The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Volume I: Reactionary Worldviews

[ 1 ] "The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the flower, and one could say that the flower is refuted by the bud; likewise, the flower is declared by the fruit to be a false existence of the plant, and as its truth the flower takes the place of the flower. These forms not only differ, but also displace each other as incompatible. But their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of organic unity, in which they not only do not contradict each other, but one is as necessary as the other, and this same necessity is what constitutes the life of the whole." In these words Hegel expresses one of the most important characteristics of his way of thinking. He believed that the things of reality carry contradiction within themselves; and that it is precisely in this that the impetus for their becoming, for their living movement, lies, that they continually seek to overcome this contradiction. The blossom would never become fruit if it were without contradiction. It would then have no reason to emerge from its contradiction-free existence. Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) had the exact opposite mindset. Hegel is a sharp thinker, but at the same time a mind thirsty for reality. He only wants to have thoughts that have absorbed the rich, saturated content of the world. That is why his thoughts must be in perpetual flux, in constant evolution, in contradictory movement like reality itself. Herbart is a completely abstract thinker; he does not seek to penetrate things, but views them from the corner of his mind. The purely logical thinker is disturbed by contradiction; he demands clear concepts that can exist side by side. The one must not interfere with the other. He faces reality, which is full of contradictions, in a peculiar position. The concepts it provides him with do not satisfy him. They violate his logical needs. This feeling of dissatisfaction becomes the starting point of his world view. Herbart says to himself: "If the reality spread out before my senses and my mind provides me with contradictory concepts, then it cannot be the true reality to which my thinking aspires. His task arises from this. The contradictory reality is not real being at all, but only appearance. In this view, Herbart follows Kant to a certain extent. However, while the latter explains true being as something unattainable for thinking cognition, Herbart believes that he can advance from appearance to being precisely by working through the contradictory concepts of appearance and transforming them into non-contradictory ones. Just as smoke points to fire, appearance points to an underlying being. If we work out a non-contradictory picture of the world through logical thinking from the contradictory picture given to our senses and our mind, then we have what we are looking for in the latter. It does not appear to us in this lack of contradiction, but it lies behind what appears to us as the true, genuine reality. Herbart therefore does not set out to understand the immediately present reality as such, but creates another reality through which the former is to become explicable. As a result, he arrives at an abstract system of thought that is quite meagre compared to the rich, full reality. True reality cannot be a unity, for such a unity would have to contain within itself the infinite multiplicity of real things and processes with all their contradictions. It must be a multiplicity of simple, eternally identical beings in which there is no becoming, no development. Only a simple being that unchangingly preserves its characteristics is without contradiction. A being that evolves is something different at one moment than at another, that is, it contradicts at one point in time the characteristics it has at another. A multiplicity of simple, never-changing beings is therefore the true world. And what we perceive are not these simple beings, but only their relationships to one another. These relationships have nothing to do with the true being. When one simple being enters into a relationship with another, neither is changed by it; but I perceive the result of their relationship. Our immediate reality is a sum of relationships between real beings. When a being steps out of its relationship with one being and instead enters into a relationship with a third being, something has happened without the being of the beings themselves being affected by this event. We perceive this event. It is our apparent, contradictory reality. It is interesting to see how Herbart imagines the life of the soul on the basis of this view. Like all other real beings, it is a simple, unchanging entity. It now enters into relationships with other existing beings. The expression of these relationships is the life of imagination. Everything that takes place within us: Imagining, feeling, willing is a play of relationships between the soul and the rest of the world of simple beings. You see, the life of the soul is thus made into a semblance of relationships into which the simple being of the soul enters with the world. Herbart is a mathematical mind. And basically his whole conception of the world is born out of mathematical ideas. A number does not change when it becomes the element of an arithmetical operation. Three remains three whether it is added to four or subtracted from seven. Just as the numbers stand within the arithmetical operations, so the simple beings stand within the relationships that develop between them. And this is why Herbart also turns psychology into an example of arithmetic. He seeks to apply mathematics to psychology. He calculates how ideas are mutually dependent, how they interact, what results they produce through their interaction. For him, the "I" is not the spiritual entity that we grasp in our self-consciousness, but is the result of the interaction of all ideas, thus nothing other than a sum, a supreme expression of relationships. We know nothing of the simple being that underlies our soul life, but its continuous relationships with other beings do appear to us. Thus, a being is entangled in this play of relationships. This is expressed in the fact that they all strive towards a center; and this center is the ego thought.

[ 2 ] Herbart gains the possibility of saving the thoughts of immortality and of a wise, purposeful divine world ruler from the point of view of this world view of his. For Fichte, there can be no immortality in the usual sense, for the ego as the true soul being is only present insofar as it grasps itself, even cooperates in its own existence. Its existence is absorbed in its self-perception. Only through its will does it reach beyond itself. It creates something that continues to have an effect, even if it is not imagined. It settles into a world order that goes beyond self-consciousness. For Fichte, however, this world order is also the divine being. In contrast to all church religions, such a religious view must be regarded as atheism. Fichte was therefore also accused of it and removed from his teaching activities in Jenens as a denier of God. In his first period, Schelling makes the spirit that appears in the individual human being into a memory image of the divine being. Both God and the finite spirit are therefore basically one and the same. However, the individual spirit cannot ascribe to itself a continuous, separate existence, for it is in God. Only God is immortal, and the individual soul is a thought, an idea of memory within the All-Spirit. Even if, in the course of his development, Schelling placed more and more of the human soul's characteristics into his God, even if he made him more and more personal, this relationship of the individual spirit to the All-Spirit remains the same within his evolving world view. The situation is similar with Hegel. The primal being comes to its most perfect expression in the individual being. But if it no longer really gives itself this most perfect form, the primordial being does not exist as individual spirit, but only as all-spirit. It can be seen that the questions of immortality and God could not have been raised within the world views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the form in which they play a role for Kant and his predecessors and are indigenous to theological science. There is a completely different relationship between individual spirit and all-spirit under the presuppositions of these philosophers than is meant by these questions.

[ 3 ] This is different with Herbart. His simple soul being is unchangeable. It does not arise, it does not pass away. It was present when this apparent life began, which man encloses with his ego; and it will detach itself from these relationships again and continue to exist when this life ceases. - Herbart arrives at a conception of God entirely in the theological sense through his view of the world, which contains many simple beings that bring about events through their relationships. We perceive purposefulness within these events. But the relationships could only be random, chaotic ones if the beings, which, according to their own being, have nothing to do with each other, were left to their own devices. The fact that they are purposeful therefore points to a wise ruler of the world who orders their relationships. Thus, alongside Herbart's view of the world gained through pure thinking, there is also a place for a theological one. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel search for a world view that completely absorbs the entire human imagination, including the theological one; Herbart places himself in the corner with his uncontradictory world view and allows the theological one to exist alongside his thinking. "No one is able to define the nature of the Godhead more precisely," he says. "He condemns the pretensions of systems that speak of God as a known object to be grasped in sharp outlines, through which we could elevate ourselves to a knowledge for which we are denied the data".

[ 4 ] Man's actions and his artistic creations are completely suspended in the air in this world view. There is no possibility of inserting them into it. For what relationship should there be between a relationship between simple beings who are indifferent to all processes and between the actions of human beings? Herbart must therefore seek an independent root for both ethics and aesthetics. He believes to find it in human feelings. When a person perceives things or processes, a feeling of pleasure or displeasure can be attached to them. For example, we like it when a person's will takes a direction that coincides with their convictions. If we perceive the opposite, the feeling of displeasure settles in us. Because of this feeling, we call the harmony of conviction with the will morally good, the discord morally reprehensible. Such a feeling can only be linked to a relationship between moral elements. The will as such is morally indifferent to us. So is conviction. Only when they cooperate does ethical pleasure or displeasure come to light. Herbart calls a relationship of moral elements a practical idea. He lists five such practical-ethical ideas: the idea of moral freedom, consisting in the agreement of will and conviction; the idea of perfection, which is based on the fact that the strong is pleasing in comparison with the weak; the idea of right, which arises from displeasure at the dispute; the idea of benevolence, which expresses the pleasure one feels when one will promotes the other; and the idea of retribution, which demands that all good and evil that has emanated from an individual be redressed to that individual. Herbart builds ethics on a human feeling, on moral sentiment. He separates it from the world view, which has to do with what is, and makes it a sum of demands of what should be. He connects it with aesthetics, indeed makes it a component of it. For this science also contains demands about what ought to be. It also has to do with relationships to which feelings are linked. The individual color leaves us aesthetically indifferent. If another color is placed next to it, this combination can satisfy or displease us. What is pleasing in its combination is beautiful; what is displeasing is ugly. Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898) built a science of art on these principles. Only one part of it is ethics or the science of the good, which considers those beautiful relationships that come into consideration in the field of action.

[ 5 ] Due to his mind, which was geared toward mathematical necessity, Herbart was fortunate in observing those processes of human mental life that truly occur in the same way in all people with a certain regularity. The more intimate, more individual processes will naturally not be included. Such a mathematical mind overlooks the original and unique aspects of each personality. However, it will gain a certain insight into the average nature of the mind and, at the same time, with its mathematical certainty, control over the development of the mind. Just as the laws of mechanics enable us to use technology, so the laws of the soul enable us to educate and train the soul. That is why Herbart's work in the field of pedagogy has been so fruitful. He has found a large following among educators. But not only among them. At first glance, this does not seem obvious given this worldview, which offers a picture of meager, gray generalities. However, it can be explained by the fact that it is precisely those natures most in need of a worldview that have a certain inclination toward such general concepts, which are strung together with rigid necessity like the links of a mathematical equation. There is something captivating about experiencing how one thought links to another, because it evokes a feeling of security. Mathematical sciences are so highly valued because of this security. They build themselves up, as it were; we merely provide the material for thought and leave the rest to automatic logical necessity. With the progression of Hegelian thought, which is saturated with reality, we must intervene continuously. There is more warmth, more immediacy in this thinking; but in return, its flow requires our constant intervention. It is reality that we capture in our thoughts; this ever-flowing reality, individual in each of its points, which resists any logical rigidity. Hegel also had numerous students and followers. But they are far less loyal than those of Herbart. As long as Hegel's powerful personality animated his thoughts, they exerted their magic and had a convincing effect on whatever this magic was based on. After his death, many of his students went their own ways. And that is only natural. For those who are independent will also shape their relationship to reality in an independent way. With Herbart's students, we perceive something different. They are loyal. They continue the teachings of their master, but they retain the foundation of his ideas in unchanged form. Those who familiarize themselves with Hegel's way of thinking immerse themselves in the development of the world, which manifests itself in countless stages of evolution. Individuals can be inspired to follow this path of becoming, but they can shape the individual stages according to their own individual ideas. With Herbart, we are dealing with a firmly structured system of thought that inspires confidence through its solid structure. One can reject it. But if one accepts it, then one must also accept it in its original form. For the individual, the personal, which compels one to contrast one's own self with the foreign self, is precisely what is missing.

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[ 6 ] "Life is a miserable thing; I have resolved to spend mine thinking about it." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once said these words to Wieland at the beginning of his time at university. His world view grew out of this sentiment. Schopenhauer had gone through hard experiences of his own and the observation of the sad experiences of others when he took up philosophical thought as a new goal in life. The sudden death of his father, caused by a fall from an attic, the bad experiences in his commercial profession, the sight of scenes of human misery on the journeys the young man made, and many other things had not so much created in him the need to know the world because he considered it worth knowing, but rather the quite different need to create a means of bearing it in the contemplation of things. He needed a world view to calm his gloomy state of mind. When he entered the university in 1809, the ideas that Kant, Fichte and Schelling had incorporated into the development of the German world view were in full effect. Hegel's star was rising. He had published his first major work "The Phenomenology of Spirit" in 1806. In Göttingen, Schopenhauer listened to the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of "Aenesidemus", who was in some respects an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless described Kant and Plato to the student as the two great minds to which he should adhere. Schopenhauer immersed himself enthusiastically in Kant's way of thinking. He described the revolution that this brought about in his mind as a spiritual rebirth. He finds it all the more satisfying because he finds it in full agreement with the views of the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him, those of Plato. The latter says: "As long as we relate to things and processes merely perceptively, we are like people who are tied up in a dark cave so that they cannot turn their heads, and see nothing but, by the light of a fire burning behind them, on the wall opposite them, the shadows of real things that pass between them and the fire, indeed also of each other and each of themselves only the shadows. Just as these shadows relate to real things, so our perceptual things relate to the ideas, which are the truly real. The things of the perceptible world come into being and pass away, the ideas are eternal. Did not Kant teach the same? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him too? Although the Königsberg sage did not ascribe this eternal reality to the Ideas, Schopenhauer found complete agreement between Plato and Kant in their view of the reality spread out in space and time. This view soon became his incontrovertible truth. He said to himself: I gain knowledge of things insofar as I see them, hear them, feel them, etc., in a word: insofar as I imagine them. An object exists for me only in my imagination. Heaven, earth, etc. are therefore my ideas, because the "thing in itself" that corresponds to them has only become my object by taking on the character of an idea.

[ 7 ] As much as Schopenhauer agreed with everything Kant said about the imaginary nature of the perceptual world, he was less than satisfied with his remarks about the “thing in itself.” Schulze was also an opponent of Kant's views. How can we know anything about a “thing in itself,” how can we even say a word about it, if we only know from ideas, and the “thing in itself” lies completely outside of all ideas? Schopenhauer had to find another way to arrive at the “thing in itself.” In this search, he was influenced much more by contemporary worldviews than he ever admitted. The element that Schopenhauer added to his convictions derived from Kant and Plato, as the “thing in itself,” can be found in Fichte, whose lectures he attended in Berlin in 1811. And we also find it in Schelling. Schopenhauer was able to hear the most mature form of Fichte's views in Berlin. This form has been handed down to us in Fichte's posthumous writings. Fichte emphatically proclaims, while Schopenhauer—by his own admission—“listens attentively,” that all being is ultimately grounded in a “universal will.” As soon as man finds the will within himself, he becomes convinced that there is a world independent of his individuality. The will is not the knowledge of the individual, but a form of real being. Fichte could also have described his worldview as “The World as Knowledge and Will.” And in Schelling's writing, “On the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Objects,” there is the sentence: "In the final and highest instance, there is no other being than will. Will is primordial being, and all its predicates apply to this alone: groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-affirmation. The whole of philosophy strives only to find this highest expression." — That will is primordial being also becomes Schopenhauer's view. When knowledge is extinguished, the will remains. For the will precedes knowledge. Knowledge has its origin in my brain. But this must have been produced by an active, creative force. Man knows such a creative force in his own will. Schopenhauer now seeks to prove that what is effective in other things is also will. Will thus lies at the basis of imagined reality as a “thing in itself.” And we can know about this “thing in itself.” It does not lie beyond our imagination, as Kant's does; we experience its effects within our own organism.

[ 8 ] Goethe also exerted a profound influence on Schopenhauer. From the fall of 1813 to May 1814, he enjoyed the poet's company. Goethe personally introduced the philosopher to the doctrine of colors. The former's way of looking at things corresponded completely to the ideas Schopenhauer had formed about the way our sensory organs and our mind work when they perceive things and processes. Goethe had carried out careful and extensive investigations into the eye's perception of light and color, the results of which he wrote about in his work "On the Theory of Color". He arrived at views that differed from those of Newton, the founder of modern color theory. It is impossible to judge the contrast between Newton and Goethe in this field from the right point of view if one does not start from the fundamental difference in the world views of the two personalities. Unfortunately, Goethe himself contributed a great deal to making the matter unclear through his polemics against Newton's theory of color. He sought to prove the error in individual experiments and theorems of Newton. But if, as is the case with Goethe, one stands on the ground of a quite different point of view from that which one is opposing, then one should not fight individual propositions of the opposing view. For as long as it remains the same, nothing will change in the contrast as a whole, even if errors are corrected in detail. Goethe regards man's sense organs as the best, the highest physical apparatuses. For him, the eye must therefore be the highest authority for determining the lawful relationships in the world of color. Newton and the physicists investigate the phenomena in question in a way that Goethe describes as the "greatest disaster of modern physics" and which, as already mentioned in another context (p. 71 [97f.]), consists in the fact that "one has, as it were, separated the experiments from man, and merely wants to recognize nature in what artificial instruments show, indeed to limit and prove what it can achieve". The eye perceives light and dark or light and darkness, and the colors within the light-dark field of observation. Goethe remains within this field and seeks to prove how light, darkness and color are connected. Newton and his followers want to observe the processes of light and color as they take place outside the human organism in space, as they would have to take place if there were no eye. However, such an external sphere separated from the human being has no justification for Goethe's world view. We do not arrive at the essence of a thing by refraining from the effects that we perceive, but in the exact lawfulness of these effects, grasped by the spirit, we have given this essence. The effects that the eye perceives, grasped in their entirety and presented in their lawful context, are the essence of light and color - not a world of external processes separated from the eye that is to be determined with artificial instruments. "For we actually undertake to express the essence of a thing in vain. We become aware of effects, and a complete history of these effects would at best encompass the essence of that thing. In vain do we endeavor to portray the character of a man; but put together his deeds, his actions, and a picture of character will confront us. - The colors are deeds of light, deeds and suffering. In this sense, we can expect information about the light from them. Colors and light are indeed in the most exact relationship to each other, but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of nature; for it is the whole of nature that wants to reveal itself especially to the sense of the eye." Here we find Goethe's view of the world applied to a special case. What lies hidden in the rest of nature is revealed in the human organism, through its senses, through its soul. It reaches its summit in man. Whoever therefore seeks the truth of nature apart from man, like Newton, cannot find it, according to Goethe's basic view.

[ 9 ] Schopenhauer sees in the world, which is given to the spirit in space and time, only an imagination of this spirit. The essence of this imaginary world reveals itself to us in the will by which we see our own organism permeated. He therefore cannot accept a physical doctrine that sees the essence of light and color phenomena not in the ideas given to the eye, but in a world that is supposed to exist separately from the eye. Goethe's way of imagining things must have been appealing to him because it remains within the imaginary world of the eye. He found in it a confirmation of what he himself had to assume about this world. The battle between Goethe and Newton is not a physical question, but a matter of the whole world view. Anyone who believes that something can be discovered about nature through experiments that are separate from man must remain on the ground of Newton's theory of color. Modern physics is of this opinion. It can therefore only pass the judgment on Goethe's theory of color that Hermann Helmholtz expressed in his treatise "Goethe's Premonitions of Coming Scientific Ideas": "Where it is a matter of tasks that can be solved by poetic divinations arising in visual images, the poet has shown himself capable of the highest achievements, where only the consciously implemented inductive method could have helped, he has failed." If one sees in human visual images only products that are added to nature, then one must determine what happens in nature apart from these visual images. If, like Goethe, one sees in them revelations of the entities contained in nature, then one will adhere to them if one wants to investigate the truth. Schopenhauer, however, takes neither the one nor the other standpoint. He does not want to recognize the essence of things in the perceptions of the senses; he rejects the physical method because it does not stop at what is solely available to us, at the ideas. But he also turned the question from a purely physical one into a question of worldview. And since he basically based his world view on man, not on an external world separate from man, he had to decide in favor of Goethe. For Goethe drew the conclusion for the theory of color that must necessarily follow for those who see in man with his healthy senses the "greatest and most exact physical apparatus". Hegel, who as a philosopher stands entirely on the ground of this world view, must therefore vigorously advocate Goethe's theory of color. We read in his Naturphilosophie: "We owe the representation of colors appropriate to the concept to Goethe, whom colors and light attracted early on to contemplate them, especially from the side of painting; and his pure, simple sense of nature, the first condition of the poet, had to resist such barbarism of reflection as is found in Newton. He went through everything that had been stated and experimented on light and color from Plato onwards. He understood the phenomenon simply; and the true instinct of reason consists in understanding the phenomenon from the side where it presents itself most simply."

[ 10 ] For Schopenhauer, the essential ground of all world processes is the will. It is an eternal, dark striving for existence. It contains no reason. For reason only arises in the human brain, which is created by the will. While Hegel makes reason, the spirit, the foundation of the world and sees in human reason only an individual realization of the general world reason, Schopenhauer only allows reason to be a product of the brain, a bubble of foam that finally arises when the unreasoning, dark urge, the will, has created everything else. For Hegel, all things and processes are reasonable, because they are produced by reason; for Schopenhauer, everything is unreasonable, because it is produced by the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer confirms Fichte's words as clearly as possible: The world view one chooses depends on what kind of person one is. Schopenhauer had bad experiences, he got to know the world from its worst side before he decided to think about it. It therefore satisfies him to imagine this world as unreasonable in its essence, as the result of a blind will. According to his way of thinking, reason has no power over unreason. For it arises itself as the result of unreason, it is an illusion and a dream, begotten out of the will. Schopenhauer's world view is the gloomy mood of his mind translated into thought. His eye was not attuned to following the rational institutions of existence with joy; it saw only the irrationality of the blind will expressed in suffering and pain. His moral doctrine could therefore only be based on the perception of suffering. For him, an action is only moral if it is based on this perception. Compassion must be the source of human deeds. What better could a person do who realizes that all beings suffer than to let compassion guide all his actions? Since the unreasonable and evil lies in the will, the more a person kills the impetuous will within him, the higher he will stand morally. The expression of will in the individual person is selfishness, egoism. Whoever surrenders to compassion, i.e. does not want for himself but for others, has become master of the will. - One way to get rid of the will is to devote oneself to the creation of art and to the impressions that emanate from works of art. The artist does not create because he desires something, because his selfish will is directed towards things and processes. He creates out of egoistic joy. He immerses himself in the essence of things as a pure observer. It is the same with the enjoyment of works of art. When we stand before a work of art and the desire stirs in us to possess it, we are still entangled in the base desires of the will. Only when we admire beauty without desiring it have we risen to the sublime position where we are no longer dependent on blind will. Then, however, art has become something for us that momentarily liberates us from the irrationality of blindly wanting existence. This redemption is purest in the enjoyment of musical works of art. For music does not speak to us through the imagination like other forms of art. It does not depict anything in nature. Since all natural things and processes are only representations, the arts that take these things and processes as models can also only come to us as embodiments and representations. Man produces sounds out of himself without a natural model. Because he has the will, as his essence, within himself, it can only be the will that directly emanates the world of music. This is why music speaks so strongly to the human mind, because it is the embodiment of that which expresses the innermost essence of man, his true being, the will. And it is a triumph of man that he has an art in which he can enjoy, free of will, selflessly, that which is the origin of all desire, the origin of all irrationality. Schopenhauer's view of music is again the result of his very personal idiosyncrasy. Even as a Hamburg merchant's apprentice, he wrote to his mother: "How did the heavenly seed find room on our hard soil, where necessity and want fight for every little place? We are banished from the primordial spirit and are not meant to reach it." - "And yet a compassionate angel has implored the heavenly flower for us and it is rooted high in glory on this soil of misery. - The pulsations of the divine art of music have not ceased to beat through the centuries of barbarism and an immediate echo of the Eternal has remained in it, comprehensible to every sense and sublime even above vice and virtue."

[ 11 ] You can see from the position that the two opponents of the world view, Hegel and Schopenhauer, take on art how the world view intervenes in the personal relationship of man to the individual areas of life. Hegel, who saw in man's world of imagination and ideas that towards which the whole of external nature strives as towards its perfection, can also see the most perfect art only in that where the spirit appears highest, most perfect, and where at the same time it clings to that which continually strives towards it. Every form of external nature wants to be spirit, but it does not attain it. If man now creates such an external, three-dimensional structure, on which he imprints the spirit that it seeks but cannot attain through itself, then he has created a perfect work of art. This is the case with sculpture. What otherwise only appears within the human soul as a formless spirit, as an idea, is shaped by the sculptural artist out of the raw material. The soul, the mind, which we perceive in our consciousness without form: they speak from the statue, from a structure of space. In this marriage of the world of the senses and the spiritual world lies the artistic ideal of a world view that sees the purpose of nature in the production of the spirit, i.e. that can only see beauty in a work that appears as the direct expression of the spirit coming to light in nature. On the other hand, he who, like Schopenhauer, sees only imagination in all nature, cannot possibly see this ideal in a work that imitates nature. He must resort to an art form that is free of all nature: this is music,

[ 12 ] Anything that leads to the eradication, even mortification of the will, Schopenhauer logically saw as desirable. Because eradicating the will means eradicating the unreasonable in the world. Man should not want. He should kill all desire within himself. Ascesis is therefore Schopenhauer's moral ideal. The wise man will extinguish all desires within himself, completely negate his will. He goes so far that no motive compels him to will. His striving consists only in the quietistic urge for redemption from all life. Schopenhauer saw a high teaching of wisdom in Buddhism's world-denying views of life. One can therefore call his world view a reactionary one compared to Hegel's. Hegel sought to reconcile man everywhere with life; he strove to portray all action as cooperation in a rational ordering of the world. Schopenhauer regarded the hostility to life, the turning away from reality, the Buddhist and Christian flight from the world as the ideal of the wise man.

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[ 13 ] There is something in Hegel's way of viewing the world and life that can give rise to doubts and questions. Hegel's starting point is pure thought, the abstract idea, which he himself describes as an "oyster-like, gray or completely black" being (letter to Goethe dated 20 Feb. 1821), but which he also claims should be understood as the "representation of God as he is in his eternal being before the creation of nature and a finite spirit". The goal he arrives at is the substantive, individual human spirit, through which that which leads only a shadowy existence in the gray, oyster-like world first comes to light. A personality as a living, self-conscious being therefore does not exist apart from the human spirit. Hegel therefore derives the rich content that we experience in ourselves from the ideal that we must think. It is understandable that minds of a certain disposition feel repelled by this view of the world and of life. Only thinkers as selflessly devoted as Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) were able to fully immerse themselves in Hegel's train of thought and, in full agreement with it, to create a system of ideas that appears to be a reproduction of Hegel's from a lesser nature. Others could not comprehend how man is to enlighten himself through the pure idea about the infinity and diversity of impressions that assail him when he turns his gaze to nature, which is rich in color and form, and how he is to gain anything by raising his gaze from the experiences of the world of sensation, feeling and imagination of his soul to the icy height of pure thought. This mood, unsatisfied by Hegel's way of thinking, found expression in the current of thought that had its representatives in Franz Benedikt Baader (1765-1841), Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), Anton Günther (1785-1862), K. E E. Trahndorff (1782-1863), Martin Deutinger (1815-1864) and Hermann Ulrici (1806-1884). They strove to replace Hegel's gray, oyster-like, pure thought with a life-filled, personal primordial being, an individual God. Baader called it a "God-denying idea" to believe that God only attains his perfect existence in man. God must be a personality; and the world must not, as Hegel imagines, emerge from him as a logical process in which one concept always necessarily drives another. No, the world must be God's free act, a creation of his omnipotent will. This is how these thinkers approach the Christian doctrine of revelation. Justifying and scientifically substantiating it becomes the more or less conscious purpose of their reflections. Baader immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme (1575-1624), the master Eckhart (1250-1329), Tauler (1290-1361) and Paracelsus (1493-1541), in whose imagery-rich language he found a much more suitable means of expressing the deepest truths than in the pure thoughts of Hegel's doctrine. That he also induced Schelling to deepen his thoughts by incorporating Jacob Boehme's ideas, to fill them with warmer content, has already been explained (cf. pp. 84 f. [113]). Remarkable phenomena within the development of the world view will always be personalities such as Krause. He was a mathematician. He did not allow himself to be determined by the proud, logical and perfect character of this science to solve the worldview questions that were to satisfy his deepest spiritual needs according to the method he was familiar with in this science. The type for such thinkers is the great mathematician Newton, who treated the phenomena of the visible universe as an example of arithmetic and, in addition, satisfied the basic questions of worldview for himself in a way that was close to the belief in revelation. Krause cannot accept a view that seeks the primordial nature of the world in things and processes. Those who seek God in the world, as Hegel does, cannot find him. For although the world is in God, God does not exist in the world, but as an independent, self-sufficient being. Krause's world of ideas is based on the "thought of an infinite, independent being, which has nothing outside itself, but which is everything in itself and in itself as the one ground, and which we therefore also think of as the ground of reason, nature and humanity". He wants to have nothing in common with a view that "takes the finite or the world as the epitome of the finite for God himself, idolizes it, confuses it with God". No matter how much we immerse ourselves in the reality given to our senses and our spirit, we will never arrive at the primordial ground of all existence, of which we can only gain an idea by allowing the observation of all finite existence to be accompanied by the foreboding vision of a supra-worldly being. Immanuel Hermann Fichte delivered a sharp reckoning with Hegelianism in his writings "Sätze zur Vorschule der Theologie" (1826) and "Beiträge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie" (1829). In numerous works, he then sought to substantiate and deepen his view that a conscious, personal being must underlie world phenomena. In 1837, he joined forces with his like-minded friends Weiße, Sengler, K. Ph. Fischer, Chalybäus, Fr. Hoffmann, Ulrici, Wirth and others to publish the "Zeitschrift für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie" (Journal of Philosophy and Speculative Theology) in order to give his opposition to Hegel's view, which was based on pure thinking, a strong impact. According to I. H. Fichte's conviction, only those who have grasped that "the highest thought that truly solves the problem of the world is the idea of the primordial subject or the absolute personality that knows and understands itself in its ideal and real infinity" have ascended to the highest knowledge. "The creation and preservation of the world, which constitutes the reality of the world, consists solely in the uninterrupted manifestation of God's will, permeated by consciousness, so that he is only consciousness and will, but both in highest unity, he alone is therefore person, or it in the most eminent sense." Chr. Hermann Weiße believed he had to ascend from Hegel's world view to a completely theological approach. He saw the goal of his thinking in the Christian idea of the three personalities in the one Godhead. He therefore sought to present this idea with an immense amount of ingenuity as the result of natural, unbiased thinking. With him, the philosophical worldview returned completely to the point where it stood at the time of scholasticism. Reason becomes the support of the belief in revelation. Weisse believed to possess something infinitely richer than Hegel with his gray idea in his triune personal deity, which possesses a living will. This living will "will, in a word, expressly give to the inner divine nature the form and no other, which is everywhere presupposed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, when they present God both before the creation of the world, as well as during and after it in the bright element of his glory, as surrounded by an incalculable host of ministering spirits with a fluid, immaterial corporeality, through which his intercourse with the created world is everywhere expressly mediated to him".

[ 14 ] Anton Günther, the “Viennese philosopher,” and Martin Deutinger, who was influenced by him, remained entirely within the framework of Catholic theology with their worldviews. The former sought to detach humans from the natural world order by dividing them into two parts: a natural being that belongs to the necessary laws of nature like lower things, and a spiritual being that is an independent part of a higher spiritual world and has an existence like a “being” in Herbart's philosophy. He believed that this would enable him to overcome Hegelianism, which sees the spirit as merely a higher stage of natural existence, and to establish a Christian worldview. The Church itself did not share this view, for Günther's writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in Rome. Deutinger fought fiercely against Hegel's pure thinking, which, in his opinion, should not engulf life-filled existence. For him, the living will is higher than pure thought. The former can truly bring something into being as a creative force; the latter is powerless and abstract. Trahndorff also takes this living will as his starting point. The world cannot be explained from the shadow realm of ideas; rather, the powerful will must seize these ideas in order to create real existence. It is not through the intellectual comprehension of the world that its deepest meaning is revealed to man, but through an emotional stirring, through love, through which the individual surrenders himself to the whole, to the will that reigns in the universe. It is quite clear that all these reactionary thinkers are striving to overcome thinking and its object, the pure idea. They do not want to accept this thinking as the highest expression of the human spirit. In order to comprehend the primordial essence of the world, Trahndorff does not want to recognize it, but to love it. It should be an object for the mind, not for reason. These philosophers believe that clear, pure thinking destroys warm, religious devotion to the primal forces of existence.

[ 15 ] This latter idea is based on a misunderstanding of Hegel's world of thought. This misunderstanding was particularly evident in the views that prevailed after Hegel's death regarding his position on religion. The confusion that prevailed over this position divided Hegel's followers into two camps: one that saw his worldview as a firm support for revealed Christianity, and another that used his teachings precisely to dissolve Christian beliefs and replace them with a radically free-thinking view.

[ 16 ] Neither party could have invoked Hegel if they had understood him correctly. For there is nothing in Hegel's worldview that can serve as a support for a religion or lead to its dissolution. Just as Hegel did not want to create any phenomenon of nature out of pure thought, he did not want to do so with religion either. Just as he wanted to extract pure thought from the processes of nature and thereby “comprehend” them, so too with religion he pursued the sole goal of bringing its intellectual content to the surface. Just as he regarded everything in the world as rational because it is real, so too did he regard religion. It must exist, created by forces of the soul that are entirely different from those available to the thinker when he approaches it in order to comprehend it. It was also the mistake of I. H. Fichte, Chr. H. Weiße, Deutinger, and others that they opposed Hegel because he had not progressed from the sphere of pure thought to the religious comprehension of the personal deity. However, Hegel never set himself such a task. He regarded it as a matter of religious consciousness. Fichte, Weiße, Krause, Deutinger, and others wanted to create a religion out of their worldview. Hegel would have found such a task just as absurd as if someone had wanted to illuminate the world out of the idea of light, or create a magnet out of the idea of magnetism. However, in his view, religion, like the entire natural and spiritual world, also originates from the idea. Therefore, the human spirit can rediscover this idea in religion. But just as the magnet was created from the idea of magnetism before the emergence of the human spirit, and the latter afterwards only has to comprehend this emergence, so too did religion come into being from the idea before this idea dawned in the human soul as a component of the worldview. If Hegel had experienced his students' criticism of religion, he would have been compelled to say: Keep your hands off all foundations of religion, off all creation of religious ideas, as long as you want to remain thinkers and not become messiahs. Hegel's worldview, properly understood, cannot have a retroactive effect on religious consciousness. Those who reflect on art stand in the same relationship to it as those who seek to fathom the essence of religion.

[ 17 ] The “Hallische Jahrbücher” (Halle Yearbooks), published by Arnold Ruge and Theodor Echtermeyer between 1838 and 1843, served the battle of worldviews. From defending and explaining Hegel, they soon moved on to independently developing his ideas further, thus leading to the points of view that we will characterize in the next essay as those of “radical worldviews.” From 1841 onwards, the editors renamed their journal Deutsche Jahrbücher (German Yearbooks) and considered one of their goals to be the “fight against political bondage, against feudalism and the theory of landed property.” As radical politicians, they intervened in the developments of the time, demanding a state in which complete freedom prevailed. In doing so, they distanced themselves from the spirit of Hegel, who did not want to make history, but to understand it.