr. H. Jacobi is a representative of this. He realized that reason left to itself would not lead to the doctrines of faith, but to the view that Spinoza had arrived at, that the world is governed by eternal, necessary laws. Jacobi was thus faced with a momentous decision: either he had to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of faith; or, in order to retain the latter, he had to deny reason itself the possibility of arriving at the highest insights. He chose the latter. He claimed that man had an immediate certainty in his innermost mind, a certain faith, by means of which he felt the truth of the idea of a personal God, freedom of will and immortality, so that this conviction was completely independent of the insights of reason based on logical inferences, which do not relate to these things at all, but only to the external processes of nature. In this way, Jacobi has set aside reasonable knowledge in order to make room for a faith that satisfies the needs of the heart. Goethe, who was less than pleased by this dethroning of knowledge, wrote to his friend: "God has punished you with metaphysics and put a stake in your flesh, blessed me with physics. I adhere to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave to you whatever you may call religion. You hold to believing in God; I to looking." The Enlightenment ultimately presented minds with the choice of either replacing revealed truths with rational truths in the Spinozist sense or declaring war on rational knowledge itself.

[ 5 ] And Kant was also faced with this choice. How he approached it and decided on it can be seen from the clear explanation in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason: "Supposing now that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in the strictest sense) as a property of our will, in that it adduces practical principles lying in our reason which would be utterly impossible without the presupposition of freedom, but speculative reason had proved that this could not be thought at all, then that presupposition, namely the moral one, must necessarily give way to that whose opposite contains an obvious contradiction, consequently freedom, and with it morality, must give place to the natural mechanism. But since I need nothing more for morality than that freedom does not contradict itself and can therefore at least be thought without the need to understand it further, that it therefore places no obstacle at all in the way of the natural mechanism of the same action (taken in another respect); thus the doctrine of morality claims its place, which, however, would not have taken place if criticism had not first instructed us of our unavoidable ignorance in regard to things in themselves, and restricted all that we can theoretically recognize to mere appearances. This very discussion of the positive utility of critical principles of pure reason can be shown with regard to the concept of God and the simple nature of our soul, which I shall pass over for the sake of brevity. I cannot therefore even accept God, freedom and immortality for the use of the necessary use of practical reason, if I do not at the same time remove from speculative reason its presumption of exuberant insights ... . I therefore had to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith." As you can see, Kant stands on similar ground to Jacobi with regard to knowledge and faith.

[ 6 ] The path he took to get there, however, is different. He was a devout follower of Wolff until his forty-fifth year. His studies of the English philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had led him away from this belief. Hume had opposed all insights of the human mind with radical doubt. What could be a more certain truth than that every effect must have a cause? Hume shattered the conviction of this certainty. If I see a stone fall, and afterwards perceive a cavity in the ground, I call it an effect of the fall. But where do I get the certainty that there is a necessary connection between cause and effect? I perceive the fall of the stone and then the hollowing out. I think that the two are connected, says Hume. Thought connects perceptions, but not because there is something in them that corresponds to this connection, but because the mind has become accustomed to connecting things. Man is used to seeing that one thing follows another in time. He also sees that certain processes are always followed by others of the same kind; he forms the idea that it must be so. He makes the first process the cause, the second the effect. Man is also used to seeing that a thought of his spirit is followed by a movement of his body. He declares: The spirit has caused the movement of the body. Habit of thought, nothing else underlies the statements about the connection of world phenomena. Only the individual perceptions have reality.

[ 7 ] These statements by Hume awakened Kant from the slumber into which, by his own admission, Wolff's school of thought had put him. How can reason make judgments about God, freedom and immortality if its statements about the simplest facts rest on such uncertain foundations? The onslaught that Kant now had to make against rational knowledge was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. The latter had at least been able to leave this knowledge the possibility of understanding nature in its necessary context. Now Kant accomplished an important deed in the field of knowledge of nature with his "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens", published in 1755. He showed that our entire planetary system could be thought of as having arisen from a ball of gas moving around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematical and physical forces, the sun and planets condensed within this ball and assumed the movements they have in accordance with the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant had thus proved the fruitfulness of the Spinozistic way of thinking, according to which everything takes place with strict mathematical necessity, through his own great discovery in a special field. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that he exclaimed in the aforementioned work: "Give me matter, and I will build you a world out of it." And the unconditional certainty of mathematical truths was so firm for him that he asserted in his "The Origin of Natural Science" that a real science is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, there could be no question of certainty in mathematical and scientific knowledge. For then these insights would be nothing but habits of thought that man has acquired because he has seen the course of the world play out in their sense. But there would not be the slightest certainty that these habits of thought have anything to do with the lawful connection of things. Hume draws the following conclusion from his premises: "Appearances are continually changing in the world, and one follows another in uninterrupted succession; but the laws and forces which move the universe are entirely hidden from us, and do not manifest themselves in any perceptible property of bodies .... ." If we place Spinoza's view of the world in the light of Hume's view, we must say that, according to the course of world processes we have perceived so far, we have become accustomed to think of them in a necessary, lawful connection; but we must not claim that this connection is more than a mere habit of thought. If this were true, then it would only be a delusion of human reason that it could gain any insight into the nature of the world through itself. And Hume could not be contradicted when he says of every worldview derived from pure reason: "Throw it into the fire, for it is nothing but deceit and deception."

[ 8 ] It was impossible for Kant to adopt this conclusion of Hume's as his own. For him, as we have seen, the certainty of scientific and mathematical knowledge was absolutely certain. He did not want this certainty to be compromised, but nevertheless could not escape the realization that Hume was right when he said: "We gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and forming ideas about their connection on the basis of our observations. If there is a lawful connection in things, then we must also extract it from them. What we extract from things, however, we know no more about than that it has been so up to now; but we do not know whether such a connection is really so interwoven with the nature of things that it cannot change at any time. If we form one view of the world today on the basis of our observations, phenomena may occur tomorrow that force us to adopt a completely different one. If we get all our knowledge from things, there is no certainty. But there is certainty, says Kant. Mathematics and natural science prove it. Our reason could never claim that anything in a world that is spread out beyond us and that we only allow to affect us through observation is certain. Consequently, our world can only be one that we construct ourselves: a world that lies within our minds. I do not know what is going on outside me while a stone falls and hollows out the earth. This whole process takes place inside me. And it can only take place within me as dictated by the laws of my own spiritual organism. The structure of my mind demands that every effect has a cause and that two times two is four. And the spirit builds a world according to this arrangement. May the world outside us be built as it always has been, may it not even today resemble yesterday in any way; it cannot affect us, for our spirit creates its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human spirit is the same, it will proceed in the same way when creating its world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the outside world, but those of our spiritual organism. Therefore, we only need to explore this if we want to get to know what is absolutely true. "The mind does not draw its laws from nature, but prescribes them to it." In this sentence, Kant summarizes his conviction. However, the mind does not create its inner world without impulses or impressions from outside. When I feel a red color, the "red" is a state, a process within me; but I must have a cause for feeling "red". So there are "things in themselves". However, we know nothing about them other than that they exist. Everything we observe are things in us. In order to save the certainty of mathematical and scientific truths, Kant thus incorporated the entire world of observation into the human mind. In doing so, however, he also set insurmountable limits to the faculty of knowledge. For everything that we can recognize does not refer to things outside us, but to processes within us, to appearances, as he puts it. Now the objects of the highest questions of reason: God, freedom and immortality can never appear. We see things within us; we cannot know whether those outside us originate from a divine being. We can perceive our own soul states. But even these are only appearances. Whether there is a free, immortal soul behind them remains hidden from our knowledge. Our knowledge says nothing at all about these "things in themselves". It says nothing about whether the ideas about them are true or false. If we now hear something about these things from another side, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming their existence. We can only know nothing about them. There is now an access to these highest truths. And that is the voice of duty, which speaks loud and clear within us: You shall do this and that. This "categorical imperative" imposes an obligation on us that we cannot escape. But how would we be able to fulfill such an obligation if we did not have a free will? We cannot know the nature of our soul, but we must believe that it is free so that it can fulfill its inner voice of duty. We therefore have no certainty of knowledge about freedom as we do about the objects of mathematics and natural science; but we do have a moral certainty. Following the categorical imperative leads to virtue. Through virtue alone, man can achieve his destiny. He becomes worthy of bliss. He must therefore also be able to achieve happiness. Otherwise his virtue would be without meaning and significance. However, for bliss to be linked to virtue, there must be a being that makes this bliss a consequence of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, God, who determines the highest value of things. The existence of virtue guarantees us its effect, bliss, and through this again the existence of God. And because a sensual being, as man is, cannot attain perfect bliss in this imperfect world, his existence must extend beyond this sensual existence, that is, the soul must be immortal. So what we cannot know: Kant conjures up from the moral belief in the voice of duty. Respect for the sense of duty was what re-established a real world for him when, under Hume's influence, the observational world sank to a mere inner world. This respect is expressed in beautiful words in his "Critique of Practical Reason": "Duty! thou sublime, great name, who dost not hold in thyself anything popular that leads to ingratiation, but dost demand submission", who dost "establish a law ... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it ...". Kant considered it his discovery that the highest truths are not cognitive truths, but moral ones. Man must forego insights into a supersensible world; his moral nature provides him with a substitute for knowledge. It is no wonder that Kant sees unconditional, unreserved devotion to duty as the highest demand on man. If duty did not offer him a view out of the world of the senses, he would be locked into it for the rest of his life. So whatever the world of the senses demands, it must take a back seat to the demands of duty. And the world of the senses cannot of itself agree with duty. It wants the pleasurable, the pleasure. Duty must confront them so that man can fulfill his destiny. What man accomplishes out of pleasure is not virtuous; only what he accomplishes in selfless devotion to duty is virtuous. Subdue your desires to duty: that is the strict task of Kant's moral doctrine. Want nothing that satisfies you in your selfishness, but act in such a way that the principles of your actions can become those of all men. Man achieves perfection by devoting himself to the moral law. The belief that this moral law hovers in sublime heights above all other world events and is realized in the world by a divine being is, in Kant's opinion, true religion. It springs from morality. Man should not be good because he believes in a God who wills the good; he should be good solely out of a sense of duty; but he should believe in God because duty is meaningless without God. This is "religion within the limits of mere reason", as Kant called his book on religious worldviews.

[ 9 ] Kant made selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit the foundation of morality. In the field of virtuous action, such devotion is not compatible with that to the world of the senses. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is so elevated that it appears as a direct expression of the spiritual. This is the field of beauty and art. In everyday life we desire the sensual because it arouses our desire, our selfish interest. We desire that which gives us pleasure. But we can also have a selfless interest in an object. We can stand before it in admiration, full of blissful pleasure, and this pleasure can be completely independent of the possession of the object. Whether I want to own a beautiful house that I pass by has nothing to do with a selfless interest in its beauty. If I exclude all desire from my feelings, something remains, a pleasure that is purely linked to the beautiful work of art. Such a pleasure is an aesthetic one. The beautiful differs from the pleasant and the good. The pleasant arouses my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be realized through me. I face the beautiful without any such interest connected with my person. How can beauty attract my selfless pleasure? I can only like a thing if it fulfills its purpose, if it is made in such a way that it serves a purpose. I must therefore perceive a purpose in the beautiful. Purposefulness is pleasing; inappropriateness is displeasing. But since I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful object, but the mere contemplation of it satisfies me, the beautiful need not really serve a purpose. I am indifferent to the purpose, I only demand expediency. This is why Kant calls "beautiful" that in which we perceive purposefulness without thinking of a specific purpose.

[ 10 ] It is not only an explanation, it is also a justification of art that Kant has given. The best way to see this is to visualize the way he approached his world view with his feelings. He expresses this in profoundly beautiful words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever increasing admiration and awe: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. The first sight of an innumerable multitude of worlds destroys, as it were, my importance as an animal creature that must return the matter from which it was made to the planet, a mere point in space, after it has been endowed with life force for a short time (one does not know how). The second, on the other hand, raises my value as an intelligence, infinitely through my (self-conscious and free) personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the entire world of the senses, at least as much as can be deduced from the purposeful purpose of my existence through this law, which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life, but goes to infinity." The artist now implants this purposeful purpose, which in reality only reigns in the moral realm of the world, into the world of the senses. The work of art thus stands between the realm of the world of observation, in which the eternal chernal laws of necessity prevail, which the human spirit itself has first placed in it, and the realm of free morality, in which the commandments of duty, as the outflow of a wise divine world order, indicate direction and purpose. The artist enters between these two realms with his works. He takes his material from the realm of the real; but at the same time he reshapes this material in such a way that it is the bearer of a purposeful harmony, as it is found in the realm of freedom. The human mind thus feels unsatisfied with the mere realms of reality, which Kant means by the starry sky and the countless multitude of worlds, and that of moral lawfulness. He therefore creates for himself a beautiful realm of appearance that combines rigid natural necessity with free expediency. Now beauty is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is a natural beauty alongside the artistic beauty. This natural beauty exists without human intervention. It therefore seems as if in reality not only rigid, lawful necessity, but a free, wise activity can be observed. Beauty, however, does not compel such a view. For it offers expediency without one having to think of a real purpose. And it offers not only the purposeful-beautiful, but also the purposeful-ugly. We can therefore assume that among the abundance of natural phenomena, which are connected according to necessary laws as if by chance, there are also those in which the human mind perceives an analogy with its own works of art. Since there is no need to think of a real purpose, such a quasi-accidental purposefulness is sufficient for the aesthetic observation of nature.

[ 11 ] The matter becomes different, however, when we encounter beings in nature that do not carry purpose merely by chance, but actually within themselves. And there are also such beings, according to Kant. These are organic beings. The necessary, lawful connections in which Spinoza's world view is exhausted and which Kant regards as those of the human mind are not sufficient to explain them. For an "organism is a product of nature in which everything is purpose and reciprocally also means, cause and reciprocally also effect". Unlike inorganic nature, the organism cannot therefore be explained by eternal, iron laws. This is why Kant, who in his "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels" (General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens) himself attempted to "treat the constitution and mechanical origin of the whole structure of the world according to Newtonian principles", believes that a similar attempt must fail for organic beings. In his "Critique of Judgment" he asserts: "For it is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, much less explain to ourselves, organized beings and their inner possibility according to merely mechanical principles of nature; and so certain, indeed, that one can boldly say that it is unrighteous for man to conceive even such a proposition, or to hope that a Newton may yet one day arise who will make intelligible even the production of a blade of grass according to laws of nature which no intention has ordered; but one must deny this insight to men par excellence. " With Kant's view that the human mind itself creates the laws it finds in nature, another opinion about a purposefully designed being cannot be reconciled. For the purpose points to the one who placed it in the beings, to the intelligent creator of the world. If the human mind could explain a purposeful being in the same way as a being that is merely necessary to nature, then it would also have to place the laws of purpose into things out of itself. It would therefore not only have to give things laws that apply to them insofar as they signify its inner world; it would also have to be able to prescribe their own purpose, which is completely independent of it. He would therefore not only have to be a cognizing spirit, but also a creating spirit; his reason would have to create things like the divine one.

[ 12 ] Whoever visualizes the structure of Kant's conception of the world as outlined here will understand the strong effect it had on his contemporaries and also on posterity. For it does not touch any of the ideas that have been imprinted on the human mind in the course of Western cultural development. It leaves the religious spirit: God, freedom and immortality. It satisfies the need for knowledge by demarcating an area within which certain truths absolutely exist. Indeed, it even accepts the opinion that human reason has a right to use not only the eternal, iron laws of nature to explain living beings, but also the concept of purpose, which points to a deliberate order in the world.

[ 13 ] But at what cost did Kant achieve all this! He placed the whole of nature into the human spirit and made its laws into those of this spirit itself. He expelled the higher world order entirely from nature and placed it on a purely moral basis. He drew a sharp line between the inorganic and the organic realms, and explained the former according to purely mechanical, strictly necessary laws, the latter according to purposeful ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality. For the purposefulness observed in beauty has nothing to do with real purposes. It does not matter how a beautiful object enters into the context of the world; it is enough that it arouses in us the idea of the purposeful and thereby arouses our pleasure.

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[ 14 ] The contrast to this Kantian view of the world was in all essential respects that of Goethe. Around the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe set down his creed in a hymn in prose entitled "Nature", in which he placed man entirely within nature and made her, who rules independently of him, both her own and his lawgiver. Kant took the whole of nature into the human spirit, Goethe saw everything human as a member of this nature; he added the human spirit to the natural world order. "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it - unable to step out of it and unable to enter deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we are tired and fall from her arms. ...The people are all in her, and she in all of them. ... Even the most unnatural is nature, even the clumsiest philistinism has something of her genius. ... One obeys its laws, even if one resists them; one works with it, even if one wants to work against it. ... It is everything. She rewards herself and punishes herself, delights and tortures herself. ...She put me in, she will also lead me out. I trust myself to her. She may switch gears with me; she will not hate her work. I did not speak of her; no, what is true and what is false, she has spoken it all. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit." This is the antithesis of Kant's world view. For Kant, nature is all spirit; for Goethe, spirit is all nature. It is therefore only too understandable when Goethe says in the essay "Influence of Recent Philosophy": "Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ... was completely outside my circle. However, I attended many a conversation about it, and with some attention I was able to notice that the old main question was renewing itself as to how much our self and how much the outside world contribute to our spiritual existence. I never separated the two, and when I philosophized about objects in my own way, I did so with unconscious naivety and really believed that I saw my opinions before my eyes." In this view of Goethe's position towards Kant, we need not be disturbed by the fact that the former passed many a favorable judgment on the Königsberg philosopher. For this contrast would only have become completely clear to him if he had engaged in a detailed study of Kant. But he did not. In the essay mentioned above, he says: "It was the entrance that appealed to me; I could not venture into the labyrinth itself; sometimes the gift of poetry hindered me, sometimes common sense, and I felt nowhere bettered." He did, however, once express the contrast sharply in a note that was only published from his estate by the Weimar Goethe Edition (Weimarische Ausgabe, 2. Abteilung. Vol. XI, p. 377): Kant's fundamental error, Goethe thinks, consists in the fact that the latter "regards the subjective faculty of knowledge itself as an object and separates the point where subjective and objective meet, sharply but not quite correctly". Goethe is of the opinion that in the subjective human faculty of cognition it is not merely the spirit as such that expresses itself, but that it is nature itself that has created an organ in the human being through which it allows its secrets to be revealed. It is not man who speaks about nature, but nature speaks about itself in man. That is Goethe's conviction. Thus Goethe was able to say: As soon as the dispute over Kant's view of the world "came up, I was happy to take the side that did man the most honor, and gave complete approval to all friends who, with Kant, maintained that, although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not therefore all spring from experience. For Goethe believed that the eternal laws according to which nature proceeds are revealed in the human spirit; but for him they were therefore not the subjective laws of this spirit, but the objective laws of the natural order itself. This is why he could not agree with Schiller when the latter, under Kant's influence, erected an abrupt dividing wall between the realm of natural necessity and that of freedom. He speaks of this in the essay "Bekanntschaft mit Schiller" (Acquaintance with Schiller): "Kant's philosophy, which elevates the subject so high by seeming to constrict it, he had gladly absorbed; it developed the extraordinary that nature had placed in his being, and he, in the highest feeling of freedom and self-determination, was ungrateful to the great mother, who certainly did not treat him like a stepmother. Instead of regarding her as independent, living, law-generating from the deepest to the highest, he took her from the side of some empirical human naturalities." And in the essay "Influence of Recent Philosophy", he indicates the contrast to Schiller with the words: "He preached the gospel of freedom, I did not want the rights of nature to be abridged." There was something of the Kantian way of thinking in Schiller; for Goethe, however, it is true what he says with regard to conversations he had with Kantians: "They heard me well, but could neither answer me nor be of any help. More than once I encountered one or the other admitting with smiling astonishment that it was, of course, an analog of Kant's way of thinking, but a strange one."

[ 15 ] In art and beauty, Goethe did not see a realm torn from its real context, but a higher level of natural lawfulness. On seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him, he wrote down the following words during his trip to Italy: "The high works of art, like the highest works of nature, were produced by human beings according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." If the artist proceeds in the sense of the Greeks, namely "according to the laws according to which nature itself proceeds", then his works contain the divine that is to be found in nature itself. For Goethe, art is "a manifestation of the secret laws of nature"; what the artist creates are works of nature on a higher level of perfection. Art is the continuation and human conclusion of nature, because "by placing himself at the summit of nature, man sees himself again as a whole nature, which in itself must again produce a summit. To this end, he increases himself by imbuing himself with all perfections and virtues, calling upon choice, order, harmony and meaning and finally rising to the production of the work of art". Everything is nature, from the inorganic stone to the highest works of human art, and everything in this nature is governed by the same "eternal, necessary, so divine laws" that "the deity himself could not change it". ("Dichtung und Wahrheit". 16th book)

[ 16 ] When Goethe read Jacobi's book "Von den göttlichen Dingen" in 1811, he was "not at ease; how could I welcome the book of a friend so dear to me, in which I was to see the thesis carried out that nature conceals God! With my pure, deep, innate and practiced way of seeing things, which had taught me to see God in nature, nature in God without fail, so that this way of seeing things was the foundation of my entire existence, did not such a strange, one-sidedly limited statement have to distance me in spirit from the noblest man, whose heart I adored, forever? But I did not indulge in my painful chagrin; on the contrary, I rescued myself to my old asylum and found my daily entertainment for several weeks in Spinoza's Ethics, and since my education had increased, I was astonished to discover many things in the already familiar that stood out as new and different, and also had a fresh effect on me in their own right."

[ 17 ] For Kant, the realm of necessity in the sense of Spinoza is a realm of inner human lawfulness; for Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and doing is a link within this chain of necessities. Within this realm there is only a natural, but not a moral lawfulness.

The sun shines
Over evil and good;
And the criminal
Shine, like the best,
The moon and the stars.

From one root, from the eternal driving forces of nature, Goethe lets everything spring forth: the inorganic, the organic beings, man with all the results of his spirit: his knowledge, his morality, his art.

What would a god be who only pushed from the outside,
To let the universe run in circles on his finger! It behoves him to move the world within,
Nature in itself, to nurture itself in nature,
So that what lives and weaves and is in him,
Never misses its power, never its spirit.

In such words Goethe summarizes his confession. Against Haller, who spoke the words "No created spirit penetrates into the interior of nature", Goethe turns with the sharpest words:

"Into the interior of nature-"
O, you Philistine!"
"No created spirit penetrates."
Myself and brothers and sisters
May you remember such a word
Only do not remember;
We think: place by place
We are within.
"Blessed to whom they only
The outer shell knows",
I hear that repeated for sixty years,
And curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand thousand times:
Everything she gives abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is everything at once; You only test yourself most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

In line with this world view, Goethe was also unable to recognize the difference between inorganic and organic nature, which Kant had established in his "Critique of Judgment". He strove to explain animate organisms according to the same laws that explain inanimate nature. The leading botanist of the time, Linn€, knew nothing else to say about the diverse species in the plant world than that there are as many such species as "different forms have been created in principle". Anyone with such an opinion can only endeavor to study the characteristics of the individual forms and to distinguish them carefully from one another. Goethe could not agree with such a view of nature. "That which Linne€ sought to keep apart by force had, according to the innermost need of my being, to strive towards unification." He sought out that which is common to all plant species. On his journey in Italy, this common archetype in all plant forms became increasingly clear to him: "The many plants that I was otherwise only used to seeing in tubs and pots, indeed for most of the year only behind glass windows, stand here happy and fresh in the open air, and by fulfilling their purpose, they become clearer to us. In the face of so many new and renewed formations, the old cricket came back to my mind: could I not discover the original plant among this crowd? There must be one after all: how else would I recognize that this or that structure is a plant if they were not all formed according to one pattern?" Another time he expresses himself about this original plant: It "becomes the most marvelous creature from the world, which nature itself shall envy me. With this model and the key to it, one can then invent plants into infinity, which must be consistent, that is, which, even if they do not exist, could still exist, and are not picturesque or poetic shadows and schemes, but have an inner truth and necessity." Just as Kant exclaims in his "Natural History and Theory of Heaven": "Give me matter; I will build you a world out of it", because he understands the lawful connection of this world, so Goethe says here: with the help of the primordial plant, one can invent plants capable of existence into infinity, because one possesses the law of their formation and becoming. What Kant only wanted to apply to inorganic nature, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe also extended to the world of organisms. In the letter in which he informs Herder of his discovery of the primordial plant, he adds: "The same law can be applied to all other living things." And Goethe did apply it. His diligent studies of the animal world led him in 1795 to "unabashedly assert that all perfect organic natures, among which we see fish, amphibians, birds, mammals and, at the top of the latter, man, are all formed according to one archetype, which only leans more or less back and forth in its constant parts, and still forms and reshapes itself daily through reproduction". Goethe is therefore also in complete opposition to Kant in his view of nature. The latter called it a daring "adventure of reason" if it wanted to attempt to explain the origin of living things. He considered the human cognitive faculty to be unsuitable for such an explanation. "It is infinitely important to reason not to abandon the mechanism of nature in its creations and not to bypass it in its explanation, because without it no insight into the nature of things can be gained. If we concede at once that a supreme architect has directly created the forms of nature as they have always existed, or has predetermined those that are continuously formed in their course according to the same pattern, our knowledge of nature is not in the least furthered by this; because we do not know that being's mode of action and the ideas of it, which are supposed to contain the principles of the possibility of natural beings, at all, and cannot explain nature from the same as from above". To such Kantian remarks, Goethe replies: "If in the moral realm, through belief in God, virtue and immortality, we are to elevate ourselves to an upper region and approach the first being: then it may well be the same case in the intellectual realm that we, through the contemplation of an ever-creating nature, make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in its productions. If I had first unconsciously and out of an inner urge restlessly pressed for that archetypal, typical thing, if I had even succeeded in constructing a natural representation, then nothing else could now prevent me from bravely passing the adventure of reason, as the old man from Königsberg himself calls it."

[ 18 ] Of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Goethe says that he owes it "a most joyful epoch of life". "The great main ideas of the work were completely analogous to my previous work, actions and thinking. The inner life of art and nature, their mutual working from within, was clearly expressed in the book." Even this statement by Goethe cannot conceal his opposition to Kant. For the essay from which it is taken also states: "Passionately inspired, I went on my way all the more quickly because I myself did not know where it was leading, and for what and how I had appropriated it, I found little favor with the Kantians. For I spoke out what was stirring in me, but not what I had read."

[ 19 ] A strictly unified world view is characteristic of Goethe; he wants to gain a point of view from which the whole universe reveals its lawfulness, "from the brick that falls from the roof to the shining flash of inspiration that comes to you and which you communicate". For "all effects, of whatever kind they may be, which we notice in experience, are connected in the most constant way, merge into one another". "A tile detaches itself from the roof: we call this in the common sense accidental; it strikes the shoulders of a passer-by, but certainly mechanically; but not quite mechanically, it follows the laws of gravity, and so it acts physically. The torn life vessels immediately give up their function; at the moment the juices act chemically, the elementary properties emerge. Only the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and seeks to restore itself; meanwhile the human whole is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. The person who recognizes himself feels ethically deeply wounded; he laments his disturbed activity, of whatever kind it may be, but reluctantly man surrenders to patience. Religiously, on the other hand, it becomes easy for him to ascribe this case to a higher destiny, to regard it as protection from greater evil, as an introduction to greater good. This is enough for the sufferer; but the convalescent rises genius, trusts God and himself and feels saved, seizes even the accidental, turns it to his advantage in order to begin an eternally fresh circle of life." This is how Goethe uses the example of a falling brick to explain the connection between all types of natural effects; it would be an explanation in his sense if one could also derive their strictly lawful connection from a root.

[ 20 ] Kant and Goethe stood like two intellectual antipodes at the beginning of the development of the world view of this century. And the way in which those who were interested in the highest questions approached them was fundamentally different. Kant built up his world view with all the means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophized naively, abandoning himself to his healthy nature. This is why Fichte, as mentioned above, believed that he could only turn to Goethe "as the representative of the purest spirituality of feeling at the presently attained stage of humanity", whereas he was of the opinion of Kant that "no human understanding could penetrate further than the limit at which Kant, especially in his Critique of Judgment, stood". Anyone who penetrates Goethe's world view, given in a naïve guise, will, however, find in it a secure foundation that can be brought down to clear ideas. Goethe himself, however, did not realize this foundation. That is why his way of thinking only gradually found its way into the development of the world view; and at the beginning of the century it was Kant with whom the minds tried to come to terms.

[ 21 ] However great the effect that Kant had, it could not remain hidden from his contemporaries that a deeper need for knowledge could not be satisfied by him. Such a need for explanation insists on a unified view of the world, as was the case with Goethe. With Kant, the individual areas of existence stand side by side. For this reason, despite his unconditional admiration for Kant, Fichte could not hide the fact that "Kant merely hinted at the truth, but neither presented nor proved it". "This wonderful single man either has a divination of truth without being aware of its reasons himself, or he did not esteem his age highly enough to communicate it to it, or he shied away from usurping in his life the superhuman veneration that would sooner or later have to be bestowed on him. No one has yet understood him, no one will who will not arrive at Kant's results in his own way, and only then will the world be astonished." "But I believe I know just as surely that Kant has conceived such a system; that everything he actually presents are fragments and results of this system, and that his assertions only have meaning and coherence under this assumption." For if this were not the case, he would "consider the Critique of Pure Reason to be the work of the strangest accident rather than that of a mind." -

[ 22 ] Others also recognized the unsatisfactory nature of Kant's circles of thought. Lichtenberg, one of the most intellectual and at the same time most independent minds from the second half of the last century, who appreciated Kant, could not refrain from making weighty objections to his world view. On the one hand, he says: "What does it mean to think with the Kantian spirit? I believe it means to find out the relations of our being, whatever it may be, to the things we call outside ourselves; that is, to determine the relations of the subjective to the objective. This has, of course, always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but the question is whether they have ever begun as truly philosophical as Mr. Kant. What is and must be subjective has been taken for objective." On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg remarks: "Should it then be so completely clear that our reason can know nothing at all of the supersensible? Should not man be able to weave his ideas of God as purposefully as a spider weaves its web to catch flies? Or in other words: Shouldn't there be beings who admire us for our ideas of God and immortality just as much as we admire the spider and the silkworm?" But one could make an even more weighty objection. If it is true that the laws of human reason relate only to the inner world of the mind, how do we come to speak of things outside ourselves at all? We would then have to spin ourselves completely into our inner world. Such an objection was raised by Gottlob Ernst Schulze in his essay "Aenesidemus", published anonymously in 1792. In it, he claims that all our knowledge is pure imagination and that we cannot go beyond our imaginary world in any way. This basically also refuted Kant's moral truths. For if it is not even possible to think beyond the inner world, then no moral voice can guide us into a world that is impossible to think. Thus, Kant's view initially developed into a new doubt about all truth; criticism became skepticism. One of the most consistent followers of scepticism is Salomon Maimon, who from 1790 onwards wrote various works influenced by Kant and Schulze, in which he resolutely argued that the existence of external objects should not be spoken of at all because of the entire structure of our cognitive faculty. Another of Kant's students, Jacob Sigismund Beck, even went so far as to claim that Kant himself had in truth assumed no things apart from us, and that it was only based on a misunderstanding if such an idea was attributed to him.

[ 23 ] One thing is certain: Kant offered his contemporaries countless points of attack for interpretation and contradiction. It was precisely through his ambiguities and contradictions that he became the father of the classical German worldviews of Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher. His ambiguities became new questions for them. As much as he had endeavored to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith, the human spirit can only be satisfied, in the truest sense of the word, through knowledge, through cognition. And so it was that Kant's successors wanted to restore knowledge to its full rights; they wanted to use it to satisfy man's highest spiritual needs. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the perfect continuator of Kant in this direction. He who said: "The love of science, and especially of speculation, once it has taken hold of man, so captivates him that he has no other wish left than to occupy himself with it in peace." Fichte can be called a fanatic of worldview. His fanaticism must have had an enchanting effect on his contemporaries and students. Let us listen to what one of the latter, Forberg, says about him: "His public discourse rushes along like a thunderstorm that discharges its fire in single blows; he elevates the soul, he wants to make not merely good, but great men; his eye is punishing, his gait defiant, he wants to guide the spirit of the age through his philosophy; his imagination is not flourishing, but energetic and powerful; his images are not charming, but bold and great. He penetrates into the innermost depths of the subject and operates in the realm of concepts with an impartiality that reveals that he not only dwells in this invisible land, but rules it." The most striking feature of Fichte's personality is the grand, serious style in his view of life. He applies the highest standards to everything. For example, he describes the profession of the writer: "The idea must speak for itself, not the writer. All arbitrariness of the latter, all his individuality, his own manner and art must be extinguished in his presentation, so that only the manner and art of his idea may live, the highest life that it can gain in this language and in this age. Just as he is free from the obligation of the oral teacher to submit to the receptivity of others, so he has no excuse for himself. He has no set reader in view, but constructs his reader and gives him the law of how it ought to be." - "But the writer's work is in itself a work for eternity. May future ages take a higher impetus in the science which he has laid down in his work; he has not only laid down the science, he has laid down the very definite and perfect character of an age, in reference to this science, in his work, and this retains its interest as long as there will be men in the world. Regardless of changeability, its letter speaks in all ages to all men who are able to animate this letter, and inspires, elevates, ennobles until the end of days." Thus speaks a man who is aware of his vocation as the spiritual leader of his age, who was very serious when he said - in the preface to his Wissenschaftslehre - that there is nothing in my person, but everything in the truth, for "I am a priest of truth". From a man who lived in the realm of "truth" in this way, we understand that he did not merely want to guide others to understanding, but force them. He was allowed to give one of his writings the title: "Sonnenklarer Bericht an das größere Publikum über das eigentliche Wesen der neuesten Philosophie. An attempt to force the reader to understand." Fichte is a personality who does not believe he needs reality and its facts in order to follow the path of life, but who keeps his eyes fixed on the world of ideas. He thinks little of those who do not understand such an ideal direction of the spirit. "While in the circle which ordinary experience has drawn around us, one thinks more generally and judges more correctly than perhaps ever before, the majority are completely deluded and blinded as soon as they should go even a little beyond it. If it is impossible to rekindle in them the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, they must remain quietly in that circle, and in so far as they are useful and indispensable in it, their value in and for it must be left undiminished. But if they therefore demand that everything they cannot rise to should be brought down to them, if they demand, for example, that everything printed should be usable as a cookery book, or as an arithmetic book, or as a set of official regulations, and denounce everything that cannot be so used, they are themselves greatly mistaken. - That ideals cannot be represented in the real world, the rest of us know perhaps as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the power to do so. Even if they cannot convince themselves of this, once they are what they are, they lose very little, and humanity loses nothing. This merely makes it clear that they alone are not reckoned with in the plan for the improvement of mankind. The latter will undoubtedly continue on their path; may kind nature rule over them, and give them rain and sunshine in due time, beneficial nourishment and undisturbed circulation of the juices, and at the same time - wise thoughts!" He prefaced the printing of the lectures with these words, in which he explained the "Destiny of the Scholar" to the students in Jenens. Views such as Fichte's grew out of a great spiritual energy, which gives certainty for the knowledge of the world and for life. He had ruthless words for all those who did not feel the strength for such certainty within themselves. When Reinhold said that the inner voice of man could also err, Fichte replied: "You say that the philosopher should think that he can err as an individual, that as such he can and must learn from others. Do you know what mood you are describing: that of a person who has never been convinced of anything in his entire life?"

[ 24 ] This powerful personality, whose gaze was directed entirely inwards, was reluctant to seek the highest that man can achieve, a world view, anywhere other than within himself. "All culture should be the exercise of all forces towards the one purpose of complete freedom, i.e. complete independence from everything that is not ourselves, our pure self (reason, moral law), for only this is ours..." This is Fichte's judgment in the "Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution" published in 1793. And the most valuable power in man, the power of cognition, should not be directed towards this one purpose of being completely independent of everything that is not ourselves? Could we ever achieve complete independence if we were dependent on any being in our view of the world? If it were determined by such a being outside us what nature is, what our soul is, what our duties are, and we then obtained knowledge behind from such a ready-made fact? If we are independent, then we must also be independent with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has arisen without our intervention, then we are dependent on it. So we cannot receive the highest truth. We must create it; it must arise through us. Fichte can therefore only place at the top of the world view something that first attains its existence through us. When we say of any thing in the external world: it is, we do so because we perceive it. We know that we attribute existence to another being. What this other thing is does not depend on us. We can only recognize its nature if we focus our perceptive faculty on it. We would never know what "red", "warm", "cold" is if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of things, we cannot take anything away from them. We say "they are". What they are: that is what they tell us. It is completely different with our own existence. Man does not say to himself: "it is", but: "I am". In doing so, however, he has not only said: that he is, but also: what he is, namely an "I". Only an other being could say of me: "it is". Yes, it would have to say so. For even if this other being had created me, it could not say of my existence: I am. The statement: "I am" loses all meaning if the being that speaks of its existence does not do so itself. There is therefore nothing in the world that can address me as "I" other than myself. This recognition of myself as an "I" must therefore be my very own act. No being other than me can have any influence on it.

[ 25 ] Here Fichte found something where he saw himself completely independent of any foreign entity. A god could create me; but he would have to leave it up to me to recognize myself as an "I". I give my self-consciousness to myself. In him, therefore, I do not have a knowledge, a recognition that I have received, but one that I have made myself. In this way, Fichte has created a fixed point for the world view, something where there is certainty. But what about the existence of other beings? I attribute an existence to them. But I do not have the same right to do so as I do for myself. They must become parts of my "I" if I am to attach an existence to them with the same right. And they become that by me perceiving them. Because as soon as that is the case, they are there for me. I can only say: my self feels "red", my self feels "warm". And as truly as I attribute an existence to myself, I can also attribute this to my feelings and my sensations. So if I understand myself correctly, I can only say: I am and I also attribute existence to an external world.

[ 26 ] In this way, for Fichte, the world lost its independent existence apart from the "I"; it only has an existence that has been added to it by the I, that is, an existence that has been added to it. In his striving to give his own self the greatest possible independence, Fichte deprived the external world of all independence. Where such an independent external world is not thought to exist, it is also understandable that interest in knowledge, in recognizing this external world, ceases. Thus the interest in the actual knowledge itself is extinguished. For the ego basically experiences nothing through such knowledge other than what it produces itself. In all knowledge, the human ego only holds monologues with itself, as it were. It does not go beyond itself. But the way in which it accomplishes the latter is through living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world: then it is no longer monologuing with itself alone. Then its actions flow out into the world. They attain an independent existence. I accomplish something; and when I have accomplished it, it continues to have an effect, even if I no longer participate in its effect. What I know has an existence only through me; what I do is part of a moral world order that is independent of me. But what does all the certainty that we draw from our own ego mean in relation to this supreme truth of a moral world order, which must be independent of us if existence is to have meaning? After all, all knowledge is only something for the self; this world order must be apart from the self. It must be, even though we cannot know anything about it. We must therefore believe it. In this way, Fichte also goes beyond knowledge to a belief. Like the dream in relation to reality, all knowledge is in relation to belief. Even one's own ego only has such a dream existence when it merely observes itself. It creates an image of itself, which need be nothing more than a floating image; only the action remains. Fichte describes this dream existence of the world with significant words in his "Determination of Man": "There is no permanence anywhere, neither outside me, nor in me, but only an incessant change. I know of no being anywhere, nor of my own. There is no being. I myself do not know at all, and am not. Images are: they are the only thing that is there, and they know of themselves in the manner of images: -- images that float in front of without there being anything they float in front of: that are connected by images of images, images without anything depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I myself am one of these images; indeed, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of images. - All reality is transformed into a marvelous dream, without a life that is dreamed of and without a spirit that dreams; into a dream that hangs together in a dream of itself. The looking is the dream; the thinking, - the source of all being, and of all reality that I imagine, my being, my power, my purposes, - is the dream of that dream. " How different the moral world order, the world of faith, appears to Fichte: "My will should work absolutely through itself, without any tool that weakens its expression, in a sphere completely similar to itself, as reason on reason, as the spiritual on the spiritual; - in a sphere, however, to which it does not give the law of life, of activity, of continuity, but which has it in itself; thus to self-acting reason. But self-acting reason is will. The law of the supersensible world would therefore be a will." "That sublime will therefore does not go its own way separately from the rest of the rational world. There is a spiritual bond between it and all finite rational beings, and it itself is this spiritual bond within the world of reason." "I cover my face from you and put my hand over my mouth. How you are for yourself and how you appear to yourself, I can never understand, just as I can never become yourself. After living through a thousand times a thousand spirit worlds, I will understand you just as little as I do now in this hut of earth. - What I comprehend becomes finite through my mere comprehension; and this can never be transformed into the infinite, even through infinite increase. You are not different from the finite in degree, but in fact. They only make you a greater man by that increase, and always a greater one; but never the God, the Infinite, who is incapable of any measure."

[ 27 ] Because knowledge is a dream, the moral world order the only truly real thing for Fichte, he also places life, through which man places himself in the moral world context, above mere cognition, the contemplation of things. "Nothing" - he says - "has unconditional value and meaning as life; everything else, thinking, poetry and knowledge only has value insofar as it relates in some way to the living, emanates from it and intends to run back into it."

[ 28 ] It is the basic ethical trait in Fichte's personality that has erased everything in his worldview or reduced its significance that does not amount to the moral destiny of man. He wanted to set up the greatest, the purest demands for life; and in doing so he did not want to be misled by any cognition that might discover contradictions with the natural laws of the world in these goals. Goethe said: "The doer is always without conscience; no one has a conscience but the observer." By this he meant that the observer assesses everything according to its true, real value and understands and accepts every thing in its place. The doer's main aim is to see his demands fulfilled; whether he does things wrong or not is all the same to him. Fichte was primarily concerned with action; however, he did not want to be accused of unconscionability by contemplation. That is why he denied the value of contemplation.

[ 29 ] Fichte constantly endeavored to intervene in immediate life. He felt most satisfied where he believed that his words could become action in others. It was out of this urge that he wrote: "Reclaiming freedom of thought from the princes of Europe who had hitherto suppressed it. Heliopolis, in the last year of the old darkness, 1792." "Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution, 1793." Out of this urge he delivered his captivating speeches: "Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, dargestellt in Vorlesungen, gehalten zu Berlin im Jahr 18041805"; "Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder auch die Religionslehre. In lectures delivered in Berlin in 1806", and finally his "Speeches to the German Nation, 1808", a work in which boldness of thought, the noblest enthusiasm and courage of personality challenge our admiration in equal measure.

[ 30 ] Uncompromising devotion to the moral order of the world, acting from the deepest core of man's ethical nature: these are the demands that give life value and meaning. This view is the basic motif that runs through all these speeches and writings. In the "Fundamental Features of the Present Age", he reproached this age in flaming words for its selfishness. Everyone goes only the way that his lower instincts dictate. But these instincts lead away from the great whole that encompasses the human community as moral harmony. Such an age must lead those who live in its spirit towards destruction. Fichte wanted to revive duty in the human mind. And when Germany was about to lose its independence through foreign rule, his lively spirit was presented with the most beautiful opportunity to intervene in the course of events. In the midst of the enemy, in the winter of 1807-1808, he delivered his "Speeches to the German Nation". Just as he had said in Jena, when he began to develop his world view in front of his students, that his person was not a consideration, but only the truth, so he thought now, when he knew quite well that at any moment the enemy could make it impossible for him to speak with a bullet, through which he wanted to arouse the enthusiasm in his nation to defend its autonomy and independence against this enemy. "The good thing is enthusiasm, elevation; my personal danger does not come into play at all, but could rather have a highly advantageous effect." He pointed out to the Germans their own nature. Everything about this nature is original: the language, the poetry, the science. The Germans speak their original language; they have not adopted the Roman language like the Western European peoples. Language, however, is the expression of the spirit. Whoever speaks the original language that emerged from his tribe expresses his most independent spiritual being in it. Those who, like those western peoples, have lost this original language and adopted a foreign one, have also given up the individuality of the spirit. And look at the poetry of both tribes. German poetry sounds out of the deepest character of the people; the spirit of its western neighbors is created in external forms. Therefore, even if German art is sometimes rough and harsh in its expression, it is an art of the deepest needs of the soul; even if Western art is elegant and graceful, it springs from an outward spirit of beauty. Science is no different. German philosophy is in touch with the popular soul; French philosophy is the property of a learned caste that has lost touch with the people. How can a nation that has a culture of its own succumb to one that has implanted a foreign one? It cannot succumb if it only remembers its originality. "A people that is capable, even if only in its highest representatives and leaders, of firmly grasping the face of the spirit world, of independence, and of being seized by love for it, like our oldest ancestors, will certainly triumph over one that is only used as an instrument of foreign domination and for the subjugation of independent peoples, like the Roman armies; for the former have everything to lose, the latter only a few things to gain." Only a mind to which the highest regions of the world of ideas are accessible could provide such a thoughtful characterization of its people, and only a personality with confidence in the victorious power of ideas could add these spiritual weapons to the physical ones that were then fighting against the foreign conqueror.

[ 31 ] Just as Kant dethroned knowledge in order to make room for faith, so Fichte declared cognition worthless in order to have a clear path ahead of him for living action, for moral deeds. Schiller also attempted something similar. Only in his case, beauty took the place of belief in Kant and action in Fichte. Schiller's importance for the development of the world view is usually underestimated. Just as Goethe had to complain that he was not accepted as a natural scientist because he was once used to being taken as a poet, so those who delve into Schiller's philosophical ideas must regret that he is so little appreciated by those who deal with the history of world views, because his field is confined to the realm of art.

[ 32 ] As a thoroughly independent thinker, Schiller confronts his inspiration Kant. The poet, who held up a mirror to the depravity of his time in The Robbers and Cabal and Love, certainly did not hold the majesty of moral faith to which Kant sought to elevate mankind in low esteem. But he said to himself: Should it be absolutely necessary that man can only rise to the heights of the categorical imperative by fighting against his inclinations, desires and instincts? Kant wanted to attribute to man's sensual nature only the tendency to the lower, to the selfish, to the sensually pleasing; and only he who rises above this sensual nature, who kills it and lets the purely spiritual voice of duty speak within him: he can be virtuous. Thus Kant degraded the natural man in order to raise the moral man all the higher. To Schiller, this seemed to be something unworthy of man. Should it not be possible to refine man's instincts in such a way that they do what is obligatory, what is moral, of their own accord? Then they would not need to be suppressed in order to have a moral effect. Schiller therefore contrasted Kant's strict demand for duty with his own view in the following epigram:

Scruples of conscience.
I like to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with reluctance,
And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.

Decision.
There is no other advice, you must seek to despise them,
And with loathing then do as duty bids you.

Schiller sought to resolve these "scruples of conscience" in his own way. There are actually two drives in man: the sensual drive and the rational drive. If man abandons himself to the sensual drive, he is a plaything of his desires and passions, in short his selfishness. If he gives himself completely to the rational instinct, he is a slave to its strict commandments, its relentless logic, its categorical imperative. A person who only wants to live according to the sensual drive must silence reason within himself; someone who only wants to serve reason must kill sensuality. If the former hears reason, he submits to it only involuntarily; if the latter hears the voice of his desires, he feels it as a burden on his path of virtue. The physical and spiritual nature of man thus seem to live in a fatal dichotomy. Is there not a state in man in which both instincts, the sensual and the spiritual, are in harmony? Schiller answers the question with "yes". It is the state in which the beautiful is created and enjoyed. Anyone who creates a work of art is following a free natural instinct. They do it out of inclination. But it is not physical passions that drive him; it is the imagination, the spirit. It is the same with those who indulge in the pleasure of a work of art. It satisfies his spirit at the same time as it acts on his sensuality. Man can pursue his desires without heeding the higher laws of the spirit; he can fulfill his duty without worrying about sensuality; a beautiful work of art affects his pleasure without arousing his desire; and it transports him into a spiritual world in which he dwells out of inclination. In this state, man is like a child who follows his inclination in his actions and does not ask whether it contradicts the laws of reason: "Through beauty, the sensual man ... to thinking; through beauty the spiritual man is led back to matter and returned to the world of the senses." (Eighteenth Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man) "The high freedom and equanimity of spirit, combined with strength and vigor, is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no surer touchstone of true aesthetic goodness. If, after an enjoyment of this kind, we find ourselves favorably disposed to any particular mode of feeling or action, but awkward and discontented to another, this serves as an unmistakable proof that we have not experienced a purely aesthetic effect, whether it was due to the object or to our mode of feeling or (as is almost always the case) to both at the same time." (Twenty-second Letter on Aesthetic Education) Because through beauty man is neither a slave to sensuality nor to reason, but through it both work together in his soul, Schiller compares the drive to beauty to that of the child, who in his play does not subject his mind to the laws of reason, but uses it freely, according to his inclination. This is why he calls this instinct for beauty the play instinct: "Man is only serious about the pleasant, the good, the perfect; but he plays with beauty. Of course, we must not think here of the games that are played in real life and which are usually only directed towards very material objects; but in real life we would also look in vain for the beauty we are talking about here. The really existing beauty is worth the really existing play instinct; but through the ideal of beauty, which reason sets up, an ideal of the play instinct is also given up, which man should have in mind in all his games." (Letter 25) In the fulfillment of this ideal play instinct, man finds the reality of freedom. He no longer obeys reason; and he no longer follows sensual inclination. He acts out of inclination as if he were acting out of reason. "Man should only play with beauty, and he should only play with beauty. - For, to put it bluntly, man only plays where he is man in the full meaning of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays." Schiller could also have said: In play, man is free; in the fulfillment of duty and in devotion to sensuality, he is unfree. If man now also wants to be human in his moral actions in the full meaning of the word, that is, if he wants to be free, he must have the same relationship to his virtues as to beauty. He must ennoble his inclinations into virtues; and he must so imbue himself with his virtues that he has, in his whole being, no other impulse than to follow them. A man who has established this harmony between inclination and duty can count on the goodness of his actions at any moment, as on something self-evident.

[ 33 ] The social coexistence of people can also be viewed from this point of view. People who follow their sensual urges are selfish. He would only ever pursue his own well-being if the state did not regulate coexistence through rational laws. The free man accomplishes of his own accord what the state must demand of the selfish man. In a community of free people, there is no need for coercive laws. "In the midst of the terrible realm of forces and in the midst of the holy realm of laws, the aesthetic instinct for education is building a third, happy realm of play, in which it removes the shackles of all relationships from man and frees him from everything that is called compulsion, both physically and morally" (27. Letter) "This realm extends upwards to where reason rules with unconditional necessity and all matter ceases; it extends downwards to where the natural instinct rules with blind compulsion." Schiller thus sees a moral realm as an ideal in which the virtuous mind rules with the same ease and freedom as taste in the realm of beauty. He makes life in the realm of beauty the model of a perfect moral social order that liberates man in every direction. He concludes the beautiful treatise in which he presents this ideal of his with the question of whether such an order exists anywhere, and answers it thus: "According to necessity, it exists in every finely tuned scele; in fact, one would probably like to find it only, like the pure church and the pure republic, in a few select circles, where not the mindless imitation of foreign customs, but one's own beautiful nature guides conduct, where man goes through the most intricate relationships with bold simplicity and calm innocence, and has no need to offend another's freedom in order to assert his own, nor to throw away his dignity in order to show grace. "

[ 34 ] In this virtue ennobled to beauty, Schiller found a mediation between Kant's worldview and that of Goethe. No matter how great the spell that Kant cast on Schiller when he himself defended the ideal of pure humanity against the truly prevailing moral order, Schiller became an admirer of Goethe's view of the world and life when he got to know him better, and his mind, which was always striving for the purest clarity of thought, would not let him rest until he had succeeded in penetrating Goethe's wisdom conceptually. The great satisfaction that Goethe drew from his views on beauty and art, also for his way of life, led Schiller more and more to the former's way of thinking. When he thanked Goethe for sending him "Wilhelm Meister", he did so with the words: "I cannot express to you how embarrassing it often feels to me to look from a product of this kind into the philosophical being. There everything is so cheerful, so lively, so harmoniously resolved and so humanly true; here everything is so strict, so rigid and abstract, and so highly unnatural, because all nature is only synthesis and philosophy antithesis. To be sure, I can testify that in my speculations I have remained as faithful to nature as is compatible with the concept of analysis; indeed, perhaps I have remained more faithful to it than our Kantians considered permissible and possible. But nevertheless, I feel no less vividly the infinite distance between life and reasoning - and cannot refrain, in such a melancholy moment, from interpreting as a defect in my nature what, in a cheerful hour, I must merely regard as a natural characteristic of the matter. This much, however, is certain: the poet is the only true man, and the best philosopher is only a caricature compared to him." Schiller's judgment can only refer to Kant's philosophy, on which Schiller gained his experience. It distances man from nature in many respects. It has no faith in nature, but only accepts as valid truth that which is taken from man's own mental organization. As a result, all of its judgments lack the fresh, substantive coloring that we gain through direct observation of natural processes and things themselves. It moves in bloodless, gray, cold abstractions. It gives up the warmth that we gain from direct contact with things in exchange for the coldness of its abstract concepts. And Kant's worldview also shows the same opposition to nature in the moral sphere. The purely rational concept of duty is its highest aspiration. What man loves, what he is inclined to do: everything that is directly natural in the human being must be subordinated to this ideal of duty. Even in the region of beauty, Kant eradicates the part that man must have according to his original sensations and feelings. The beautiful is supposed to evoke a completely "uninterested" pleasure. Let us hear how devoted, how "interested" Schiller is in the work in which he admires the highest level of the artistic. He says of "Wilhelm Meister": "I can express the feeling that pervades and possesses me when reading this work, and indeed to an increasing degree the further I get into it, no better than through a sweet and intimate comfort, through a feeling of spiritual and physical health, and I would vouch for the fact that it must be the same for all readers as a whole. - I explain this well-being by the calm clarity, smoothness and transparency that prevails throughout, which does not leave the slightest thing behind that leaves the mind unsatisfied and restless, and does not drive its movement further than is necessary to kindle and maintain a joyful life in man." This is not spoken by someone who believes in disinterested pleasure, but by someone who considers the pleasure of beauty to be capable of such refinement that it is not humiliating to give oneself completely to this pleasure. Our interest should not be extinguished when we come face to face with the work of art; rather, we should be able to show our interest in that which is the outflow of the spirit. And the "true" human being should also have this kind of interest in the beautiful in relation to moral concepts. In a letter to Goethe, Schiller writes: "It is really worth noting that slackness about aesthetic things is always connected with moral slackness, and that the pure, strict striving for the high beauty, with the highest liberality towards everything that is nature, will lead to rigorism in moral matters."

[ 35 ] Schiller felt the alienation from nature in the world view, in the entire contemporary culture within which he lived, so strongly that he made it the subject of a consideration in the essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry". He compares the view of life of his time with that of the Greeks and asks himself: "How is it that we, who are so infinitely surpassed by the ancients in everything that is nature, can pay homage to nature to a higher degree, cling to it with intimacy and embrace even the lifeless world with the warmest feeling?" And he answers this question: "This is because nature has disappeared from humanity and we only encounter it again in its truth outside of it, in the inanimate world. It is not our greater naturalness but, on the contrary, the natural un-naturalness of our circumstances, conditions and customs that drives us to provide the awakening instinct for truth and simplicity, which, like the moral disposition from which it flows, lies incorruptible and ineffaceable in all human hearts, with a satisfaction in the physical world that cannot be hoped for in the moral world. That is why the feeling with which we cling to nature is so closely related to the feeling with which we lament the escaped age of childhood and childlike innocence. Our childhood is the only unmutilated nature that we still find in cultivated humanity, so it is no wonder that every footstep of nature apart from us leads us back to our childhood." It was quite different for the Greeks. They lived a life within the natural. Everything they did came from their natural imaginations, feelings and sensibilities. They were intimately connected with nature. Modern man feels a contrast to nature in his being. But since the urge for this primordial mother of all existence cannot be eradicated, it will transform itself in the modern soul into a longing for nature, into a search for it. The Greek had nature; the modern seeks nature. "As long as man is still pure, it goes without saying, not raw nature, he acts as an undivided sensual unity and as a harmonizing whole. Senses and reason, receptive and self-acting faculties, have not yet separated in their business, much less are they in contradiction with each other. His sensations are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the insubstantial play of imagination; those arise from the law of necessity, these from reality. Once man has entered the state of culture and art has laid its hand on him, this sensual harmony is abolished in him and he can only express himself as moral unity, i.e. as striving for unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking, which in the first state was real, now exists only ideally; it is no longer in him, but outside him, as a thought that is first to be realized, no longer as a fact of his life." The basic mood of the Greek mind was naïve, that of the modern is sentimental; the world view of the former could therefore be realistic. For he had not yet separated the spiritual from the natural; for him, nature still included the spirit. If he left himself to nature, he did so in the face of spirit-filled nature. Modernity is different. It has detached the spirit from nature and elevated it to the gray realm of abstraction. If it were to surrender to its nature, it would do so in the face of spirit-filled nature. Therefore, his highest striving must be directed towards the ideal; by striving for this, he will reconcile spirit and nature. In Goethe's way of thinking, Schiller found something akin to the Greek way. Goethe believed that he saw his ideas and thoughts with his eyes because he perceived reality as an undivided unity of spirit and nature. In Schiller's opinion, he had retained something to which the sentimental man only returns when he reaches the summit of his aspirations. And he climbs such a peak in the aesthetic state described by Schiller, in which sensuality and reason have found their harmony.

[ 36 ] This view of the world and of life, which is present in Goethe in a naïve way and for which Schiller strove in all detours of thought, does not have the need for that generally valid truth that sees its ideal in mathematics; it is satisfied by the other truth that arises for our spirit from direct intercourse with the real world. The insights that Goethe drew from the contemplation of works of art in Italy were certainly not of the same absolute certainty as the theorems of mathematics. But they were also less abstract. But Goethe stood before them with the feeling: There is necessity, there is God. A truth in the sense that it is something other than that which is also revealed in the perfect work of art did not exist for Goethe. What art does with its technical means: Sound, marble, color, rhythm, etc., that is embodied is taken from the same source of truth from which the philosopher also draws, who, however, does not have the immediately vivid means of representation, but who has only the thought, the idea itself, at his disposal. "Poetry points to the secrets of nature and seeks to solve them through the image. Philosophy points to the mysteries of reason and seeks to solve them through words," says Goethe. But reason and nature are ultimately an inseparable unity for him, based on the same truth. A striving for knowledge that lives in an abstract world, detached from things, is not considered by him to be the highest. "The highest thing would be to realize that everything factual is already theory." The blueness of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color phenomena. "Just don't look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson." In his anthropology, the psychologist Heinroth described the thinking through which Goethe arrived at his insights into the natural formation of plants and animals as "representational thinking". By this he meant that this thinking was not separate from the objects; that the objects, the views, were intimately interwoven with the thinking, that Goethe's thinking was at the same time a viewing, his viewing at the same time a thinking. Schiller has become a keen observer and depictor of this way of thinking. He wrote about it in a letter to Goethe: "Your observant gaze, which rests so quietly and purely on things, never puts you in danger of going astray, into which both speculation and the arbitrary imagination, which merely obeys itself, so easily stray. In your correct intuition lies all and far more completely what analysis laboriously seeks, and it is only because it lies in you as a whole that your own wealth is hidden from you; for unfortunately we only know what we separate. Spirits of your kind therefore seldom know how far they have penetrated, and how little reason they have to borrow from philosophy, which can only learn from them." For Goethe's and Schiller's view of the world, truth does not only exist within science, but also within art. Goethe's opinion is this: "I think science could be called the knowledge of the general, the deduced knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action; science would be reason, and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem." Goethe describes the interaction between scientific cognition and the artistic shaping of knowledge: "It is obvious that an ... It is obvious that an artist must only become the greater and more decisive if he is an instructed botanist in addition to his talent, if he recognizes from the root the influence of the various parts on the flourishing and growth of the plant, their purpose and reciprocal effects, if he understands and reflects on the successive development of the leaves, flowers, fertilization, fruit and the new germ. He will then not only show his taste by choosing from the appearances, but he will also amaze us by a correct representation of the characteristics." In this way, truth prevails in artistic creation, for the style of art, according to this view, rests on "the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms". One consequence of this view of truth and its cognition is that the imagination was allowed its share in the creation of knowledge and that the abstract mind was not seen as the only faculty of knowledge. The ideas that Goethe based his observations on the formation of plants and animals on were not gray, abstract thoughts, but sensual-supersensible images generated from the imagination. Only observation with imagination can really lead into the essence of things, not bloodless abstraction: this is Goethe's conviction. He emphasizes the fact that Galileo observed as a genius to whom "one case for a thousand applies" by "developing the theory of the pendulum and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps". The imagination uses the one case to create a substantive image of the essential in the phenomena; the abstracting mind can only gain a general rule of their course from the combination, comparison and calculation of the phenomena. This belief of Goethe's in the cognitive capacity of the imagination rests on his entire conception of the world. Anyone who, like him, sees the workings of nature in everything, can also see nothing but natural products in the spiritual content of the human imagination. Fantasy images are products of nature; and since they reproduce nature, they can only contain the truth, for otherwise nature would be lying to itself with these images that it creates of itself. Only people with imagination can reach the highest level of cognition. Goethe calls them the "comprehensive" and "contemplative" in contrast to the merely "inquisitive", who remain at a lower level of knowledge. "The inquisitive require a calm, disinterested gaze, a curious restlessness, a clear mind ...; they also only process what they find in a scientific sense. ... The contemplators already behave productively, and knowledge, by increasing itself, demands contemplation without realizing it, and passes over to it; and however much the knowers crucify and bless themselves before the imagination, they must, before they know it, call the productive imagination to their aid. ... The comprehensive, which in a prouder sense could be called the creators, behave productively in the highest sense; namely, by starting from ideas, they already express the unity of the whole, and it is, as it were, afterwards the business of nature to fit itself into this idea." Anyone who believes in such a way of cognition cannot be helped by talking about the limitations of human cognition in the Kantian manner. For that which man needs as his truth, he experiences within himself. The core of nature lies within man. Goethe's and Schiller's worldview does not demand of truth that it be a repetition of world phenomena in the imagination, i.e. that the latter should conform in the literal sense to something outside man. That which appears in man is not present as such, as the ideal, as spiritual being, in any external world; but it is that which ultimately appears as the summit of all becoming. Therefore, for this world view, truth need not appear to all people in the same form. It can have an individual character in each individual. For those who seek truth in its correspondence with an exterior, there is only one form of truth, and they will search with Kant for that "metaphysics" which alone "will be able to appear as science". Whoever sees in truth the highest fruit of all existence, that in which the "universe, if it could perceive itself as having reached its goal, would rejoice and admire the summit of its own becoming and being", can say with Goethe: "If I know my relationship to myself and to the outside world, I call it truth. And so everyone can have their own truth, and yet it is always the same." The essence of being does not lie in what the outside world provides us with, but in what man creates within himself without it already being present in the outside world. Goethe therefore opposes those who want to penetrate the so-called "interior of nature" through instruments and objective experiments, because: "Man in himself, insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest and most precise physical apparatus that can exist, and that is precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has, as it were, separated experiments from man, and only wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed, to limit and prove what it can achieve." "But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Indeed, one could say, what are the elementary phenomena of nature itself compared to man, who must tame and modify them all in order to be able to assimilate them to some extent?"

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[ 37 ] The intimate alliance that Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries forged between poetry and worldview has, at the beginning of our century, deprived the latter of the lifeless character that it must acquire if it moves solely in the region of the abstracting intellect. The result of this covenant was the belief that there is a personal, an individual element in the world view. Man is entitled to create his relationship to the world according to his own nature. His ideal need not be the Kantian one of a once and for all closed theoretical view along the lines of mathematics. Only from the spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that elevates human individuality can an idea such as Jean Paul's be born: "The heart of genius, to which all other brilliance and auxiliary powers only serve, has and gives a genuine characteristic, namely a new view of the world and of life." How could it be the hallmark of the most highly developed human being, the genius, to create a new view of the world and of life if there were only one true, universally valid view of the world, if truth had only one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe's view that man experiences the highest form of existence within himself. He writes to Jakobi: "We do not actually believe in divine freedom, God, virtue, but we really see them as already given or giving themselves, and this seeing is precisely a knowledge, and a higher one, whereas the knowledge of the intellect merely refers to a lower seeing. One could call reason the consciousness of the sole positive, for all the positive of sensuality ultimately dissolves into that of spirituality, and the intellect eternally drives its being only with the relative, which in itself is nothing, therefore before God the more or less and all levels of comparison fall away." Jean Paul does not want to let anything rob him of the right to experience the truth within himself and to set all the powers of the soul, not just the logical mind, in motion. "The heart, the living root of man, should not be torn from my breast by transcendental philosophy and replaced by a pure instinct of selfhood; I will not allow myself to be freed from the dependence on love in order to be saved by pride alone." He thus rejects the unworldly moral order of Kant and Fichte. "I maintain that, as there are four last things, so there are four first things: Beauty, Truth, Morality and Bliss, and that the synthesis of these is not only necessary, but also already given, but only (and therefore it is precisely one) in incomprehensible spiritual-organic unity, without which we can find no understanding and no transition at all in these four evangelists or parts of the world." In Kant and Fichte, the mind, proceeding according to the utmost logical rigor, had come so far as to reduce the independent meaning of the real, the vital, to a mere appearance, to a dream image. This view was unbearable for imaginative people who enriched life with the figures of their imagination. These people sensed reality, it was present in their perception, in their souls; and they were to have its mere dreamlike nature proven to them. "The windows of philosophical auditoriums are too high to allow a view of the alleys of real life," says Jean Paul.

[ 38 ] Fichte strove for the purest, highest truth of reason. He renounced all knowledge that did not arise from within himself, because only from this can certainty arise. The counter-current to his world view is Romanticism. Fichte only accepts the truth, and the inner being of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the romantic world view only accepts the inner being and declares everything that springs from this inner being to be truly valuable. The ego should not be bound by anything external. Everything it creates has its justification.

[ 39 ] It can be said of Romanticism that it pursued Schiller's sentence: "Man only plays where he is man in the full meaning of the word, and he is only fully man where he plays" to its utmost consequences. She wants to turn the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed human being knows no other norm than the laws that he creates with his freely exercised imagination, just as the artist creates those that he imprints on his work. He rises above everything that determines him from the outside and lives entirely from within himself. The whole world is merely material for his aesthetic play. The seriousness of everyday life is alien to him. He cannot take things seriously in themselves, because they are not valuable to him in themselves. Rather, it is he himself who gives them value. The mood of the mind, which is aware of its sovereignty over things, is what the Romantics call the ironic. Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780-1819) gave the following explanation of Romantic irony: It "must be the artist's mind that summarizes all directions in an all-overlooking gaze, and this gaze hovering over everything, destroying everything, we call irony". Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the leaders of the Romantic school of thought, says of the ironic mood that it "overlooks everything and rises infinitely above everything conditional, even above one's own art, virtue or genius". Those who live in this mood feel bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of their actions. He can "tune himself at will philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, anciently or modernly". The ironic mind smiles at a truth that wants to be shackled by logic; but it also smiles at an eternal, moral world order. For nothing tells him what he should do but himself alone. The ironist should do what he likes, for his morality can only be an aesthetic one. The Romantics are the heirs of Fichte's idea of the uniqueness of the ego. But they did not want to fill this ego with ideas of reason and with a moral faith as Fichte did, but relied above all on the freest power of the soul, the imagination, which is not bound by anything. For them, thought was completely absorbed by poetry. Novalis, the most amiable of the Romantics, says: "It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that poets constitute a special guild. It is nothing special at all. It is the peculiar behavior of the human spirit. Doesn't everyone write poetry and aspire every minute?" The ego, preoccupied with itself alone, can arrive at the highest truth: "It seems to man as if he were engaged in a conversation and some unknown spiritual being is causing him to develop the most evident thoughts in a wonderful way." Basically, the Romantics wanted nothing other than what Goethe and Schiller also made their confession: A view of man that makes him appear as perfect, as free as possible. But they based their views on firm, unshakeable foundations. Schiller rose to a free way of life through incessant philosophical thinking, Goethe through the exploration of the laws of nature.

[ 40 ] Schiller knew the scope of the necessity of reason when he demanded that the true man should free himself from it; and Goethe was able to profess the cult of beauty, because for him the highest works of art were formed according to true, necessary laws of nature. The Romantics, however, leapt into the land of aesthetic freedom with a single bound, as it were; they did not conquer it laboriously, but declared themselves its owners by proclamations of power. Goethe, too, saw his ideal of duty in "loving what one commands oneself". But he was constantly striving to seek the true only in the sense of the deepest foundations of knowledge. And in this way, he also strove for true art.