Fourth Lecture

Now it is not easy to cultivate a sense of reality, especially when it comes to spiritual matters, because more often than not we are dealing with mere playing with concepts, with playful dialectics. And what appears as an external illusion is, as soon as it enters into the moral and spiritual life of human beings, very apt to foster the illusionary. Man always tries to theorize about certain things. He tries to theorize about good and evil, about freedom or necessity; one could say that man is actually terribly inclined to theorize about the most important questions of life, that is, to indulge in mere conceptual play. And what one encounters today here and there in discussions of world views actually only runs within the dialectic of concepts. People are even deceived about this, believing that they have concepts, when in reality they cannot have concepts at all; rather, in addition to the concept, they still have sympathies and antipathies for certain concepts and against certain concepts, and according to one's sympathies and antipathies, a person then forms this or that conceptual context and the like. But I do not want to dwell on that. In the vast majority of discussions of world-views, which are a game of concepts in questions, a disregard of reality is inevitable.