{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p091-p102","extent":"range","passage_number":91,"through":102,"paragraph_count":12,"first_locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p091","last_locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p102","lang":"en","edition":"AP1973","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"title":"VI. The Age of Kant and Goethe","date":null,"location":null,"alignment_confidence":"low","alignment_reason":"count_diverges","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["AP1973"]},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null,"word_count":22399,"original_word_count":null,"may_be_abridged":false},"site_heading":null,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p091-p102","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p091-p102.json","lecture_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06#p091","word_count":2052,"quote_safe":true,"passages":[{"passage_number":91,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p091","text":"This is Fichte's judgment in his *Contributions Toward the Corrections of the Public Judgments Concerning the French Revolution,* which appeared in 1793. Should not the most valuable energy in man, his power of knowledge, be directed toward this *one* purpose of complete independence from everything that is not we, ourselves? Could we ever arrive at a complete independence if we were dependent in our world conception on any kind of being? If it had been predetermined by such a being outside ourselves of what nature our soul and our duties *are,* and that we thereby procured a knowledge *afterwards* out of such an accomplished fact? If we are independent, then we must be independent also with regard to the knowledge of truth. If we receive something that has come into existence without our help, then we are dependent on this something. For this reason, we cannot *receive* the highest truths. We must create them, they must come into being through us. Thus, Fichte can only place something at the summit of his world conception that obtains its existence through ourselves. When we say about a thing of the external world, “It *is,”* we are doing so because we perceive it. We know that we are recognizing the existence of *another* being. What this other being is does not depend on us. We can know its qualities only when we direct our faculty of perception toward it. We should never know what “red,” “warm,” “cold” is, if we did not know it through perception. We cannot add anything to these qualities of the thing, nor can we subtract anything from them. We say, *“They are.”* What they are is what *they* tell us. This is entirely different in regard to our own existence. Man does not say to himself, “It is,” but, “I am.” He says, thereby, not only *that* he is, but also *what* he is, namely, an “I.” Only *another* being could say concerning me, “It is.” This is, in fact, what another being would *have* to say, for even in the case that this other being should have created me, it could not say concerning *my* existence, “I am.” The statement, “I am,” loses all meaning if it is not uttered by the being itself that speaks about its own existence. There is, therefore, nothing in the world that can address me as “I” except myself. This recognition of myself as an “I,” therefore, must be my own original action. No being outside myself can have influence on this.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":421,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p091","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":92,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p092","text":"At this point Fichte found something with respect to which he saw himself completely independent of every “foreign” entity. A God could *create* me, but he would have to leave it to myself to recognize myself as an “I.” I give my ego-consciousness to myself. In this way, Fichte obtained a firm point for his world conception, something in which there is certainty. How do matters stand now concerning the existence of other beings? l ascribe this existence to them, but to do so I have not the same right as with myself. They must become part of my “I” if I am to recognize an existence in them with the same right, and they do become a part of myself as I perceive them, for as soon as this is the case, they are there *for me.* What I can say is only, my “self” feels “red,” my “self' feels “warm.” Just as truly as I ascribe to myself an existence, I can also ascribe it to my feeling, to my sensation. Therefore, if I understand myself rightly, I can only say, I am, and I myself ascribe existence also to an external world.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":195,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p092","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":93,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p093","text":"For Fichte, the external world lost its independent existence in this way: It has an existence that is only ascribed to it by the ego, projected by the ego's imagination. In his endeavor to give to his own “self” the highest possible independence, Fichte deprived the outer world of all self-dependence. Now, where such an independent external world is not supposed to exist, it is also quite understandable if the interest in a knowledge concerning this external world ceases. Thereby, the interest in what is properly called knowledge is altogether extinguished, for the ego learns nothing through *its* knowledge but what it produces for itself. In all such knowledge the human ego holds soliloquies, as it were, with itself. It does not transcend its own being. It can do so only through what can be called living action. When the ego acts, when it accomplishes something in the world, then it is no longer alone by itself, talking to itself. Then its actions flow out into the world. They obtain a self-dependent existence. I accomplish something and when I have done so, this something will continue to have its effect, even if I no longer participate in its action. What I know has being only through myself, what I do, is part and parcel of a *moral world order* independent of myself. But what does all certainty that we derive from our own ego mean compared to this highest truth of a moral world order, which must surely be independent of ourselves if existence is to have any significance at all? All knowledge is something only for the ego, but this world order *must* be something outside the ego. It must be, in spite of the fact that we cannot know anything of it. We must, therefore, *believe* it.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":299,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p093","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":94,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p094","text":"In this manner Fichte also goes beyond *knowledge* and arrives at a *belief.* Compared to this belief, all knowledge is as dream to reality. The ego itself has only such a dream existence as long as it contemplates itself. It makes itself a *picture* of itself, which does not have to be anything but a passing picture; it is *action* alone that remains. Fichte describes this dream life of the world with significant words in his *Vocation of Man:*","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":79,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p094","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":95,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p095","text":"> There is nowhere anything permanent, neither within myself nor outside, but there is only a never ceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any *being,* not even of my own being. *I, myself,* do not know at all, and I am not. *Pictures* are; they are the only thing that is, and they know of themselves after the fashion of pictures; hovering pictures that pass by, without anything *that* they pass: interconnected through pictures of pictures, pictures without anything that is depicted in them, without meaning and purpose. I, myself, am one of these pictures; in fact, I am not even that but only a confused picture of pictures. All reality is changed into a strange dream without a life of which to dream, without a spirit to do the dreaming; it changes into a dream, which is held together by a dream of itself. *Seeing*—this is the dream; *thinking*—the source of all beings, of all reality, which I imagine, of *my* being, my strength of my purposes. *This is the dream of that dream.*","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":176,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p095","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":96,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p096","text":"In what a different light the moral world order, the world of belief, appears to Fichte:","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":16,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p096","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":97,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p097","text":"> My will is to exert its effect absolutely through itself, without any tool that would only weaken its expression, in a completely homogeneous sphere, as reason upon reason, as spirit upon what is also spirit; in a sphere to which, however, my will is not to *give* the law of life, of activity, of progression, but which contains this in itself. My will, then, is to exert itself upon self-active reason, but self-active reason is will. The law of the supersensible world accordingly would be a *will. . . .* This sublime will, therefore, does not pursue its course separated from the rest of the world of reason in a detached fashion. There is a spiritual bond between the sublime will and all finite rational beings, and the sublime will itself *is* this spiritual bond within the world of reason. . . . I hide my face before you and I lay my hands on my lips. What you are for yourself and how you appear to yourself, I can never know as surely as I can never become you. After having lived through a thousand spirit worlds a thousand times, I shall be able to understand you as little as now in this house of clay. What I understand becomes finite merely through my understanding it, and the finite can never be changed into the infinite, not even through an infinite growth and elevation. You are separated from the finite not by a difference in degree but in kind. Through that gradation they will make you into a greater and greater man, but never into God, into the infinite that is capable of no measure.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":277,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p097","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":98,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p098","text":"Because knowledge is a dream and the moral world order is the only true reality for Fichte, he places the life through which man participates in the moral world order higher than knowledge, the contemplation of things. “Nothing,” so Fichte maintains, “has unconditional value and significance except life; everything else, for instance thinking, poetic imagination and knowledge, has value only insofar as it refers in some way to the living, insofar as it proceeds from it or means to turn back into it.”","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":83,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p098","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":99,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p099","text":"This is the fundamental ethical trait in Fichte's personality, which extinguished or reduced in significance everything in his world conception that does not directly tend toward the moral destination of man. He meant to establish the highest, the purest aims and standards for life, and for this purpose he refused to be distracted by any process of knowledge that might discover contradictions with the natural world order in these aims. Goethe made the statement, “The active person is always without conscience; no one has conscience except the onlooker.” He means to say that the contemplative man estimates everything in its true, real value, understanding and recognizing everything in its own proper place. The active man, however, is, above everything else, bent on seeing his demands fulfilled; he is not concerned with the question of whether or not he thereby encroaches upon the rights of things. Fichte was, above all, concerned with action; he was, however, unwilling to be charged by contemplation with lack of conscience. He, therefore, denied the value of contemplation.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":172,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p099","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":100,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p100","text":"To effect life immediately—this was Fichte's continuous endeavor. He felt most satisfied when he believed that his words could become action in others. It is under the influence of this ardent desire that he composed the following works. *Demand to the Princess of Europe to Return the Freedom of Thought, Which They Have Heretofore Suppressed. Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness 1792; Contributions Toward the Correction of the Public Judgment Concerning the French Revolution 1793.* This ardent desire also caused him to give his powerful speeches, *Outline of the Present Age* Presented in Lectures in Berlin in 1804–5; *Direction Toward the Beatific Life or Doctrine of Religion,* Lectures given in Berlin in 1806; finally, his *Speeches to the German Nation, 1808.*","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":124,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p100","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}},{"passage_number":101,"locus":"GA 18/p01c06/p101","text":"Unconditional surrender to the moral world order, action that springs out of the deepest core of man's nature: These are the demands through which life obtains value and meaning. This view runs through all of Fichte's speeches and writings as the basic theme. In his *Outline of the Present Age,* he reprimands this age with flaming words for its egotism. He claims that everybody is only following the path prescribed by his lower desires, but these desires lead him away from the great totality that comprises the human community in moral harmony. Such an age must needs lead those who live in its tendency into decline and destruction. What Fichte meant to enliven in the human soul was the sense of duty and obligation.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"word_count":124,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/18/p01c06/p101","witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. 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An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}],"witnesses":[{"lang":"en","edition":"AP1973","is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"first_passage":1,"last_passage":154,"passage_count":154,"word_count":22399,"completeness":{"ratio":null,"band":"no_original","note":null}}],"aligned_witness":{"status":"no_other_language","note":"No German witness of this unit is served."}}