Chapter VI.
The Age of Kant and Goethe
Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of world and life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Kant and Goethe. Another person who strove for such a clarity in the most forceful way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted with Kant"s Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote: I am living in a new world. . . . Things I had thought could never be proven to me, for instance, the concept of absolute freedom and duty, now have been proven to me and I feel much happier because of it. It is incomprehensible what a high degree of respect for humanity, what strength this philosophy gives us; what a blessing it is for an age in which morality had been destroyed in its foundation, and in which the concept of duty had been struck from all dictionaries.
And when, on the basis of Kant"s conception, he had built his own Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to Goethe with the words: I consider you, and always have considered you, to be the representative of the purest spiritual force of feeling on the level of development that mankind has reached at the present time. To you philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is its touchstone.
A similar att.i.tude to both representative spirits was taken by Schiller. He writes about Kant on October 28, 1794:
I am not at all frightened by the prospect that the law of change, which shows no mercy to any human or divine work, will also destroy the form of the Kantian as well as every other philosophy. Its foundation, however, will not have to fear this destiny, for since the human race exists, and as long as there has been a reason, this philosophy has been silently acknowledged and mankind as a whole has acted in agreement with its principles.
Schiller describes Goethe"s conception in a letter addressed to him on August 23, 1794: For a long time I have, although from a considerable distance, watched the course of your spirit, and with ever increasing admiration I have observed the path you have marked out for yourself. You are seeking the necessary in nature, but you are seeking it along the most difficult road, which any spirit weaker than yours would be most careful to avoid. You take hold of nature as a whole in order to obtain light in a particular point; in the totality of nature"s various types of phenomena, you seek the explanation for the individual. . . .
Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and from the cradle been surrounded by an exquisite nature and an idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened; perhaps it would have been made entirely unnecessary. With the first perception of things you would have caught the form of the Necessary, and from your first experiences the grand style would have developed in you. But now, having been born a German, your Greek spirit having thus been cast into a northern world, you had no choice but that of becoming a northern artist yourself, or of supplying your imagination with what it is refused by reality through the help of your power of thought and thus, to produce a second Greece, as it were, from within and by means of reason.
Seen from the present age, Kant and Goethe can be considered spirits in whom the evolution of world conception of modern times reveals itself as in an important moment of its development. These spirits experience intensely the enigmatic problems of existence, which have formerly, in a more preparatory stage, been latent in the substrata of the life of the soul.
To ill.u.s.trate the effect that Kant exerted on his age, the statements of two men who stood at the full height of their time"s culture may be quoted. Jean Paul wrote to a friend in 1788:.
For heaven"s sake, do buy two books, Kant"s Foundation for a Metaphysics of Morals and his Critique of Practical Reason.
Kant is not a light of the world but a complete radiating solar system all at once.
Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the statement: Kant undertook the greatest work that philosophical reason has perhaps ever owed to a single man. . . . Three things remain unmistakably certain if one wants to determine the fame that Kant bestowed on his nation and the benefit that he brought to speculative thinking. Some of the things he destroyed will never be raised again, some of those to which he laid the foundation will never perish; most important of all, he brought about a reform that has no equal in the whole history of human thought.
This shows how Kant"s contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself considered it so important for this development that he judged its significance equal to that which Copernicus"s discovery of the planetary motion holds for natural science.
Various currents of philosophical development of previous times continue their effect in Kant"s thinking and are transformed in his thought into questions that determine the character of his world conception. The reader who feels the characteristic traits in those of Kant"s writings that are most significant for his view is aware of a special appreciation of Kant for the mathematical mode of thinking as one of these traits. Kant feels that what is known in the way mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of mathematics cannot be doubted.
With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on Spinoza"s realm of thoughts, appears in Kant"s mind. Spinoza wants to construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science. Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere pa.s.sive reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize such a support yielding force. This Greek att.i.tude toward the world of thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied by the fulfillment of the postulate that the soul should deal with thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception. As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to his conclusion, "I think,
therefore I am," and the statements connected with it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance, which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the "ego"
for the security it needs, leads this "ego" to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent existence.
Leibniz"s thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed off in itself. But this monad experiences only what it contains within itself; the world order, which presents itself "from without, as it were," is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, the order of which is the predetermined (pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to the human soul, the self- dependent existence in the universe, its freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world"s evolution. If, however, it means to remain consistent with its basic principle, it cannot avoid maintaining that everything known by the soul is only the soul itself, that it is incapable of going outside the self- conscious ego and that the universe cannot become revealed to the soul in its truth from without.
For Descartes and for Leibniz, the convictions they had acquired in their religious education were still effective
enough that they adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of their world pictures. Into Descartes"s world picture there crept the conception of a spiritual world that he had obtained through religious channels. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture tended to extinguish his "ego." In Leibniz, religious impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself. Leibniz believed, nevertheless, that he could a.s.sume the existence of the spiritual world outside the "ego." Spinoza, through a certain courageous trait of his personality, actually drew the consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for this world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced the self- dependence of this self-consciousness and found his supreme happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance.
With regard to Kant we must raise the question of how he was compelled to feel with respect to the currents of world conception, which had produced its prominent representatives in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. For all soul impulses that had been at work in these three were also active in him, and in his soul these impulses effected each other and caused the riddles of world and mankind with which Kant found himself confronted. A glance at the life of the spirit in the Age of Kant informs us of the general trend of Kant"s feeling with respect to these riddles. Significantly, Lessing"s (1729 1781) att.i.tude toward the questions of world conception is symptomatic of this intellectual life. Lessing sums up his credo in the words, "The transformation of revealed truths into truths of reason is absolutely necessary if
the human race is to derive any help from them." The eighteenth century has been called the century of the Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood enlightenment in the sense of Lessing"s remark.
Kant declared the enlightenment to be "man"s departure from his self-caused bondage of mind," and as its motto he chose the words, "Have courage to use your own mind." Even thinkers as prominent as Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of the "self-caused bondage of mind." They did not penetrate to a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza"s doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep impression on such spirits.
Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in the course of this process he had arrived at results that were entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significant since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the current of Leibniz"s philosophy, which effected the spirits of that age in the form "developed"
by Wolff. From Goethe"s autobiography, Poetry and Truth, we receive an idea of how this school of thought impressed deeper spirits as it reached them through the channels of Wolff"s conceptions. Goethe tells of the impressions the lectures of Professor Winckler in Leipzig, given in the spirit of Wolff, had made on him.
At the beginning, I attended my cla.s.ses industriously and faithfully, but the philosophy offered in no way succeeded in enlightening me. It seemed strange to me that in logic I was to tear apart, isolate and destroy, as it were, the intellectual operations I had been handling with the greatest ease since the days of my childhood, in order to gain an insight into their
correct use. I thought I knew just about as much as the lecturer about the nature of things, the world and G.o.d, and on more than one occasion it seemed to me that there was a considerable hitch in the matter.
About his occupation with Spinoza"s writings, however, the poet tells us, "I surrendered to this reading and, inspecting myself, I believed never to have seen the world so distinctly."
There were, however, only a few people who could surrender to Spinoza"s mode of thought as frankly as Goethe. Most readers were led into deep convicts of world conception by this philosophy. Goethe"s friend, F. H. Jacobi, is typical of them. He believed that he had to admit that reason, left to its own resources, would not lead to the doctrines of belief, but to the view at which Spinoza had arrived - that the world is ruled by eternal, necessary laws. Thus, Jacobi found himself confronted with an important decision: Either to trust his reason and abandon the doctrines of his creed or to deny reason the possibility to lead to the highest insights in order to be able to retain his belief. He chose the latter. He maintained that man possessed a direct certainty in his innermost soul, a secure belief by virtue of which he was capable of feeling the truth of the conception of a personal G.o.d, of the freedom of will and of immortality, so that these convictions were entirely independent of the insights of reason that were leaning on logical conclusions, and had no reference to these things but only to the external things of nature. In this way, Jacobi deposed the knowledge of reason to make room for a belief that satisfied the needs of the heart. Goethe who was not at all pleased by this dethronement of reason, wrote to his friend, "G.o.d has punished you with metaphysics and placed a thorn in your flesh; he has blessed me with physics. I cling to the atheist"s (Spinoza"s) worship of G.o.d and leave everything to you that you call, and may continue to call, religion. Your trust rests in belief in G.o.d; mine in seeing." The philosophy of the
enlightenment ended by confronting the spirits with the alternative, either to supplant the revealed truths by truths of reason in the sense of Spinoza, or to declare war on the knowledge of reason itself.
Kant also found himself confronted with this choice. The att.i.tude he took and how he made his decision is apparent from the clear account in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason.
Now let us a.s.sume that morality necessarily presupposes freedom (in its strictest sense) as a property of our will, pleading practical principles inherent in our reason that would be positively impossible without the presupposition of freedom. Speculative reason, however, having proven that this is not even thinkable, the former a.s.sumption, made on behalf of morality, would have to give way to the latter, whose opposite contains an obvious self-contradiction and therefore freedom, and with it morality, would have to give way to the mechanism of nature. But since, as the case lies, for the possibility of morality nothing more is required than that the idea of freedom be not contradictory in itself, and may at least be considered as thinkable without the future necessity of being understood, such that granting the freedom of a given action would not place any obstacle into the attempt of considering the same action (see in other relation) as a mechanism of nature. In this way, the doctrine of morality maintains its place . . . which could, however, not have happened if our critical philosophy had not previously enlightened us about our inevitable ignorance with respect to things in themselves, restricting all that we can know theoretically to mere phenomena. In the same way, the positive value of the critical principles of pure reason can be brought to light with regard to the concepts of G.o.d and of the simple nature of our soul, which I do, however, leave undiscussed here for the sake of brevity. I cannot even a.s.sume
G.o.d, freedom and immortality for the use of practical reason if I do not at the same time deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to excessive insight. . . . I, therefore, had to suspend knowledge in order to make room for belief. . . .
We see here how Kant stands on a similar ground as Jacobi in regard to knowledge and belief.
The way in which Kant had arrived at his results had led through the thought world of Hume. In Hume he had found the view that the things and events of the world in no way reveal connections of thought to the human soul, that the human mind imagined such connections only through habit while it is perceiving the things and events of the world simultaneously in s.p.a.ce and successively in time. Kant was impressed by Hume"s opinion according to which the human mind does not receive from the world what appears to it as knowledge. For Kant, the thought emerged as a possibility: What is knowledge for the human mind does not come from the reality of the world.
Through Hume"s arguments, Kant was, according to his own confession, awakened out of the slumber into which he had fallen in following Wolff"s train of ideas. How can reason produce judgments about G.o.d, freedom and immortality if its statement about the simplest events rests on such insecure foundation? The attack that Kant now had to undertake against the knowledge of reason was much more far-reaching than that of Jacobi. He had at least left to knowledge the possibility of comprehending nature in its necessary connection. Now Kant had produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly
necessary mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and planets to have consolidated, and to have a.s.sumed the motions in which they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the fruitfulness of Spinoza"s mode of thought, according to which everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. He was so convinced of this fruitfulness that in the above- mentioned work he went so far as to exclaim, "Give me matter, and I will build you a universe!" The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths was so firmly established for him that he maintains in his Basic Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper sense of the word is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible. If Hume were right, it would be out of the question to a.s.sume such a certainty for the knowledge of mathematical natural science, for, in that case, this knowledge would consist of nothing but thought habits that man had developed because he had seen the course of the world along certain lines. But there would not be the slightest guaranty that these thought habits had anything to do with the law-ordered connection of the things of the world. From his presupposition Hume draws the conclusion: The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession, but the power of force which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed from us and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body. . . . . (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. VII, part 1.) If we then place the world conception of Spinoza into the light of Hume"s view, we must say, "In accordance with the perceived course of the processes of the world, man has formed the habit of thinking these processes in a necessary, law-ordered connection, but he is not ent.i.tled to maintain that
this "connection" is anything but a mere thought habit." Now if this were the case, then it would be a mere deception of the human reason to imagine that it could, through itself, gain any insight into the nature of the world, and Hume could not be contradicted when he says about every world conception that is gained out of pure reason, "Throw it into the fire, for it is nothing but deception and illusion."
Kant could not possibly adopt this conclusion of Hume as his own. For him, the certainty of the knowledge of mathematical natural science was irrevocably established. He would not allow this certainty to be touched but was unable to deny that Hume was justified in saying that we gain all knowledge about real things only by observing them and by forming for ourselves thoughts about their connection that are based on this observation. If a law-ordered connection is inherent in things, then we must also extract this connection out of them, but what we really derive from the things is such that we know no more about it than that it has been so up to the present time. We do not know, however, whether such a connection is really so linked up with the nature of things that it cannot change in any moment. If we form for ourselves today a world conception based on our observations, events can happen tomorrow that compel us to form an entirely different one. If we received all our knowledge from things, there would be no certainty. Mathematics and natural sciences are a proof of this. That the world does not give its knowledge to the human mind was a view Kant was ready to adopt from Hume. That this knowledge does not contain certainty and truth, however, is a conclusion he was not willing to draw. Thus, Kant was confronted with the question that disturbed him deeply: How is it possible that man is in possession of true and certain knowledge and that he is, nevertheless, incapable of knowing anything of the reality of the world in itself?
Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world. Our reason could never claim certainty about anything in a world lying spread out around us so that we would be affected by it through observation only.
Therefore, our world can only be one that is constructed by ourselves: A world that lies within the limits of our minds.
What is going on outside myself as a stone falls and causes a hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs a world for itself. No matter how the world outside ourselves might be constructed, today"s world may not coincide in even a single trait with that of yesterday. This can never concern us for our mind produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this organization if we want to know what is unconditionally true. "Reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature." Kant sums up his conviction in this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without an impetus or impression from without. When I perceive the color red, the perception, "red," is, to be sure, a state, a process within me, but it is necessary for me to have an occasion to perceive "red." There are, therefore, "things in themselves," but we know nothing about them but the fact that they exist. Everything we observe belongs to the appearances within us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of observation in the
human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything that we can know refers merely to processes within ourselves, to appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant expresses it. But the objects of the highest questions of reason - G.o.d, Freedom and Immortality - can never become phenomena. We see the appearances within ourselves; whether or not these have their origin in a divine being we cannot know. We can observe our own psychic conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to our knowledge. About the "things in themselves,"
our knowledge cannot produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas concerning these "things in themselves" are true or false. If they are announced to us from another direction, there is no objection to a.s.sume their existence, but a knowledge concerning them is impossible for us. There is only one access to these highest truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within us emphatically and distinctly, "You are morally obliged to do this and that." This "Categorical Imperative" imposes on us an obligation we are incapable of avoiding. But how could we comply with this obligation if we were not in the possession of a free will? We are, to be sure, incapable of knowledge concerning this quality of our soul, but we must believe that it is free in order to be capable of following its inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, we have, therefore, no certainty of knowledge as we possess it with respect to the objects of mathematics and natural science, but we have moral certainty for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. Without this possibility his virtue would be void of meaning and significance. In order that virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists who secures this
happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be an intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: G.o.d. Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through this guarantee, in turn, the existence of G.o.d. Because man is a sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which we are denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by Kant out of the moral belief in the voice of duty. It was respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully expressed in his Critique of Practical Reason: Duty! Thou sublime, great name that containest nothing pleasurable to bid for our favor, but demandest submission, . .
. proclaiming a law in the presence of which all inclinations are silenced although they may secretly offer resistance. . . .
That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths is what Kant considered as his discovery. Man has to renounce all insight into a supersensible world, but from his moral nature springs a compensation for this knowledge. No wonder Kant sees the highest demand on man in the unconditional surrender to duty. If it were not for duty to open a vista for him beyond the sensual world, man would be enclosed for his whole life in the world of the senses. No matter, therefore, what the sensual world demands; it has to give way before the peremptory claims of duty, and the sensual world cannot, out of its own initiative, agree with duty. Its own inclination is directed toward the agreeable, toward pleasure. These aims have to be opposed by duty in order to enable man to reach his destination. What man does for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is
the rigorous task that is taught by Kant"s moral philosophy.
Do not allow your will to be directed toward what satisfies you in your egotism, but so act that the principles of your action can become those of all men. In surrendering to the moral law, man attains his perfection. The belief that this moral law has its being above all other events of the world and is made real within the world by a divine being is, in Kant"s opinion, true religion. It springs from the moral life. Man is to be good, not because of his belief in a G.o.d whose will demands the good; he is to be good only because of his feeling for duty. He is to believe in G.o.d, however, because duty without G.o.d would be meaningless. This is religion within the Limits of Mere Reason. It is thus that Kant ent.i.tles his book on religious world conception.
The course that the development of the natural sciences took since they began to flourish has produced in many people the feeling that every element that does not carry the character of strict necessity should be eliminated from our thought picture of nature. Kant had this feeling also. In his Natural History of the Heavens, he had even outlined such a picture for a certain realm of nature that was in accordance with this feeling. In a thought picture of this kind, there is no place for the conception of the self-conscious ego that the man of the eighteenth century felt necessary. The Platonic and the Aristotelian thought could be considered as the revelation of nature in the form in which that idea was accepted in the earlier age, and as that of the human soul as well. In thought life, nature and the soul met. From the picture of nature as it seems to be demanded by modern science, nothing leads to the conception of the self-conscious soul. Kant had the feeling that the conception of nature offered nothing to him on which he could base the certainty of self-consciousness. This certainty had to be created for the modern age had presented the self-conscious ego as a fact. The possibility had to be
created to acknowledge this fact, but everything that can be recognized as knowledge by our understanding is devoured by the conception of nature. Thus, Kant feels himself compelled to provide for the self-conscious ego as well as for the spiritual world connected with it, something that is not knowledge but nevertheless supplies certainty.
Kant established selfless devotion to the voice of the spirit as the foundation of moral life. In the realm of virtuous action, such a devotion is not compatible with a surrender to the sensual world. There is, however, a field in which the sensual is elevated in such a way that it appears as the immediate expression of the spirit. That is the field of beauty and art. In our ordinary life we want the sensual because it excites our desire, our self-seeking interest. We desire what gives us pleasure, but it is also possible to take a selfless interest in an object. We can look at it in admiration, filled by a heavenly delight and this delight can be quite independent of the possession of the thing. Whether or not I should like to own a beautiful house that I pa.s.s has nothing to do with the "disinterested pleasure" that I may take in its beauty. If I eliminate all desire from my feeling, there may still be found as a remaining element a pleasure that is clearly and exclusively linked to the beautiful work of art. A pleasure of this kind is an "esthetic pleasure." The beautiful is to be distinguished from the agreeable and the good. The agreeable excites my interest because it arouses my desire; the good interests me because it is to be made real by me. In confronting the beautiful I have no such interest that is connected with my person. What is it then, by means of which my selfless delight is attracted? I can be pleased by a thing only when its purpose is fulfilled, when it is so organized that it serves an end. Fitness to purpose pleases; incongruity displeases, but as I have no interest in the reality of the beautiful thing, as the mere sight of it satisfies me, it is also
not necessary that the beautiful object really serves a purpose.
The purpose is of no importance to me; what I demand is only the appropriateness. For this reason, Kant calls an object "beautiful" in which we perceive fitness to purpose without thinking at the same time of a definite purpose.
What Kant gives in this exposition is not merely an explanation but also a justification of art. This is best seen if one remembers Kant"s feeling in regard to his world conception. He expresses his feeling in profound, beautiful words: Two things fill the heart with ever new and always increasing admiration and awe: The starred heaven above me and the moral law within me. At first, the sight of an innumerable world quant.i.ty annihilates, as it were, my importance as a living creature, which must give back to the planet that is a mere dot in the universe the matter out of which it became what it is, after having been for a short while (one does not know how) provided with the energy of life. On second consideration, however, this spectacle infinitely raises my value as an intelligent being, through my (conscious and free) personality in which the moral law reveals to me a life that is independent of the whole world of the senses, at least insofar as this can be concluded from the purpose-directed destination of my existence, which is not hemmed in by the conditions and limitations of this life but extends into the infinite.
The artist now transplants this purpose-directed destination, which, in reality, rules in the realm of the moral world, into the world of the senses. Thus, the world of art stands between the realm of the world of observation that is dominated by the eternal stern laws of necessity, which the human mind itself has previously laid into this world, and the realm of free morality in which commands of duty, as the result of a wise,
divine world-order, set out direction and aim. Between both realms the artist enters with his works. Out of the realm of the real he takes his material, but he reshapes this material at the same time in such a fashion that it becomes the bearer of a purpose-directed harmony as it is found in the realm of freedom. That is to say, the human spirit feels dissatisfied both with the realms of external reality, which Kant has in mind when he speaks of the starred heaven and the innumerable things of the world, and also with the realm of moral law. Man, therefore, creates a beautiful realm of "semblance," which combines the rigid necessity of nature with the element of a free purpose. The beautiful now is not only found in human works of art, but also in nature. There is nature-beauty as well as art-beauty. This beauty of nature is there without man"s activity. It seems, therefore, as if there were observable in the world of reality, not merely the rigid law-ordered necessity, but a free wisdom-revealing activity as well. The phenomenon of the beautiful, nevertheless, does not force us to accept a conception of this kind, for what it offers is the form of a purpose-directed activity without implying also the thought of a real purpose. Furthermore, there is not only the phenomenon of integrated beauty but also that of integrated ugliness. It is, therefore, possible to a.s.sume that in the mult.i.tude of natural events, which are interconnected according to necessary laws, some happen to occur - accidentally, as it were - in which the human mind observes an a.n.a.logy with man"s own works of art. As it is not necessary to a.s.sume a real purpose, this element of free purpose, which appears as it were by accident, is quite sufficient for the esthetic contemplation of nature.
The situation is different when we meet the ent.i.ties in nature to which the purpose concept is not merely to be attributed as accidental but that carry this purpose really within themselves. There are also ent.i.ties of this kind according to
Kant"s opinion. They are the organic beings. The necessary law-determined connections are insufficient to explain them; these, in Spinoza"s world conception are considered not only necessary but sufficient, and by Kant are considered as those of the human mind itself. For an "organism is a product of nature in which everything is, at the same time, purpose, just as it is cause and also effect." An organism, therefore, cannot be explained merely through rigid laws that operate with necessity, as is the case with inorganic nature. It is for this reason that, although Kant himself had, in his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, undertaken the attempt to "discuss the const.i.tution and the mechanical origin of the entire world structure according to Newtonian principles," he is of the opinion that a similar attempt, applied to the world of organic beings, would necessarily fail. In his Critique of Judgment, he advances the following statement: It is, namely, absolutely certain that in following merely mechanical principles of nature we cannot even become sufficiently acquainted with organisms and their inner possibility, much less explain them. This is so certain that one can boldly say that it would be absurd for man to set out on any such attempt or to hope that at some future time a Newton could arise who would explain as much as the production of a blade of gra.s.s according to natural laws into which no purpose had brought order and direction. Such a knowledge must, on the contrary, be altogether denied to man.
Kant"s view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with another opinion concerning a purpose- directed ent.i.ty, for a purpose points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an ent.i.ty, that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind could explain a teleological being in the same way as an ent.i.ty that is merely
const.i.tuted according to natural necessity, it would also have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely independent of the mind.
The human mind would, therefore, have to be not merely a cognitive, but a creative, spirit; its reason would, like that of G.o.d, have to create the things.
Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as it has been outlined here will understand its strong effect on Kant"s contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This world conception leaves G.o.d, freedom and immortality, to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that suggests a designed order in the world.
But at what price did Kant obtain all this! He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be
observed in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is sufficient that it stimulates in us the conception of the purposeful and thereby produces our delight.
Kant not only presents the view that man"s knowledge is possible so far as the law-structure of this knowledge has its origin in the self-conscious soul, and the certainty concerning this soul comes out of a source that is different from the one out of which our knowledge of nature springs. He also points out that our human knowledge has to resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which thought itself seems to reign in nature. In taking this position, Kant confesses by implication that he cannot imagine thoughts that are conceived as active in the ent.i.ties of nature themselves.
The recognition of such thoughts presupposes that the human soul not merely thinks, but in thinking shares the life of nature in its inner experience. If somebody discovered that thoughts are capable not merely of being received as perceptions, as is the case with the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, but that it is possible to experience thoughts by penetrating into the ent.i.ties of nature, then this would mean that again a new element had been found that could enter the picture of nature as well as the conception of the self- conscious ego. The self-conscious ego by itself does not find a place in the nature picture of modern times. If the self- conscious ego, in filling itself with thought, is not merely aware that it forms this thought, but recognizes in thought a life of which it can know, "This life can realize itself also outside myself," then this self-conscious ego can arrive at the insight, "I hold within myself something that can also be found without." The evolution of modern world conception thus urges man on to the step: To find the thought in the self- conscious ego that is felt to be alive. This step Kant did not
take; Goethe did.
In all essential points, Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant"s conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man"s lawgiver as well. Kant drew all nature into the human mind. Goethe considered everything as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the natural world order: Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms. . . . A11 men are in her and she is in them. . . .
Even the most unnatural is Nature; even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius. . . .We obey her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even when we mean to work against her. . . . Nature is everything. . . . She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself. . . . She has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it all, true and false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the merit.
This is the polar opposite to Kant"s world conception.