The Riddle of Philosophy Part 13

Strauss becomes even more radical in his book, The Christian Doctrine in the Course of Its Historical Development and Its Struggle with Modern Science, which appeared in the years 1840 and 1841. Here he intends to dissolve the Christian dogmas in their poetic form so as to obtain the thought content of the truths contained in them. He now points out that the modern consciousness is incompatible with the consciousness that clings to the old mythological picture representation of the truth.

May, then, the believers allow the knowers to go their own way unmolested and vice versa; we do not deprive them of their belief; let them grant us our philosophy, and, if the super-pious should succeed in ejecting us from their church, we shall consider that as a gain. Enough wrong compromises have now been attempted; only the separation of the opposite camps can now lead us ahead.

These views of Strauss produced an enormous uproar. It was deeply resented that those representing the modern world conception were no longer satisfied in attacking only the basic religious conceptions in general, but, equipped with all scientific means of historical research, attempted to eliminate the irrelevancy about which Lichtenberg had once said that it consisted of the fact that "human nature had submitted even to the yoke of a book." He continued: One cannot imagine anything more horrible, and this example alone shows what a helpless creature man really is in concreto, enclosed as he really is in this two-legged vessel of earth, water and salt. If it were ever possible that reason could have a despotic throne erected, a man who seriously wanted to contradict the Copernican system through the authority of a book would have to be hanged. To read in a book that it originates from G.o.d is not a proof as yet that it really does. It is certain, however, that our reason has its origin in G.o.d no

matter in what sense one takes the word G.o.d. Reason punishes, where it rules, only through the natural consequences of a transgression or through instruction, if instruction can be called punishment.

Strauss was discharged from his position as a tutor at the Seminary of Tuebingen because of his book, The Life of Jesus, and when he then accepted a professors.h.i.+p in theology at the University of Zurich, the peasants came to meet him with thres.h.i.+ng flails in order to make the position of the dissolver of the myth impossible and to force his retirement.

Another thinker, Bruno Bauer (1809 1882), in his criticism of the old world conception from the standpoint of the new, went far beyond the aim that Strauss had set for himself. He held the same view as Feuerbach, that man's nature is also his supreme being and any other kind of a supreme being is only an illusion created after man's image and set above himself.

But Bauer goes further and expresses this opinion in a grotesque form. He describes how he thinks the human ego came to create for itself an illusory counter-image, and he uses expressions that show they are not inspired by the wish for an intimate understanding of the religious consciousness as was the case with Strauss. They have their origin in the pleasure of destruction. Bauer says: The all-devouring ego became frightened of itself; it did not dare to consider itself as everything and as the most general power, that is to say, it still kept the form of the religious spirit and thus completed its self-alienation in setting its own general power against itself in fear and trembling for its own preservation and salvation.

Bruno Bauer is a personality who sets out to test his impetuous thinking critically against everything in existence.

That thinking is destined to penetrate to the essence of things

is a conviction he adopted from Hegel's world conception, but he does not, like Hegel, tend to let thinking lead to results and a thought structure. His thinking is not productive, but critical. He would have felt a definite thought or a positive idea as a limitation. He is unwilling to limit the power of critical thought by taking his departure from a definite point of view as Hegel had done.

Critique is, on the one hand, the last act of a definite philosophy, which through this act frees itself from the limitation of a positive determination, still curtailed in its generality. It is, therefore, on the other hand, the presupposition without which philosophy cannot be raised to the last level of generality of the self-consciousness.

This is the credo of the Critique of World Conception to which Bruno Bauer confesses. This "critique" does not believe in thoughts and ideas but in thinking alone. "Only now has man been discovered," announces Bauer triumphantly, for now man is bound by nothing except his thinking. It is not human to surrender to a non-human element, but to work everything out in the melting pot of thinking. Man is not to be the afterimage of another being, but above all, he is to be "a human being," and he can become human only through his thinking. The thinking man is the true man. Nothing external, neither religion nor right, neither state nor law, etc., can make him into a human being, but only his thinking. The weakness of a thinking that strives to reach the self-consciousness but cannot do so is demonstrated in Bauer.

Feuerbach had declared the "human being to be man's supreme being; Bruno Bauer maintained that he had discovered it for the first time through his critique of world conception; Max Stirner (1806 1856) set himself the task of

approaching this "human being" completely without bias and without presupposition in his book, The Only One and His Possession, which appeared in 1845. This is Stirner's judgment: With the power of desperation, Feuerbach grasps at the entire content of Christianity, not in order to throw it away, but, on the contrary, in order to seize it, to draw upon this content for so long and so ardently desired and yet always so remote, with a last effort down from heaven, to have and to hold onto it forever. Is this not the clutch of last despair, a matter of life and death, and is it not at the same time the Christian yearning and pa.s.sionate desire for the beyond? The hero does not mean to depart into the beyond, but to draw the beyond down to himself so that it should turn into this world. Has not all the world since then been screaming more or less consciously, "This world is all that matters; heaven must come down to earth and must be felt here already?"

Stirner opposes the view of Feuerbach with his violent contradiction: The highest being, to be sure, is man's being, but exactly because it is his being and not he, himself, is it a matter of complete indifference whether we contemplate it outside man, considering it as G.o.d, or whether we find it in him and call it "the nature of man," or the "human being." I am neither G.o.d nor the human being, neither the highest being nor my own being, and for this reason, it is fundamentally of no importance whether I think this nature within myself or without. We do, indeed, always think the supreme being in both forms of beyondness, in the inward one as well as in the outward one at the same time, for the "spirit of G.o.d" is, according to Christian conception, also "our spirit"

and "dwelleth within us." This spirit dwells in heaven and within us. We, poor things, are nothing but his "dwelling place" and if Feuerbach now goes about and destroys his heavenly habitations and forces him bag and baggage to move

into us, then we, as his terrestrial quarters, will become very badly overcrowded.

The individual human ego does not consider itself from its own standpoint but from the standpoint of a foreign power. A religious man claims that there is a divine supreme being whose afterimage is man. He is possessed by this supreme being. The Hegelian says that there is a general world reason and it realizes itself to reach its climax in the human ego. The ego is therefore possessed by this world reason. Feuerbach maintains that there is a nature of the human being and every particular person is an individualized afterimage of this nature. Every individual is thereby possessed by the idea of the "nature of humanity." For only the individual man is really existing, not the "generic concept of humanity" by which Feuerbach replaces the divine being. If, then, the individual man places the "genus man" above himself, he abandons himself to an illusion, just as much as when he feels himself dependent on a personal G.o.d. For Feuerbach, therefore, the commandments the Christian considers as given by G.o.d, and which for this reason he accepts as valid, change into commandments that have their validity because they are in accordance with the general idea of humanity. Man now judges himself morally by asking the question: Do my actions as an individual correspond to what is adequate to the nature of humanity in general? For Feuerbach says: If the essence of humanity is man's supreme being, then the highest and first law of his practical life must also be the love of man to man. h.o.m.o homini deus est, man is G.o.d to man.

Ethics is in itself a divine power. Moral relations.h.i.+ps are by themselves truly religious relations.h.i.+ps. Life in general is, in its substantial connections, of a thoroughly divine nature.

Everything that is right, true and good carries the ground of its salvation in its own qualities. Friends.h.i.+p is and shall be sacred, as shall be property and marriage, and sacred shall be

the well-being of every man, but sacred in and for itself.

There are, then, general human powers, and ethics is one of them. It is sacred in and for itself; the individual has to submit to it. The individual is not to will what it decides out of its own initiative, but what follows from the direction of the sacred ethics. The individual is possessed by this ethics. Stirner characterizes this view as follows: The G.o.d of all, namely, the human being, has now been elevated to be the G.o.d of the individual, for it is the highest aim of all of us to be a human being. As no one can entirely become what the idea of humanity expresses, however, the "human being" remains for every individual a sublime beyond, an unattainable supreme being, a G.o.d.

But such a supreme being is also thinking, which has been elevated to be G.o.d by the critique of world conception. Stirner cannot accept this either.

The critical thinker is afraid of becoming dogmatic, or of making positive statements. Of course, he would in doing so become the opposite of a critic, a dogmatist; he would then be as bad as a dogmatist as he is now good as a critic. . . . There must by no means be any dogma! This is his dogma. For the critic stays on the same ground with the dogmatist, namely, on the ground of thought. Like the dogmatist, he always proceeds from a thought, but he differs insofar as he abandons the practice of preserving the princ.i.p.al thought in the process of thinking; he does not allow this process to become stabilized. He only emphasizes the process of thinking against the belief in thoughts, the process of the former against the stagnation of the latter. No thought is safe against criticism because it is thinking or the thinking spirit itself. . . . I am no antagonist of criticism, that is to say, I am no dogmatist and feel that the teeth of the critic that tear the flesh of the

dogmatist do not touch me. If I were a dogmatist, I should place a dogma, a thought, an idea, a principle, at the beginning, and I should begin this process as a systematic thinker by spinning it out into a system that is a thought structure. If, on the other hand, I were a critical thinker, that is, an opponent of the dogmatist, then I should lead the fight of free thinking against the enslaved thought. I should defend thinking against the result of this activity. But I am neither the champion of thought nor of thinking.

Every thought is also produced by the individual ego of an individual, even the thought of one's own being, and when man means to know his own ego and wants to describe it according to its nature, he immediately brings it into dependence on this nature. No matter what I may invent in my thinking, as soon as I determine and define myself conceptually, I make myself the slave of the result of the definition, the concept. Hegel made the ego into a manifestation of reason, that is to say, he made it dependent on reason. But all such generalities cannot be valid with regard to the ego because they all have their source in the ego.

They are caused by the fact that the ego is deceived by itself. It is really not dependent, for everything on which it could depend must first be produced by the ego. The ego must produce something out of itself, set it above itself and allow it to turn into a spectre that haunts its own originator.

Man, you have bats in your belfry; there is a screw loose in your head! You imagine big things; you invent a whole world of G.o.ds that is supposed to be there for your benefit, a realm of spirit for which you are destined, an ideal that is becoming you. You have an idee fixe!

In reality, no thinking can approach what lives within me as "I." I can reach everything with my thinking; only my ego is an exception in this respect. I cannot think it; I can only

experience it. I am not will; I am not idea; I am that no more than the image of a deity. I make all other things comprehensible to myself through thinking. The ego I am. I have no need to define and to describe myself because I experience myself in every moment. I need to describe only what I do not immediately experience, what is outside myself.

It is absurd that I should also have to conceive myself as a thought, as an idea, since I always have myself as something.

If I face a stone, I may attempt to explain to myself what this stone is. What I am myself, I need not explain; it is given in my life.

Stirner answers to an attack against his book: The "only one" is a word and with a word it should be possible to think something; a word should have a thought content.

But the "only one" is a thoughtless word; it does not have a thought content. What then is its content if it is not thought?

It is a content that cannot be there a second time and therefore is also incapable of being expressed; for if it could be expressed, really and completely pressed out, then it would be there a second time; it would be there in the expression.

Because the content of the "only one" is not a thought content, it is also unthinkable and ineffable, but because it is ineffable, this perfectly empty phrase is at the same time not a phrase.

Only when nothing is said of you, when you are simply called, are you recognized as you. As long as something is said of you, you are recognized only as this something (human being, spirit, Christian, etc.). The "only one" does not contain a statement because it is only name, saying nothing more than that you are you and nothing but you; that you are a unique "you" and you yourself. Through this, you are without a predicate, and thereby without quality, calling, legal standing and restriction, and so forth. (Compare Stirner's Kleine Schriften, edited by J. H. Mackay, pp. 116.)

Stirner, in an essay written in 1842, The Untrue Principle of Our Education, or Humanism and Realism, had already expressed his conviction that thinking cannot penetrate as far as the core of the personality. He therefore considers it an untrue educational principle if this core of the personality is not made the objective of education, but when knowledge as such a.s.sumes this position in a one-sided way.

A knowledge that does not so purge and concentrate itself that it inspires the will, or in other words, that only weighs me down with possession and property instead of having become entirely one with me so that the freely moving ego, unhampered by any c.u.mbersome belongings travels through the world with an open mind; a knowledge, then, that has not become personal will make a miserable preparation for life. . .

. If it is the cry of our time, after the freedom of thought has been obtained, to continue this freedom to its end through which it turns into the freedom of will so that the latter can be realized as the aim of a new epoch, then the last aim of education can no longer be knowledge but a will that is born out of knowledge, and the revealing expression of the educational aim is the personal or free man. . . . As in certain other spheres, so also in that of education, freedom is not allowed to break forth; the power of opposition is not yielded the floor: subordination is insisted upon. Only formal and material drill is the aim of this education; in the menagerie of the humanists nothing but "scholars" are produced and in that of the realists, nothing but "useful citizens." Both then produce nothing but submissive human beings. Knowledge must die to be resurrected as will and to restore itself daily in free personalities.

The personality of the individual human being can alone contain the source of his actions. The moral duties cannot be commandments that are given to man from somewhere, but they must be aims that man sets for himself. Man is mistaken

if he believes that he does something because he follows a commandment of a general code of sacred ethics. He does it because the life of his ego drives him to it. I do not love my neighbor because I follow a sacred commandment of neighborly love, but because my ego draws me to my neighbor. It is not that I am to love him; I want to love him.

What men have wanted to do they have placed as commandments above themselves. On this point Stirner can be most easily understood. He does not deny moral action.

What he does deny is the moral commandment. If man only understands himself rightly, then a moral world order will be the result of his actions. Moral prescriptions are a spectre, an idee fixe, for Stirner. They prescribe something at which man arrives all by himself if he follows entirely his own nature. The abstract thinkers will, of course, raise the objection, "Are there not criminals?" These abstract thinkers antic.i.p.ate general chaos if moral prescriptions are not sacred to man. Stirner could reply to them, "Are there not also diseases in nature?

Are they not produced in accordance with eternal unbreakable laws just as everything that is healthy?"

As little as it will ever occur to any reasonable person to reckon the sick with the healthy because the former is, like the latter, produced through natural laws, just as little would Stirner count the immoral with the moral because they both come into being when the individual is left to himself. What distinguishes Stirner from the abstract thinkers, however, is his conviction that in human life morality will be dominating as much as health is in nature, when the decision is left to the discretion of individuals. He believes in the moral n.o.bility of human nature, in the free development of morality out of the individuals. It seems to him that the abstract thinkers do not believe in this n.o.bility, and he is, therefore, of the opinion that they debase the nature of the individual to become the slave of general commandments, the corrective scourges of human

action. There must be much evil depravity at the bottom of the souls of these "moral persons," according to Stirner, because they are so insistent in their demands for moral prescriptions.

They must indeed be lacking love because they want love to be ordered to them as a commandment that should really spring from them as spontaneous impulse.

Only twenty years ago it was possible that the following criticism could be made in a serious book: Max Stirner's book, The Only One and His Possession, destroyed spirit and humanity, right and state, truth and virtue as if they were idols of the bondage of thought, and confessed without reluctance, "I place nothing above myself!"

(Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte, Part V, pp.

416; 1927.).

This only proves how easily Stirner can be misunderstood as a result of his radical mode of expression because, to him, the human individual was considered to be so n.o.ble, so elevated, unique and free that not even the loftiest thought world was supposed to reach up to it. Thanks to the endeavors of John Henry Mackay, we have today a picture of his life and his character. In his book, Max Stirner, His Life and His Work (Berlin, 1898), he has summed up the complete result of his research extending over many years to arrive at a characterization of Stirner who was, in Mackay's opinion, "The boldest and most consistent of all thinkers."

Stirner, like other thinkers of modern times, is confronted with the self-conscious ego, challenging comprehension.

Others search for means to comprehend this ego. The comprehension meets with difficulties because a wide gulf has opened up between the picture of nature and that of the life of the spirit. Stirner leaves all that without consideration. He

faces the fact of the self-conscious ego and uses every means at his disposal to express this fact. He wants to speak of the ego in a way that forces everyone to look at the ego for himself, so that n.o.body can evade this challenge by claiming that the ego is this or the ego is that. Stirner does not want to point out an idea or a thought of the ego, but the living ego itself that the personality finds in itself.

Stirner's mode of conception, as the opposite pole to that of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Sch.e.l.ling and Hegel, is a phenomenon that had to appear with a certain necessity in the course of the development of modern world conception.

Stirner became aware of the self-conscious ego with an inescapable, piercing intensity. Every thought production appeared to him in the same way in which the mythical world of pictures is experienced by a thinker who wants to seize the world in thought alone. Against this intensely experienced fact, every other world content that appeared in connection with the self-conscious ego faded away for Stirner. He presented the self-conscious ego in complete isolation.

Stirner does not feel that there could be difficulties in presenting the ego in this manner. The following decades could not establish any relations.h.i.+p to this isolated position of the ego. For these decades are occupied above all with the task of forming the nature picture under the influence of the mode of thought of natural science. After Stirner had presented the one side of modern consciousness, the fact of the self- conscious ego, the age at first withdraws all attention from this ego and turns to the picture of nature where this "ego" is not to be found.

The first half of the nineteenth century had born its world conception out of the spirit of idealism. Where a bridge is laid to lead to natural science, as it is done by Sch.e.l.ling, Lorenz Oken (1779 1851) and Henrik Steffens (1773 1845), it is

done from the viewpoint of the idealistic world conception and in its interest. So little was the time ready to make thoughts of natural science fruitful for world conceptions that the ingenious conception of Jean Lamarck pertaining to the evolution of the most perfect organisms out of the simple one, which was published in 1809, drew no attention at all. When in 1830 Geoffroy de St. Hilaire presented the idea of a general natural relations.h.i.+p of all forms of organisms in his controversy with Couvier, it took the genius of Goethe to see the significance of this idea. The numerous results of natural science that were contributed in the first half of the century became new world riddles for the development of world conception when Charles Darwin in 1859, opened up new aspects for an understanding of nature with his treatment of the world of living organisms.

Part II

Introductory Remarks to the 1914 Edition The description of the life of the philosophical spirit from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, which has been attempted in this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy, cannot be of the same character as the survey of the works of the preceding thinkers. This survey had to remain within the most restricted circle of the philosophical problems. The last sixty years represent the age in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy formerly stood. During this time, the view arose that maintained that the results of natural science shed the necessary light on the question of man's nature, his relation to the world and other riddles of existence, which the intellectual work of philosophy had formerly sought to supply. Many thinkers who wanted to serve philosophy now tried to imitate the mode of investigation of natural science. Others laid the foundation for their world conception, not in the fas.h.i.+on of the old philosophical mode of thinking, but simply by taking over that basis from the mode of conception of natural science, biology or physiology. Those who meant to preserve the independence of philosophy believed it best to examine thoroughly the results of natural science in order to prevent them from invading the philosophical sphere. It is for this reason necessary, in presenting the philosophical life of this period, to pay attention to the views that, derived from natural science, have been introduced into world conceptions. The significance of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one realizes for oneself the tendencies

of scientific thinking according to which they were developed.

This situation is given expression in this book by the fact that some parts of it are formulated almost as if a presentation of general natural scientific ideas, and not one of philosophical works, had been intended. The opinion appears to be justified that this method of presentation shows distinctly how thoroughly natural science has influenced the philosophical life of the present time.

A reader who finds it reconcilable to his mode of thinking to conceive the evolution of the philosophical life along the lines indicated in the introduction of the first volume of this book, and for which the more detailed account of the book has attempted to supply the foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as a necessary phase of its evolution. Through the centuries since the beginning of Greek philosophy this evolution tended to lead the human soul toward the experience of its inner essential forces. With this inner experience the soul became more and more estranged in the world that the knowledge of external nature had erected for itself. A conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the observation of the external world that it does not show any inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences in its inner world. This conception considers it as unjustified to paint the world picture in a way that it would show these inner experiences of the human soul as well as the results of the research of natural science. It characterizes the situation in which philosophy found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which many currents of thought can still be found in the present time.

Such a judgment does not have to be artificially introduced to the study of the philosophy of this age. It can be arrived at by simply observing the facts. The second volume of this book attempts to record this new development, but it has also made

it necessary to add to the second edition a final chapter that contains "A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy."

One can be of the opinion that this account does not belong in the framework of the whole book but, in the preface to the first volume, it was announced that the purpose of this presentation "is not only to give a short outline of the history of philosophical problems, but also to discuss these problems and the attempts at their solution through their historical treatment." The view expressed in this book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture.

As it is the philosophical conviction of the author of this book that the account of the final chapter deals with soul experiences that are adequate to bring fulfillment to the search of modern philosophy, he feels he was justified in adding this chapter to his presentation. As a result of observation of these philosophies, it seems to the author to be basically characteristic of them and of their historical manifestation that they do not consistently continue their direction toward the goal they are seeking. This direction must lead toward the world conception that is outlined at the end of the book, which aims at a real science of the spirit. The reader who can agree with this can find in this conception something that supplies the solutions to problems that the philosophy of the present time poses without giving answers. If this is true, the content of the last chapter will also throw light on the historical position of modern philosophy.

The author of this book does not imagine that everyone who can accept the content of the final chapter must necessarily also seek a world conception that replaces philosophy by a view that can no longer be recognized as a philosophy by

traditional philosophers. What this book means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is, to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it. In this way, philosophy retains its significance for everyone who, according to his mode of thinking, must demand a secure intellectual foundation for the results of this soul experience.

Whoever can accept these results through a natural sense for truth, is justified in feeling himself on secure ground even if he pays no special attention to a philosophical foundation of these results. But whoever seeks the scientific justification of the world conception that is presented at the end of the book, must follow the path of the philosophical foundation.

That this path, if it is followed through to its end, leads to the experience of a spiritual world, and that the soul through this experience can become aware of its own spiritual essence through a method that is independent of its experience and knowledge through the sense world, is what the presentation of this book attempts to prove. It was not the author's intention to project this thought as a preconceived idea into his observation of philosophical life. He wanted to search without bias for the conception expressed in this life itself. He has at least endeavored to proceed in this way. He believes that this thought could be best presented by speaking the language of a natural scientist, as it were, in some parts of the book. Only if one is capable of temporarily identifying oneself completely with a certain point of view is it possible to do full justice to it. By this method of deliberately taking the position of a world view, the human soul can most safely obtain the ability to withdraw from it again and enter into modes of conception that have their source in realms that are not comprised by this view of the world.

The printing of this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy was about half finished before the great war that mankind is now experiencing broke out. It was finished just as this event began. This is only to indicate what outer events stirred and occupied my soul as the last thoughts included in this book pa.s.sed before my inner eye.

Rudolf Steiner September 1, 1914 Berlin

Chapter I.

The Struggle Over the Spirit