64. Characteristics of Paul Asmus's Worldview

The fact that Paul Asmus sought the secrets of existence at the ethereal height of pure thought is the defining characteristic of his research. What underlies things as their essence is revealed in the thinking human being. This fundamental view of German philosophical idealism is also Paul Asmus's. The thoughts that a person has about the starry sky are also the order, the inner lawfulness itself, on which this starry sky is based. When I think, it is not just me who speaks, but the things within me express their essence, that which they actually are. Sensuous things are, as it were, only parables of their ideal essence; and human thought grasps this essence. In his essay 'The Ego and the Thing in Itself', Paul Asmus writes: 'Let us imagine a lump of sugar; it is round, sweet, impenetrable, etc. These are all qualities that we comprehend; only one thing we have a notion of something absolutely other, something that is so different from us that we cannot penetrate it without losing ourselves; from whose mere surface thought recoils in awe. This one is the unknown carrier of all those qualities; the in itself, which constitutes the innermost self of this object. Thus, Hegel correctly says that the whole content of our representation is only an accident to that dark subject, and we, without penetrating into its depths, only attach determinations to this in itself – which, after all, because we do not know it ourselves, also have no truly objective value, are subjective. Comprehending thought, on the other hand, has no such unknowable subject to which its determinations are mere accidents, but the representational subject falls within the concept. When I comprehend something, it is present in its entire fullness in my concept; I am at home in the innermost sanctuary of its essence, not because it has no essence of its own, but because the necessity of the concept, which appears subjectively in me and objectively in the thing, compels me to reflect its essence after it. Through this re- flection, as Hegel says, the true nature of the object reveals itself to us at the same time, just as this is our subjective activity. —"

Anyone who expresses his or her belief in such a sentence has placed himself and his thinking in a true relationship to the world and reality. Through observation we get to know the periphery of the world; through thinking we penetrate to its center. Contemplation within ourselves solves the riddle of existence for us. The thought that flashes up in me is not only of concern to me, but also to the things about which it enlightens me. And my soul is only the arena in which things express themselves about themselves.

To understand this, however, man must have thought as an element of life, something that is as much a reality for him as the things that he encounters and can grasp with his hands are a reality for the undeveloped man. He who can grasp nothing in his ideas but shadowy after-images of what the senses tell him does not understand what thinking is. For in order to penetrate to the essence of things, thinking must be filled with a content that no external sense can provide, but that flows from the spirit itself. Thinking must be productive, intuitive. When it then lives not in fantastic creations, but in the bright clarity of inner vision, then the world law itself lives and moves in it. One could well say of such thinking: the world thinks itself in the thoughts of man. But for this it is necessary that man experiences within himself the eternal laws that thinking gives itself. What people usually call “thinking” is, after all, only a confused imagining.

The fact that Paul Asmus has risen to the point of view of pure thinking, living within itself and giving itself its own necessity, makes him a genuine philosopher. And the fact that he handles this self-directing thinking with such clarity and naturalness makes him a significant philosopher. The philosopher knows selflessness in thought; he knows what it means to let thought arise within. He knows that in so doing he rises above mere opinion, which originates in the arbitrariness of the human will, and that he ascends to the summit of intellectual necessity, through which he becomes the interpreter of world existence. Theosophy demands strict control of thought from its disciples, so that they strip away all arbitrariness, all erroneous thinking, so that no longer they, but rather the things speak through them. Hegel's school was also a school of thought control. And because so few people really practice thought control, and because even very few of those who call themselves philosophers know what it is about, so many must misunderstand Hegel. Paul Asmus is one of the very few who have understood Hegel. What he has said about Hegel are pearls of philosophical insight. Anyone who reads and understands Paul Asmus's short essay 'The I and the Thing in It' will gain more than he could from studying the bulky philosophical works of authors who talk about the fundamental questions of knowledge and have never acquired the basic condition for such participation: a strictly controlled, intuitive, productive thinking.