The Rudolf Steiner Archive

While the empirical sciences seek to fathom and explain the context in the world of given objects and to explain the relationships between the individual empirical phenomena, philosophy sets out to explain the given in its entirety itself, to show how the finite, the limited, is connected to the infinite, the unlimited. For the empirical scientist, the world of phenomena is a foundation on which he thinks he stands firmly, but he does not venture to ask further questions about it. The philosopher, however, seeing the conditionality of this foundation, unhinges it in order to rebuild it and let it emerge from the only unchanging and absolute. What the human mind unconsciously created in an earlier period becomes its object in a later one. The inner becomes an outer for it and as such it is taken up and endowed with new life. Whenever the old is taken as an object and given new breath, then the human mind has reached a new level.

When minds inspired by old ideas are awakened and infuse new life into them, a new epoch in human history has begun. The longer ideas reproduce without the infusion of fresh life, the more rigid they become; they appear to be alive, but they are dead. This was the state of German culture in all its branches at the beginning of the last century. But then the time came when a new ray of sunshine warmed the frozen world and new life sprouted everywhere. In the realm of the beautiful there arose a Lessing, a Herder, a Goethe, a Schiller; in philosophy there was a Kant.

In 1746, the death of his father deprived him of the necessary funds to continue his university studies, and he was forced to leave the university. He left by publishing a treatise that already foreshadowed his ingenuity: “On the True Estimation of the Living Forces of Nature”.

Through the spirited [illegible word] Martin Knutzen, who introduced him to Newton, the studies on this great man were the immediate cause of the cited writing. Now he became a private tutor and remained in this position for nine years until he had sufficient material means to be able to pursue his career as an academic teacher. In 1755, he earned the degree of Magister with his treatise “A New Illumination of the First Principles of All Metaphysical Knowledge,” and at the same time he began his beneficial academic work as a private lecturer.

In the aforementioned treatise, he now presents himself to us fully as a philosopher. Although he still starts from the Leibniz-Wolffian direction, he is already standing completely independently, declaring the ontological proof of the existence of God to be fraudulent, showing the impossibility of assuming that a simple being could have the reason for its change within itself.

In 1762, he proves that the four syllogistic figures [two unreadable words] of contemporary philosophy are only false subtleties.

In 1763, he attempts to introduce negative quantities into world wisdom.

1764 he shows that if philosophy is to be more than a dead skeleton of the active and living world view, and correspond to reality, it must emulate the mathematical method, for this is the view that corresponds to reality [and is more true to life].

In 1766, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, he regards old metaphysics as nothing more than a form of enthusiasm, which he equates with the musings of Swedenborg, who was well known at the time.

In 1768, he also broke with Leibniz's assumption that space is nothing but the relationship between things that are next to each other; he attributed to it an independent and original significance.

And so the dilapidated house of old metaphysics was demolished piece by piece, and David Hume's skeptical investigations had left a deep impression.

Not as fast as in his inner philosophical views, he progressed in his external career. He had to remain a private lecturer for 15 years. His circumstances were not brilliant; this is proved by the fact that the only coat was so worn out that his friends would have bought him a new one if he had agreed. He had been proposed for a full professorship since 1756. But the then seven-year war was an obstacle to his aspirations. Only in 1762 was he offered a full professorship in poetry.

Those who have had even a small amount of contact with Kantian intellectual products will hardly be surprised when they hear that the philosopher turned down a position in which he would have had the obligation to [illegible word] all possible daily phenomena in the field of poetry, to make occasional poems and the like. He was proposed for a position that was next to be filled. And so he was brought to the royal castle in 1766 as a sub-librarian with an annual salary of - 62 thalers.

Meanwhile, however, his seeds had also found more fertile soil here and there in the rest of Germany, and in November 1769 he was called to Erlangen and in January 1770 to Jena. Already determined to accept the latter appointment, in March 1770 the long-awaited opportunity arose for him to take up the post of full professor in his native Königsberg; he became a full professor of logic and metaphysics.

In August 1770, he then [emerged] with the treatise “On the Principles of the Sensual and the Intellectual World” and in this, the transformation had already taken place, the old dogmatic philosophy was concluded and the foundation for the critical one was laid. Here it is already clearly stated that the conditions under which things can appear to us cannot at the same time provide the conditions of the possibility of things in themselves. And now he sets to work on the most famous of all philosophical works, the work by which he made himself immortal, the “Critique of Pure Reason”.

In February 1772, he writes to Herz in Berlin, the man who, in defense of the aforementioned essay, replied that he hoped to finish his work in three months.

In Nov. 1776, he does not think he will be finished by Easter, and he believes he will have to work all summer long; the systematic development presents enormous difficulties.

In Aug. 1777, he hopes to be finished by winter, and in August of the following year, he speaks of a handbook of metaphysics that is to be published by him soon. However, it is not until 1781 that the work appears under the title “Critique of Pure Reason”.

This was

not a critique of books and systems, but [the] of reason in general, in view of all knowledge to which it may aspire independently of all experience, and thus the decision of the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general and the determination of both the sources and the scope and limits of the same, all from principles

given. Wormy dogmatism, together with destructive skepticism, was thrown overboard, mere groping under mere concepts abandoned, the whole world view placed on different feet. Until then, it had been assumed that

all our knowledge must conform to the objects; but all attempts to determine a priori something through concepts by which our knowledge would be expanded came to nothing under this assumption.

Kant tried

therefore tried to see whether we would not get better results in the tasks of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must be based on our knowledge, which [so] better agrees with the desired possibility [of] knowledge of the same a priori, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. The situation here is similar to that of Copernicus's first thoughts, who, [after not much success in explaining the movements in the heavens when he assumed that the whole starry sky rotated around the observer, tried to see if he might not be more successful if he made the observer rotate and left the stars at rest. In metaphysics, we can now try a similar approach with regard to the perception of objects. If perception had to conform to the nature of objects, then I do not see how we can know anything about it a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the nature of our faculty of perception, then I can well imagine this possibility.

[breaks off]

On the Possibility of Experience

Experience arises only through looking at and recognizing (that is, thinking in valid judgments - through understanding) what is given.

Everything that is ever to become the object of my thinking can only do so to the extent that it takes on those forms under which thinking is possible at all. Thus, anything that is not capable of taking on the forms of my thinking could not become the object of my experience at all. Therefore, everything that is ever to become experience must conform to the forms of my thinking.

These forms are therefore the conditions for all possible experience.

An object cannot simply be thought of as being, but must be in a certain way; being in general is substance, the way it is is its accident. Although both are strictly identical, strictly one and the same in reality, thinking separates them here and considers the thing insofar as it is and also insofar as it is somehow and then says that what is cannot perish or arise, only its accidents change. This is quite right, if only we do not think of a persisting thing in itself, because if an object ceases to exist in a certain way and begins to exist in a different way, I used to ascribe being to it and I still do so; it is therefore always being, that is, it persists in its being. To say that the existing ceases to exist is inconsistent and impossible precisely because it is inconsistent, for it means that the existing should not be at a time, which is roughly the same as saying that the beautiful should be ugly at a time.

[missing part of the manuscript]

The ego is absolute in its form, therefore it cannot be asked about an authority to use the above listed forms, it is simply capable of doing so.

But insofar as it applies the forms, it is absolute identity with itself and everything else is only through the absolute ego, and therefore also the imagined ego.

A genuine theory of science, which is supposed to be a science of the pursuit of truth, must start from the absolute ego and tie in with the sentence: The absolute ego sets (i.e. makes into an entity) a conceived ego (relatively consistent with itself) and a conceived non-ego (relatively different from the ego) and sets both through each other.

The explanation and complete exposition of these propositions is a matter for a general theory of science. However, for the purpose of this essay, this proposition is justified insofar as the ego would be conceived as absolute and at the same time a matter determined by a form. This has been critically established as a fact.

If I now repeat the critical result found here, it is presented in the following sentences:

1. There is an absolute form that confronts us in the ego.

2. There is a matter that confronts us as opposed to the absolute ego.

3. The I determines matter through its forms and forms from its totality formed matter - the absolutely unconditional - as idea.

4. Matter is given to us only by observation of experience and there is no other source of experience than this.

Depending on the diversity of forms in which matter appears, it appears either as truth, as beauty or as goodness. The true, the beautiful and the good therefore lie in forms and only in forms.

Notes 5511-5515, undated, c. 1883.

[First page missing] the “principle of the mechanism of nature, without which there can be no natural science at all”, as suggested by Kant, in organic natural science, while du Bois-Reymond's treatise culminates in the sentence: “it is the concept of mechanical causality that Goethe completely lacked.”

If we could be pleased about du Bois-Reymond's dismissive judgments about the esteem that Haeckel has for our great genius, then on the other hand we must admit that the path the latter takes is by no means the right one, simply because an understanding of Goethe's scientific endeavors is impossible in this way. What is most important for the latter is the ability to completely forget opposing views – even if they are one's own – and to immerse oneself objectively in the spirit of Goethe's scientific achievements, because only in this way is it possible to penetrate his way of thinking in a comprehensive and unbiased way. His great friend Schiller has admirably shown us the way to do this (see Schiller's correspondence with Goethe from 1794. Edition by Spemann $. 11-21). What most natural scientists of our time do, however, and what [here a manuscript page is missing] [mannigjfaltigkeit der Erscheinungswelt merely as a sensual side-by-side and after each other, cannot suffice for him. He seeks something higher, in which all diversity appears as unity, an ideal whole that permeates all forms of the sensory world as its expressions, its variously modified manifestations. He perceives this to be lacking in the scientific views of his time. He expresses this deficiency in Faust with the well-known words: “Whoever wants to understand and grasp what is alive — seeks first to expel the spirit — unfortunately only the spiritual bond is missing.” He seeks this spiritual bond, “that which holds the world together at its core”. His later research pursues this goal; but, to speak in his own words, he rose from “belief” to “vision”, from “intuition” to “comprehension”. He later says: (Hempel's edition B [volume] 33. p. 191) “The idea must prevail over the whole and draw the general picture in a genetic way.” And: “Therefore, here is a proposal for an anatomical type, for a general image, in which the shapes of all animals would be included in the possibility, and according to which one describes each animal in a certain order.” ... “From the general [idea of a type, it follows that no single animal can be set up as such a canon of comparison; no single one can be a model for the whole.”]

[a manuscript page is missing here]

The aim of thinking about nature is to find types. In the introduction to Metamorphosis of Plants (Hempel, vol. 33, p. 7), he calls the idea “something that is only held for a moment in experience.” The phrase “the idea is what remains in the phenomena” is often used. This has only a limited validity. It must be defined more closely. Nothing persists in the phenomenon as such; everything is changeable here. The senses know no permanence. “What is formed is immediately reformed” (Hempel, p. 7). The idea is characterized precisely by the fact that it is only held for a moment in the phenomenon. It “actually appears as such only to the mind” (Hempel, vol. 3, p. 5). Nevertheless, it is the object of science. Goethe's view of nature is a truly thinking, reasonable one. Concepts that cannot be thought of in any definite way, such as consanguinity, are alien to him.

The facts that modern natural philosophy presents to establish the doctrine of consanguinity can all be considered correct; indeed, one can go even further and say that one would admit everything that our naturalists assume could still be found to confirm their theory, and yet one must admit that the modern theory of descent is insufficient to explain all these facts, whereas the path taken by Goethe is the more perfect one. Let us delve deeper. What about the famous principle of inheritance? Does it provide a law, a concept? Absolutely not. It merely states the fact that a series of characteristics found in the parents can also be found in the offspring. This is not a law, merely an experience put into words. And does the principle of adaptation say anything? No more: That a series of character traits in a living being can be modified by external influences. Again, not a mental, legal definition. And what does consanguinity mean? That a series of different organisms have developed through procreation from ancestors. All this and more can be admitted by modern Darwinism. But Goethe's way of looking at things goes deeper. He seeks the organic laws of action. He is not satisfied with what our senses convey to us. He seeks that which is independent of space and time, which is determined in and by itself. He does not seek the relationships between two entities in their spatial-temporal relationships, but in the concrete, specific content of the two forms of existence, which can only be grasped through thought. He does not relate the individual organs of the plant in such a way that he traces the spatial emergence of one from the other, /breaks off]

But how does he then conceive of the relationship between the type and the individual form? The correct interpretation of that famous conversation with Schiller, in which he sketched out the concept of the Urpflanze for him on a piece of paper, helps us to answer this question. Schiller could only find an idea in this Urpflanze. He knew [breaks off]

Introduction. This is based on the fact that we consider the view of nature itself to be incomplete.

In science, no special attention is paid to the actual genius of nature. At most, it is admitted that the genius's gaze succeeds in spotting the combination of natural forces; but it is not considered decisive for the shaping of the world view that we seek in science. The influence of genius on science is therefore said to be only a historical one, not a factual one.

What distinguishes the epoch of education in which we live from others can be traced back to Goethe. He has given it its character. In him, German poetry of our century sees an ideal to strive for; with the eye gained from his writings, we look at antiquity; with the same eye, Germans have succeeded in unraveling Shakespeare's genius. All the radii of German intellectual life emanate from him. However, this magnificent image of the great genius is marred by a dark spot that stands in unsatisfactory disharmony with the brightness spreading over it. Goethe's unreserved admiration in all fields of the intellect is contrasted with the dubious position in which his scientific achievements are placed.

Today, we have come back from the absolute rejection of these achievements, which occurred during Goethe's lifetime and long after his death, and we still have a completely negative attitude towards the physical part of the color theory, but we still grant them some importance. But if we take a closer look at the verdict of modern science, we cannot deny that the recognition of Goethe's scientific achievements is based on completely different premises than his other achievements and is by no means on a par with them.

Those who go furthest in their appreciation of Goethe in a scientific sense admit that Goethe's view of nature is based on ideas that also underlie the modern science of organisms – the Darwin-Haeckelian theory of evolution. But no one can dispute that this modern science does not originate from Goethe's view at all. His influence on it is not noticeable. And if it has been claimed in recent times that modern developmental theory would have reached its present state even without Goethe, this cannot be denied. Thus, one cannot ascribe to his efforts the power that was necessary to elevate the ideas on which they were based to the level of scientific conviction.

This fact is attributed to the fact that Goethe, while conceiving the connections within the organic series of beings entirely in line with the theory of evolution, did not penetrate to the principles that make this kind of connection comprehensible to us. Goethe is said to have anticipated Darwin's world view without being able to provide an explanation of it at the same time. Without this explanation, the theory of evolution appears as an arbitrary hypothesis.

This is precisely where the difference in the appreciation of Goethe's scientific achievements and his other writings lies. Through the latter, he created a new epoch. But the former lack precisely that which would make them the starting point of a new epoch. For we must not deceive ourselves: a scientific world view without a principled foundation is without any kind of justification and is no more than a series of unfounded ideas. Such a view lacks the one characteristic that would make it convincing: inner perfection, self-contained.

One would think that with such a fundamental difference in the influence of Goethe's two directions on posterity (that of his artistic and that of his scientific achievements), the origin of the same should also be traced back to two very different dispositions of Goethe's mind.

The question arises as to why Goethe was able to achieve the highest level of perfection in one direction, while in the other he was forced to stop where he should have provided the supports for his scientific edifice. Why the highest level of perfection in one area, while in the other it is precisely that which is lacking, which is necessary for perfection? Otherwise, it is much more the task of the genius to state the principles, and it is then up to the lesser minds to draw the further conclusions.

It seems to us that these principles are by no means lacking in Goethe, that one has simply not yet found the way to arrive at them.

The main characteristic of all of Goethe's views can be traced back to the fact that he seeks everything that is supposed to determine our judgment about an object in the external world in the realm of the latter itself. He does not allow anything extraneous or borrowed from the outside into such a judgment.

We can follow this in his ethical, aesthetic and also in his scientific assessments of events or objects. In Truth and Poetry, he occasionally says, in an explanation of his inclination towards incognito: “It is not a matter of objects in so far as they are worthy of praise or blame, but in so far as they can occur.” A judgment about whether something is praiseworthy or blameworthy presupposes an ethical model according to which one values an object. But Goethe rejects such a model because it is not taken from the events themselves, but rather is brought in from the outside. His judgment seeks only that which lies within the events themselves and makes it possible for us to explain why they have come about as they have. In his works one can find innumerable proofs of this direction of his mind. It may be said that Goethe does not judge about the objects of the external world, but he regards them in such a way that they express the explanation that our scientific need demands. He judges in the objects.

Knowledge and Belief

Goethe's views on the organic can be traced back to this principle. He contradicts the same, both the view of the final causes, which at the time of Goethe still represented almost the whole world, as well as the assumption [regarding] that the living beings could be traced back to mechanical causes. The former view comes down to the fact that an organic being has such an organization that we cannot explain it according to mere physical laws; the components of the being are in a connection and interaction that they would never enter into if they merely obeyed the mechanical-physical forces that govern them. Since these forces are the only ones that are accessible to our knowledge, the structure of organisms can only be explained if we assume that an external principle builds them according to a premeditated plan, so that this structure becomes a purposeful one. In this doctrine, theology found a mainstay of religion, a proof of the existence of God, and Kant gave it philosophical sanction. It contradicted Goethe's fundamental principle because it resorted to something outside the organism to explain it. It had to demand that all the elements that help us to understand the organism be found within it. If living beings have some purposeful structure, then something must be found within them from which this structure follows. Goethe's response to Link, who seeks to explain organic natural phenomena in terms of teleological principles, is: “The author, a knowledgeable botanist, explains physiological phenomena in terms of teleological views that are not, and cannot be, ours.” On January 6, 1798, he wrote to Schiller: “You know how much I am attached to the purposiveness of organic nature inwardly.” But the mechanistic view of living beings was just as incompatible with his fundamental principles as the teleologic one. The reason is quite the same. This view, too, does not explain the organism in terms of laws that are peculiar to it, as it were, innate in it, but rather makes it appear to be dominated by forces that are effective in inorganic nature. He did not want to explain the organic from the inorganic, but from itself. Even in his youth, he rejected the idea that the whole universe could be traced back to mechanical laws, as he describes in Truth and Fiction in relation to the système de la nature. “The système de la nature was announced, and so we really hoped to learn something about nature, our idol.” He sees himself as disappointed. “A matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now with this movement right and left and on all sides without further ado produce the infinite phenomena of existence. We would have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he may know as little about nature as we do: for by putting up some general concepts, he immediately leaves them to transform that which appears higher than nature, or as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, indeed moving, but still directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained a great deal.” The same is expressed in the following saying of Goethe: “The nearest comprehensible causes are comprehensible and for that very reason most comprehensible; which is why we like to think of ourselves as mechanical, which is of a higher kind.” - This is proof that Goethe found teleology and the mechanical world view to be equally insufficient to explain the organic.

He demanded that a true science of the organic should create the concept of the organic and the laws of life in the mind, just as Galileo once created the laws of mechanical nature. But that is the task of genius. In his theory of colors, Goethe emphasizes the importance of natural science to the genius, for whom “one case is worth a thousand,” and he admires Galileo for developing the theory of pendulums and the fall of bodies from swinging church lamps.

Every advance in science depends on our expanding our system of concepts, for in doing so we shed light in a realm of phenomena that is dark to us. Without Galileo's laws, we can observe the swinging motion of bodies, the motion of falling and throwing, for as long as we like, but we will not understand them. Merely describing the phenomena is not enough. It is essential that our mind is able to create a concept that makes an appearance understandable to us. But this requires creative power. It is the peculiarity of genius that from within it the conceptual does not emerge as a gray, content-free generalization - gray theory - but as one that is saturated and full of content, creating ideas that make the outside world comprehensible to our minds.

In our time, however, people fail to recognize the necessity of this creative power of genius for science. This is because they consider the latter to be nothing more than a reflection, a photograph of reality, to which faithfulness is the main requirement. The task of compiling such a “lifelike” image falls primarily to what is called “common sense.” In the face of such a view, the substantial ideas of genius naturally appear as a falsification of experience, as “conceptual poetry”.

For this view, genius has a very small role at all. At most, it can hasten the discovery of some natural law through a divinatory insight, it can find sooner what the history of science without it would have arrived at sooner or later, but that genius should also have any significance for the formulation of the content of a natural law is, according to this view, out of the question. In the face of this view, one is driven to ask: why have science at all if it is supposed to offer nothing more than a reflection of experience? Why not be satisfied with mere contemplation? The history of science, as well as science itself today, refutes this view. All progress in science is based on the creative power of the human mind. The laws of nature are not the object of direct experience; they are the creations of the human mind. Goethe belongs to the ranks of those who have truly conquered a field for science by creating new ideas. What he calls the type in the field of organic nature is to the latter what Galileo's mechanical principles are.

Only the consistent development of the fundamental view of the necessity of explaining every object of nature from its own self, as set forth above, led Goethe to this idea of the type. But his mission as a poet is also based on the same fundamental direction of his spirit. As a poet, he had the task of transforming immediate reality into poetry. This immediate reality as such no longer satisfies a certain higher need of man.

There is something about the way phenomena unfold that can no longer satisfy us. Chance plays a role and brings about constellations in reality that do not satisfy our reason. Goethe felt this more than anyone else. He often speaks of “wicked” chance, by which he means that some event takes an outcome that it would not take if only the necessity of reason were to prevail in the world. His mission in both poetry and science is to arrive at a satisfactory view of things that goes beyond what is directly experienced. “Real life often loses its luster to such an extent” (Poetry and Truth II, 9th book and Schröer's edition of the dramas $117), ”that it [sometimes] has to be refreshed with the varnish of fiction.” But in doing so, he never goes beyond what is given to man in poetry either, so that Merck could say of him that he seeks to give the real a poetic form, while others seek to realize the so-called poetic, the imaginative, which gives nothing but nonsense. We see that Goethe's whole mission actually consists in seeking the necessary, that which satisfies our minds, within reality itself. But his work in the field of inorganic nature is also based on the same disposition of his mind.

In the organism, we have a center that works from within the phenomena, and this is what we have to start with in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of them. In inorganic nature, however, there is no such central element; all effects can be traced back to external influences, spatial and temporal conditions, etc. It seems almost impossible to provide anything other than a mere photograph if one does not want to go beyond reality. And yet Goethe demands with all his energy that we also seek the principles for explaining phenomena within the given itself. “The highest would be to comprehend that all fact is already theory.” To get to know Goethe from this side, it is necessary, above all, to consider what Goethe the experiment is. A phenomenon of inorganic nature results from the interaction of the qualities that fill space and time, from the interaction of substances and forces.

The conditions for the progression of a phenomenon lie in the nature of the interacting objects and in the constellation in which they find themselves as a result of their location in space and time. This latter factor is now something that is added to the nature of the objects. Phenomena thus always contain a factor that prevents us from explaining them as a necessary consequence of the existing objects. According to Goethe, the experiment is to eliminate this factor of direct experience. The experiment is to bring the objects of the sensory world into such a mutual dependence that we are able to recognize a certain event as the necessary consequence of the existing objects. Everything that modifies the original mutual behavior of the objects is to be eliminated by the experiment. Goethe calls a phenomenon that comes about in this way a primal phenomenon. In mathematics, the primal phenomenon of physics corresponds to the axiom. The latter has no other function than to show us the relationships between simple spatial quantities in such a way that their connection is immediately comprehensible to us without further deduction. The entire mathematical system is nothing more than a complication of the axioms. Goethe wants to shape physics in an analogous way. It should be a system that arises through a complication of the archetypal phenomena and thus has an inner necessity in the way it is constructed. We find every phenomenon of experience in the system of science, not only in the random constellation in which it appears to us in the external world, but in a systematic whole from which it can be fully understood in its course. For Goethe, theory is nothing more than higher experience, but precisely higher experience, in which all details are connected as required by reason. “There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself intimately identical with the object and thereby becomes the actual theory” (Spr. in Prosa, N. 906).

Do we now ask whether Goethe's view of nature really lacks fundamental principles and whether it therefore proves to be incomplete, unfinished, in need of justification? The preceding pages show most decidedly that this is not the case. The foundations of Goethe's scientific views are the most definite that can be imagined, and they are identical with those that determine the whole direction of his work. His view is self-sustaining and did not have to await its justification from a later time. What it lacked was to apply the given points of view to all areas of the world of phenomena.

The reason why the self-justifying guarantee of Goethe's world view was denied is that so far no one has considered his scientific endeavors in the context of his entire being. But most of his assertions are not at all comprehensible without such a perspective, and it is easy to then attribute a false sense to them. If we now look from the Goethean view of nature to the modern one, of which he was a prophet, then we must indeed admit that his starting points were essentially different. The modern view of nature arose from the need to explain the entire universe in terms of mechanical causality. It was believed that the explanation of nature could only be made consistent if the laws that govern the inorganic could also be extended to the organic. We see that this view is based on a premise that Goethe rejected.

From this alone it is clear that the similarity of one of Goethe's assertions with one of the mechanical explanation of nature can only be an external one, and that it is absolutely necessary to go back to the most original axioms of Goethe if one wants to recognize the true meaning of his assertions. From this it also becomes clear how the misunderstanding we referred to above regarding the recognition of Goethe as a scientific thinker developed. There is a certain, and it must be admitted extensive, agreement between Goethe's view of nature and that of modern natural science; however, Goethe starts from completely different premises than the latter. But because these latter premises were not regarded as really scientific, because they were denied the power to found a view of nature, it was concluded that Goethe lacked the principles for his view of nature altogether, whereas in fact he lacked only those that dominate the mechanical explanation of the universe.

Goethe's view of nature is thus a self-contained whole, with its own foundations, and can only be understood in itself. By being lumped together with other theories, it is placed in an inadequate position.

But if one is to pass judgment on its influence on the shaping of science, then it must indeed be described as very slight, and it remains for the future to decide whether, through the power inherent in it, it will succeed to satisfy the scientific needs of humanity more than other explanations of nature, and whether it will thus one day be granted a more fruitful influence on the development of human thought than has been the case so far.

These lines vividly illustrate the profound contrast between Goethe's way of thinking and Kant's philosophy. With judgments like: Goethe was not receptive to philosophy and the like, it is not at all dismissed there. The correct thing is that an essentially different philosophy than the Kantian one was inherent in Goethe's way of thinking. Thus it happened that Goethe always misunderstood Kant's statements and when he thought he was speaking of Kantian philosophy, he had something completely different in mind than the latter. It was not his gift for poetry and not his common sense that prevented him, but only that his view of the world is exactly the opposite pole of Kant's.

In the Critique of Judgment, too, it is not Kant's own findings that attract the poet, but rather things that were essential to Goethe's thinking, but which, in the sense of Kantian philosophy, are either insignificant externalities or forced assumptions by Kant. The juxtaposition of aesthetic and teleological judgment in the Critique of Judgment is of the latter kind. What is the principle of all research in Goethe, indeed the principle of all intellectual activity: the inner sufficiency, the self-contained totality of the natural beings under consideration, Kant found it only in a [illegible word] human activity in the aesthetic production and contemplation of a work of art [and] the teleological observation of nature. And that only by breaking – as Hegel already noted – the strict framework of his philosophy and actually founding an aesthetics and teleology in an inconsistent way.

Goethe was not simply dismissive of Fichte. Those familiar with Fichte's philosophy must also admit that Fichte has far more points of contact with Goethe than with Kant. In the Annalen, Goethe is indignant about him:

He was one of the most capable personalities one had ever seen, and there was nothing wrong with his attitudes in a higher regard; but how could he have kept pace with the world that he regarded as his acquired property?

And what he, G., says in 1797 at the gate of the University of Jena: where “the interaction of talented people and fortunate circumstances would be worthy of the most faithful and vivid description,” he first mentions Fichte, who “gave a new presentation of the theory of science in the philosophical journal.” Also significant is what he wrote to Fichte on June 24, 1794, after Fichte had sent him the first sheets of the Theory of Science:

What has been sent contains nothing that I do not understand or at least believe I understand, nothing that does not readily connect with my usual way of thinking.

When Goethe's relationship to Schelling is discussed, it is only Schelling's first philosophical thesis that can be considered. As for the mystical period of Schelling's philosophy, there are neither historical points of contact nor, at least initially, any similarities. Schelling's natural philosophy does contain something of Goethe's way of thinking. The creative principle that Schelling posits as the basis of nature, which permeates all of nature as an active force, is also characteristic of Goethe. It is therefore clear that Goethe's ideas were clarified in his discussions with Schelling, that many of them took on a more definite form. But the German philosopher who understood Goethe best is likely to be Hegel. He not only regarded Goethe's scientific way of thinking as justified, but, if one disregards Hegel's peculiar mental disposition, which above all lacks cases in which everything develops according to the logical side, Hegel's philosophical way of thinking is likely to be closer to Goethe's than to that of any other German philosopher. The Humboldt brothers, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt, also had much in common with Goethean research in their way of thinking. We need only think of the words with which Goethe greeted Alexander von Humboldt's Physiognomy of Plants in 1806: “Now that Linnaeus has developed an alphabet of plant forms and left us a convenient-to-use directory; now that Jussieu has already organized the whole in a more natural way , and ingenious men with and without eyesight continue to define the distinguishing characteristics in great detail, and philosophy promises us a lively unity of a higher view: So here the man, to whom the plant forms distributed over the earth's surface are present in living groups and masses, is already hastening to take the last step and indicating how what has been individually recognized, seen, and observed can be appropriated by the mind in all its splendor and abundance, and how the woodpile that has been piled and smoking for so long can be brought to life by an aesthetic breath into a bright flame."

Goethe was, however, unable to come to terms with another of A. v. Humboldt's views, namely his volcanism. We will have more to say about this later. The extent to which Goethe's thinking was related to that of W. v. Humboldt can be seen from the fact that [text breaks off]

[First line indecipherable]

How does a truth approach a person who is based on the assumption that it does not contain the reasons for being, but merely reflects them? It must be assumed that the reason why it makes this or that assumption lies not within the conscious thinking, permeated by our self, but outside of it. Just as what a single thought represents lies outside of consciousness, so too the reason why we connect two or more thoughts in a certain way lies not within, but outside of our world of thought. The reason why we connect two concepts is not at the same time the reason why they belong together in reality. In this contemplation, thinking must therefore always bear in mind that it cannot produce truth from its own activity, but that it can only appropriate it as it is determined by something beyond it. Here, man does not produce truth by himself, but allows himself to be determined by circumstances beyond the scope of his ideas. In the truest sense, he receives truths determined by entities other than thoughts. For it is not the fact that thoughts are determined by entities outside our consciousness that is actually important, but rather that it is extra-mental entities, i.e., entities that cannot be reached by conscious thought, that determine the truth. This truth, which comes to man in a finished form, is in the proper sense that which can be called a dogma. This dogma can appear in two forms: either the ideal world itself comes to us as a finished product, with the claim that the reasons for its formation lie in an alien element; then we are dealing with the dogmatics of theology. Theological truths are dogmatic because they do not allow the reasons for being and the reasons for believing to coincide. Our insight into them is not one that we actively generate ourselves, but one that is imposed on us.

The second type of dogmatics is the dogmatics of [experience]. It is based on the principle that we can only gain our truths by observing the world as it is presented to our senses and by conceptualizing the things and phenomena it contains. This, then, is the obvious reason why we establish a truth. Not in the content of the thoughts that constitute it, but in the factors that determine the course of the phenomena that the thoughts merely depict. Here, too, the reason for believing is the fact that we [observe] a fact, not that which determines the actual relationship of the fact itself. The truth, as in the previous case, is determined, according to its content, not by the course of thought that we have penetrated, but by circumstances lying outside it; it is one that has been forced upon us. In every respect, observation is [analogous to] revelation as a source of knowledge in theology. In both cases, the truth is to be received as a finished product. In both cases, knowledge is actually a form of belief. Real knowledge can never arise from a truth taken from outside. Thus, two points of view of science that appear to be so opposed are in principle based on exactly the same premise. Both can also lead to the same consequences. Since they both see the ultimate foundation of existence as lying in the beyond, they lack the lucid clarity in the theoretical world view that characterized self-conscious thinking that relies only on itself. It loses itself in mysterious foreboding of an unknown; this is not without consequence for practical action, as we shall see in the last part of this essay. That self-conscious, self-reliant, intense thinking wants nothing to do with a moral behavior whose driving forces it would not find within itself. It recognizes only in itself the motives of its actions. The other thinking is characterized in a practical sense by a relationship of servility to the power of the great, sensed unknown. It finds its moral support not in itself but outside itself. The first thinking is characterized by a self-awareness appropriate to man; he has a noble pride in achieving his destiny through his own strength. The other is in its very essence determined by its humility and awareness of powerlessness in the face of the divine being. We will then see what consequences these determinations have for our view of human freedom.

Our view of the sources of our knowledge cannot fail to influence our practical actions. It is, after all, an equally incontrovertible and common truth that true wisdom always brings about a better attitude and that the knowledgeable and educated person is also morally superior to the ignorant and uncultured. It is true that one often hears the opposite view, that an ugly disposition can very well be combined with high insight and that the source of moral goodness can be present in the simplest, most uneducated nature as well as in the highly educated. But against the first it may be objected that not everything that is called by that name is real knowledge, and that there is an after-wisdom that is very little connected with man. This kind of knowledge is merely something that has been learned and acquired externally, not something that has been gained through one's own vigorous thinking. But what is acquired through the power of independent thinking becomes so deeply intertwined with our entire being, with the core of our inner self, we identify with it so completely that we cannot emancipate ourselves from it in any way. We do not merely possess such knowledge, but we ourselves are truly that which constitutes the content of this knowledge. When we act, we must put our very essence into the action to be accomplished. How else should we take the motives of the activity, from the source from which all our thinking and all our being flows. We must here fully agree with Riehl when he says of knowledge: “The deeper it sinks and the further it spreads, the more it is transformed into moral power; as such, knowledge becomes practical insight, understanding becomes wisdom. From the increase of insight follows the improvement of attitude, and so the system of knowledge is the prerequisite and support of ethics.” But the other objection, that a person with relatively little education can be morally superior, is also easily countered. After all, the actions of a particular person only extend to a particular sphere, to one area. Now, it is not a question of an unrestricted range of knowledge, but only of whether a person's knowledge extends as far as the range of his actions. He who has a narrow circle of activity also needs a narrow circle of knowledge. And so it may come about that a person with relatively limited knowledge behaves morally higher if he does not break his circle.

The doctrine of moral action will first have to start from the motives for moral behavior. These can be determined in two ways. And this determination is completely parallel to the determinations of the two theoretical worldviews determined at the beginning of our theory of knowledge.

These motives can be sought outside of our thinking or they can be seen as emerging from the content of thinking itself, which we have developed. Those who seek the sources of truth in the thinking of otherworldly entities and conditions will also seek the motives of morality in a beyond; they will perceive the precepts of their behavior as externally imposed commandments that they must obey. There is a moral imperative for such a view, to which one simply has to submit and which sets a certain standard for our actions. In this case, acting according to this standard is felt to be a duty. Kant's moral teaching is based on this point of view insofar as it is based on the categorical imperative. The moral dogma of theology also takes this view. This is simply imposed on us as God-given; we act according to it not because of our insight into its truth, but because of its divinity, which is guaranteed by revelation. It is not the moral force that prompts us to act and flows from the moral thoughts, but it is the compulsion, the feeling of necessity that they entail. But there is still another view that seems to be completely opposed to this point of view. It is the one that sees the impulses for action in the instincts of nature. Here man acts just as little as he would under divine commandments from implanted fundamental moral forces, but under the compulsion of mere natural law. He may not act out of necessity, but he does act out of physical necessity. It is the dogma of the efficacy of nature, which, in relation to moral value and in principle, is on the same level as the dogma of the first kind. The second world view presents a fundamentally different picture of moral action. It does not allow the precepts of morality to be determined by a power in the hereafter, but rather to arise from human thought itself. Just as in the first part, objective truth has essentially been incorporated into thought, so now everything that determines action is strictly contained within the human world of ideas. It is not the other, which we only imagine in the conceptual world, that determines our actions, but the content of our thoughts itself. Just as, in the theoretical, the content of the thoughts was the world ground itself, so here, in the moral, this content is at the same time what directly connects us morally. Just as in our actions we must see an execution of what an external power has prescribed to us, so too in our moral behavior we must see only an execution of what we prescribe to ourselves on the basis of our insight. This is different; here we are our own moral lawgiver. There, our practical behavior is essentially the fulfillment of duty; here, it is moral will. Now it is obvious that he who does not recognize any external norm of truth in theory must also reject such a norm in action. For there can only be one fundamental principle of the world, and if this enters into our thinking truly and substantially, it can only determine our actions from there. And that is the practical conclusion of our world view: it instructs man to have no other purpose than that which he gives himself. Only in this way, however, is a real will possible. A will is present only when the prescriber is at the same time the executor in action. If one being prescribes and another being executes this prescription, then the second is merely a machine in the hands of the former, and only in the latter, but not in the agent, can one speak of a true volition. Will consists essentially in the fact that it is linked to consciousness, that the agent follows his own insight, his own command. Such action must be protected from only two degenerations. Firstly, to see only the action of subjective arbitrariness in the execution of one's own commandments. But our world view could only take this point of view if it also assumed that the circumstances of thoughts are determined not by the content of thought, but by subjective arbitrariness, by pure chance. But for us, it is not the arbitrary subject that is the determining factor, but the content of thought itself. And the awareness that we ourselves are our own legislators does not arise from the fact that we decide according to our arbitrary mood, but from the fact that we are directly present in the legislative thought, that nothing is imposed on us, but everything is imbued by us. It is not a lowering of moral motives to us, but rather an uplifting of the human being to such a height that he makes thinking, which in itself determines its content, his own activity. We do not defend Schlegel's irony of subjectivity, which feels so exalted about its entire activity, which considers itself justified in destroying everything it does in the moment, but the view that thinking has a real [practical] content, and that man is able to elevate his spiritual self so high that this content no longer appears to him as something otherworldly and overpowering, but as his own content. We defend the point of view that it is the spiritual personality of man that provides the arena in which the source of the world develops and appears in its true form. While irony destroys any sacredness of the moral by reducing it to a whim, our view sanctifies the human personality by elevating it to the source of morality. Our view does not deny the existence of an absolute world substance in morality any more than it has denied it in theoretical knowledge. But it gives man a very peculiar relationship to this primal ground. Instead of assuming a principle that only directs the world from the outside, we take the view that this principle has poured itself out into the world of things with complete self-dissolution, with absolute self-renunciation. If the most widespread view is that things exist alongside their reason as its creatures, we assume that such a reason is nowhere to be found outside of things. We say outside of things. For in itself we see this reason as a real one. We do not take the standpoint of that atheism which simply rejects the reason of the world and simply considers the things - as they appear to our senses in observation - to be the universe; we base the world on an absolute cause, but we are convinced that this view has been completely absorbed into the world and that no independent existence has been retained in and for itself. And our practical-moral world view is the consequence of this assumption. There is no volition of the world principle except for human volition, because this principle has not reserved any resolutions for itself. It wills only insofar as man wills. It has renounced its own volition and has merged into humanity, and so its action is not one according to an external norm, but according to the determining factors of its own inner being. Through this complete absorption of the original source of things in the world, all the contradictions that occupied human thought for so long are suddenly eliminated. We will come back to this later. Here we must still note that history appears not as the result of the divine plan of the world, but as that of human ideals. History becomes the development of people's own ideals of will: What Herm. Ulrici, Im. H. Fichte, and others strove for, a union of a rational theism, as it is the need of the Western population, with a pantheistic world view, seems to be achieved in our scientific conviction.

If we want to get a clear and complete picture of institutions that relate to the education of the individual, this can only be done if we relate them to our cultural life and its ideals. But what point of view should we take to understand our cultural life itself?

For a people as advanced as ours, it may seem pedantic to leave it to the inspiration of the moment to answer such questions, or to philosophize at length, deriving a few hollow phrases from mere abstract sentences, while spurning to ask our great ancestors. The high culture to which our people has risen has long since led it to gain clarity about its position in world history. The magnificent blossoms in art and science that our nation's classical era has produced have long made it clear to the unbiased and educated that the Greek spirit has been rejuvenated in the regions of Germania. Just as the more noble education poured out of Hellas through all the veins of the ancient world, so German education flows into the culture of all newer peoples in a fertilizing way. Seen in this light, it appears more than a mere figure of speech when Schiller connects his philosophical reflection to the Greek myth in the essay “On Grace and Dignity”. This prefigures the location of our reflection. If, with Fichte, we regard the Germans as the original or ancestral people of the modern world, they will be seen as representatives of modern culture, with whom we compare the Greeks, a people equal to all of them.

In this comparison, decisive contrasts emerge. The complex conditions of modern social life in our advanced culture have disrupted the disposition towards humanity that was originally present in every individual in its entirety, and no longer allow it to mature in the individual, but only in the whole of human society. In the individual Greek, the whole of humanity is reflected to us as in a mirror; with us, this disposition no longer develops in the individual, but only in the whole state. One person particularly develops this, the other that mental faculty, and in doing so neglects the others, so that one

would like to claim that the mental powers also express themselves in experience as separately as the psychologist separates them in the presentation, and we see not only individual subjects, but entire classes of people develop only a part of their abilities, while the rest, as with crippled growths, are barely hinted at with a faint trace.

You have to ask around from individual to individual to glean the totality of the species.

The entire culture of the Greeks is an expression of the harmonious activity of all forces. No part of human nature is neglected, none is particularly favored. No split has yet occurred in the forces at work, which is why they worked so harmoniously. That is why the Greeks were so happy, because they had no sense of lack in human nature. As the culture of the Greeks presents itself to us as complete in itself, it appears to us as an ideal.

But man could not remain standing on the standpoint of the Greeks. The culture of the Greeks formed a culminating point, and one could only rise to even higher spheres by splitting the forces. We would never have achieved our great intellectual accomplishments if individual mental faculties had not been particularly strongly developed in particular individuals. If we take a look at educated Europe, this soon becomes perfectly clear to us. The Italian is endowed with the most vivid imagination and the most lively sense of art, the Frenchman with dazzling rhetoric, the Englishman with a critical mind. We also find all these details in the ancient Greeks, but never developed separately by themselves. There, the contrasts only exist separately in our abstracting minds; in reality they do not exist separately. In the modern world, we are now dealing not with ideal contrasts, but with real ones. But while the peoples just mentioned, who were mainly from educated Europe, were content with their one-sided education, the Germans – and here they resemble the Greeks – had a longing when the brilliant epoch of their literature shone on the horizon of intellectual life: to reunite the contrasts that had arisen in reality in an ideal way. As in so many things, here too the stimulus proceeded from the Romance peoples. Rousseau set the conditions of natural life as an ideal in contrast to the unnatural conditions of modern state life. This was the fundamental idea which, purified by the profound thinking of Fichte and Schiller, was overcome and led to a really satisfactory solution. If we consider the prose writings of that time that leaned more towards the philosophical direction, such as Fichte's lectures on “the scholar”, Schiller's “aesthetic letters” or Jean Paul's “Levana”, we see the same idea recurring. The latter writer expresses it as follows:

Each of us has within him his ideal price-man, whom he secretly strives to set free or quiet from youth.

This whole view also comes across to us clearly and distinctly in Schiller's saying:

Always strive for the whole, and if you cannot become a whole, as a serving member, join a whole.

This whole quest becomes even clearer to us when we compare the way in which weaker, more narrow-minded spirits were divided by the split that occurred in the modern world with regard to intellectual forces, and how differently strong, far-sighted spirits sought to find an ideal way out. One of the former is now Hölderlin. Completely absorbed in Greek culture, which presents him with the whole of human nature in an indivisible unity, he feels the deepest pain at the fragmentation among Germans, a pain to which he gives a meaningful expression in the following words:

You see artisans among the Germans, but not human beings; thinkers, but not human beings; priests, but not human beings; masters, servants, boys, and set people.

Schiller and Fichte now confront this narrow-minded view in a truly magnificent way and find the way out of the error. I called Hölderlin's view narrow-minded because it neglects the members in relation to the whole. The individual spiritual power had to suffer, it had to remain at a certain level so that the harmony of the whole would not be destroyed. But a further look only arouses our interest in the whole if we see the whole in the perfection of each individual link and not in the neglect of them.

It was necessary to consider a means by which, despite the perfection of the individual power, the whole could still be seen in each individual power. And this task is solved in Schiller's “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race.” —

Through the ideal human being that is active in each individual person, the potential for all of humanity is manifested in him. This ideal human being is now represented in the state as a “whole”.

By having to choose a particular station, each individual is no longer purely and simply human; he is a priest, a lawyer, a teacher, a technician, an artist, a physician, etc. Given the constant progress of civilization, there should be an infinite number of individual stations. The infinite isolation and specialization [illegible word] through the one-sided education of the individual [illegible word] is now contrasted with what we want to call the social sense; the interaction of individuals. The entire organism of a nation is moving towards a cultural ideal that consists in perfection and that has its roots in the spirit of the individual. When the powers and abilities of individuals combine to create an overall performance, we see a great ideal personality, embodied in society, striving towards a common goal. In this great personality, we encounter everything that the Greeks present to us in an undivided way in each individual. The ideal of their way of working is the harmonious interaction of all possible forces, and their product is a product of freedom. This latter magnificent manifestation of the purely human, of which we become more and more aware in the course of history, is the creator of the highest that man can achieve. But it is only possible through the harmonious interaction and lively interweaving of all possible human abilities and powers. The more one-sided our education is, the more we distance ourselves from this harmony of the powers of the mind. But the necessity of a one-sided education has already been repeatedly pointed out. In this case, the individual must seek what he does not find in himself in connection with his fellow human beings. And so he appears to society as a microcosm, in a different way than it was the case with the Greeks. By losing freedom through his one-sidedness, he gains as a serving member of the whole. From now on, his individual strength is no longer his property, but a link in the whole social activity. Thus, by giving himself completely to society and willingly receiving from it, he regains that state, which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, that is observed in the Greeks, that poor [breaks off]

On March 22, the anniversary of Goethe's death, Prof. Schröer gave a lecture at the local Goethe Society on the topic: “On Goethe's: ‘We call it piously’ (from the poem: ‘Trilogy of Passion’). The remarks were primarily about Goethe, the man. Popular judgments, which still endeavor to disparage Goethe in this or that respect, should be thoroughly countered. Goethe's love life, in particular, which a crude view would like to present as that of a life of debauchery, was put in its proper light as that of a highly developed, selfless idealist for whom love is the only passion free from selfishness. Goethe's love is the genuinely German love, imbued with the noblest view of feminine worth, not the selfish love that originates in base instincts. The frivolous jokes about platonic love do not catch on with Goethe, “he was not only acquainted with her, but intimate with her.” Schröer also thoroughly illuminated Goethe's position on religion. He was not pious in the sense of a positive religion; he could not make the god of any confession his own; but he was pious in the sense that he recognized a divine in all earthly things, in all reality, and revered it, even tried to embody it through poetry and to embody it through science. The much-discussed chapter “Goethe as a courtier” was also duly treated. Goethe's free nature towards the Duke of Weimar, as indeed towards the entire court, and his deeply sarcastic descriptions of court life in the second part of Faust were not known or understood by those who wanted to present Goethe as a courtier. Schröer finally showed how Goethe's poetry is only a reflection of his noble, elevated human nature, which the entire nation should endlessly honor and recognize instead of constantly trying to belittle and find fault with.

If one isolates the act of recognition and regards it as the activity of an outside observer of the world, then all the misleading philosophical questions arise: How is knowledge possible? Can we recognize things in themselves? Are there limits to knowledge? etc. All these questions lose their significance if we understand cognition as part of the process of life. Just as life expresses itself in plants as the production of leaves, flowers and fruits, so it expresses itself in humans as cognition. It makes just as little sense to ask: What are the limits of cognition? as it does to ask: What are the limits of flowering? The content of knowledge is a product of the world process, like the flower of the plant. The image of the world that man creates for himself is a fantasy content and toto genere different from what it depicts when it is merely considered in terms of its pictorial nature. When man speaks of the “essence of the world”, of the “thing in itself”, etc., he speaks of a need of his. We are not compelled by anything external to speak of the “essence of the world”. We are only pushed to do so by our nature. If I speak of the “essence of the world” and assert its unknowability, I am talking into the blue. There can be no other being for which there is anything that could be equated with knowledge. To speak of the existence of something that lies “beyond knowledge” is as foolish as to speak of something that lies beyond plant growth. Knowledge must remain within itself if it is to have any meaning. Kantian philosophy is the outpouring of a personality that does not know what it wants. Kant searches for something, but does not know what. Basically, he only talks about the unknowability of something, which he imagines as an indefinite goal in the blue. It is indicative of the boundless weakness of German philosophy that it cannot eliminate Kant's follies. World-negation, the beyond, etc., will only come into existence when man invents them. But it is the most empty, foolish invention there is.

Few of the fundamental aesthetic ideas have suffered more at the hands of the erroneous premises of German aesthetics than that of the “comic.” If, as German aestheticians do, you explain beauty by the idea (the divine) appearing in a sensual image, then insurmountable difficulties arise when it comes to defining the comic. For under this assumption, we have to distinguish two things in the art product (in the beautiful object): firstly, the sensual image, the material product made of marble, color, sound, words, and so on, and secondly, the idea that is brought to view through this image. Three cases can now arise: 1) The idea and the vivid image can be perfectly congruent, so that the idea is not too lofty, too spiritual, too sublime to be represented by this image, and the image can be worthy, significant, appropriate to the idea in the same way. In this case, there is perfect harmony between the idea and the perception; neither dominates the other, each is the equal of the other. Nowhere do we feel that something is missing, nowhere that something is lacking. When this occurs, German aestheticians believe that we are dealing with the “simply beautiful,” with the “beautiful in itself.” II.) it may happen that the idea appears more significant, greater than the perception, that it towers above it, goes beyond it, so that the perception appears too insignificant, small, inadequate to grasp the divine (the idea) in its full scope. The vessel is then not large enough to hold the content (the idea). While in the presence of the “simply beautiful” we feel satisfaction at the harmony between the divine (the ideal) and the earthly (the real), here we must stand in awe before the greatness of the idea, which seems so immense that we cannot find a picture adequate to it. In this case we are dealing with the sublime. III.) Now only the opposite case is possible; namely, that the image (the view) appears greater, more significant, more powerful than the idea. While in the [second] case the idea disturbs the harmony by its size, here the disharmony is due to the predominance of the sensory image. The latter imposes itself, rebels against the idea, revolts against the divine. Consequently, one can only find the ugly in this. If we now consider that the tragic is only a special case of the sublime, we find that the four concepts – beautiful, sublime, tragic, ugly – exhaust the inventory of aesthetics, with no room for the comic. For it is easy to see that a fourth case, distinct from the three listed, is no longer possible.

The situation is quite different if we take as our starting point the idea of beauty that I have put forward (Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic). Art can never, ever have the task of representing the idea itself. That is the task of science. If the basic ideas of German aesthetics are correct, then in terms of content there is actually no difference between science and art. The latter would only have to present in a vivid form what the former expresses through words (thoughts). This simple consideration proves that art must have a completely different task. And this is the opposite of that of science. If science has to present the divine in the form of direct thinking, as it hovers over the sensual, in pure ideal form, then art has to lift the sensual, the vivid, the pictorial into the sphere of the divine. When we stand face to face with nature, with reality, we find it neither divine nor un-divine, neither full of ideas nor empty of ideas, but simply indifferent to divinity, to the idea. The thinker looks through this indifferent shell and sees the idea in the form of the thought. But for this purpose he must leap over immediate reality, must look through and beyond it. He who stops at mere reality cannot arrive at the idea. The artist approaches reality in a different way. He does not transcend reality, he lovingly takes it up, indeed he experiences and weaves in the sensual, material, real. What he represents are objects of direct nature, of real existence. In the creations of art, we do not encounter anything in terms of content (the “what”) that we cannot also find in nature. The artist only changes the form (the “how”). He presents objects of reality, but differently than we find them in the real world. He presents them as if they were as necessary, as full of law, as divine as the idea. In terms of content, art has to do with the sensual; in terms of form, with the ideal. If science presents the idea in terms of content and form, and nature presents the sensual in terms of form and content, then a new realm emerges with art: the realm of the sensual in the guise of the divine. If someone were to claim that it is also possible for someone to present the divine in the guise of the sensual, this is refuted by the fact that no one can have an interest in such a task. For one can certainly have the need to lift up what is lower and less valuable into the realm of what is higher and more valuable, but not to lift it up into the opposite. It is precisely from the dissatisfaction with reality in its very own form that the longing arises to make it divine. But why should one want to bring the divine, which in itself already grants the highest satisfaction, into another form?

The realm of the non-unified sensual is reality; the realm of the non-sensual ideal is science; that of the sensual-ideal is art. We encounter the first realm when we observe our surroundings with healthy senses; the second when we immerse ourselves in the realm of our thoughts; we find the third nowhere ready-made; we have to create it ourselves. If the realm of nature is a sensual reality and the realm of science is a purely intellectual one, the realm of art has no reality at all. Therefore, the sphere of art products is called that of aesthetic appearance.

Aesthetic appearance is the sensuality that has been made divine by the creative human spirit.

Now we must digress into subjective territory and examine the basic mood of the personality from which the longing for art and for the enjoyment of art arises. All higher striving of man is a striving for freedom. To rule freely over the instincts of nature, freely over the laws of sensuality, freely over passions and human statutes, that is the way and goal of the better man. To succumb less and less to what nature demands and to follow more and more what the spirit has recognized as an idea, that is what frees the spirit. Freedom is the domination of the spirit over nature, of the idea over reality. What I accomplish according to the laws of nature, I must do, just as a raindrop must fall to the earth according to an immutable law. If I act only out of such natural impulses, then I am not a true self, not a free personality, for I do not drive myself; I am driven; I do not will, I must. But the more I kindle the light of the spirit within me, the freer I become. Only now can I say: it is I who act, who accomplish something. At the same time, there is the fact that I know which light I am following, that I have the object at which my actions are aimed in a pure, transparent form in my mind. I do not follow for the sake of my individuality, but for the sake of the recognized object. Such action, although it truly arises only from the self, is completely selfless. For it is not done by the self for the sake of the self. Such an action is an action of love, that is, one that arises out of the full surrender of the self to the object. Thus, when understood at the deepest level, truly free actions are only those of love.

The artist's creations are now (among other things) such actions of love. For he seeks to overcome sensual reality by spiritualizing it. He wants to conjure up a work before our senses that, for all its sensuality, is not permeated by natural laws but by spiritual laws. Whatever is natural about the object should be stripped away, overcome and presented as if it were divine. Art is an ongoing process of liberation for the human spirit and at the same time an educator of humanity to act out of love. Those who are able to look into the full depth of a truly great work of art will feel it, that lofty upward pull that makes us forget space and time and our own personality for the duration of the contemplation and lose ourselves completely in the object we are looking at. Only those who know full, pure, unclouded love can fully understand this self-forgetful gaze. Those who do not know true love will always remain alien to true art.

If we now have to assume that in a work of art the human spirit divinizes the material, then it will depend on the spiritual faculty that it employs in the process to which genre the work of art belongs. We must keep in mind that what our spirit comes to last of all is the first and supreme in the world. The unity of ideas, the primal principle of things, certainly precedes all things in the world. But in our spiritual striving, we come to this primal principle last. The first thing we encounter in the world is the infinite variety of sensual things, which are in truth the final emanation of the primal principle. The senses perceive this diversity, the mind organizes and compares them, thereby forming concepts, and reason then sees the inner unity in this multiplicity. Sensuality, understanding and reason are the three faculties through which we comprehend the universe. Sensuality brings us nature stripped of spirit, understanding brings us the multiplicity of concepts, and reason brings us the divine idea that reigns over all.

If we now go one step further on the basis of our explanation of the beautiful, we must ask ourselves to what extent the sensible material can be reworked by the artist, given the above three abilities?

First of all, it is clear that the senses cannot undertake any reworking at all, because their task is to grasp reality as faithfully, as unchanged as possible. The intellect, which forms concepts of individual things, is already dealing with the spiritual. Although it still has a multiplicity, it is one that has been lifted out of sensuality. It is thus already possible for understanding to spiritualize nature. This hardly needs to be said of reason, for it grasps the quintessence of all spiritual reality. From this it follows directly: the artist can transform the material of immediate reality in such a way that it appears in a form as if it were permeated either by understanding or by reason itself. Art is therefore concerned with works: 1) that correspond in content to the life of reality and in form to the rational order of things; 2) and those that correspond in content to this real life but in form to the rational order and unity of the world.

When the artist, following the course of reason, transforms reality, we are filled with such great satisfaction by his works because he presents the things that came from his hand as if they had emerged directly from the original principle itself. Through the work, which is glowing with divine unity, the artist brings us closer to the spirit of the world. That is why Goethe, when he saw the works of Greek art, exclaimed in admiration: “There is necessity, there is God; it is as if these eternal things were conjured forth by creative nature itself.”

Thus, we see no contradiction in the aesthetic appearance that the work of art provides us with, but only with the depths of reality, only with its surface. It is precisely a higher reality that art presents to us.

But how does this relate when the artist does not allow reason but understanding to prevail in him when transforming reality?

Understanding is something between sense perception and reason. It moves away from the former and does not reach the latter. It no longer has the superficial truth that lies in a simple copy of sensory reality, but it also does not yet have the truth that lies in the depths of the rational view. The concept that the mind forms of the individual thing is in fact the most unreal thing in the world. For in the order of the world there is no single thing by itself; everything is necessarily grounded in the context and flow of things. He who does not have the whole in mind and measures the individual thing by it can never know the truth. I can form a concept of an individual thing in an understanding way: Truth is not in this concept as long as the light of reason does not illuminate it. If I form two concepts, they may be in an inner unity in the depths of the world order, but the intellect has only the individual concepts, which in this separateness do not have to agree at all, but go side by side.

The things perceived by the senses, which the human mind thus transforms as if they were permeated by understanding, will thus stand in stark contradiction to any reality. Of course, the mind itself does not notice the incongruity of its concepts because it allows them to stand as separate entities. But when they appear in this inner contradiction side by side in an object, then the same immediately comes to the fore. I can form a concept of a person's mind intellectually. For example, I imagine the mind to be exalted and great. Alongside this, I also form a concept of his outward appearance. This is small, inconspicuous, awkward, perhaps clumsy. I can think of these two concepts quite well side by side. But when they come to me in the flesh, united in one person on the stage, then I perceive the contradiction with what is possible according to natural law.

How large I imagine a person's head is completely irrelevant; as long as I do not go beyond the head. But if I put together a large head with a small body and present this together in a real picture, I perceive the contradiction to what is possible.

The realization of such a contradiction between a created object and its inner possibility causes in us the sensation of the comic.

The comic is therefore a reality in the form of an intellectual contradiction. The “what” is sensuality, the “how” is intellect with its content not grounded in the nature of the whole.

Wherever you examine something as being funny, you will find that what the creative human being has made out of his material contradicts the deeper, inner nature, the fundamental laws of being. And whoever is able to see through this contradiction perceives it as being funny.

The liberating effect that lies in laughing at a comical object is based on the fact that the person who sees the contradiction feels superior to the object; he believes he understands the matter better than it appears before him in the presentation. Those who do not see the contradiction also miss out on the effect of the comic. Therefore, one and the same object can appear comical to one person but not to another. Those who have no understanding of the contradiction also have no understanding of comedy. Of course, it may happen that the perception of such a contradiction even puts us in a gloomy mood. But then we also look at the matter differently. We no longer look at the intellectual contradiction, but at the disharmony between the individual and the whole. But this already has its basis in a rational view. And here the comedy stops. This is particularly the case when we perceive something incongruous in nature itself, for example, something deformed or crippled. Here we no longer understand the individual parts rationally, but we see the contrast between what has become and what should and could have become, and this leads us deeper than a mere rational understanding.

This is why there is actually little that is directly comical in nature itself. The comic is mostly man-made.

In presenting the comic, man may even have the direct intention of achieving through the pictorial, the demonstrative, that which cannot be achieved by the presentation of mere, contradictory concepts: to lead to the recognition of the contradiction. What does not make the necessary impression in thought is done by the visual presentation. This is the purpose of irony, of comic satire. Parody and travesty also aim to ridicule the paradox of the one by juxtaposing the opposite.

It is in the nature of the comic that it finds a far larger circle of connoisseurs than the other art forms. For man needs only grasp the contradictory details with the mind; the contemplation of the contradiction itself provides him with the image, the representation. It is not necessary here to elevate it to the level of rational contemplation.

Furthermore, it is also in the nature of the comic that it serves excellently to demonstrate human folly. After all, folly consists in taking the wrong, the contradictory, for reality. If the fool's delusions were presented to him externally in a vivid way, he might be more easily convinced of his folly than in any other way.

The serious artist who does not create from the whole, but instead assembles his work from individual parts, can easily inadvertently create something comic. Likewise, we present ourselves as a comic object to our fellow human beings when we commit acts in which nothing but the contradiction we are experiencing comes to light for the audience.

The effect of the comic always depends, of course, on how far the observer is above the comic object, that is, in other words, to what extent he is able to grasp the contradiction in its full depth. To the wise man, for example, it will seem comical when he sees so many people striving, cherishing and worshiping something in life that does not seem worthy of cherishing or worshiping to him. From what has been said earlier, it is clear that he can only remain with the impression of the comical as long as he stops at grasping the contradiction with his mind. If he penetrates deeper and considers the effort that mankind puts into empty vanity, then he must, of course, take the matter more seriously.

On the other hand, many things will make a comical impression on the fool that will not make the wise laugh at all. If the latter regards a thing only from its outward appearance and does not see its inner depth, he may well laugh at the contradictions of this surface. Precisely what better-laid natures do is so often laughed at, because it is not understood, but the contradiction is seen in which these actions stand with what is ordinary in life.

Those who have a sense for finding contradictions in life and for linking together what is contradictory, only to be brought together artificially by the mind, will be particularly suited to depict the comic. The joke is nothing more than the play of the mind, which seeks out similarities in things that are very far apart and, by juxtaposing them, creates an obvious contradiction.

The effect of the comic also depends on the degree to which the contradiction outweighs the harmony, which is always present, even if it is slight. The realm of the comic also excludes anything that is completely alien. We can say that the comic corresponds to understanding, but it contradicts both sensuality and reason.

Those who perceive the contradiction but mistake understanding for reason, and instead of laughing are saddened by the disharmony, have no sense of humor. They will see only contradictions everywhere and mistake them for the “one and only” of the world. This leads to the melancholic mood. On the other hand, anyone who is convinced that reason prevails behind understanding, and that inner, higher unity prevails behind contradiction, can laugh at the disharmony. Indeed, they can even go so far as to believe that where there is contradiction, only understanding is at play; when viewed rationally and more deeply, one always arrives at harmony. Such a person lives in the belief that contradiction is always superficial, never deep; he therefore always takes it lightly; as something that frees life from uniformity and monotony, but which immediately disappears when one penetrates deeper. This person laughs at the contradictory and becomes serious about the divine harmony of things. In him we find the basic tenor of humor.

A third case is also possible. A person may have an organ for perceiving contradictions, but none for perceiving unity and ideality. Such a person can understand what is perverse, petty, and unreasonable, but this understanding is not supported by a sense of depth. This person can laugh, but cannot be truly earnest and pious. This is the basic mood of frivolity. The melancholic does have a need for deep harmony, but he does not have the spiritual strength to grasp it. Therefore, he also lacks the sense to laugh at the absurdities. What he should take seriously is missing; therefore, he takes seriously what cannot be considered as such. The humorist can laugh at the wrong without worry, because he knows that it lies on the surface rather than at the bottom, and he has a sense for the things at the bottom of the world's existence. The frivolous person has only a sense for the superficial, but even that is the only need he has. He does not know the depths and does not want to know them. He lives on the surface.

And so we have come full circle of our journey. We have shown the idea of the comic as a form of aesthetic appearance and characterized the position that this idea has in relation to life. The comic is not just an arbitrary creation of man, it is the only way to look at and represent the in many ways contradictory outer side of life.

Rudolf Steiner.