Second Lecture

Thus, from the effects of agnosticism at the end of the 19th century, one had to ask the fundamental question: What actually happens in human beings when they cognize? — This cognition is obviously an activity that he performs internally; but it is not merely an indifferent activity. It is an activity that is supposed to bring him together with the essence of world phenomena, an activity through which he is supposed to orient himself as to how he stands with his own being within the facts of the world. Is cognition something with which one stands, I might say, like a fifth wheel on a wagon next to the outer world, and is there only something to be found in one's ideas, which form the process of cognition, that is a reflection of outer reality? Or is the process of cognition not merely something formal with which one stands in a corner while the world process takes place outside, through which one allows this world process to be reflected within oneself, so that it would be completely irrelevant to this process whether the human being stands there in the corner and, in addition to everything else that is happening, also forms all kinds of concepts and ideas about this world process through his thinking? In other words: Is cognition merely a formal thing, something that man does for himself, or is cognition something real? Does man stand with cognition as with something real, with a real process in the world as a whole? By recognizing, does one experience something that happens in the world and through the world, and which, only because of the special organization of the world, takes place not outside but within man, so that man himself becomes the scene for important world events that take place on this scene? If the latter is the case, then human beings, with their cognition, are part of a real process in the context of the world. Then they are not a bystander of existence, then they are, in a sense, counted on in the world process; then their organization is such that the world would not be complete if what takes place within them, within their skin, so to speak, did not also happen and did not constitute the pinnacle of world events.