The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. Worldviews and Philosophies of Life from the Earliest Times to the Present

1. Greek Worldviews

[ 1 ] Aristotle—whom the great medieval poet Dante calls the master of those who know—spoke the following beautiful words about the fact that human beings cannot be content with what their senses tell them about nature and about themselves: “All human beings naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love of sensory perceptions, which they love for their own sake, even apart from any practical use; in particular, those of sight. Not merely for the sake of action, but even without such an intention, one prefers seeing, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense, more than any other, brings us knowledge and reveals many properties of things. All animals live within their sensory perceptions and have little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought.” And Hegel particularly emphasized this seemingly self-evident yet highly important statement: “It is thought that transforms the soul—with which even animals are endowed—into spirit.” Human beings cannot help but ask themselves numerous questions about the world and about themselves. The answers they give themselves to these questions through their thinking constitute their “worldviews and outlooks on life.” Angelus Silesius, a 17th-century German thinker, aptly said that the rose simply blooms because it blooms; it does not ask why it blooms. Human beings cannot live their lives in this way. They must ask themselves what purpose the world and they themselves serve. First and foremost, human beings naturally put their thinking at the service of practical life. Through thinking, they create tools, machines, and devices that allow them to satisfy their needs more fully than animals can with theirs. But secondarily, he wants to use his thinking to achieve something that has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to gain insight into things, he wants to understand how the facts he encounters in life are connected. The first concepts humans form about the connection between things are religious ones. He imagines that the events in nature are brought about by beings similar to himself. He merely conceives of these beings as more powerful than he is. Man creates gods in his own image. Just as he himself performs his work, so he also imagines the world as the work of the gods. From these religious views, however, scientific ones gradually emerge. Humans learn to observe nature and its forces. They can then no longer be content to imagine these forces as if they were similar to human powers. They no longer create a god in their own image, but rather form ideas about the interrelationship of worldly phenomena based on the picture provided by observation and science.

[ 2 ] Thus, a rational worldview emerged within Western culture at a time when the natural sciences had reached a certain level of advancement. The first figures in Greek culture whose worldview—one no longer based on religious beliefs—has been handed down to us were natural scientists. Thales, the first great thinker of whom Aristotle tells us, was a natural scientist of great significance for his time. He was able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., while the Median and Lydian armies were facing off on the banks of the Halys River. His contemporary Anaximander was also a great astronomer.

[ 3 ] If, in our time, the cultivation of a “worldview and outlook on life”—taught as philosophy at our universities—does not enjoy any particular prestige, but is rather regarded as a one-sided academic discipline that is superfluous to life, this stems from the fact that contemporary philosophers have, for the most part, lost the proper connection with the individual sciences. Anyone who wishes to develop a “worldview and outlook on life” cannot limit themselves to a single discipline. They must assimilate all the knowledge of their time—everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other disciplines are tools for the philosopher. Given the vast amount of knowledge that has gradually accumulated, it is indeed difficult today to develop a comprehensive “worldview and outlook on life.” Consequently, those who teach worldviews and outlooks on life often deal with questions that do not arise from a genuine human need, but rather are presented to them by their one-sided thinking, which clings to certain traditions.

[ 4 ] A true “worldview and philosophy of life” must address the questions that cannot be answered by any single science. For each individual science deals with a specific area of nature or human life. A “worldview and outlook on life” must seek a coherent framework of thought within the body of knowledge that all the individual sciences offer us. Nor can every individual science be of interest to everyone. In contrast, a “worldview and outlook on life” is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can explore all the sciences. But just as it takes a vast amount of knowledge to build a table—knowledge that not everyone who needs a table can acquire—so too does the development of a “worldview” require a comprehensive set of tools that cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned how can make one. A worldview and outlook on life are of interest to everyone; however, they can and should be developed and taught only by those who can acquire the necessary tools from all the individual sciences. The sciences are merely the tools of worldviews and outlooks on life.

[ 5 ] Kant posed the fundamental questions that give rise to the human need for a worldview as follows: “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for?” Goethe expressed the matter more succinctly and profoundly when he said: “If I know my relationship to myself and to the outside world, then I call that truth.” In fact, through a worldview and outlook on life, human beings seek nothing more than insight into the meaning of their own existence and how they are connected to the nature that exists outside of them.

[ 6 ] The earliest Greek thinkers, Aristotle tells us, regarded material beginnings as the sole source of all things. They pondered the substance of which all things are composed, from which everything arises, and into which everything ultimately returns. The seeds of living beings develop in moist earth. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The idea seemed obvious that water was the primordial substance from which all things develop. Thus it came to be that the first Greek philosopher declared water to be the foundation of all things. Everything, he said, arises from water, and everything is transformed into water. Anaximander took it a step further. He did not trust the senses as much as Thales did. Water can be seen. But everything that can be seen is transformed into something else. That was Anaximander’s view. Water can become solid by freezing; it can become vapor by evaporating. The ancients considered steam and air to be the same thing. Likewise, they called everything solid “earth.” Solid water—earth—can transform into a liquid, and that liquid into air, Anaximander reasoned. Therefore, no specific substance is permanent. For this reason, he did not seek the primordial substance in a specific material, but rather in the indeterminate. Anaximenes, on the other hand, posited a specific primordial substance: air. He said: “Just as our soul—which is air—holds us together, so breath and air encompass the entire world.”

[ 7 ] Heraclitus reached a much higher level of worldview. Above all, the eternal change of all things struck him as self-evident. Nothing remains the same; everything changes. It is only our senses that deceive us when they tell us that something remains the same. I cannot step into the same river twice. For it is only seemingly the same river into which I step the second time. The water of which the river is composed has become something entirely different. And so it is with all things. Today’s tree is not yesterday’s. Different sap has flowed into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has since been excreted. Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction in the saying, “Everything flows.” That is why the most restless element, fire, becomes for him the symbol of all becoming and passing away.

[ 8 ] Empedocles, from Agrigento, took a completely different approach. His predecessors had sought a single primordial substance. He regarded four primordial substances as equal and coexisting. Earth, water, air, and fire have coexisted from the very beginning. None of these elements can be transformed into the others. They can only mix in the most diverse ways. And through their mixture, all the various things in nature come into being. Empedocles, therefore, no longer believes that a thing truly comes into being and ceases to exist. He believed that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believed that the same thing appears to cease to exist again when water and fire separate. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: “According to him, his four elements are said to persist forever, without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions to form an object or to separate from it.” Empedocles posits forces that govern the interaction of his four elements. Two or more elements combine when an attractive force acts between them; they separate when a repulsive force acts between them. According to Empedocles’ conviction, these attractive and repulsive forces can construct not only inanimate nature from the four elements, but also the entire realm of the living. He imagines that animal and plant bodies arise naturally through these forces. And because no rational intelligence guides this process, living forms—both fit for purpose and unfit for purpose—arise in a colorful jumble. However, only the fit-for-purpose forms can survive; the unfit-for-purpose ones must perish of their own accord. This idea of Empedocles is already similar to Darwin’s concept of the “struggle for existence.” Darwin also imagines that in nature, both fit-for-purpose and unfit-for-purpose forms arise, and that the world appears fit-for-purpose only because, in the “struggle for existence,” the unfit-for-purpose forms are constantly defeated and thus must perish.

[ 9 ] Anaxagoras, a contemporary of Empedocles, did not, like Empedocles, believe that the purposeful order of the world could be explained solely by the action of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual entity—a universal world intellect—gives things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consists of the smallest particles, the so-called “homeomeries,” each of which possesses distinct properties. The universal world intellect assembles these primordial particles so that they form purposeful things and, as a whole, a harmoniously arranged cosmic structure. Because he replaced the ancient folk gods with a universal world intellect, Anaxagoras was accused of atheism in Athens and was forced to flee to Lampsacus. In Athens, where he had traveled from Clazomenae, he was associated with Pericles, Euripides, and Themistocles.

[ 10 ] Anaxagoras conceived of the smallest parts—the “homeomeries,” or seeds of all things—as being entirely different from one another. Democritus, on the other hand, replaced these smallest parts with ones that differed from one another only in size, shape, position, and arrangement in space. In all other respects, the smallest constituents of things—the atoms—are supposed to be identical to one another. According to this atomist belief, what actually occurs in nature can be nothing other than a change in the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of bodies. When a body changes color, what has actually changed is the arrangement of its atoms. Apart from empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing else in the world. There is no power that imposes order on the atoms. They are in constant motion. Some move more slowly, others more quickly. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. As a result, bodies clump together. Thus, nothing in the world comes into being through an intellect or through a universal reason, but rather through blind natural necessity, which may also be called chance. Based on these convictions, it is understandable that Democritus’s followers waged a fierce struggle against the ancient folk gods. They were staunch deniers of God, or atheists. They must be regarded as the precursors of the materialist worldviews of later centuries.

[ 11 ] Parmenides and his followers sought to understand the phenomena of the world from a perspective entirely different from that of the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus, based on the fact that everything is in a state of eternal flux, concluded precisely that nothing is permanent, but rather that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to true being. Parmenides argued exactly the opposite: because everything in the external world is in a state of flux—because here everything is eternally coming into being and passing away—we cannot attain the true and the permanent through observation of the external world. We must regard what this external world presents to us as an illusion and can attain the eternal, the enduring, only through thought itself. The external world is a sensory delusion, a dream that is something entirely different from what our senses lead us to believe. What this dream truly is—what remains eternally the same—we cannot grasp through observation of the external world; it is revealed to us through thought. In the external world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thought, the eternally One is revealed to us—that which does not change, that which always remains the same. This is how Parmenides expresses himself in his didactic poem “On Nature.” We are thus dealing with a worldview that does not seek to derive truth from things themselves, but rather seeks to spin the very foundation of the world out of thought. If one wishes to understand the fundamental intuition from which such a worldview arises, one must bear in mind that thinking often must, in fact, interpret and explain sensory perceptions correctly in order to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. When we hold a stick in water, it appears broken to the eye. Thinking must seek the reasons why the stick appears broken. We thus obtain a satisfactory conception of this phenomenon only by having our reasoning explain the perception. If we merely observe the starry sky with our senses, we cannot form any conception other than that the Earth stands at the center of the world, and that the Sun, Moon, and all the stars revolve around it. Only through reasoning do we gain a different conception. In this case, even reason gives us a picture entirely different from that of sensory perception. One can therefore rightly say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the worldview of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For just as perception provides us with certain phenomena that deceive us, it also provides us with other facts through which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not arrive at his view of the motion of the celestial bodies by conjuring it up from mere thought, but by reconciling one perception with others.

[ 12 ] In contrast to Parmenides’ view stands another, earlier worldview. It does not seek to regard the interrelationships in the external world as an illusion, but rather aims, precisely through a deeper observation of this external world, to lead to the realization that everything in the world is based on a great harmony, that measure and number are present in all things. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle recounts that the Pythagoreans turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above—and even before them. “They were the first to pursue it, and, becoming completely absorbed in it, they regarded the principles within it as the principles of all things. Since, in mathematics, numbers are by nature the first, and they believed they saw in numbers much that was similar to things and to becoming—indeed, more so in numbers than in fire, earth, and water—they regarded one property of numbers as justice, another as the soul and the spirit, yet another as time, and so on for everything else. They also found in numbers the properties and relationships of harmony, and so everything else seemed, by its very nature, to be a reflection of numbers, and numbers themselves to be the first in nature.” Anyone who truly appreciates the significance of measure and number in nature will not find it surprising that a worldview such as the Pythagorean one could have emerged. When a string of a certain length is plucked, a specific pitch is produced. If the string is shortened in specific numerical ratios, different pitches are always produced. Pitch can be expressed in terms of numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in terms of numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always occurs in such a way that quantities of mass in one body—which can be expressed in terms of numbers—combine with those of the other body. Countless examples can be cited of the role that numbers and measures play in nature. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided manner by stating: “Measure and number are the foundation of all things.”

[ 13 ] A question lies dormant in all the worldviews discussed so far. It is never clearly articulated in any of them, because the thinkers apparently believed that it was answered automatically by the other questions they posed. It is the question of humanity’s relationship to the world. If Thales believed that all things arose from water, he also conceived of humanity as having sprung from the same source. Heraclitus believed that human beings flowed along with everything else in the eternal stream of things; and Anaxagoras conceived of human beings as being constructed from their primordial particles through their universal world-mind, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also assembled human beings from atoms. With Empedocles, an aspect of the question first emerges: What is the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature? How can humans perceive things? How is it possible for them to form concepts of what lies outside themselves? Empedocles provided the answer: Like can only be perceived by like. — Because humans consist of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, they are therefore able to perceive it.

[ 14 ] A number of thinkers, who are usually misunderstood, approached this question in an entirely different way. These are the Sophists, the most prominent of whom is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually portrayed as people who engaged in superficial intellectual games and vain debates, and who are said to have lacked any serious commitment to the pursuit of truth. The way in which the reactionary comic playwright Aristophanes mocked them in his plays has contributed greatly to the opinion that has formed about the Sophists. It may be that some individual Sophists exaggerated the art of debate; it may also be that there were some among them who were concerned only with hair-splitting and dandyish behavior—but this does not apply to the most prominent among them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves through comprehensive knowledge in a wide variety of fields. This must be particularly emphasized in the case of Protagoras, but we also know that Gorgias was an outstanding politician, and Socrates himself, as a student of Prodicus, praises him as an excellent scholar who took special care to refine the language of his pupils.

[ 15 ] Protagoras expresses his fundamental view in the following statement: “Man is the measure of all things—of those that are, that they are; of those that are not, that they are not.” What might this statement mean? One could say, like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than that and say: perhaps our thinking deceives us as well. Protagoras would reply: what business is it of man’s whether the world outside him is different from how he perceives and thinks it to be? Does he, after all, conceive of the world for someone else and not for himself? Let it be whatever it may be for another being: that is not his concern. His ideas are meant to serve him alone; with their help, he is to find his way in the world. A person cannot possibly want any other ideas about the world than those that serve him. Whatever else may exist in the world: if a person does not perceive it, it cannot concern him. For him, what he perceives exists; and what he does not perceive does not exist for him. But this means precisely that humans measure things by the standard provided by their senses and reason. Through his philosophy, Protagoras gives humans a firm footing and security in the world. He frees them from countless anxious questions that they raise only because they do not dare to judge things for themselves.

[ 16 ] It can be said that sophistry placed human beings at the center of the worldview. The fact that this occurred during the time of Protagoras is linked to the development of public conditions in Greece. The social fabric of the Greek city-states had become more fragmented. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431–404 B.C.E. Previously, the individual had been firmly embedded in social structures; the community and tradition provided the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual had value and significance only as a member of a whole. Under such circumstances, it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the value of the individual human being? Sophistry represents a tremendous step forward toward the Greek Enlightenment. People could now conceive of organizing their lives according to their reason. The Sophists traveled throughout the country as teachers of virtue. If one wishes to teach virtue, one must be convinced that it is not traditional moral views that are decisive, but that human beings can recognize virtue through their own reflection.

[ 17 ] Socrates, too, lived according to such conceptions of virtue. He must certainly be regarded as a disciple of the Sophists. Little is known about him. The accounts of what he taught are unreliable. What is clear, however, is that he was first and foremost a teacher of virtue, just like the Sophists. It is also certain that his manner of teaching was captivating. His teaching consisted of seeking, through conversation, to draw out from the listener himself what he recognized as the truth. The expression “intellectual midwifery” is well known in connection with his teachings. He did not wish to introduce anything from the outside into the student’s mind. He believed that the truth lay within every person, and that one need only provide assistance so that this truth might come to light. If one considers this, it becomes clear that Socrates helped reason in every individual to achieve its fullest potential. He always guided the student to the point where he could form the correct concept of a given matter. He drew upon the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, and what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different ways of living virtuously have something in common. This common element is precisely the concept of virtue. When one proceeds in this way with one’s thinking, one is following the so-called inductive method. One gathers individual experiences in order to form a concept of a thing. Once one has this concept, one can define the thing. One then has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living being with a spine that gives birth to live young. This is the definition of a mammal. It specifies the characteristic—giving birth to live young—that is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. That is his great merit. — The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he had brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. What this means is that he focused his reflections primarily on human beings themselves. How human beings should live was, above all else, close to his heart. That is why we now see in Greece that those who strive to develop a worldview always also ask what moral goals human beings should set for themselves.

[ 18 ] We encounter this right away in Socrates’ immediate successors. The Cynics, whose most prominent figure is Diogenes of Sinope, address the question of living in accordance with nature. How should a person live so that their life does not contradict the dispositions and abilities that nature has endowed them with? The Cynics sought to eliminate everything artificial and unnatural from life. It is understandable that, above all, the utmost simplicity seemed to them to be the best. What is natural is a need common to all people. The commoner found his place in this view of life. One can therefore imagine that this philosophy did not sit well with the so-called higher classes. After all, what the Cynics demanded was at odds with artificially created needs. While the name “Cynic” originally derived solely from the school—Kynosarges—where the Cynics taught, it later took on a derogatory connotation. Alongside the Cynics were the Cyrenaics and the Megarians. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to vindicate pleasure. Pleasure is in accordance with human nature. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating pleasure within oneself, but rather in not making oneself a slave to pleasure. Whoever strives for pleasure, yet always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only those who become slaves to their passions are vice-ridden.

[ 19 ] The Megarians firmly adhered to Socrates’s principle that virtue can be taught, and that, consequently, the perfection of thought must also lead to greater virtue. The most important proponent of the Megarian school was Euclid. For him, the Good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. That is why his primary concern was the attainment of wisdom. And from this high regard for wisdom, the idea likely arose in him that wisdom itself is the primordial source of the world. If—so he thought—human beings rise to concepts through their thinking, they simultaneously rise to the origins of things. With Euclid, the worldview takes on a decidedly idealistic hue. One must imagine Euclid’s line of thought something like this: There are many lions. The substances of which they are composed do not remain united. The individual lion comes into being and passes away. It takes in substances from the external world and returns them to it. What I perceive with my senses is the material. What is sensually perceptible in things thus comes into being and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion that lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion living today. It cannot be the materials. It can only be the concept, the idea of the lion, which I grasp through my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are structured according to the same idea. The sensory passes away; the idea remains. Ideas are embodied anew in the sensory world time and again.

[ 20 ] Plato was a student of Euclid. He made his teacher’s concept of the eternity of ideas his fundamental belief. For him, the sensory world has only secondary importance. The true reality consists of ideas. Anyone who looks only at the things of the sensory world sees only an illusion, a mirage of the true world. Plato’s conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world that we perceive with our senses have no true existence; they do not endure. One might just as well call their entire existence “non-existence.” Anyone who strives for the true, therefore, cannot be satisfied with the things of the sensory world. For the true can only come from where that which endures exists. If one limits oneself solely to sensory perception, one is like a person sitting bound in a dark cave, unable even to turn one’s head, and seeing nothing but the shadows of the things behind him—and his own shadow—cast by the light of a lamp burning behind him. Ideas can be compared to real, true things, and shadows to the things of the sensory world. Even of themselves, those who limit themselves to the sensory world perceive only a shadow. The tree I see, the scent of blossoms I breathe in: these are merely shadows. Only when I rise through my thinking to the idea of the tree do I possess that which is truly enduring and not a fleeting illusion of the tree.

[ 21 ] One must now ask: How did Plato conceive of the relationship between his world of ideas and the Greeks’ conceptions of the gods? This relationship is by no means entirely clear from Plato’s writings. He repeatedly speaks of otherworldly gods. However, one may hold the view that with such statements he merely sought to draw on Greek popular religion; and one would not be mistaken in interpreting his references to gods merely as figurative illustrations. What Plato himself conceives of as a deity is a primary moving cause of the world. In Plato’s view, one must imagine that the world consists of Ideas and prime matter. The Ideas are continually embodied in prime matter. And God, as the source of all motion, provides the impetus for this embodiment. For Plato, God is also the Good. This gives the world a grand, unified purpose. The Good moves all being and all events. The highest laws of the world thus constitute a moral world order.

[ 22 ] Plato recorded his worldview in the form of dialogues. His style of presentation was a source of admiration throughout the subsequent history of Western cultural development. — Plato came from an ancient noble family in Athens. We know from accounts that he was prone to idealism. He became Socrates’ most loyal and understanding student, devoted to his master with unconditional reverence. After his teacher’s execution, he went to Megara to study under Euclid. Later, he undertook extensive travels to Cyrene, Egypt, Magna Graecia—that is, southern Italy—and Sicily. In 389 B.C., he returned to Athens. However, he went on to make a second and third journey to Sicily. Upon returning from his first trip to Sicily, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the prominent figures of that era emerged. In Plato’s writings, one can observe a gradual shift in his views. He adopts ideas that he finds in the works of others. In his early writings, he fully adheres to the perspective he had developed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclid exerted a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he absorbed various Eastern ideas. Consequently, his worldview does not appear in his writings as if it were cast from a single mold. He later incorporated ideas he encountered into his original views. We may count his doctrine of the transmigration of souls among these. The soul already exists before the body. Indeed, its incarnation—that is, its union with matter—is regarded as a kind of punishment that it must endure for a transgression committed in its pre-worldly existence. But the soul does not incarnate just once, but repeatedly. Plato links this view to the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with a single life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the wicked. Rather, the evil that the soul has committed in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its atonement in the various lives does the soul return to the realm of ideas from which it originated.

[ 23 ] In its connection with the body, the human soul does not form a single unity. It is divided into three parts. The lowest part of the soul is that of sensory life; it is responsible for the instincts of nourishment and procreation. Plato describes the middle part of the soul as the will in human beings. Personal courage and bravery are based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It is responsible for the highest knowledge. It is at home in the realm of ideas. It is the truly immortal part of the human soul. Plato connects his ideas about immortality with Socrates’ notion that teaching consists solely of a kind of midwifery. If this is the case, then all the thoughts that are awakened in a person must already lie within him. They lie within him because he already possessed them before his birth, since the soul was already present then. Thus, in life, he merely recalls the thoughts that were already his own before his birth.

[ 24 ] Plato’s theory of the soul is again linked to his view of the state. The state, too, is the embodiment of an idea. And when it is perfect, it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature. The individual faculties of the soul are represented in the state by the various classes. The ruling class represents the highest soul; the guardian class, which is responsible for defense, represents the middle soul; and the artisan class represents the lowest soul. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic class structure. For the two upper classes, Plato recommends celibacy and the absence of private property. Monastic-like community life and communal ownership of property are to prevail. The entire education of youth—with the exception of the initial physical care of children, which is to be provided by the family—is to be the responsibility of the state.

[ 25 ] Plato’s most important student was Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato’s pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian campaigns, Aristotle returned to Athens and opened a school there.

[ 26 ] The relationship between Aristotle’s worldview and that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato’s ideas are entirely foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of a work of art that lives in the artist’s mind and which he shapes into his material. This material—the marble of a statue—is something entirely foreign to the artist’s idea. Aristotle, however, does not conceive of the relationship between ideas and matter in this way. For him, the idea lies within the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but rather as if it gave itself its form through a power inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in Aristotle’s view, there is no idea of the lion, for example, that is separate from the material. This idea lies within the material itself. According to Aristotle, there is no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the embryo in the womb to its fully formed state because the form is active within the living substance and acts like an innate power. This force or form is already present in the initial stage of a living being; it is simply not yet visible externally; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works its way out, so that the matter assumes the form that, as a dormant force, was already present within it from the beginning. In the beginning of all things, there was only external, formless matter. The force or matter was still entirely dormant within it. There was chaos, containing an immeasurable force sleeping within it. To awaken this force, so that chaos might form into the manifold world of things, an initial impulse was necessary. Therefore, Aristotle posits a prime mover of the world, a divine cause of the universe.

[ 27 ] If the idea—or, as Aristotle puts it, the form—lies within every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato suggests, regard things as mere illusions and shadows and elevate one’s thinking to an entirely different world if one wishes to attain the true; rather, one must turn directly to the sensible things themselves and bring to light the essence that lies within them. Thoughtful observation itself, therefore, provides insight into the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he devoted his attention above all to observation. In doing so, he became a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a manner as was at all possible for his time. He is recognized as the “Father of Natural History.” For example, he has left us subtle and insightful studies on the development of living beings from the embryonic stage onward. Such studies were most naturally connected to his philosophical views. He must have held the view, for instance, that the entire living being is already present within the egg, though not yet in a form visible from the outside. He reasoned: if a living being emerges from the egg, then it must be this living being itself that works its way into existence within the egg. When we look at an egg, it essentially has a dual nature. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it also has an invisible nature that will only come to light later, when it becomes a fully formed bird.

[ 28 ] Aristotle applies this view to all of nature. He stops only at the human being. The human egg already contains the entire human being, even the soul, insofar as it performs the lower functions that animals can also carry out. However, the situation is different with the human mind, which performs the higher activities of thought. This spirit is not yet present in the human embryo. If the embryo were left to its own devices, it could develop only into an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must intervene at the moment when the purely animal development of the human being has progressed far enough, and must create the spirit within the body. In human development, everything proceeds naturally up to a certain point—namely, until the body has reached the stage where it can accommodate the spirit. Then, once this has occurred—once the body has developed through natural processes to the point where it possesses all the necessary organs the spirit requires for its purposes—the spirit is created and placed within its physical dwelling. Aristotle thus conceives of the human spiritual soul as having come into being over time; but he does not attribute its origin to the same forces that give rise to the body, but rather to a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. Thus, when the spirit makes use of the eye to form thoughts about what it sees, it can do so only within the body that first developed an eye for it. For this reason, Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that, after death, the spirit continues to exist in the same way as it did before death. For through death, its organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It is no longer connected to the world. One must not, therefore, claim that Aristotle conceived of immortality as if the mind were to leave its body like an earthly prison and continue to exist with the characteristics by which it is known. Rather, it is stripped of all the attributes it possessed during its earthly existence. It thus leads, in effect, a sort of shadowy existence, much like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And it is of this life in the underworld that Achilles utters the famous saying: “Better to be a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows.”

[ 29 ] Given this view of the mind, Aristotle had to regard moral action as something that this mind carries out with the help of the animal soul. After all, the animal part of the soul has arisen naturally. When this part acts alone—that is, when a person follows only his animal instincts and passions—he cannot be a virtuous person. He becomes one only when the spirit takes control of the animal instincts and passions and moderates them. Left to itself, the animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. A person who merely follows his passions is either reckless or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right balance between recklessness and cowardice, namely, prudent courage.

[ 30 ] With regard to the state, Aristotle holds the view that the community must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of human nature to live in a community. One of Aristotle’s sayings is: “Anyone who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal... But man is a political animal.” Aristotle does not assume that there is a single form of government suitable for all people; rather, he considers the best form of government in each individual case to be the one that best meets the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the younger generation. Education is thus, for him, a matter of state; and he regards the cultivation of virtue as the purpose of education.

[ 31 ] Anyone who wishes to fully understand Greek culture in its unique form must not forget that this culture was built on the foundation of slavery. The educated members of Greek society were able to attain their level of education only because the vast army of slaves provided them with that opportunity. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of a culture. That is why even Aristotle regards slavery as a natural necessity. He simply takes it for granted, for he believes that many people are, by their very nature, so constituted that they are not at all suited to full freedom. However, it must not be overlooked that the Greeks were concerned for the welfare of their slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master’s obligation to conscientiously care for his slaves and to respect their human dignity.

[ 32 ] Aristotle dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries, people did not concern themselves with the things of nature themselves, but rather with Aristotle’s opinions about those things. His writings were accorded absolute authority. All scholarship consisted of explaining the writings of the ancient sage. Furthermore, for a long time these writings were available only in a very incomplete and unreliable form. Consequently, the most diverse opinions were regarded as those that were supposed to have originated with Aristotle. It was not until the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas that the writings of the “Master of Those Who Know” were compiled in such a way that one could say one was dealing with a reasonably reliable text. Furthermore, up until the 12th century, scholars focused almost exclusively on one aspect of Aristotelian thought: his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle was particularly groundbreaking in this field. He laid the foundations for the art of thinking correctly—that is, logic—in such a way that even Kant, at the end of the 18th century, could hold the view that logic had not taken any significant step forward since Aristotle. Aristotle masterfully systematized the art of correctly deriving one truth from another through appropriate logical inferences. And since scholars in the Middle Ages were less interested in expanding the human mind through observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation through logical proofs, they must have been particularly concerned with the application of the theory of reasoning.

[ 33 ] What Aristotle had actually taught was soon obscured after his death by the interpretations his successors gave to his views, as well as by other opinions that were associated with his own. In the centuries following Aristotle, we see three worldviews emerge: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism.

[ 34 ] The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342 to 270 B.C. The school takes its name from the colorful colonnade (Stoa) in Athens, where its teachers gave their lectures. Since the days of the Sophists, public life in Greece had become even more fragmented. The individual was increasingly left to his own devices. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue at the center of thought. The Stoics regarded perfect equanimity in life as the highest goal a person could achieve. Anyone who can be thrown into emotional turmoil by their desires and passions cannot attain such equanimity. They are driven hither and thither by pleasure and desire without ever feeling satisfied. One should therefore strive to become independent of pleasure and desire and lead a life governed solely by wise insight. The Stoics conceived of the world as having arisen from a kind of primordial fire. They believed that everything had emerged from the fire and that everything would return to the fire. Then, from the fire, the exact same world that already existed is renewed. The world, therefore, does not exist just once, but countless times in exactly the same way. Every single event has already occurred an infinite number of times and will recur an infinite number of times. This is the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things and events, which Friedrich Nietzsche revived in exactly the same way in our own time. Such an explanation of the world is perfectly consistent with the Stoics’ ethical teachings. For if everything has already existed, then human beings cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that humans should see the highest moral wisdom in equanimity toward everything that must come to pass in any case.

[ 35 ] The Epicureans saw the purpose of life in the satisfaction that existence affords a person when he pursues pleasure and happiness in a rational manner. It is unreasonable to chase after petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even to unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, lofty pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes human happiness. Epicurus’s entire view of nature bears a mark that clearly shows it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, it emphasizes a correct understanding of the faculty of judgment, so that humans may find their way in life through their thinking. For the senses do not deceive us; only our thinking can deceive us. When the eye sees a stick submerged in water as if it were broken, the eye does not deceive us. The actual facts are such that the stick must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our reasoning forms a false judgment about why the stick appears broken. Epicurus’s view found numerous followers at the end of antiquity; in particular, Romans seeking education found satisfaction in it. The Roman poet Lucretius Carus gave it a masterful expression in his brilliant didactic poem On the Nature of Things.

[ 36 ] Skepticism is the worldview of doubt and distrust. Its first and most significant proponent was Pyrrho, who was a contemporary of Aristotle but made little impact at the time. It was only his successors who found followers for their view that human cognitive faculties are insufficient to gain an understanding of true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things are really as our thinking tells us they are cannot be determined.

[ 37 ] The manifold attempts to arrive at a worldview through thought had led to such diverse—and in some cases contradictory—conceptions that, by the end of antiquity, people had come to distrust all sensory perception and all thought. Added to this were ideas, such as those of Plato, that the sensory world was merely a dream and an illusion. Such ideas then became intertwined with certain Eastern philosophies that preached the futility and worthlessness of life. From these elements, Neoplatonism took shape in Alexandria during the final centuries of antiquity. The most important proponents of this doctrine were Philo, who lived during the time of Christ, and Plotinus. Philo drew conclusions from Plato’s teachings regarding moral life. If reality is an illusion, then virtue can consist only in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and feelings toward the one true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed he found in the God of Judaism. Plotinus, however, did not seek to reach this God through rational knowledge, for such knowledge can only pertain to the finite and transitory; rather, he sought to attain the eternal Primordial Being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion into the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, human beings reach the Primordial Being, which has poured itself out into the world. This world is merely an imperfect outflow, a byproduct of the Primordial Being.

2. Worldviews of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era

[ 38 ] With the advent of Christianity, something entirely new emerges in the development of the Western worldview. Rational thought is overshadowed by a completely different authority: revelation. Truth does not come from thought, but originates from a higher power that has revealed it to humankind: this now becomes the conviction. It is faith in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in reason that constitute the essence of Christianity. Those who profess the Christian doctrine do not wish to believe in their own thinking, but rather in tangible events through which the truth has been revealed. “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the Word of Life... what we have seen and heard, we proclaim to you, so that you may have fellowship with us.” So it is written in the First Epistle of John. And Augustine says: “I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so.” What Christ’s contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church has preserved through tradition as such hearing and seeing, now becomes truth; what a person attains through his own reasoning is no longer regarded as such.

[ 39 ] In Christianity, we encounter, on the one hand, the religious thought of Judaism and, on the other, the ideas of the Greek worldview. The religion of Judaism was originally a nationalistic and self-centered one. God had chosen His people for earthly power and glory. But this people had suffered the most bitter disappointments. They had fallen into captivity and subjection to other peoples. Their hopes for the Messiah stemmed from their expectation that God would deliver them from their disgrace and humiliation. This humiliation was attributed to their own sinfulness. Here, ideas emerge of a turning away from the life that has led to sinfulness. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; rather, one should turn to God, who will soon bring His kingdom to this earth and free people from their disgrace. Jesus was completely filled with such ideas. He wanted to speak to the poor and the oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who have previously lived in misery. And Jesus envisioned the Kingdom of Heaven as being imminent. He did not direct people’s attention to a spiritual afterlife, but rather to the fact that, in this age—and indeed soon—the Lord would come and bring glory to humanity. Already through Paul, and even more so through the teachers of the faith in the first Christian centuries, a fusion of Christ’s teachings with the ideas of later Greek philosophers replaced that naive faith. The Kingdom of Heaven, which was to come soon, thus became the afterlife. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek philosophical concepts. From this reinterpretation—from this interplay of originally naive ideas with traditional views—the dogmatic content of Christian doctrine developed over the course of time. Thought placed itself entirely at the service of faith; it became the servant of revelation. The entire Middle Ages was devoted to supporting revelation through the power of thought. The Church Father Augustine bears witness to how thought and revelation worked together in the early centuries; Thomas Aquinas illustrates how this occurred in the Church in later times. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt, one fact remains: that thought—the thinking human being himself—must exist; otherwise, he could not doubt. If I doubt, then I am thinking; therefore, I exist, and my reason is present. And certain truths are revealed to me through reason. But my reason never grasps the whole truth, only individual truths. These individual truths can only originate from the Being in whom all truth resides—from God. Therefore, there must be a divine Being. My reason proves this to me. Yet my reason gives me only parts of the truth; the highest truth lies in revelation. Thomas Aquinas is a comprehensive thinker who processes the entire body of knowledge of his time in an astonishingly astute manner. One must by no means imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and to reason. For him, nature was one source of truth; revelation, however, was the other. In his view, everything in the world originates from God. Even natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we investigate nature, we are using our minds to investigate the works of God. Yet with our feeble human minds, we cannot penetrate to the highest works of God. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can indeed use our reason to prove that God exists; but we cannot learn anything through reason about the nature of God, His Trinity, the redemption of humanity through Christ, the power of the sacraments, and so on; revelation, through the authority of the Church, instructs us on these matters. Thomas argues that it is not because these things have nothing to do with reason at all that human beings cannot grasp them through their thinking, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason, therefore, could also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is reflected in medieval Scholasticism.

[ 40 ] German mysticism took a different path from scholasticism in its pursuit of truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, and Angelus Silesius. In this respect, they are the precursors of modern worldviews, in that they did not rely on an external authority but sought truth in the human soul and in the phenomena of nature. In their view, it is not an external Christ who can show human beings the way to their goal, but rather the spiritual powers within the human soul alone that point the way. “The physician must examine nature,” says Paracelsus, pointing out that the source of truth lies within nature itself. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that there is no divine being outside the things of nature, but that God is within nature. He expresses how nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine in beautiful phrases, such as: “I know that without me God cannot live for a single moment; if I cease to be, He must give up His spirit out of necessity.” God has no life apart from things, but only within them. Jakob Böhme’s worldview is also entirely dominated by such a conception.

[ 41 ] It is evident from Scholasticism that it constantly strove to establish harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be achieved without contrived logic and the most sophistical conclusions. The mystics sought to free themselves from such conclusions. To them, the highest truth that human beings can know seems impossible to base on logical sophistry; it must reveal itself clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind.

[ 42 ] Luther also proceeded from similar sentiments. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic; above all, he wanted to protect divine revelation from the contradictions of reason. In contrast to the scholastics, he sought to achieve this by stating: Reason has no say whatsoever in matters of faith. Reason should concern itself with explaining the phenomena of the world; it has no business with the truths of faith. The revealed Word is the source of faith. Reason has absolutely nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its concern. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firm on its own. When reason attempts to grapple with religious truths, the result is nothing but vain bickering and idle chatter. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they sought to establish a foundation for faith through reason. He says: “This god-cursed Aristotle is a veritable devil, a hideous slanderer, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a beast, a hideous deceiver of humanity, devoid of almost all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous billy goat.” One can see what this is all about. Aristotle had sought to attain the highest truths through human reasoning; Luther wanted to safeguard these highest truths once and for all from being tampered with by reason. That is why he also calls reason “the devil’s whore, who can do nothing but blaspheme and defile what God says and does.” We see Luther’s ideas continuing to exert their influence in the same form even today, even if modern theology cloaks them in a veneer of progressiveness. In Adolf Harnack’s much-praised The Essence of Christianity, we read: “Science is incapable of giving life meaning... It is religion—namely, love of God and love of neighbor—that gives life meaning... Jesus’ true greatness lies in the fact that he led people to God... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time.”

[ 43 ] Shortly after Luther’s emergence, reason—which he had denounced—achieved one victory after another. Copernicus formulated his new view of the motion of the celestial bodies. Kepler established the laws governing the planets’ motion around the sun; Galileo turned the telescope toward the boundless expanse of the heavens, thereby giving nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts of its own accord. Through such advances, the study of nature was bound to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo conveys the sentiments that took root in the mind of a thinker of that era. People no longer believed they were acting in the spirit of Aristotle by clinging to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. That was what the Middle Ages had done. Now it was believed that one was creating in the spirit of Aristotle if, like him, one turned one’s gaze toward nature. The words Galileo spoke in this regard are golden. “You are always,” he says, “talking about your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or he would refute our arguments and set us straight. … Philosophy is written in this greatest of books, which lies constantly open before our eyes—I mean the universe—but one cannot understand it unless one has first learned the language and become familiar with the symbols in which it is written.” Giordano Bruno is one of those minds of this flourishing era of thought who, while capable of constructing a worldview based on a naturalistic perspective, nevertheless clung entirely to traditional dogmas without considering how one could be reconciled with the other.

[ 44 ] If human thought did not wish to deny itself, if it did not wish to allow itself to be forced into a completely subordinate position, it could only, in a new way, return to the path that the Greek worldviews had already sought. It had to strive to advance from within itself toward the highest truths.

[ 45 ] René Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first to make an attempt. His approach bears a strong resemblance to that of Augustine. Descartes, too, began with doubt regarding all truth. And he, too, said to himself: Even if I can doubt everything, I cannot doubt that I exist. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But since I think, I am. “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum)—that is Descartes’ famous principle. And from this fundamental truth, Descartes seeks to ascend to higher insights. He tells himself: Whatever I perceive as clearly and distinctly as the fact that I exist must also be equally true. — And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs in his thinking. He believes he can find in his reason the Christian concepts of God, the soul, and immortality—which have been instilled in Western humanity through centuries of education—as truths just as certain as the knowledge that he himself exists. These essential components of ancient theology reappear here as supposed truths of reason. We even find the old conception of the soul in Descartes. He conceives of this soul as an independent spiritual being that merely makes use of the body. We have encountered such an idea in Aristotle. According to Descartes, animals have no soul whatsoever. They are automatons. Human beings have a soul that is located in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an aspiration that is also present among the Scholastics, namely, the desire to prove the “highest truths” handed down from ancient tradition through reason. Only the Scholastics openly admit that this is their aim, while Descartes believes he can derive all proofs purely from reason itself. Descartes thus seemingly proved through reason what stemmed solely from religion. This disguised scholasticism continued to prevail for a long time thereafter; and in Germany, we find its principal representatives in Leibniz and Wolff. Leibniz preserves the old concept of the soul by making everything a kind of independent, animate being. These neither come into being nor cease to exist. And he preserves the concept of God by attributing to God the power to bring all beings into harmonious interaction. Time and again, the old religious concepts resurface as supposed truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes between sensory truths, which are gained through observation, and higher insights, which reason derives from within itself. But these higher truths are, when viewed in the light of reason, nothing other than the old truths of revelation, obtained through distortion and filtering. No wonder that, in proving such truths, reason relied on highly questionable concepts that could not withstand closer critical examination.

[ 46 ] The English thinkers Locke and David Hume, along with the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, undertook such a critical examination of the process of reasoning in human reason. Locke examined the human capacity for knowledge and believed he had found that we can arrive at knowledge only through the observation of natural phenomena themselves. Hume then asked what kind of knowledge this was. He asked himself: If I observe today that the sun’s heat is the cause of the stone’s warming, do I have the right to say that this will always be the case? If I perceive a cause and then an effect, may I say that this cause will always and necessarily produce this effect? No, I may not. I see the stone fall to the ground and observe that it creates a hollow in the earth. I cannot assert that this must be the case, or that it could not be otherwise. I see certain processes and also become accustomed to seeing them in a specific context. But whether such a connection truly exists, whether there are laws of nature that can tell me anything real about the connection between things—of that I know nothing. Kant, who had lived within the framework of Wolff’s worldview until he reached adulthood, was shaken to the core in all his convictions when he became acquainted with Hume’s writings. He had never before doubted that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown, however, that even in the case of simple truths, there could be no question of proof, but rather that we accept everything we believe merely out of habit. Are there really no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such truths. He could not doubt, for example, that the truths of mathematics must always and necessarily be true. Nor could he doubt that something like “every effect has a cause” must be eternally valid. But Hume convinced him that these insights could not be eternally true if we had derived them from external observation. For observation can only tell us what has always been; it cannot tell us whether this must always be the case. Kant found a way out. He said: how things in nature appear to us does not depend on the things themselves at all. It depends solely on ourselves. I am constituted in such a way that, for me, “two times two must be four”; I am constituted in such a way that, for me, every effect must have a cause. So no matter what may be the case out there, in the “thing-in-itself”—whether things are such that “two times two is three” at one time, or “two times two is five” at another—none of that can affect me. I can only perceive that “two times two is four”; consequently, everything appears to me as if “two times two is four.” I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently, everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether causes are connected to effects in the “thing-in-itself,” I do not know. I am, as it were, afflicted with blue-tinted glasses. Whatever colors things may have out there, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue hue. So I do not know what the “things-in-themselves” are; I know only how they appear to me. Since God, immortality, and the freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all—since they do not appear—human thought and reason cannot determine anything about these things. They are none of reason’s concern. But does that mean they are of no concern to human beings at all? Kant asks himself this. They are of great concern to human beings, he answers. It’s just that their existence cannot be comprehended; one must believe in it. I know that I am to do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks within me: “You must.” Therefore, I must also be able to. At the very least, I must believe that I can. And for this belief, I need another. I myself cannot give the performance of my duty the necessary force. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as the moral order of the world. Therefore, there must be a God who determines this moral order of the world. He also grants my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it may enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transitory, imperfect life. It is clear that, for Kant, everything that knowledge can never attain reappears as faith. Kant achieved, by a different path, something similar to what Luther sought to achieve in his own way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same. His faith is no longer biblical faith; he speaks of a “religion within the bounds of mere reason.” But cognition, or knowledge, should be limited solely to phenomena; it should have no say regarding the objects of faith. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He himself best described what he believed he had achieved with the words: “I therefore had to set aside knowledge in order to make room for faith.” According to Kant, then, knowledge should concern itself only with the subordinate world, which gives no meaning to life; what gives life meaning are the objects of faith, which no knowledge can approach.

[ 47 ] Whoever wishes to save faith can do so with the weapons of Kant’s worldview; for knowledge has no power—in the sense of this view—to determine anything about the highest truths. Many currents of nineteenth-century philosophy are influenced by Kant’s ideas. They make it so easy to clip the wings of knowledge; they allow one to deny reason the right to have a say in matters of the highest order. One might say, for example: What, after all, does natural science aim for? It can, after all, offer only subordinate wisdom at best. Kant—whom people so readily call the great reformer of philosophy—has proven once and for all that knowledge is limited and subordinate, and that it cannot give life any meaning. Contemporary worldviews that invoke such self-mutilation of knowledge have not even reached the level of Scholasticism, which at least felt obligated to bring about harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even cloaked this position in the guise of natural science in his famous lecture, “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge.”

3. The New Worldviews

[ 48 ] Another school of thought that extends to the present day has its origins in Spinoza. He is a thinker who has an unconditional trust in human reason. Reason accepts as its insights whatever can be recognized in the same way as mathematical truths. And the things of the world are connected by the same kind of necessary relationships as the terms of a calculation or as mathematical figures. Everything spiritual, just like everything physical, is governed by such necessary laws of nature. It is a childish notion to believe that a human-like, all-wise providence arranges things. The activities of living beings and the actions of the human mind are just as subject to the laws of nature as a stone that falls to the earth in accordance with the laws of gravity. It is a mistake to believe that a creative power has created any beings for specific purposes. One is mistaken, for example, in believing that a creator gave the bull horns so that it might gore. No, the bull has acquired its horns according to laws that are just as necessary as the laws by which a billiard ball continues to roll when struck. It has horns by natural necessity, and that is why it gores. One could also say: the bull does not have horns so that it can gore, but rather it gores because it has horns. In Spinoza’s sense, God is nothing other than the natural necessity inherent in all physical and mental phenomena. When a person looks out into the world, he beholds God; when he reflects on things and events, the divine world order presents itself to him—which is, however, nothing other than the natural order of things. In Spinoza’s view, one cannot speak of a conflict between faith and knowledge. For there is nothing but nature. Human beings themselves are part of this nature. Thus, when they contemplate themselves and nature, everything that can be spoken of at all is revealed to them.

[ 49 ] Goethe, too, was imbued with this worldview. He, too, sought in nature itself what earlier philosophies had sought in an otherworldly realm. Nature became his God. He wanted nothing to do with any other divine being.

What kind of God would he be who merely pushed from the outside,
Making the universe run in circles on his finger!
It befits Him to move the world from within,
Nature within Himself, nurturing Himself in Nature,
So that what lives, weaves, and is within Him,
Never lacks His power, never His spirit.

[ 50 ] So says Goethe. For him, nature is God, and nature also reveals God. There is no other revelation. And there can be no other entities besides those of nature that are to be attained solely through faith. That is why Goethe never wanted anything to do with Kant’s distinction between faith and knowledge.

[ 51 ] And that everything a person could wish for in terms of truth can also be attained through the contemplation of nature and of human beings themselves—this is also the conviction of the thinkers who, at the beginning of the 19th century, were striving to develop worldviews. This is also the conviction of the thinkers who, in the second half of the 19th century, sought to construct a worldview based on the findings of the natural sciences. These latter thinkers, such as Haeckel, are of the opinion that the laws of nature they investigate are not merely secondary matters, but that they truly represent what gives life its meaning.

[ 52 ] Johann Gottlieb Fichte places the human being’s own “I” at the center of his reflections. What have earlier worldviews done with this “I”? They have extracted it from human beings and made it into God. This gave rise to the human-like creator of the world. Fichte sets aside all such conceptions of God. He seeks consciousness where it can truly be found—in human beings. Fichte finds what was once worshipped as God—such a spiritual being—only in human beings. Thus, when seeking the relationship between the spirit and the world, human beings are not dealing with a connection between “God and the world,” but only with an interaction between the spirit within them and nature. This is the essence of Fichte’s worldview; and everything that has been falsely attributed to Fichte—as if, for example, he had wanted to claim that the individual human being creates nature out of himself—is based solely on a very short-sighted interpretation of his ideas. Schelling then built upon Fichte’s ideas. Fichte wanted nothing more than to observe the human mind as it forms its own concepts of nature. For no God gives him these concepts; he forms them on his own. For Fichte, the question was not how God does it, but how human beings do it as they find their way in the world. Schelling built upon this the view that we can regard the world from two perspectives: from the external side, when we observe physical processes, and from the internal side, when we observe the spirit, which is, after all, nothing other than nature itself. Hegel then went one step further. He asked himself: What, in fact, is it that our thinking reveals to us about nature? When I explore the laws of the celestial bodies through my thinking, do these laws not reveal the eternal necessity that reigns in nature? What, then, do all my concepts and ideas give me? Nothing other than what is out there in nature itself. Within me exist the same essences as concepts, as ideas, which in the world govern all existence as eternal, ironclad laws. When I look within myself, I perceive concepts and ideas; when I look outside myself, these concepts and ideas are the laws of nature. What governs the entire world as law is reflected in the individual human being as thought. Hegel is misunderstood when it is claimed that he sought to spin the entire world out of the idea, out of the human mind. It will one day have to be counted as an eternal disgrace of German philosophy that it misunderstood Hegel in this way. Anyone who understands Hegel would never even think of trying to spin anything out of the idea. Marx truly understood Hegel—in the fruitful sense of the word. That is why Marx sought the laws of economic development where they alone are to be found. Where are the laws to be found? Hegel answered this question: Where the facts are, there are also the laws. There is no idea anywhere else but where the facts are that one seeks to grasp through that idea. Whoever investigates the facts of real life thinks in a Hegelian way. For Hegel was of the view that it is not abstract thoughts, but things themselves, that lead to their essences.

[ 53 ] Modern natural science proceeds in the same way, in the spirit of Hegel. This new natural science, of which Charles Darwin became the great founder through his work On the Origin of Species (1859), seeks out the laws of nature in the realm of living beings just as it does in inanimate nature. Ernst Haeckel summarizes the creed of this natural science in the following words: “The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive … they act through a living force just as much as the human being who thinks.” This branch of natural science is convinced that, by deriving the laws that reason extracts from things, it simultaneously reveals the essence of those things. There is no room left for a faith that is supposed to give life its meaning. In the 1850s, courageous minds such as Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner attempted to restore the view that the essence of the things in this world is also fully and completely revealed through knowledge. It has become fashionable today to attack these men as if they were the most narrow-minded of thinkers and to claim that they failed to see the true mysteries of the world. Only people who themselves have no idea what questions can even be raised do this. What else did these men want but to explore nature in order to gain the meaning of life from nature itself through knowledge? Deeper minds will certainly be able to discern even deeper truths from nature than Vogt and Büchner did. But even these deeper minds will have to follow the same paths of knowledge as they did. For it is always said: You must seek the spirit, not the raw matter! Well then, the answer can only be given with Goethe: The spirit is in nature.

[ 54 ] Ludwig Feuerbach provided the answer to the question of what any god other than nature is by showing how such a conception of God is created by human beings, in their own image. “God is the revealed inner self, the articulated self of man; religion is the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the admission of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his secrets of love.” What man possesses within himself, he projects into the world and worships as God. Man does the same with the moral order of the world. Only man himself, acting from within himself in relation to his fellow human beings, can create this order. Yet he then imagines that it has been imposed upon him by another, higher being. Max Stirner took a radical stand against such entities, which man creates for himself and then places above himself as higher powers, as spectres or ghosts. Stirner calls for man’s liberation from such ghosts.

[ 55 ] The path that leads to liberation from them was taken solely by the worldviews based on the natural sciences in the second half of the 19th century. Other worldviews, such as those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, are merely a return to outdated ideas. Schopenhauer elevated only a part of the entire human “I”—the will—to the status of a divine being; and Hartmann did the same with the “I,” after first removing consciousness from it. In doing so, he arrived at the “unconscious” as the primordial source of the world. It is understandable that, starting from such premises, these two thinkers had to arrive at the conviction that the world is the worst conceivable one. For they made the “I” the foundation of the world after having removed reason from it, either entirely or in part. Earlier thinkers of this persuasion first idealized the “I”—that is, endowed it with even more reason than it possesses in human beings. In this way, the world became a creation of infinite wisdom.

[ 56 ] A truly modern worldview can no longer incorporate any of the old religious ideas. Schiller had already articulated its foundation when he described Goethe’s view of nature in a letter to him: “From the simplest organization, you ascend, step by step, to the more complex, in order to finally construct the most complex of all—human beings—naturally from the materials of the entire edifice of nature.” If human beings wish to derive their existence from something, they can only derive it from nature itself. Human beings are formed from nature according to eternal, immutable laws; but they are not yet in any way—neither as God nor as any other spiritual being—already present within nature. All conceptions that imagine nature to be animated or spiritualized (e.g., those of Paulsen and others) are relapses into old theological ideas. The spirit has come into being; it has not developed out of nature. This must first be understood; only then can thought form a conception of this spirit that has arisen within the natural order. Only such a worldview can speak of true freedom. I have demonstrated this in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom and in my book Worldviews and Lifestyles in the 19th Century. A spirit that had developed out of another spirit would also have to derive its moral goals and purposes from the latter—from the divine or world spirit; a spirit that has arisen from nature sets the purpose and goal of its existence for itself and determines its own destiny. A true philosophy of freedom can no longer agree with Adolf Harnack that knowledge is incapable of giving life meaning; rather, it shows that human beings arose through natural necessity, that they were indeed not endowed with a predetermined meaning, but that it is up to them to give themselves meaning. The old worldviews stand alongside the old economic orders, but they will also fall along with them. Human beings who are economically liberated will also be freer in terms of knowledge and morality; and when the economic order brings a dignified existence to all people, they will also adopt as their own a worldview that fully liberates the spirit.