21. On the History of Philosophy

People with a comprehensive, worldly spirit often find the redeeming word for a matter that scholars sitting in a room have racked their brains over for a long time in vain.

What is philosophy supposed to do alongside and above the individual specialized sciences? The representatives of the latter are probably not averse to answering this question simply as follows: it should do nothing at all. In their view, the entire field of reality is encompassed by the special sciences. Why anything that goes beyond these? The person who used the most succinct expression for this was the labor apostle Ferdinand Lassalle. "Philosophy can be nothing but the consciousness which the empirical sciences attain about themselves." These are his words. You could hardly find a better formula for the matter.

All sciences regard it as their task to investigate the truth. Truth can be understood as nothing other than a system of concepts that reflects the phenomena of reality in their lawful context in a way that corresponds to the facts. If someone stands still and says that for him the network of concepts, which represents a certain area of reality, has an absolute value and he needs nothing about it, then a higher interest cannot be demonstrated to him. However, such a person will not be able to explain to us why his collection of concepts has a higher value than, for example, a collection of stamps, which, when organized systematically, also depicts certain connections in reality. This is the reason why the argument about the value of philosophy with many natural scientists does not lead to any results. They are lovers of concepts in the same sense as there are lovers of stamps or coins. But there is an interest that goes beyond this. This interest seeks, with the help and on the basis of the sciences, to enlighten man about his position in relation to the universe, or in other words: this interest leads man to place himself in such a relationship to the world as is possible and necessary according to the results obtained in the sciences.

In the individual sciences, man confronts nature, he separates himself from it and observes it, he alienates himself from it. In philosophy, he seeks to reunite with it. He seeks to make the abstract relationship into which he has fallen in scientific observation into a real, concrete, living one. The scientific researcher wants to acquire an awareness of the world and its effects through knowledge; the philosopher wants to use this awareness to make himself a vital member of the world as a whole. In this sense, individual science is a preliminary stage of philosophy. We have a similar relationship in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. The latter is a sum of knowledge that is a necessary precondition for composing. Composing transforms the laws of musicology into life, ın real reality. Anyone who does not understand that a similar relationship also exists between philosophy and science is not fit to be a philosopher. All real philosophers were free conceptual artists. With them, human ideas became artistic material and the scientific method became artistic technique. Thus the abstract scientific consciousness is elevated to concrete life. Our ideas become powers of life. We have not merely a knowledge of things, but we have made knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has taken precedence over a mere passive assimilation of truths. This is where I seek the meaning of Lassalle's words.

This conception of philosophy should be penetrated in particular by those who want to present the historical development of philosophy in writing or in academic lectures. In the face of many an unpleasant phenomenon in this field, we welcome with pleasure a recently published book: "Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwicklung und teilweise Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Lectures, held at the K.K. Vienna University by Vinzenz Knauer (Vienna 1892)."

From the presentation of the history of philosophy by the same author (Geschichte der Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Neuzeit. Second improved edition. 1882) we got the impression that in Vinzenz Knauer we are dealing with a philosophical nature in the truest sense of the word. It is not an external observer, but a man living in the world of ideas who describes the phenomena of philosophy in ancient and modern times. And the new book has only strengthened this conviction. The lectures are highly suitable for stimulating philosophical thought. We are not dealing with a historian who gives a lecture on one system after another and then adds a critique from any point of view - J. H. Kirchmann, Thilo and others have practiced such arts ad nauseam - but with a philosopher who develops the problems vividly for his listeners and readers.

There are people who think it is objectivity to be as external as possible to the problems they deal with. They want to see everything from a bird's eye view. Such so-called objectivity, however, does not achieve a true visualization of its subject. Knauer has a different, genuine objectivity; he penetrates so deeply into the ideas of a philosopher that he resurrects them before our minds in the most unadulterated way possible. He knows how to revive the dramatic element that characterizes the ideas of every true philosopher. Where we so often only feel "the master's own spirit", Knauer really introduces us to the "spirit of the times".

Of course, all this is only possible with the high degree of mastery of the material that we admire in Knauer. Every sentence testifies to a long, thorough immersion in philosophical world views.

I would like to award this praise unreservedly to the first part of the book, which I extend to Thomas Aquinas. From Thomas Aquinas onwards, Knauer's inclination towards dualistic and pluralistic ideas seems to me to impair the free historical presentation. I personally felt this painfully in the second part. I consider Knauer's presentation of Aristotelian philosophy to be one of the clearest, most transparent and most correct there is; his treatment of modern philosophy does not yet seem to me to be so free of scholastic concepts as to be able to do justice to monistic philosophy. Knauer fails to recognize the difference between abstract and concrete monism. The former seeks a unity alongside and above the individual things of the cosmos. This monism is always embarrassed when it is supposed to derive the multiplicity of things from the absolutized unity and make it comprehensible. The consequence is usually that it declares the multiplicity to be illusory, which results in a complete evaporation of the given reality. Schopenhauer's and Schelling's first system are examples of this abstract monism. Concrete monism pursues the unified world principle in living reality. It does not seek a metaphysical unity alongside the given world, but is convinced that this given world contains the moments of development into which the unified world principle divides and separates itself.

This concrete monism does not seek unity in multiplicity, but wants to understand multiplicity as unity. The concept of unity on which concrete monism is based conceives the latter as substantial, which sets the difference in itself. It is contrasted with that unity which is generally indiscriminate in itself, i.e. absolutely simple (Herbart's reals), and with that which, of the equalities contained in these things, combines the former into a formal unity, just as we combine ten years into a decennium. Knauer only recognizes the latter two concepts of unity. The former, since it can only explain the distinct things of reality from the interaction of many simple realities, can lead to pluralism; the latter leads to abstract monism, because its unity is not immanent in things, but exists alongside and above them. Knauer tends towards pluralism. He overlooks the concrete-monistic elements of recent philosophy. That is why this part of his lectures seems deficient to me.

I am committed to concrete monism. With its help, I am able to understand the results of recent natural science, namely Goethe-Darwin-Haeckel organicism. If Knauer had taken the science of the organic into account in his arguments in the same way as he rightly does with that of the inorganic (heat equivalent, conservation of force, second law of mechanical heat theory), he would have seen through the difficulty of applying pluralism. It is impossible to apply the theory of development (and its consequences: Heredity Theory, Adaptation Theory and Basic Biogenetic Law) by means of the interaction of distinct simple reals without contradiction.

However, these objections should not prevent me from recognizing the great importance of the second part of Knauer's book. In addition to the clear, original discussion of Herbart's thought processes, I see this significance in the comprehensive and fair treatment of Hamerling's philosophizing. The fact that Hamerling appears in such an unprejudiced, unreserved manner in the ranks of philosophers is a merit that cannot be overestimated, which Knauer has earned through these lectures. As a historian of philosophy, he has spoken a word first. He who merely compiles and develops the philosophical systems recognized by everyone in a new way cannot be compared with the one who first recognizes the significance of a phenomenon. The fact that I myself have a completely different attitude to Hamerling than Knauer does not prevent me from recognizing this in these lectures. I appreciate the poet-philosopher's philosophical view because of the many monistic elements it contains, despite its tendency towards a dualistic and pluralistic world view. In my opinion, this circumstance cannot be judged correctly as long as German philosophy remains completely dependent on Kant, which completely obscures the free view of world conditions. Kant's philosophy is a dualistic one. It bases dualism on the organization of the human cognitive organism. And the fact that the propositions which Kant put forward for the subjectivity of cognition are inviolable in a more or less modified form is regarded today as the basic dogma of philosophy, so to speak. Anyone who doubts this is declared by many to be unsuitable for philosophical thinking. Anyone who has their own opinion, regardless of this prejudice, can have bad experiences today. I recently experienced it myself. When a "Society for Ethical Culture" was formed in Germany last year along the lines of similar associations in England and America, I took the opportunity to publicly express my opinion about such a backward foundation (e.g. in the "Literar. Merkur", Vol. XII. 1892, No. 40, and "Zukunft", 1892, Vol. I, No. 5). My views in this regard are rooted in my epistemological convictions, which I last substantiated in my essay "Truth and Science". The latter represent an epistemology that is independent of Kant and has grown out of the doctrines of modern monism. They provide full proof that I arrived at my views quite independently of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I was simply accused of Nietzscheanism by German philosophers who were supposed to know something about the matter, and I was accused not only of lacking intellect but also of having an immoral attitude. That doesn't bother me any more. Some people think differently about my intellect than the gentlemen of the "ethical culture"; and as far as my morals are concerned: in my school reports it says: "exemplary", later it said: "perfectly in accordance with the academic laws"; since then, every authority I have called upon has given me a good moral certificate. So it seems that I have done nothing that should prompt a German scholar to call me before a "moral judgment seat" (cf. Ferd. Tönnies, "Ethische Kultur und ihr Geleite"). Or is it one of the insights of the new "ethical culture" that one is morally condemned because of one's theoretical views?