103. Haeckel, Tolstoy and Nietzsche

Those who seek the deeper impulses in the intellectual life of the present day will be confronted by three personalities. In a one-sided way, but with monumental greatness, each of these personalities represents what moves our time most deeply: Haeckel, Tolstoy, Nietzsche. Truth, goodness, beauty are called the eternal ideals of humanity. It is as if each of the three personalities had taken from another of these ideals the means of expression with which they say what they have to say. Haeckel speaks the language of truth, Tolstoy that of goodness, Nietzsche that of beauty.

From the development of modern thought as a whole, we must gain the points of view from which we can form a view of the three representative men of our world view. For the time being, we must let our gaze wander to two deeds in this development. After that great deed in the sixteenth century which Copernicus accomplished, and through which man attained his presently valid view of the earth, according to which it is a star among stars. And one must look to the other deed of the nineteenth century, through which the organic-living, indeed man himself, was recognized as a natural being. The names Lamarck and Darwin will first come to mind when we think of this deed. But Goethe was its first herald.

Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Distinguishes him
From all beings,
That we know.
...
According to eternal, honorable,
Great laws
We must all
Of our existence
Complete circles.

In these words, spoken by Goethe as early as the last third of the eighteenth century, lies the proclamation of a "natural creation story".

It took a long time for man to become accustomed to seeing the "eternal, honorable and great laws" as the solid pillars of his knowledge of the world. Medieval man looked up at the starry sky and saw -- not such eternal, honorable laws, but human-like intelligences. And right up to the eighteenth century, man did not see "eternal laws" in the structure of his organism and in that of other living beings, but the reign of an "eternal wisdom", which he could only think in the manner of human reason. Christianity was a powerful promoter of this way of thinking. It had degraded "mere, coarse matter" to a being of a lower kind. How was it to be content with this matter and its innate laws when it came to explaining the marvelous movements in the celestial ether or the purposeful structure of organic beings! Science had to conquer piece by piece of our world structure for the "eternal, honorable laws". Copernicus did this for the starry heavens, Goethe, Lamarck, Darwin for what lives on earth.

And to the same extent that science tore away piece by piece from the old world view, to the same extent the Christian spirit became tougher in saving what it could still save for itself. Luther had to leave the world of space to science. He wanted to claim the world of the soul for religion all the more energetically. He made a strict distinction between the explanation of the world and the Gospel. No science should be able to harm the latter; it should remain the faith that leads to salvation. It is no coincidence that Luther's Protestant doctrine entered world history at the same time as the new scientific explanation of the world. It had to come if faith was to be valid alongside knowledge. It had to be assigned the area that had not yet been touched by science.

And like Luther to Copernicus, Kant stands opposite the modern "natural history of creation". At the end of the eighteenth century, everything seemed to have fallen prey to rational thinking. Then Kant came along and declared that man was not at all predisposed to recognize the real nature of things. Kant betrayed the deepest impulses of his thinking when he wrote the words: "I therefore had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith." In Kant's opinion, this knowledge is only limited; it can never penetrate to where the objects of faith, God, freedom and immortality, have their domain. Faith has its eternal justification alongside reason and science.

It was only a necessary consequence of such presuppositions that Kant was of the opinion that the construction of a living being would never be as explainable to man as a machine is. The history of the creation of the organic living must remain supernatural: for Kant, that was the last word in wisdom.

The nineteenth century gradually wove the living into the web of "eternal, honorable laws". Kant appears to us today like a new Luther, like the last of the line of those spirits who still wanted to save something, as much as possible, for the faith inaccessible to science. Development is moving beyond these spirits. The "natural history of creation" can no longer accept the piece of faith that Kant wanted to save. The scientific way of thinking is in the process of completely dissolving the Christian way of thinking. Kant is only interesting to us as one of the last great representatives of the Christian spirit.

When Haeckel, Tolstoy and Nietzsche asked themselves, each in their own way, in the last third of the nineteenth century, how to live with the new ideals of humanity, they were faced with a world view that had been revolutionized by science.

Haeckel found himself in the world situation in the sense of the naive naturalist. What science presented to him was the truth. And the truth is both good and beautiful to him. He constructs the world of living beings right up to human beings according to "eternal, honorable laws". He radically rejects everything that does not bow to this explanation of the world. He has no time to ponder whether the spirit, drunk with beauty and striving for moral perfection, can find its account in the world built by reason and science. Rather, both are self-evident to him. Tolstoy and Nietzsche are different. They could not find their ideals in the new world situation from the outset. In both of them the old Christianity lives on as the basic mood of their being. Tolstoy believes that man can only feel happy in actions that are inspired by a genuinely Christian attitude. It is not the truth of science, but love, such as pure Christianity achieves in man, that can lead to the highest satisfaction. Truth must be subordinated to love, reason to goodness. What is the point of all science with its explanation of the spirit according to "eternal, honorable laws", since this spirit rests firmly and securely within itself and must acknowledge the primal law of love as its essence, without all science? Before all scientific research, the spirit knows its essence. Tolstoy fights the scientific confession because he believes that it degrades the spirit to a mere natural being, because it wants to recognize it from the outside, since it is closest to itself and finds its essence within itself. Tolstoy therefore preaches a return to a truly Christian view of the spirit. The spatial and the temporal belong to science. But the spatial and the temporal are sinful. It is precisely in overcoming the spatial and temporal that the spirit must find its essence. When he comes to the conviction that his individual existence is sinful and that he can only find his bliss in the love of the universe, then man has reached his goal. Never has this view been described more captivatingly than by Tolstoy in the novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". Dying, man comes to the conviction that existence is always full of injustice. This conviction gives death its deepest meaning. One dies with the confession that one can only live unjustly. Thus, dying, one overcomes existence and justifies it by declaring it null and void. He who dies as an esteemer of life does not die with the true, human confession. Death is the annihilation of individual existence, and only he who believes in the justification of this annihilation at the moment when this annihilation actually occurs dies with the truth in his heart.

There can be no greater contrast to this glorification of death than Nietzsche's drunkenness of life. For Nietzsche, too, the material world governed by "eternal, honorable laws" has no value in itself. He harbored this attitude in every period of his life. The Christian contempt for material existence is in him. Like all of us, he carries it in his blood. But just as Tolstoy wants to build his higher Christian world beyond this one, Nietzsche wants to build a blissful but no less temporal one within the unsatisfactory temporal one. He begins by contrasting Christianity with Greekness. And in Greek he sees the embodied world of beauty, of the strong, ideal enjoyment of life. The world can only be endured as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a manifestation of art. Whoever can transfigure the world through beauty is a true human being. Nietzsche also wants to overcome the immediate life of everyday life; however, he does not want to overcome it through death, but through a higher life. And when Nietzsche immerses himself in modern natural science, he does not become its opponent like Tolstoy, but rather detaches from it what can be useful for his philosophy of the highest enjoyment of life. He develops the superman from the human being. The purpose of existence should not be what is, but what can become. And it makes Nietzsche drunk with enthusiasm for the "eternal, great laws", because he can say to himself: they develop the superman from the human being, just as they developed the human being from the worm. The temporal, the real, albeit the future-real, becomes the content of Nietzsche's wisdom. And can one imagine a sharper contrast than Tolstoy's longing for death and Nietzsche's drunkenness with life, as expressed in the idea that all things, as they are today, will return eternally?

So Tolstoy's view of the world is completely reversed when we move from him to Nietzsche. What is an end becomes a means. The great geniuses of mankind: Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Christ are the great teachers of mankind for Tolstoy. They should sacrifice themselves for others. For Nietzsche, all other people are only there in order to reach the great spirits via a detour. Humanity must sacrifice itself in order to produce from its bosom a few great individuals who are there for their own sake. Anyone who values existence as Nietzsche does can probably think like this. This existence has all the more value the more enjoyment of life can be sucked out of it. The great enjoyers of life best fulfill the goal of existence. For their sake, this existence seems justified. Not so for Tolstoy. The great enjoyers of life are the worst victims of the vain, worthless existence, if they do not enter into the service of universal love, which brings redemption to all men from the earthly, vain existence.

Thus, the three strange representatives of our contemporary education stand opposite each other: the naive truth researcher Haeckel, for whom everything old must perish because the new truth is destined to triumph, the prophet of goodness Tolstoy, who wants to lead a true Christianity into the souls of his fellow human beings, which should make them overcomers not only of the old Christianity, which clings to nothingness, but also of science, which is just as attached to nothingness, and Nietzsche, who also wants to overcome the old Christianity, but wants to form a higher humanity out of the spirit of the new science, which overcomes the void in the earthly, because within this earthly it finds the truly valuable, which is worthy of enjoyment, which is not contemptible despite its temporality and spatiality, because it represents the highest content of life. Beauty and genuine enjoyment of life are to him what good is to Tolstoy, what truth is to Haeckel.