spirit as it is meant here thus enters into the development of world conception as the soul force that is appropriate to an age to which thought is no longer what it had been to the Greek thinkers, but in which thought had revealed itself as a product of self-consciousness, a product, however, that is arrived at through the fact that this self-consciousness is aware of itself as having its being within the spiritually creative forces of nature. Goethe is the representative of an epoch of world conception in which the need is felt to make the transition from mere thinking to spiritual seeing. Schiller strives to justify this transition against Kant"s position.
The close alliance that was formed by Goethe, Schiller and their contemporaries between poetic imagination and world conception has freed this conception from the lifeless expression that it must take on when it exclusively moves in the region of the abstract intellect. This alliance has resulted in the belief that there is a personal element in world conception. It is possible for man to work out an approach to the world for himself that is in accordance with his own specific nature and enter thereby into the world of reality, not merely into a world of fantastic schemes. His ideal no longer needs to be that of Kant, which is formed after the model of mathematics and arrives at a world picture that is once and for all finished and completed. Only from a spiritual atmosphere of such a conviction that has an inspiring effect on the human individuality can a conception like that of Jean Paul (1763 1825) arise. "The heart of a genius, to whom all other splendor and help-giving energies are subordinated, has one genuine symptom, namely, a new outlook on world and life." How could it be the mark of the highest developed man, of genius, to create a new world and life conception if the conceived world consisted only in one form? Jean Paul is, in his own way, a defender of Goethe"s view that man
experiences inside his own self the ultimate existence. He writes to Jacobi: Properly speaking, we do not merely believe in divine freedom, G.o.d and virtue, but we really see them manifested or in the process of manifestation; this very seeing is a knowing and a higher form of knowing, while the knowledge of intellect merely refers to a seeing of a lower order. One could call reason the consciousness of the only positive, for everything positive experienced by sense perception does finally dissolve into the spiritual, and understanding carries on its bustle only with the relative, which in itself is nothing, so that before G.o.d all conditions of "more or less," and all stages of comparison cease to be.
Jean Paul will not allow anything to deprive him of the right to experience truth inwardly and to employ all forces of the soul for this purpose. He will not be restricted to the use of logical intellect.
Transcendental philosophy (Jean Paul has in mind here the world view following Kant) is not to tear the heart, man"s living root, out of his breast to replace it with a pure impulse of selfhood; I shall not consent to be liberated from the dependence of Love, to be blessed by pride only.
With these words he rejects the world-estranged moral order of Kant.
I remain firmly with my conviction that there are four last, and four first things: Beauty, Truth, Morality and Salvation, and their synthesis is not only necessary but also already a fact, but only in a subtle spiritual-organic unity (and for just this reason it is a unity), without which we could not find any understanding of these four evangelists or world continents, nor any transition between them.
The critical a.n.a.lysis of the intellect, which proceeded with an extreme logical rigor, had, in Kant and Fichte, come to the point of reducing the self-dependent significance of the real life-saturated world to a mere shadow, to a dream picture.
This view was unbearable to men gifted with spontaneous imagination, who enriched life by the creation of their imaginative power. These men felt the reality; it was there in their perception, present in their souls, and now it was attempted to prove to them its mere dreamlike quality. "The windows of the philosophical academic halls are too high to allow a view into the alleys of real life," was the answer of Jean Paul.
Fichte strove for the purest, highest experienced truth. He renounced all knowledge that does not spring from our own inner source. The counter movement to his world conception is formed by the Romantic Movement. Fichte acknowledges only the truth, and the inner life of man only insofar as it reveals the truth; the world conception of the romanticists acknowledges only the inner life, and it declares as valuable everything that springs from this inner life. The ego is not to be chained by anything external. Whatever it produces is justified.
One may say about the romantic movement that it carries Schiller"s statement to its extreme consequence, "Man plays only where he is human in the full sense of the word, and he is only wholly human when he is playing." Romanticism wants to make the whole world into a realm of the artistic. The fully developed man knows no other norms than the laws he creates through his freely ruling imaginative power, in the same way as the artist creates those laws he impresses into his works. He rises above everything that determines him from without and lives entirely through the springs of his own self.
The whole world is for him nothing but a material for his esthetic play. The seriousness of man in his everyday life is not
rooted in truth. The soul that arrives at true knowledge cannot take seriously the things by themselves; for such a soul they are not in themselves valuable. They are endowed with value only by the soul. The mood of a spirit that is aware of his sovereignty over things is called by the romanticists, the ironical mood of spirit.
Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780 1819) gave the following explanation of the term "romantic irony": The spirit of the artist must comprise all directions in one sweeping glance and this glance, hovering above everything, looking down on everything and annihilating it, we call "irony."
Friedrich Schlegel (1772 1829), one of the leading spokesmen for the romantic turn of spirit, states concerning this mood of irony that it takes everything in at a glance and rises infinitely above everything that is limited, also above some form of art, virtue or genius. Whoever lives in this mood feels bound by nothing; nothing determines the direction of his activity for him. He can "at his own pleasure tune himself to be either philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, antique or modern." The ironical spirit rises above an eternal moral world order, for this spirit is not told what to do by anything except himself. The ironist is to do what he pleases, for his morality can only be an esthetic morality. The romanticists are the heirs of Fichte"s thought of the uniqueness of the ego. They were, however, unwilling to fill this ego with a moral belief, as Fichte did, but stood above all on the right of fantasy and of the unrestrained power of the soul. With them, thinking was entirely absorbed by poetic imagination. Novalis says, "It is quite bad that poetry has a special name and that the poet represents a special profession.
It is not anything special by itself. It is the mode of activity proper to the human spirit. Are not the imaginations of man"s heart at work every minute?" The ego, exclusively concerned with itself, can arrive at the highest truth: "It seems to man
that he is engaged in a conversation, and some unknown spiritual being causes him to develop the most evident thoughts in a miraculous fashion.
Fundamentally, what the romanticists aimed at did not differ from what Goethe and Schiller had also made their credo: A conception of man through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible. Novalis experiences his poems and contemplation"s in a soul mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that of Fichte. Fichte"s spirit, however, works the sharp contours of pure concepts, while that of Novalis springs from a richness of soul, feeling where others think, living in the element of love where others aim to embrace what is and what goes on in the world with ideas. It is the tendency of this age, as can be seen in its representative thinkers, to search for the higher spirit nature in which the self-conscious soul is rooted because it cannot have its roots in the world of sense reality. Novalis feels and experiences himself as having his being within the higher spirit nature.
What he expresses he feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit nature. He writes: One man succeeded; he lifted the veil of the G.o.ddess at Saris.
What did he see then? He saw - wonder of wonders - himself.
Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words: The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should see ourselves in the midst of it.
Chapter VII.
The Cla.s.sics of World and Life Conception
A sentence in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Sch.e.l.ling"s Philosophy of Nature strikes us like a flash of lightning illuminating the past and future path of the evolution of philosophy. It reads, "To philosophize about nature means to create nature." What had been a deep conviction of Goethe and Schiller, namely, that creative imagination must have a share in the creation of a world conception, is monumentally expressed in this sentence. What nature yields voluntarily when we focus our attention on it in observation and perception does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot conceive this meaning from without. He must produce it.
Sch.e.l.ling was especially gifted for this kind of creation. With him, all spiritual energies tended toward the imagination. His mind was inventive without compare. His imagination did not produce pictures as the artistic imagination does, but rather concepts and ideas. Through this disposition of mind he was well-suited to continue along Fichte"s path of thought. Fichte did not have this productive imagination. In his search for truth he had penetrated as far as to the center of man"s soul, the "ego." If this center is to become the nucleus for the world conception, then a thinker who holds this view must also be capable of arriving at thoughts whose content are saturated with world and life as he proceeds from the "ego" as a vantage point. This can only be done by means of the power of imagination, and this power was not at Fichte"s disposal. For this reason, he was really limited in his philosophical position all his life to directing attention to the "ego" and to pointing out that it has to gain a content in thoughts. He, himself, had been unable to supply it with such a content, which can be
learned clearly from the lectures he gave in 1813 at the University of Berlin on the Doctrine of Science (Posthumous Works, Vol. 1). For those who want to arrive at a world conception, he there demands "a completely new inner sense organ, which for the ordinary man does not exist at all." But Fichte does not go beyond this postulate. He fails to develop what such an organ is to perceive. Sch.e.l.ling saw the result of this higher sense in the thoughts that his imagination produced in his soul, and he calls this "intellectual imagination" (intellectuelle Anschauung). For him, then, who saw a product created by the spirit in the spirit"s statement about nature, the following question became urgent. How can what springs from the spirit be the pattern of the law that rules in the real world, holding sway in real nature? With sharp words Sch.e.l.ling turns against those who believe that we "merely project our ideas into nature," because "they have no inkling of what nature is and must be for us. . . . For we are not satisfied to have nature accidentally (through the intermediary function of a third element, for instance) correspond to the laws of our spirit. We insist that nature itself necessarily and fundamentally should not only express, but realize, the laws of our spirit and that it should only then be, and be called, nature if it did just this. . . . Nature is to be the visible spirit: spirit the invisible nature. At this point then, at the point of the absolute ident.i.ty of the spirit in us and of nature outside us, the problem must be solved as to how a nature outside ourselves should be possible."
Nature and spirit, then, are not two different ent.i.ties at all but one and the same being in two different forms. The real meaning of Sch.e.l.ling concerning this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been correctly grasped. It is necessary to immerse oneself completely into his mode of conception if one wants to avoid seeing in it nothing but a triviality or an absurdity. To clarify this mode of conception one can point to
a sentence in Sch.e.l.ling"s book, On the World Soul, in which he expresses himself on the nature of gravity. Many people find a difficulty in understanding this concept because it implies a so-called "action in distance." The sun attracts the earth in spite of the fact that there is nothing between the sun and earth to act as intermediary. One is to think that the sun extends its sphere of activity through s.p.a.ce to places where it is not present. Those who live in coa.r.s.e, sensual perceptions see a difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act in a place where it is not? Sch.e.l.ling reverses this thought process.
He says, "It is true that a body acts only where it is, but it is just as true that it is only where it acts." If we see that the sun affects the earth through the force of attraction, then it follows from this fact that it extends its being as far as our earth and that we have no right to limit its existence exclusively to the place in which it acts through its being visible. The sun transcends the limits where it is visible with its being. Only a part of it can be seen; the other part reveals itself through the attraction. We must also think of the relation of spirit and nature in approximately this manner. The spirit is not merely where it is perceived; it is also where it perceives. Its being extends as far as to the most distant places where objects can still be observed. It embraces and permeates all nature that it knows. When the spirit thinks the law of an external process, this process does not remain outside the spirit. The latter does not merely receive a mirror picture, but extends its essence into a process. The spirit permeates the process and, in finding the law of the process, it is not the spirit in its isolated brain corner that proclaims this law; it is the law of the process that expresses itself. The spirit has moved to the place where the law is active. Without the spirit"s attention the law would also have been active but it would not have been expressed. When the spirit submerges into the process, as it were, the law is then, in addition to being active in nature, expressed in conceptual form. It is only when the spirit
withdraws its attention from nature and contemplates its own being that the impression arises that the spirit exists in separation from nature, in the same way that the sun"s existence appears to the eye as being limited within a certain s.p.a.ce when one disregards the fact that it also has its being where it works through attraction. Therefore, if I, within my spirit, cause ideas to arise in which laws of nature are expressed, the two statements, "I produce nature," and "nature produces itself within me," are equally true.
Now there are two possible ways to describe the one being that is spirit and nature at the same time. First, I can point out the natural laws that are at work in reality; second, I can show how the spirit proceeds to arrive at these laws. In both cases I am directed by the same object. In the first instance, the law shows me its activity in nature; in the second, the spirit shows me the procedure used to represent the same law in the imagination. In the one case, I am engaged in natural science; in the other, in spiritual science. How these two belong together is described by Sch.e.l.ling in an attractive fashion: The necessary trend of all natural science is to proceed from nature toward intelligence. This, and nothing else, is at the bottom of the tendency to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect transfiguration of all laws of nature into laws of imagination and thinking. The phenomena (the material element) must completely vanish and only the laws (the formal element) must remain. This is the reason for the fact that the more the law-structure in nature, itself, emerges, as if it were breaking the crust, the more the covering element vanishes. The phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear. The phenomena of optics are nothing but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by the light, and this light, itself, is already of an ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism, all material traces have already
vanished. Of the phenomena of gravity, which, even according to natural scientists, can only be understood as a direct spiritual effect of action into distance, nothing is left but their law, the application of which is the mechanism of the celestial motions on a large scale. The completed theory of nature would be the one through which the whole of nature would dissolve into intelligence. The inanimate and consciousless products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts of nature to reflect itself, and the so-called dead nature is, in general, an immature intelligence, so that the intelligent character shines through unconsciously in its phenomena. The highest aim of nature - to become completely objective to itself - can be reached by it only through the highest and last reflection, which is man, or, more generally speaking, what we call reason, through which nature returns in its own track and whereby it becomes evident that nature originally is identical with what is known in us as the intelligent and conscious element.
Sch.e.l.ling spun the facts of nature into an artful network of thought in such a fashion that all of its phenomena stood as in an ideal, harmonious organism before his creative imagination. He was inspired by the feeling that the ideas that appear in his imagination are also the creative forces of nature"s process. Spiritual forces, then, are the basis of nature, and what appears dead and lifeless to our eyes has its origin in the spiritual. In turning our spirit to this, we discover the ideas, the spiritual, in nature. Thus, for man, according to Sch.e.l.ling, the things of nature are manifestations of the spirit.
The spirit conceals itself behind these manifestations as behind a cover, so to speak. It shows itself in our own inner life in its right form. In this way, man knows what is spirit, and he is therefore able to find the spirit that is hidden in nature. The manner in which Sch.e.l.ling has nature return as spirit in himself reminds one of what Goethe believes is to be
found in the perfect artist. The artist, in Goethe"s opinion, proceeds in the production of a work of art as nature does in its creations. Therefore, we should observe in the artist"s creation the same process through which everything has come into being that is spread out before man in nature. What nature conceals from the outer eye is presented in perceptible form to man in the process of artistic creation. Nature shows man only the finished works; man must decipher from these works how it proceeded to produce them. He is confronted with the creatures, not with the creator. In the case of the artist, creation and creator are observed at the same time.
Sch.e.l.ling wants to penetrate through the products of nature to nature"s creative process. He places himself in the position of creative nature and brings it into being within his soul as an artist produces his work of art. What are, then, according to Sch.e.l.ling, the thoughts that are contained in his world conception? They are the ideas of the creative spirit of nature.
What preceded the things and what created them is what emerges in an individual human spirit as thought. This thought is to its original real existence as a memory picture of an experience is to the experience itself. Thereby, human science becomes for Sch.e.l.ling a reminiscence of the spiritual prototypes that were creatively active before the things existed. A divine spirit created the world and at the end of the process it also creates men in order to form in their souls as many tools through which the spirit can, in recollection, become aware of its creative activity. Sch.e.l.ling does not feel himself as an individual being at all as he surrenders himself to the contemplation of the world phenomena. He appears to himself as a part, a member of the creative world forces. Not he thinks, but the spirit of the world forces thinks in him. This spirit contemplates his own creative activity in him.
Sch.e.l.ling sees a world creation on a small scale in the production of a work of art. In the thinking contemplation of
things, he sees a reminiscence of the world creation on a large scale. In the panorama of the world conception, the very ideas, which are the basis of things and have produced them, appear in our spirit. Man disregards everything in the world that the senses perceive in it and preserves only what pure thinking provides. In the creation and enjoyment of a work of art, the idea appears intimately permeated with elements that are revealed through the senses. According to Sch.e.l.ling"s view, then, nature, art and world conception (philosophy) stand in the following relation to one another. Nature presents the finished products; world conception, the productive ideas; art combines both elements in harmonious interaction. On the one side, artistic activity stands halfway between creative nature, which produces without being aware of the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and, on the other, the thinking spirit, which knows these ideas without being able at the same time to create things with their help. Sch.e.l.ling expresses this with the words: The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity. The concurrence of both (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness leads to the real world, with consciousness to the esthetic world. The objective world is only the more primitive, still unconscious poem of the spirit, the general organon of philosophy, and the philosophy of art is the crowning piece of its entire structure.
The spiritual activities of man, his thinking contemplation and his artistic creation, appear to Sch.e.l.ling not merely as the separate accomplishments of the individual person, but, if they are understood in their highest significance, they are at the same time the achievement of the supreme being, the world spirit. In truly dithyrambic words, Sch.e.l.ling depicts the feeling that emerges in the soul when it becomes aware of the fact that its life is not merely an individual life limited to a
point of the universe, but that its activity is one of general spirituality. When the soul says, "I know; I am aware," then, in a higher sense, this means that the world spirit remembers its action before the existence of things; when the soul produces a work of art, it means that the world spirit repeats, on a small scale, what that spirit accomplished on a large scale at the creation of all nature.
The soul in man is not the principle of individuality, then, but that through which he lifts himself above all selfhood, through which he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of selfless love, and, to crown it all, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things and thereby of art. The soul is no longer occupied with matter, nor is it engaged in any direct intercourse with matter, but it is alone with spirit as the life of things. Even when appearing in the body, the soul is nevertheless free from the body, the consciousness of which - in its most perfect formation - merely hovers like a light dream by which it is not disturbed. The soul is not a quality, nor faculty, nor anything of that kind in particular. The soul does not know, but is knowledge. The soul is not good, not beautiful in the way that bodies also can be beautiful, but it is beauty itself. (On the Relation of Fine Arts to Nature.) Such a mode of conception is reminiscent of the German mysticism that had a representative in Jakob Boehme (1575 1624). In Munich, where Sch.e.l.ling lived with short interruptions from 1806 1842, he enjoyed the stimulating a.s.sociation with Franz Benedict Baader, whose philosophical ideas moved completely in the direction of this older doctrine.
This a.s.sociation gave Sch.e.l.ling the occasion to penetrate deeply into the thought world that depended entirely on a point of view at which he had arrived in his own thinking. If one reads the above quoted pa.s.sage from the address, On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature, which he gave at the Royal Academy of Science in Munich in 1807, one is reminded
of Jakob Boehme"s view, "As thou beholdest the depth and the stars and the earth, thou seest thy G.o.d, and in the same thou also livest and hast thy being, and the same G.o.d ruleth thee also . . . thou art created out of this G.o.d and thou livest in Him; all thy knowledge also standeth in this G.o.d and when thou diest thou wilt be buried in this G.o.d."
As Sch.e.l.ling"s thinking developed, his contemplation of the world turned into the contemplation of G.o.d, or theosophy. In 1809, when he published his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom and Topics Pertinent to This Question, he had already taken his stand on the basis of such a theosophy. All questions of world conception are now seen by him in a new light. If all things are divine, how can there be evil in the world since G.o.d can only be perfect goodness? If the soul is in G.o.d, how can it still follow its selfish interests? If G.o.d is and acts within me, how can I then still be called free, as I, in that case, do not at all act as a self-dependent being?
Thus does Sch.e.l.ling attempt to answer these questions through contemplation of G.o.d rather than through world contemplation. It would be entirely incongruous to G.o.d if a world of beings were created that he would continually have to lead and direct as helpless creatures. G.o.d is perfect only if he can create a world that is equal to himself in perfection. A G.o.d who can produce only what is less perfect than he, himself, is imperfect himself. Therefore, G.o.d has created beings in men who do not need his guidance, but are themselves free and independent as he is. A being that has its origin in another being does not have to be dependent on its originator, for it is not a contradiction that the son of man is also a man. As the eye, which is possible only in the whole structure of the organism, has nevertheless an independent life of its own, so also the individual soul is, to be sure, comprised in G.o.d, yet not directly activated by him as a part in a machine.
G.o.d is not a G.o.d of the dead, but of the living. How he could find his satisfaction in the most perfect machine is quite unintelligible. No matter in what form one might think the succession of created beings out of G.o.d, it can never be a mechanical succession, not a mere causation or production so that the products would not be anything in themselves. Nor could it be an emanation such that the emanating ent.i.ty would remain merely a part of the being it sprang from and therefore would have no being of its own, nothing that would be self- dependent. The sequence of things out of G.o.d is a self- revelation of G.o.d. G.o.d, however, can only become revealed to himself in an element similar to him, in beings that are free and act out of their own initiative, for whose existence there is no ground but G.o.d but who are themselves like G.o.d.
If G.o.d were a G.o.d of the dead and all world phenomena merely like a mechanism, the individual processes of which could be derived from him as their cause and mover, then it would only be necessary to describe G.o.d and everything would be comprehended thereby. Out of G.o.d one would be able to understand all things and their activity, but this is not the case. The divine world has self-dependence. G.o.d created it, but it has its own being. Thus, it is indeed divine, but the divine appears in an ent.i.ty that is independent of G.o.d; it appears in a non-divine element. As light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born out of non-divine existence, and from this non-divine element springs evil, selfishness. G.o.d thus has not all beings in his power. He can give them the light, but they, themselves, emerge from the dark night. They are the sons of this night, and G.o.d has no power over whatever is darkness in them. They must work their way through the night into the light. This is their freedom. One can also say that the world is G.o.d"s creation out of the unG.o.dly. The unG.o.dly, therefore, is the first, and the G.o.dly the second.
Sch.e.l.ling started out by searching for the ideas in all things, that is to say, by searching for what is divine in them. In this way, the whole world was transformed into a manifestation of G.o.d for him. He then had to proceed from G.o.d to the unG.o.dly in order to comprehend the imperfect, the evil, the selfish.
Now the whole process of world evolution became a continuous conquest of the unG.o.dly by the G.o.dly for him. The individual man has his origin in the unG.o.dly. He works his way out of this element into the divine. This process from the unG.o.dly to the G.o.dly was originally the dominating element in the world. In antiquity men surrendered to their natures. They acted naively out of selfishness. The Greek civilization stands on this ground. It was the age in which man lived in harmony with nature, or, as Schiller expresses it in his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, man, himself, was nature and therefore did not seek nature. With the rise of Christianity, this state of innocence of humanity vanishes. Mere nature is considered as unG.o.dly, as evil, and is seen as the opposite of the divine, the good. Christ appears to let the light of the divine shine in the darkness of the unG.o.dly. This is the moment when "the earth becomes waste and void for the second time," the moment of "birth of the higher light of the spirit, which was from the beginning of the world, but was not comprehended by the darkness that operated by and for itself, and was then still in its concealed and limited manifestation.
It appears in order to oppose the personal and spiritual evil, also in personal and human shape, and as mediator in order to restore again the connection of creation and G.o.d on the highest level. For only the personal can heal the personal, and G.o.d must become man to enable man to come to G.o.d."
Spinozism is a world conception that seeks the ground of all world events in G.o.d, and derives all processes according to external necessary laws from this ground, just as the mathematical truths are derived from the axioms. Sch.e.l.ling
considers such a world conception insufficient. Like Spinoza, he also believes that all things are in G.o.d, but according to his opinion, they are not determined only by "the lifelessness of his system, the soullessness of its form, the poverty of its concepts and expressions, the inexorable harshness of its statements that tallies perfectly with its abstract mode of contemplation." Sch.e.l.ling, therefore, does find Spinoza"s "mechanical view of nature" perfectly consistent, but nature, itself, does not show us this consistency.
All that nature tells us is that it does not exist as a result of a geometric necessity. There is in it, not clear, pure reason, but personality and spirit; otherwise, the geometric intellect, which has ruled so long, ought to have penetrated it long ago.
Intellect would necessarily have realized its idol of general and eternal laws of nature to a far greater extent, whereas it has everyday to acknowledge nature"s irrational relation to itself more and more.
As man is not merely intellect and reason but unites still other faculties and forces within himself, so, according to Sch.e.l.ling, is this also the case with the divine supreme being. A G.o.d who is clear, pure reason seems like personified mathematics. A G.o.d, however, who cannot proceed according to pure reason with his world creation but continuously has to struggle against the unG.o.dly, can be regarded as "a wholly personal living being." His life has the greatest a.n.a.logy with the human life. As man attempts to overcome the imperfect within himself as he strives toward his ideal of perfection, so such a G.o.d is conceived as an eternally struggling G.o.d whose activity is the progressive conquest of the unG.o.dly. Sch.e.l.ling compares Spinoza"s G.o.d to the "oldest pictures of divinities, who appeared the more mysterious the less individually-living features spoke out of them." Sch.e.l.ling endows his G.o.d with more and more individualized traits. He depicts him as a human being when he says, "If we consider what is horrible in
nature and the spirit-world, and how much more a benevolent hand seems to cover it up for us, then we cannot doubt that the deity is reigning over a world of horror, and that G.o.d could be called the horrible, the terrible G.o.d, not merely figuratively but literally."
Sch.e.l.ling could no longer look upon a G.o.d like this in the same way in which Spinoza had regarded his G.o.d. A G.o.d who orders everything according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason. A personal G.o.d, as Sch.e.l.ling conceived him in his later life, is incalculable, for he does not act according to reason alone. In a mathematical problem we can predetermine the result through mere thinking; with an acting human being this is not possible. With him, we have to wait and see what action he will decide upon in a given moment. Experience must be added to reason. A pure rational science is, therefore, insufficient for Sch.e.l.ling for a conception of world and G.o.d. In the later period of his world conception, he calls all knowledge that is derived from reason a negative knowledge that has to be supplemented by a positive knowledge. Whoever wants to know the living G.o.d must not merely depend on the necessary conclusions of reason; he must plunge into the life of G.o.d with his whole personal being. He will then experience what no conclusion, no pure reason can give him. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine cause, but a free action of the personal G.o.d. What Sch.e.l.ling believed he had reached, not by the cognitive process of the method of reason, but by intuition as the free incalculable acts of G.o.d, he has presented in his Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology. He used the content of these two works as the basis of the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after he had been called to the Prussian capital by Frederic Wilhelm IV. They were published only after Sch.e.l.ling"s death in 1854.
With views of this kind, Sch.e.l.ling shows himself to be the boldest and most courageous of the group of philosophers who were stimulated to develop an idealistic world conception by Kant. Under Kant"s influence, the attempt to philosophize about things that transcended thinking and observation was abandoned. One tried to be satisfied with staying within the limits of observation and thinking. Where Kant, however, had concluded from the necessity of such a resignation that no knowledge of transcendent things was possible, the post- Kantians declared that as observation and thinking do not point at a transcendent divine element, they are this divine element themselves. Among those who took this position, Sch.e.l.ling was the most forceful. Fichte had taken everything into the ego; Sch.e.l.ling had spread this ego over everything.
What he meant to show was not, as Fichte did, that the ego was everything, but that everything was ego. Sch.e.l.ling had the courage to declare not only the ego"s content of ideas as divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only elevated the human reason into a G.o.dly reason, but he made the human life content into the G.o.dly personal ent.i.ty. A world explanation that proceeds from man and thinks of the course of the whole world as having as its ground an ent.i.ty that directs its course in the same way as man directs his actions, is called anthropomorphism. Anyone who considers events as being dependent on a general world reason, explains the world anthropomorphically, for this general world reason is nothing but the human reason made into this general reason.
When Goethe says, "Man never understands how anthropomorphic he is," he has in mind the fact that our simplest statements concerning nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say a body rolls on because another body pushed it, we form such a conception from our own experience. We push a body and it rolls on. When we now see that a ball moves against another ball that thereupon rolls on, we form the conception that the first ball pushed the
second, using the a.n.a.logy of the effect we ourselves exert.
Haeckel observes that the anthropomorphic dogma "compares G.o.d"s creation and rule of the world with the artful creation of an ingenious technician or engineer, or with the government of a wise ruler. G.o.d, the Lord, as creator, preserver and ruler of the world is, in all his thinking and doing, always conceived as similar to a human being."
Sch.e.l.ling had the courage of the most consistent anthropomorphism. He finally declared man, with all his life- content, as divinity, and since a part of this life-content is not only the reasonable but the unreasonable as well, he had the possibility of explaining also the unreasonable in the world.
To this end, however, he had to supplement the view of reason by another view that does not have its source in thinking. This higher view, according to his opinion, he called "positive philosophy."
It "is the free philosophy in the proper sense of the word; whoever does not want it, may leave it. I put it to the free choice of everybody. I only say that if, for instance, somebody wants to get at the real process, a free world creation, etc., he can have all this only by means of such a philosophy. If he is satisfied with a rational philosophy and has no need beyond it, he may continue holding this position, only he must give up his claim to possess with and in a rational philosophy what the latter simply cannot supply because of its very nature, namely, the real G.o.d, the real process and a free relation between G.o.d and world."
The negative philosophy "will remain the preferred philosophy for the school, the positive philosophy, that for life. Only if both of them are united will the complete consecration be obtained that can be demanded of philosophy. As is well-known in the Eleusinian mysteries, the minor mysteries were distinguished from the major ones and
the former were considered as a prerequisite stage of the latter . . . The positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of the correctly understood negative one and thus one may indeed say that in the negative philosophy are celebrated the minor mysteries of philosophy, in the positive philosophy, the major ones."
If the inner life is declared to be the divine life, then it appears to be an inconsistency to limit this distinction to a part of this inner life. Sch.e.l.ling is not guilty of this inconsistency. The moment he declared that to explain nature is to create nature, he set the direction for all his life conception. If thinking contemplation of nature is a repet.i.tion of nature"s creation, then the fundamental character of this creation must also correspond to that of human action; it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity. We cannot know a free creation through the laws of reason; it must reveal itself through other means.
The individual human personality lives and has its being in and through the ground of the world, which is spirit.
Nevertheless, man is in possession of his full freedom and self-dependence. Sch.e.l.ling considered this conception as one of the most important in his whole philosophy. Because of it, he thought he could consider his idealistic trend of ideas as a progress from earlier views since those earlier views thought the individual to be completely determined by the world spirit when they considered it rooted in it, and thereby robbed it of its freedom and self-dependence.
For until the discovery of idealism, the real concept of freedom was lacking in all systems, in that of Leibniz as well as in that of Spinoza. A freedom that many of us had conceived and even boasted of because of the vivid inner