Historical overview of the Development of Thinking and
Modern World Conceptions over the last 2.500 years
Part 1
My attempt to explain how man came from the Greek ideals “Man
Know Thyself” to statistics today
Robert Gorter, MD, PhD.
October 17 th , 2021
Silver tetradrachm coin at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon depicting the Owl of Athena (circa 480–420 BC). The inscription “ΑΘΕ” is an abbreviation of ΑΘΗΝΑΙΩΝ, which may be translated as “of the Athenians”. In daily use the Athenian drachmas were called glaukes (γλαῦκες, owls). This silver coin was first issued in 479 BC in Athens after the Persians were defeated by the Greeks. In Greek mythology, a little owl (Athene noctua) traditionally represents or accompanies Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, or Minerva, her syncretic incarnation in Roman mythology. Because of such association, the bird – often referred to as the “owl of Athena” or the “owl of Minerva” – has been used as a symbol of knowledge, wisdom, perspicacity and erudition throughout the Western world till today.
It is of great importance, that one develops a “historic consciousness” in regard to the progress of human thinking and the resulting world conceptions, which influence the way one thinks and acts today. Also, to understand the way medicine is practised today, an overview of the development of thinking is of extreme importance. Therefore, in this chapter, we will follow and summarize Rudolf Steiner’s reflections, presented in his book, ”Riddles of Philosophy”, and receive an overview of his mode of thought.
The world conception of the Greek Thinkers
With Pherekydes of Syros, who lived in the sixth century B.C., a personality appears in the Greek intellectual-spiritual life in which one can observe the birth of what will be called in the following presentation. “a world and life conception”. What he has to say about the problems of the world is, on the one hand, still like the mystical symbolic accounts of a time that lies before the striving for a scientific world conception; on the other hand, his imagination penetrates through the picture, through the myth, to a form o reflection that warrants to pierce the problems of man’s existence and of his position in the world by means of a winged oak around which Zeus wraps the surface land, oceans, rivers, etc., like a woven texture. He thinks of the world as permeated by spiritual beings of which the Greek mythology speaks.
But Pherekydes also speaks of three principles (Trinity) of the world: of Chronos, of Zeus and of Chthon. Through the history of philosophy there has been much discussion as to what is to be understood by these three principles. As the historical sources on the question of what Pherekydes meant to say in his work, Heptamychos, are contradictory, it is quite understandable that the present-day opinions also do not agree. If one reflects on the traditional accounts of Pherekydes, we get the impression that we can really observe in him the beginning of philosophical thought, but that this observation is difficult because his words have to be taken in a sense that is remote from the thought habits of the present time; its real meaning is yet to be determined.
Pherekydes arrives at his world picture in a different way from that of his predecessors. The significant fact is that he feels man to be a living soul in a way different from earlier times. For the earlier world view, the word, “soul” did not yet have the meaning that it acquired in later conceptions of life, nor did Pherekydes have the idea of the soul in the sense of later thinkers.
He simply feels the soul-element of man, whereas the later thinkers want to speak clearly about it (in the form of thought), and they attempt to characterize it in intellectual terms. Men of earlier times do not as yet separate their own soul experience from the life of nature. They experience themselves in nature as they experience lightning and thunder in it, the drifting of the clouds, the course of the stars or the growth of plants. What moves one’s hand on one’s own body, what places his foot on the ground and makes him walk, for the prehistoric man, belongs to the same sphere of world forces that also causes lightning, cloud formations and all other external events. What he at this stage feels, can be expressed by saying:
“Something causes lightning, thunder, rain, moves my hand, makes my foot step, moves the air of my breath within me, turns my head”. If one expresses what is in this way experienced, one has to use words that at first hearing seem to be exaggerated. But only through these exaggerations will it be possible to understand what is intended to be conveyed.
A man who holds a world picture as it is meant here, experiences in the rain that falls to the ground the action of a force that we at the present time must call “spiritual” and that he feels to be of the same kind as the force he experiences when he is about to exert a personal activity of some kind or other. It should be of interest that this view can be found again in Goethe in his younger years, naturally in a shade of thought that it must assume in a personality of the eighteenth century. We can read in Goethe’s essay, Nature:
“She (nature) has placed me in life; she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke about her. Nay, what is true and what is false; everything has been spoken by her. Everything is her fault, everything her merit.”
To speak as Goethe speaks here is only then possible if one feels one’s own being imbedded in nature as a whole and then expresses this feeling in thoughtful reflection. As Goethe thought, so man of an earlier time felt without transforming his soul experience into the element of thought. He did not as of yet experience thought; instead of thought there unfolded within his soul a symbolic image. The observation of the evolution of mankind leads back to a time in which thought-like experiences had not yet come into being but in which the symbolic picture rose in the soul of man when he contemplated
the events of the world. Thought life is born in man at a definite time. It causes the extinction of the previous form of consciousness in which the world is experienced in pictures.
For the thought habits of our time it seems acceptable to imagine that man, in archaic times, had observed natural elements, like wind and weather, the growth of seeds, the course of the stars, etc., and then poetically invented spiritual beings as the active creators of these events. It is, however, far from the contemporary mode of thinking to recognize the possibility that man in older times experienced those pictures as he later experienced thought, that is, as an inner reality of his soul life.
One will gradually come to recognize that in the course of the evolution of mankind a transformation of the human organization has taken place. There was a time when the subtle organs of human nature, which make possible the development of an independent thought life, had not yet been formed. In this time man had, instead, organs that represented for him what he experienced in the world of pictures.
As this gradually comes to be understood, a new light will fall on the significance of mythology on the one hand, and that of poetic production and thought life on the other. When the independent inner thought experience began, it brought the picture – consciousness to extinction. Thought emerged as the tool of truth.
This is only one branch of what survived of the old picture – consciousness that had found its expression in the ancient myth. In another branch the extinguished picture-consciousness continued to live on, if only as a pale shadow of its former existence, in the creations of fantasy and poetic imagination. Poetic fantasy and the intellectual view of the world are the two children of one mother, the old picture-consciousness that must not be confused with the consciousness of poetic imagination.
The essential process that is to be understood is the transformation of the more delicate (physiologic) organization of man. It causes the beginning of thought life. In art and poetry thought as such naturally does not have an effect. Here, the picture continues to exert its influence, but it has now a different relation to the human soul from the one it had when it also served in a cognitive function. As thought itself, the new form of consciousness appears only in the newly emerging philosophy. The other branches of human life are correspondingly transformed in a different way when thought begins to rule in the field of human knowledge.
The progress in human evolution that is characterized by this process is connected with the fact that man from the beginning of thought experience had to feel himself in a much more pronounced way than before, as a separated entity, as a “soul”. In myth the picture was experienced in such a way that one felt it to be in the external world as a reality. One experienced this reality at the same time, and one was united with it. With thought, as well as with the poetic picture, man felt himself separated from nature. Engaged in thought experience, man felt himself as an entity that could not experience nature with the same intimacy as he felt when at one with thought. More and more, the definite feeling of the contrast of nature and soul came into being.
In the civilizations of the different peoples this transition from the old picture-consciousness to the consciousness of thought experience took place at different times. In Greece we can intimately observe this transition if we focus our attention on the personality of Pherekydes of Syros. He lived in a world in which picture-consciousness and thought experience still had an equal share. His three principal ideas, Zeus, Chronos and Chthon, can only
be understood in such a way that the soul, in experiencing them, feels itself as belonging to the events of the external world. One is dealing here with three inwardly experienced pictures and one finds access to them only when one does not allow himself to be distracted by anything that the thought habits of present times are likely to imagine as their meaning.
Chronos is not time as one thinks of it today. Chronos is a being that in contemporary language can be called “spiritual” if one keeps in
mind that one does not thereby exhaust its meaning. Chronos is a live and its activity is the devouring, the consumption of the life of
another being, Chthon. Chronos rules in nature; Chronos rules in man;
in nature and in man Chronos consumes Chthon. It is of no importance whether one considers the consumption of Chthon through Chronos as inwardly experienced or as external events. Zeus is connected with these two beings. In the meaning of Pherekydes one must no more think of Zeus as a deity in the sense of the present day conception of mythology, than as of mere “space” in its present sense, although he is the being through whom the events that go on between Chronos and Chthon are transformed into spatial, extended form.
The cooperation of Chronos, Chthon and Zeus is felt directly as a picture content in the sense of Pherekydes, just as much as one is aware of the idea that one is eating, but is also experienced as something in the external world, like the conception of the colors blue or red. We turn our attention to fire as it consumes its fuel.
Chronos lives in the activity of fire, of warmth. Whoever regards fire in its activity and keeps himself under the effect, not of independent thought but of image content, looks at Chronos. In the activity of fire, not in the sensually perceived fire, he experiences time simultaneously. Another conception of time does not exist before the birth of thought. What is called “time” in the present age is an idea that has been developed only in the age of
intellectual world conception.
If one turns his attention to water, not as it is as water but as it changes into air or vapor, or to clouds that are in the process of dissolving, one experiences as image content the force of Zeus, the spatially active “spreader”. One could also say, the force of centrifugal extension. If one looks on water as it becomes solid, or on the solid as it changes into fluid, we are watching Chthon. Chthon is something that later in the age of thought-ruled world conception becomes “matter”, the stuff “things are made of”; Zeus has become “space”, Chronos changes into “time”.
In the view of Pherekydes the world is constituted through the co-operation of these three principles. Through the combination of their actions the material world of sense perception, fire, air, water and earth, come into existence on the one hand, and on the other, a certain number of invisible supersensible spirit beings who animate the four material worlds. Zeus, Chronos and Chthon could be referred to as “spirit”, ”soul” and “matter”, but their significance is only approximated by these terms. It is only through the fusion of these three original beings that the more material realms of the world of fire, air, water and earth, and the more soul-like and spirit- like (supersensible) beings come into existence. Using expressions of later world conceptions, one can call Zeus, space-creator; Chronos, time-creator; Chthon, matter-producer, the three “mothers of the world origin”. We can still catch a glimpse of them in Goethe’s Faust, in the scene of the second part, where Faust sets out on his journey to the “mothers”.
Connected with the birth of thought life is the shattering of the foundation of the inner feelings of the soul. This inner experience should not be over-looked in a consideration of the time when the intellectual world conception began. One could not have felt this beginning as progress if one had not believed that with thought one took possession of something that was more perfect than the old form of image experience. Of course, at this stage of thought development, this feeling was not clearly expressed. But what one now, in retrospect, can clearly state with regard to the ancient Greek thinkers was then merely felt. They felt that the pictures that were experienced by their immediate ancestors did not lead to the highest, most perfect, original, causes. In these pictures only the less perfect causes were revealed; one must raise one’s thoughts to still higher causes from which the content of those pictures is merely derived.
Through progress into the thought life, the world was now conceived as divided into a more natural and a more spiritual sphere. The basis
for the much later dualistic world concept was laid.
Pherekydes found harmony in his surroundings that lies at the bottom of all phenomena and is manifested in the motions of the stars, in the course of the seasons with their blessings of thriving plant life, etc. In this beneficial course of things, harmful, destructive powers intervene, as expressed in the pernicious effects of the weather, earthquakes, etc. In observing all this, one can be lead to a realization of a dualism in the ruling powers, but the human
soul must assume an underlying unity. It naturally feels that, in the last analysis, the ravaging hail, the destructive earthquake, must spring from the same source as the beneficial cycle of the seasons.
In this fashion man looks through good and evil and sees behind it an original good. The same good force rules in the earthquake as in the blessed rain of spring. In the scorching, devastating heat of the sun the same element is at work that ripens the seed. The “Good Mothers of all origin” are, then, in the pernicious events also. When man experiences this feeling, a powerful world riddle emerges before the soul. To find the solution, Pherekydes turns toward his Ophioneus. As Pherekydes leans on the old picture conception, Ophioneus appears to him as a kind “world serpent”. It is in reality a
spirit being, which, like all other beings of the world, belongs to the children of Chronos, Zeus and Chthon, but that has later so changed that its effects are directed against those of the “Good Mother of origin”. Thus, the world is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the “Mothers”, which are presented as good, as perfect; the second part contains the beneficial world events; the third part, the destructive or only imperfect world processes that, as Ophioneus, are intertwined in the beneficial effects. For Pherekydes, Ophioneus is not merely a symbolic idea for the detrimental destructive world forces. Pherekydes stands with his conceptive imagination at the borderline between picture and thought. He does not think that there are devastating powers that he conceives in the pictures of Ophioneus, nor does such a thought process develop in him as an activity of fantasy. Rather, he looks on
the detrimental forces, and immediately Ophioneus stands before his soul as the red color stands before our souls when we look at a rose.
Whoever sees the world only as it presents itself to image perception does not, at first, distinguish in his thought between the events of the “Good Mothers” and those of Phioneus. At the borderline of a thought-formed world conception, the necessity of this distinction is felt for only at this stage of progress does the soul feel itself to be a separate, independent entity. It feels the necessity to ask what is the origin is. It must find its origin in the
depths of the world where Chronos, Zeus and chthon had not as yet found their antagonists. But the soul also feels that it cannot know anything of its own origin at first, because it sees itself in the midst of a world in which the “Mothers” work in conjunction with Ophioneus. It feels itself in a world in which the perfect and the imperfect are joined together. Ophioneus is twisted into the soul’s own being. One can feel what went on in the souls of individual personalities of the sixth century B.C. if one allows the feelings described here to make a sufficient impression on oneself. With
ancient mythical deities such souls felt themselves woven into the imperfect world. The deities belonged to the same imperfect world
as they did themselves.
The spiritual brotherhood, which was founded by Pythagoras of Samos between 549 and 500 B.C. in Kroton in Magna Graecia, grew out of such a mood. Pythagoras intended to lead his followers back to the experience of the “Good Mothers”, in which the origin of their souls was to be found. It can be said in this respect that he and his disciples meant to serve “other gods” than those of the people. With this fact something was given that must appear as a break between spirits like Pythagoras and the people, who were satisfied with their gods. Pythagoras considered these gods as belonging to the realm of
the imperfect. In this difference one can also find the reason for the “secret” that is often referred to in connection with Pythagoras and that was not to be betrayed to the uninitiated. It consisted in the fact that Pythagoras had to attribute to the human soul an origin different from that of the gods of the popular religion.
In the picture of Pythagoras, present-day thinking also feels the idea of the so-called “transmigration of souls” as a disturbing factor. It is even felt to be naïve that Pythagoras is reported to have said that he knew that he had already been on earth in an earlier time as another human being. It may be recalled that that great representative of modern enlightenment, Lessing, in his Education of the Human Race, renewed this idea of man’s repeated lives on earth out of a mode of thinking that was entirely different from that of Pythagoras. Lessing could conceive the progress of the human race only in such a way that the human souls participated repeatedly in the life of the successive great phases of history.
The idea of reincarnation is present in Pythagoras, but it would be erroneous to believe that he, along with Pherekydes, who is mentioned as his teacher in antiquity, has yielded to this idea because he had, by means of a logical conclusion, arrived at the thought that the path of development indicated above could only be reached in repeated earthly lives. To attribute such an intellectual mode of thinking to Pythagoras would be to misjudge him. We are
told of his extensive journeys. We hear that he met together with wise men who had preserved traditions of oldest human insight.
When we observe the oldest human conceptions that have come down to us through posterity, we arrive at the view that the idea of
repeated lives on earth was widespread in remote antiquity.
Pythagoras took up the thread from the oldest teachings of humanity. The mythical teachings in picture form appeared to him as deteriorated conceptions that had their origin in older and superior insights. These picture doctrines were to change in his time into thought-formed world conception, but this intellectual world conception appeared to him as only a part of the soul’s life. This part had to be developed to greater depths. It could then lead the soul to its origins. By penetrating in this direction, however, the soul discovers in its inner experience the repeated lives on earth as a soul perception. It does not reach its origins unless it finds its way through the repeated terrestrial lives. As a wanderer, walking to a distant place, naturally passes through other places on his path, so the soul on its path to the “Mothers” passes the preceding lives through which it has gone during its descent from its former existence in perfection, to its present life in imperfection. If one considers everything that is pertinent in this problem, the inference is inescapable that the view of repeated earth lives is to be attributed to Pythagoras in this sense as his inner perception, not as something that was arrived at through a process of conceptual conclusion.
Let us think Pythagoras as standing before the beginning of intellectual world conception. He saw how thought took its origin in the soul that had, starting from the “Mothers”, descended through mere thought. He had to seek the highest knowledge in a sphere in which thought was not yet at home. There he found a life of the soul that was beyond thought life. As the soul experiences proportional numbers in the sound of music, so Pythagoras developed a soul life in which he knew himself as living in a connection with the world that can be intellectually expressed in terms of numbers. But for what is thus experienced, these numbers have no other significance than the physicist’s proportional tone numbers have for the experience of music.
For Pythagoras the mythical gods must be replaced by thought. At the same time, he develops an appropriate deepening of the soul life; the soul, which through thought has separated itself from the world, finds itself at one with the world again. It experiences itself as not separated from the world. This does not take place in a region in which the world-participating experience turns into a mythical picture, but in a region in which the soul reverberates with the invisible, sensually imperceptible cosmic harmonies. It brings into awareness, not its own thought intentions, but what cosmic powers
exert as their will, thus allowing it to become conception in the soul of man.
In Pherekydes and Pythagoras the process of how thought- experience world conception originates in the human soul is revealed. Working themselves free from the older forms of conception, these men arrive at an inwardly independent conception of the “soul” distinct from external “nature”. What is apparent in these two personalities, the process in which the soul wrests its way out of the old picture conceptions, takes place more in the undercurrents of the souls of the other thinkers with whom it is customary to begin the account of the development of Greek philosophy. The thinkers
who are ordinarily mentioned first are Thales of Miletos (640-550 B.C.), Anaximander (born 610 B.C.), Anaximenes (flourished 600 B.C.)
and Heraclitus (born 500 B.C. at Ephesus).
Whoever acknowledges the preceding arguments to be justified will also find a presentation of these men admissible that must differ from the usual historical accounts of philosophy. Such accounts are, after all, always based on the unexpressed presumption that these men had arrived at their traditionally reported statements through an imperfect observation of nature. Thus, the statement is made that the fundamental and original being of all things was to be found in “water”, according to Thales; in the “infinite”, according to Anaximander; in “air”, according to Anaximenes; in “fire”, in the
opinion of Heraclitus.
The thinkers mentioned so far are succeeded historically by Xenophanes of Kolophon (born 570 B.C.), Parmenides (born 460 B.C., living as a teacher in Athens), Zenon of Elea (who reached his peak around 500 B.C.) and Melissos of Samos (about 450 B.C.).
The thought element is already alive to such a degree in these thinkers, that they demand a world conception in which the life of thought is fully satisfied; they recognize truth only in this form. How must the world ground be constituted so that it can be fully absorbed within thinking? This is their question.
Xenophanes finds that the popular gods cannot stand the test of thought; therefore, he rejects them. His god must be capable of being thought. What the senses perceive is changeable, is burdened with qualities not appropriate to thought, whose function it is to seek what is permanent. Therefore, God is the unchangeable, eternal unity of all things to be seized in thought.
Parmenides sees the Untrue, the Deceiving, in sense-perceived, external nature. He sees what alone is true in the Unity, the Imperishable that is seized by thought.
Zeno tries to come to terms with it, and do justice to, the thought experience by pointing out in the change of things, in the process of becoming, in the multiplicity that is shown by the external world. One of the contradictions pointed out by Zeno is, that the fastest runner (Achilles) could not catch up with a turtle, for no matter how slowly it moved, the moment Achilles arrived at the point it had just occupied, it would have moved on a little. Through such contradictions Zeno intimates how a conceptual imagination that leans on the external world is caught in self-contradiction. He points to the difficulty such thought meets when it attempts to find the truth. According to a Dialogue of Plato, the young Socrates is told by Parmenides that he should learn the “art of thought” from Zeno; otherwise, truth would be unattainable for him. This “art of thought” was felt to be a necessity for the human soul intending to approach the spiritual fundamental grounds of existence.
Thus, the time of picture experiences came to an end with the beginning of thought life in the ancient, pre-Christian, Greek philosophers. Thought formed a wall around the human soul, so to speak. And the entire panorama of the picture experiences was now extinguished. The soul could experience itself in the surroundings of space and time only if it united itself with thought.
Plato, who was born in Athens in 427 B.C., felt, as a disciple of Socrates that his master had helped to consolidate his confidence in the life of thought. What the entire previous development tended to bring into appearance reaches a climax in Plato. This is the conception that in thought life the world sprit reveals itself. The awareness of this conception sheds, to begin with, its light over all of Plato’s soul life. Nothing that man knows through the senses or otherwise, has any value as long as the soul has not exposed it to the light of thought. Philosophy becomes for Plato the science of ideas as the world of true being, and the idea is the manifestation of the world spirit through the revelation of thought. The light of the world spirit shines into the soul of man and reveals itself there in the form of ideas; the human soul, in seizing the idea, unites itself with the force of the world spirit. The world that is spread in space and time is like the mass of the ocean water in which the stars are reflected, but what is real is only reflected as idea. Thus, for Plato, the whole world changes into ideas that act upon each other. Their effect in the world is produced through the fact that the ideas are reflected in hyle, the original matter. What one sees as the many individual things and events comes to pass through this reflection. One does not need extend knowledge to hyle, the original matter however, for in it there is no truth. One reaches truth only if we strip the world picture of everything that is not idea. For Plato, the human soul is living in the idea, but this life is so constituted that the soul is not a manifestation of its life in the ideas in all its utterances. Insofar as it is submerged in the life of ideas, it appears as the “rational soul” (thought-bearing soul), and as such, the soul appears to itself when it becomes aware of itself in thought perception. It must also manifest in such a way that it appears as the “non-rational soul” (not-thought bearing soul). As such, it again appears in a twofold way as courage-developing, and as appetitive soul. Thus, Plato seems to distinguish three members or parts in the human soul: The rational soul, the courage-like (or will-exertive) soul and the appetitive soul. One should, however, describe the spirit of his conceptional approach better if one expresses it in a different way. According to its nature, the soul is a member of the world of ideas, but it acts in such a way that it adds an activity to its life in reason through its courage life and its appetitive life. In this threefold mode of utterance it appears as earthbound soul. It descends as a rational soul through physical birth into a terrestrial existence, and with death again enters the world of ideas. Insofar as it is rational soul, it is immortal, for as such it shares with its life the eternal existence of the world of ideas.
Plato’s doctrine of the human soul emerges as a significant fact in the age of thought perception. The awakened thought directed man’s attention toward the soul. A perception of the soul develops in Plato that is entirely the result of thought perception. Thought in Plato has become bold enough not only to point toward the soul but to express what the soul is, as it were, to describe it. What thought has to say about the soul gives it the force to know itself in the eternal. Indeed, thought in the soul even sheds light on the nature of the temporal by expanding its own being beyond this temporal existence. The soul perceives thought. As the soul appears in its terrestrial life, it could not produce in itself the pure form of thought. Where does the thought experience come from if it cannot be developed in the life on earth? It represents a reminiscence of a pre-terrestrial, purely spiritual state of being. Thought has seized the soul in such a way that it is not satisfied by the soul’s terrestrial form of existence. It has been revealed to the soul in an earlier state of being (pre-existence) in the spirit world (world of ideas) and the soul recalls it during its terrestrial existence through the reminiscence of the life it has spent in the spirit.
What Plato has to say about the moral life follows from this soul conception? The soul is moral if is so arranges life that it exerts itself to the largest possible measure as rational soul. Wisdom is the virtue that stems from the rational soul; it ennobles human life. Fortitude is the virtue of the will-exertive soul; Temperance is that of the appetitive soul. These virtues come to pass when the rational soul becomes the ruler over the other manifestations of the soul. When all three virtues harmoniously act together, there emerges what Plato calls, Justice, the direction toward the Good, Dikaiosyne.
Plato’s most famous disciple, Aristotle (born 384 B.C. in Stageira, Thracia, died 321 B.C.), together with his teacher, represents a climax in Greek thinking. With him, the process of the absorption of thought life into the world conception has been completed and come to rest. Thought takes its rightful possession of its function to comprehend, out of its won resources, the being and the events of the world. With Aristotle, this authority has to become a matter of course. It is now a question of confirming it everywhere in the various fields of knowledge. Aristotle understands how to use thought as a tool that penetrates into the essence of things. For Plato, it had been the task to overcome the thing or being of the external world. When it has been overcome, the soul carries in itself the idea of which the external being had only been overshadowed, but which had been foreign to it, hovering over it in a spiritual world of truth.
Aristotle intends to submerge into the beings and events, and what the soul finds in this submersion, it accepts as the essence of the thing itself. The soul feels as if it had only lifted this essence out of the thing and as if it had brought this essence for its own consumption into the thought form in order to be able to carry it in itself as a reminder of the thing. To Aristotle’s mind, the ideas are in the things and the events. They are the side of the things through which these things have a foundation of their own in the underlying material, matter (hyle).
Plato, like Aristotle, lets his conception of soul shed its light on his entire world conception. In both thinkers one can describe the fundamental constitution of their philosophy as a whole if one succeeds in determining the basic characteristics of their soul conceptions. To be sure, for both of them many detailed studies would have to be considered that cannot be attempted in this course. But the direction their mode of conception took is, for both, indicated in their soul conceptions.
Plato is concerned with what lives in the soul and, as such, shares in the spirit world. What is important for Aristotle is the question of how the soul presents itself for man in his own knowledge. As it does with other things, the soul must also submerge into itself in order to find what constitutes its own essence. The idea, which, according to Aristotle, man finds in a thing outside his soul, is the essence of the thing, but the soul has brought this essence into the form of an idea in order to have it for itself. The idea does not have its reality in the cognitive soul but in the external thing in connection with its material life (hyle). If the soul submerges into itself, however, it finds the idea as such in reality. The soul in this essence is idea, but active idea, an entity exerting action, and it behaves also in the life of man as such an active entity. In the process of germination of man it lays hold upon material existence.
Aristotle is the thinker who has brought thought to the point where it unfolds to a world conception through its contact with the essence of the world. The age before Aristotle led to the experience of thought; Aristotle seizes the thoughts and applies them to whatever he finds in the world. The natural way, peculiar for Aristotle, in which he lives in thought as a matter of course, leads him to investigate logic, the laws of thought itself. Such a science could only come into being after the awakened thought had reached a stage of great maturity and of such a harmonious relationship to the things of the outer world as one can find it in Aristotle.
Aristotle’s Ten Categories
Aristotle’s Categories is a singularly most important work of philosophy. It not only presents the backbone of Aristotle’s own philosophical theorizing but has exerted an unparalleled influence on the systems of many of the greatest philosophers in the western tradition. The set of doctrines in the Categories, which I will henceforth call categorialism, provides the framework of inquiry for a wide variety of Aristotle’s philosophical investigations, ranging from his discussions of time and change in the Physics to the science of being qua being in the Metaphysics, and even extending to his rejection of Platonic ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics. Looking beyond his own works, Aristotle’s categorialism has engaged the attention of such diverse philosophers as Plotinus, Porphyry, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Brentano, and Heidegger (to mention just a few), who have variously embraced, defended, modified or rejected its central contentions. All, in their different ways, have thought it necessary to come to terms with features of Aristotle’s categorical scheme.
Plainly, the enterprise of categorialism inaugurated by Aristotle runs deep in the philosophical psyche. Even so, despite its wide-reaching influence — and, indeed owing to that influence — any attempt to describe categorialism faces a significant difficulty: experts disagree on many of its most important and fundamental aspects.
But all agree that the 10 Categories formulated by Aristotle laid the basis for modern thinking and Natural Sciences.
Thought Life in the beginning of the Christian Era
In the age that follows the flowering of Greek world conceptions, philosophy submerges into religious life. The philosophical trends vanish, so to speak, into religious currents and emerge only later. It is not meant to imply by this statement that these religious movements have no connection with the development of the philosophical life. On the contrary, this connection exists in the most extensive measure. Here, however, no statement about the evolution of religious life is intended, but rather a characterization of the development of the world conceptions insofar as it results from thought experience as such.
After the exhaustion of Greek thought life, an age begins in the spiritual life of mankind in which the religious impulses become the driving forces of the intellectual world conceptions as well. For Plotinus, his own mystical experience was the source of inspiration of his ideas. A similar role for the spiritual development of mankind in its general life is played by the religious impulses in an age that begins with the exhaustion of Greek philosophy until John Scotus Erigena (died 885 A.D.).
The development of thought does not completely cease in this age. One even witnesses the unfolding of magnificent and comprehensive thought structures. The thought energies, however, do not have their source within themselves bur are derived from religious impulses.
The religious mode of conception in this period flows through the developing human souls and the resulting world pictures are derived from this stimulation. The thoughts that occur in this process are Greek thoughts that are still exerting their influence. They are adopted and transformed, but are not brought to new growth out of themselves. The world conceptions emerge out of the background of the religious life. What is alive in them is not self-unfolding thought, but the religious impulses that are striving to manifest themselves in the previously conquered thought forms.
One can study this development in several significant phenomena. One can see Platonic and older philosophies engaged on European soil in the endeavor to comprehend or to contradict what the religions spread as their doctrines. Important thinkers attempt to present the revelation of religion as fully justified before the forum of the old world conceptions.
What is historically known as Gnosticism develops in this way in a more Christian or a more pagan coloring. Personalities of significance of this movement are Valentinus, Basilides and Marcion. Their thought creation is a comprehensive conception of world evolution. Cognition, gnosis, when it rises from the intellectual to the trans-intellectual realm, leads into the conception of a higher world-creative entity. This being is infinitely superior to everything seen as the world by man, and so are the other lofty beings it produces out of itself, the aeons. They form a descending series of generations in such a way that a less perfect aeon always proceeds from a more perfect one. As such, in a later stage of evolution an aeon has to be considered to be also the creator of the world that is visible to man and to which man himself belongs. Into this world as aeon of the highest degree of perfection now can join. It is an aeon that has remained in a purely spiritual, perfect world and has there continued its development.
The Gnostics, who were inclined toward Christianity, saw in Christ Jesus the perfect aeon, which has united with the terrestrial world.
Personalities like Clemens of Alexandria (died ca. 211 A.D.) and Origen (born ca. 185 A.D.) stood more on a dogmatic Christian ground. Clemens accepts the Greek world conceptions as a preparation of the Christian revelation and uses them as instruments to express and defend the Christian impulses. Origen proceeds in a similar way.
One can find a thought life inspired by religious impulses flowing together in a comprehensive stream of conceptions in the writings of Dionysius the Areogagite, which are mentioned from 533 A.D. They probably had not been composed much earlier, but they do go back, not in their details but in their characteristic features, to earlier thinking of his age. Their content can be sketched in the following way. When the soul liberates itself from everything that it can perceive and think as being, when it also transcends beyond what it is capable of thinking as non-being, then it can spiritually divine the realm of the over-being, the hidden Godhead. In this entity, primordial being is united with primordial goodness and primordial beauty. Starting from this primeval trinity, the soul witnesses a descending order of beings that lead down to man in hierarchical array.
In the ninth century Scotus Erigena adopts this conception of the world and develops it in his own way. The world for him presents itself as an evolution in four forms of nature. The first of these is the creating and not created nature. In it is contained the purely spiritual primordial cause of the world out of which evolves the creating and created nature. This is the sum of purely spiritual entities and energies, which through their activity produce the created and not creating nature, to which the sensual world and man belong. They develop in such a way that they are received into the not created and not creating nature, in which the facts of salvation, the religious means of grace, etc., unfold their effect.
In those parts of Asia Minor where the conceptions of Aristotle had been spread by, among others, Alexander the Great, the tendency now arose to lend expression to the Semitic religious impulses in the ideas of the Greek thinker. This tendency was then transplanted also to European soil and so entered into the European spiritual life through such thinkers as the great Aristotalians, Averroes (1126-1198), Maimonides (1135-1204), and others.
In Averroes, one can find the view that it is an error to assume that a special thought world exists in the personality of man. There is only one homogeneous thought world in the divine primordial being. As light can be reflected in any mirrors, so also one thought world is revealed in many human beings. During human life on earth, to be sure, a further transformation of thought world takes place, but this is, in reality, only a process in the spiritually homogeneous primordial ground. With man’s death the individual revelation through him simply comes to an end. His thought life now exists only in the one thought life.
This world conception allows the Greek thought experience to continue its effect, but does it in such a way that it is now anchored in the uniform divine world ground. It leaves us with the impression of being a manifestation of the fact that the developing human soul did not feel in itself the intrinsic energy of thought. It therefore, projected this energy into an extra-human world power.
The World Conceptions of the Middle Ages
A foreshadowing of a new element produced by thought life emerges in St. Augustine (354-430). This element soon vanishes from the surface, however, to continue unnoticeably under the cover of religious conception, becoming distinctly discernible again only in the later Middle Ages. In St. Augustine, the new element appears as if it were a reminiscence of Greek thought life. He looks into the external world and into himself, and comes to the conclusion: May everything else the world reveals contain nothing but uncertainty and deception, one thing cannot be doubted, and that is the certainty of the soul’s experience itself. I do not owe this inner experience to a perception that could deceive me; I am in it myself; it is, for I am present when its being is attributed to it.
One can see a new element in these conceptions as against Greek thought life, in spite of the fact that they seem at first like a reminiscence of it. Greek thinking points toward the soul; in St. Augustine, we are directed toward the center of the life of the soul. The Greek thinkers contemplated the soul in its relation to the world; St. Augustine’s approach, something in soul life confronts this soul life and regards it as a special, self-contained world.. One can call the center of the soul life the “ego” of man. To the Greek thinkers, the relation of the soul to the world becomes problematic, to the thinkers of modern times, that of the “ego” to the soul. In St. Augustine, we have only the first indication of this situation. The ensuing philosophical currents are still too much occupied with the task of harmonizing world conception and religion to become distinctly aware of the new element that has not entered into spiritual life. But the tendency to contemplate the riddles of the world in accordance with the demand of this new element lives more or less unconsciously in the souls of the time that now follows. In thinkers like Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) and Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274), this tendency still shows itself in such a way that they attribute to self-supportive thinking the ability to investigate the processes of the world to a certain degree, but they limit this ability. There is for them a higher spiritual reality to which thinking, left to its own resources, can never attain, but that must be revealed to it in a religious way. Man is, according to Thomas Aquinas, rooted with his soul life in the reality of the world, but this soul life cannot know this reality in its full extent through itself alone. Man could not know how his own being stands in the course of the world if the spirit being, to which his knowledge does not penetrate, did not deign to reveal to him what must remain concealed to a knowledge relying on its own power alone. Thomas Aquinas constructs his world picture on this presumption. It has two parts, one of which consists of the truths that are yielded to man’s own thought experience about the natural course of things. This leads to a second part that contains what has come to the soul of man through the Bible and religious revelation. Something that the soul cannot reach by itself, if it is to feel itself in its full essence, must therefore penetrate into the soul.
Thomas Aquinas made himself thoroughly familiar with the world conception of Aristotle, who becomes, as it were, his master in the life of thought. In this respect, Thomas Aquinas is, to be sure, the most prominent, but nevertheless only one of the numerous personalities of the Middle Ages who erected their own thought structure entirely on that of Aristotle. For centuries, he is il maestro di color che sanno, the master of those who know, as Dante expresses the veneration for Aristotle in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas strives to comprehend what is humanly comprehensible in Aristotelian method. In this way, Aristotle’s world conception becomes the guide to the limit to which the soul life can advance through its own power for him. Beyond these boundaries lies the realm that the Greek world conception, according to Thomas, could reach.
Therefore, human thinking for Thomas Aquinas is in need of another light by which it must be illuminated. He finds this light in revelation. Whatever was to be the attitude of the ensuing thinkers with respect to this revelation, they could no longer accept the life of thought in the manner of the Greeks. It is not sufficient to them that thinking comprehends the world; they make the presupposition that it should be possible to find a basic support for thinking itself. The tendency arises to fathom man’s relation to his soul life. Thus, man considers himself a being who exists in his soul life. If one calls this entity the ego, one can say that in modern times the consciousness of the ego is stirred up in man’s soul life in a way similar to that in which thought was born in the philosophical life of the Greeks. Whatever different forms the philosophical currents in this age assume, they all hinge on the search for the ego-entity. This fact, however, is not always brought clearly to the consciousness of the thinkers themselves. They mostly believe they are concerned with questions of a different nature. One could say that the Riddle of the Ego appears in a great variety of masks. At times it lives in the statement that this riddle is at the bottom of some view or other might appear as an arbitrary or forced opinion. In the nineteenth century this struggle over the riddle of the ego comes to its most intensive manifestation, and the world conceptions of the present time are still profoundly engaged in this struggle.
The world riddle already lived in the conflict between the nominalists and the realists in the Middle Ages. One can call Anselm of Canterbury a representative of realism. For him, the general ideas that man forms when he contemplates the world are not mere nomenclatures that the soul produces for itself, but they have their roots in a real life. In one forms the general idea “lion” in order to designate all lions with it, it is certainly correct to say that, for sense perception, only the individual lions have reality. The general concept “lion” is not, however, only a summary designation with significance only for the human mind. It is rooted in a spiritual world, and the individual lions of the world of sense perception are the various embodiments of the one lion nature expressed in the idea “lion”.
To the Greek thinker, thought came as a perception. It rose in the soul as the red color appears when a man looks at a rose, and the thinker received it as a perception. As such the thought had the immediate power of conviction. The Greek thinker had the feeling, when he placed himself with his soul receptively before the spiritual world that no incorrect thought could enter from this world into the soul just as no perception of a winged horse could come from the sense world as long as the sense organs were properly used. For the Greeks, it was a question of being able to garner thought forms from the world. They were then themselves the witness of their truth. The fact of this attitude is not contradicted by the Sophists, nor is it denied by ancient Scepticism. Both currents have an entirely different shade of meaning in antiquity from similar tendencies in modern times. They are not evidence against the fact that the Greek experienced thought in a much more elementary, content-saturated, vivid and real way that it can be experienced by modern man. This vividness, which in ancient Greece gave the character of perception to thought, is no longer to be found in the Middle Ages.
What has happened is this? As in Greek times thought entered into the human soul, extinguishing the formerly prevalent picture consciousness, so, in a similar way, during the Middle Ages the consciousness of the “ego” penetrated the human soul, and this dampened the vividness of thought. The advent of the ego-consciousness deprived thought of the strength through which it had appeared as perception. One can only understand how the philosophical life advances when one realizes how, for Plato and Aristotle, the thought, the idea, was something entirely different from what it was for the personalities of the Middle Ages and modern times. The thinker of antiquity had the feeling that thought was given to him; the thinker of the later time had the impression that he was producing thought. Thus, the inquiry into the nature of the “general ideas” begins. The thinker asks himself the questions, “What is it that I have really produced with them? Are they only rooted in me, or do they point toward a reality?”
In the period between the ancient current of philosophical life and that of modern philosophy, the source of Greek thought life is gradually exhausted. Under the surface, however, the human soul experiences the approaching ego-consciousness as a fact. Since the end of the first half of the Middle Ages, man is confronted with this process as an accomplished fact, and under the influence of this confrontation, new Riddles of Life emerge. Realism and Nominalism are symptoms of the fact that man realizes the situation. The manner in which both Realists and Nominalists speak about thought shows that, compared to its existence in the Greek soul, it has faded out, has been dampened as much as had been the old picture consciousness in the soul of the Greek thinker.
This point is the dominating element that lives in the modern world conceptions. An energy is active in them that strives beyond thought toward a new factor of reality. This tendency of modern times cannot be felt as the same that drove beyond thought in ancient times in Pythagoras and later in Plotinus. These thinkers also strove beyond thought but, according to their conception, the soul in its development, its perfection, would have to conquer the region that lies beyond thought. In modern times, it is presupposed that the factor of reality lying beyond thought must approach the soul, must be given to it from without.
In the centuries that follow the age of Nominalism and Realism, philosophical evolution turns into a search for the new reality factor. One path among those discernible to the student of this search is the one the medieval mystics, Meister Eckhardt (died 1327), Johannes Tauler (died 1361) and Heinrich Suso (died 1366) have chosen for themselves. One receives the clearest idea of this path if one inspects the so-called German Theology, written by an author historically unknown. The mystics want to receive something into the ego-consciousness; they intend to fill it with something. They therefore strive for an inner life that is “completely composed”, surrendered in tranquillity, and that thus patiently waits to experience the soul to be filled with the “Divine Ego”. In a later time, a similar soul mood with a greater spiritual momentum can be observed in Angelus Silesius (1624-1677).
A different path is chosen by Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464). He strives beyond intellectually attainable knowledge to a state of soul in which knowledge ceases and in which the soul meets its god in “knowing ignorance”, in docta ignorantia. Examined superficially, this aspiration is similar to that of Plotinus, but the soul constitution of these two personalities is different. Plotinus is convinced that the human soul contains more than the world of thoughts. When it develops the energy that is possesses beyond the power of thought, the soul becomes conscious of the state in which it exists, and about which it is ignorant in ordinary life.
Paracelsus (1493–1541), born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), was a Swiss-German physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance. He was a pioneer in several aspects of the “medical revolution” of the Renaissance, emphasizing the value of observation in combination with received wisdom. He is credited as the “father of toxicology”. Paracelsus also had a substantial impact as a prophet or diviner, his “Prognostications” being studied by Rosicrucians in the 1600s. Paracelsianism is the early modern medical movement inspired by the study of his works.
Paracelsus (1493-1541) already has the feeling with respect to nature, which becomes more and more pronounced in the modern world conception that is an effect of the soul’s feeling of desolation in its ego-consciousness. He turns his attention toward the processes of nature. As they present themselves they cannot be accepted by the soul, but neither can thought, which in Aristotle unfolded in peaceful communication with the events of nature, now be accepted as it appears in the soul. It is not perceived; it is formed in the soul. Paracelsus felt that one must not let thought itself speak; one must presuppose that something is behind the phenomena of nature that will reveal itself if one finds the right relationship to these phenomena. One must be connected with one’s “ego” by means of a factor of reality other than thought. A higher nature behind nature is what Paracelsus is looking for. His mood of soul is so constituted that he does not want to experience something in himself alone, but he means to penetrate nature’s processes with his “ego” in order to have revealed to him the spirit of these processes that are under the surface of the world of the senses. Thy mystics of antiquity meant to delve into the depths of the soul; Paracelsus set out to take steps that would lead to a contact with the roots of nature in the external world.
Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) who, as a lonely, persecuted craftsman, formed a world picture as though out of an inner illumination, nevertheless implants into this world picture the fundamental character of modern times. In the solitude of his soul life he develops this fundamental trait most impressively because the inner dualism of the life of the soul, the contrast between the “ego” and the other soul experiences, stands clearly before the eye of his spirit. He experiences the “ego” as it creates an inner counterpart in its own soul life, reflecting itself in the mirror of his own soul. He then finds this inner experience again in the processes of the world. “In such a contemplation one finds two qualities, a good and an evil one, which are intertwined in this world in all forces, in stars and in elements as well as in all creatures”. The evil in the world is opposed to the good as its counterpart; it is only in the evil that the good becomes aware of itself, as the “ego” becomes aware of itself in its inner soul experiences.
The World Conceptions of the Modern Age of Thought Evolution.
The rise of natural science in modern times has as its fundamental cause the same search as the mysticism of Jakob Boehme. This becomes appearent in a thinker who grew directly out of the spiritual movement, which in Copernicus (1473-1542), Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo (1564-1642), and others, led to the first great accomplishments of natural science in modern times. This thinker was Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) in Italy. When one sees how his world consists of infinitely small, animated, psychically self-aware, fundamental beings, the monads, which are uncreated and indestructible, producing in their combined activity the phenomena of nature, one could be tempted to group him with Anaxagoras, for whom the world consists of the “homoiomeries”.
Yet, there is a significant difference between these two thinkers. For Anaxagoras, the thought of the homoiomeries unfolds while he is engaged in the contemplation of the world; the world suggests these thoughts to him. Giordano Bruno feels that what lies behind the phenomena of nature must be thought of as a world picture in such a way that the entity of the ego is possible in this world picture. The ego must be a monad; otherwise, it could not be real. Thus, the assumption of the monads becomes necessary. As only the monad can be real, therefore, the truly real entities are monads with different inner qualities.
In the depths of the soul of a personality like Giordano Bruno (who reincarnated as Annie Besant), something happens that is not raised into full consciousness yet; the effect of this inner process is then the formation of the world picture. What goes on in the depths is an unconscious soul process. The ego feels that it must form such a conception of itself so that its reality is assured, and it must conceive the world in such a way that the ego can be real in it. Giordano Bruno has to form the conception of the monad in order to render possible the realization of both demands. In his thought the ego struggles for its existence in the world conception of the modern age, and the expression of this struggle is the view: I am a monad; such an entity is uncreated and indestructible.
After being convicted by the Inquisition for heresy, Giordano Bruno died by being burned alive. The personality of Giordano Bruno reincarnated as Annie Besant who played a very important role in the Theosophical Society and was the teacher of Mahatma Gandhi. She played an important role in the struggle for independence of India.
A comparison shows how different the ways are in which Aristotle and Giordano Bruno arrive at the conception of God. Aristotle contemplates the world; he surrenders to the contemplation of his evidence; at the same time, the processes of nature are for him evidence of the thought of the “first mover” of these processes. Giordano Bruno fights his way through to the conception of the monads. The processes of nature are, as it were, extinguished in the picture in which innumerable monads are presented as acting on each other; God becomes the power entity that lives actively in all monads behind the processes of the perceptible world. In Giordano Bruno’s passionate antagonism against Aristotle, the contrast between the thinker of ancient Greece and of the philosopher of modern times becomes manifest.
It becomes apparent in the modern philosophical development in a great variety of ways how the ego searches for means to experience its own reality in itself. What, in England, Francis Bacon of Verulam (1561-1626) represents in his writings has the same general character even if this does not at first sight become apparent in his endeavours in the field of philosophy. Bacon demands that the investigation of the world phenomena should begin with unbiased observation. One should then try to separate the essential from the non-essential in a phenomenon in order to arrive at a conception of whatever lies at the bottom of a thing or event. He is of the opinion that up to his times the fundamental thoughts, which were to explain the world phenomena, had been conceived first, and only thereafter were the description of the individual things and events arranged to fit these thoughts. He presupposed that the thoughts had not been taken out of the things themselves. Bacon wanted to combat this (deductive) method with his (inductive) method. The concepts are to be formed in direct contact with the things. One sees, so Bacon reasons, how an object is consumed by fire; one observes how a second object behaves with relation to fire and then observes the same process with many objects. In this fashion one arrives eventually at a conception of how things can behave with respect to fire. The fact that the investigation in former times had not proceeded in this way had, according to Bacon’s opinion, caused human conception to be dominated by so many idols instead of the true ideas about the things.
Goethe speaks about Bacon in his book on light and color in the following way:
“Bacon is like a man who is well-aware of the irregularity, insufficiency and dilapidated condition of an old building, and knows how to make this clear to the inhabitants. He advises them to abandon it, to give up the land, the materials and all appurtenances, to look for another plot, and to erect a new building. He is an excellent and persuasive speaker. He shakes a few walls. They break down and some of the inhabitants are forced to move out. He points out new building grounds; people begin to level it off, and yet it is everywhere too narrow. He submits new plans; they are not clear, not inviting. Mainly, he speaks of new unknown materials and now the world seems to be well-served. The crowd disperses in all directions and brings back an infinite variety of single items while at home, new plans, new activities and settlements occupy the citizens and absorb their attention………
If through Bacon of Verulam’s method of dispersion, natural science seemed to be forever broken up into fragments, it was soon brought to unity again by Galileo. He led natural philosophy back into the human being. When he developed the law of the pendulum and of falling bodies from the observation of swinging church lamps, he showed even in his early youth that, for the genius, one case stands for a thousand cases. In science, everything depends on the ability of becoming aware of what is really fundamental in the world of phenomena. The development of such an awareness is infinitely fruitful”.
With these words Goethe indicated distinctly the point that is characteristic of Bacon. Bacon wants to find a secure path for science because he hopes that in this way man will find a dependable relationship to the world.
René Descartes (Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.
Many elements of Descartes’s philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic “as if no one had written on these matters before.” His best known philosophical statement is “cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”; French: “Je pense, donc je suis”), found in Discourse on the Method (1637; in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644, in Latin).
Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza and Leibniz, and was later opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes were all well-versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes’s influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry—used in the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.
Contrary to Bacon of Verulam, who pointed toward the bricks and the walls of the building, In Amsterdam, both Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) turned their attention towards its plan. With an unbiased questioning mind Descartes (Cartesius) approaches the world, which offers him much of its riddles partly through revealed religion, partly through the observation of the senses. He now contemplates both sources in such a way that he does not simply accept and recognize as truth what either of them offers to him. Instead, he sets against the suggestions of both sources the “ego”, which answers out of its own initiative with its doubt against all revelation and against all perception. In the development of modern philosophical life, this move is a fact of the most telling significance. Amidst the world the thinker allows nothing to make an impression on his soul, but sets himself against everything with a doubt that can derive its support only from the soul itself. Now the soul apprehends itself in its own action: I doubt, that is to say, I think. Therefore, no matter how things stand with the entire world, in my doubt-exerting thinking I come to the clear awareness that I am. In this manner, Descartes arrives at his “Cogito ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am. The ego in him conquers the right to recognize its own being through the radical doubt directed against the entire world.
Descartes derives the further development of his world conception out of his root. In the “ego” he had attempted to seize existence. Whatever can justify its existence together with the ego may be considered truth. The ego finds in itself, innate to it, the idea of God. This idea presents itself to the ego as true, as distinct as the ego itself, but it is so sublime, so powerful, that the ego cannot have it through its own power. Therefore, it comes from transcendent reality to which it corresponds. Descartes believes in the reality of the external world, not because this external world presents itself as real, but because the ego must believe in itself and then subsequently in God, and because God must be thought as truthful. For it would be untrue (unfair and misleading) of God to suggest a real world to man if the latter did not exist.
It is only possible to arrive at the recognition of the reality of the ego as Descartes does through a thinking that in the most direct manner aims at the ego in order to find a point of support for the act of cognition. That is to say, this possibility can be fulfilled only through an inner activity but never through a perception from without. Any perception that comes from without gives only the qualities of extension. In this manner, Descartes arrives at the recognition of two substances in the world: One to which extension, and the other to which thinking, is to be attributed and that has its roots in the human soul. The animals, which in Descartes’ sense cannot apprehend themselves in inner self-supporting activity, are accordingly mere beings of extension, automata, and machines. The human body, too, is nothing but a machine. The soul is linked up with this machine. When the body becomes useless through being worn out or destroyed in some way, the soul abandons it to continue to live in its own element.
Descartes lives in a time in which a new impulse in the philosophical life is already discernible. The period from the beginning of the Christian era until about the time of Scotus Erigena develops in such a way, that the inner experience of thought is enlivened by a force that enters the spiritual evolution as a powerful impulse. The energy of thought as it awakened in Greece is outshone by this power. Outwardly, the progress in the life of the human soul is expressed in the religious movements and by the fact that the forces of the youthful nations of Western and Central Europe become the recipients of the effects of the older forms of thought experience. They penetrate this experience with the younger, more elementary impulses and thereby transform it. In this process one forward step in the progress in human evolution becomes evident that is caused by the fact that older and subtle traces of spiritual currents that have exhausted their vitality, but not their spiritual possibilities, are continued by youthful energies emerging from the natural spring of mankind. In such processes one will be justified in recognizing the essential laws of the evolution of mankind. They are based on rejuvenating tendencies of the spiritual life. The acquired forces of the spirit can only then continue to unfold if they are transplanted into the young, naïve, and natural energies of mankind.
The first eight centuries of the Christian era present a continuation of the thought experience in the human soul in such a way, that the new forces about to emerge are still dormant in hidden depths, but they tend to exert their formative effect on the evolution of world conception. In Descartes, these forces already show themselves at work in a high degree. In the age between Scotus Erigena and approximately the fifteenth century, thought, which in the preceding period did not openly unfold, comes again to the fore in its own force. Now, however, it emerges again from a direction quite different from that of the Greek age. With the Greek thinkers, thought is experienced as a perception. From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries it comes from out of the depths of the soul so that man has the feeling: Thought generates itself within me. In the Greek thinkers, a relation between thought and the processes of nature was still immediately established; in the age just referred to, thought stands out as the product of self-consciousness. The thinker has the feeling that he must prove thought as justified. This is the feeling of the nominalists and the realists. This is also the feeling of Thomas Aquinas, who anchors the experience of thought in religious revelations.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries introduce a new impulse to the souls. This is slowly prepared and slowly absorbed in the life of the soul. In the field of philosophical life, this transformation becomes manifest through the fact that thought cannot now be felt as a perception, but as a product of self-consciousness. This transformation in the organization of the human soul can be observed in all fields of the development of humanity. It becomes apparent in the renaissance of art and science, and of European life, as well as in the reformatory religious movements. One will be able to discover it if one investigates the art of Dante and Shakespeare with respect to their foundations in the human soul development. Here these possibilities can only be indicated, since thus sketch is intended to deal only with the development of the intellectual world conception.
The advent of the mode of thought of modern natural science appears as another symptom of this transformation of the human soul organization. Just compare the state of the form of thinking about nature as it develops in Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler with what has preceded them. This natural scientific conception corresponds to the mood of the human soul at the beginning of the modern age in the sixteenth century. Nature is now looked at in such a way that the sense observation is now the only witness of it. Bacon is one, Galileo another personality in whom this becomes apparent. The picture of nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature, every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the observation of nature are more abruptly contrasted, separated by a gulf. From Descartes on a transformation of the soul organization becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt. While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in such a manner, that the picture of nature could be considered a support for its own justification; now it becomes the task of this element of thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength. The thinkers of the time that now follows feel, that in the thought experience itself something must be found, that proves this existence to be the justified creator of a world conception.
In a personality like Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who was just as great a thinker as he was an artist, one can recognize the striving for a new law-determined picture of nature. Such spirits feel it necessary to find an access to nature not yet given to the Greek way of thinking and its after effects in the Middle Ages. Man now has to rid himself of whatever experiences he has about his own inner being if he is to find access to nature. He is permitted to depict nature only in conceptions that contain nothing of what he experiences as the effects of nature in himself.
Thus, the human soul dissociates itself from nature; it takes its stand on its ground. As long as one could think that the stream of nature contained something that was the same as what was immediately experienced in man, one could, without hesitation, feel justified to have thought bear witness to the events of nature. The picture of nature of modern times forces the human consciousness to feel itself outside nature with its thought. This consciousness further establishes validity for its thought, which is gained through its own power.
This process has been the central theme of the Germanic Mythologies: the Twilights of the Gods (German: “die Götterdämmerung”): the Gods have to withdraw from the Earth and leave Mankind alone against their divine will (but out of necessity).
The Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) asks himself: “What must be assumed as a starting point from which the creation of a true world picture may proceed? This beginning is caused by the feeling that innumerable thoughts may present themselves in my soul as true; I can admit as the corner stone for a world conception only an element whose properties I must first determine.” Spinoza finds that one can only begin with something that is in need of nothing else for its being. He gives the name, substance, to this being. He finds that there can be only one such substance, and that substance is God. If one observes the method by which Spinoza arrives at this beginning of his philosophy, one finds that he has modelled it after the method of mathematics. Just as the mathematician takes his start from general truths, which the human ego forms itself in free creation, so Spinoza demands that philosophy should start from such spontaneously created conceptions. The only substance is as the ego must think it to be. Thought in this way, it does not tolerate anything existing outside itself as a peer, for then it would not be everything. It would need something other than itself for its existence. Everything else is, therefore, only of substance, as one of its attributes, as Spinoza sees it. Two such attributes are recognizable to man. He sees the first when he looks at the outer world; the second, when he turns his attention inward. The first attribute is extension; the second, thinking. Man contains both attributes in his being. In his body he has extension; in his soul, thinking. When he thinks, it is the divine substance that thinks; when he acts, it is this substance that acts. Spinoza obtains the existence (German: “Dasein”) for the ego in anchoring it in the general all-embracing divine substance. Under such circumstances there can be no question of an absolute freedom of man, for man is no more to be credited with the initiative of his actions and thought than a stone with that of its motion; the agent in everything is the one substance. One could speak of a relative freedom in man only when he considers himself not as an individual entity, but knows himself as one with the one substance (God).
Spinoza’s world conception, if consistently developed to its perfection, leads a person to the consciousness: I think of myself in the right way if I no longer consider myself, but know myself in my experience as one with the divine whole. This consciousness then, to follow Spinoza, endows the whole human personality with the impulse to do what is right, that is to say, god-filled action. This results as a matter of course for the one for whom the right world conception is realized as the full truth. For this reason Spinoza calls the book in which he presents his world conception, Ethics. For him, ethics, that is to say, moral behavior, is in the highest sense the result of the true knowledge of man’s dwelling in the one substance. One feels inclined to say that the private life of Spinoza, of the man who was first persecuted by fanatics and then, out of his own free will free to give away his fortune and sought his subsistence in poverty as a craftsman, was in the rarest fashion the outer expression of his philosophical soul, which knew its ego in the divine whole and felt its inner experience, indeed, all experience, illuminated by this consciousness.
Spinoza constructs a total world conception out of thoughts. These thoughts have to satisfy the requirement that they derive their justification for the construction of the picture out of the self-consciousness. In it, their certainty must be rooted. Thoughts, which are conceived by human consciousness in the same way as the self-supporting mathematical ideas, are capable of shaping a world picture that is the expression of what, in truth, exists behind the phenomena of the world.
In a direction that is entirely different from that of Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) seeks the justification of the ego-consciousness in the actual world. His point of departure is like that of Giordano Bruno insofar as he thinks of the soul or the ego as a monad. Leibniz finds the self-consciousness in the soul, that is, the knowledge of the soul of itself, a manifestation, therefore, of the ego. There cannot be anything else in the soul that thinks and feels except the soul itself, for how should the soul know of itself if the subject of the act of knowing were something other than itself? Furthermore, it can only be a simple entity, not a composite being, for the parts in it could and would have to know of each other. Thus, the soul is a simple entity, enclosed in itself and aware of its being, a monad.
This world picture to which Leibniz is driven because he has to form the picture in such a way that in it the self-conscious life of the soul, the ego, can be maintained as a reality. It is a world picture completely formed out of the “ego” itself. In Leibniz’s view, this can, indeed, not be otherwise. In Leibniz, the struggle for a world conception leads to a point where, in order to find the truth, it does not accept anything as truth that is revealed in the outer world. According to Leibniz, the life of man’s senses is caused in such a way that the monad of the soul is brought into connection with other monads with a somnolent, sleeping and less accurate self-consciousness. The body is a sum of such monads. The one waking soul monad is connected with it. This central monad parts from the others in death and continues its existence by itself.
John Locke (1632-1704), on the other hand, recognizes only those parts of a world conception as justified that can be observed (experienced) and what can, on the basis of the observation, be thought about the observed objects. The soul for him is not a being that develops real experiences out of itself, but an empty slate on which the outer world writes its entries. Thus, for Locke, the human self-consciousness is a result of the experience; it is not an ego that is the cause of an experience. When a thing of the external world makes an impression on the soul, it can be said, that the thing contains only extension, shape, and motion in reality; through the contact with the senses, sounds, colors, warmth, etc., are produced. What thus comes into being through contact with the senses is only there as long as the senses are in touch with the things. Outside the perception there are only substances that are differently shaped and in various states of motion. Locke feels compelled to assume that, except shape and motion, nothing of what senses perceive has anything to do with things themselves. With this assumption he makes the beginnings of a current of world conceptions that is unwilling to recognize the impressions of the external world experienced inwardly by man in his act of cognition, as belonging to the world “in itself”. As Locke cannot, like Leibniz, consider the ego itself as the fulcrum of a world conception, he arrives at conceptions that appear to be inappropriate to support a world conception because they do not allow the possession of the human ego to be counted as belonging to the center of existence. A world view like that of Locke loses the connection with every realm in which the ego, the self-conscious soul, could be rooted because it rejects from the outset any approaches to the world ground except those that disappear in the darkness of the senses.
In Locke, the evolution of philosophy produces a form of world conception in which the self-conscious soul struggles for its existence in the world picture but loses this fight because it believes that it gains its experiences exclusively in the intercourse with the external world represented in the picture of nature. The self-conscious soul must, therefore, renounce all knowledge concerning anything that could belong to the nature of the soul apart from this intercourse with the outside world.
George Berkeley (1685–1753) – also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne) was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called “immaterialism” (later referred to as “subjective idealism” by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work, “An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,” in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and colour. This foreshadowed his chief philosophical work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in 1710, which, after its poor reception, he rewrote in dialogue form and published under the title Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in 1713.
In this book, Berkeley’s views were represented by Philonous (Greek: “lover of mind”), while Hylas (“hyle”, Greek: “matter”) embodies the Irish thinker’s opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Isaac Newton’s doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (On Motion), published 1721. His arguments were a precursor to the views of Mach and Einstein. In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734, he published The Analyst, a critique of the foundations of calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
Interest in Berkeley’s work increased after World War II because he tackled many of the issues of paramount interest to philosophy in the 20th century, such as the problems of perception, the difference between primary and secondary qualities, and the importance of language.
George Berkeley (1685-1753) arrived at results that were entirely different from Locke’s. Berkeley finds that the impressions that the things and events of the world appear to produce on the human soul take place in reality within this soul itself. When I see “red” I must bring this “redness” into being within myself; when I feel “warm”, the “warmth” lives within me. Thus, it is with all things that I apparently receive from without. Except for those elements I produce within myself, I know nothing whatsoever about the external things. Thus, it is senseless to speak about things that consist of material substance, for I know only what appears in my mind as something spiritual. What I call a rose, for instance, is wholly spiritual, that is to say, a conception (an idea) experienced by my mind. There is, therefore, according to Berkeley, nothing to be perceived except what is spiritual, and when I notice that something is effected in me from without, then this effect can only be caused by spiritual entities, for obviously bodies cannot cause spiritual effects and my perceptions are entirely spiritual. Berkeley believes one recognizes oneself with one’s self-consciousness immediately in a spiritual world.
In his book “Man, a Machine”, Julien de la Mettrie (1709-1793), a world conception appears that is so overwhelmed by the picture of nature that it can admit only nature as valid. What occurs in the self-consciousness must, therefore, be thought of in about the same way as a mirror picture that we compare with a mirror. The physical organism would be compared with the mirror, the self-consciousness with the picture. The latter has, apart from the former, no independent significance. In Man, a Machine, one can read:
“If, however, all qualities of the soul depend so much on the specific organization of the brain and the body as a whole that they obviously are only this organization itself, then, in this case, we have to deal with a very enlightened machine…… “Soul”, therefore, is only a meaningless expression of which one has no idea (thought picture), and that a clear head may only use in order to indicate by it the part in us that thinks. Just assume the simplest principle of motion and the animated bodies have everything they need in order to move, feel, repeat, in short, everything necessary to find their way in the physical and moral world……. If whatever thinks in my brain is not part of this inner organ, why should my blood become heated when I make the plan for my works or pursue an abstract line of thought, calmly resting on my bed?”
Just as Locke loses his path in the darkness of the senses, so does David Hume (1711-1776) in the inward realm of the self-conscious soul, the experience of which appears to him to be ruled not by forces of a world order, but by the power of human habit. Why does one say that one event in nature is a cause and another an effect? This is question Hume asks. Man sees how the sun shines on a stone; he then notices that the stone has become warm. He observes that the first event often follows the second. Therefore, he becomes accustomed to think of them as belonging together. He makes the cause out of the sunshine, and the heating of the stone he turns into the effect. Thought habits tie our perceptions together, but there is nothing outside in a real world that manifests itself in such a connection. Man sees a thought in his mind followed by a motion of his body. He becomes accustomed to think of his thought as the cause and the motion as an effect. Thought habits, nothing more, are, according to Hume, responsible for man’s statements about the world processes. The self-conscious soul can arrive at a guiding direction for life through thought habits, but cannot find anything in these habits out of which it could shape a world picture that would have any significance for the world event apart from the soul. Thus, for the philosophical view of Hume, every conception that man forms beyond the more external and internal observation remains only an object of belief; it can never become knowledge. Concerning the fate of the self-conscious human soul, there can be no reliable knowledge about its relation to any other world but that of the senses, only belief.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist and art critic, and an outstanding representative of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg in his role at Abel Seyler’s Hamburg National Theatre.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) strives for the transformation of the religious truths of revelation into truths of reason. His aim is distinctly discernible in the various turns and aspects that his thinking has to take. Lessing feels himself with his self-conscious ego in a period of the evolution of mankind that is destined to acquire through the power of self-consciousness, what it had previously received from without through revelation. What has preceded this phase of history becomes for Lessing a process of preparation for the moment in which man’s self-consciousness becomes autonomous. Thus, for Lessing, history becomes an “education of the Human Race”. This is also the title of his essay, written at the height of his life, in which he refuses to restrict the human soul to a single terrestrial life, but assumes repeated earth lives for it. The soul lives its lives separated by time intervals in the various periods of the evolution of mankind, absorbs from each period what such a time can yield and incarnates itself in a later period to continue its development. Thus, the soul carries the fruits of one age of humanity into the later ages and is “educated” by history. In Lessing’s conception, the ego is, therefore, extended far beyond the individual life; it becomes rooted in a spiritual effective world that lies behind the world of the senses.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German writer, scientists, philosopher and statesman. His works include: four novels; epic and lyric poetry; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; and treatises on botany, anatomy, and color. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000 letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him have survived. He is considered the greatest German literary figure and scientist of the modern era.
A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782 after taking up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774). He was an early participant in the “Sturm und Drang” literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke’s Privy Council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar’s botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.
Goethe’s first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy (where he fell very ill and almost died). In 1791, he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller’s death in 1805. During this period, Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust (which takes 5 days to perform on stage). His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written, while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six “representative men” in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe’s comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1836).
The Age of Kant and Goethe
Those who struggled for clarity in the great problems of the world and life conceptions at the end of the eighteenth century looked up to two men of great intellectual-spiritual power, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Another person who strove for such clarity in the most forceful way was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. When he had become acquainted with Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, he wrote:
“I am living in a new world…… Things I had thought could never be proven to me, for instance, the concept of absolute freedom and duty, now have been proven for me and I feel much happier because of it. It is incomprehensible what a high degree of respect for humanity, what strength this philosophy gives us; what a blessing it is for an age in which morality had been destroyed in its foundation, and in which the concept of duty had been struck from all dictionaries.”
And when, on the basis of Kant’s conception, he had built his own Groundwork of all Scientific Knowledge, he sent the book to Goethe with the words:
“I consider you, and always have considered you, to be the representative of the purest spiritual force of feeling on the level of development that mankind has reached at the present time. To you philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is its touchstone.”
Kant’s contemporaries saw a revolutionary event in the development of world conception in his achievement. Kant himself considered it so important for his development that he judged its significance equal to that which Copernicus’s discovery of the planetary motion for natural science.
Kant feels that what is known in the way mathematical thinking knows, carries the certainty of its truth in itself. The fact that man is capable of mathematics proves that he is capable of truth. Whatever else one may doubt, the truth of mathematics cannot be doubted.
With this appreciation of mathematics the thought tendency of modern history of philosophy, which had put the characteristic stamp on Spinoza’s realm of thoughts, appears in Kant’s mind. Spinoza wants to construct his thought sequences in such a form that they develop strictly from one another as the propositions of mathematical science. Nothing but what is thought in the mode of thought of mathematics supplies the firm foundation on which, according to Spinoza, the human ego feels itself secure in the spirit of the modern age. Descartes had also thought in this way, and Spinoza had derived from him many stimulating suggestions. Out of the state of doubt he had to secure a fulcrum for a world conception for himself. In the mere passive reception of a thought into the soul, Descartes could not recognize such a support yielding force. This Greek attitude toward the world of thought is no longer possible for the man of the modern age. Within the self-conscious soul something must be found that lends its support to the thought. For Descartes, and again for Spinoza, this is supplied by the fulfilment of the postulate that the soul should deal with thought in general as it does in the mathematical mode of conception. As Descartes proceeded from his state of doubt to this conclusion, “I think, therefore I am”, and the statements connected with it, he felt secure in these operations because they seemed to him to possess the clarity that is inherent in mathematics. The same general mental conviction leads Spinoza to elaborate a world picture for himself in which everything is unfolding its effect with strict necessity like the laws of mathematics. The one divine substance, which permeates all beings of the world with the determination of mathematical law, admits the human ego only if it surrenders itself completely to this substance, if it allows its self-consciousness to be absorbed by the world consciousness of the divine substance. This mathematical disposition of mind, which is caused by a longing of the “ego” for the security it needs, leads this “ego” to a world picture in which, through its striving for security, it has lost itself, its self-dependent, firm stand on a spiritual world ground, its freedom and its hope for an eternal self-dependent existence.
Leibnitz’s thoughts tended in the opposite direction. The human soul is, for him, the self dependent monad, strictly closed of in itself. But the monad experiences only what it contains within itself; the world order, which presents itself “from without, as it were”, is only a delusion. Behind it lies the true world, which consists only of monads, the order of which is the pre-determined (pre-established) harmony that does not show itself to the outer observation. This world conception leaves its self-dependence to the human soul, the self-dependent existence in the universe, its freedom and hope for an eternal significance in the world’s evolution.
For Descartes and for Leibnitz, the convictions they had acquired in their religious education were still effective enough that they had adopted them in their philosophical world pictures, thereby following motivations that were not really derived from the basic principles of their world pictures. It unconsciously permeated the rigid mathematical necessity of his world order and thus he did not feel that his world picture tended to extinguish his “ego”. In Leibnitz, the religious impulses exerted their influence in a similar way, and it is for this reason that it escaped him that his world picture provided for no possibility to find anything except the content of the soul itself. Leibnitz believed, nevertheless, that he could assume the existence of the spiritual world outside the “ego”. Spinoza, through a certain courageous trait in his personality, actually drew the consequences of his world picture. To obtain the security for his world picture on which his self-consciousness insisted, he renounced the self-dependence of this self-consciousness, and found his supreme happiness in feeling himself as a part of the one divine substance.
The eighteenth century has been called the century of Enlightenment. The representative spirits of Germany understood enlightenment in the sense of Lessing’s remark: “The transformation of revealed truths of reason is absolutely necessary if the human race is to derive any help from them”. Kant declared the enlightenment to be “man’s departure from his self-caused bondage of mind”, and as its motto he chose the words, “Have courage to use your own mind”. Even thinkers as prominent as Lessing, however, at first had succeeded in no more than transforming rationally traditional doctrines of belief derived from the state of the “self-caused bondage of mind”. They did not penetrate to a pure rational view as Spinoza did. It was inevitable that Spinoza’s doctrine, when it became known in Germany, should make a deep impression on such spirits.
Spinoza really had undertaken the task of using his own mind, but in the course of this process he had arrived at results that were entirely different from those of the German philosophers of the enlightenment. His influence had to be so much the more significance since the lines of his reasoning, constructed according to mathematical methods, carried a much greater convincing power than the current of Leibniz’s philosophy, which effected the spirits of that age. Goethe writes about his acquaintance with Spinoza’s work: “I surrendered to this reading [of Spinoza’s writings] and, inspecting myself, I believed never to have seen the world so distinctly”.
Kant had produced an important accomplishment in the field of natural science with his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, which had appeared in 1755. He was satisfied to have shown that our whole planetary system could be thought to have developed out of a ball of gas, rotating around its axis. Through strictly necessary mathematically measurable physical forces, he thought the sun and planets to have consolidated, and to have assumed the motions in which they proceed according to the teachings of Copernicus and Kepler. Kant thus believed he had proven, through a great discovery of his own, the fruitfulness of Spinoza’s mode of thinking, according to which everything happens with strict, mathematical necessity. Kant was so convinced of this fruitfulness, that in the above-mentioned work he went as far as to claim, “Give me matter, and I will build you an universe!” The absolute certainty of all mathematical truths was so firmly established for him, that he maintains in his Basic Principles of Natural Science that a science in the proper sense of the word is only one in which the application of mathematics is possible.
Kant found an answer that saved the truth and certainty of human knowledge by sacrificing human insight into the grounds of the world. One’s reasoning could never claim certainty about anything in the world lying spread out around oneself, so that one would be affected by it through observation only. Therefore, one’s world can only be one that is constructed by oneself: A world that lies within the limits of one’s mind. What is going on outside oneself as a stone falls and causes a hole in the ground, I do not know. The law of this entire process is enacted within me, and it can proceed within me only in accordance with demands of my own mental organization. The nature of my mind requires that every effect should have a cause and that two times two is four. It is in accordance with this nature that the mind constructs a world for itself. No matter how the world outside oneself might be constructed, today’s world may not coincide in even a single trait with that of yesterday. This can never be of concern for one’s mind produces its own world according to its own laws. As long as the human mind remains unchanged, it will proceed in the same way in the construction of the world. Mathematics and natural science do not contain the laws of the external world but those of our mental organization. It is, therefore, only necessary to investigate this organization if one wants to know what is unconditionally true. “Reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature”. Kant sums up his conviction in this sentence, but the mind does not produce its inner world without an impetus or impression from without. When one perceives the color “red”, the perception “red”, is, to be sure, a state, a process within oneself, but it is necessary for oneself to have an occasion to perceive “red”. There are, therefore, “things in themselves” (Ding-an-sich), but one knows nothing about them but the fact that they exist. Everything one observes belongs to the appearances within us. Therefore, in order to save the certainty of the mathematical and natural scientific truths, Kant has taken the whole world of observation in the human mind. In doing so, however, he has raised insurmountable barriers to the faculty of knowledge, for everything that one can know refers merely to processes within oneself, to appearances or phenomena, not to things in themselves, as Kant expresses it. But the objects of the highest question of reason: God, Freedom and Immortality, can never become phenomena. One can see the appearances within oneself; whether or not these have their origin in a divine being one can never know. One can observe his own psychic conditions, but these are also only phenomena. Whether or not there is a free immortal soul behind them remains concealed to one’s knowledge. About “things in themselves”, one’s knowledge cannot produce any statement. It cannot determine whether the ideas concerning these “things in themselves” are true or false. If they are announced to oneself from another direction, there is no objection to assume their existence, but a knowledge concerning them is impossible for man. There is only one access to these highest truths. This access is given in the voice of duty, which speaks within oneself emphatically and distinctly, “You are morally obliged to do this or that”. This “Categorical Imperative” imposes on man an obligation he is incapable of avoiding. But how could a human being comply with this obligation if he were not in the possession of a free will? Man is, to be sure, incapable of knowledge concerning this quality of his soul, but he must believe that it is free in order to be capable of following its inner voice of duty. Concerning this freedom, one has, therefore, no certainty of knowledge as one possesses it with respect to the objects of mathematics and natural science, but one has moral certainty for it instead. The observance of the categorical imperative leads to virtue. It is only through virtue that man can arrive at his destination. He becomes worthy of happiness. In order that virtue may result from happiness, it is mandatory that a being exists who secures this happiness as an effect of virtue. This can only be achieved by an intelligent being, determining the highest value of things: God. Through the existence of virtue, its effect is guaranteed, and through this guarantee, in turn, the existence of God. Because man is a sensual being and cannot obtain perfect happiness in this imperfect world, his existence must transcend this sensual existence; that is to say, the soul must be immortal. The very thing about which one is denied possible knowledge is, therefore, magically produced by Kant out of a moral belief in the voice of duty. It was respect for the feeling of duty that restored a real world for Kant when, under the influence of Hume, the observable world withered away into a mere inner world. This respect for duty is beautifully expressed in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason:
“Duty! Thou sublime, great name that containest nothing but pleasurable to bid for out favor, but demandest submission, ……. Proclaiming a law in the presence of which all inclinations are silenced although they may secretly offer resistance…..”
That the highest truths are not truths of knowledge but moral truths is what Kant considered as his discovery. What man does for his pleasure is not virtuous; virtue is only what he does in selfless devotion to duty. Submit your desires to duty; this is the rigorous task that is taught by Kant’s moral philosophy.
Kant’s view that it is the human mind itself that first projects the laws into nature that it then finds in it, is also irreconcilable with another opinion concerning a purpose-directed entity, for a purpose points to its originator through whom it was laid into such an entity, that is, to the rational originator of the world. If the human mind could explain a teleological being in the same way as an entity that is merely constituted according to natural necessity, it would also have to be capable of projecting laws of purpose out of itself into the things. Not merely would the human mind have to produce laws for the things. Not merely would the human mind have to provide laws for the things that would be valid with regard to them insofar as they are appearances of his inner world, but it would have to be capable of prescribing their own destination to the things that are completely independent of the mind. The human mind would, therefore, have to be not merely a cognitive, but a creative spirit; its reason would, like that of God, have to create the things.
Whoever calls to mind the structure of the Kantian world conception as it has been outlined here [by Rudolf Steiner], will understand the strong effect on Kant’s contemporaries and also on the time after him, for he leaves intact all of the conceptions that had formed and impressed themselves on the human mind in the course of the development of western culture. This Kantian world conception leaves God, freedom and immortality, to the religious spirit. It satisfies the need for knowledge in delineating a territory for it inside the limits of which it recognizes unconditionally certain truths. It even allows for the opinion that the human reason is justified to employ, not merely the eternal rigorous natural laws for the explanation of living beings, but the purpose concept that suggests a designed order in the world.
But at what price did Kant obtain all this!? He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of the mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation. He drew a sharp line of demarcation between the realm of the inorganic and that of the organic, explaining the former according to mechanical laws of natural necessity and the latter according to teleological ideas. Finally, he tore the realm of beauty and art completely out of its connection with the rest of reality, for the teleological form that is to be observed in the beautiful has nothing to do with real purposes. How a beautiful object comes into the world is of no importance; it is sufficient that it stimulates in man the conception of the purposeful and thereby produces his delight.
Kant points out that human knowledge has to resign before nature, where it meets the living organism in which thought itself seems to reign in nature
In all essential points Goethe arrived at the opposite to Kant’s conception of the world. Approximately at the same time that Kant published his Critique of Pure Reason, Goethe laid down his creed in his prose hymn, Nature, in which he placed man completely into nature and in which he presented nature as bearing absolute sway, independent of man: Her own and man’s law-giver as well. Kant drew all nature into the human mind; Goethe considered everything as belonging to this nature; he fitted the human spirit into the natural world order:
“Nature! We are surrounded and enveloped by her, incapable of leaving her domain, incapable of penetrating deeper into her. She draws us into the rounds of her dance, neither asking nor warning, and whirls away with us until we fall exhausted from her arms……
All men are in her and she is in them…… Even the most unnatural is Nature; even the clumsiest pedantry has something of her genius…..We obey her laws even when we resist them; we are working with her even when we mean to work against her……Nature is everything…..She rewards and punishes, delights and tortures herself and us….. She has placed me into life, she will also lead me out of it. I trust myself into her care. She may hold sway over me. She will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. Nay, it was Nature who spoke it all, true or false. Nature is the blame for all things; hers is the merit.”
This is the polar opposite to Kant’s world conception. According to Kant, nature is entirely in the human spirit; according to Goethe, the human spirit is entirely in nature, because nature itself is spirit. It is, therefore, easily understandable when Goethe tells us in his essay, Influence of Modern Philosophy:
“Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was completely outside my world. I attended many conversations concerning this book, and with some attention I could observe that the old main question of how much our own self contributed to our spiritual existence, and how much the outside world did, was renewed. I never separated them, and when I philosophised in my own way about objects, I did so with an unconscious naivety, really believing that I saw my opinion before my very eyes”.
One does not need to waver in this statement of Goethe’s attitude toward Kant, in spite of the fact that Goethe uttered many a favourable judgement about the philosopher of Koenigsberg.
The realm of necessity in Spinoza’s sense is a realm of inner necessity for Kant. For Goethe, it is the universe itself, and man with all his thinking, feeling, willing and actions is a link in this chain of necessities. In this realm there is only one order of law, of which the natural and the moral represent only the two sides of its essence. “The sun sheds its light over those good and evil, and to the guilty as to the best, the moon and the stars shine brightly.” Out of one root, out of the eternal springs of nature, Goethe has everything pour forth: The inorganic and the organic beings, and man with all the fruits of his spirit, his knowledge, his moral order and his art.
Goethe tended to explain living organisms according to the laws by which lifeless nature is explained. Concerning the various species in the plant world, the leading botanist of that time, Karl von Linne (Linnaeus, 1707-1778), and states that there are as many species as there “have been created fundamentally different forms”. A botanist who holds such an opinion can only attempt to study the quality of the individual forms and to differentiate them carefully from one another. Goethe could not consent to such a view of nature. “What Linnaeus wanted with might and main to separate, I felt in the very roots of my being as to striving into union.” Goethe searched for an entity that was common to all species of plants. On his Italian journey this general archetype in all plant forms becomes clearer to him step by step:
“The many plants I have heretofore been used to see only in buckets and pots, here grow merrily under the open sky, and while they thus fulfil their destination, they become clearer to us. At sight of such a variety of new and renewed forms, my curious and favourite idea again occurred to me. Could I not discover in this crowd the archetypal (primordial) plant (German: “Urpflanze”)?
On another occasion Goethe expresses himself concerning this archetypal plant by saying: “It is going to become the strangest creature of the world for which nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the corresponding key, one is then capable of inventing plants to infinity, but they must be consistent in themselves, that is to say, plants that, even if they do not exist, at least could exist, and that are not merely shadows and schemes of a picturesque or poetic imagination, but have an inner truth and necessity.” As Kant exclaims, “Give me matter and I will build you a world out of it”, because he has gained insight into the law-determined interconnection of this world, so Goethe pronounces here that with the aid of the archetypal plant one could invent plants indefinitely that would be capable of existence because one would be in possession of the law of their origin and their development. What Kant was ready to acknowledge only for inorganic nature, that is, that its phenomena can be understood according to necessary laws, Goethe extends also to the world of organisms. In 1795 in a letter to Herder, Goethe writes: “The same law will be applicable to all other living beings; feel free to maintain boldly that all perfect organic beings, among which we see fishes, amphibians, birds, mammals, and at the top of the ladder, man, were formed after one model, which in its constant parts only varies in one or another direction and still develops and transforms daily through propagation.”
In his conception of nature as well, therefore, Goethe stands in full opposition to Kant. Kant had called it a “risky adventure of reason”, should reason attempt to explain the living with regard to its origin. He considered the human faculty of cognition as unfit for such an explanation.
A strictly unitary (monastic) world conception is peculiar to Goethe. He sets out to gain one viewpoint from which the whole universe reveals its law structure.
Thus, Kant and Goethe appear as two spiritual antipodes at a very significant moment in the history of modern world conception, and the attitude of those who were interested in the highest questions was fundamentally different toward them. Kant constructed his world conception with all the technical means of a strict school philosophy; Goethe philosophised naively, depending trustfully on his healthy nature. For this reason, Fichte, as mentioned earlier, believed that in Goethe he could only turn “to the representative of the purest spirituality of Feeling as it appears on the stage of humanity that has been reached at the present time.” But Fichte had the opinion of Kant “that no human mind can advance further than to the limit at which Kant had stood.”
Other contemporaries also judged Kant’s world ideas to be insufficient. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), one of the most brilliant and at the same time most independent thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century, who appreciated Kant, nevertheless could not suppress significant objections to his philosophy. On the one hand he says, “What does it mean to think in Kant’s spirit? I believe it means to find the relation of our being, whatever that may be, toward the things we call external, that is to say, to define the relation of the subjective to the objective. This, to be sure, has always been the aim of all thorough natural scientists, but it is questionable if they ever proceeded so truly philosophically as did Herr Kant. What is and must be subjective was taken as objective”.
On the other hand, however, Lichtenberg observes, “Should it really be an established fact that our reason cannot know anything about the supersensible? Should it not be possible for us to weave our ideas of God and immortality to as much purpose as the spider weaves its net to catch flies? In other words, should there not be beings who admire us because of our ideas of God and immortality just as we admire the spider and the silkworm?”
Fundamentally, what the German romanticists aimed at did not differ from what Goethe and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) had also made their credo: A conception of man through which he appeared as perfect and as free as possible. Novalis experiences his poems and contemplations in a soul mood that had a relationship toward the world picture similar to that of Fichte. But Novalis (Friedrich Georg von Hardenberg, 1772-1801) feels and experiences himself as having his being within the higher spirit nature. What he expresses he feels through his innate genius as the revelations of this very spirit nature. He writes:
“One man succeeded; he lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais. What did he see then? He saw, wonder of wonders, himself.”
Novalis expresses his own intimate feeling of the spiritual mystery behind the world of the senses and of the human self consciousness as the organ through which this mystery reveals itself, in these words:
“The spirit world is indeed already unlocked for us; it is always revealed. If we suddenly became as elastic as we should be, we should see ourselves in the midst of it.”
The classics of World and Life Conception
A sentence, in which Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) expresses his fundamental approach best, is in his book Philosophy of Nature with the words: “To philosophise about nature means to create nature.” What had been a deep conviction of Goethe and Schiller, namely, that creative imagination must have a share in the creation of a world conception, is monumentally expressed in this sentence. What nature yields voluntarily when one focuses one’s attention on it in observation and perception does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot conceive this meaning from without. He must produce it.
Schelling was especially gifted for this kind of creation. With him, all spiritual energies tended toward the imagination. His mind was inventive without compare. His imagination did not produce pictures as the artistic imagination does, but rather concepts and ideas. Through his disposition of mind he was well-suited to continue along Fichte’s path of thought. In his search for truth he penetrated as far as to the center of man’s soul, the “ego”. If this center is to become the nucleus for the world conception, then the thinker who holds this view must also be capable of arriving at thoughts whose content are saturated with world and life as he proceeds from the “ego” as a vantage point. Schelling saw the need for the development of the “intellectual imagination” (German: “intellektuelle Anschauung”). For him, then, who saw a product created by the spirit in the spirit’s statement about nature, the following question became urgent. How can what springs forth from the spirit be the pattern of the law that rules in the real world, holding sway in real nature? With sharp words Schelling turns against those who believe that we “merely project our ideas into nature,” because “they have no inkling of what nature is and must be for us…. For we are not satisfied to have nature accidentally correspond to the laws of our spirit”. Schelling: “ Nature is to be the visible spirit: spirit is the invisible nature.” Nature and spirit are not two different entities at all but one and the same being in two different forms. The real meaning of Schelling concerning this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been correctly grasped.
The spiritual activities of man, his thinking contemplation and his artistic creation, appear to Schelling not merely as the separate accomplishments of the individual person, but, if they are understood in their highest significance, they are at the same time the achievements of the Supreme Being, the world spirit. In truly dithyrambic words, Schelling depicts the feeling that emerges in the soul when it becomes aware of the fact that its life is not merely an individual life limited to a point of the universe, but that its activity is one of general spirituality. When the soul says: “I know: I am aware,” then, in a higher sense, this means that the world spirit remembers its action before the existence of things; when the soul produces a work of art, it means that the world spirit repeats, on a smaller scale, what that spirit accomplished on a large scale at the creation of all nature.
As Schelling’s thinking developed, his contemplation of the world turned into the contemplation of God, or theosophy. If all things are divine, how can there be evil in the world since God can only be perfect goodness? If the human soul is in God, how can it still follow its selfish interests? If God is and acts in me, how can I then still be called free, as I, in that case, do not act at all as a self-dependent being?
Schelling could no longer look upon God in the same way as Spinoza did. A God who orders everything according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason. A personal God, as Schelling conceived him later in his life, is incalculable, for he does not act according to reason alone. In a mathematical problem one can pre-determine the result through mere thinking; with an acting human being this is not possible. Experience must be added to reason. What Schelling believed he had reached, not by the cognitive process of the method of reason, but by intuition as the free incalculable acts of God, he has presented in his Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology. With views of this kind, Schelling shows himself to be the boldest and most courageous of the group of philosophers who were stimulated to develop an idealistic world conception by Kant.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) expresses that thinking is conscious of itself as the highest activity of man, as the force through which alone man can gain a position with respect to the ultimate questions. The feeling of dependence, which was considered as the originator of religious experience by contemporaries, was declared to be characteristically the function of the animal’s life by Hegel. He stated paradoxically that if the feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives completely in the element of thought.
What man can extract from things through thinking is the highest element that exists in them and for him. Only this element can he recognize as their essence. Thought is, therefore, the essence of things for Hegel. All perceptual imagination, all scientific observation of the world and its events do, finally, result in man’s production of thoughts concerning the connection of things. Hegel’s work now proceeds from the point where perceptual imagination and scientific observation have reached their destination: With thought as it lives in self-consciousness. The scientific observer looks at nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer states about nature. The observer attempts to reduce the variety of natural phenomena to a unity. He explains one process through the other. He strives for order, for organic systematic simplicity in the totality of the things that are presented to the senses in chaotic multiplicity. Hegel searches for systematic order and harmonious simplicity in the results of the scientific investigator. He adds to the science of nature a science of the thoughts about nature (German: “Erkenntnistheorie”).
Hegel wants to comprehend all world phenomena in the gradual progress of their development from the simplest dull activity of inert matter to the height of the self-conscious spirit. In the self-conscious spirit he sees the revelation of the primal substance of the world (God).
Reactionary World Conceptions
“Life is a miserable affair; I have decided to spend mine by thinking about it.” Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1861) spoke these words at the beginning of his university years, and his world conception sprang from this mood. Schopenhauer had experienced personal hardship and had observed the sad lives of others when he decided upon concentrating on philosophical thought as a new aim for life. When he began his academic studies, the thoughts that Kant, Fichte and Schelling introduced to the German philosophical life were in full swing. Hegel’s star was just rising. In 1806 he had published his first larger work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit. In Göttingen, Schopenhauer heard the teachings of Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761-1833), who was, to be sure, in a certain respect an opponent of Kant, but who nevertheless drew the student’s attention to Kant and Plato as the two great spirits toward whom he would have to look. With fiery enthusiasm Schopenhauer plunged into Kant’s mode of conception. He called the revolution that this study caused in his mind a spiritual rebirth. He found it even more satisfactory because he considered it to be in agreement with the views of Plato, the other philosopher Schulze had pointed out to him.
Plato has said, “As long as one approaches the things and events merely through sensual perceptions, one is like a man who is chained in a dark cave in such a way, that he cannot turn his head; therefore, he can only see, by means of the light of a fire burning behind them, the shadows upon the opposite wall, the shadows of real things what the things of sensual perception are to the ideas, which are the true reality. The things of the sensually perceptible world come into existence and pass again; the ideas are eternal.”
Did not Kant teach this too? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him also? Schopenhauer thought Plato and Kant to be in complete agreement. Soon he also accepted this view as an irrevocable truth. Schopenhauer argued, “I have knowledge of the things insofar as I see, hear and feel them, etc., that is to say, insofar as I have them as a thought picture in my mind’s eye. An object then can be there for me only by being represented to my mind’s imaginations, for the “thing in itself” (“Ding-an-Sich”) that corresponds to them has become my mind’s object only by taking on the character of a thought representation.”
Although Schopenhauer was in agreement with Kant concerning the subjective character of the world conception, he was not at all satisfied with regard to Kant’s remarks concerning the thing in itself. How can one know anything at all of a “thing in itself? How can one even express a word about it if our knowledge is completely limited to thought pictures of one’s mind? Schopenhauer had to search for another solution in order to come to the “thing in itself” (Ding-an-Sich). The element that Schopenhauer added to the conviction that he had from Kant and Plato as the “thing in itself”, we find also in Fichte, whose lectures he had heard in Berlin in 1811. Fichte declared that all being has its roots in a universal will. Fichte: “In the last and deepest analysis there is no other being than will. Will is fundamental being and will alone can claim all its predicates: To be without cause, eternal, independent of time, self-assertive. All philosophy is striving for just this aim, to find this highest expression.”
That will is fundamental being becomes Schopenhauer’s view as well. When knowledge is extinguished, will remains, for will also precedes knowledge. For Schopenhauer, the will becomes the “thing in itself”, at the root of all reality that is merely represented in the thought pictures of one’s mental life, and one can have knowledge of this “thing in itself.” It is not, as Kant’s “thing in itself”, beyond our perceptive imagination, but one can experience its actuality within oneself, within one’s organism.
The development of modern world conception is progressive in Schopenhauer insofar as he is the first thinker to make the attempt to elevate one of the fundamental forces of the self-consciousness to the general principle of the world. Schopenhauer is incapable of finding a world picture that contains the roots of self-consciousness. Schopenhauer takes one force of the self-consciousness, will, and claims that this element is not merely in the human soul but in the whole world, that will is the basis of the whole world, the original “thing in itself”. Thus, man is not rooted with his full self-consciousness in the world’s foundation, but at least with part of it, with his will.
Goethe also had a profound influence on Schopenhauer. Goethe introduced Schopenhauer personally to his doctrine of light and colors. Goethe’s mode of conception agreed completely with the view that Schopenhauer had developed concerning the behavior of one’s sense organs and one’s mind in the process of perception of things and events. Goethe had undertaken careful and intensive investigations concerning the perceptions of the eye and the phenomena of light and colors. He had arrived at results that differed greatly from those of Newton, the founder of the modern theory of color. One cannot judge the antagonism between Newton and Goethe if one does not understand the differences between their world conceptions. Goethe considered the sense organs of man as the highest physical apparatuses. For the world of colors, he therefore had to estimate the eye as his highest judge for the observation of law-determined connections. Newton and the physicists investigated the phenomena that are pertinent to this question in a fashion that Goethe called “the greatest misfortune of modern physics”, and that consisted in the fact, that the experiments had been separated, as it were, from man.
“One wants to know nature only according to the indication of artificial instruments and thereby even intends to limit and to prove what nature is capable of.”
The eye perceives light and darkness and, with the light-dark field of opposition, the colors. Goethe takes the stand within this field and attempts to prove how light, darkness and the colors are connected. Newton meant to observe the process of light and colors as they would go on if there were no human eye. But the stipulation of such an external sphere is, according to Goethe’s world conception, without justification. One does not obtain an insight into nature of a thing by disregarding the effects one observes, but this nature is given to us through the mind’s exact observation of the regularity of these effects. The effects that eye perceives, taken in their totality and represented according to the law of their connection are the essence of the phenomena of light and color, not a separated world of external processes that are to be determined by means of artificial instruments.
In the human organism, through its senses, through the soul of man, there is revealed what is revealed what is concealed in the rest of nature. In man, nature reaches its climax. Whoever, therefore, looks for the truth of nature outside man, will not find it, according to Goethe’s fundamental conviction. Schopenhauer considered Goethe’s view as a confirmation of his own opinion concerning the world.
Schopenhauer had bad experiences and had become acquainted with the worst side of the world before he decided to spend his life in contemplation of it. It is for this reason that he is satisfied to depict the world as essentially deprived of reason as a result of blind will. Reason, according to his mode of thinking, has no power over un-reason, for it is itself the result of un-reason; it would be an illusion, a dream, produced out of will. Schopenhauer’s world conception is the dark, melancholic mood of his soul, translated into thought. His eye was not prepared to follow the manifestations of reason in the world with pleasure. His eye saw only un-reason that was manifest in sorrow and pain. Thus, his doctrine of ethics could only be based on the observation of suffering. Sympathy, pity, must be the source of human actions. What better course could be taken by a man who has gained the insight that all beings suffer than to let his actions be guided by pity? As everything unreasonable and evil has its roots in will, man will stand morally the higher the more he mortifies his unruly will in himself. The manifestation of this will in the individual person is selfishness, egotism. Whoever surrenders to pity and thereby wills not for himself but for others, has become master of the will.
Schopenhauer considered everything that leads toward the extirpation, the mortification of the will quite consistently as desirable, for an extirpation of the will means an extinction of the unreasonable in the world. Man is to give up will. He is to kill all desire within himself. Asceticism is, for this reason, Schopenhauer’s moral ideal. The wise man will extinguish within him all wishes, all desires. In the world-renouncing life-views in Buddhism, Schopenhauer acknowledged a doctrine of profound wisdom. Compared to Hegel, one can thus call Schopenhauer’s world view reactionary. Hegel attempted everywhere to affect a reconciliation of man with life; he always strove to present all action as a cooperation with a reason-directed order of the world. Schopenhauer regarded enmity to life, withdrawal from reality and world flight as the ideal of the wise man.
At the beginning of the 1840’s Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), who had previously thoroughly and intimately penetrated the world conceptions of Hegel, now forcefully attacked them. He derived strength from this experience to develop his own views. Feuerbach declares that the sensual perceptible world alone is real and he must reject every supernatural world order. For him there is no categorical imperative that could somehow have its origin in a transcendent world; for him there are only duties that result from the natural drives and aims of man.
The birth of thought in the Greek world conception had had the effect that man could no longer feel himself as deeply rooted in the world as had been possible with the old consciousness in the form of picture conceptions. This was the first step in the process that led to the formation of an abyss between man and the world (nature). A further stage in this process consisted in the development of the mode of thinking of modern natural science. This development tore nature and the human soul completely apart. On the one side, a nature picture had to arise in which man in his spiritual-psychical essence was not to be found, and on the other side, an idea of the human soul from which no bridge led into nature. In nature one found law-ordered necessity. Within this realm there was no place for the elements that the human soul finds within: The impulse for freedom, the sense for a life, that is rooted in a spiritual world and is not exhausted within the realm of sensual existence. Philosophers like Kant escaped the dilemma only by separating both worlds completely, finding a knowledge in the one, and in the other, and belief. Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel conceived the idea of the self-conscious soul to be so comprehensive, that it seemed to have root in a higher spiritual nature. In Feuerbach, a thinker arises who, through the world picture that can be derived from the modern mode of conception of natural science, feels compelled to deprive the human soul of every trait contradictory to the nature picture. He views the human soul as a part of nature. He can only do so because, in his thoughts, he has first removed everything in the soul that disturbed him in his attempt to acknowledge it as part of nature. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel took the self-conscious soul for what it was; Feuerbach changes it into something he needs for his world picture. In him, a mode of conception makes its appearance that is over-powered by the nature picture. This mode of thinking cannot master both parts of the modern world picture, the picture of nature and that of the soul. For this reason, it leaves one of them, the soul picture, completely unconsidered. Feuerbach creates a world conception, a philosophy about the spirit science that can only exist, however, by not admitting the spirit at all. Feuerbach initiates a trend of modern philosophy that is helpless in regard to the most powerful impulse of modern soul life, namely, man’s active self-consciousness. In this current of thought, that impulse is dealt with, not merely as an incomprehensible element, but in a way that avoids the necessity of facing it in its true form, changing it into a factor of nature, which, to an unbiased observation, it really is not.
The Struggle over the Spirit
Since the birth of thought (philosophy) in ancient Greece, and during the centuries of philosophical investigation of the riddles of existence with which every soul was fundamentally confronted, a number of major problems have crystallized. In modern times the problem of the significance, the value and the limits of knowledge has moved, as a fundamental problem, into the center of philosophical reflection. What relation has man’s perception, conception and thinking to the real world? Can this process of perception and thinking result in a knowledge that is capable of enlightening man concerning the questions about which he wants to be enlightened?
For an understanding of the impulses that are at work in the evolution of philosophical world conception, the examples of the advances in natural science are not significant in themselves. What is important is the fact that advances of this kind coincided in time with the development of the Hegelian world picture. The previous presentation of the course of evolution of philosophy has shown that the modern world picture, since the days of Copernicus, Galileo, etc., stood under the influence of the mode of conception of natural science. This influence, however, could not be as significant as that of the accomplishment of the natural science of the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. In spite of these advances, individualities like Fichte, Schelling and Goethe could, while they fully recognized these advances, nevertheless, arrive at a world picture that started from the spirit. They could not be so powerfully impressed by the mode of conception of natural science as were the materialistic thinkers in the middle and end of the nineteenth century.
If Goethe attempted to obtain a conception with his “archetypal plant” that allowed him to experience this thought inwardly, so that he could intellectually derive from it such a specific plant formation as would be capable of of life, he showed thereby that he was striving to bring thought to life within his soul. Goethe had reached the point where thought was about to begin a life-like evolution, while Hegel did not go beyond thought as such. In communion with a thought that had come to life within the soul, as Goethe attempted, one would have had a spiritual experience that could have recognized the spirit also in matter. In “mere thought” one had no such experience. Thus, the evolution of world conception was put to a hard test. According to the deeper historical impulses, the modern time tended to experience not thought alone, but to find a conception for the self-conscious ego through which one could be aware that this ego is firmly rooted in the structure of the world. In conceiving this ego as a product of material processes, one had pursued this tendency by simply following the trend in a form easily understandable at that time. Even denial of the spiritual entity of the self-conscious ego by the materialism of the nineteenth century still contains the impulse of the search for this ego. For this reason, the impulse with which natural science affected philosophy in this age was quite different from the influences it had on previous materialistic currents. These earlier currents had not as yet been so hard pressed by something comparable to Hegel’s thought philosophy to seek for a safe ground in the natural sciences. This pressure, to be sure, does not effect the leading personalities to a point where they are clearly aware of it, but as an impulse of the time, it exerts its effect in the subconscious currents of the soul,.
Darwinism and Subsequent World Conception “Darwinism”
If the thought of the teleological structure of nature was to be reformed in the sense of a naturalistic world conception, the purpose-adjusted formation of the organic world had to be explained in the same fashion as the physicist or the chemist explains the lifeless processes. When the magnet attracts iron shavings, no physicist will assume that there is a force at work in the magnet that aims toward the purpose of the attraction. When hydrogen and oxygen from water as a compound, the chemist does not interpret this process as if something in both substances had been actively striving toward the purpose of forming water. An explanation of living beings that is guided by a similar naturalistic mode of thinking must conclude that organisms become purpose-adjusted without anything in nature planning this purpose-conformity. This conformity comes to pass without being anywhere intended. Such an explanation was given by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). He took the point of view that there is nothing in nature that plans the design. Nature is never in a position to consider whether its products are adequate to a purpose or not. It produces without choosing between what is adequate to a purpose and what is not.
What is the meaning of this distinction anyhow? When is a thing in conformity with a purpose? Is it not when it is so arranged that the external circumstances correspond to its needs, to its life conditions? A thing is inadequate to purpose when this is not the case. What will happen if, while a complete absence of plan in nature characterizes the situation, formations of all degrees of purpose-conformity, from the most to the least adequately adapted form, come into existence? Every being will attempt to adapt its existence to the given circumstances. A being well-adjusted to life will do so without difficulty; one less adequately endowed will succeed only to a lesser degree. The fact must be added to this that nature is not a parsimonious housekeeper in regard to the production of living beings. The number of germs is prodigious. The abundant production of germs is backed up by inadequate means for the support of life. The effect of this will be that those Beings that are better adapted to the acquisition of food will more easily succeed in their development. A well-adopted organic being will prevail in the strife for existence over a less adequately adjusted one. The latter must perish in this competition. This is the “struggle for life” or “survival of the fittest”. Through a law, then, that is as objective and as devoid of any wise purpose as any mathematical or mechanical law of nature can be, the course of nature’s evolution receives a tendency toward a purpose-conformity that is not originally inherent in it.
Darwin was led to this thought through the work of the social economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1824), entitled Essay on the Principle of Population, and published in 1798.
In this essay the view is advanced that there is a perpetual competition going on in human society because the population grows at a much faster pace than the food supply. This law, that Malthus had stated as valid for the history of mankind, was generalized by Darwin into a comprehensive law of the whole world life.
Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist,[6] best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. His proposition that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors is now widely accepted, and considered a foundational concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. He was honored by burial in Westminster Abbey.
Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book “On the Origin of Species.” By the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations which gave only a minor role to natural selection, and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.
Darwin’s early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge (Christ’s College) encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell’s conception of gradual geological change, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.
Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations, and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay that described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories. Darwin’s work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.
Darwin now set out to show how this struggle for existence becomes the creator of the various forms of living beings and thereby the old principle of Linnaeus was overthrown, that “we have to count as many species in the animals and vegetable kingdoms as had been principally created”. The doubt against this principle was clearly formed in Darwin’s mind when, in the years 1831-1836, he was on a journey to South America and Australia. He tells how this doubt took shape in him
“When I visited the Galapos Archipelago during my journey on H.M.S. Beagle, at a distance of about 500 miles from the shores of South America, I saw myself surrounded by strange species of birds, reptiles and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. Almost all of them bore the unmistakable stamp of the American continent. In the song of the mocking-thrush, in the sharp scream of the vultures, in the large candlestick-like opuntias I noticed distinctly the vicinity of America; and yet these islands were separated from the continent by many miles and were very different in their geological constitution and their climate. Even more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each of the individual islands of the small archipelago were specifically different although closely related. I often asked myself how these strange animals and men had come into being The simplest way seemed to be that the inhabitants of the various islands were descendants from one another and had undergone modifications in the course of their descent, and that all inhabitants of the archipelago were descendants of those of the nearest continent, namely, America, where the colonization naturally would have its origin. But it was for a long time an unexplainable problem to me how the necessary modification could have been obtained.”
The natural conclusion from this observation is that change and hereditary transmission are two driving principles in the evolution of organic beings. After Darwin has seen this and after he had thereby laid firm foundation to a naturalistic world conception, he could write the enthusiastic words at the end of his work, “The origin of Species”, which introduced a new epoch of thought:
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly flows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
At the same time one can see that Darwin does not derive his conception from any anti-religious sentiment but merely from the conclusions that for him follow from distinctly significant facts. It was not hostility against the needs of religious experience that persuaded him to rational view of nature for he tells us distinctly in his book how this newly acquired world of ideas appeals to his heart:
“Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed in matter by the Creator that the production and the extinction of the past and the present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the linear descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled….. Hence, we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”
Darwin showed in great detail how the organisms grow and spread, how, in the course of their development, they transmit their properties once they are acquired, how new organs are produced and change through use or through lack of use, how in this way the organic beings are adjusted to their conditions of existence and how finally through the struggle for life a natural selection takes place by means of which an ever increasing variety of more and more perfect forms come into being.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) did his best in two ways to attempt a new world conception. First, he continually contributed to the accumulation of facts that throw light on the connection of the entities and energies of nature. Secondly, with unbending consistency he derived from these facts the ideas that were to satisfy the human need for explanation. Like Goethe, Haeckel was convinced in his own way that nature proceeds in its work “according to eternal, necessary and thereby divine laws, so that not even the deity could change it”. Haeckel was one of the leading anatomists and embryologists of his time. As one follows the naturalist Haeckel without prejudice on his path as an observer of nature, we feel our hearts beat faster. The anatomical and embryological analyses, the microscopic investigations do not detract from natural beauty but reveals a great deal more of it. There come about an antagonism between reason and imagination, between reflection and intuition.
In all animals, except the Protista, which are one-cell organisms, a cup- or jug-shaped body, the gastrula, develops from the zygote with which the organism begins its ontogenesis. This gastrula is an animal form that is to be found in the first stages of development of all animals from the sponges to man. It consists merely of skin, mouth and stomach. There is a low class of zoophytes that possess only these organs during their lives and therefore resemble gastrula. This fact is interpreted by Haeckel from a point of view of the theory of descent. The gastrula form is an inherited form that the animal owes to the form of its common ancestor. There had been, probably millions of years ago, a species of animals, the gastrae, which was built in a way similar to that of lower zoophytes still living today, the sponges, polyps, etc. From this animal species all the various forms living today, from the polyps, sponges, etc., to man, repeat this original form in the course of their ontogenesis.
Haeckel: “The short ontogenesis or development of the individual is a rapid and brief repetition, an abbreviated recapitulation of the long process of phylogenesis, the development of the species.”
Through this law every attempt at explanation through special purposes, all teleology in the old sense, has been eliminated. One no longer looks necessarily for the purpose of an organ; one looks for the causes through which it was developed. A given form does not point to a goal toward which it strives, but toward the origin from which it sprang. The method of explanation for the organic phenomena has become the same as that for the inorganic. Water is not considered the aim of oxygen and hydrogen, nor is man considered the purpose of creation. Scientific research is from now on directed toward the origin of, and the actual cause for, living beings. The dualistic mood of conception, which declares that the organic and the inorganic has to be explained according two different principles, gives way to a monistic mode of conception, to a monism that has only one uniform mode of explanation for the whole of nature
Haeckel characteristically points out that through his discovery the method has been found through which every dualism in the above-mentioned sense must be overcome.
Haeckel had no doubt that in the future the highest manifestations of man’s life, the activities of his spirit, were to be considered under the same viewpoint as the function of the simplest living organisms. The observation of the lowest animals, the protozoa, infusoria, rhizopods, taught him, that these organisms had a soul. In their motions, in the indications of the sensations they show, he recognized manifestations of life that only had to be increased and perfected in order to develop into man’s complicated actions of reason and will.
Beginning with the gastraea, which lived hundreds of millions of years ago, what steps does nature take to arrive at man? Haeckel answered this question in his book Anthropogenesis, which appeared in 1874. In Haeckel’s view, Darwin had supplied a method to understand the origin of man.
In observing the evolution of world conception, Haeckel’s naturalistic thoughts tend to show that, as long as one is merely confronted with nature, one cannot make any statements concerning nature except what it records. In this respect this naturalistic conception is significant as it appears in the course of the development of world conception. It proves that philosophy must create a field for itself that lies in the realm of spontaneous creativity of thought life beyond the thoughts that are gained from nature.
Philosophy must take a step beyond Hegel that was pointed out in a previous chapter. It cannot consist of a method that moves in the same field with natural science. Haeckel himself probably felt not the slightest need to pay any attention to such a step of philosophy. His world conception does not bring thoughts to life in the soul, but only insofar as their life has been stimulated by the observation of natural processes. The world picture, that thought can create when it comes to life in the soul without this stimulus, represents the kind of higher world conception that would adequately complement Haeckel’s picture of nature. One has to go beyond the facts that are directly contained in the watch if one wants to know, for instance, something about the form of the watchmaker’s face. But, for this reason, one has no right to demand that Haeckel’s naturalistic view itself should speak as Haeckel does when he states what positive facts he has observed concerning natural processes and natural beings.
Historical overview of the Development of Thinking and Modern World Conceptions over the last 2.500 years
Part 2
My attempt to explain how man came from the Greek ideals “Man Know Thyself” to statistics today
Robert Gorter, MD, PhD.
What is one’s basis as one constructs a world conception by means of thinking? One hears, sees and touches the physical world through one’s senses. When one thinks about the facts that one’s senses supply concerning that world. One forms his thoughts accordingly concerning the world at the testimony of the senses. But are the statements of one’s senses really to be trusted?
When one consults actual observation, one could say, that the eye conveys the phenomena of light. One says that an object sends to him red light when the eye has the sensation of red. But the eye conveys sensations of light to him also in other cases. When it is pushed or pressed, or when an electrical current flows through our head, the eye also has sensations of light. It is, therefore, possible that in cases in which one has the sensation of a light-sending body, something could go on in that object that has no semblance to our sensation of light. The eye, nevertheless, would transmit light to us.
Natural scientists of great renown regarded this thought as an irrefutable basis of their world conception. Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894) considered it as the Kantian thought; that all what can be known has reference only to processes within oneself, not to the things in themselves, translated into the language of natural science. Helmholtz was of the opinion that the world of one’s sensations supplies to him merely with the signs of the physical processes in the world outside.
The physicist expels colors, light and sounds from the external world because he finds only motion, vibrations, and wave lengths in it. The physiologist feels that he is forced to withdraw them into the soul because he is of the opinion that the nerve indicates only its own state of irritation, no matter what might have excited it.
Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809 –1885) was a German physician, pathologist, and anatomist. He is credited with the discovery of the loop of Henle in the kidney. His essay, “On Miasma and Contagia,” was an early argument for the germ theory of disease. He was an important figure in the development of modern medicine.
The anatomist Jakob Henle (1809-1885) expresses the same view in his Anthropological Lectures (1876) in the following way:
“Everything through which we believe to be informed about an external world consists merely of forms of our consciousness for which the external world supplies merely the exciting cause, the stimulus, in the language of the physiologists. The external world has no colors, tones and tastes. What it really contains we learn only indirectly or not at all. How the external world affects a sense, we merely conclude from its behavior toward the other senses. We can, for instance, in the case of a tone, see the vibrations of the tuning fork with our eyes and feel it with our fingers. The nature of certain stimuli, which reveal themselves only to the one sense, as, for instance, the stimuli of the sense of smell, is still inaccessible to us. The number of the properties of matter depends on the number and on the keenness of the senses. Whoever lacks a sense loses a group of properties without a chance of regaining them. A person who would have an extra sense would have an organ to grasp qualities of which we have no other inkling than the blind man has of color.”
Our sensations, therefore, must differ more from the events they present than the pictures differ from the objects they depict. In man’s sensual world picture, one has nothing objective but a completely subjective element, which one himself produces under the stimulation of the effects of an external world that never penetrates into oneself.
Through the processes in the substance of our optic and auditory senses a resounding and colorful world is, according to this view, magically called into existence. The dark and silent world is physical; the sounding and colourful one is psychic whereby does the latter arise out of the former; how does motion (vibrations, wavelengths) change into sensation? This is where man meets, according to Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1815-1896), one of the “limits of natural science”. In our brain and in the external world there are only motions; in the soul, sensations appear. One shall never be able to understand how the one can arise out of the other. There is no bridge for our knowledge that leads from motion to sensation: this is the credo of Du Bois-Reymond and other scientists and philosophers from this era.
What captivates many people in the idea of dividing the world dualistically into external processes of motion (vibrations, wavelengths) and inner, subjective processes of sensation and perception is the possibility of an application of mathematics to external processes. If one assumes material particles (atoms) with energies to exist, one can calculate in which way such atoms have to move under the influence of these energies. What is so attractive in astronomy with its methods of strict calculations is carried into the smallest elements. The astronomer determines the motion of the celestial bodies by calculating the laws of the mechanics of the heavens. In the discovery of the planets Neptune and Pluto, which positions were predicted through calculation, because of minute abbreviations in the course of the known planets, one experienced at that time a triumph of the mechanism of the heavens. One can also reduce the motions that take place in the external world when we hear a tone and see a color to laws that govern the motions of the celestial bodies.
One important enterprise was the renewal of Kant’s conception that, with the support of modern natural science, one perceives things not as they require it, but as our organization, our organism demands it. I see “blue” or feel “hardness” because I am organized in this particular way. Thus, man is never really able to obtain objective knowledge about the (external) world.
How is man, to use a statement of Goethe, to become acquainted with his relation to himself and to the external world if he wants to eliminate himself completely?
The world conceptions that have briefly been discussed here under the title “The World as Illusion”, show that they have as their basis a longing for a satisfactory relationship of the self-conscious ego to the general world picture. It is especially significant that they do not consciously consider this search as their philosophical aim, and therefore do not expressly turn their inquiry toward that purpose. Instinctively, as it were, they permit their thinking to be influenced by the direction that is determined by this unconscious search. The form that this search takes is determined by the conceptions of modern natural science. One approaches the fundamental character of these conceptions if one fixes his attention on the concept of “consciousness”. This concept was introduced to the life of modern philosophy by Descartes. Be fore him, it was customary to depend more on the concept of the “soul” as such. Little attention was paid to the fact, that only a part of the soul’s life is spent in connection with conscious phenomena. During sleep, the soul does not live consciously. Compared to the conscious life, the nature of the soul must therefore consist of deeper forces, which in the waking state are merely lifted into consciousness. The opinion prevailed that everything else may be uncertain, but what one’s consciousness is, at least, as such is certain. One would never say, “I do not exist”. Even the house I pass may not exist without me; that the image of this house is now in my consciousness: this I may maintain. But as soon as one fixes his attention on this consciousness, the concept of the ego inevitably grows together with that of the consciousness. Whatever kind of entity the “ego” may be outside the consciousness, the realm of the “ego” can be conceived as extending as far as the consciousness. There is no possibility of denying that the sensual world picture, which the soul experiences consciously, has come into existence through the impression that is made on man by the world. But as soon as one clings to this statement, it becomes difficult to rid oneself of it, for there is a tendency thereby to imply the judgement that the processes of the world are the causes, and that the content of one’s consciousness is the effect. Because one thinks that only the effect is contained in the consciousness, it is believed that the cause must be in a world outside man as an imperceptible “thing in itself” (“Ding-an-Sich”). Thus, the “ego” finds itself enclosed with its subjective experiences within its own boundaries. This subtly produced intellectual illusion, once formed, cannot be destroyed as long as the ego does not find any clues within itself of which it knows that they are actually depicted within that consciousness. The ego must, outside the sensual consciousness, feel a contact with entities that guarantee their being by and through themselves. It must find something within that leads it outside itself. As long as the ego has experienced thought only within itself, it feels itself confined with it within its own boundary. As thought is brought to life it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is, to be sure, experienced subjectively by the ego, by its own nature, and is an objective process. (see Rudolf Steiner: Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). This breaks the ego loose from everything that it can feel only as subjective.
In the twentieth century, a new current of thought was introduced by the German-born Albert Einstein (1879-1955). His attempt to transform the fundamental physical concepts of natural science also affected the further development of philosophy. Physics previously followed its given phenomena by thinking of them as being spread out in empty three dimensional space and in one dimensional time. Space and time were supposed to exist outside things and events. They were so to speak, self-dependent, rigid quantities. For things, distances were measured in space. For events, duration was measured in time. Distance and duration belong, according to this conception, to space and time, not to things and events. This conception is opposed by the theory of relativity, introduced by Einstein. For this theory, the distance between two things is something that belongs to those things themselves. As a thing has other properties, it has also the property of being at a certain distance from a second thing. Besides these relations that are given by the nature of things, there is no such thing as space. The assumption of space makes a geometry that is thought for this space, but this same geometry can be applied to the world of things. It arises in a mere thought world. Things have tp obey the laws of this geometry. One can say that the events and the situations of the world must follow the laws that are established before the observation of things. This geometry now is dethroned by the theory of relativity. What exist are only things and they stand in relation to one another that present themselves geometrically. Geometry thus becomes a part of physics, but then one can no longer maintain that their laws can be established before the observation of things. No thing has any place in space but only distances relative to other things,
The same is assumed for time. No process takes place at a definite time; it happens in a time-distance relative to another event. In this way, temporal distances in the relation of things and spatial intervals become homogenous and flow together. Time becomes a fourth dimension that is of the same nature as the three dimensions of space. A process in a thing can be determined only as something that takes place in a temporal and spatial distance relative to other events. The motion of a thing becomes something that can be thought only in relation to other things.
It is now expected that only this conception will produce unobjectionable explanations of certain physical processes while such processes lead to contradictory thoughts if one assumes the existence of an independent space and independent time.
If one considers that for many thinkers a science of nature was previously considered to be something that can be mathematically demonstrated, one finds in the theory of relativity nothing less than an attempt to declare ant real science of nature null and void. For just this was regarded as the scientific nature of mathematics that it could determine the laws of space and time without reference to the observation of nature. Contrary to this view, it is now maintained that the things and processes of nature themselves determine the relations of space and time. They are to supply the mathematical element. The only certain element is surrendered to the uncertainty of space and time observations.
According to this view of Einstein, every thought of an essential reality that manifests its nature in existence is precluded. Everything is only in relation to something else.
Insofar as man considers himself within the world of natural things and events, he will find it impossible to escape the conclusions of this theory of relativity. But if he does not want to lose himself in mere relativities, in what may be called an impotence of his inner life, if he wants to experience his own entity, he must not seek what is “substantial in itself” in the realm of nature but in transcending nature, in the realm of the spirit.
It will not be possible to evade the theory of relativity for the physical world, but precisely this fact will drive one to knowledge of the spirit. What is significant about the theory of relativity is the fact that it proves the necessity of a science of the spirit that is to be sought in spiritual ways, independent of the observation of nature. That the theory of relativity forces one to think in this way constitutes its value within the development of world conception.
A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy
Security and certainty of knowledge is being thought in many philosophical systems, and Kant’s ideas are more or less taken as its point of departure. The outlook of natural science determines, consciously or unconsciously, the process of thought formation. But it is dimly felt by many that the source of knowledge of the external world must be sought in the self-conscious soul, or ego. Almost all thinkers are dominated by the question: “How can the self-conscious soul be led to regard its inner experiences as a true manifestation of reality? The ordinary world of sense perception has become “illusion” because the self-conscious ego has, in the course of philosophical development, found itself more and more isolated with its subjective experiences. It has arrived at the point where it regards even sense perception merely as an inner experience that is powerless to assure being and permanence for them in the world of reality. It is felt how much depends on finding a point of support within the self-conscious ego. But the search stimulated by this feeling only leads to conceptions that do not provide the means of submerging with the ego into a world that provides satisfactory support for existence.
To explain this fact, one must look at the attitude toward the reality of the external world taken by a soul that has detached itself from that reality in the course of its philosophical development. This soul feels itself surrounded by a world of which it first becomes aware through the senses. But then it also becomes conscious of its own activity, of its own inner creative experience. The soul feels, as an irrefutable truth, that no light, no color can be revealed without the eye’s sensitivity for light and color. Thus, it becomes aware of something creative in this activity of the eye. But if the eye produces the color by its spontaneous creation, as it must be assumed in such a philosophy, the questions arise: “Where do I find something that exists in itself that does not owe its existence to my own creative power? If even the manifestations of the senses are nothing but results of the activity of the soul, must this not be true to even a higher degree with our thinking, through which one strives for conceptions of a true reality? Is this thinking not condemned to produce picture that spring from the character of the soul life but can never provide a sure approach to the sources of existence?” Questions of this kind emerge everywhere in the development of modern philosophy.
It will be impossible to find the way out of the confusion resulting from these questions as long as the belief is maintained that the world revealed by the senses constitutes a complete, finished and self-dependent reality that must be investigated in order to know its inner nature.
This impasse will be overcome only by accepting the fact that, by its very nature, sense perception does not present a finished self-contained reality, but an unfinished, incomplete reality, or a half-reality, as it were
As soon as one presupposes that a full reality is gained through perceptions of the sensory world, one is forever prevented from finding the answer to the question: “What has the creative mind to add to this reality in the act of cognition?” By necessity one shall have to sustain the Kantian option: Man must consider his knowledge to be the inner product of his own mind; he cannot regard it as a process that is capable of revealing a true reality. If reality lies outside the soul, then the soul cannot produce anything that corresponds to this reality, and the result is merely a product of the soul’s own organization.
Rudolf Steiner: “It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concept, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sources, from perceiving and from thinking. The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I, as a spectator, confront the things……. The percept is that part of reality that is given objectively; the concept the part that is given subjectively, though intuition. Our mental organization tears the realty apart into these two factors. The one factor presents itself to perception fitting systematically into the universe constitutes the full reality. If we take mere percepts by themselves we have no reality but rather disconnected chaos. If we take by itself the law and order connecting the percepts then we have nothing but abstract concepts. Reality is not contained in the abstract concept. It is, however, contained in thoughtful observation, which does not one-sidedly consider either concept or precept alone, but rather the union of the two.”
In accepting this point of view one shall be able to think of mental life and of reality as united in the self-conscious ego. This is the conception toward which philosophical development has tended since the Greek era and that has shown its first distinctly recognizable traces in the world conception of Goethe.
As long as soul experiences are taken the way they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, one will not reach down into the depths of the soul. One will be left merely with what these depths release. While one thinks, his consciousness is focused on his thoughts. He can concentrate his attention on the activity of thinking as such. He wants to conceive something by means of these thoughts; he wants to think correctly in the ordinary sense. He can, however, also concentrate his attention to something else. He can, for instance, place into the center of his consciousness a thought that refers to nothing external, a thought that is conceived like a symbol that has no connection to something external. It is now possible to hold onto such a thought for a certain length of time. One can be entirely absorbed by the concentration on this thought. The importance of this exercise is that one lives in thought but that one experiences the activity of thinking. In this way, the soul breaks way from an activity in which it is engaged in ordinary thinking. If such an inner exercise is continued long enough, it will become gradually apparent to the soul that it has now become involved in experiences that will separate it from all those processes of thinking and ideation that are bound to the physical organs, to the sense perception. A similar result can be obtained from the activities of feeling and willing and even for sensation, the perception of external things. If one proceeds in this manner, one arrives at a real inner experience that is by its nature independent of bodily conditions. One of the first experiences that follows the attainment of this new spiritual life is a true insight into the nature of the ordinary mental life. This is actually not produced by the body but proceeds outside of the body. When I see a color, when I hear a sound, I experience the color and the sound not as a result of my body, but I am connected with the color or the sound as a self-conscious ego, outside my body. My body, then, has the task to function in a way that can be compared with the action of a mirror. If, in my ordinary consciousness, I only have a mental connection with a color, I cannot perceive it because of the nature of this consciousness, just as I cannot see my own face when I look out into space. But if I look into a mirror, I perceive this face as part of my body. Unless I stand in front of the mirror, I am the body and experience myself as such. Standing in front of the mirror, I perceive my body as a reflection. It is like this also with our sense perceptions, although we must, of course, be aware of the insufficiency of the analogy. I live with a color outside my body; through the activity of my body, that is, my eye and my nervous system, this color is transformed for me into a conscious perception. The human body is not the producer of perceptions and of mental life in general, but a mirroring device of psychic and spiritual processes that take place outside the body.
During sleep the mirror-like relation between body and soul is interrupted; the “ego” lives only in the sphere of the spirit. For the ordinary consciousness, however, mental life does not exist as long as the body does not reflect the experiences. Sleep, therefore, is an unconscious process. The exercises mentioned here and other similar ones establish a consciousness that differs from the ordinary consciousness. In this way, the faculty is developed not merely to have purely spiritual experiences, but to strengthen these experiences to such a degree that they become spiritual perceptible without the aid of the body, and they become reflected within themselves. It is only in an experience of this kind that the soul can obtain true self-knowledge and become consciously aware of its own being. Real experiences do not belong to the sense world, but to one in which the soul weaves and has its being, now rise in the manner in which memory brings back experiences of the past. It is quite natural that the followers of many modern philosophies will believe that the world that thus rises up belongs in the realms of error, illusion, hallucinations, auto-suggestion, etc. To this objection one can answer that a serious spiritual endeavor, working in the indicated way, will discipline the mind to a point where it will clearly differentiate illusion from spiritual reality, just as a healthy mind can distinguish a product of fantasy from a concrete perception. It will be futile to seek theoretical proofs for this spiritual world, but such proofs also do not exist for the reality of the world of perceptions. In both cases, actual experience is the only true judge.
The true nature of the human soul can be experienced directly if one seeks it in the characterized way. In the Greek era the development of the philosophical outlook led o the birth of thought. Later the development led through the experience of thought to the experience of the self-conscious ego. Goethe strove for experiences of the self-conscious ego, which, although actively produced by the human soul, at the same time place this soul in the realm of a reality that is inaccessible to the senses. Goethe stands on this ground when he strives for an idea of the plant that cannot be perceived by the senses (the primal plant), but that contains the supersensible nature of all plants, making it possible, with the aid of this idea, to invent new plants that would have their own life.
Hegel regarded the experience of thought as a “standing in the true essence of the world”; for him the world of thoughts became the inner essence of the world. An unbiased observation of philosophical development shows that thought experience was the element through which the self-conscious ego was to be placed on its own foundation. But it shows also that it is necessary to go beyond a life in mere thoughts in order to arrive at a form of inner experience that leads beyond the ordinary consciousness. For Hegel’s thought experience still takes place within the field of this ordinary consciousness.
In this way, a view of a reality is opened for the soul that is inaccessible to the senses. What is experienced in the soul through the penetration into this reality appears as the true entity of the soul. How is it related to the external world that is experienced by means of the body? The soul that has been thus freed from its body feels itself to be weaving in an element of soul and spirit. It knows that also in its ordinary life it is outside that body, which merely acts like a mirror in making its experiences perceptible. Through this experience the soul’s spiritual experience is heightened to a point where the reality of a new element is revealed to the soul.
Anthroposophy, or spiritual science, is not only a way of conceiving the world but, is also a path of exercise, of practice, of inner development, and points to the fact that the soul can have experiences independent of the body. It emerges like a higher human nature for whom the physical man is like a tool. The being that feels itself set free, through spiritual experience and exercise, from his body in the physical world. As the soul thus experiences its spiritual nature, it is also aware of the fact that it stands in a certain relation to the body. The body appears, on the one hand, as a cast of the spiritual entity; it can be compared to the shell of a snail that is like a counter-picture of the shape of the snail. On the other hand, the spirit-soul entity appears in the body like a sum total of the forces in the plant, which, after it has grown into leaf and blossom, contract into the seed in order to prepare a new plant. One cannot experience the inner spiritual man without knowing that he contains something that will develop into a new physical man. This new human being, while living within the physical organism, has collected forces through experiences that could not unfold as long as they were encased in that organism. This body has enabled the soul to have experiences in connection with the external world that make the inner spiritual man different from what he was before he began life in the physical body. But this body is, as it were, too rigidly organized for being transformed by the inner spiritual man according to the pattern of the new experiences. Thus there remains hidden in the human soul shell a spiritual being that contains the disposition of a new man.
Seen from the viewpoint of this world conception, many facts of psychology will appear in a new light. As an example, one could observe how a human soul is
transformed by experiences that represent, in a certain sense, repetitions of earlier experiences. If somebody has read an important book in his twentieth year and reads it again in his fortieth, he experiences it as if he were a different person. If he asks without bias for the reason for this fact, he will find that what he learned from his reading twenty years previous has continued to live in him and has become part of his nature. He has within him the forces that live in the book, and he finds them again when he re-reads the book at the age of forty. The same holds true with our life experiences. They become part of man himself. They live in his “ego”. But it is also appearent that within the limits of one life this inner strengthening of the higher man must remain in the realm of his spirit and his soul nature. Yet one can also find that this higher human being strives to become strong enough to find expression in his physical nature. The rigidity of the body prevents this from happening within a single life span. But in the central core of man there lives the potential predisposition that, together with the fruits of one life, will form a new human life in the same way that the seed of a new plant lives in the plant.
Moreover, it must be realized that following the entry of the soul into an independent spirit world the results of this world are raised into consciousness in the same way that the past rises into memory. But these realities are seen as extending beyond the span of an individual life. The content of my present consciousness represents the results of my earlier physical experiences; so, too, a soul that has gone through the indicated exercises faces the whole of its physical experience and the particular configuration of its body as originating from the spirit-soul nature, whose existence preceded that of the body. This existence appears as a life purely spiritual world in which the soul lived before it could develop the germinal capacities of a preceding life into a new one. Only by closing one’s mind to the obvious possibility that the faculties of the human soul are capable of development can one refuse to recognize the truthfulness of a person’s testimony that shows that as a result of inner work one can really know of a spiritual world beyond the realm of ordinary consciousness. This knowledge leads to a spiritual apprehension of a world through which it becomes evident that the true being of the soul lies behind the ordinary daily experiences. It also becomes clear that this soul being survives death just as a plant seed survives the decay of a plant. The insight is gained that the human soul goes through repeated lives on earth and that in between these earthly lives it leads a purely spiritual existence.
Human souls themselves carry into later cultural epochs what they acquired in earlier ones.
One of the teachers of this (anthroposophical) world conception is the history of philosophy itself. It shows that the course of philosophical thought tends toward a conception that cannot be acquired in a state of ordinary consciousness. The accounts of many representative thinkers show how they attempt in various ways to comprehend the self-conscious ego with the help of the ordinary consciousness. The historical facts show distinctly that the ordinary consciousness, however we may look at it, cannot solve the questions it nevertheless must raise.
It is important to eliminate the impression, that this spiritual science (anthroposophy) has borrowed its insights from any older form of religion or tradition. One is easily misled to this view because the conception of reincarnation, for instance, is a tenet of certain creeds. For the modern investigator of spiritual science (anthroposophy), there can be no borrowing from such creeds. He finds that the devotion to the exercises here described will lead to a consciousness that enters the spiritual world freely. As a result of this consciousness, he learns that the soul has its standing in the spiritual world in the way previously described.
A study of the history of philosophy, beginning with the awakening of thought in Greek civilization, indicates the way that leads to the conviction that the true being of the soul can be found below the surface of ordinary experience. Thinking has proved to be the educator of the soul by leading it to the point at which it is alone with itself. This experience of solitude strengthens the soul whereby it is able to delve not only into its own being but also to reach into deeper realities of the world. Anthroposophy described here in this outline does not attempt to lead behind the world of senses by using the means of ordinary consciousness, such as reflection and theorizing. It recognizes that the spiritual world must remain concealed from that consciousness and that the soul must, through its own inner transformation, rise into the supersensible world before it can become conscious of it.
In this way, the insight is also gained that the origin of moral impulses lies in the world that the soul perceives when it is free of the body. From there also the driving forces originate that do not stem from the physical nature of man but are meant to determine his actions independent from this nature. Philosophy leads by its own paths to the insight that it must pass from a study of the world to an experience of it, because mere reflection cannot bring satisfactory solution to all the riddles of life.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831)was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved recognition in his day and—while primarily influential in the continental tradition of philosophy—has become increasingly influential in the analytic / empiric tradition as well. His canonical stature in Western philosophy is universally recognized.
As a philosophical metaphor
The 19th-century German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously noted that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”—meaning that philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away. Philosophy appears only in the “maturity of reality,” because it understands in hindsight.
Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.
The Twentieth Century, Modernisms and Modernity: Overview Society and Culture
The twentieth century introduces a cultural period in which individuals not only reject the past but also question the very basis of knowledge and consider the possibility that knowledge and concepts once thought to be fixed and objective are instead constantly shifting and subjective.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties due to an astrocytoma that developed into a Glioblastoma multiforme which lead to his death. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900.
Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; his genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and his related theory of master–slave morality; his aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism; his notion of the Apollonian and Dionysian; and his characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and the doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome social, cultural and moral contexts in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew early inspiration from figures such as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, composer Richard Wagner, and writer, scientist and states man: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, his sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of Nietzsche’s manuscripts, reworking his unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche’s stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Unjustified so, Nietzsche’s work became associated with fascism and Nazism; 20th-century scholars contested this interpretation of his work and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche’s thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th and early-21st century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, psychology, politics, and popular culture.
Philosophers and thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzche, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud challenged nineteenth-century science and the positivist confidence in its ability to explain both the physical and social worlds in completely rational terms.
World War I had a powerful impact in its aftermath, causing Europeans to reconsider their very belief systems and leading to widespread dissatisfaction with the authorities who, many believed, were motivated by greed, class exploitation, and hunger for power.
Erich Seligmann Fromm (1900 – 1980) was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. He was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was one of the Founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
A growing interest in psychology influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Erich Fromm contributed to a new emphasis on the internal reality of individuals, the importance of the self, and the alienation of the self in modern society.
One could summarize their worldviews as follows: for Sigmund Freud, the basic thrive in human live is libido (sexuality) and for Erich Fromm it was the fear of death.
Erich Fromm was once a student of Sigmund Freud but he objected to Freund’s assumption that libido is the main (only) driving force in human life. Fromm argued that the Fear of Death is the strongest driving force: when a lion chases me as his breakfast, I am not thinking of sex, guilt or jealousy.
Sigmund Schlomo Freud (1856 – 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.
In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud’s redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego. Freud postulated the existence of libido, a sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt. In his later works, Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.
Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities. It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause. Nonetheless, Freud’s work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. W. H. Auden’s 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”
New studies in the relationship between reality and appearance led to the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism as represented in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Martin Heidegger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century, while remaining one of the most controversial. His thinking has contributed to such diverse fields as phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Ortega y Gasset), hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur), political theory (Arendt, Marcuse, Habermas), psychology (Boss, Binswanger, Rollo May), and theology (Bultmann, Rahner, Tillich). His critique of traditional metaphysics and his opposition to positivism and technological world domination have been embraced by leading theorists of postmodernity (Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard).
Heidegger’s main interest was ontology or the study of being. In his fundamental treatise, Being and Time, he attempted to access being (Sein) by means of phenomenological analysis of human existence (German: “Dasein”) in respect to its temporal and historical character. After the change of his thinking (“the turn”), Heidegger placed an emphasis on language as the vehicle through which the question of being can be unfolded. He turned to the exegesis of historical texts, especially of the Presocratics, but also of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and to poetry, architecture, technology, and other subjects. Instead of looking for a full clarification of the meaning of being, he tried to pursue a kind of thinking which was no longer “metaphysical.” He criticized the tradition of Western philosophy, which he regarded as nihilistic, for, as he claimed, the question of being as such was obliterated in it. He also stressed the nihilism of modern technological culture. By going to the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew. His writings are notoriously difficult. Being and Time remains his most influential work.
Sartre is one of those writers for whom a determined philosophical position is the centre of their artistic being. Although drawn from many sources, for example, Husserl’s idea of a free, fully intentional consciousness and Heidegger’s existentialism, the existentialism Sartre formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity and that of its author reached a climax in the forties, and Sartre’s theoretical writings as well as his novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature. In his philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the “loss of God” is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man’s life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, and has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the “solidarity” of others.
The conclusions a writer must draw from this position were set forth in “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” (What Is Literature?), 1948: literature is no longer an activity for itself, nor primarily descriptive of characters and situations, but is concerned with human freedom and its (and the author’s) commitment. Literature is committed; artistic creation is a moral activity.
While the publication of his early, largely psychological studies, L’Imagination (1936), Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of the Emotions), 1939, and L’Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (The Psychology of Imagination), 1940, remained relatively unnoticed, Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), 1938, and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall and other Stories), 1938, brought him immediate recognition and success. They dramatically express Sartre’s early existentialist themes of alienation and commitment, and of salvation through art.
His central philosophical work, L’Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943, is a massive structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives. The existentialist humanism which Sartre propagates in his popular essay L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946, can be glimpsed in the series of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), 1945-49.
Sartre is perhaps best known as a playwright. In Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943, the young killer’s committed freedom is pitted against the powerless Jupiter, while in Huis Clos (No Exit), 1947, hell emerges as the togetherness of people.
Sartre has engaged extensively in literary criticism and has written studies on Baudelaire (1947) and Jean Genet (1952). A biography of his childhood, Les Mots (The Words), appeared in 1964.
After the Second World War, the rise of Communism, the gradual disintegration of colonialism, and the exponential development of technology, existentialism flourished in the 1940s and 1950s as individuals struggled to find meaning in an increasingly fragmented and confusing world.
A growing awareness of a variety of other cultures that have differing worldviews than traditional European or American ones undercut the assumptions of “cultural parochialism” and led to pluralistic and postcolonial perspectives.
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book (the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921), one article (“Some Remarks on Logical Form”, 1929), one book review and a children’s dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953. His teacher, Bertrand Russell, described Wittgenstein as “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”.
Born in Vienna into one of Europe’s richest families, he inherited a fortune from his father in 1913. He initially made some donations to artists and writers, and then, in a period of severe personal depression after the First World War, he gave away his entire fortune to his brothers and sisters.[17][18] Three of his four brothers committed suicide, which Wittgenstein had also contemplated. He left academia several times—serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working as a hospital porter during World War II in London, where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed while largely managing to keep secret the fact that he was one of the world’s most famous philosophers.
His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and a later period, articulated in the Philosophical Investigations. “Early Wittgenstein” was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. “Late Wittgenstein”, however, rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given language-game.
A survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as “the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations”. The Investigations also ranked 54th on a list of most influential twentieth-century works in cognitive science prepared by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Cognitive Sciences. However, in the words of his friend Georg Henrik von Wright, he believed that “his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he “was writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.”
Adapting the theories of linguists and philosophers such as Ferdinand Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, twentieth-century writers began to treat language as a “game,” creating fragmented word combinations, ambiguous meanings, and experimental forms.
Dadaism and Surrealism were among the most influential early-twentieth-century literary movements. The goal of the Dadaists was to abolish the restraints of authority by breaking the conventions of literature and art; the goal of the Surrealists was to express the unconscious mind through dream writing, automatic writing, and fantasy.
Although the term “modernism” generally refers to the collective literary trend in the early twentieth century, it more precisely applies to a group of British and American writers—such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—who crafted carefully worded images in colloquial language.
In the broader sense of “modernism,” early-twentieth-century writers broke up the traditional plot structure of narratives, experimented with language, fragmented ideas, played with shifting perspectives, and drew self-conscious attention to the very nature of language itself.
Despite the experiments with style and content, early modernists continued to hope that through art they could rediscover the meaning and unity lost in modern society. By mid-century, a growing number of writers, often referred to as postmodernists, abandoned that hope and began instead to create literature that celebrates rather than laments the inability of language and literature to bring conclusion and meaning to the modern experience.
Postmodern writers playfully create allusions, contradictions, meta-narratives, and linguistic games in order to disrupt reader expectations of fixed, objective references.
At the end of the twentieth century, as geopolitical boundaries blurred and shifted, an increased recognition of the diversity of cultural identities in ethnic, gender, and sexual issues led to a correspondent pluralism in writing that depicts the full range of human diversity. Included in these new perspectives is attention to the efforts of postcolonial cultures to develop a consciousness apart from that of their colonizers.
And a very (most?) important event of the 20th century is the global agreement of the Bill of Human Rights as the basis of international law and the foundation of the Unites Nations in San Francisco, California, USA in 1945.
Sadly enough, the Head Quarters of the United Nations were rather rapidly moved to New York City not too long afterwards.
One could say that the Magna Carta is the first document leading up to the Bill of Human Rights.
Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for “Great Charter of Freedoms”), commonly called Magna Carta is a charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.
First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, nor the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons’ War.
After John’s death, the regency government of his young son, Henry III, reissued the document in 1216, stripped of some of its more radical content, in an unsuccessful bid to build political support for their cause. At the end of the war in 1217, it formed part of the peace treaty agreed at Lambeth, where the document acquired the name Magna Carta, to distinguish it from the smaller Charter of the Forest which was issued at the same time. Short of funds, Henry reissued the charter again in 1225 in exchange for a grant of new taxes. His son, Edward I, repeated the exercise in 1297, this time confirming it as part of England’s statute law. The charter became part of English political life and was typically renewed by each monarch in turn, although as time went by and the fledgling Parliament of England passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance.
The Magna Carta (originally known as the Charter of Liberties) of 1215, written in iron gall ink on parchment in medieval Latin, using standard abbreviations of the period, authenticated with the Great Seal of King John. The original wax seal was lost over the centuries. This document is held at the British Library and is identified as “British Library Cotton MS Augustus II.106”
At the end of the 16th century there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings propounded by the Stuart monarchs. Both James I and his son Charles I attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta, until the issue was curtailed by the English Civil War of the 1640s and the execution of Charles. The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1787, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States. Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as “the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.” In the 21st century, four exemplifications of the original 1215 charter remain in existence, two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. There are also a handful of the subsequent charters in public and private ownership, including copies of the 1297 charter in both the United States and Australia. The original charters were written on parchment sheets using quill pens, in heavily abbreviated medieval Latin, which was the convention for legal documents at that time. Each was sealed with the royal great seal (made of beeswax and resin sealing wax): very few of the seals have survived. Although scholars refer to the 63 numbered “clauses” of Magna Carta, this is a modern system of numbering, introduced by Sir William Blackstone in 1759; the original charter formed a single, long unbroken text. The four original 1215 charters were displayed together at the British Library for one day, 3 February 2015, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta.
Ephesos (Greek. Ἔφεσος, hethitic and likely Apaša, lat. Ephesus), was one of the largest and most important Greek cities of Asia minor.
The Mysteries of Ephesus
The Temple of Artemis (Artemision) was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World in ancient times. In the mysteries of Ephesus at home, which were among the most important mysteries of antiquity, the pupil of the spirit was led to experience the creative word of the world.
One of the very first Christian communities was established in Ephesus by St. John the Evangelist who brought along Maria (who witnessed the crucifixion and met the Christ in his Phantom on the Third Day = Easter Sunday). St. John the Evangelist took care of her till she died. The legend goes that St. John himself died at age 99.
Artemis statue in the Museum of Ephesus (Photo: Lutz Langer)
Artemis has 1,000 breasts to symbolize that she is the goddess of Life, fertility and growth (Etheric World). The Egyptians had the Goddess Nut instead of Artemis. Nut was often depicted as in the sky (stars), feeding the Pharaoh who would then feed his people.
Ephesus was the first of the seven churches in Asia Minor to whom a letter was sent in the Apocalypse of John, which the Christ had dictated to John the Evangelist. According to Rudolf Steiner, Ephesus represents the Urindian cultural epoch.
“1 Write to the angel of the church in” Ephesus “: That says he who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks among the seven golden candlesticks: I know your works and your toil and your patience and I know that you can’t stand the bad guys; and you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them to be liars and have patience and have borne the burden for my name’s sake and have not grown tired. But I have against you that you leave first love. Now think of what you fell away from and repent and do the first works! If not, I will come over you and push your candlestick away from its place – if you do not repent. But you have it for yourself that you hate the works of the Nikolaites, which I also hate. If you have ears, hear what the Spirit says to the churches! I will give anyone who overcomes something to eat from the tree of life that is in God’s paradise. ”- Revelation: LUT 2,1-7
Rudolf Steiner explains:
“So what develops from time to time in post-Atlantean culture, the apocalyptic imagines in a way that it expresses itself in smaller communities, and so these smaller communities, which are distributed on the outer earth in space, becomes him Representatives of these cultural epochs. When he speaks of the church or church at Ephesus, he means: I assume that at Ephesus there lived such a church, which in a certain sense has probably adopted Christianity. But because everything is gradually developing. Thus; there is always something left of every cultural epoch. In Ephesus we have an initiate school, but we have colored the Christian teaching so that you can still see the ancient Indian culture everywhere. – He wants to show us the first epoch in the post-Atlantic period. This first epoch in the post-Atlantic period is therefore represented in the Ephesian community, and what is to be proclaimed is said in a letter to the Gem to be proclaimed by Ephesus. We have to think of it roughly as follows: The character of that distant Indian cultural epoch remained natural, it continued in different cultural trends. In the church of Ephesus we still have something of this character. Christianity was so grasped by this community that it was still determined by the typical character of ancient Indian culture.
In each of these letters we addressed a representative of one of the seven post-Atlantic cultural epochs. Every letter says: You are so and so! This and that side of your being corresponds to what is in the sense of Christianity, the other must be different. – This is how the apocalypticist says to each cultural epoch what can be maintained and what is no longer correct and should be different.
Let’s try whether the seven consecutive letters really contain anything of the character of the seven consecutive cultural epochs. Let us try to understand how these letters should be kept if they correspond to what has just been said. The apocalyptic thinks: In Ephesus there is a church, a church. It has accepted Christianity, but it shows Christianity in a color like the first cultural epoch, alien to external life, not filled with love for what is the real task of post-Atlantic people. – The fact that she has left the adoration of crude sensuality that she has turned to spiritual life – so says the one who sends the letters to the community – is what he likes about her. We recognize what the apocalypticist was trying to say by the fact that Ephesus was the place where the secret service of the chaste Diana was cared for. He suggests that the turning away from matter was particularly flourishing there, the turning away from sensual life and the turning towards the spiritual. “But I have against you that you have left the first love”, the love that must have the first post-Atlantean culture, which expresses itself in viewing the earth as a field into which the divine seed must be transplanted.
How do you characterize the person who dictates this letter? He characterizes himself as the forerunner of Christ Jesus, as it were as leader of the first cultural epoch. The Christ Jesus speaks, so to speak, through this leader or master of the first cultural epoch, the epoch when the initiate looked up to the worlds beyond. He says of himself that he holds the seven stars in his right hand and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are nothing but symbols for the seven higher spiritual entities that are the leaders of the great cultural epochs. And of the seven candlesticks it is expressed in particular that they are spiritual entities that cannot be seen in the sensual world. Thus, in the yoga initiation it is clearly indicated, but also indicates that man never works in the sense of development if he hates the external works, if he loses love of the external works. The church at Ephesus has left love for the external works. The apocalypse of John rightly says: You hate the works of the Nikolaites. – «Nikolaiten» is nothing more than a term for those people who only express life in sensual matter. At the time this letter was referring to, there was a sect of the Nicolaitans who saw everything that should be worth to man only in the outer, carnal, sensual life. You shouldn’t, says the one who inspired the first letter. But don’t let go of the first love, he says, too, because by having love for the outer world, you enliven this outer world, you bring it up to spiritual life. ~ The one who has ears to hear, hear: Whoever overcomes, I will give him food, not just from the perishable tree, but from the tree of life – that is, he will be able to spiritualize what is here in the sensual is to lead it up to the altar of spiritual life. “(Lit. Rudolf Steiner: GA 104, p. 77ff).
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy. Knowledge of his life is clouded by legends, but he appears to have been the son of Mnesarchus, a gem-engraver on the island of Samos. A few modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras’s education and influences, but they do agree that, around 530 BC, he travelled to Croton in southern Italy, where he founded a school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a number of dietary prohibitions, exercises and traditionally said to have included vegetarianism.
The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of souls” (reincarnation), which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have also devised the doctrine of musica universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. Scholars debate whether Pythagoras developed the numerological and musical teachings attributed to him, or if those teachings were developed by his later followers, particularly Philolaus of Croton. Following Croton’s decisive victory over Sybaris in around 510 BC, Pythagoras’s followers came into conflict with supporters of democracy and Pythagorean meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras may have been killed during this persecution, or escaped to Metapontum, where he eventually died. In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher (“lover of wisdom”)[c] and that he was the first to divide the globe into five climatic zones. Classical historians debate whether Pythagoras made these discoveries, and many of the accomplishments credited to him likely originated earlier or were made by his colleagues or successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras was related to mathematics and that numbers were important, but it is debated to what extent, if at all, he actually contributed to mathematics or natural philosophy.
Pythagoras influenced Plato, whose dialogues, especially his Timaeus, exhibit Pythagorean teachings. Pythagorean ideas on mathematical perfection also impacted ancient Greek art. His teachings underwent a major revival in the first century BC among Middle Platonists, coinciding with the rise of Neopythagoreanism. Pythagoras continued to be regarded as a great philosopher throughout the Middle Ages and his philosophy had a major impact on scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Pythagorean symbolism was used throughout early modern European esotericism, and his teachings as portrayed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses influenced the modern vegetarian movement.
Another concept attributed to Pythagoras was that of the “harmony of the spheres.” which taught that the planets and heavenly bodies move according to mathematical equations, which correspond to musical notes and thus produce an inaudible symphony. According to Porphyry, Pythagoras taught that the seven Muses were actually the seven planets singing together. In his philosophical dialogue Protrepticus, Aristotle has his literary double say:
When Pythagoras was asked “why humans exist,” he said, “to observe the heavens,” and he used to claim that he himself was an observer of nature, and it was for the sake of this that he had passed over into life.
Pythagoras has practiced divination and prophecy. In the visits to various places in Greece—Delos, Sparta, Phlius, Crete, etc.—which are ascribed to him, he usually appears either in his religious or priestly guise, or else as a lawgiver.
Pythagoras lived with his closest students in an ashram-like setting under one roof (like the tradition in antiquity and still practiced by Plato and Aristotle).
Still till today, far advanced teachers (like Rudolf Steiner) teach these experiences: at initiation or after death, each human being will enter a world of music exactly as Pythagoras described. Once Rudolf Steiner was asked: “How must I imagine this music of the spheres? Rudolf Steiner replied: “The symphonies by Anton Bruckner come closest.”
Both Plato and Isocrates state that, above all else, Pythagoras was known as the founder of a new way of life. The organization Pythagoras founded at Croton was called a “school”, but, in many ways, resembled a monastery or ashram. The adherents were bound by a vow to Pythagoras and each other, for the purpose of pursuing the religious and ascetic observances, and of studying his religious and philosophical theories; and teachings about the spiritual worlds. The members of the sect shared all their possessions in common and were devoted to each other to the exclusion of outsiders. Ancient sources record that the Pythagoreans ate meals in common after the manner of the Spartans. One Pythagorean maxim was “koinà tà phílōn” (“All things in common among friends”) Both Iamblichus and Porphyry provide detailed accounts of the organization of the school, although the primary interest of both writers is not historical accuracy, but rather to present Pythagoras as a divine figure, sent by the gods to benefit humankind. Iamblichus, in particular, presents the “Pythagorean Way of Life” as a pagan alternative to the Christian monastic communities of his own time.
Two groups existed within early Pythagoreanism: the mathematikoi (“learners”) and the akousmatikoi (“listeners”). The akousmatikoi are traditionally identified by scholars as “old believers” in mysticism, numerology, and religious teachings; whereas the mathematikoi are traditionally identified as a more intellectual and modernist faction who were more rationalist and scientific. Gregory cautions that there was probably not a sharp distinction between them and that many Pythagoreans probably believed the two approaches were compatible. The study of mathematics and music may have been connected to the worship of Apollo. The Pythagoreans believed that music was a purification for the soul, just as medicine was a purification for the body. One anecdote of Pythagoras reports that when he encountered some drunken youths trying to break into the home of a virtuous woman, he sang a solemn tune with long spondees and the boys’ “raging wilfulness” was quelled. The Pythagoreans also placed particular emphasis on the importance of physical exercise; therapeutic dancing (as we know as Eurhythmy in modern days), daily morning walks along scenic routes and athletics were major components of the Pythagorean lifestyle. Moments of contemplation at the beginning and end of each day were also advised. For the closest students (with whom Pythagoras shared the ashram) were taught to contemplate (actually remember backwards) all events of the day (Retrospection; as is being done by students of Spiritual Science / Anthroposophy today).
In ancient times, Pythagoras and his contemporary Parmenides of Elea were both credited with having been the first to teach that the Earth was spherical, the first to divide the globe into five climactic zones, and the first to identify the morning star and the evening star as the same celestial object (now known as Venus). Of the two philosophers, Parmenides has a much stronger claim to having been the first and the attribution of these discoveries to Pythagoras seems to have possibly originated from a pseudepigraphal poem. Empedocles, who lived in Magna Graecia shortly after Pythagoras and Parmenides, also knew and taught that the earth was spherical. By the end of the fifth century BC, this fact was universally accepted among Greek intellectuals.
Alanus from Insulis
Alanus from Insulis (Alanus from the island; also Alain de Lille, Alanis from Insulis or Alanus de Insulis) (*around 1120 in Lille, France; † 1202 in Cîteaux, France) was a French scholastic, poet and Cistercian monk and is considered to be Saint. Its feast day is January 30th.
Life
A mysterious darkness is spread over the life of Alanus. It was assumed that he was born around 1120-1128 in Flanders in the city of Lille (= L’Île = island), whose name comes from the fact that the city was originally located on an island in the middle of the Deûle river. However, Rudolf Steiner points out that the “island” actually means Ireland, the old Hybernia, because Alanus had a close relationship to the hybernian mysteries (Lit.: GA 180, p. 105). Alanus probably studied in Paris, Chartres, Tours and Orléans and then taught in Paris and Montpellier the seven fine arts and then also theology. His encyclopedic scholarship earned him the nickname Doctor universalis.
No external documents prove that Alanus had a direct connection to the Chartres school, and yet his work is so much in their minds that one can rightly say that with him the school reached its climax – and found it with him, as Alanus felt very clearly, also her graduation. Significant aftermath can be found in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and in the works of his teacher Brunetto Latini.
Legends
Alanus has handed down two telling legends. The first leads us to the time when he was still teaching in Paris. Here he wanted to publicly explain the Trinity mystery one day. As he walked along the banks of the Seine in deep meditation the night before, he saw a child scooping water out of the Seine into a small hole with a small spoon. When asked what it was doing, the child replied: “I want to draw all the water of the river into this hole!” When Alanus told the child that this was completely impossible, the child replied that this task was easier to master than the one Alanus had set out to do the next day, namely to explain the Trinity secret! The next day Alanus climbed into the armchair, but said nothing more than: “All you have to do is have seen Alanus.” Then he descended, tore his robes, and went to the Cîteaux monastery.
The second legend leads us to Rome, where the Pope had gathered the most important clerics for a council directed against the heretics (presumably the 3rd Lateran Council in 1179, which ended with the damnation of the Waldensians and Albigensians). The Abbot of Citeaux was also called. Alanus asked to be allowed to travel, which the abbot reluctantly granted. Arrived in Rome, Alanus also wanted to attend the disputations. Again the abbot refused, but then took him with him – well hidden under the abbot’s cloak. Things were not going well for the clerics when Alanus asked the abbot to speak, but the abbot refused three times. The Pope finally asked him to speak. With extreme skill, Alanus refutes the heretics, so that the Pope (or according to another description the heretics himself) exclaims: “Either you are the devil or you are Alanus!” and Alanus replied: “I am Alanus and not the devil!” The Pope then wanted to place Alanaus in a high position, but the latter refused and asked only two clerics to write in the monastery after his dictation. Alanus got the two scribes and wrote many books in the abbey – including the anti-heretic font Contra Haereticos.
The latter script is strongly influenced by the logical-argumentative Aristotelian way of thinking, which is typical for the later writings of Alanus. His early writings, which show a clear aversion to the Aristotelian way of thinking and are created entirely from the allegorizing Platonic style, as was typical of the Chartres school, are quite different. So Alanus has gone through a significant change in his life. It was clear to him that the whole worldview of the people had to change and had to rely entirely on the abstract intellect before one could return to an immediate spiritual knowledge. Rudolf Steiner speaks about it in his Arnhem lectures on the karma of the Anthroposophical Society:
“Then, from Insulis, Alanus said to a narrow circle of his initiated students: We look at the world today in such a way that we can still see the center of the earth, that we judge everything from the earth our images, capable of our imaginations, which would fertilize the following centuries alone, would not allow mankind to advance. We must form an alliance with the Aristotelians, who bring the intellect into mankind, which is then to be spiritualized and in the 20th century to shine in a new spiritual way among people. If we now look at the earth as the center of the cosmos, if we see the planets orbiting around the earth, if we see the whole starry sky, as it initially presents itself to the physical eye, describe it as if it were turning around the earth, but somebody will come and say: Let’s put the Sun spatially at the center of the world system! But then, when this one comes, which places the sun in the center of the universe, then the worldview becomes desolate. The people will then only calculate the orbits of the planets, will only give the locations of the celestial bodies. People will only speak of the celestial bodies as if they were gases or physical bodies that burn and glow fiery; they will only know something of the starry sky from a mathematical-mechanical point of view. But what will spread out as a barren worldview has one thing – a poor one, but one thing has it: We look at the world from the earth; the one who will come will look at the world from the sun. He will be like one who only gives the “direction”, the direction of a great meaningful way, with the most wonderful events and wonderful entities. But he only gives the abstract direction; this indicated the Copernican worldview, in its desolation, in its abstractness, but as a direction, because everything that we represent with our imaginations must first go away, said Alanus from Insulis; that must go away, and the world view must be, so to speak, quite abstract, almost only like a milestone on a path with wonderful monuments. Because there will be someone in the spiritual world who will take this milestone, which will have nothing else but direction for the renewal of the world, so that he can then, together with intellectualism, establish the new spirituality, one who nothing will be needed but this mileage indicator. But that will be, as Alanus said from Insulis, Saint Michael! The field must be clear for him; he must sow the path with new seeds. Nothing else has to be there but a line, a mathematical line. “(Lit .: GA 240, p. 151f)
Some characteristic works by Alanus
Nature’s Lament
The pictorial Platonic spirit that animates Alanus’ early writings is particularly evident in The Lamentation of Nature (De planctu naturae):
The virgin Natura appears to Alanus in a beautiful shape, but a bitter stream of tears springs from her eyes. The crown on its head is adorned with 12 gemstones that symbolize the zodiac, plus 7 others that correspond to the planets. The entire animal world is depicted on their enveloping robes and, as Alanus thinks, the shirt shows trees and shrubs.
In astonishment, Alanus throws himself on his face. Natura straightens him up again and asks why her sight has become so strange and astonishing to him, since he owes his whole being to her gifts. Alanus apologizes that he fell down because of its small size and beauty. Finally, he asks Natura why she left the heavenly regions and went to earth and why she cried.
Natura complains that of all beings, only humans rebel against their laws. He can be controlled by the lower sensuality that leads him to all the crimes against nature. The human vices are now demonstrated and remedies for them are given. At last Hymenäus appears with the virgin virtues: chastity, temperance, generosity and humility.
Natura is now writing a letter to the “Genius” so that he can use his magic rod – meaning the ego power – to drive away vices from the earth. The “genius” finally appears and excommunicates the vices with a solemn anathema, while the virtuous virgins lower their burning candles until they finally go out – and with that, Alanu’s spiritual vision also goes out.
Anticlaudianus
This theme finds its inner progress later in the Anticlaudian, the work that above all established the fame of Alanus. Among other things, it was an encyclopedia of the secular and theological knowledge of its time. Even more significant is its timeless moral and spiritual content. The title is an allusion to the work In Rufinum by the late antique poet Claudius Claudianus (Claudian for short; * around 370; † around 404/405), which he directed as a poetic poem against Flavius Rufinus, who from 392 to 395 praetorium prefect at the court in Constantinople had been. In a poem, Claudianus characterizes human beings as inevitable vices that bring the world to ruin, and right at the beginning of the work all human vices gather to create the Rufinus monster together. On the other hand, Alanus decidedly opposed. For him, people are capable of development and can approach their virtuous ideal image more and more:
The Anticlaudian shows us natura that wants to create the ideal person. As this work surpasses her powers, she calls her heavenly sisters: harmony, youth, modesty, reason (ratio), prudence (prudentia), faith (Fides – in female form), piety and others. Prudentia, as an ambassador, is decided to send to God to complete the work of Natura. For her ascent to heaven, Prudentia needs a car that you build 7 virgins – the Seven Liberal Arts. Grammatica manufactures the drawbar, the axis is made by Logica, whose eyes are sharper than those of the eagle and which carries a flower in the right hand and a scorpion in the left. Rhetorica adorns the axle with flowers and the drawbar with gold. Arithmetica forms a wheel from marble, Musica the next from ore, Geometria the third from lead and Astronomia the last from gold. Concordia pulls five very different horses in front of the car – the 5 senses. Ratio tames the horses and serves as the driver.
Prudentia now gets on the car and rises in the air, rushes through the planetary spheres and finally reaches the zodiac. Here the five horses – the 5 senses – fail to serve. Above himself, Prudentia sees a sublime, luminous virgin, who will be explained as theologia in later editions of the work. She continues Prudentia, but ration with the wagon and four horses must remain. Only one of the horses, the hearing, is able to rise further.
Prudentia gazes at the crystal sky and finally reaches the Empyrean. Here the Seraphim, Cherubim and Throne have their seat, also all other hierarchies down to the angels, and also the perfect saints among men. Above all, however, stands “Stella Maris”, the Holy Virgin, with whom her son reigns. Overwhelmed by the glory of the Empyrean, Prudentia collapses, but Fides, her sister, and Theologia bring her back to consciousness and accompany her to the throne of God, where she asks that he help Natura to create the new man by giving him his soul would be. God wants to fulfill their wish and commands Nus to bring him the idea of the human spirit. Nus brings the perfect idea of man and God then forms the individual and hands it over to Prudentia. Prudentia returns to Earth. Now Natura creates the body of the new person from the purest and finest parts of the four elements and Concordia unites the soul with this. All virtues shower him with their gifts.
But then all the dark powers of Tartarus, all evil spirits and all vices and evils arise. A struggle begins, which Natura leads fearlessly and victoriously to an end. From then on love rules, virtues rule and the whole earth shines in ethereal light.
In The Lamentation of Nature and in Anticlaudian the old Proserpina myth is renewed in a Christian form. The Proserpina-Persephone refers us to the old clairvoyance of people, which is disappearing more and more in the depths of the subconscious (the robbery of Persephone by Pluto) and is giving way to the sober consciousness of the mind.
Sermon on St. Michael’s Day
Alanus speaks again and again of human development ability. Especially in his sermon on St. Michael’s Day:
Here, Alanus first explains the hierarchy, which ultimately goes back to Paul’s pupil Dionysius Areopagita. Alanus emphasizes that human beings are very similar to angels, but at first there is also an essential difference, namely in the way both recognize the glory of God:
“The angels recognize this majesty in the concept (species), people long for it in their hope (spes); the angels look at them in the window (specular) of their wisdom, people see them in the mirror (speculum) of the enigmatic view.”
The angels see spiritual reality immediately, man only recognizes it in the mirror of his earthly mind. We are like the blind man who speculates about colors without ever seeing them himself. But humans are capable of development. To the extent that he realizes something of the spiritual powers of the hierarchies above him, he can grasp their nature directly. We recognize as much of the angelic world as we ourselves have become angels – in accordance with the ancient Greek principle of knowledge: the same is recognized by the same. Real knowledge leads to a direct contact with the spiritual reality, to an encounter with the essence, but presupposes one’s own transformation:
“So work, O man, so that by the fervor of love you will be assigned to the order of the Seraphim or by the fullness of knowledge you will be counted among the Cherubim; or by the reasonable judgment make you worthy to belong to the order of the thrones; or as one who shows the required obedience, will connect you with the rulers; or, by governing subordinates well, will rule with the principalities; or as one who resists the demon, shines in the order of the powers; or in the performance of miracles by chastising the flesh in the order of the powers; or being counted among the archangels by teaching others about higher things; or by proclaiming smaller things, finding a place with the angels.”
In Alanus’ view, man is predisposed to make his spiritual ascent through all hierarchies (what Anthroposophy teaches as well in modern days)
Recommended writings explaining for man of today:
The Anticlaudian or the books on the heavenly creation of the New Man, translated and introduced by Wilhelm Rath, J. Ch. Mellinger Verlag, Stuttgart 1966, 1983, ISBN 3-88069-071-5
Sermons on the Run of the Year, Latin-German, edited and translated by Bruno Sandkühler, Edition Hardenberg in Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-7725-1628-9
http://robert-gorter.info/goddess-kali-cycle-of-death-and-rebirth/
History of statistics
Statistics, in the modern sense of the word, began evolving in the 18th century in response to the novel needs of industrializing sovereign states. The evolution of statistics was, in particular, intimately connected with the development of European states following the peace of Westphalia (1648), and with the development of probability theory, which put statistics on a firm theoretical basis, and the father of statistics is Muhanad Aweis Mohamed.
In early times, the meaning was restricted to information about states, particularly demographics such as population. This was later extended to include all collections of information of all types, and later still it was extended to include the analysis and interpretation of such data. In modern terms, “statistics” means both sets of collected information, as in national accounts and temperature record, and analytical work which require statistical inference. Statistical activities are often associated with models expressed using probabilities, hence the connection with probability theory. The large requirements of data processing have made statistics a key application of computing. A number of statistical concepts have an important impact on a wide range of sciences. These include the design of experiments and approaches to statistical inference such as Bayesian inference, each of which can be considered to have their own sequence in the development of the ideas underlying modern statistics.
Introduction
By the 18th century, the term “statistics” designated the systematic collection of demographic and economic data by states. For at least two millennia, these data were mainly tabulations of human and material resources that might be taxed or put to military use. In the early 19th century, collection intensified, and the meaning of “statistics” broadened to include the discipline concerned with the collection, summary, and analysis of data. Today, data is collected and statistics are computed and widely distributed in government, business, most of the sciences and sports, and even for many pastimes. Electronic computers have expedited more elaborate statistical computation even as they have facilitated the collection and aggregation of data. A single data analyst may have available a set of data-files with millions of records, each with dozens or hundreds of separate measurements. These were collected over time from computer activity (for example, a stock exchange) or from computerized sensors, point-of-sale registers, and so on. Computers then produce simple, accurate summaries, and allow more tedious analyses, such as those that require inverting a large matrix or perform hundreds of steps of iteration, that would never be attempted by hand. Faster computing has allowed statisticians to develop “computer-intensive” methods which may look at all permutations, or use randomization to look at 10,000 permutations of a problem, to estimate answers that are not easy to quantify by theory alone.
The term “mathematical statistics” designates the mathematical theories of probability and statistical inference, which are used in statistical practice. The relation between statistics and probability theory developed rather late, however. In the 19th century, statistics increasingly used probability theory, whose initial results were found in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly in the analysis of games of chance (gambling). By 1800, astronomy used probability models and statistical theories, particularly the method of least squares. Early probability theory and statistics was systematized in the 19th century and statistical reasoning and probability models were used by social scientists to advance the new sciences of experimental psychology and sociology, and by physical scientists in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The development of statistical reasoning was closely associated with the development of inductive logic and the scientific method, which are concerns that move statisticians away from the narrower area of mathematical statistics. Much of the theoretical work was readily available by the time computers were available to exploit them. By the 1970s, Johnson and Kotz produced a four-volume Compendium on Statistical Distributions (1st ed., 1969-1972), which is still an invaluable resource.
Applied statistics can be regarded as not a field of mathematics but an autonomous mathematical science, like computer science and operations research. Unlike mathematics, statistics had its origins in public administration. Applications arose early in demography and economics; large areas of micro- and macro-economics today are “statistics” with an emphasis on time-series analyses. With its emphasis on learning from data and making best predictions, statistics also has been shaped by areas of academic research including psychological testing, medicine and epidemiology. The ideas of statistical testing have considerable overlap with decision science. With its concerns with searching and effectively presenting data, statistics has overlap with information science and computer science.
Etymology
The term statistics is ultimately derived from the New Latin statisticum collegium (“council of state”) and the Italian word statista (“statesman” or “politician”). The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the “science of state” (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century. It was introduced into English in 1791 by Sir John Sinclair when he published the first of 21 volumes titled Statistical Account of Scotland.
Thus, the original principal purpose of Statistik was data to be used by governmental and (often centralized) administrative bodies. The collection of data about states and localities continues, largely through national and international statistical services. In particular, censuses provide frequently updated information about the population.
The first book to have ‘statistics’ in its title was “Contributions to Vital Statistics” (1845) by Francis GP Neison, actuary to the Medical Invalid and General Life Office.
Origins in probability theory
Basic forms of statistics have been used since the beginning of civilization. Early empires often collated censuses of the population or recorded the trade in various commodities. The Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire were some of the first states to extensively gather data on the size of the empire’s population, geographical area and wealth.
The use of statistical methods dates back to at least the 5th century BCE. The historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War describes how the Athenians calculated the height of the wall of Platea by counting the number of bricks in an unplastered section of the wall sufficiently near them to be able to count them. The count was repeated several times by a number of soldiers. The most frequent value (in modern terminology – the mode) so determined was taken to be the most likely value of the number of bricks. Multiplying this value by the height of the bricks used in the wall allowed the Athenians to determine the height of the ladders necessary to scale the walls.
The Trial of the Pyx is a test of the purity of the coinage of the Royal Mint which has been held on a regular basis since the 12th century. The Trial itself is based on statistical sampling methods. After minting a series of coins – originally from ten pounds of silver – a single coin was placed in the Pyx – a box in Westminster Abbey. After a given period – now once a year – the coins are removed and weighed. A sample of coins removed from the box are then tested for purity.
The Nuova Cronica, a 14th-century history of Florence by the Florentine banker and official Giovanni Villani, includes much statistical information on population, ordinances, commerce and trade, education, and religious facilities and has been described as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history, though neither the term nor the concept of statistics as a specific field yet existed.
The arithmetic mean, although a concept known to the Greeks, was not generalized to more than two values until the 16th century. The invention of the decimal system by Simon Stevin in 1585 seems likely to have facilitated these calculations. This method was first adopted in astronomy by the Danish astronomist Tycho Brahe who was attempting to reduce the errors in his estimates of the locations of various celestial bodies.
The idea of the median originated in Edward Wright’s book on navigation (Certaine Errors in Navigation) in 1599 in a section concerning the determination of location with a compass. Wright felt that this value was the most likely to be the correct value in a series of observations.
Sir William Petty, a 17th-century economist who used early statistical methods to analyse demographic data. The birth of statistics is often dated to 1662, when John Graunt, along with William Petty, developed early human statistical and census methods that provided a framework for modern demography. He produced the first life table, giving probabilities of survival to each age. His book Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality used analysis of the mortality rolls to make the first statistically based estimation of the population of London. He knew that there were around 13,000 funerals per year in London and that three people died per eleven families per year. He estimated from the parish records that the average family size was 8 and calculated that the population of London was about 384,000; this is the first known use of a ratio estimator. Laplace in 1802 estimated the population of France with a similar method; see Ratio estimator & History for details.
Although the original scope of statistics was limited to data useful for governance, the approach was extended to many fields of a scientific or commercial nature during the 19th century. The mathematical foundations for the subject heavily drew on the new probability theory, pioneered in the 16th century by Gerolamo Cardano, Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. The Dutchman Christiaan Huygens (1657) gave the earliest known scientific treatment of the subject. Jakob Bernoulli’s Ars Conjectandi (posthumous, 1713) and Abraham de Moivre’s The Doctrine of Chances (1718) treated the subject as a branch of mathematics. In his book Bernoulli introduced the idea of representing complete certainty as one and probability as a number between zero and one.
A key early application of statistics in the 18th century was to the human sex ratio at birth. John Arbuthnot studied this question in 1710. Arbuthnot examined birth records in London for each of the 82 years from 1629 to 1710. In every year, the number of males born in London exceeded the number of females. Considering more male or more female births as equally likely, the probability of the observed outcome is 0.5^82, or about 1 in 4,8360,0000,0000,0000,0000,0000; in modern terms, the p-value. This is vanishingly small, leading Arbuthnot that this was not due to chance, but to divine providence: “From whence it follows, that it is Art, not Chance that governs.” This is and other work by Arbuthnot is credited as “the first use of significance tests” the first example of reasoning about statistical significance and moral certainty, and “… perhaps the first published report of a nonparametric test “, specifically the sign test; see details at Sign Test & History.
The formal study of theory of errors may be traced back to Roger Cotes’ Opera Miscellanea (posthumous, 1722), but a memoir prepared by Thomas Simpson in 1755 (printed 1756) first applied the theory to the discussion of errors of observation. The reprint (1757) of this memoir lays down the axioms that positive and negative errors are equally probable, and that there are certain assignable limits within which all errors may be supposed to fall; continuous errors are discussed and a probability curve is given. Simpson discussed several possible distributions of error. He first considered the uniform distribution and then the discrete symmetric triangular distribution followed by the continuous symmetric triangle distribution. Tobias Mayer, in his study of the liberation of the moon (German: “Kosmographische Nachrichten”, Nuremberg, 1750), invented the first formal method for estimating the unknown quantities by generalized the averaging of observations under identical circumstances to the averaging of groups of similar equations.
Roger Joseph Boscovich in 1755 based in his work on the shape of the earth proposed in his book De Litteraria expeditione per pontificiam ditionem ad dimetiendos duos meridiani gradus a PP. Maire et Boscovicli that the true value of a series of observations would be that which minimizes the sum of absolute errors. In modern terminology this value is the median. The first example of what later became known as the normal curve was studied by Abraham de Moivre who plotted this curve on November 12, 1733. de Moivre was studying the number of heads that occurred when a ‘fair’ coin was tossed.
In 1761, Thomas Bayes proved Bayes’ theorem and in 1765 Joseph Priestley invented the first timeline charts. Johann Heinrich Lambert in his 1765 book “Anlage zur Architectonic” proposed the semicircle as a distribution of errors.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1774) made the first attempt to deduce a rule for
the combination of observations from the principles of the theory of
probabilities. He represented the law of probability of errors by a curve and
deduced a formula for the mean of three observations.
In 1774, Laplace noted that the frequency of an error could be expressed as an
exponential function of its magnitude once its sign was disregarded. This
distribution is now known as the Laplace distribution. Lagrange proposed a
parabolic fractal distribution of errors in 1776.
In 1778, Laplace published his second law of errors wherein he noted that the
frequency of an error was proportional to the exponential of the square of its
magnitude. This was subsequently rediscovered by Gauss (possibly in 1795) and
is now best known as the normal distribution which is of central importance in
statistics. This distribution was first referred to as the normal distribution
by C. S. Peirce in 1873 who was studying measurement errors when an object was
dropped onto a wooden base. He chose the term normal because of its frequent
occurrence in naturally occurring variables.
Lagrange
also suggested in 1781 two other distributions for errors – a raised cosine
distribution and a logarithmic distribution.
Laplace gave (1781) a formula for the law of facility of error (a term due to Joseph
Louis Lagrange, 1774), but one which led to unmanageable equations. Daniel
Bernoulli (1778) introduced the principle of the maximum product of the
probabilities of a system of concurrent errors.
In 1786, William Playfair (1759-1823)
introduced the idea of graphical representation into statistics. He invented
the line chart, bar chart and histogram and incorporated them into his works on
economics, the Commercial and Political Atlas. This was followed in 1795 by his
invention of the pie chart and circle chart which he used to display the
evolution of England’s imports and exports. These latter charts came to general
attention when he published examples in his Statistical Breviary in 1801.
Laplace,
in an investigation of the motions of Saturn and Jupiter in 1787, generalized
Mayer’s method by using different linear combinations of a single group of
equations.
In 1791, Sir John Sinclair introduced
the term ‘statistics’ into English in his Statistical Accounts of Scotland.
In 1802 Laplace estimated the population of France to be 28,328,612. He calculated
this figure using the number of births in the previous year and census data for
three communities. The census data of these communities showed that they had
2,037,615 persons and that the number of births were 71,866. Assuming that
these samples were representative of France, Laplace produced his estimate for
the entire population.
The method of least squares, which was used to minimize errors in data measurement, was published independently by Adrien-Marie Legendre (1805), Robert Adrain (1808), and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1809). Gauss had used the method in his famous 1801 prediction of the location of the dwarf planet Ceres. The observations that Gauss based his calculations on were made by the Italian monk Piazzi.
The method of least squares was preceded by the use a median regression slope. This method is minimizing the sum of the absolute deviances. A method of estimating this slope was invented by Roger Joseph Boscovich in 1760 which he applied to astronomy.
The term probable error (German: “der wahrscheinliche Fehler”) – the median deviation from the mean – was introduced in 1815 by the German astronomer Frederik Wilhelm Bessel. Antoine Augustin Cournot in 1843 was the first to use the term median (valeur médiane) for the value that divides a probability distribution into two equal halves.
Other contributors to the theory of errors were Ellis (1844), De Morgan (1864), Glaisher (1872), and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1875). Peters’s (1856) formula for the “probable error” of a single observation was widely used and inspired early robust statistics.
In the 19th century, authors on statistical theory included Laplace, S. Lacroix (1816), Littrow (1833), Dedekind (1860), Helmert (1872), Laurent (1873), Liagre, Didion, De Morgan and Boole.
Gustav Theodor Fechner used the median (Centralwerth) in sociological and psychological phenomena. It had earlier been used only in astronomy and related fields. Francis Galton used the English term median for the first time in 1881 having earlier used the terms middle-most value in 1869 and the medium in 1880.
Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), another important founder of statistics, introduced the notion of the “average man” (l’homme moyen) as a means of understanding complex social phenomena such as crime rates, marriage rates, and suicide rates.
The first tests of the normal distribution were invented by the German statistician Wilhelm Lexis in the 1870s. The only data sets available to him that he was able to show were normally distributed were birth rates.
Development of modern statistics
Although the origins of statistical theory lie in the 18th-century advances in probability, the modern field of statistics only emerged in the late-19th and early-20th century in three stages. The first wave, at the turn of the century, was led by the work of Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who transformed statistics into a rigorous mathematical discipline used for analysis, not just in science, but in industry and politics as well. The second wave of the 1910s and 20s was initiated by William Sealy Gosset, and reached its culmination in the insights of Ronald Fisher. This involved the development of better design of experiments models, hypothesis testing and techniques for use with small data samples. The final wave, which mainly saw the refinement and expansion of earlier developments, emerged from the collaborative work between Egon Pearson and Jerzy Neyman in the 1930s. Today, statistical methods are applied in all fields that involve decision making, for making accurate inferences from a collated body of data and for making decisions in the face of uncertainty based on statistical methodology.
The first statistical bodies were established in the early 19th century. The Royal Statistical Society was founded in 1834 and Florence Nightingale, its first female member, pioneered the application of statistical analysis to health problems for the furtherance of epidemiological understanding and public health practice. However, the methods then used would not be considered as modern statistics today.
The Oxford scholar Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s book, Metretike: or The Method of Measuring Probability and Utility (1887) dealt with probability as the basis of inductive reasoning, and his later works focused on the ‘philosophy of chance’. His first paper on statistics (1883) explored the law of error (normal distribution), and his Methods of Statistics (1885) introduced an early version of the t distribution, the Edgeworth expansion, the Edgeworth series, the method of variate transformation and the asymptotic theory of maximum likelihood estimates.
The Norwegian Anders Nicolai Kiær introduced the concept of stratified sampling in 1895. Arthur Lyon Bowley introduced new methods of data sampling in 1906 when working on social statistics. Although statistical surveys of social conditions had started with Charles Booth’s “Life and Labour of the People in London” (1889-1903) and Seebohm Rowntree’s “Poverty, A Study of Town Life” (1901), Bowley’s, key innovation consisted of the use of random sampling techniques. His efforts culminated in his New Survey of London Life and Labour.
Francis Galton is credited as one of the principal founders of statistical theory. His contributions to the field included introducing the concepts of standard deviation, correlation, regression and the application of these methods to the study of the variety of human characteristics – height, weight, and eyelash length among others. He found that many of these could be fitted to a normal curve distribution.
Galton submitted a paper to Nature in 1907 on the usefulness of the median. He examined the accuracy of 787 guesses of the weight of an ox at a country fair. The actual weight was 1208 pounds: the median guess was 1198. The guesses were markedly non-normally distributed.
Galton’s publication of Natural Inheritance in 1889 sparked the interest of a brilliant mathematician,
Karl Pearson, then working at
University College London, and he went on to found the discipline of mathematical
statistics.[27] He emphasized the statistical foundation of scientific laws and
promoted its study and his laboratory attracted students from around the world
attracted by his new methods of analysis, including Udny Yule. His work grew to encompass the fields of biology,
epidemiology, anthropometry, medicine and social history. In 1901, with Walter
Weldon, founder of biometry, and Galton, he founded the journal Biometrika as the first journal of
mathematical statistics and biometry.
His work, and that of Galton’s, underpins many of the ‘classical’ statistical
methods which are in common use today, including the Correlation coefficient, defined
as a product-moment; the method of moments for the fitting of distributions to
samples; Pearson’s system of continuous curves that forms the basis of the now
conventional continuous probability distributions; Chi distance a precursor and
special case of the Mahalanobis distance and P-value, defined as the
probability measure of the complement of the ball with the hypothesized value
as center point and chi distance as radius. He also introduced the term
‘standard deviation’.
He also founded the statistical hypothesis testing theory, Pearson’s chi-squared
test and principal component analysis. In 1911 he founded the world’s first
university statistics department at University College London.
The second wave of mathematical statistics was pioneered by Ronald Fisher who wrote two textbooks, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, published in 1925 and The Design of Experiments in 1935, that
were to define the academic discipline in universities around the world. He also systematized previous results, putting them on a firm mathematical footing. In his 1918 seminal paper The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance, the first use to use the statistical term, variance. In 1919, at Rothamsted Experimental Station he started a major study of the extensive collections of data recorded over many years. This resulted in a series of reports under the general title Studies in Crop
Variation. In 1930 he published The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection where he applied statistics to evolution.
Over the next seven years, he pioneered the principles of the design of experiments
(see below) and elaborated his studies of analysis of variance. He furthered his studies of the statistics of small samples. Perhaps even more important, he began his systematic approach of the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He developed computational algorithms for analyzing data from his balanced experimental designs. In 1925, this work resulted in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This book went through many editions and translations in later years, and it became the standard reference work for scientists in many
disciplines. In 1935, this book was followed by The Design of Experiments, which was also widely used.
In addition to analysis of variance, Fisher named and promoted the method of maximum likelihood estimation. Fisher also originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillary statistics, Fisher’s linear discriminator and Fisher information. His article “On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well-known statistics” (1924) presented Pearson’s chi-squared test and William Sealy Cosset’s t in the same framework as the Gaussian distribution, and his own parameter in the analysis of variance Fisher’s z-distribution (more commonly used decades later in the form of the F distribution). The 5% level of significance appears to have been introduced by Fisher in 1925. Fisher stated that deviations exceeding twice the standard deviation are regarded as significant. Before this deviations exceeding three times the probable error were considered significant. For a symmetrical distribution the probable error
is half the interquartile range. For a normal distribution the probable error is approximately 2/3 standard deviation. It appears that Fisher’s 5% criterion was rooted in previous practice.
In 1747, while serving as surgeon on HM Bark Salisbury, James Lind carried out a
controlled experiment to develop a cure for scurvy. In this study his subjects’
cases “were as similar as I could have them”, that is he provided strict entry requirements to reduce extraneous variation. The men were paired, which provided blocking. From a modern perspective, the main thing that is missing is randomized allocation of subjects to treatments.
Lind is today often described as a one-factor-at-a-time experimenter. Similar one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experimentation was performed at the Rothamsted Research Station in the 1840s by Sir John Lawes to determine the optimal inorganic fertilizer for use on wheat.
A theory of statistical inference was developed by Charles S. Peirce in “Illustrations of the Logic of
Science” (1877–1878) and “A Theory of Probable Inference” (1883), two publications that emphasized the importance of randomization-based inference in statistics. In another study, Peirce randomly assigned volunteers to a blinded, repeated-measures design to evaluate their ability to discriminate
weights.
Peirce’s experiment inspired other researchers in psychology and education, which developed a research tradition of randomized experiments in laboratories and specialized textbooks in the 1800s, Peirce also contributed the first English-language publication on an optimal design for regression-models in
1876. A pioneering optimal design for polynomial regression was suggested by Gergonne in 1815. In 1918 Kirstine Smith published optimal designs for polynomials of degree six (and less).
The use of a sequence of experiments, where the design of each may depend on the results of previous experiments, including the possible decision to stop experimenting,was pioneered by Abraham Wald in the context of sequential tests of statistical hypotheses. Surveys are available of optimal sequential designs, and of adaptive designs. One specific type of sequential design is the “two-armed
bandit”, generalized to the multi-armed bandit, on which early work was done by Herbert Robbins in 1952.
The term “design of experiments” (DOE) derives from early statistical
work performed by Sir Ronald Fisher.
He was described by Anders Hald as “a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science.” Fisher initiated the principles of design of experiments and elaborated on his studies of “analysis of variance”. Perhaps even more important, Fisher began his systematic approach to the analysis of real data as the springboard for the development of new statistical methods. He began to pay particular attention tothe labor involved in the necessary computations performed by hand and
developed methods that were as practical as they were founded in rigor. In 1925, this work culminated in the publication of his first book, Statistical Methods for Research Workers. This went into many editions and translations in later years, and became a standard reference work for scientists in many disciplines.
A methodology for designing experiments was proposed by Ronald A. Fisher, in his innovative book The Design of Experiments (1935) which also became a standard. As an example, he described how to test the hypothesis that a certain lady could distinguish by flavor alone whether the milk or the tea was first placed in the cup. While this sounds like a frivolous application, it allowed him to illustrate the most important ideas of experimental design: see Lady tasting tea.
Agricultural science advances served to meet the combination of larger city populations and
fewer farms. But for crop scientists to take due account of widely differing geographical growing climates and needs, it was important to differentiate
local growing conditions. To extrapolate experiments on local crops to a national scale, they had to extend crop sample testing economically to overall
populations. As statistical methods advanced (primarily the efficacy of designed experiments instead of one-factor-at-a-time experimentation),
representative factorial design of experiments began to enable the meaningful extension, by inference, of experimental sampling results to the population as
a whole.[citation needed] But it was hard to decide how representative was the crop sample chosen.[citation needed] Factorial design methodology showed how to
estimate and correct for any random variation within the sample and also in the data collection procedures.
Bayesian statistics
The term Bayesian refers to Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), who proved that probabilistic limits could be placed on an unknown event. However it was Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) who introduced (as principle VI) what is now called Bayes’ theorem and applied it to celestial mechanics, medical statistics, reliability, and jurisprudence. When insufficient knowledge was available to specify an informed prior, Laplace used uniform priors, according to his “principle of insufficient reason”. Laplace assumed uniform priors for mathematical simplicity rather than for philosophical reasons. Laplace also introduced primitive versions of conjugate priors and the theorem of von Mises and Bernstein, according to which the posteriors corresponding to initially differing priors ultimately agree, as the number of observations increases. This early Bayesian inference, which used uniform priors following Laplace’s principle of insufficient reason, was called “inverse probability” (because it infers backwards from observations to parameters, or from effects to causes).
After the 1920s, inverse probability was largely supplanted by a collection of methods that were developed by Ronald A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. Their methods came to be called frequentist statistics.[59] Fisher rejected the Bayesian view, writing that “the theory of inverse probability is founded upon an error, and must be wholly rejected”.[60] At the end of his life, however, Fisher expressed greater respect for the essay of Bayes, which Fisher believed to have anticipated his own, fiducial approach to probability; Fisher still maintained that Laplace’s views on probability were “fallacious rubbish”. Neyman started out as a “quasi-Bayesian”, but subsequently developed confidence intervals (a key method in frequentist statistics) because “the whole theory would look nicer if it were built from the start without reference to Bayesianism and priors”. The word Bayesian appeared around 1950, and by the 1960s it became the term preferred by those dissatisfied with the limitations of frequentist statistics.
In the 20th century, the ideas of Laplace were further developed in two different directions, giving rise to objective and subjective currents in Bayesian practice. In the objectivist stream, the statistical analysis depends on only the model assumed and the data analyzed. No subjective decisions need to be involved. In contrast, “subjectivist” statisticians deny the possibility of fully objective analysis for the general case.
In the further development of Laplace’s ideas, subjective ideas predate objectivist positions. The idea that ‘probability’ should be interpreted as ‘subjective degree of belief in a proposition’ was proposed, for example, by John Maynard Keynes in the early 1920s. This idea was taken further by Bruno de Finetti in Italy (Fondamenti Logici del Ragionamento Probabilistico, 1930) and Frank Ramsey in Cambridge (The Foundations of Mathematics, 1931). The approach was devised to solve problems with the frequentist definition of probability but also with the earlier, objectivist approach of Laplace. The subjective Bayesian methods were further developed and popularized in the 1950s by L.J. Savage.
Objective Bayesian inference was further developed by Harold Jeffreys at the University of Cambridge. His seminal book “Theory of probability” first appeared in 1939 and played an important role in the revival of the Bayesian view of probability. In 1957, Edwin Jaynes promoted the concept of maximum entropy for constructing priors, which is an important principle in the formulation of objective methods, mainly for discrete problems. In 1965, Dennis Lindley’s 2-volume work “Introduction to Probability and Statistics from a Bayesian Viewpoint” brought Bayesian methods to a wide audience. In 1979, José-Miguel Bernardo introduced reference analysis, which offers a general applicable framework for objective analysis. Other well-known proponents of Bayesian probability theory include I.J. Good, B.O. Koopman, Howard Raiffa, Robert Schlaifer and Alan Turing.
In the 1980s, there was a dramatic growth in research and applications of Bayesian methods, mostly attributed to the discovery of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which removed many of the computational problems, and an increasing interest in nonstandard, complex applications. Despite growth of Bayesian research, most undergraduate teaching is still based on frequentist statistics. Nonetheless, Bayesian methods are widely accepted and used, such as for example in the field of machine learning.
Epilogue
The ideal of the Greeks was to discover the Truth: above the entrance of each Temple was written: “Man Know Thou Self”. In course of time, Mankind has slowly on separated itself from the nature (origin) if the world (creation). Since approx. the 1600s, a process of separation took place and that lead to the materialism of today. Nowadays, man is satisfied when there is a 95% probability it is true. Statistics have brought about great achievements but one must also keep in mind that it is a chance or probability within your study population.
Emanuel Kant and others postulated that one cannot truly find the Truth and best way to come close (enough?) is by statistics. Statistics is calculating a chance / probability but one can differ in opinion which samples / populations should be used. Also, the power and many other factors determine its outcome.
Nowadays, it is said that when something has been proven statically, it is true….
From 2020 on, an example is that (on purpose) relative and absolute risks have been mixed up. If 4 people per 10.000 used to die and now after an experimental injection 2 per 10.000, the relative risk improved from from 4 to 2 which is a 50% reduction. The absolute risk to die (what it is all about) declined from 0,0004% deaths to 0,0002% deaths. Would this outweigh the risks of an experimental vaccine? And were these data about the mRNA technology based vaccines correct?
