A New Book about Atheism

In 1910, Fritz Mauthner published a “Dictionary of Philosophy”. In this book, he arranged in alphabetical order a variety of reflections on concepts that are commonly discussed in philosophy. The light in which these concepts are placed is the one that the author believes he himself and the world lit years ago in his “Critique of Language”. Now two volumes of a new work by Fritz Mauthner are available: “Atheism and its History in the West” (1922, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart and Berlin).

If one does not want to be unjust to Mauthner through the use of language, then when discussing his works, one must first see from them themselves the way in which he uses certain words. One begins to read “The History of Atheism”. The first sentences of the “preface” are: “So that the reader does not have to wait until the last section of the fourth volume to get to know the ultimate goal of this work, I want to make a confession right here; I would like to lead those who trust me to the bright and cold heights from which all dogmas appear as historically developed and historically transient human ordinances, the dogmas of all positive religions as well as the dogmas of materialistic science, from which heights faith and superstition are equivalent concepts. What I am trying to offer between the lines of this devastating book, my credo, is a godless mysticism that may compensate for the length of the path of doubt."

The ‘language critic’ Mauthner could give you a little tap on the knuckles if you were to make any comments about this ‘creed’ without further ado. He could say that one is simply “dependent on language”. And if, as he does on one occasion, he adds the sentence: “... language, which also includes shared customs and science,” then he could even give you a rap on the knuckles.

Therefore, I will first look up a writer who has written a “dictionary” to see what he himself has to say about “belief” before I comment on his “creed”. Now I turn to page 438 of the first volume of the “Dictionary of Philosophy”. This is where the article on “sex” ends and the one on “happiness” begins. There is nothing about “belief.” Belief is in a certain contrast to “knowledge.” So I look on page 582 (of the second volume). But there “feelings of value” are followed immediately by “miracle.” “Knowledge” and “science” have no articles of their own in this philosophical dictionary.

If I wanted to express an opinion on this, it would have to be pedantic in any case. I have opened this dictionary too often and read it again and again to know that the language critic Mauthner discusses “less important” terms with “more important” ones. And so I look up “truth”. And there it says on page 543 (volume 2): “The awareness that faith also refers to the absurd is perhaps most crassly expressed in a Catholic writing that quotes Paulus Sarpius... But this contrast between faith and knowledge of truth or knowledge is not bridged only by the word history of the English truth. I will note here that our glauben (old high German giloubon) is virtually identical with geloben, and that this geloben, in its oldest provable meaning, is a praise reinforced by ge, to approve. Perhaps a translation of probare. Yes, the only thing that is based on it, when you declare a judgment to be true, when you say yes to a sentence and not no, is already contained in this old vow or believe. In the Nibelungen, to praise, to vow means much the same as our to become engaged, that is to say, to solemnly say yes."

But now I am in the same situation that I have been in countless times when I have opened Mauthner's dictionary and read this or that article. I wanted to read about the “thing”; I was immediately referred from the thing to the word for the thing. One word discussion followed another word discussion. It went from the extraordinarily ingenious to the abominably philistine, from the certainties of established knowledge to the often comically daring. And then – the end. The “thing” was lost in a flood of word explanations.

While reading Mauthner's works, Nietzsche's book about David Friedrich Strauß, the philistine and writer, kept coming to mind. And I always forgave myself for this thought. I had something to “forgive”. Because I appreciate a lot about Mauthner: a great knowledge, an often healthy judgment, a courageous expression of what he means, and much more. But I could “forgive” myself, because Strauss, whom Nietzsche exposed as a “philistine,” was also a man worthy of esteem.

If I am not to think that Mauthner, in making his “creed,” actually means that he wants to—in the sense of the Nibelungen language—praise his view, “solemnly say yes to it, then I do not get very far with his own “explanation” when I am supposed to form thoughts about what he wants to say “between the lines of the devastating book” about a “godless mysticism”. But even then it is not easy, if one leaves aside for the time being the “building up” that is not in the book and sticks to the “tearing down”, of which there is so much in it.

With this “demolition,” Mauthner is only a child of his time. It has lost all power to move from abstract thinking to a truly experienced soul content. And only such a content also leads to a spiritual world content. One must first find the spiritual reality in the soul; then one attaches oneself with one's own spirit to the spirit of the external reality. If one knows thought only as abstract thought, which merely depicts a reality, then one must lose the spirit of the world. For in mere abstraction there is no path leading from the mental image to reality. Mauthner has now developed this disease of the time in his own particular way. He does not content himself with examining thought as other sceptics do and then showing that thought is powerless to grasp the “true world”; he fixes his attention on the words in which thoughts are expressed. He cannot find in words the “things” that others cannot discover in abstract thoughts. In his own way he can search for every thought in the words through which people have ever striven to approach a reality under the compulsion of experience. He finds the thought shimmering in the words, and can then say: everything slips your mind when you try to draw a “reality” out of a word.

But in doing so, one bypasses the entire experience of reality. You examine the labels of reality and say: there is no reality in these labels. — Yes, but couldn't Mauthner now reply: that's exactly what he wants to show. He wants to say: people think in words and thus believe they have “something” of the real. But they have nothing real in words.

I wonder whether Mauthner ever fully considered how miserable humanity would be if it had something real in words, or even just in thoughts, in his sense. You would see not the horse, but the thought, the word of the horse. And through this thought, this word, which one placed before the eye of the soul, one would be in the same position vis-à-vis the spiritual as someone who held an opaque disc in front of his physical eyes and thus could not see anything of the physical things. How good it is that one does not need to see anything real in the words; with their help, one can see what they describe.

Mauthner allowed his time to educate him to become a skeptic. Now he wanted to ground skepticism even more deeply than others. He did this by moving from the deeper region of the soul, the thoughts, to the more superficial region of words. He went completely in the wrong direction. He wanted to descend through an urge of his soul and let himself be driven upwards by the spirit of the time.

And in this sense, he has now really and truly decreed “God”, “soul” and much more away from “reason” in his latest book, if one understands it in the sense challenged by Mauthner, by criticizing the word-ideas “ of God”, “ of soul” and so on. On 1250 large pages, one experiences the words in which “God”, “soul” and so on were spoken in the Middle Ages, in modern times, and also in ancient times; and in the fabric of words, one is led everywhere over that which people experienced as “God”, as “soul”.

But Mauthner can also say: yes, that is precisely it, that one should come to reality in a different way than through words, or, as he likes to emphasize again and again, through word superstition. After all, it should not just come down to de-divinizing reality, but to prepare the way for a “godless mysticism” through this de-divinization.

Mauthner has written thick books in which it is important to be guided by what is written in the lines to what is written between the lines. A “godless mysticism” is supposed to be there. It is no wonder that nothing is there. For what should be there if not “words”? But these would have as little relation to reality as those written in the black lines.

I must confess that I have always sought this “godless mysticism” between the lines of dictionary articles. But I confess with shame that I have only ever seen white paper there. Because when I had finished an article about something or other, during the dance of words the ground had disappeared for this “something”; one no longer walked, one “flew”. But this “flying” was quite windy; because one noticed that one had lifted oneself up by one's own hair like a famous “personality”.

And so one flies through the 1250 pages of Mauthner's History of Atheism and also over most of the spaces between the lines. And in the end one realizes that the procedure described above did not lead to “flying” after all, but that one remained nailed to the starting point. But one has seen, even if only in the “reflection of the words,” many interesting, witty, courageous things. And one can do that even if one does not make any headway intellectually.1I am interrupting the publication of the reflections that formed the content of the French course at the Goetheanum with this essay. But I see in what has been said above an episodic transition from the considerations of supersensible knowledge to the presentation of the supersensible regions of the world themselves, which is to be the subject of the publications of the last four numbers. Perhaps, if one also reads this episode, one will find that what is to be said later does not hang in the air as it might seem.