114. Eduard Kulke “On the History of the Development of Opinions”

When we read the title of this book, we were very pleased. Today we know to a greater extent than in the past that there is a wide field in the realm of human opinions that is subject to constant change in historical development. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his grotesque, nervous and therefore exciting and stimulating way, has made wide circles illogically but effectively aware of this. A history of the development of opinions would now have to show by which laws the changes in human views are brought about, in the same sense as natural science seeks to determine the laws of the transformation of one organic form into another, or history that of one state into another. Of course, we find little of all this in Kulke's book. All that is said about the formation of opinions is that instinct is the source of common opinion, and imagination the source of opinions that differ among individuals and peoples. The needs created by instinct are the same for a multitude of people inhabiting the same region. There is no dispute about the best way to satisfy them. What, on the other hand, is removed from this area is seized by the imagination, and this works differently in different people. In a rather broad way, the text shows how opinions differ with regard to political, economic, social, artistic, religious and scientific matters. Instead of examining the laws according to which one develops out of the other, the author considers how the changing opinions are ultimately transformed into fixed knowledge, into practically incontestable maxims. In his view, this correction is carried out with regard to theoretical opinions at the moment when they become the result of a science and are supported within it by incontestable evidence. With ethical maxims, however, the transition from changeability to permanence takes place when the state formulates them in such a way that the best concern for the common good is combined with the freest mobility of individuality. Thus Kulke has actually only determined the beginning and end points in the history of the development of opinions, but has left the middle, i.e. precisely the area where the laws for the eternal metamorphosis of opinions should be found, completely untouched. The content of this book therefore does not deliver what the title promises.