importance in this connection is the fact of the power of so-called
"ideas" in history--the fact that certain aims transcending natural
welfare win power over the whole domain of culture, bind men together
and lift them above their selfish interests. To be sure, in the
movements which arise to carry out these ideas much that is
insignificantly human is introduced; and the interests of individuals
and of classes often largely preponderate, but the origin and the
progress of these movements cannot be accounted for by the merely human;
they are only to be explained as due to man feeling directly within
himself the necessity of spiritual tasks. If he feels this necessity
only under particular conditions, and if it is only for a short time
that it asserts itself at its highest, still it extends its influence
over life as a whole, and is everywhere a unique phenomenon, even when
limited and confused by much that is alien to it.
Further, the fact that whole peoples have developed distinctive national
characters is of importance in this connection. Such a character is
distinguished essentially from all mere participation of common
conditions, not only physical but also psychical, that social life
brings with it. For the development of such a character life must rise
to energetic activity and become unified; there must be an advance
towards a common goal; an active relation must be taken up not only
towards the environment but also towards itself. A national character is
not "given," but is attained through the work of history; it develops
only through common experiences, sufferings, and triumphs: in its origin
and its continuance it involves an elevation above the aims of physical
and social preservation, a development of pure inwardness.
Finally, no inner relation of humanity proceeds from the physical
association of men, from their meeting in a common world. If a vital
whole, a common truth, did not exist within us, all our relations would
be external: we could not follow common aims in life and endeavour or
have common experiences; we could not think and live for one another, or
develop spiritual contents in different departments, such as those of
law and religion, science and art, and give to them a cognate spiritual
character. It is always the presence of a self-conscious reality that
binds humanity together inwardly. We can be as certain in our
acknowledgment of this presence as we can that our experience shows such
an inner unity in important achievements and in the formation of whole
departments of work and other complexes.
With its acknowledgment we avoid the severe contradiction that is shown
in the contemporary estimate and conception of humanity. To our more
dispassionate consideration of things the disagreeable aspect of the
social machinery, the growing sharpness of the conflict, the passionate
eagerness of the desire for more, the inconsistency between the enormous
amount of subjective excitement and the spiritual poverty, are clear.
Logically, this confused and self-contradictory state of affairs ought
to lead to a rejection of the whole, and to a pronounced pessimism. Yet
humanity is regarded as noble and worthy of respect; it is made the
value of all values; the object of our faith and our hope; all our
efforts are directed towards its well-being. And this is done without it
being perceived that thus the basis of experience is forsaken and that
the impression of humanity obtained from experience is bluntly
contradicted: the introduction of an abstract conception seems to alter
everything and to lead to its being regarded as good. In the shattering
of beliefs at least this one has remained: belief in the power of
abstractions. He who would abandon this belief and at the same time hold
fast to the high estimate of humanity must admit that a spiritual world
is active in man, and in so doing acknowledge that man is more than he
appears in immediate experience. Such a one will feel increasingly the
necessity of actively comprehending and definitely distinguishing from
the medley of trivial social concerns every manifestation of a spiritual
world in man. It is not out of society but in conflict with it that
everything great has grown. And yet that which is great is rooted in a
whole of life. Spiritual work must have its basis in this invisible
whole, not in mere society; and from this position it must protest
against the presumptuous claim of society to evolve the spiritual life
of its own power. The community that proceeds from a spiritual union
will be primarily an invisible one; but whether this invisible unity
could not realise itself better and be effective also in the visible
world is a serious and difficult question that continually becomes more
urgent.
If the conviction that we have here given an account of definitely
contradicts the historico-social view of life which was so potent in the
nineteenth century, and which deeply degraded the spiritual life and its
self-conscious and self-determining activity, it by no means fails to
recognise the significance of history and society; and has no intention
of taking up again the mode of thought common in the period of the
Enlightenment. History and society are indispensable means for the
development of the spiritual life in humanity: from mere individuals and
from individual moments it could attain neither content nor power. But
to declare for this reason that history and society are the generating
basis of the spiritual life was a definite error; though in the
historical movement of the problem it certainly finds an explanation and
an excuse. The higher estimate of history and society has grown up on
the basis of Idealism; to Idealism the spiritual life seemed to live and
first to attain to its complete truth in history and society. Later on,
attention and activity were diverted from a world of thought chiefly to
the world of sense; and with this change history and society lost their
spiritual foundation and their animating soul. Nevertheless, their claim
to produce the spiritual life remained; they were expected to achieve of
their own power more than was possible even with the greatest exertion.
In truth they can bring forth spiritual contents, and serve the
development of the spiritual life within man, only under the
presupposition of the presence of a transcendent spiritual life. At the
same time their achievement in the combination of forces and in the
production of spiritual results is a witness to the reality of the
spiritual life.
(e) _The Elevation of Life above Division_
We saw that the spiritual life attains an independence only if it does
not simply bring about an effect upon a world independent of it, but
produces a reality from itself; concentrates so as to become a reality
itself. At the first glance man seems by no means to satisfy this
demand. For his life, after, in its progress, rising above its initial
stages, in which it was undifferentiated from the environment, is
subject to the antithesis of man and world, of subject and object, and
the divergence seems to increase continually in the course of his
development. The more power the life of the soul wins, the more it
produces a characteristic content, the freer and more active reflection
becomes, the more does the world recede before man, the more definitely
is immediate contact with the world prevented. The gulf is not bridged
by the epistemological consideration that that over against which we
place ourselves must also, fundamentally, belong to our own life, be in
some way included within it: this treatment signifies a removal of the
antithesis to another region rather than an inner transcendence of it. A
genuine transcendence cannot be effected without an expansion and
development of life, evolving new connections which transcend the
division, and lifting us into a sphere above mere subjectivity.
Connections such as these are, as a fact, brought about by an expansion
and development of life; but these connections which in their individual
appearances are evident to all are seldom adequately estimated as a
whole, and in respect of the problems to which they give rise. These
connections are effected in work, in work as a spiritual occurrence. We
have already seen how in work the object loses its alien nature and is
taken up into our own life; we must now follow more closely the process
by which work is extended and deepened; produces a characteristic sphere
of life and establishes a spiritual reality in the domain of man.
At first we are occupied in work with an abundance of individual tasks
that have no inner relation to one another. But the more work advances
from an external contact with objects to an inner change of them, the
more necessary is it that these tasks should be unified so as to form a
whole; and that each task should have its position in this whole, and
represent in itself a particular aspect of the whole. The proof of
greatness in a "work" is just that the nature of the individual aspects
is determined fundamentally by their relation within the whole; that
what is characteristic in the work as a whole is manifested even in its
simplest elements; thus, for example, every independent thinker has
particular views with regard to the nature of the fundamental forms of
logical thought such as the concept and the judgment; in the same way
every independent artist creates his own language of forms. Work not
only leads to a unity of life in the case of individuals; but, further,
without a union of individual forces for a common end, without an
organisation of all human work, we should stand defenceless in face of
the infinity of the world, and we could never advance to a state of
culture. In such community of work man creates a new sphere of existence
for himself; he forms his world of work and sets it in contrast to
everything which does not come within it. This world of work transcends
the individual; and yet it is our world; it is sustained by human power
and, directing and forming, reacts upon man. For, the more unity this
world of work acquires and the more control it wins over the object, the
more definite departments and relations it evolves in itself, the more
does it manifest characteristic laws and methods which, with superior
power, prescribe to human activity its nature and direction, but which
can originate nowhere else than in the domain of man. And so within the
domain of man we rise above all caprice and subjectivity: since the law
of the object determines man's work, his life is raised above the
antithesis between soul and object. Work is not something that man,
essentially perfect, undertakes incidentally and as something
supplementary, but it is that through which he first develops a
spiritual life; through which he acquires a spiritual existence; and the
character of the work determines at the same time the nature of this
existence. As the individual departments of work evolve characteristic
modes of thought and conviction, so out of work as a whole a particular
spiritual nature arises which does not exist in relation to a world
external to it, but contains within itself a world formed by its own
activity. All this, in conformity with our fundamental conviction,
involves the implication that man is not a spiritual being from the
beginning, but only has the potency to become one.
Such a raising of the aim which is set to work involves an increase in
the amount of toil that it necessitates, and the dangers which are
incurred: the object and the encompassing life are subject to these
dangers. For the complete success of work and the formation of a genuine
self, it is as necessary that the object be taken up entirely into the
process of work as that there should not be another vital unity more
ultimate than the self which grows up in the work, but that the self
should form the final conclusion: whatever is not taken up into the
process of work lessens its content, weakens its power, endangers its
truth, and prevents just that from being achieved which is here in
question. If, however, we consider the opposition that arises at
different points, genuine work is seen to be a high ideal, an infinite
task which even in favourable cases is only approximately fulfilled. At
the same time it is a witness to the sway of elevating and modifying
powers within the domain of man.
The object is concealed from man chiefly by his own inclination to treat
himself as the centre of reality; to transform the environment into a
reflection of his own being; and to measure the infinite by the standard
of his own well-being. Along with this humanising of the environment,
man develops the most diverse forms of occupation with it, but however
far such occupation may be extended, it does not lead man beyond his own
domain; it does not aid him in his spiritual progress. It is possible
for occupation upon the environment to aid spiritual progress only when
things attain an independence, and from this firmly resist the tendency
of man to represent them in accordance with his subjective wishes. Only
such independence of the objective makes it possible for it to arouse
new powers in man and for his life to be based on something deeper than
immediate feeling and desire, and to begin an inner transformation. But
this movement has various levels which differ distinctly from one
another; and from the position of a higher level it is difficult to
regard the achievement at a lower one as genuine and complete work. The
Modern Age with its exact research often cannot regard the work of early
natural science as work of high value. A similar gradation is evident in
the striving for happiness; for the raising of human well-being. So long
as endeavour is directed to attaining and preserving mere subjective
states of feeling, and so long as a movement beyond this subjectivity is
not acknowledged to exist within man himself, and the requirements of
this movement are not satisfied--as is the case with Epicureanism and
Utilitarianism--endeavour, earnest as it may be, does not acquire the
character of spiritual work; it does not essentially advance life, and
therefore in the long run does not satisfy human needs. Epicureanism and
Utilitarianism with all their results inevitably become insipid and
empty to him.
If there are powerful hindrances to this endeavour for something more
than the subjective, there is at the same time a wealth of movement
which bids defiance to them, and the course of history shows continuous
expansion and development of this movement; it shows that man is able to
take up a conflict against the trivially human, and, in the building up
of a new world, to raise himself essentially above his original
condition. Exact science breaks away from the object of perception,
removes it to a distance, analyses it there, ascertains its laws, and
then restores it in changed form to men: in this it also advances human
life in itself, in that thought rises more freely above perception, and
a system of pure thought sustains the whole world of sense. A further
divergence between the struggle for physical existence and the building
up of a new world appears in history in the endeavour for happiness and
a significant content of life. In the experience of humanity, morality
and religion, looked at inwardly, assume two fundamentally different
forms. On the one hand they are looked upon as a mere means to support
man in a given world; to bring him into congenial relation with the
world; and so to organise this world that it may achieve as much as
possible for human well-being. This form governs human experience at its
general level, and easily comes to be regarded as the only form. At
higher levels of creative activity, however, a totally different form
made its appearance: there was a break with the whole world of sense and
well-being as though with something intolerably narrow, and in a
self-conscious life a new world arose and brought forth characteristic
contents; the appropriation of this world raised life above all mere
particularity and subjectivity; at the same time this appropriation
became an infinite task and work for man and for humanity as a whole. If
this form of religion and morality has been manifested with complete
clearness only at high levels of life in history, from these heights
this form has also exerted an influence upon the rest of life, animating
and raising it; indeed, it is only this genuine conception of religion
and morality which first gives to them an independence and a value in
themselves. Thus, notwithstanding the inadequacy of human achievement we
cannot but recognise that life transcends mere subjectivity and the
separation that it involves.
In another direction complexities arise in that something objective is
evolved and established which, however, is not brought sufficiently into
relation with life as a whole and united with it. Then, work may
progress within its own province constantly and vigorously, but it loses
touch with our soul; we do not realise or develop ourselves in it. With
all the feverish tension of individual powers work is then inwardly
alien to us, and its power over us may become a heavy oppression.
Through such a detachment from life as a whole work loses soul and is
nothing more than mechanical; in short, we have all those results of
division between work and soul which we may feel with particular
acuteness in the contemporary state of culture. Experiences rising from
this division lead us to demand that work shall be so organised as to be
capable of taking up life as a whole into itself, and with this of
becoming our true self. Again, life as a whole cannot enter upon work as
complete, for then it would force something alien upon work, and by this
pervert it; life as a whole can be evolved only from the unification and
elevation of work itself. We do not begin and carry on work as a fixed
individuality, but we form individuality first through work by the
continual overcoming of the opposition of subjective disposition and
object. Spiritual contents are not produced by a communication of
something that is in itself complete to something else that is in itself
complete, an interaction of disposition and object; rather must we say
that genuine work sets both sides in motion and with elevating power
unites them in a single life. So understood, every movement which tends
to the development of spirituality in individuals, peoples, ages, and
finally of humanity as a whole, is a witness to the possibility of a
transcendence of this opposition, of the emergence of a reality within
the life-process.
We cannot give work a spiritual nature in this way, and make it the
instrument of a new reality, without being compelled to acknowledge that
there is much less genuine work among men than we are accustomed to
assume. On the other hand, we must also recognise that the little that
there is signifies much more, and indicates much greater advances of
life than it is usual to admit. Nothing differentiates individuals and
ages more from one another than the extent to which they take part in
genuine work; the degree to which they transform their life in such
work. Mere reflection and good will can accomplish very little in this
matter; without an energetic nature, a strong inner disposition with a
definite tendency, as well as the favour of destiny, not much can be
achieved. What is usually called "life" is only a will to live, a
straining after life; it yields but an outward appearance and a shadow
of life: genuine life is first brought forth by that transformation.
But the less human existence in general immediately includes genuine
work, the more indispensable is it that there should be firmly rooted
tendencies to such work in the basis of our being, and that these
tendencies should be developed to greater clearness of form and to
greater effect in the work of universal history. So that our work may
not be split up and destroyed, we need definite syntheses that establish
a structure of life. On the one hand we must accomplish an analysis into
individual tendencies and departments of life which, operating
independently, generate life; and on the other hand we must find a unity
of endeavour among these tendencies and departments; a movement from one
to another; a common activity directed towards the building up of a new
world. These syntheses must be an immediate experience at each point;
they must be involved in all division of work; everywhere set
distinctive tasks; produce characteristic achievements; and in energetic
organisation of existence elevate it to the level of a characteristic
system of life, full of power, which presses forward to further
development. Only thus could a movement originate which might expand to
a real whole and be capable of establishing this whole against the world
as it is for immediate experience; only thus could humanity defend
itself against the power of the environment and of destiny.
Experience alone can decide whether our life contains such syntheses,
and whether by means of them it forms a whole: the movement of universal
history shows that there are such syntheses. The natures of these
syntheses give to the chief epochs of culture their distinctive
characters, by which the natures of their elements and of the relations
between them are determined; and man acquires a definite relation to
the world and can make a judgment upon it. Such a synthesis, with its
life-penetrating and life-forming power, certainly contains some truth;
it is not a product of narrowly human reflection and imagination. The
course of time and the changes of history, therefore, cannot simply
break it down completely; rather with the truth that it contains such a
synthesis elevates life above time into the eternal. But it has not been
demonstrated that life is capable of only one synthesis, or that it may
not produce a variety of such: life does not necessarily realise its
unity in simply establishing a single synthesis; it can seek unity in
the supremacy of a chief synthesis above others. That experience in our
own sphere of culture shows the latter to be the case we intend to
indicate in a few lines.
A characteristic synthesis first made its appearance at the height of
classical Antiquity. It was art, chiefly plastic art, that determined
the nature of this synthesis. Form as a unifying and systematising power
is at the centre of life, takes possession of matter and organises it,
transforms chaos into a cosmos; and in this exercise of power it
realises itself, even though its fundamental nature is regarded as
transcending all change and variation. Spiritual work is formative and
selective; it is the triumphant realisation of form; it is necessary
that life in all its stages of development should be permeated by this
formative spiritual activity. There are numerous independent centres of
life, but the tendencies from each are towards the realisation of the
whole, and find their perfection in it alone.
Thought, independent of the world, must extract from the medley of first
impressions permanent forms, and unite these into a consistent
representation of the whole; it finds the acme of its achievement in
bringing this representation clearly to consciousness in a form that is
complete and free from subjective addition. In conduct, an organisation
and a unifying of the elements so as to produce a harmonious effect is
the chief thing. From the chaotic mass of individuals, the state by
constitution and law forms a living work of art, a differentiated
organism. For the individual the chief matter in conduct is to bring the
diverse forces in the soul into the right relation of order and
gradation, to reach the highest of all harmonies, the harmonious life.