All that is, only to be understood or
explained
from the point of view of that which ought to be {soil) .
Windelband - History of Philosophy
* For this shows everywhere the living force of individuality.
We know of the subject because it wills something, and of the object because it furnishes
the inhibition to + "* ~ and to _ —. Cf. on thin arbitrarily axiomatic a a+"
assumption and on the mistaken nature of the whole psychological calculus," A. Lange, Die Grundlegung dtr mathftnatuehen Ptyehologif, Duisburg, 1866.
Allgrm. Mttnphyrik. «f 240 ff. . 331 If. VV\, IV. 147 ft. , 3*7 fl. In llerbart's metaphysics the branching out of general ontology into the beginnings of psy chology and natural philosophy designated by the names Eidology and Sfneehology.
Cf. asp. Apodiktik. 261, 302 ff.
lb. 386 ff.
Following the example of Kant and Fichte, Bouterwek ends his theoretical
Apodiktik in scepticism or in completely abstract-formal, absolute knowledge U the "practical" apodictic which first gala* a relation of its content to
reality.
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588 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI
resistance to this will. The antithesis of force and resistance thus furnishes a common basis to the knowledge of the reality of our selves, and to that of the reality of other things, — of the I and the Not-I. 1 This doctrine Bouterwek would have called absolute Virtu- alism. We know our own reality in that we will, and the reality of other things in that our will finds in them a resisting force. The feeling of resistance refutes pure subjectivism or solipsism, but this relative knowledge of the particular forces of the real is supple mented by the consciousness of our own willing to form a merely empirical science. 8
This thought of his Gottingen teacher was developed by Schopen hauer, under the influence of Fichte, to a metaphysics. With a bold leap he swings himself up from the position of Virtualism to the knowledge of the essential nature of all things. We recognise the will within us as the true reality, and the resistance from which we know the reality of other things must, therefore, be likewise will. This is demanded by the " metaphysical need " of a unitary explana tion for all experience. The world " as idea " can be only phenome non ; an object is possible only in the subject and determined by the Forms of the subject. Hence the world in man's idea or mental representation (as " phenomenon of the brain," as Schopenhauer has often said with a dangerously contradictory laxity of expression) appears as a manifold ordered in space and time, a manifold whose connection can be thought only in accordance with the principle of causality, — the only one of the Kantian categories which Schopen hauer can admit to an originality of the same rank as that which belongs to the pure perceptions. Bound to these Forms, conceptional knowledge can have for its object only the necessity which prevails between individual phenomena: for causality is a relation of phe nomena to each other; science knows nothing absolute, nothing unconditioned; the guiding thread of causality, which leads from one condition to the other, never breaks off and must not be broken off arbitrarily. 8 The conceptional work of science can, therefore, in nowise raise itself above this infinite series of phenomena ; only an intuitive interpretation of the whole world of ideas, a look of genius over experience, an immediate apprehension, can penetrate to th6 true essence, which appears in our ideas as the world determined in space and time and hy causality. This intuition, however, is that by which the knowing subject is given immediately through itself as will. This word solves, therefore, the mystery of the outer world
i Apodiktik II. 68 ,ft a lb. II. 67 I.
8 In this Schopenhauer is in complete agreement with Jacobi (cf. above, p. 674).
Cm Ac. 41. Thing-in-itself Schopenhauer. 589
also. For we must apprehend the significance of all that given to ns immediately in space and time as idea,1 according to this analogy
of the only thing which immediately given. The thing-in-itself the Will.
The word "will" as here used must indeed be taken in an ex tended sense. In men and in animals the will appears as motiva tion determined through ideas, in the instinctive and vegetative life of the organism as susceptibility to stimulation, in the rest of the world of experience as mechanical processes. The meaning which
common to these different internal or external kinds of causality, should be designated a potiori as will, in accordance with that form in which alone immediately known to us. Accordingly the philosopher emphasises expressly the point, that the particular peculiarities with which the will given in human self-perception, i. e. its motivation through ideas and conceptions, must be kept quite apart from our notion of the will as thing-in-itself, — requirement which was, indeed, hard enough for Schopenhauer himself to
fulfil.
At the same time, however, the relation between thing-in-itself
and phenomenon must not be thought according to the rule of the understanding, i. e. causally. The thing-in-itself is not the cause of phenomena. Even in the case of man the will not the cause of his body or of the bodily activities but the same reality, which given us mediately, through our ideas in space and time perception, as body, and which in cognition conceived as something causally necessary and dependent upon other phenomena, — this im mediately given as will. Because the thing-in-itself not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, we have the paradox, that man feels himself as will immediately free, and yet in idea knows him self to be necessarily determined. So Schopenhauer adopts Kant's doctrine of intelligible and empirical character. In the same way, however, phenomenal Nature must everywhere be regarded as objectificatum that as the perceptional and conceptional mode of representation of the will or the immediately real, and must not be regarded as the product of the latter. The relation of essence to phenomenon not that of cause and effect
" Further, the will as thing-in-itself can be only the one, universal Korld-tcill. " All plurality and multiplicity belong to perception
in space and time; these latter are the principium indieiduationis. Hence things are different and separate from each other only as phenomena — in idea and cognition; in their true essence they are
Cf. World as Will, etc. , II. 18-83.
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590 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Past VL
all the same. The will is the tv «i war. Here lies for Schopen hauer the metaphysical root of morals. It is the deception of the phenomenal that makes the individual distinguish his own weal and woe from that of other individuals, and brings the two into opposition : in the fundamental moral feeling which feels another's sorrows as one's own — in sympathy, the transcendental unity of will of all reality comes to light.
Finally, the will can have for its object no particular content that can be empirically presented in consciousness; for every such content belongs already to its "objectivity. " The world-will has only itself for its object ; it wills only to will. It wills only to be actual; for all that actually is, is itself only a willing. In this sense Schopenhauer calls it the will to live. It is the thing-in-itself which ever gives birth to itself in timeless, eternal process, and as such it is represented in the restless mutation of phenomena.
§ 42. The System of Reason.
The direction which the main line of the idealistic development was to take was prescribed by the principle from which Fichte made bold to throw overboard the conception of the thing-in-itself. The relation of Being and consciousness can be explained only out of consciousness, and by the fact that consciousness " looks at its own action" and creates thereby at once the real and the ideal series of experience — objects and the knowledge of them. The problem of the Wissenschaftslehre therefore, to comprehend the world as a necessary connected whole of rational activities, and the solution can proceed only by reflection on the part of the philos ophising reason upon its own action and upon that which is requi site therefor. The necessity, therefore, which prevails in this system ofreason not caused, but teleological. The dogmatic system understands the intelligence as product of things, the idealistic develops intelligence as an inherently purposeful connection of acts, some of which serve to produce objects. The progress of philo sophical thought should not take the form, that because something is, therefore something else also, but should rather shape itself after the guiding principle that in order that something may take
place, something else must take place also. Every act of reason has a task; to perforin this needs other acts and thus other tasks; the connected series of all activities for the fulfilment of all tasks, taken as a purposeful unity, the system of the reason, the " history of consciousness. " The ground or reason of all Being lies
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Crap. 2, { 42. ] System of Reason : Dialectic. 591
in the ought ; that is, in the activity of self-consciousness directed toward an end.
The schema for carrying out this thought is the dialectical method. If the world is to be comprehended as reason, the system of reason must be developed from an original task; all particular acts of intelligence must be deduced as means to its performance. This
act [lit "deed-act," Thathandlung'] is self-consciousness. A begin ning without assumptions, such as philosophy needs, is not to be found by means of an assertion or proposition, but by means of a demand, which every one must be able to fulfil : " Think thyself! " And the whole business of philosophy consists in making clear what takes place in this act, and what is requisite for it. But this principle can lead on farther, only so long as it is shown that between that which should take place and that which does take place to this end, there is still a contradiction, out of which the new task results, and so on. The dialectical method is a system in
which every problem or task creates a new one. There is in the reason itself a resistance to the result it seeks to achieve, and to overcome this resistance it unfolds a new function. These three momenta are designated as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
If Kant had maintained the necessity of insoluble problems of reason for his explanation and criticism of metaphysics, the idealis tic metaphysics now makes this thought a positive principle. By this means the reason's world becomes an infinity of self-production, and the contradiction between the task and the actual doing is declared to be the real nature of the reason itself. This contradic tion is necessary and cannot be abolished. It belongs to the essen tial nature of the reason ; and since only the reason is real, the con tradiction is thus declared to be real. Thus the dialectical method, this metaphysical transformation of Kant's transcendental logic, came into stronger and stronger opposition to formal logic. The rules of the understanding, which have their general principle in the principle of contradiction, are adequate, perhaps, for the ordi nary elaboration of perceptions into conceptions, judgments, and conclusions; for the intellectual perception of the philosophising reason they do not suffice, before the problems of " speculative con struction" they sink to a relative importance.
This doctrine asserts itself already in the first exposition which Fichte gave to his Science of Knowledge;' it was then spoken out more and more boldly by disciples and associates like Fr. Schlegel, and, ultimately, the speculative reason affected a superiority to the
Omuttage der gtt. W. -L. , f 1 j W, I. 92 H. [Kroegfr's tr„ pp. 63 ff. ].
692 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
"reflective philosophy of the understanding" hemmed in within the principle of contradiction. Schelling ' appealed to the coind- dentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno, and Hegel2 sees in the triumph of the "narrow understanding" over the reason the hereditary error of all earlier philosophy. 3 Meta physics, of which Kant has shown that it is not possible for the understanding, seeks an organ of its own in intellectual perception or intuition, and a form of its own in the dialectical method. The productive synthesis of the manifold must keep its unity above the antitheses into which it divides itself. It is the essential nature of mind or spirit to disunite itself, and from this state of being rent apart, to return back to its original unity.
This triplicity rests entirely upon the above (Fichtean) funda mental characterisation of the mind as that which beholds itself. The reason is not only "in-itself" as a simple ideal reality, but also " for-its. elf " ; it appears to itself as "something other, alien"; it becomes for itself an object different from the subject, and this otherness is the principle of negation. The doing away with this difference, the negation of the negation, is the synthesis of the two moments above named. These are annulled or sublated
[" aufge- hoben," which has no exact English equivalent ; Bosanquet suggests "put by"] in the threefold aspect that their one-sided force is overcome, their relative meaniug is preserved, and their original sense transmuted into a higher truth. Following " this scheme of the "in-itself," "for-itself," and " in-and-for-itself (An-sich, Fir-
sich, An-und-fiir-sich). Hegel developed his dialectical method with great virtuosoship by making each conception " turn into its oppo site," and from the contradiction of the two making the higher con ception proceed, which then experienced the same fortune of finding an antithesis which required a still higher synthesis, and so on. The Master himself, in his employment of this method, particularly in the Phcenomenology and in the Logic, worked in an astonishing wealth of knowledge, a quite unique fineness of feeling for concep- tional connections, and a victorious power of combining thought, while occasionally his profundity passed over into obscurity and schematic word-building. In the case of his disciples, a philosophical jargon grew out of this, which pressed all thought into the triple scheme, and by the thoughtless externality with which it was used,—
> Sixth Vorl. after Meth. d. ak. St. , W. , V. 267 ff.
3 Cf. esp. hia article on Glauben und Wissen, W. , I. 21 ff.
* It is from this point of view that we best can understand Herbart's polemic
against absolute idealism. He, too, finds contradictions in the fundamental conceptions of experience, but just on this account they ought to be worked over until the contradictionless reality is recognised ; cf. above, § 41, 7.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Fichte. 598
and used for a time in widely extended circles, — it was all too well adapted to discredit philosophy as an empty bombast1
2. The system of reason with Fichte, in the first period of his philosophical activity (about 1800), is, in its content also, in full accord with the above method. The original "act" (Tliathandlung) of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing except itself, is that the " J" or self can only be ** posited " by being distinguished from a " Not-I" or "not-self. " Since, however, the not-self is posited only in the self, — i. e. historically expressed, the object posited only in consciousness, — the self and the not-self (i. e. subject and object) must reciprocally determine each other within the " I " or self. From this results the theoretical or the practical series of self-conscious ness, according as the Not-I or the " I " is the determining part.
The functions of the theoretical reason are now developed by Fichte in the following manner : The particular stages result from the reflection of consciousness upon its own previously determined action. By virtue of its own activity, which is limited by nothing external, it presses beyond every bound which the "I" has set for itself in the Not-I as object. The pure perceptions, space and time, the categories as rules of the understanding, and the principles of the reason, are treated as the several forms of this self-determin ing. In place of the antitheses which Kant had set up between these particular strata, Fichte set the principle, that in each higher stage the reason apprehends in purer form what it has accomplished in the lower stage. Knowing is a process of self-knowledge on the part of the reason, beginning with sense perception and ascending to complete knowledge. ' But this whole series of the theoretical reason presupposes an original " self-limitation " of the I. If this is given, the entire series is comprehensible in accordance with the principle of self-perception ; for every activity has its object and its reason in the preceding. The first self-limitation has its ground in no preceding act, and therefore, theoretically, no ground what
ever. It is a groundless, free activity, but as such, the ground of all other activities. This groundless [undetermined] free act is sen sation. It falls into consciousness, therefore, only in its content, which is to be taken up into perception ; as act it like all that has
Of. the humorous portrayal in G. Rtlmelin, Reden nnd AuftaUt, pp. 47-60, Freiburg. 1888.
Without any directly visible influence from Leibniz, his conception of the relation of the different knowing faculties asserts itself here in contrast with the Kantian separation. Only to be noted that this "history of the devel opment of reason " la, with Leibniz, determined causally, with Fichte teleologi- cally . What Hainan and Herder (cf. above, p. 670) demanded as requirement of the unity of intelligence in the I/eibnizian sense, Fichte and Schelling had
lwhile performed in quite another sense.
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694 Germany: Development of Idealism. (. i'art VI.
no ground, unconscious. 1 In this consists its " givenness," by virtue of which it appears as foreign and coming " from without. " In place of the thing-in-itself comes, therefore, the unconscious self- limitation of the I. Fichte calls this activity the productive imagina tion. It is the world-producing activity of the reason.
For sensation there is then no ground which determines it; it is there with absolute freedom, and determines on its part all knowledge as regards content. Hence it can be comprehended only through its end — in the practical Wissenschaflslehre, which has to investigate to what end the self limits itself. This is only to be understood if we regard the I or self, not as resting Being, but as in its nature infinite activity or impulse. For since all action is directed toward an object in connection with which it develops, so the self, which finds its object not given to as the case with the empirical will, must, in order to remain impulse and action, set objects for itself. This takes place in sensation sensation has no ground, but only the end of creating for the impulse of the self
limit beyond which the self passes in order to become object for itself. The actual world of experience, with all its things, and with the " Reality " which has for the theoretical consciousness, only the material for the activity of the practical reason.
The inmost essence of the ego, therefore, its action, directed only toward itself, determined only by itself, — the autonomy of the ethical reason. The system of reason culminates in the categorical imperative. The the ethical will, and the world the material of duty put into sensuous form. It there, to the end that we may be active in it. It not that Being the cause of doing, but Being brought forth for the sake of the doing.
All that is, only to be understood or explained from the point of view of that which ought to be {soil) .
The demand of the Wissenschaflslehre, so paradoxical for the ordinary consciousness,* amounts, accordingly, to robbing the category
The paradox of the "unconscious activities of consciousness" lies in the expression, not in the thing. German philosophers have frequently been very unfortunate in their terminology, most unfortunate precisely where they wished to give German words a new meaning. Fichte not only uses consciousness and self-consciousness promiscuously, but he understands by consciousness, on the one hand, the actual idea or mental presentation of the individual or the empirical ego (hence in this sense " unconscious," bewunttlos), and on the other hand, the functions of the " consciousness in general," of the transcen dental apperception or the " universal ego or self " (in this sense he speaks of "history of consciousness"). In these verbal relations rests good part of the difficulty of Fichte's exposition and of the misunderstanding which has called forth.
In this spirit Fr. H. Jacobi protested against this knitting, not indeed of the stocking, but of the knitting (W. , III. 24 ff. ). Cf. , on the other hand, C. Fort- lage, Beitragc zur Psychologie (Leips. 1876), pp. 40
f.
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Chaf. 2, § 42. ] System oj Reason : Fichte. 595
of substantiality of the fundamental significance which it has in the naive, sensuous view of the world. In this a something that " is," a " Being " (" Seiendes ") is always thought as support and cause of activities; in Fichte's thought the "doing "or action is conceived as the original, and Being is regarded as only the means posited for that end. This antithesis came sharply to light in the atheism controversy, which had so important consequences for Fichte per sonally. The Wissenschaftslehre could not allow God to be regarded as " substance " ; in this case he would necessarily be something derived ; it could seek the metaphysical conception of God only in the "Universal Ego or Self" (allgemeinen Ich), in the absolutely free, world-creating action; and in clear contrast to the natura naiurans of dogmatism it calls God the Moral World-order,1 the ordo ordinans.
Accordingly, the chief philosophical discipline for Fichte is moral science. Projected before Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Fichte's system takes from the same the categorical imperative in the formula " act according to thy conscience," for the starting-point of a strictly carried out science of duties, which develops the general and particular tasks of man from the opposition appearing in the empirical self between the natural impulse and the moral impulse. At the same time, the Kantian rigour is softened by the fact, that man's sensibility, also, is permitted to assert its rights as product
of reason. The dualism still survives, but it is already on the way toward being overcome, and in the thought that the purposeful connected whole of the reason assigns each of its members a voca tion prescribed by its natural manifestation, ethical theory is brought to an elaboration of the " material for the fulfilment of duty," which is much more penetrating and gives a deeper value to the data of experience. This shows itself in Fichte's exposition of professional duties, in his nobler conception of marriage and family life, in the finer penetration of his ethical investigations into the manifold relations of human life.
The like is true, also, of Fichte's treatment of the problems of public life. A youthful energy masters the Kantian fundamental thoughts here, and gives them a much more impressive formulation than they could receive from Kant himself, who undertook the systematic carrying out of these thoughts, only in his old age. The reciprocal limitation of spheres of freedom in the outer social life of individuals for Fichte also, the principle of Natural Right. As "primitive rights" he regarded the claims of the individual to
Ficbte, W. , V. lttt H. , 210 B.
is, '
696 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
freedom of his body as the organ for performance of duty, of his property as being the external sphere of operation to this end, and finally of his self-preservation 'as personality. But these primitive rights become efficient as compulsory rights or laws only through the authority of (positive) laws in the state. The idea of the com pact which is at the basis of the state, Fichte analyses into the citizen, the property, and the defence contract. It is interesting in this connection to see how these thoughts culminate in his politics in the principle, that the state has to make provision that every one may be able to live by his work, — the doctrine, named after him, of the so-called right to work. 1 Work is the duty of the moral person ality, the condition of existence of the physical ; it must uncondi tionally be furnished by the state. Hence the regulation of the relations of labour must not be left to the natural working of supply
and demand (as according to Adam Smith), and the profits of labour must not be left to the mechanism of society's war of interests, but the rational law of the state must enter here. From the point of view of this thought, with a careful consideration of the conditions given by experience,8 Fichte projected his ideal of the socialistic state as "the complete industrial state" (geschlossenen Handelsstaates) . which itself takes in hand all production and manufacturing, and all trade with foreign countries, in order to assign to each citizen his work and also the full revenue for his work. The powerful idealism of the philosopher did not shrink from a deep system of compulsion, if he could hope to assure to every individual thereby a sphere for the free fulfilment of duty.
3. The problem of conceiving the universe as a system of reason was solved in the main in the Science of Knowledge by the method of deducing the external world of the senses as a product, appearing in the empirical ego, of the " consciousness in general " ; in this sense Fichte's doctrine, like Kant's, was later characterised as-" sub jective idealism. " Fichte's meaning in this, however, was through out that " Nature," which it was his intention to have posited as an organic whole,8 should possess the full significance of an objective product of reason, in contrast with the ideas of individuals ; to set this forth he lacked the penetrating knowledge of his subject which he possessed in the case of the relations of human life. Thus it was a supplementing of this work, that was welcome to Fichte
» Naturrecht, § 18 ; W. , III. 210 fl. ; Grschl. Handelsst. , I. 1 ; W„ III. 400 ff.
1 Cf. G. Schmoller, Studie iiber J. G. Fichte in Hildebrand's Jahrb. /. Nat. u. Stat. , 1866; also W. Windelband, Fichte't Idee det deutschen StaaUt (Frei
burg, 1890). * « Fichte, W. . IV. 116.
•
also.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schelling. 597
when Schelling undertook to solve the other part of the problem and took up in earnest the thought of constructing or deducing Nature as the objective system of reason. According to the Science of Knowledge and Kant's Philosophy of Nature this was possible only if Nature could be successfully comprehended as a connected whole
j}f_fprces, having their ultimate end in a service toward the realisa tion of the reason's command. The starting-point for this construc tion was necessarily Kant's dynamic theory, which derived the existence of matter from the relation of the forces of attraction and repulsion (cf. § 38, 7), and its goal was given by that manifestation of Nature in which alone the practical reason evinces itself — the human organism. Between the two the whole wealth of Nature's forms and functions must be spread out as a life in unity, whose rational meaning was to be sought in the organic growth of the final goal out of the material beginnings. Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becoming — this is the theme of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises, seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving asserted itself the more vigorously, as the progress of empirical science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century. The derivation of the organic from the inorganic remained, as Kant stated, problematical, to say the least; a genetic development of organisms on this basis was a vexed question ; for the theory of medieine, which was then passing through a great movement, no key had as yet been found by which it could be fitted into the mechanical conception of the world ; now came, also, the discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena, for which at that time it could not be anticipated that it would be possible to subsume their peculiar mysterious qualities under the point of view of the Galilean mechanics. In contrast with this, Spinoza had made his powerful impression upon the minds of men just because he thought all Nature, man not excluded, as a con nected unity, in which the divine Being manifests itself in all its fulness, and for the development of German thought it became of decisive importance that Goethe made this conception his own. The poet, indeed, as we find it best expressed in his splendid apho risms Die Natur, reinterpreted this view in his own way ; in the stead of the " mathematical consequence " and its mechanical neces sity he set the concrete idea of a tiring unity of Nature, in which the
Weltanschauung of the Renaissance was revived, though without a
598 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
formulation in abstract thought. This poetic Spinozism ' became an essential link in the development of the idealistic systems.
All these motives come into play in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature : as a result itsjsentral conception, is life, and it makes the attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate end of the production of organic life. Nature is not to be described and measured, but the meaning and significance which belong to its particular phenomena in the purposeful system of the whole are to be understood. The " categories of Nature " are the forms or shapes in which the reason sets itself as objective to itself; they form a system of development in which every particular phenomenon finds its logically determined place. In carrying out this idea Schelling
was of course dependent upon the condition of the natural science of his time. Of the connection of forces, of their transformation into each other, which was the principal point of interest for his purpose, ideas at that time were still very imperfect, and the philosopher did not hesitate to fill out the gaps of knowledge by hypotheses, which he took from the a priori construction of the teleological system. In many cases these theories proved valuable heuristic principles (cf. above, p. 666), in others they proved false
paths by which investigation could attain no useful results.
The element in the Philosophy of Nature, which is of historical significance, is its opposition to the dominance of the Democritic- Galilean principle of the purely mechanical explanation of Nature.
determination is here again regarded as only external form and appearance, and the causal mechanical connection as only the mode of representation which conforms to the understanding. The meaning of the structures of Nature is the significance which they have in the system of the development of the whole. If, there fore, Schelling turned his look toward the relationship of forms in the organic world, if he used the beginnings of comj>arative mor phology, in which Goethe played so important a role, in order to ex hibit the unity of the plan which Nature follows in the succession of animate beings, yet this connected system was not for him, or for his disciples such as Oken, properly a causal genesis in time, but the expression of a gradually succeeding fulfilment of the end. In the different orders of animate beings we see in separate forms, accord ing to Oken, what Nature intends with the organism, and what she first reaches completely in man. This teleological interpretation
1 It took Herder prisoner also, as is proved by his conversations on Spinoza's system under the title Gott (1787).
Quantitative
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reanon : iSchelling, Goethe. 599
does not exclude a causal relation in time, but, with Schelling and Oken at least, it does not include it. It is not their point to ask whether one species has arisen from another; they only wish to show that one is the preliminary stage for that which the other accomplishes. 1
From this we can understand why the mechanical explanation of Nature, which has again attained the victory in the nineteenth cen tury, is wont to see in the period of the Philosophy of Nature, only a fit of teleologies! excess, now happily overcome, which checked the quiet work of investigation. But the chronicles of the contro versy, which since the time of Democritus and Plato has tilled the history of the mode of conceiving Nature, are not yet closed, even to-day. The reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative, which
presses forward victoriously under the flag of mathematics, has repeatedly encountered the need which seeks behind motions in space a reality of rational meaning. This felt need of a living con tent of Nature Schelling's theory aimed to meet, and for this reason the great poet, who endeavoured to demonstrate as the true reality in the charming play of colours not a vibration of atoms, but a some thing that is originally qualitative, felt drawn toward it. This is the philosophical meaning of Goethe's " Theory of Colours. "
With Schelling the system of Nature is ruled by the thought that in it the objective reason struggles upward from its material modes of manifestation, through the multitude of forms and transforma tions of forces, up to the organism in which it comes to conscious ness. * Sensitive beings form the termination of the life of Nature ; with sensation the system of the Science of Knowledge begins. The devious way which Nature pursues to this goal is frequently altered in details in the various remodellings which Schelling gave to his Philosophy of Nature, but in its main outlines it remained the same. In particular, it was the conception of duality, of the opposition of forces which negate each other in a higher unity, that formed the fundamental schema of his " construction of Nature," — a conception due to the Science of Knowledge, — and from this point of view the polarity in electric and magnetic phenomena which
1 The " interpretation " of phenomena wu, to be sure, a dangerous principle from a scientific point of view ; it opened the gates of the Philosophy of Nature to poetic fancy and brilliant flashes. These guests forced their way in even with Schelling, but still more with his disciple*, such as Xoralit, Ottffetu, and Schubert. In the case of Novalis especially we have a magical, dreamy sym bolism of Nature in a play which is admirable ia poetry but questionable in philosophy.
. • The poetry of this fundamental thought was expressed in most character istic form by Schelling himself In the beautiful verses which are printed in &*. '• Ltben in Brie/en, I. 282 ft
600 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
busied Schelling's contemporaries as a newly found enigma was particularly significant for him.
4. When Schelling wished to place beside his Philosophy of Nature an elaboration of his own of the Science of Knowledge, under the name of " Transcendental Idealism," an important change had taken place in the common thought of the Jena idealists, to which he now gave the first systematic expression. The impetus to this came from Schiller, and from the development which he had given to the thoughts of the Critique of Judgment. It had become plainer step by step that the system of reason must become perfected for idealism in the aesthetic function, and in place of the ethical idealism which the Science of Knowledge taught, and the physical idealism which the Philosophy of Nature presented, appeared now aesthetic idealism.
The re-shaping, so rich in results, which Kant's thoughts experi enced through Schiller, by no means concerned merely the aesthetic questions which lay nearest the poet, but likewise the ethical ques tions and those pertaining to the history of philosophy, and there with the whole system of reason. For Schiller's thoughts, even before his acquaintance with Kant, — as is shown among other things by his poem, Die Kiinstler, — had been turned to the prob lem of the significance of art and the beautiful in the whole con nected system of man's rational life and its historical development, and by solving this problem with Kantian conceptions he gave to the idealism of the Science of Knowledge a decisive turn.
This began with the new Forms which Schiller found for Kant's conception of beauty. The synthesis of the theoretical and the practical in the aesthetic reason (cf. § 40, 2) could perhaps find no more fortunate expression than in Schiller's definition of beauty as
freedom in phenomenal appearance. 1 It asserts that aesthetic con templation apprehends its object without subjecting it to the rules of the cognising understanding ; it is not subsumed under concep tions, and we do not ask for the conditions which it has in other phenomena. It is perceived as if it were free. Schopenhauer after wards expressed this in the form that the enjoyment of the beautiful is the contemplation of the object in independence of the principle of sufficient reason. Schiller later laid still more weight upon the point that the aesthetic process is as independent of the practical reason as of the theoretical. The beautiful (in distinction from the agreeable and the good) is as little an object of the sensuous as it
1 CI. chiefly the letters to Korner of February, 1793, also the sketch on "The Beautiful in Art," printed with the letter of the 20th of June of that same year, — all fragments of the dialogue Kallias which was not completed.
Chap. 2, §42. ] System of Reason : Schiller. 601
is of the moral impulse ; it lacks that quality of want or need which belongs to the life of empirical impulse, just as it lacks the earnest ness of the practical reason. In the aesthetic life the play impulse unfolds itself ; ' every stirring of the will is silent in disinterested
In this, too, Schiller was followed by Schopenhauer, when the latter found the happiness of the {esthetic condition in the
overcoming of the unhappy will to live, in the activity of the pure, ' willess subject of knowledge. *
From this Schiller concluded in the first place that wherever we have to do with educating man, subject to his sensuous nature, to a condition where he shall will morally, the aesthetic life offers the most effective means to this end. Kant had designated the " rever sal of motives " as the ethical task of man (cf. above, § 39, 6) ; for the transition from the sensuous to the ethical determination of the will he offered man, as an aid, religion ; Schiller offered art. ' Faith and taste cause man to act legally, at least, when he is not yet ripe for morality. In intercourse with the beautiful the feelings become refined, so that natural rudeness vanishes, and man awakes to his higher vocation. Art is the fostering soil for science and morality. Such was the teaching of Schiller in the Artists ; his Letters on the ^Esthetic Education of the Human Race go deeper. The aesthetic condition, or state (Stoat), because it is the completely disinterested state, destroys the sensuous will, also, and thus makes room for the possibility of the moral will ; it is the necessary point of transition from the physical state, ruled by needs, into the moral state. In the physical state man endures the power of Nature ; in the aesthetic state he frees himself from it ; and in the moral state
he controls it.
But already in the Artists the beautiful had been assigned a
second higher task of ultimately giving also the culmination and completion to moral and intellectual cultivation, and in building this thought into the critical system the poet passes over from supple menting to transforming the Kantian doctrine. The two sides of human nature are not reconciled if the moral impulse is obliged to overcome the sensuous impulse. In the physical and in the " moral " state oue side of human nature is always suppressed in favour of the
' The attempt which Schiller make* in his Letters concerning Afthrstie Education (11 f. ) to lay a basis (or this in transcendental psychology remind us strongly of the Keinhold-Fichte time when "Jena whirred with the buxi of Form and Matter. "
• World as Will, etc. , I. }{ 36-38. In this connection Schopenhauer no doubt claims the same value for scientific knowledge. Cf. ( 43, 4.
* Cf. the conclusion of the essay, Utber den moralitchrn Nutsen asthttitchtr SUten.
contemplation.
602 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pakt VL
other. We have a complete manhood only where neither of the two impulses prevails over the other. Man is truly man, only where he plays, where the war within him is silent, where his sensuous nature is exalted to so noble a sentiment or sensibility that it is no longer needful for him to will loftily. The Kantian rigorism holds where- ever sensuous inclination stands over against duty : but there is the higher ideal of the " schone Seele " — the beautiful soul — which does not know this internal conflict because its nature is so ennobled that
lit fulfils the moral law from its own inclination. And just this ennobling is gained by man, only through aesthetic education. Through it alone is the sensuous-supersensuous discord in human nature abolished ; in it alone does complete, full manhood come to realisation. " " " "
5. In the ideal of the schone Seele the virtuosoship of Shaftesbury overcomes the Kantian dualism. The completion of man is the aesthetic reconciliation of the two natures which dwell within him ; culture is to make the life of the individual a work of art, by ennobling what is given through the senses to full accord with the ethical vocation. In this direction Schiller gave expres sion to the ideal view of life characteristic of his time in antithesis to the rigorism of Kant, and the aesthetic Humanism which he thus wrested from abstract thought found besides his, a wealth of other characteristic manifestations. In them all, however, Goethe appeared as the mighty personality, who presented in living form this ideal height of humanity in the aesthetic perfection of his conduct of life, as well as in the great works of his poetic activity.
In this conception of the genius Schiller was first joined by Wil liam von Humboldt} He sought to understand the nature of great poems from this point of view ; he found the ideal of man's life in the harmony of the sensuous and the moral nature, and in his treatise which laid the foundations for the science of language 2 he applied this principle by teaching that the nature of language is to be under stood from the organic interaction of the two elements.
An attitude of sharper opposition to the Kantian rigorism had already been taken, in the Shaftesbury spirit, by Jacobi in his romance patterned after Goethe's personality, " AUwill's Briefsamm- lung. " The moral genius also is " exemplary " ; he does not subject himself to traditional rules and maxims, he lives himself out and thereby " gives himself the laws of his morality. This "ethical Nature is the highest that the circuit of humanity affords.
i Born 1787, died 1836. Works, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1841 ff. ). Aside from the correspondence, especially that with Schiller, cf. principally the jf&theti- »chen Versuehe (Brunswick, 1799). Also Rud. Haym, W. v. H. (Berlin, 1866).
* Urbrr die Katei- Spraehe (Berlin, 18361.
Chap. 2, $ 42. ] 8ystem of Reason : Romanticists. 603
Among the Romantic School this ethical "geniality" in theory and practice came to its full pride of luxuriant efflorescence. Here it developed as an cesthetic aristocracy of culture in opposition to the democratic utility of the Enlightenment morals.
the inhibition to + "* ~ and to _ —. Cf. on thin arbitrarily axiomatic a a+"
assumption and on the mistaken nature of the whole psychological calculus," A. Lange, Die Grundlegung dtr mathftnatuehen Ptyehologif, Duisburg, 1866.
Allgrm. Mttnphyrik. «f 240 ff. . 331 If. VV\, IV. 147 ft. , 3*7 fl. In llerbart's metaphysics the branching out of general ontology into the beginnings of psy chology and natural philosophy designated by the names Eidology and Sfneehology.
Cf. asp. Apodiktik. 261, 302 ff.
lb. 386 ff.
Following the example of Kant and Fichte, Bouterwek ends his theoretical
Apodiktik in scepticism or in completely abstract-formal, absolute knowledge U the "practical" apodictic which first gala* a relation of its content to
reality.
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588 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI
resistance to this will. The antithesis of force and resistance thus furnishes a common basis to the knowledge of the reality of our selves, and to that of the reality of other things, — of the I and the Not-I. 1 This doctrine Bouterwek would have called absolute Virtu- alism. We know our own reality in that we will, and the reality of other things in that our will finds in them a resisting force. The feeling of resistance refutes pure subjectivism or solipsism, but this relative knowledge of the particular forces of the real is supple mented by the consciousness of our own willing to form a merely empirical science. 8
This thought of his Gottingen teacher was developed by Schopen hauer, under the influence of Fichte, to a metaphysics. With a bold leap he swings himself up from the position of Virtualism to the knowledge of the essential nature of all things. We recognise the will within us as the true reality, and the resistance from which we know the reality of other things must, therefore, be likewise will. This is demanded by the " metaphysical need " of a unitary explana tion for all experience. The world " as idea " can be only phenome non ; an object is possible only in the subject and determined by the Forms of the subject. Hence the world in man's idea or mental representation (as " phenomenon of the brain," as Schopenhauer has often said with a dangerously contradictory laxity of expression) appears as a manifold ordered in space and time, a manifold whose connection can be thought only in accordance with the principle of causality, — the only one of the Kantian categories which Schopen hauer can admit to an originality of the same rank as that which belongs to the pure perceptions. Bound to these Forms, conceptional knowledge can have for its object only the necessity which prevails between individual phenomena: for causality is a relation of phe nomena to each other; science knows nothing absolute, nothing unconditioned; the guiding thread of causality, which leads from one condition to the other, never breaks off and must not be broken off arbitrarily. 8 The conceptional work of science can, therefore, in nowise raise itself above this infinite series of phenomena ; only an intuitive interpretation of the whole world of ideas, a look of genius over experience, an immediate apprehension, can penetrate to th6 true essence, which appears in our ideas as the world determined in space and time and hy causality. This intuition, however, is that by which the knowing subject is given immediately through itself as will. This word solves, therefore, the mystery of the outer world
i Apodiktik II. 68 ,ft a lb. II. 67 I.
8 In this Schopenhauer is in complete agreement with Jacobi (cf. above, p. 674).
Cm Ac. 41. Thing-in-itself Schopenhauer. 589
also. For we must apprehend the significance of all that given to ns immediately in space and time as idea,1 according to this analogy
of the only thing which immediately given. The thing-in-itself the Will.
The word "will" as here used must indeed be taken in an ex tended sense. In men and in animals the will appears as motiva tion determined through ideas, in the instinctive and vegetative life of the organism as susceptibility to stimulation, in the rest of the world of experience as mechanical processes. The meaning which
common to these different internal or external kinds of causality, should be designated a potiori as will, in accordance with that form in which alone immediately known to us. Accordingly the philosopher emphasises expressly the point, that the particular peculiarities with which the will given in human self-perception, i. e. its motivation through ideas and conceptions, must be kept quite apart from our notion of the will as thing-in-itself, — requirement which was, indeed, hard enough for Schopenhauer himself to
fulfil.
At the same time, however, the relation between thing-in-itself
and phenomenon must not be thought according to the rule of the understanding, i. e. causally. The thing-in-itself is not the cause of phenomena. Even in the case of man the will not the cause of his body or of the bodily activities but the same reality, which given us mediately, through our ideas in space and time perception, as body, and which in cognition conceived as something causally necessary and dependent upon other phenomena, — this im mediately given as will. Because the thing-in-itself not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, we have the paradox, that man feels himself as will immediately free, and yet in idea knows him self to be necessarily determined. So Schopenhauer adopts Kant's doctrine of intelligible and empirical character. In the same way, however, phenomenal Nature must everywhere be regarded as objectificatum that as the perceptional and conceptional mode of representation of the will or the immediately real, and must not be regarded as the product of the latter. The relation of essence to phenomenon not that of cause and effect
" Further, the will as thing-in-itself can be only the one, universal Korld-tcill. " All plurality and multiplicity belong to perception
in space and time; these latter are the principium indieiduationis. Hence things are different and separate from each other only as phenomena — in idea and cognition; in their true essence they are
Cf. World as Will, etc. , II. 18-83.
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590 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Past VL
all the same. The will is the tv «i war. Here lies for Schopen hauer the metaphysical root of morals. It is the deception of the phenomenal that makes the individual distinguish his own weal and woe from that of other individuals, and brings the two into opposition : in the fundamental moral feeling which feels another's sorrows as one's own — in sympathy, the transcendental unity of will of all reality comes to light.
Finally, the will can have for its object no particular content that can be empirically presented in consciousness; for every such content belongs already to its "objectivity. " The world-will has only itself for its object ; it wills only to will. It wills only to be actual; for all that actually is, is itself only a willing. In this sense Schopenhauer calls it the will to live. It is the thing-in-itself which ever gives birth to itself in timeless, eternal process, and as such it is represented in the restless mutation of phenomena.
§ 42. The System of Reason.
The direction which the main line of the idealistic development was to take was prescribed by the principle from which Fichte made bold to throw overboard the conception of the thing-in-itself. The relation of Being and consciousness can be explained only out of consciousness, and by the fact that consciousness " looks at its own action" and creates thereby at once the real and the ideal series of experience — objects and the knowledge of them. The problem of the Wissenschaftslehre therefore, to comprehend the world as a necessary connected whole of rational activities, and the solution can proceed only by reflection on the part of the philos ophising reason upon its own action and upon that which is requi site therefor. The necessity, therefore, which prevails in this system ofreason not caused, but teleological. The dogmatic system understands the intelligence as product of things, the idealistic develops intelligence as an inherently purposeful connection of acts, some of which serve to produce objects. The progress of philo sophical thought should not take the form, that because something is, therefore something else also, but should rather shape itself after the guiding principle that in order that something may take
place, something else must take place also. Every act of reason has a task; to perforin this needs other acts and thus other tasks; the connected series of all activities for the fulfilment of all tasks, taken as a purposeful unity, the system of the reason, the " history of consciousness. " The ground or reason of all Being lies
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Crap. 2, { 42. ] System of Reason : Dialectic. 591
in the ought ; that is, in the activity of self-consciousness directed toward an end.
The schema for carrying out this thought is the dialectical method. If the world is to be comprehended as reason, the system of reason must be developed from an original task; all particular acts of intelligence must be deduced as means to its performance. This
act [lit "deed-act," Thathandlung'] is self-consciousness. A begin ning without assumptions, such as philosophy needs, is not to be found by means of an assertion or proposition, but by means of a demand, which every one must be able to fulfil : " Think thyself! " And the whole business of philosophy consists in making clear what takes place in this act, and what is requisite for it. But this principle can lead on farther, only so long as it is shown that between that which should take place and that which does take place to this end, there is still a contradiction, out of which the new task results, and so on. The dialectical method is a system in
which every problem or task creates a new one. There is in the reason itself a resistance to the result it seeks to achieve, and to overcome this resistance it unfolds a new function. These three momenta are designated as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
If Kant had maintained the necessity of insoluble problems of reason for his explanation and criticism of metaphysics, the idealis tic metaphysics now makes this thought a positive principle. By this means the reason's world becomes an infinity of self-production, and the contradiction between the task and the actual doing is declared to be the real nature of the reason itself. This contradic tion is necessary and cannot be abolished. It belongs to the essen tial nature of the reason ; and since only the reason is real, the con tradiction is thus declared to be real. Thus the dialectical method, this metaphysical transformation of Kant's transcendental logic, came into stronger and stronger opposition to formal logic. The rules of the understanding, which have their general principle in the principle of contradiction, are adequate, perhaps, for the ordi nary elaboration of perceptions into conceptions, judgments, and conclusions; for the intellectual perception of the philosophising reason they do not suffice, before the problems of " speculative con struction" they sink to a relative importance.
This doctrine asserts itself already in the first exposition which Fichte gave to his Science of Knowledge;' it was then spoken out more and more boldly by disciples and associates like Fr. Schlegel, and, ultimately, the speculative reason affected a superiority to the
Omuttage der gtt. W. -L. , f 1 j W, I. 92 H. [Kroegfr's tr„ pp. 63 ff. ].
692 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
"reflective philosophy of the understanding" hemmed in within the principle of contradiction. Schelling ' appealed to the coind- dentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno, and Hegel2 sees in the triumph of the "narrow understanding" over the reason the hereditary error of all earlier philosophy. 3 Meta physics, of which Kant has shown that it is not possible for the understanding, seeks an organ of its own in intellectual perception or intuition, and a form of its own in the dialectical method. The productive synthesis of the manifold must keep its unity above the antitheses into which it divides itself. It is the essential nature of mind or spirit to disunite itself, and from this state of being rent apart, to return back to its original unity.
This triplicity rests entirely upon the above (Fichtean) funda mental characterisation of the mind as that which beholds itself. The reason is not only "in-itself" as a simple ideal reality, but also " for-its. elf " ; it appears to itself as "something other, alien"; it becomes for itself an object different from the subject, and this otherness is the principle of negation. The doing away with this difference, the negation of the negation, is the synthesis of the two moments above named. These are annulled or sublated
[" aufge- hoben," which has no exact English equivalent ; Bosanquet suggests "put by"] in the threefold aspect that their one-sided force is overcome, their relative meaniug is preserved, and their original sense transmuted into a higher truth. Following " this scheme of the "in-itself," "for-itself," and " in-and-for-itself (An-sich, Fir-
sich, An-und-fiir-sich). Hegel developed his dialectical method with great virtuosoship by making each conception " turn into its oppo site," and from the contradiction of the two making the higher con ception proceed, which then experienced the same fortune of finding an antithesis which required a still higher synthesis, and so on. The Master himself, in his employment of this method, particularly in the Phcenomenology and in the Logic, worked in an astonishing wealth of knowledge, a quite unique fineness of feeling for concep- tional connections, and a victorious power of combining thought, while occasionally his profundity passed over into obscurity and schematic word-building. In the case of his disciples, a philosophical jargon grew out of this, which pressed all thought into the triple scheme, and by the thoughtless externality with which it was used,—
> Sixth Vorl. after Meth. d. ak. St. , W. , V. 267 ff.
3 Cf. esp. hia article on Glauben und Wissen, W. , I. 21 ff.
* It is from this point of view that we best can understand Herbart's polemic
against absolute idealism. He, too, finds contradictions in the fundamental conceptions of experience, but just on this account they ought to be worked over until the contradictionless reality is recognised ; cf. above, § 41, 7.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Fichte. 598
and used for a time in widely extended circles, — it was all too well adapted to discredit philosophy as an empty bombast1
2. The system of reason with Fichte, in the first period of his philosophical activity (about 1800), is, in its content also, in full accord with the above method. The original "act" (Tliathandlung) of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing except itself, is that the " J" or self can only be ** posited " by being distinguished from a " Not-I" or "not-self. " Since, however, the not-self is posited only in the self, — i. e. historically expressed, the object posited only in consciousness, — the self and the not-self (i. e. subject and object) must reciprocally determine each other within the " I " or self. From this results the theoretical or the practical series of self-conscious ness, according as the Not-I or the " I " is the determining part.
The functions of the theoretical reason are now developed by Fichte in the following manner : The particular stages result from the reflection of consciousness upon its own previously determined action. By virtue of its own activity, which is limited by nothing external, it presses beyond every bound which the "I" has set for itself in the Not-I as object. The pure perceptions, space and time, the categories as rules of the understanding, and the principles of the reason, are treated as the several forms of this self-determin ing. In place of the antitheses which Kant had set up between these particular strata, Fichte set the principle, that in each higher stage the reason apprehends in purer form what it has accomplished in the lower stage. Knowing is a process of self-knowledge on the part of the reason, beginning with sense perception and ascending to complete knowledge. ' But this whole series of the theoretical reason presupposes an original " self-limitation " of the I. If this is given, the entire series is comprehensible in accordance with the principle of self-perception ; for every activity has its object and its reason in the preceding. The first self-limitation has its ground in no preceding act, and therefore, theoretically, no ground what
ever. It is a groundless, free activity, but as such, the ground of all other activities. This groundless [undetermined] free act is sen sation. It falls into consciousness, therefore, only in its content, which is to be taken up into perception ; as act it like all that has
Of. the humorous portrayal in G. Rtlmelin, Reden nnd AuftaUt, pp. 47-60, Freiburg. 1888.
Without any directly visible influence from Leibniz, his conception of the relation of the different knowing faculties asserts itself here in contrast with the Kantian separation. Only to be noted that this "history of the devel opment of reason " la, with Leibniz, determined causally, with Fichte teleologi- cally . What Hainan and Herder (cf. above, p. 670) demanded as requirement of the unity of intelligence in the I/eibnizian sense, Fichte and Schelling had
lwhile performed in quite another sense.
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694 Germany: Development of Idealism. (. i'art VI.
no ground, unconscious. 1 In this consists its " givenness," by virtue of which it appears as foreign and coming " from without. " In place of the thing-in-itself comes, therefore, the unconscious self- limitation of the I. Fichte calls this activity the productive imagina tion. It is the world-producing activity of the reason.
For sensation there is then no ground which determines it; it is there with absolute freedom, and determines on its part all knowledge as regards content. Hence it can be comprehended only through its end — in the practical Wissenschaflslehre, which has to investigate to what end the self limits itself. This is only to be understood if we regard the I or self, not as resting Being, but as in its nature infinite activity or impulse. For since all action is directed toward an object in connection with which it develops, so the self, which finds its object not given to as the case with the empirical will, must, in order to remain impulse and action, set objects for itself. This takes place in sensation sensation has no ground, but only the end of creating for the impulse of the self
limit beyond which the self passes in order to become object for itself. The actual world of experience, with all its things, and with the " Reality " which has for the theoretical consciousness, only the material for the activity of the practical reason.
The inmost essence of the ego, therefore, its action, directed only toward itself, determined only by itself, — the autonomy of the ethical reason. The system of reason culminates in the categorical imperative. The the ethical will, and the world the material of duty put into sensuous form. It there, to the end that we may be active in it. It not that Being the cause of doing, but Being brought forth for the sake of the doing.
All that is, only to be understood or explained from the point of view of that which ought to be {soil) .
The demand of the Wissenschaflslehre, so paradoxical for the ordinary consciousness,* amounts, accordingly, to robbing the category
The paradox of the "unconscious activities of consciousness" lies in the expression, not in the thing. German philosophers have frequently been very unfortunate in their terminology, most unfortunate precisely where they wished to give German words a new meaning. Fichte not only uses consciousness and self-consciousness promiscuously, but he understands by consciousness, on the one hand, the actual idea or mental presentation of the individual or the empirical ego (hence in this sense " unconscious," bewunttlos), and on the other hand, the functions of the " consciousness in general," of the transcen dental apperception or the " universal ego or self " (in this sense he speaks of "history of consciousness"). In these verbal relations rests good part of the difficulty of Fichte's exposition and of the misunderstanding which has called forth.
In this spirit Fr. H. Jacobi protested against this knitting, not indeed of the stocking, but of the knitting (W. , III. 24 ff. ). Cf. , on the other hand, C. Fort- lage, Beitragc zur Psychologie (Leips. 1876), pp. 40
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Chaf. 2, § 42. ] System oj Reason : Fichte. 595
of substantiality of the fundamental significance which it has in the naive, sensuous view of the world. In this a something that " is," a " Being " (" Seiendes ") is always thought as support and cause of activities; in Fichte's thought the "doing "or action is conceived as the original, and Being is regarded as only the means posited for that end. This antithesis came sharply to light in the atheism controversy, which had so important consequences for Fichte per sonally. The Wissenschaftslehre could not allow God to be regarded as " substance " ; in this case he would necessarily be something derived ; it could seek the metaphysical conception of God only in the "Universal Ego or Self" (allgemeinen Ich), in the absolutely free, world-creating action; and in clear contrast to the natura naiurans of dogmatism it calls God the Moral World-order,1 the ordo ordinans.
Accordingly, the chief philosophical discipline for Fichte is moral science. Projected before Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Fichte's system takes from the same the categorical imperative in the formula " act according to thy conscience," for the starting-point of a strictly carried out science of duties, which develops the general and particular tasks of man from the opposition appearing in the empirical self between the natural impulse and the moral impulse. At the same time, the Kantian rigour is softened by the fact, that man's sensibility, also, is permitted to assert its rights as product
of reason. The dualism still survives, but it is already on the way toward being overcome, and in the thought that the purposeful connected whole of the reason assigns each of its members a voca tion prescribed by its natural manifestation, ethical theory is brought to an elaboration of the " material for the fulfilment of duty," which is much more penetrating and gives a deeper value to the data of experience. This shows itself in Fichte's exposition of professional duties, in his nobler conception of marriage and family life, in the finer penetration of his ethical investigations into the manifold relations of human life.
The like is true, also, of Fichte's treatment of the problems of public life. A youthful energy masters the Kantian fundamental thoughts here, and gives them a much more impressive formulation than they could receive from Kant himself, who undertook the systematic carrying out of these thoughts, only in his old age. The reciprocal limitation of spheres of freedom in the outer social life of individuals for Fichte also, the principle of Natural Right. As "primitive rights" he regarded the claims of the individual to
Ficbte, W. , V. lttt H. , 210 B.
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696 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
freedom of his body as the organ for performance of duty, of his property as being the external sphere of operation to this end, and finally of his self-preservation 'as personality. But these primitive rights become efficient as compulsory rights or laws only through the authority of (positive) laws in the state. The idea of the com pact which is at the basis of the state, Fichte analyses into the citizen, the property, and the defence contract. It is interesting in this connection to see how these thoughts culminate in his politics in the principle, that the state has to make provision that every one may be able to live by his work, — the doctrine, named after him, of the so-called right to work. 1 Work is the duty of the moral person ality, the condition of existence of the physical ; it must uncondi tionally be furnished by the state. Hence the regulation of the relations of labour must not be left to the natural working of supply
and demand (as according to Adam Smith), and the profits of labour must not be left to the mechanism of society's war of interests, but the rational law of the state must enter here. From the point of view of this thought, with a careful consideration of the conditions given by experience,8 Fichte projected his ideal of the socialistic state as "the complete industrial state" (geschlossenen Handelsstaates) . which itself takes in hand all production and manufacturing, and all trade with foreign countries, in order to assign to each citizen his work and also the full revenue for his work. The powerful idealism of the philosopher did not shrink from a deep system of compulsion, if he could hope to assure to every individual thereby a sphere for the free fulfilment of duty.
3. The problem of conceiving the universe as a system of reason was solved in the main in the Science of Knowledge by the method of deducing the external world of the senses as a product, appearing in the empirical ego, of the " consciousness in general " ; in this sense Fichte's doctrine, like Kant's, was later characterised as-" sub jective idealism. " Fichte's meaning in this, however, was through out that " Nature," which it was his intention to have posited as an organic whole,8 should possess the full significance of an objective product of reason, in contrast with the ideas of individuals ; to set this forth he lacked the penetrating knowledge of his subject which he possessed in the case of the relations of human life. Thus it was a supplementing of this work, that was welcome to Fichte
» Naturrecht, § 18 ; W. , III. 210 fl. ; Grschl. Handelsst. , I. 1 ; W„ III. 400 ff.
1 Cf. G. Schmoller, Studie iiber J. G. Fichte in Hildebrand's Jahrb. /. Nat. u. Stat. , 1866; also W. Windelband, Fichte't Idee det deutschen StaaUt (Frei
burg, 1890). * « Fichte, W. . IV. 116.
•
also.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schelling. 597
when Schelling undertook to solve the other part of the problem and took up in earnest the thought of constructing or deducing Nature as the objective system of reason. According to the Science of Knowledge and Kant's Philosophy of Nature this was possible only if Nature could be successfully comprehended as a connected whole
j}f_fprces, having their ultimate end in a service toward the realisa tion of the reason's command. The starting-point for this construc tion was necessarily Kant's dynamic theory, which derived the existence of matter from the relation of the forces of attraction and repulsion (cf. § 38, 7), and its goal was given by that manifestation of Nature in which alone the practical reason evinces itself — the human organism. Between the two the whole wealth of Nature's forms and functions must be spread out as a life in unity, whose rational meaning was to be sought in the organic growth of the final goal out of the material beginnings. Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becoming — this is the theme of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises, seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving asserted itself the more vigorously, as the progress of empirical science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century. The derivation of the organic from the inorganic remained, as Kant stated, problematical, to say the least; a genetic development of organisms on this basis was a vexed question ; for the theory of medieine, which was then passing through a great movement, no key had as yet been found by which it could be fitted into the mechanical conception of the world ; now came, also, the discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena, for which at that time it could not be anticipated that it would be possible to subsume their peculiar mysterious qualities under the point of view of the Galilean mechanics. In contrast with this, Spinoza had made his powerful impression upon the minds of men just because he thought all Nature, man not excluded, as a con nected unity, in which the divine Being manifests itself in all its fulness, and for the development of German thought it became of decisive importance that Goethe made this conception his own. The poet, indeed, as we find it best expressed in his splendid apho risms Die Natur, reinterpreted this view in his own way ; in the stead of the " mathematical consequence " and its mechanical neces sity he set the concrete idea of a tiring unity of Nature, in which the
Weltanschauung of the Renaissance was revived, though without a
598 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
formulation in abstract thought. This poetic Spinozism ' became an essential link in the development of the idealistic systems.
All these motives come into play in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature : as a result itsjsentral conception, is life, and it makes the attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate end of the production of organic life. Nature is not to be described and measured, but the meaning and significance which belong to its particular phenomena in the purposeful system of the whole are to be understood. The " categories of Nature " are the forms or shapes in which the reason sets itself as objective to itself; they form a system of development in which every particular phenomenon finds its logically determined place. In carrying out this idea Schelling
was of course dependent upon the condition of the natural science of his time. Of the connection of forces, of their transformation into each other, which was the principal point of interest for his purpose, ideas at that time were still very imperfect, and the philosopher did not hesitate to fill out the gaps of knowledge by hypotheses, which he took from the a priori construction of the teleological system. In many cases these theories proved valuable heuristic principles (cf. above, p. 666), in others they proved false
paths by which investigation could attain no useful results.
The element in the Philosophy of Nature, which is of historical significance, is its opposition to the dominance of the Democritic- Galilean principle of the purely mechanical explanation of Nature.
determination is here again regarded as only external form and appearance, and the causal mechanical connection as only the mode of representation which conforms to the understanding. The meaning of the structures of Nature is the significance which they have in the system of the development of the whole. If, there fore, Schelling turned his look toward the relationship of forms in the organic world, if he used the beginnings of comj>arative mor phology, in which Goethe played so important a role, in order to ex hibit the unity of the plan which Nature follows in the succession of animate beings, yet this connected system was not for him, or for his disciples such as Oken, properly a causal genesis in time, but the expression of a gradually succeeding fulfilment of the end. In the different orders of animate beings we see in separate forms, accord ing to Oken, what Nature intends with the organism, and what she first reaches completely in man. This teleological interpretation
1 It took Herder prisoner also, as is proved by his conversations on Spinoza's system under the title Gott (1787).
Quantitative
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reanon : iSchelling, Goethe. 599
does not exclude a causal relation in time, but, with Schelling and Oken at least, it does not include it. It is not their point to ask whether one species has arisen from another; they only wish to show that one is the preliminary stage for that which the other accomplishes. 1
From this we can understand why the mechanical explanation of Nature, which has again attained the victory in the nineteenth cen tury, is wont to see in the period of the Philosophy of Nature, only a fit of teleologies! excess, now happily overcome, which checked the quiet work of investigation. But the chronicles of the contro versy, which since the time of Democritus and Plato has tilled the history of the mode of conceiving Nature, are not yet closed, even to-day. The reduction of the qualitative to the quantitative, which
presses forward victoriously under the flag of mathematics, has repeatedly encountered the need which seeks behind motions in space a reality of rational meaning. This felt need of a living con tent of Nature Schelling's theory aimed to meet, and for this reason the great poet, who endeavoured to demonstrate as the true reality in the charming play of colours not a vibration of atoms, but a some thing that is originally qualitative, felt drawn toward it. This is the philosophical meaning of Goethe's " Theory of Colours. "
With Schelling the system of Nature is ruled by the thought that in it the objective reason struggles upward from its material modes of manifestation, through the multitude of forms and transforma tions of forces, up to the organism in which it comes to conscious ness. * Sensitive beings form the termination of the life of Nature ; with sensation the system of the Science of Knowledge begins. The devious way which Nature pursues to this goal is frequently altered in details in the various remodellings which Schelling gave to his Philosophy of Nature, but in its main outlines it remained the same. In particular, it was the conception of duality, of the opposition of forces which negate each other in a higher unity, that formed the fundamental schema of his " construction of Nature," — a conception due to the Science of Knowledge, — and from this point of view the polarity in electric and magnetic phenomena which
1 The " interpretation " of phenomena wu, to be sure, a dangerous principle from a scientific point of view ; it opened the gates of the Philosophy of Nature to poetic fancy and brilliant flashes. These guests forced their way in even with Schelling, but still more with his disciple*, such as Xoralit, Ottffetu, and Schubert. In the case of Novalis especially we have a magical, dreamy sym bolism of Nature in a play which is admirable ia poetry but questionable in philosophy.
. • The poetry of this fundamental thought was expressed in most character istic form by Schelling himself In the beautiful verses which are printed in &*. '• Ltben in Brie/en, I. 282 ft
600 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
busied Schelling's contemporaries as a newly found enigma was particularly significant for him.
4. When Schelling wished to place beside his Philosophy of Nature an elaboration of his own of the Science of Knowledge, under the name of " Transcendental Idealism," an important change had taken place in the common thought of the Jena idealists, to which he now gave the first systematic expression. The impetus to this came from Schiller, and from the development which he had given to the thoughts of the Critique of Judgment. It had become plainer step by step that the system of reason must become perfected for idealism in the aesthetic function, and in place of the ethical idealism which the Science of Knowledge taught, and the physical idealism which the Philosophy of Nature presented, appeared now aesthetic idealism.
The re-shaping, so rich in results, which Kant's thoughts experi enced through Schiller, by no means concerned merely the aesthetic questions which lay nearest the poet, but likewise the ethical ques tions and those pertaining to the history of philosophy, and there with the whole system of reason. For Schiller's thoughts, even before his acquaintance with Kant, — as is shown among other things by his poem, Die Kiinstler, — had been turned to the prob lem of the significance of art and the beautiful in the whole con nected system of man's rational life and its historical development, and by solving this problem with Kantian conceptions he gave to the idealism of the Science of Knowledge a decisive turn.
This began with the new Forms which Schiller found for Kant's conception of beauty. The synthesis of the theoretical and the practical in the aesthetic reason (cf. § 40, 2) could perhaps find no more fortunate expression than in Schiller's definition of beauty as
freedom in phenomenal appearance. 1 It asserts that aesthetic con templation apprehends its object without subjecting it to the rules of the cognising understanding ; it is not subsumed under concep tions, and we do not ask for the conditions which it has in other phenomena. It is perceived as if it were free. Schopenhauer after wards expressed this in the form that the enjoyment of the beautiful is the contemplation of the object in independence of the principle of sufficient reason. Schiller later laid still more weight upon the point that the aesthetic process is as independent of the practical reason as of the theoretical. The beautiful (in distinction from the agreeable and the good) is as little an object of the sensuous as it
1 CI. chiefly the letters to Korner of February, 1793, also the sketch on "The Beautiful in Art," printed with the letter of the 20th of June of that same year, — all fragments of the dialogue Kallias which was not completed.
Chap. 2, §42. ] System of Reason : Schiller. 601
is of the moral impulse ; it lacks that quality of want or need which belongs to the life of empirical impulse, just as it lacks the earnest ness of the practical reason. In the aesthetic life the play impulse unfolds itself ; ' every stirring of the will is silent in disinterested
In this, too, Schiller was followed by Schopenhauer, when the latter found the happiness of the {esthetic condition in the
overcoming of the unhappy will to live, in the activity of the pure, ' willess subject of knowledge. *
From this Schiller concluded in the first place that wherever we have to do with educating man, subject to his sensuous nature, to a condition where he shall will morally, the aesthetic life offers the most effective means to this end. Kant had designated the " rever sal of motives " as the ethical task of man (cf. above, § 39, 6) ; for the transition from the sensuous to the ethical determination of the will he offered man, as an aid, religion ; Schiller offered art. ' Faith and taste cause man to act legally, at least, when he is not yet ripe for morality. In intercourse with the beautiful the feelings become refined, so that natural rudeness vanishes, and man awakes to his higher vocation. Art is the fostering soil for science and morality. Such was the teaching of Schiller in the Artists ; his Letters on the ^Esthetic Education of the Human Race go deeper. The aesthetic condition, or state (Stoat), because it is the completely disinterested state, destroys the sensuous will, also, and thus makes room for the possibility of the moral will ; it is the necessary point of transition from the physical state, ruled by needs, into the moral state. In the physical state man endures the power of Nature ; in the aesthetic state he frees himself from it ; and in the moral state
he controls it.
But already in the Artists the beautiful had been assigned a
second higher task of ultimately giving also the culmination and completion to moral and intellectual cultivation, and in building this thought into the critical system the poet passes over from supple menting to transforming the Kantian doctrine. The two sides of human nature are not reconciled if the moral impulse is obliged to overcome the sensuous impulse. In the physical and in the " moral " state oue side of human nature is always suppressed in favour of the
' The attempt which Schiller make* in his Letters concerning Afthrstie Education (11 f. ) to lay a basis (or this in transcendental psychology remind us strongly of the Keinhold-Fichte time when "Jena whirred with the buxi of Form and Matter. "
• World as Will, etc. , I. }{ 36-38. In this connection Schopenhauer no doubt claims the same value for scientific knowledge. Cf. ( 43, 4.
* Cf. the conclusion of the essay, Utber den moralitchrn Nutsen asthttitchtr SUten.
contemplation.
602 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pakt VL
other. We have a complete manhood only where neither of the two impulses prevails over the other. Man is truly man, only where he plays, where the war within him is silent, where his sensuous nature is exalted to so noble a sentiment or sensibility that it is no longer needful for him to will loftily. The Kantian rigorism holds where- ever sensuous inclination stands over against duty : but there is the higher ideal of the " schone Seele " — the beautiful soul — which does not know this internal conflict because its nature is so ennobled that
lit fulfils the moral law from its own inclination. And just this ennobling is gained by man, only through aesthetic education. Through it alone is the sensuous-supersensuous discord in human nature abolished ; in it alone does complete, full manhood come to realisation. " " " "
5. In the ideal of the schone Seele the virtuosoship of Shaftesbury overcomes the Kantian dualism. The completion of man is the aesthetic reconciliation of the two natures which dwell within him ; culture is to make the life of the individual a work of art, by ennobling what is given through the senses to full accord with the ethical vocation. In this direction Schiller gave expres sion to the ideal view of life characteristic of his time in antithesis to the rigorism of Kant, and the aesthetic Humanism which he thus wrested from abstract thought found besides his, a wealth of other characteristic manifestations. In them all, however, Goethe appeared as the mighty personality, who presented in living form this ideal height of humanity in the aesthetic perfection of his conduct of life, as well as in the great works of his poetic activity.
In this conception of the genius Schiller was first joined by Wil liam von Humboldt} He sought to understand the nature of great poems from this point of view ; he found the ideal of man's life in the harmony of the sensuous and the moral nature, and in his treatise which laid the foundations for the science of language 2 he applied this principle by teaching that the nature of language is to be under stood from the organic interaction of the two elements.
An attitude of sharper opposition to the Kantian rigorism had already been taken, in the Shaftesbury spirit, by Jacobi in his romance patterned after Goethe's personality, " AUwill's Briefsamm- lung. " The moral genius also is " exemplary " ; he does not subject himself to traditional rules and maxims, he lives himself out and thereby " gives himself the laws of his morality. This "ethical Nature is the highest that the circuit of humanity affords.
i Born 1787, died 1836. Works, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1841 ff. ). Aside from the correspondence, especially that with Schiller, cf. principally the jf&theti- »chen Versuehe (Brunswick, 1799). Also Rud. Haym, W. v. H. (Berlin, 1866).
* Urbrr die Katei- Spraehe (Berlin, 18361.
Chap. 2, $ 42. ] 8ystem of Reason : Romanticists. 603
Among the Romantic School this ethical "geniality" in theory and practice came to its full pride of luxuriant efflorescence. Here it developed as an cesthetic aristocracy of culture in opposition to the democratic utility of the Enlightenment morals.
