10. Knowing and Human Action in the Light of the Goethean Way of Thinking

It will not do to assume higher forms of existence than those belonging to the world of ideas. Only because the human being is often not able to comprehend that the existence ( Sein) of the idea is something far higher and fuller than that of perceptual reality, does he still seek a further reality. He regards ideal existence as something chimerical, as something needing to be imbued with some real element, and is not satisfied with it. He cannot, in fact, grasp the idea in its positive nature; he has it only as something abstract; he has no inkling of its fullness, of its inner perfection and genuineness. But we must demand of our education that it work its way up to that high standpoint where even an existence that cannot be seen with the eyes, nor grasped with the hands, but that must be apprehended by reason, is regarded as real. We have therefore actually founded an idealism that is realism at the same time. Our train of thought is: Thinking presses toward explanation of reality out of the idea. It conceals this urge in the question: What is the real being of reality? Only at the end of a scientific process do we ask about the content of this real being itself; we do not go about it as realism does, which presupposes something real in order then to trace reality back to it. We differ from realism in having full consciousness of the fact that only in the idea do we have a means of explaining the world. Even realism has only this means but does not realize it. It derives the world from ideas, but believes it derives it from some other reality. Leibniz' world of monads is nothing other than a world of ideas; but Leibniz believes that in it he possesses a higher reality than the ideal one. All the realists make the same mistake: they think up beings, without becoming aware that they are not getting outside of the idea. We have rejected this realism, because it deceives itself about the actual ideal nature of its world foundation; but we also have to reject that false idealism which believes that because we do not get outside of the idea, we also do not get outside of our consciousness, and that all the mental pictures given us and the whole world are only subjective illusion, only a dream that our consciousness dreams (Fichte). These idealists also do not comprehend that although we do not get outside of the idea, we do nevertheless have in the idea something objective, something that has its basis in itself and not in the subject. They do not consider the fact that even though we do not get outside of the unity of thinking, we do enter with the thinking of our reason into the midst of full objectivity. The realists do not comprehend that what is objective is idea, and the idealists do not comprehend that the idea is objective.