The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Modern Man

[ 1 ] The Austrian thinker Bartholomäus Carneri (born 1821) used Darwinism to open up broad perspectives on worldview and lifestyle. Eleven years after the publication of Darwin's “On the Origin of Species,” he published his book “Morality and Darwinism” (Vienna, 1871), in which he comprehensively established the new world of ideas as the basis for an ethical worldview. Since then, he has been tirelessly striving to develop Darwinian ethics (cf. his writings “Foundations of Ethics,” 1881; “Man as an End in Himself,” 1878, and "Modern Man. Attempts at a Way of Life," 1891). Carneri rejects any moral view that seeks to impose on humans moral precepts other than those that arise from their own human nature. One must hold fast to the idea that humans are not to be understood as special beings alongside all other natural things, but as beings that have gradually developed from lower entities according to purely natural laws. Carneri is convinced that all life is a chemical process: “Digestion in humans is similar to the nutrition of plants.” At the same time, however, he emphasizes that the chemical process must rise to a higher form of development if it is to become a plant or animal. "Life is a chemical process of its own kind; it is the chemical process that has become individual [.-:]. The chemical process can reach a point at which it can depart from certain conditions that it previously required..." It is clear that Carneri is pursuing the question of how lower natural processes rise to higher ones, how matter, through the perfection of its modes of action, attains higher forms of existence. “We perceive matter as substance insofar as the phenomena resulting from its divisibility and movement affect our senses physically, i.e., as mass. If the division or differentiation goes so far that the resulting phenomena are no longer perceptible to the senses, but only to the mind, then the effect of the substance is spiritual.” Morality, too, does not exist as a special form of existence; it is a natural process on a higher level. The question cannot therefore arise as to what man should do in accordance with any moral precepts that apply specifically to him, but only as to what appears as morality when the lower processes rise to the highest spiritual ones. "While moral philosophy establishes certain moral laws and commands them to be observed so that man may be what he ought to be, ethics develops man as he is, limiting itself to showing him what he can still become: There are duties whose observance seeks to enforce penalties; here there is an ideal from which all coercion would distract, because the approach can only proceed by way of knowledge and freedom." Just as the chemical process individualizes itself at a higher level to become a living being, so at an even higher level life rises to self-consciousness. The self-conscious being no longer looks merely out into nature; it looks within itself. "The awakening of self-consciousness was, understood dualistically, a break with nature, and man felt separated from it. The rift was only there for him, but for him it was complete. It did not arise as suddenly as Genesis teaches, just as the days of creation are not to be taken literally; but with the completion of self-awareness, the rift was a fact, and with the feeling of boundless loneliness that came over man, his ethical development began." Up to a certain point, nature guides life. At this point, self-awareness arises, and man comes into being. “His further development is his own work, and what has kept him on the path of progress was the power and gradual clarification of his desires.” Nature cares for all other beings; it endows man with desires, which it leaves him to satisfy himself. Humans have an inner drive to shape their existence according to their desires. This drive is the drive for happiness. “This drive is foreign to animals: they know only the drive for self-preservation, and elevating it to the drive for happiness requires human self-awareness as a basic condition.” The pursuit of happiness underlies all action. "The martyr who gives his life here for his scientific convictions, there for his belief in God, has nothing else in mind but his happiness; the former finds it in his loyalty to his convictions, the latter seeks it in a better world. For all, bliss is the ultimate goal, and however different the image that the individual may have of it, from the most primitive times to the most educated, it is the beginning and end of the thinking and feeling of the sentient being." Since nature only gives humans the need for happiness, the image of happiness must spring from within. Humans create the images of their happiness. They spring from their ethical imagination. In this, Carneri finds the new concept that outlines the ideals of our actions in our thinking. For Carneri, “good” is “identical with further development. And since further development is pleasure, bliss is not only the goal, but also the motivating element that drives us toward the goal.”

[ 2 ] Carneri succeeded in finding the path from natural law to the sources of morality. He found the ideal power that, as the driving element of the moral world order, acts just as creatively from ethical event to ethical event as the material forces in the physical structure develop from structure to structure, fact to fact.

[ 3 ] Carneri's way of thinking is entirely in line with the idea of development, which does not allow the later to be preformed in the earlier, but rather considers the later to be a real new formation (cf. above p. 43 ff. [269 ff.)). The chemical process does not already contain animal life; bliss forms as a completely new element based on the animals' instinct for self-preservation. The difficulty inherent in this idea prompted an astute thinker, W. H. Rolph, to write the explanations he set out in his book “Biologische Probleme, zugleich als Versuch zur Entwickelung einer rationellen Ethik” (Biological Problems, at the same time as an attempt to develop a rational ethic) (Leipzig 1884). Rolph asks himself: What is the reason that a life form does not remain at a certain stage, but continues to develop and perfect itself? Those who believe that the later is already contained in the earlier find no difficulty in this question. For them, it is immediately clear that what is contained will unfold at a certain point in time. But Rolph did not want to give himself this answer. On the other hand, he was not satisfied with the mere “struggle for existence” of living beings. If a living being struggles only to fulfill its necessary needs, it will indeed drive other weaker forms out of the field; but it will itself remain what it is. If one does not want to attribute a mysterious, mystical striving for perfection to this, one must seek the reasons for this perfection in external, natural circumstances. Rolph finds them in the fact that every being satisfies its needs to a greater extent than its immediate necessities require, if the opportunity is available. “Only through the introduction of insatiability does the Darwinian principle of perfection in the struggle for life become acceptable. For only now do we have an explanation for the fact that creatures acquire more than they need to maintain their status quo wherever they can: that they grow in excess wherever the opportunity arises.” (“Biological Problems,” p. 96f.) In Rolph's opinion, the realm of living beings is not a struggle for the acquisition of the most basic necessities of life, but a “struggle for more.” “So while for Darwinists there is no struggle for existence wherever the creature's existence is not threatened, for me the struggle is omnipresent: it is primarily a struggle for life, a struggle for the increase of life, but not a struggle for existence.” (“Biol. Prob.,” p. 97) Rolph draws conclusions for ethics from these scientific premises. “The increase of life, not the preservation of life; the struggle for preference, not for existence, is the slogan. The mere acquisition of the necessities of life and food is not enough; comfort, if not wealth, power, and influence must also be acquired. The addiction, the striving for constant improvement of one's circumstances, is the characteristic drive of animals and humans.” (“Biol. Probl.”, p. 222f.)

[ 4 ] Inspired by Rolph's ideas, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) developed his view of how to live based on the idea of evolution. At the beginning of his writing career, he was far removed from the idea of evolution, as he was from natural science in general. He was initially greatly impressed by Arthur Schopenhauer's worldview. The idea that pain is the basis of all existence is one that he adopted from Schopenhauer. Unlike Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, he did not seek salvation from this pain in the fulfillment of moral duties; rather, he believed that shaping life into a work of art would lead beyond the pain of existence. The Greeks created a world of beauty and illusion to make their painful existence bearable. And in Richard Wagner's musical drama, he believed he had found a world that elevated people above pain through beauty. So it was basically illusion that Nietzsche sought in order to overcome the misery of the world. He believed that the oldest Greek culture was based on the human urge to forget the real world by entering a state of intoxication. “Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community. He has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on his way to flying up into the air, dancing.” This is how Nietzsche describes and explains the cult of the ancient servants of Dionysus, in which the roots of all art lie. Socrates tamed this Dionysian urge by making reason the judge of impulses. The phrase “virtue can be taught” signifies the replacement of a comprehensive impulsive culture with a watered-down one, kept in check by thought. Such ideas arose in Nietzsche under the influence of Schopenhauer, who placed the untamed, restless will above the ordering concept, and through Richard Wagner, who professed his allegiance to Schopenhauer as a human being and artist. But Nietzsche was, by his very nature, also a contemplative person. After devoting himself for a time to the idea of world redemption through beautiful appearances, he felt that this idea was a foreign element in his very essence, one that had been transplanted into him through the personal influence of his friend Richard Wagner. He sought to free himself from this line of thought and devote himself to a more appropriate conception of reality. At first, it was artistic appearance that was to lead him beyond reality; later, he sought satisfaction by immersing himself deeply in this reality. The admirer of illusion became an idolater of reality. Thinkers who dealt with the nature of reality now gained influence over him. Nietzsche's entire intellectual work is characterized by an intensely personal processing of the ideas he encountered on his path through life. He does not produce new ideas, but he has a deep sensitivity to those he finds in others. He immerses the components of his worldview in his emotional life and shows them to us not as thoughts, but as feelings from the mirror of his very personal inner life. In Friedrich Albert Lange's Geist (cf. above p. 85 ff. [320 ff.]), the world has become poetry; the idea of a revaluation of values has been realized. For this thinker, all this takes place within the world of ideas. In calm contemplation of his mode of imagination, he gives it the direction it must take through his evaluation of reality. Nietzsche made the matter his emotional personal experience, just as he had earlier made the idea that Dionysian culture had been lost through intellectual contemplation his personal experience. This gives his writings their peculiar undertone, which makes Nietzsche appear more as an artistic glorifier or accuser, as a singer of a way of thinking, than as a thinker. Lange's idea of reality as poetry becomes, in Nietzsche, a declaration of war against the concept of truth. "The will to truth, which will tempt us into many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have spoken with reverence until now: what questions this will to truth has already presented us with! What strange, terrible, questionable questions! It is already a long story—and yet it seems that it has barely begun. ... Assuming we want truth, why not rather untruth?“ The developmental idea of modern science gave rise to the thought in Nietzsche that man transcends humanity just as animality has advanced to man. Just as man is the continuation of animality, so the ”superman" will be the continuation of man. The idea, which found a significant proponent in Carneri, that human morality with its “good” and ‘evil’ has no original validity but has developed over the course of evolution, became for Nietzsche a vision of a state “beyond good and evil.” He coined the term “master race,” which does not accept what has become, but determines “good” and ‘bad’ on its own. Rolph's idea of “life increase” develops in Nietzsche into the concept of the “will to power,” which he attributes to all being and life in the animal and human worlds. He sees life as “appropriation, injury, overcoming of the foreign and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and, at the very least, mild exploitation.” In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche sang the praises of belief in reality, in the development of man into a “superman”; in his unfinished work “The Revaluation of All Values,” he wanted to reshape all ideas from the point of view that no other will in man has supreme dominion than that of “power.”

[ 5 ] The misjudgment of the basic idea of all possible worldviews, that “our reason recognizes not only the true, but also the truth of its own knowledge” (cf. above p. 171 ff. [424 ff.]), led Nietzsche to reject all truth and to replace the will to truth with the “will to power,” which no longer asks: Is a piece of knowledge true? But rather: Does it sustain life, promote life? “All philosophizing was not about ‘truth’ at all, but about something else entirely, let's say health, future, growth, power, life...” In fact, man always strove for power; he only succumbed to the illusion that he wanted “truth.” They confused the means with the end. Truth is only a means to the end of “power.” “The falseness of a judgment is not yet an objection to the judgment.” It does not matter whether a judgment is true, but “to what extent it promotes life, sustains life, preserves the species, perhaps even breeds the species.” “Most of the philosopher's thinking is secretly guided by his instincts and forced into certain channels.” Nietzsche's worldview is agnosticism as a personal feeling, as an individual experience and destiny.

[ 6 ] A counter-image to Nietzsche's worldview is found in the materialistic view of history and life, which found its most concise expression in Karl Marx (1818-1883). He denied that ideas had any part in historical development. What really underlies this development are the real factors of life, the class struggles between the exploited and the exploiters, between the rulers and the ruled. If one wants to understand any era, one must refer to such conflicts and economic events for explanation. All political and intellectual currents are only a reflection of these events playing out on the surface. In essence, they present themselves as ideal consequences of real facts; they have no part in these facts themselves. Thus, no worldview that has come about through ideal factors can contribute to the further development of the current way of life; rather, the task is to take up the real conflicts where they are today and to continue them in the same spirit. This view arose from a materialistic reinterpretation of Hegelianism. For Hegel, the idea is in eternal development, and the consequences of this development are the actual events of life. What August Comte develops from scientific ideas, a conception of society based on the actual events of life, Karl Marx arrives at through the direct observation of economic development. Marxism is the boldest expression of an intellectual movement that takes as its starting point the observation of external historical phenomena accessible to immediate perception in order to understand intellectual life, the entire cultural development of humankind. This is modern “sociology.” It does not view humans in any way as individual beings, but as links in the chain of social development. How humans imagine, recognize, act, and feel: all of this is understood as a result of social forces under whose influence the individual stands. Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) calls the totality of forces that determine every cultural event the “milieu.” Every work of art, every institution, every action can be explained by the preceding and simultaneous circumstances. If one knows the race, milieu, and moment from which and in which a human work arises, one has explained it. In his “System of Acquired Rights,” Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) showed how legal institutions—property, contract, family, inheritance law, etc.—arise and develop from the conceptual circles of a people. The Roman way of thinking created a different kind of rights than that of the Germans. None of these schools of thought raise the question: What arises in the individual human being, what does he accomplish out of his own nature? Instead, they ask: What causes in social associations determine the meaning of life for the individual? This trend can be seen as the opposite of the one that prevailed at the beginning of the century with regard to questions about the relationship between man and the world. At that time, the question was asked: What rights does the individual human being have by virtue of his own nature (natural rights), or how does man recognize in accordance with his individual reason? The sociological trend, on the other hand, asks: What concepts of law, what concepts of knowledge do social associations instill in the individual? The fact that I have certain ideas about things does not depend on my reason, but is a result of the development from which I was born.

[ 7 ] Within scientific circles, doubts have arisen in the last decades of the century as to whether characteristics acquired by an individual during its lifetime can also be passed on to its offspring. This has given rise to a new opponent of the idea of evolution. For how can a lower species evolve into a higher one if it cannot acquire more perfect characteristics than it already has through purely natural processes (adaptation to living conditions) during its lifetime and then pass these on to its offspring? If this were not the case, one would have to assume that everything is already present in the predispositions of a species, that, in a sense, the whole world is already present in the primordial germ, and that the already predisposed perfection only comes to fruition in the “struggle for existence,” while the more inappropriate predispositions perish. In Germany, this view is represented by August Weismann, while in England Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace stand on its ground. They are of the opinion that the facts do not justify the assumption that acquired characteristics can be inherited.

[ 8 ] In his important book “From Darwin to Nietzsche,” Alexander Tille drew the conclusions of this view for ethics with iron consistency. The principle of selection in the struggle for existence must also be the only valid one for moral development. One cannot hope that humans will acquire characteristics in life that they have not already developed in their predisposition. Therefore, it cannot be a matter of acquiring such characteristics, but only of establishing conditions that offer perfect, fit individuals the opportunity to overcome the imperfect and weak. “In short, it is a matter of natural selection in today's human world, of social selection.” (“Von Darwin bis Nietzsche,” p. 31)