Worldviews in the 19th Century

Contemporary critics praised Steiner's philosophical history for its thoroughness and clear presentation of 19th-century German thought from Kant to Haeckel, though some questioned whether his pronounced individualism and allegiance to Haeckel's monism adequately served historical objectivity. Reviewers noted strengths in his treatment of idealist philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and Goethe, but criticized selective emphasis, insufficient attention to Romanticism and Neo-Kantian movements, and arbitrary omissions of significant figures like Wagner and Tolstoy. The work was recognized as an important cultural document bridging specialist philosophy and educated general readership, despite concerns about one-sidedness in its interpretive framework.

Darwin's theory of natural selection explains organic purposefulness through mechanical laws of nature rather than divine design, eliminating the need for teleology in biology. This mechanistic worldview, developed through heredity, variation, and struggle for existence, fundamentally reversed nineteenth-century thought from idealism toward monism, unifying the explanation of organic and inorganic nature. Haeckel's rigorous application of Darwinian principles to human origins and his biogenetic law—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—established evolutionary theory as the foundation for a comprehensive, fact-based worldview reconciling science and spirituality.

Lotze, Fechner, and von Hartmann synthesized scientific methodology with idealistic philosophy, each constructing distinctive worldviews that transcended empirical facts through ideas of universal soul, psychophysical correspondence, and unconscious will respectively. Their work demonstrates the necessity of moving beyond observation to idealistic interpretation while maintaining rigorous engagement with natural science and experience.

Bartholomäus Carneri develops Darwinian ethics grounded in human nature and the drive for happiness, while Nietzsche transforms evolutionary ideas into a "will to power" beyond good and evil. Contrasting materialist approaches—Marx's historical materialism and sociological determinism—deny individual agency, positioning ideas as mere reflections of economic and social forces rather than creative powers shaping human development.

A true developmental worldview recognizes that later formations are genuinely new creations, not preformed in earlier stages. Through thinking, human beings actively participate in world events and create the world of ideas as a new impulse, thereby grounding both human freedom and the continuous creative evolution of reality.

The work's aim to trace nineteenth-century worldview development toward contemporary knowledge, using Haeckel's monism as a reference point while arguing that rigorous personal thinking—rather than false objectivity—enables genuine understanding of others' ideas and reveals where scientific materialism must be transcended by higher spiritual concerns.

The discovery of Neptune in 1846 symbolizes the mid-nineteenth century's intellectual conflict between idealistic philosophy and rising materialism. Steiner traces how scientific advances—from Wöhler's synthesis of urea to discoveries in cellular biology—provided materialists like Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott with empirical foundations to explain all phenomena through natural forces alone, fundamentally transforming public consciousness away from supernatural worldviews toward naturalistic explanations of human existence and morality.

Physiological research into sensory perception—particularly Johannes Müller's law of specific sensory energies and Helmholtz's theory of signs—reveals that our perceptions reflect only our nervous organization, not external reality itself. This epistemological crisis generates two opposing scientific worldviews: monism, which maintains faith in knowledge of true existence through observation and thought, and dualism (represented by F.A. Lange and Herbert Spencer), which accepts an unknowable reality beyond all possible knowledge, relegating truth-claims to mere subjective poetry valuable only for life's practical needs.

Auguste Comte's positivism represents an attempt to construct a comprehensive worldview based exclusively on mathematical and empirical scientific methods, rejecting both idealism and psychology as unscientific. This "fanaticism about facts" eliminates living, spiritual dimensions from nature and human experience, reducing all phenomena to mechanical laws, while later thinkers like Dühring and Kirchmann extend this approach to increasingly paradoxical conclusions that undermine knowledge itself.

Schelling revolutionizes idealism by declaring that to philosophize about nature means creating it, uniting spirit and nature as one divine reality expressed through productive imagination and intellectual intuition. Moving beyond Fichte's abstract ego, he develops a theosophical worldview where human thinking participates in God's self-remembrance, art mediates between unconscious nature and conscious philosophy, and freedom emerges from the non-divine ground of being—a vision contrasted with Schleiermacher's feeling-based piety and Hegel's systematic thought-philosophy.

The development of worldviews from Goethe and Kant through Darwin and Haeckel represents the nineteenth century's struggle to solve existence's great riddles, divided into an idealistic first half (seeking truth from within) and a realistic second half (grounded in empirical observation). This historical survey aims to present each thinker's contributions fairly and rigorously, demonstrating how opposing philosophical perspectives can sharpen rather than cloud understanding of modern thought.

Human consciousness necessarily generates three fundamental questions—What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?—which Steiner traces through the century's intellectual development from Fichte's idealistic emphasis on the will to Haeckel's naturalistic monism. The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented transformation in answering these questions, driven by advances in natural science, technological innovation, and the emergence of sociology as a framework for understanding human action within social development.

Kant and Goethe represent opposing responses to the Enlightenment crisis: Kant resolved the conflict between reason and faith by limiting knowledge to phenomena while grounding morality in duty, whereas Goethe sought unified understanding by viewing spirit as integral to nature itself. Their contrasting worldviews—Kant's separation of necessity and freedom, Goethe's integration of all existence under natural law—established the fundamental tension shaping nineteenth-century thought.

Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of Hegel's idealism parallels Wolff's biological epigenesis: rejecting preformation of spirit in nature, Feuerbach argues consciousness emerges as a new formation in the human organism, making sensory reality alone divine. His anthropological materialism inspired radical thinkers—Strauss, Bauer, and especially Stirner—who progressively radicalized the critique, with Stirner ultimately transcending all thought-systems to assert the sovereign, unique individual as beyond conceptual determination.

Herbart's abstract, mathematically-structured philosophy opposes Hegel's reality-saturated idealism by reducing the world to simple, unchanging beings whose relationships constitute apparent reality, enabling him to preserve immortality and divine providence while establishing ethics and aesthetics on human feeling. Schopenhauer synthesizes Kant, Plato, Fichte, and Schelling into a pessimistic worldview where blind will—not reason—grounds existence, making compassion and ascetic negation of desire the path to moral redemption, particularly through music's direct expression of the will. Anti-Hegelian thinkers like Baader, Krause, I. H. Fichte, Weiße, Günther, and Deutinger sought to replace pure thought with a personal, conscious God and living will, misunderstanding Hegel's project of comprehending rather than creating religion, thereby initiating the radical worldviews that would follow.