Fourth Lecture

The other point is: What about today's view of the spirit? This view of the spirit today is something that floats very, very much in abstractions. You can best follow this if you take one or the other philosophy. It does not matter which philosophy you take. You can take a philosophy that is half confused and rambling in words, like Eucken's; you can take one that rests on somewhat firmer foundations, like Liebmann's; you can get involved in one that speaks more to the popular consciousness, like Schopen and so on: in the philosophies and world views of the present day, there is talk of spirit; if the philosophies are not purely positivist, like the Comtean one we recently got to know, if they are not materialist, then there is still talk of spirit among philosophers. But what is it that is talked about in the philosophies, and what is called spirit from today's soul constitution? Just as that which man draws through natural phenomena like a net by assuming a certain material and energetic order makes the view of nature an illusion, so everything that is said about the spirit in current popular belief is basically a hallucination, and the usual philosophies are actually only a sum of unrecognized hallucinations. Basically, the human being today is constituted in such a way that when he looks towards nature, he hovers between illusion with his soul, and when he looks towards the spirit, he hovers between hallucination. What philosophers dream of spirit, in that they want to construct a certain view of spirit purely out of concepts, is actually only a sum of fine hallucinations, albeit fine ones, but still hallucinations. They are images that arise from the depths of the human being for reasons that we do not want to discuss today, and as such they have nothing much to do with reality.