New Perspectives

Robert Hamerling's reflections also move in a direction that finds its justification in the viewpoint of seeing consciousness. From the human “I” that thinks itself, he leads his observation over to the “I” that experiences itself in thinking; from the will that works in man, he leads his observation over to the world-will. But the “I” that experiences itself can only be seen when, in soul experience, an awakening within spiritual reality occurs; and the world-will penetrates into our knowledge only when the human “I,” in experience, grasps a willing in which the “I”, does not make itself a point of departure but rather an end point, a goal, in which it directs itself toward unfolding what occurs within the world of one's inner life. Then the soul lives into the spiritual reality in which the motive forces of nature's development can also be experienced in their actual being, Passages from his Atomism of Will like the following show how Hamerling's reflections lead to a sense that one is justified in speaking of this kind of awakening of the “I” that knows itself to be within the spiritual world: “In the half-light of bold mysticism and in the light of free speculation, this riddle, this wonder, this mysterious ‘I,’ interprets and grasps itself as one of the countless forms of manifestation in which infinite being ( Sein) attains reality, and without which the ‘I’ would be only a nothing, a shadow,” And: “To want to trace a thought in the human brain back to the activity of thoroughly lifeless, material atoms remains for all time a vain and foolish undertaking. Material atoms could never become the bearers of a thought if there did not already lie within them something that is of the same nature as the thought. And this original something, which is related in nature to living thinking, is also without a doubt the atoms' true core, their true self, their true being ( Sein),” With this thought, Hamerling does confront the viewpoint of seeing consciousness, but with mere inklings of it. Certainly, to want to trace the thoughts of the human brain back to the activity of material atoms does remain “for all time a vain and foolish undertaking,” For this is no better than wanting to trace back the mirror image of a person merely to the activity of the mirror. But in ordinary consciousness thoughts appear, after all, as the mirroring—determined by the material element of the brain—of something living and full of being that works with power in these thoughts. but unconsciously as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Only from the viewpoint of seeing consciousness does this “something” first become comprehensible. It is that real element in which seeing consciousness experiences itself, and to which also the material element of the brain relates like a picture does to the being that is pictured. On the one hand the viewpoint of seeing consciousness seeks to overcome the “half-light of bold mysticism” by the clarity of a thinking that is logically consistent in itself and that has full insight into itself; on the other hand, it seeks to overcome the unreal (abstract) thinking of philosophical “speculation” by a cognitive activity that in thinking is at the same time the experiencing of something real.