On Truth and Actuality

Biocentrism: Essays on Metaphysics and Characterology

By Ludwig Klages, translated by J.D. Pryce

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ON ACADEMIC PSYCHOLOGY AND CHARACTEROLOGY

The following reflections have a certain significance in the history of psychology; the school-methods of psychology that are here criticized still persist in wide circles even after the expiration of many years: for these reasons we give what bears upon these points in much the same shape as before.

Suppose one were to ask of psychology what would be the minimum of knowledge to which it ought in fairness to offer a key: for example, what has been the nature of the change in mind since the classical period; the distinction between civilized and "natural" man; of what vital facts the ruling religions, the various castes, and the different races are the index; what constitutes a statesman, a priest, a strategist, artist, or scientist; what are the laws which govern jealousy, greed, or selfishness; how to lay hold of a man’s enduring characteristics behind his changing actions, and how to lay hold of the true motives behind the mask of his politeness: suppose that these or similar questions were asked, then the inquirer would not only be disappointed by the tendency of our day. He will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that he has been asking in the wrong quarter. For to his disappointment he would hear of sensations, perceptions, imaginations, judgments, strivings, acts of will, feelings—in short, of the commonest characteristics of mental existence, or of the nature of our organs of sense (the admirable nature of whose physical structure is not disputed). He would be instructed in the method whereby conclusions are drawn; how something is remembered; how concepts are formed; and his study of history, law, or religious consciousness, of the forms of mental sickness, or his interest in understanding practical life would be enriched but little more than would be the botanical studies of a lover of flowers who should be instructed that these are spatial bodies fixed in their places, capable of growth, requiring certain food, and dependent upon light.

We do not desire to combat modern psychology and its openings (some of which show promise): the more so, as we shall invoke its assistance successfully more than once in the course of our argument. But, for reasons that will be touched upon later, it is certainly not what its etymology implies it to be: for it is not a science of soul. Nevertheless, we are fully aware of what modern psychology has accomplished, and of the analytical training, hitherto perhaps without parallel, which it introduced. In this connection the name of Theodor Lipps must be recalled. Quite undeservedly he has been forgotten, and in fact it is a difficult matter to do justice to this thinker. Of the results that he reached, hardly anything remains, apart from some discoveries about the observation of space and the psychology of metrics. He had a tendency to view actuality as the phenomenal manifestation of a transcendent "world-ego," a tendency that bears the imprint of the reigning liberalism of the 1860s, and so restricts his vision that one is tempted to say that it is bounded by his desk. But within a horizon that, so to speak, is spaceless, he has an eye of microscopic power, and this eye is actually turned inwards. If the Psychologie of Wundt, with all of his reading, is compared with any of the works of Lipps, it will be abundantly clear after a perusal of a few sentences that the latter practiced genuine psychology, even if it is no more than the analysis of the contents of consciousness, while the former practiced everything under the sun, but never psychology. (To put it somewhat forcibly, one might say that Wundt’s psychology consists in the fact that he tosses in the adjective "psychological" half a dozen times on every page). In short, although his world-view has already been forgotten, Lipps alone—so far as we can see—among the popular professors of the last generation was enabled by his method of self-examination to anticipate and prepare a way for the study of appearance, which now has once again become practicable. In order, however, to give a name to his merits in this connection, we would recall that it was he who, with an accuracy hitherto unattained, taught how to distinguish that connection of facts of consciousness to which self-reflection bears witness and, again, their demonstrable dependence upon the peculiar characteristics of the conscious entity, from that causality by whose aid we make calculable the sequence of processes in the world of things; and that he, at any rate, prepared the explanation of the assumption of causality by applying to extra-spirituality a certain manner of experiencing, namely, that of the activity of the will that causes action (his Bewusstsein und Gegenstände is especially valuable in this regard).

However, we feel that the time has come to remember that the course upon which modern psychology as a whole has entered never leads beyond a somewhat restricted range of questions; that it is possible to treat its subject by other methods; and that it runs the risk of exposing itself dangerously if it persists in raising those foolish objections to a loftier conception of psychology, the commonest of which will be disposed of now.

Under the influence of the curious belief that its favorite concepts--that sensations, imaginations, feelings, and the like—are the psychically simple data, atoms, so to speak, of which the mind is properly composed, psychology believes that it ought to reject as premature and unscientific any dealings with questions of characterology. We do not now ask whether it was ever seriously hoped to solve the problem that lies, for example, in the name of Napoleon, by analysis of processes of thought and of the commonest estimations of value. The objection in any case is invalid. For nothing is less immediately "given" to observation than the fact, simple enough in the meaning of modern psychology, of the perception of red. A red ball a yard distant from my eyes appears very different to a child and to an old man; to myself when rested and when tired; to instantaneous and to protracted observation; to a hungry and a full man, or to a merry and a sad one; it appears different under changing illumination, and if placed before a white, green, or red background; quite apart from the fact that unconscious—if not conscious—comparison is required in order that the same or even a similar redness shall be recognized in a raspberry, the evening sky, red wine, blood, a brick, a tiger lily, and a coral. Redness, and even a redness more closely determined, is a structure of thought; it is extracted through the elaboration of contents of perception, but it is not itself a content of perception; and whatever we might succeed in establishing with regard to the perception of red, it would never furnish us with a brick with which to build personality.

But even if it were a conceivable task to translate personality into the language of such universal concepts as must be developed in order to elucidate the processes of perception, this still would demand the closest acquaintance with personality. Once we possess this, we may perhaps be able to derive peculiarities of personal color-perception, and to test experimentally the correctness of our conclusions; otherwise we look for them in vain from any theory of color-perception, however perfect. The case is similar to that of cytology, for it is certain that most of the processes with which that science deals belong to categories which are proper partly to physics and partly to chemistry, but which are much more complicated, from the standpoint of those sciences, than any chemical processes known to us. Here, too, then, a warning might be made against the study of cells on the ground that chemistry is not yet sufficiently advanced in order to cover with its formulae all the phases of germ-formation, cell division, etc. Fortunately, man’s search for knowledge has disregarded such out-of-date impediments: with the best results it has made the cell the center of a science of its own, which even now toys with a resurrection of the vis vitalis.

The concept of a cell can be defined as exactly and unambiguously as that of light, sound, heat, magnetism, chemical affinity, etc.; and it demands to be considered independently, because it appears as the medium of those innumerable processes the totality of which we call life, and which we must know before we can undertake their interpretation in terms of physics.

A comparison of the cell with the soul seems relevant in more than one sense. Like the cell, the soul is the substratum of certain processes of the inner life, of which the modern analysis of the facts of consciousness reveals little more than would be revealed of the life of a cell by a consideration that should demonstrate in it the laws of physics and of chemistry. Naturally the concept of a cell, like that of character, is reached through abstraction. But it would appear inconsistent with natural thinking to use the vital processes merely to illustrate chemistry, and similarly it must cause surprise and even amazement that the "science of the soul" does in fact do something quite similar, in neglecting all the qualities of character, and eliminating the nature of the substratum, and finally allowing validity only to those which remain as differential signs of mental existence. We ask with astonishment how it was possible, before making any attempt at the exploration of character, to proceed towards that maximum of abstraction that was so hostile to man’s original interest in man. This remains to be explained later, and we now already remark that the unnatural direction of this development is the reason why today the science of psychology and the soul-skilled wisdom of all times and peoples are strangers to one another. But although the former direction may perhaps be justified, still the latter is closer to real life; a deeper need requires it and it admits of an unlimited progress. The dangers that threaten a scientific treatment of its material, as opposed to the objections that we have refuted, are due to the inclination to plant the ruling notions in the ground that is to be freshly ploughed. But here we touch upon, and negate, certain instructive excrescencies of modern psychology.

The more it was believed that unanimity existed about the fundamental facts of consciousness, the more attention was paid to the differences which must in the nature of things subsist in the capacities of individual minds for imagination, apprehension, striving, and the like. It was hoped to effect a reversion of the process, and to construct a kind of individual psychology from permutations and combinations of the universal characteristics. But here it appeared, as was inevitable, that the crucial question was unknown, and that the means for solving it were lacking. First, it was overlooked that it is not the distinction in these processes (a distinction which generally is unimportant) that is the goal of investigation, but the permanent disposition, which may be discovered through the distinction, but not through it alone. At this point a new branch of psychology was hatched that bore the name of "differential psychology," which is about as reasonable as to call cytology a differential chemistry, or optics, acoustics, and thermics, a differential mechanics! A wrong track was inevitably reached, which led not to personality, but through a weary waste of its disjecta membra, scattered abroad (so to speak) in the shape of degrees of sensitiveness, operations of association, comprehension, of observation, combination, judgment, and reactions--showing no law which might unite them, and still less the "spiritual bond".

At the same time the experimental method, whose validity in the mental sciences generally is open to doubt, was applied to the sphere of characterology, where it is entirely useless. The inevitable constraints even in neutral experiments for testing perception, judgment, and reaction may modify the mental disposition of the medium and invalidate the result; all security must vanish when it is no longer permissible to neglect the peculiarity of the object, since it is precisely this uniqueness that is to be ascertained. (French investigators made their own contribution to the confusion when they meticulously avoided the traditional nomenclature; they then made the grand discovery, based on descriptions by pupils of pictures shown to them, that there are some four types of apprehension: the descriptive type, the observational type, the emotional type, and the learned type!) It must, moreover, be considered whether experiments can ever teach us what we ought to know first of all--whether a man is envious, covetous or devoted, whether faithful and true or capricious and flighty, whether of a happy disposition or gloomy, brave or cowardly, bold or timid—and what is the nature and operation of these and similar qualities.

The wrong formulation of the question produced a corresponding fiasco all along the line in the results—which we would pass over in silence, but for the fact that it seems more fitted than any other datum to reveal the traditional limitations of the modern handling of psychology. We select as our example no obscure light, but an authority rightly acknowledged by everyone. Kraepelin is a student who must be treated with great respect in his special field of psychopathology; he is also a master of the art of clinical classification. As fundamental qualities of personality he posits capacity for training, for stimulation, and for fatigue. (More exactly, we would present the following categories: capacity for performance, for practice, for retention of what is practiced, special memory, capacity for stimulus, for fatigue, for recovery, depth of sleep, capacity for distraction and for habituation). That is, the difference, for example, between Diocletian and Gregory VII must be reduced to differences in capacity for training, stimulation, and fatigue! Criticism is superfluous.

From this not only the fundamental strangeness to the facts of life of this kind of thought is obvious, but also its particular interest. The question here is not the qualities of personality, but the inner causes of its effectiveness. And even effectiveness is not estimated in its totality, for if it were, then initiative, inventiveness, intuition, and everything else that borders on the sphere of creative impulses would have to be investigated: here the only quarry is, the conditions of power to work; as indeed is proper to an age which has long grown unaccustomed to the view of great individualities, and has replaced nobility of blood by the dubious honor of professional fitness. Man, as such, is no longer seen or known, but only an intellectual mechanism, the servant of an external purpose, and having for criterion a hypothetical "end".

This end was unknown to other ages. A Renaissance busied with psychology might perhaps have considered a man’s faculty of action as worthy of investigation; a mediaeval period, the strength of his faith, a classical period—in part, at least—his capacity for happiness. Such traits have lost their value for the modern psychologist; they are not even regarded at all, and industry has remained as the only virtue, accompanied by its satellites, ambition and success—a complex, that is, which the Greeks and Romans would never have hesitated to relegate to the lowest of men, to pariahs and to slaves.

Others may applaud an advance to sober poverty: this is certain, that science should remain neutral, and turn a deaf ear to the suggestions of an ochlocratic idealism. But instead, it is completely hypnotized by the latter’s standards of value, and the practical nature of its apparatus is completely in harmony with a tendentious partiality in the impulses which point the way. But this does not apply to psychology alone, but to all of the philosophy of the last centuries, in so far as it is attached to names traditionally famous. The development, briefly, was this.

After the Reformation had undermined mediaeval piety, morality appeared as the true kernel of Christianity, and now it appears to be more potent than any idolatrous form of superstition. From it not only all systems since the beginning of the modern period received a moral tincture—atheism most of all—but also it governed the exploration of the facts of the natural and mental sciences, which to this day denies neither in method nor in results its origin from the Christian dogma of the kingdom of God. But spirituality without metaphysics becomes a faith in reason and finds itself referred, both in truth and in error, to the two foci of logic and utility—otherwise known as the "good".

We do not, of course, here follow the development of rationalism, or the belief in the essential rationality of the world-process; which would mean to write the history of spirit from a wholly novel point of view; we only mention what is essential for an understanding of the development of psychology. After the first assault of mechanistic thought, which was naturally directed against the universe, and won those great conquests of physics (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Huyghens, Newton) which the nineteenth century could do no more than to perfect, there followed a self-reflection of the organ of thought, mediated by the question of the range of the use of understanding and the reasons for the inviolability of its results. The self-analysis of reasonableness, which sometimes took a speculative and dogmatic, and sometimes a purely analytic turn, was given the somewhat too narrow name of "critique of cognition"; and, since Kant, no small credit was taken for a renunciation of metaphysical desires. Now modern psychology in all of its manifestations is a particular form of this critique of cognition. Its object is not man, but rational man, i.e., a being which can think logically and act in a utilitarian manner; and the mainspring of its investigation is not an interest in life—which is the proper province of psychology—but in the capacity for thinking and willing—which is that of logic.

But in view of the singleness of its fundamental aim, it is of little importance whether it finally masters its tasks with or without "soul," whether it attributes great or little importance to the gray matter of the cerebral cortex, and whether it clings to experiment or devotes itself to the art of definitions. Among the unpleasant results we shall always find an amazing ignorance of the urges and passions which, as "lower," are hardly considered worthy of notice; helplessness in the face of the unconscious, or the psychical substratum even of reasonable actions, of which for years we learned nothing save the vague "laws of association"; uncritical acceptance of moral judgment, which at the least encourages a superficial classification; a foolish misinterpretation of every non-social human type as a differential form of unnatural "sport"; and complete failure before the problem of individuality or the inner multiplicity of times, peoples, castes, strata of culture, and of everyday life. In part it commands respect for its achievements in its critique of cognition and its masterly analysis of the processes of apprehension, but it appears as the sickly offspring of average common sense when it is taken as what it professes to be—a science of the inner life. The entire achievement of the so-called "science of psychology" in this respect is outweighed by a single page of Goethe’s or of Jean Paul’s; and it is impossible to evade the bitter truth which Novalis had already pronounced when he says that this so-called psychology is one of those false idols which have usurped that place in the sanctuary where the true images of the gods should stand.

However, even today the "inner life" is somewhat deeper than it appears in the mirror of psychology, and consequently it gives individual impulses to the investigating mind which lie beyond its general considerations: in reality, therefore, it has not achieved the first thing which might rightly have been asked of it: to establish a critical foundation of the "sciences of the spirit". Philology, historiography, ethnology, psychiatry, and practical knowledge of mankind alike looked to it for help in vain--as was shown at the beginning—and therefore in time a new treatment of the material must come to the front which, while retaining the more exact knowledge of the processes of cognition, makes it its task to understand the whole wealth of forms of the life of the soul.

Nevertheless, such a treatment lacks neither precedent nor yet a certain tradition, even if we neglect the sages of all times and peoples who never practiced psychology in the intellectual sense. The impulse of psychological investigation is most active in that epoch of German spiritual life that is called Romantic, whose later period contains the name of the physician and thinker Carl Gustav Carus. It suffices to mention this name, which, though not the greatest, yet denotes a man in whose nature the roaming element of those days found a caution prudent enough to allow it to condense into a doctrine that still awaits elaboration and extension, instead of exhausting itself in prophetic imaginings. But the research of Carus, and similar essays of contemporary minds, together with many fruitful germs of the thirties and forties, was swept away by the course of development, so that now the chain must be linked afresh and across a gap of time.

All this could not be done with so sure an eye for every elective affinity without the mighty achievement of that man of the most recent past whose coming, even if it allows of no new hope, still crowns with a proud luster the decline of man—the achievement of Friedrich Nietzsche. Reasons, the analysis of which would here lead us too far afield, cause the ardor of metaphysical intuition to feed in him almost exclusively the stream of criticism, giving it a piercing quality never reached before. The instrument of his prophetic power is the gift, armed with the arrows of acutest understanding, of "discrimination of spirits." For the first time since the Middle Ages, and in the more familiar forms of the most immediate present, he furnishes us with an example of that millennial flower, the great piercer of souls and reader of spirits, who, unlike the poets, does not bury under flowery meadows of fanciful sentiment the outlines of fire-born truths. It would require a separate section, if justice were to be done to his significance for a possible future psychology. (We have since written a whole treatise on this subject: Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches, J. A. Barth, Leipzig). Here we merely state a fundamental fact, and now pass over to the next discussion by designating the essentially psychological attitude by that symptom which emerges most clearly especially with Nietzsche.

The real scope of his philosophy is the devaluation not only of ethics but, further, of intellect, of which, for the first time in the known "history of the world," paradoxically enough, the disposition, that is, in this case, the biological value, is scrutinized, without prejudice or favor, by the eye of spiritual hostility. "That it is false is no objection to a judgment"—a proposition the consequence of which may be followed in its more positive counterpart—correctness alone does not make a judgment valid, truth is no value in itself. Even the organ of thought, whose mainsprings are reasons and causes, proves to be conditioned by its urges, and its criteria are subjective. It is possible to side for or against logic, and (this is Nietzsche’s most important application) the latter is done when we take the side of life, which is unspiritual and non-logical. Life and spirit are distinct, and, as Nietzsche apprehends it, spirit is a diseased form of life.

It is possible to take a further step, and this will be done in the chapter which deals with the metaphysics of the distinctions of personality: and, although the shattered autonomy will be restored, this will be done only to widen the gap until it becomes the fundamental dualism (which appears as a necessity of thought) between life (element, soul) and spirit. In fact Nietzsche continually makes use of this, although he still takes spirit as a by-product and tries to treat it too anthropocentrically—as derailment and lusus naturae. Before him, there was no student of the soul whose analysis, however subtle, did not end with a new "rehabilitation" of man; for example, even the methodical skepticism of Stirner has for its ultimate pole an ideal of personality which (although alien to most) might be described as the "domination of the consciousness of uniqueness". Nietzsche, on the other hand, takes up his position outside man, or, in the most literal manner, "beyond good and evil," as is evidently fitting in one who makes man the object of his study. In this way alone he was able to unmask the envy of life (resentment) at the roots of every moral judgment and to lay bare the atrophy of instinct which, in the guise of numerous "ideals," distorts the view of man—especially of modern man—when he looks upon the world.

We must stand opposed to that which we would understand; this is a necessary condition of all cognition, as the name of object irrefutably proves. We remain within the metaphor (which in fact is more than metaphor) if we add that the survey is hindered if the object is too close and that philosophy rather demands a "distance"; however little we may like a name that since the time of Nietzsche has become a favorite with writers. For proximity fixes the eye upon one point and isolates the object of this contemplation at short range; it leads inevitably to that atomism of thought which was exemplified by the scholastics; whereas distance, as it widens the horizon, demands, so to speak, a roving eye, which opposes to the belief in the isolated entities of the object the totality of an image.

We emphasize the meaning of the word "intuition" as a kind of cognition that is cognate to contemplation; next, there follows the "world-view," which has now become somewhat more rare. The image, or vision, alone rises to the acid test of attention, and compels the spirit with an irresistible force of conviction. But distance causes the incomplete actuality of objects that have been merely "focused" to plunge back into a totality of contemplation; consciousness, whose eye merely distinguishes in the light of common day, borrows from it something of the synthetic foresight of the prophetic eye. The profundity of truth varies with the seeing power of the spirit that seeks it.

The study of the soul concerns itself with facts that in themselves are non-sensuous; the individual finds within himself the material needed in order to interpret them. Consequently the spirit must be able to achieve a relation of exteriority in order that it may experience the personality of which it is a part; in one sense it must dehumanize itself in order precisely to look upon this human quality; and it must even have the skill to remove itself so far from it that the individual traits of the inner life coalesce into an image for it, whence it may read partial characteristics as the corporeal eye reads the position of a particular place on the finished map. But images, whether they be dreamed or perceived, are spatial-temporal actualities. Consequently we state the facts more exactly in saying conversely that a gift for studying the soul rests essentially upon a capacity for seeing in the phenomenal world its meaning. But to see the "meaning" in it means to see the phenomenon symbolically. And indeed it is an implicit trait of the philosopher’s vision, which it shares with that of the artist and poet, that, following an irresistible compulsion, it apprehends things symbolically: herein (in spite of the enormous difference) it resembles the spiritual disposition of the "savage."

Now it is not only the fascinating, but also the essentially true element in Nietzsche’s mental attitude, that he thus sees individual persons as well as entire peoples, cultures, and epochs according to the analogy of pictures. For example, he speaks of the "Nordic gloom" of "haunting thought and thin blood," he calls the southern soul "an abundant fullness of sun and irradiation of sun," and discovers "clumsiness and peasant gravity" in the Englishman: in short, he uses convincing traits of its sensuous appearance to stamp each character, or rather he finds in the visible world the key of the invisible, and draws from the actuality of the symbol its conceptual element.

Formulated as a principle, this means that we must have the whole before we can successfully undertake to study the parts. It is possible, of course, to analyze the former into the latter, but to compose the former out of the latter is impossible, unless the idea that is to guide the process of composition has already been extracted from the whole. New and fruitful thoughts always arise at some point of that profoundest dividing line of the spirit where the symbolism of phenomena ends, and they begin to be symptoms. The Romantic philosophy is wholly dominated by the symbol—by the fact, if not by the concept. The world is taken as a vast symbolic language, which must be deciphered by speculative absorption; we do not observe facts, but look upon their face and ask what vital pulse, what secret constructive impulse, or what evolution of the soul seems to speak in these lines. The doctrines of the growth of plants or of crystals or of cosmic movements are treated as a kind of physiognomics of the universe; and conversely Carus characteristically enough gives the name of "symbolism of the human form" to the physiognomy of man in the title of his chief work on that subject.

This leads us to revert to the importance of the image as a starting point for the study of the soul. In the sense that has been laid down by us, this must primarily be a morphology, or doctrine of the forms, of the soul’s anatomy. But forms in the proper sense are external forms, and no science of the inner life could afford to renounce to be guided by its sensuous manifestations without risking to lapse into amateurishness. We consider the psychological manner of contemplation as not only cognate to the physiognomical, but as fundamentally identical with it. The new intuition, whether reached by the most circumspect thought or by lightning illumination, always has its source in an extension of an understanding of the symbolism of the external world or in the progress of spiritual assimilation of physiognomies hitherto alien. However, we have thus given a shape to the contrast between our own and the traditional point of view that, detached from its place in the logical sequence, would appear as capricious paradox. We therefore meet an impending misunderstanding, and end by throwing light upon this formula (which in truth must be taken literally) from another side.

An especial effort on the part of modern students was needed in order to master the heresy that our knowledge of the inner life is increased by investigation of the nervous system. No more than twenty years ago it was seriously believed that a study of the anatomy of the brain afforded instruction in psychical processes. In proportion as this unphilosophic hope vanished, "pure" psychology grew up by the side of "physiological" psychology, and the provisional thesis of the "psychophysical parallelism" established itself. Our demand that the psychical is to be construed out of its phenomenal form might therefore be misinterpreted as constituting a relapse into a direction to which "pure" psychology stands much closer. For it is not of essential importance that we shall discuss extra-sensual facts in a preponderantly physical, or, on the other hand, in a preponderantly psychological language: the only question is whether such concepts have, or have not, their origin in a view of the totality of the organism. Ganglia, nerves, the convolutions of the brain and the like are, within the body, only disjecta membra, so to speak, as, in the sphere of the inner life, are perceptions, imaginations, processes of sensation, and so on. The symbolism of the body is so far from coinciding with any concepts of the anatomy of the brain that the latter must be completely forgotten if we would reach the former. The soul does not reside in the brain, but in the form, and, if a paradox were permitted, we would recommend in place of a study of man’s nerves, a study of his superficies. We will conclude with a sentence of Novalis, who anticipated the truth here as he so frequently did elsewhere: "The seat of the soul is at the point of contact of the inner and the outer world." [top]

ON THE THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

A trained psychologist will not imagine that he is a doctor, but unfortunately many doctors think that they are trained psychologists. It is certainly true that the State examination in medicine requires a far greater sum of individual pieces of knowledge and skill than a degree with psychology as its main subject, but psychology requires training in a manner of thought which nobody—literally nobody—will command who does not devote a lifetime to it. The psychological fairy-tales of doctors are throughout so poor that one regrets the time spent in reading them. Naturally there are exceptions—most honorable exceptions—but they are too few to make monstrosities like the following unfashionable.

In the first edition of our treatise on characterology (1910), we introduced into the study of individual talents the distinction between the outward- and the inward-looking mind: whereupon two substitute expressions of foreign derivation, viz., "extraverted" and "introverted", were publicized by a certain medical man [C. G. Jung, editor’s note], who attempted to elevate his caricature of characterological typology into a supreme principle for classifying all characters in general. It will come as no surprise that the result, to put it most politely, was nil.

This matter would be of no importance if this pseudo-psychology had not also been connected with an utterly erroneous view about certain mental diseases. In the body of this work we began from depth and shallowness, and this in fact touches only one special case of the spiritual dispositions for directing the view. It is possible to begin from these too, but in that case we shall have to consider whether a shallow or a deep inner life by choice turns outwards, and whether it is a deep or shallow life of the soul which by choice turns inwards. If, further, we distinguish between the possibility of an excessive predominance of one or of the other direction, then the consequence (as anybody can see for himself) will vary greatly in these two different cases. We show by example what distortions result when this principle is entirely neglected.

The poet Friedrich Hebbel—according to a newspaper report of a lecture by a certain psychiatrist—is supposed to have been an introvert, or, as others express it, an "autist," or, as still others probably will say, a "schizoid" character. (We make bold henceforward to use in place of "schizophrenia," a term which wholly misses the mark, the more popular term of "madness," although in the therapeutics of lunacy it is reserved for a more special condition). If we assume that the poet Hebbel’s mentally state was predominantly introverted, we must ascertain whether or not this condition accompanied a rich or a poor inner life. In the former case it would simply be the appropriate mental state, although at the same time it would involve all kinds of oddities and eccentricities, as well as diminished adaptability: whereas, if it accompanied shallowness and sterility, it would be the basis of excessive self-importance, self-reference, and ego-centricity. But we may remark at once that it could in no case be so much as a preliminary to madness. If to be "melancholy" or "mazed" (as it is sometimes called) is popularly taken in the same ambiguous sense in which evidently many doctors take this "introvertedness," this is a last echo of the belief which is widely spread among primitive races that madmen are endowed with a sort of sacredness as being persons elected as the habitation of some dæmon: it thus offers no occasion to the psychiatrist for holding a similar view. Now observance of the distinction between depth and shallowness naturally leads (a) to a confusion of profound Spiritual Life with introvertedness and of introvertedness with profound inner Life, and (b) to the view that introvertedness is a neurotic symptom or even a mild form of insanity. Such views were at one time the particular hobby of Lombroso. But meanwhile the ruling tendency had changed considerably. The "pathographs" were at pains to comfort the Philistines by showing that men of genius are madmen: the modern wisdom prefers to instruct us that madmen are geniuses. Both schools are of equal value—that is, of none. Behind all this there lies the wish (not uninteresting to the student of the psychology of the times) to confuse the boundary between sick and sound, and to whittle down a profound contrast of kind into a mere difference in degree. But in the end even this is a matter of fashion that might be passed over in silence but for the fact that it tends to block the path to the simplest truths. If we take the system of symptoms of so-called "schizophrenia" (erroneously named after the Image of schism, which is valuable in the doctrine of neurosis and psychopathy, but false as applied to insanity), as applicable to the characterization of insanity in general, we shall be unable to understand the facts in the least so long as we cling blindly to such phrases as "introvertedness," "autism," etc. However "introverted" a man may be, this will not cause him to suffer from ideas of reference, or fixed ideas, or hallucinations, etc. And conversely he may so suffer, whether for the rest he is introverted or extraverted. One is amazed to observe how many things men can fail to see once they have put on the blinkers of wrong concepts. If we consider for one moment that the lunatic—that every lunatic—is blind to ordinary methods of conviction (whether by way of the senses or of judgment) in some respect, then no great acumen is required to show us what is the most universal characteristic of the fact of lunacy—of any kind of lunacy: it is that the vitality of the patient is cut off relatively from the common Life of the World. Already Herbart had rightly anticipated this in his own manner: "Those are bereft of reason whose thoughts can no longer be disturbed in their flow by inner or outer contradiction" (Lehrbuch zur Psychologie, 1816, p. 22). It is not the condition that determines the direction of the spiritual view, or schisms in process or perfected, but solely isolation of vitality that can, and must, serve to explain insanity. A sane vitality demands a living contact and interchange with the life of the world. This contact cannot wholly cease, else the man would die of starvation; but what may be called the side of the soul, or, more briefly, the soul-contact, from whatever causes, may be largely interrupted, and this finally to such a degree that we may say that practically it has been removed. This weakness and final lack of contact is the essential condition of any kind of insanity. (We remark merely in passing that this will explain to those trained in biological thought why persons severely afflicted by "schizophrenia" are so exceedingly insensitive to vegetable and mineral poisons. A "madman" may require as much as three times the fatal strength of a sleeping draught in order to obtain adequate sleep.) Once this is known, a good many other things that are fruitlessly discussed today become clear.

Thus, for example, it is probable in a way that a lunatic will more often be introvert than extravert; but nothing prevents us from assuming an extraverted kind of insanity. Indeed, this is certain to occur where the inner life is very shallow. For that severance of which we spoke does not mean that the patient is incapable of further perceptions or is not even, perhaps, greedily set upon fresh objects of perception, but that the connections with the life of the world are interrupted. We need not further explain ourselves on this matter, because whoever reads this book to the end will know our meaning. Further, the schisms may or may not exist by the side of this separation, and this may complicate the manifestation of the disease in several respects; but insanity never consists in schisms. Further, it is obvious from this that a lunatic may have a rich internal life or an extremely poor one. For although a rich soul may be kept from its normal food by reason of extensive severance, still it is far safer than an extremely rich soul, having many contacts, from the danger of spending or wasting itself. Paranoiac types (to resuscitate the old term) when full of life are natures that revolve about themselves and often preserve themselves in an astonishing manner. Hence it may be seen (a) that in principle there is no connection between so-called genius and lunacy, and (b) that it is no longer difficult to find a key to certain abnormal traits in genius, as well as to certain traces of "genius" in madmen. Finally, we may say that the poet as poet, whether he be Hebbel, Kleist, or Hölderlin, is always a man whose contacts with the life of the world are much above the average and that therefore, from the typological point of view, he is furthest of all from madmen. But in spite of all this, the contact need not necessarily be affected by the senses as in Goethe, but may also take place through the agency of magnetism, electro-dynamic forces or fluids which as yet are unknown to physics, and have a more powerful influence over the sleeping than over the waking organism. The poet may dream revealing dreams—dreams, that is, which reveal the world. If now we still see the poet as a man not so very rarely suffering from mental disease, we must not look for the reason in the fact that he is a poet, but must ask what dangers for the person are involved when the soul lies open to life to an exceptional degree. But we must call a halt. It is enough if we have made it plain to the unprejudiced reader how the crude confusions and speculations of incapable writers have obscured obvious facts, to the loss both of psychology and psychiatry. [top]

ON NIETZSCHE, STIRNER, AND THE WILL TO POWER

Nietzsche uses the idea of the "will to power" in order to interpret his view of Frederick the Great, whom he admired. In Jenseits von Gut und Böse he attributes to Frederick the "skepticism of daring virility" which "is most closely akin to genius for war and conquest, and first made its entry into Germany in the shape of Frederick the Great." "This skepticism," he continues, "disdains and charms at once; it undermines and seizes; it has no faith, but does not at the same time lose itself; it gives a dangerous liberty to spirit, but sternly controls the heart; it is the German form of skepticism, which, in the shape of the spirit of Frederick, but developed and raised to its most spiritual form, subjects Europe for a long period to the German spirit and to its critical and historical doubt." But Nietzsche could not be the terrible skeptic and incorruptible self-student that he was without knowing the real facts, although thereby he once more renders doubtful all his triumphs of independence. For in Morgenröte (109), under the heading "Self-control and moderation and their ultimate motive", he develops six "distinct methods to fight the violence of an urge," and then continues: "It is not in our power that we shall will to fight the violence of an urge, nor is the choice of the method in our power, or the success with which it meets. Rather, in the whole process our intellect obviously is the blind instrument of another urge which is the rival of that one of which the violence plagues us; whether it is the urge after quiet, or fear of shame and other evil results, or love. Thus, while ‘we’ think that we are complaining of the violence of an urge, it is at bottom the one urge which is complaining of another; that is, the fact that we perceive that we suffer from such a violence presupposes that there is another urge of equal or greater violence, and that a fight is impending in which our intellect must choose sides." We shall immediately revert to these facts.

Nietzsche was unrivalled in objectifying and illustrating states of experience: perhaps he has given no finer (certainly he has no more vivid) presentation of this racial will, this will for the race’s spread and perpetuation, than in his praise of Genoa (Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 291): "For some good while I have looked at this town, at its country houses and gardens, and the wide circle of habitable hills; and in the end I must say that I see visions of past generations. This region is haunted by the images of bold and self-reliant men....I always see the builder; I see his eye resting on all that has been built around him, far and near, on town, sea, and the lines of the hills; and I see his glance exerting power and conquest; all this he wishes to make part of his plan, and in the end to make it his property by making it part of the plan. All this region is overrun by this glorious and insatiable love of possession and booty; and, as these men acknowledged no boundary in the distance, and in their thirst for something new set a new world beside the old, so even at home each man revolted against his neighbor and invented a means to express his superiority, and to interpose between himself and his neighbor his personal infinity. Each made a second conquest of his country for himself: he overpowered it by his architectural thought and made it an object on which his house might feast its eyes. An admirable cunning of fantasy causes him to desire to found afresh all this, if only in thought; to lay his hand on it and to impress his mind upon it, if only for a moment on some sunny afternoon when his insatiable and melancholy soul is sated for once and nothing may show itself to his eyes but what is his own." Hence precisely it may be inferred how much will to power, that is will, that is spirit, lies in the will to self (we have gone into greater detail on these matters in our Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Nietzsches).

The pride of very proud men is perpetually at war with the urge after appreciation and applause which by natural necessity is part of their own need for self-esteem, and which constantly looks for a solution. But is such a solution possible? Careful reflection shows that with every attempted and every imaginable evasion we only deceive ourselves. It is probably clear why the forms just mentioned of a relative surrender of applause do not really lead out of the circle of the need for esteem. A mere dullness to applause, or a frigid indifference, does not prove that the inner claim to value has been overcome, but only that a certain deafness to its appeal has arisen. But the pathic and dominative natures carry their judge within their own hearts; and his claims are more rigorous than those of the spirit of society, his approval and applause can be spared even less than the applause of group-mates. Both Nietzsche and Stirner were on the search for a solution, and expended the strongest powers of their Spirit upon it; but they, too, achieved no more than subterfuges, which, however, may be counted truly splendid monuments of pride. For Nietzsche, under the stress of the struggle that we have indicated, invented the dictator of values; the "inventors of new values" are, for him, truly autocratic and master spirits. But, although they may be autocratic in the art of invention, they straightway became slaves of their inventions, for no sooner has the new "table of values" been produced than it makes its threatening claims upon him who himself wrote the text upon it. Stirner again declares the whole world to be the property of the one; but cannot escape measuring all opinion by this one opinion: he thus postulates this opinion and despises all those who are the slaves of laws that are thrust upon them. And, if an attempt were made to cling to the consciousness of one’s own uniqueness, a value could be wrung from it only at the price of a suppositious comparability with other unique entities; whereas any uniqueness which was thought to be part of it would have removed it altogether from the sphere of valuation. I am certainly unique, but the fact is not enough to give me the smallest claim to value. From all this it emerges that the fact of ego is indissolubly connected with those other facts, the urge after self-esteem, and the desire for appreciation; and we escape their demands only in proportion to our escape from the ego itself, or, in other words, to an approach to states of ecstasy. The ecstatic man alone knows nothing of impulses of self-esteem and the desire for approval; but this is only because he is no longer conscious of his ego. [top]

ON THE VALUE OF SCIENCE

Before we can hope to answer the question concerning the real value of science, one would be well advised to prepare oneself, paradoxically, by asking another, more basic question, i.e., what does one mean, precisely, by the word "science"? One must also evaluate with some judiciousness the nature and worth of those other extant values with which science competes for preëminence in our lives. When we overhear some naïve soul hold forth with such canting nonsense as "science has already decided…" etc., we must beware that we ourselves do not succumb to the false notion that science, as the highest of all values, is uniquely endowed with the capacity to generate categorically valid judgments, than which one can hardly conceive a more hollow proposition. On the other hand, of course, there have always been those truths that have managed to gain first the interest of and ultimately vindication by the scientific establishment only decades or even centuries after they were discovered. The more apodictically certain the scientist is as to the ultimate validity of the procedure whereby he has alighted upon his experimental findings, the less valid will his deliberations turn out to have been in the final analysis. To an even greater extent, it is the experimental demonstration, or that which gives at least the appearance of being such, that makes of these researches something that most scientists feel fully justified in describing as true science; and the facts are, again, validated for these students when they have properly conducted the experiment in question. They seek some measure of experimental certitude through the utilization of the methodology of quantitative formalism, which, they insist, can provide a solid guarantee of valid results only if the researcher has ignored the influence of personal affects, or emotional stressors, in order to attend to the precise measurement of the quantities that constitute the sole aim of all experimental research. Bearing this notion in mind, the scientist must conform his behavior to the dictates of a code that values nothing in the world more highly than "factuality," for it is this very attention to "factuality" on the part of the researcher that serves as the sole guarantor of the validity of his experimental work. Finally, we are more than willing to admit that every conceivable species of philosophical "irrationalism" currently on the market, whether the "irrationalist" seeks to substitute this brainstorm or that flash of inspiration or some other stray burst of intuitive "insight" necessarily possesses no more inherent truth content than a mere desert mirage or feverish hallucination.

Bearing these observations in mind, let us recognize also that the will-to-objectivity must never be erroneously promoted to the post of automatic guarantor that the student who possesses this invaluable volition will enjoy a successful outcome in every bit of research to which he devotes his time. For one thing, erroneous notions will persistently tempt the student to ignore certain inconvenient realities; one especially troublesome fact that often escapes the attention of the novice is that behind the conscious purposes that he assures himself animate his mind even when confronting the most intractable difficulties, examples of which, of course, will block the path to truth for every researcher at one time or another, other purposes—the "driving forces," to speak the language of characterology—a man’s personal "interests," are oftentimes at work in the subterranean depths of the unconscious, from which emerge the honey-sweet and gently whispered invitations to false philosophy posted by those unconfessed and scarcely recognized messages transmitted by the "driving forces.". Such lures have clouded the will-to-objectivity and thereby compromised the intellectual probity of scientific investigators throughout Western history (one is compelled, paradoxically, to inscribe upon the list of these beguiled and self-deceived sages even one or two who even now occupy—and deservedly so—the very pinnacles of scientific fame). However, the quite savage criticisms that, even as we speak, are being launched against the sciences from every conceivable direction, turn out upon closer scrutiny to be aimed not against science-in-general, but only against the particularly tendentious and ill-considered manner in which science has developed in the post-Renaissance period. The direction that we are pondering has flourished so richly that it has at last become the one and only method that is regarded as universally valid. The inner meaning of this trend was perceived quite only on in the time-frame in question; thus, we find a thinker like Auguste Comte distilling the central doctrine until it has been reduced to his formulaic slogan: voir pour prévoir. It was only what was to be expected that since Comte’s time the orthodox scientist explicitly assures us that he sees his mission to be the ultimate enslavement of nature to the demands of man’s will. It has not escaped the notice of alert students, however, that there is the very species of science that seeks to discover the laws that regulate nature, viz., the analysis of physical forces and chains of causality whose solution is determined through the statistical analysis of the relevant data. The sole imperative governing this approach is the compulsion to quantify the whole natural world in order to constrain its processes under the governance of the will-to-cognition.

On the other hand there exists a radically different perspective on cognition whose earliest as well as loftiest manifestation transpired during the golden age of Greek philosophy, and this achievement exerted a profound influence upon mediaeval scholasticism, although speculative metaphysicians during the Middle Ages were constrained by the crippling influence of the regnant church authorities who coerced thinkers into strict conformity with the superstitions and dogmas of their cult. Man seeks to develop knowledge as to the nature of the world, and he also endeavors to comprehend the forces that function as the foundations of that world; likewise, he is compelled to delve into questions as to the origins of that world, which desires an answer to the question as to whether the workings of world-process has been pre-determined under the constraints of a strict teleology that pursues, in some as yet undetermined manner, an ultimate goal whose attainment has been decreed by destiny, or, on the contrary, whether the world-process had no beginning just as it will have no end, and whose heartbeats pulsate in a rhythmic pattern that alternates between the coming-to-be and the passing-away of cosmic processes and telluric life-forms, a process that is analogous to the ceaseless rhythmic swinging to-and-fro of the pendulum in a clock. Above all, when the initial question as to the primary object sought by the researcher is broached, we find that the experimental scientist, who brags insistently about his wide-open gaze on the real world, suddenly announces that his empire now embraces every conceivable formulation of distinctions which, we are stunned to be informed, must always remain beyond the sphere of man’s non-experimentally-derived competence! How clearly this insight reveals the strange fear that obsesses materialistic scientists, viz., the haunting dread that every estimation of value and quantitative sanity will be shattered to a million fragments at the very instant when we admit the possibility that man may actually possess an intellectual faculty that enables him to make genuine discoveries of a metaphysical nature! The discoveries that have been achieved by scientists who espouse a methodological formalism based upon an alleged universally applicable quantifiability of everything that exists, are no more significant to the goals of genuine science than so many additional tools at the work-site. And it is precisely these "exact" findings that in truth provide the student with nothing more earth-shaking than an advanced yard-stick that should increase somewhat our extant store of cognitive data. On top of that, this whole formalistic methodology has never, and CAN never, succeed in any one of its attempts to engage in research into the mysteries of human consciousness.

If the student should be unable or unwilling in any significant measure to comprehend the broadly sketched outlines that we have drawn thus far he will thereby have prevented his understanding from gaining access to a significant dimension of insight into our exposition of the matter in hand. It is important that we all bear in mind that to the extent that any student involves his thinking brain in scientific research, he has thereby embarked upon a course of activity that he must regard as entailing his trafficking with a substantial reality, viz. "actuality" (G. Wirklichkeit). From our historical studies, however, we know that it was comparatively late in the evolution of human development, i.e., in ancient Greece, or, more precisely, with the advent of Protagoras, that we find individual thinkers undertaking the first truly rigorous attempt to demonstrate successfully, by means of strictly logical procedures, that science could lay just and incontrovertible claims to possess firm foundation in truth’s bedrock. Shortly after that epochal event, and building directly upon that very achievement, the Greeks philosophers worked out a unique and unprecedented mode of research, viz., epistemology (G. Erkenntnislehre), or, to put it more precisely still, "the science of cognition" (G. Bewusstseinswissenschaft), that modality of reasoning or meditating upon processes or acts that examines psychical processes and spiritual acts as elements transpiring within the structured cosmos that houses man and enables him to conduct social action; now science would for the first time be able to shed some light on political man as well as natural process. From these investigations in the fullness of time there developed even more astonishing branches of epistemological research, among which we may mention the "theory of perception" (G. Wahrnehmungslehre). If we seek for an example of the influence exerted by these epistemological advances upon the development of recent science we have no need to look any further than the field of modern Physics (taking the designation "Physics" in the broadest sense of the word).

We have previously expressed certain reservations regarding what seem to us to be untenable and even counterproductive approaches to the larger problems involving the striving for cognitive certitude. Not an insignificant number of scientists have recently responded to the perceived impasse with the novel claim that "actuality," as well as such "truths" that we can pronounce regarding the nature of that actuality, can best be validated on the basis of whatever "works" for us at the time ("Pragmatism" they call it). Many proponents of this "philosophy" occupy their time with Physics, since it is the most cherished conviction of this school that their beloved experimental work, when conducted in the modern laboratory under the most stringent system of controls and safeguards, forms the soundest foundation for any valid research program, whilst also furnishing the student with the one true guarantor that he is doing science in the strict sense of the word. Thus, armed with this experimental sine qua non, he is perfectly prepared to test the truth-content (or lack of such) embodied in a particular hypothesis, and to determine whether or not the suggested hypothesis turns out to be a mare’s nest of flummery or a brilliantly constructed theory that should enable us to discover previously unknown truths. The philosopher of pragmatic school derives additional satisfaction from the seemingly universal inability of rival scholars who seem utterly incapable mounting a credible critique of the claims by Pragmatists that they have, finally and permanently, banished all "wish-fantasies" from the laboratory work and from the refereed journals in which that lab work is preserved, like flies in amber, so that it may be rendered forever beyond reproach or cavil. To this conviction we must respond by insisting that the question as to the nature of actuality is indeed a metaphysical conundrum; the physical scientist have thus far sought to evade our attempts to acquire from their hands certain necessary clarifications regarding these matters, and they have resorted to the completely illegitimate importation of an obviously false doctrine into the debate, viz., their utterly wretched attempt to portray the living cosmos and man himself as if they were mere machines, no more than clanking mechanisms. Now when we scrutinize such highly-ingenious experimental research what we really discover is nothing but thousands of cases and countless instances of "potentialities," every one of which can be formulated as follows: if you perform such and such operations upon the physical force or substance in question, you will inevitably encounter such and such results. But consider for a moment: would we not explode with laughter at the house wife who wanted to define water—without which, admittedly, she could not produce her cakes—as "cooked liquidity"! But we indulge in a similar species of idiocy when we seek to reduce actuality to the status of a mere by-product, or epiphenomenal residue deposited by man’s manufacturing processes, an error that obviously results from the effects wrought by the very governing bias that helped to design the experimental operation in the first place!

We have already alluded to the belief that is so widely entertained by contemporaries that we now stand upon the loftiest peak ever reached by science, although we must qualify that notion by restricting that model of science to the somewhat constricted arena wherein pure cognition and quantitative formalism is monarch of all he surveys. We would be more than justified this once, I am sure, if we were to tap into our small reserves of cynicism at this juncture, however, for we all know that certain very earthly interests may play more than an insignificant part in conducting hostile interventions, to put it politely, into the researcher’s laborious campaign to discover authentic truths. Nevertheless, this insight has been resolutely ignored by the architects of every philosophical system of an idealistic cast since the days of Plato, who ascribed reality solely to his "Ideas," as well as by every builder of mechanistic, or materialist, systems since the time of Democritus, who sponsored his own candidate, viz., "atoms," for the office of most "real" being (subsequent office holders have been "ions," "electrons," and so on, until today we are treated to the ghostly doings of the illustrious "quanta," which feature so prominently in current lectures on "quantum mechanics"). Now we wish to suggest, and we will be excused, hopefully, if we raise this concern this with some vehemence at this juncture, that the proposition that we are about to adduce expresses no more than the absolute truth of the matter in hand: and with the aid provided by our access to the insight provided by this simple truth, we identify the agency whose operations result in every conceivable species of epistemological error as spirit (G. Geist). Every conceivable scientific interest that encourages us to consider "being" and "actuality" as perfect synonyms causes us, to the precise measure that our wishes are permitted to hobble our love for the truth, to decorate the self-mastery of the human spirit with the beautiful plumes that should actually adorn world-creative genius. The object of the idealist thinker cognitive strivings possesses no "actuality" content; in fact, the mill can of course grind corn into corn-meal, if we may employ an analogy, but the situation of the student of the "object" is a dismal one, for his "object" is no more than an unconscious product of the mill—the grinding, destructive mill—of understanding! But what value has this sort of speculation that alone deserves to be designated as the independent will-to-cognition? Indeed, one might even venture to inquire whether this rare mode of scientific apprehension ever existed on earth in the first place!

This style of apprehension has indeed appeared at several junctures in the history of the West over the past three and one-half millennia, just as it has achieved great prominence in the Far East, and, in fact, it has not yet completely perished from the earth even now. It is unfortunately not feasible for me to provide even the sketchiest historical outline of the lives and doctrines of the members of this select group on this occasion. Nevertheless, I will make brief mention of a particular scientist, whose genius was such that his career, even when scanned in nuce, as it were, provides more than sufficient matter for our expository purposes. The man to whom I allude was, of course, the great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He was a poet, an artist, and a sage, among many other outsize accomplishments, although he was certainly not someone whom we could be comfortable in characterizing as a philosopher or even as a comprehensively trained scientist—in the technical sense of those terms, that is; in spite of these facts, it was Goethe alone who was able to envision the prophetic path upon which he would receive that inspired, and inspiring, ability that enabled Goethe to distill the vital essence of the phenomenological approach to the study of nature and to formulate the first draft of a biocentric Weltanschauung, regardless of his own admitted lack of a thorough grounding in the bare facts of the disciplines that he was, nonetheless, to enlarge and enrich with his wisdom and vision as no other contemporary could have done. Therefore, let us choose one of Goethe’s statements that seems to express with a finished flair the type of science to which he was to devote so many of his later years: "Those who seek for truth behind the phenomena are condemned to an expedition in search nothngness—the phenomena themselves are the living truth!" On other occasions, he speaks in a similar vein of the "primordial phenomenon" and a "visionary power of judgment."

We would be wise to remain attuned at all times to detect the return from obscurity of a species of thought that from time to time seems to resurface, although the revivals of this "science of the appearances" ("phenomenology"—in our own strict sense) have been for the most part short-lived and fragile. The biocentric version of phenomenology holds that the images themselves are the reality, and that there is no other vague entity lurking behind the images in order to substantiate their claims as realia—not atoms, not quanta, not ideas, not spirit, and not the laws of spirit. With this in mind, we should proceed to the next stage of our meditations, which takes us to the point at which we are able to comprehend the transitory nature of actuality; if nothing "real" stands behind or beneath "reality," as its ontological or transcendental guarantor, then there can be no unchanging substance perduring within phenomena throughout all of their existential transactions and permutations. Now Goethe was the archetypal man of the eye, i.e., a visually & spatially oriented person without a peer; but there were others, who had diverse styles of vision, among whom we may mention the late Romantic thinkers, and, somewhat later still, Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom we can be more accurately characterized as quintessential men of cosmic rhythms, those seers whose bodies and souls lived in such profound intimacy with rhythmic alternations that their inner worlds were linked with the pulsations of the cosmos without. We must follow these earlier visionaries and incorporate as our guide their ruling-principle that the sole verities are in fact the images and their actuality, for only with this principle held firmly in mind will we be able to overturn the ever-mounting assault of appropriative-purposive mode of thought that has grown into a veritable monster in spite of all that so many obfuscators have done during so many centuries to blind themselves and their pupils to this rock-solid truth. I need not remind the learned reader that no previous methodological reform that has ever been suggested in this area has ever managed to bear wholesome fruit; as a matter of fact, every previous candidate has unfailingly managed to land its champions in a hopelessly tangled web of contradictory propositions and dogmatic quandaries. Of course, we are willing to make an exception of logic, which has, we admit, made some genuine strides in recent decades, although we feel none of our philosophers should be indulging in premature orgies of self-congratulation at this point in time (the student who wishes to probe more deeply into the issues involved here should consult the relevant technical treatises published by the author of these lines), since it is painfully clear already that the path on which philosophy has already set its foot is encumbered by dangerous obstacles that may turn out to be either useless timewasters in the best case scenarios, or—in the worst—may well be wonderfully inviting vistas that lure the student ever further and further down lost highways from which he will never, ever return.

We have already glanced at the "pure" form of the will-to-cognition in comparison with the other, radically distinct, scientific methodology, and our conclusion must be that two species are, in fact, directing their energies toward two utterly discrete realms of actuality, a realization that, in turn, provides us with more than a mere hint that the one variety inhabits an intellectual domain that is incommensurable with the other. We have indicated which of the two paths is passable and which presents certain difficulties. One can, however, when confronted with pointed objections to the "uselessness" of genuine knowledge, respond by framing one’s own questions: why on earth does man wish to acquire wisdom of the genuine sort if the very quest for such knowledge does not, and indeed cannot, in fact, provide him with what he feels to be a significant release from inner distress? And: Might there not exist somewhere else another set of conditions to which we may somehow gain access; and further that in that place those very conditions might permit man to live out a much more complete or fulfilled mode of life than the caricature of life that he seems to have been thus far condemned to serve out as if he were some hardened criminal, by a criminal court whose judge whose sentence was predetermined by the punitive demands of the will to cognition!

At this juncture, however, one must acknowledge the fact that our disputants are no longer seeking a solution to one rather narrowly delimited query as to the value of science. Rather they are beginning to question the very value of thinking consciousness itself, and that question, of course, opens up for investigation a far vaster region of the Geisteswissenschaften to the more analytical and curious natures among us. The particular response that each student will provide to the far more comprehensive query that we are alluding to here is not merely a matter of individuals and their tastes, to be the subject matter of a multiple-choice survey listing fool-fodder questions, the answers to which are be determined by consulting vague whims and transient fancies, and then professionally vetted and "corrected" before publication in the daily rag.

On the contrary, we must realize that in the end we are here dealing rather with science, with spirit, and—with the darker voices and stranger stirrings that have their deepest springs in the power of our will. Therefore, the organism, although it is entitled by all means to its moments of rapture, must also be prepared to ask (and to answer!), among all the other persistent questions that confront it, such a simple query as how this individual is to live and breathe among so many other living beings! For it is certainly the case that in primordial epochs man was not quite the intellectual giant that he believes himself—and with justice!—to be today; and we must also realize that at some subsequent epoch in ("geological") time man will undoubtedly lose once again some significant portion of the power of that renowned brain-box of which he is so proud. In any case, although his primordial-past state or his ultimate-future condition might seem at first blush to imagination’s hazy gaze as a more fulfilling state of being than does our own awkward betwixt-and-between status, we can be sure that were we to experience life at such a, shall we say? compromised niveau, we would certainly judge the experience to have been—at least as we are so constituted at this moment—as an almost inconceivably, unutterably impoverished one. So—let us at least share the hope that such an eventuality may not arrive prematurely, agreed? [top]

THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY

In pondering the "problems of psychology," I will refrain from speaking of the "soul" according to the usages of those persons who have floated a doctrine of psychology whose sole connection with a genuine science of the soul is a matter of mere semantics. These psychologists ordinarily while away their hours investigating the connections that exist between sensory-experience and neurological processes, or else they ponder thinking, feeling, and willing, which are quite discrete processes, although our "psychologists" seldom seem to be able to grasp this fact.

A more authentic concept of the soul has existed since the dawn of western thought, the ramifications of which are founded upon the hypothesis that man’s nature comprises a three-fold, or "triadic," structure whose components are: body—soul—spirit. This doctrine constitutes one of the loftiest achievements of philosophical speculation among the ancient Greeks, and no subsequent thinker who has endeavored to evade the vital truth embodied in this idea of the "three-fold," has met with the slightest success in his philosophizing. In fact, the threefold has been a constant theme throughout the history of philosophy, at times becoming buried beneath obscure formulæ, but nevertheless enduring in one avatar or another from the ancient Greeks, through the Middle Ages, and even beyond that tragic and blind age that convinced itself—as well as posterity—that such metaphysical niceties had, with one fell blow, been rendered obsolete upon the discovery of the philosophical system elaborated by the French mathematician and philosopher Descartes, whose predilection for dualistic schemes encouraged him to devise a doctrine that presented the world and man himself as divided between a bodily, or spatial half, and a spiritual, or thinking half.

There have been several significant campaigns mounted in the post-Cartesian epoch, whose proponents labored to revive a theoretical analogy to the tripartition-scheme advanced by the Greek philosophers. For instance, an unconscious attempt to bridge the gap between ancient Greek speculations and modern thought was undertaken by Goethe himself during the course of his investigations in the field of biology, and these studies were subsequently developed, refined, and systematized by the philosophers of the German Romantic Movement.

In the afterglow of the Romantic noontide, however, the soul either disappeared completely from the precincts of psychological research or it was grotesquely confused with some other entity whose true nature was utterly alien to that of the soul. I believe that I can justly claim, on the basis of the relevant research that I have conducted over several decades, that I have been able to establish the reality of this "three-fold" or triadic division of man’s being upon a rigorous scientific foundation, and I believe also that I have achieved my results with such interpretative exactitude that we can now determine with great precision what proportion of our nature stems predominantly from the soul, what proportion from the body, and what proportion, finally, stems from the spirit.

Wherever we go today, we hear a lot of empty babbling about Urmenschen ("Primordial Mankind"), in spite of the fact that no one has ever encountered such a being. There have indeed been pre-historical tribes (aussergeschichtliche Völker), falsely called "primitives," such as the pre-historical people to whom the Greeks gave the name Pelasgians, whose reign was ended by the great flood that preceded the advent of Deukalion and Pyrrha, and whose descendants became known as the tribe of Deukalion or the Hellenes; and finally we have the historical peoples in the proper sense, to whose ever mounting numbers we ourselves belong.

Nevertheless, that which we have briefly alluded to as the Pelasgian race, was somehow able to transmit a meaningful portion of its influence to the generations that survived its disappearance from the historical record, and indeed traces of this unique culture have endured even unto our own generation, viz., the Pelasgians’ symbols, cults, myths, and other barely intelligible ritual observances. Now for all of the three races that we have mentioned, as well as for the prehistoric tribal groupings, the spirit is consistently regarded as being linked to a particular individual, just as we refer to a particular person’s capacity for reflective cognition. However, we must now thrust this notion of reflective consciousness into the background of our discussion so that we may direct out attention to a very different type of process.

The necessity for this procedure reveals itself most clearly when we attempt to explain just what it is that we feel differentiates man from the animal, and what emerges with crystal clarity when we examine the thousandfold experiences and observations that fill the record is the obvious fact that the animal is devoid of spirit (in the precise sense in which we always employ that word). In fact, the animal organism represents the purest manifestation of the body-soul polarity to be discovered within the natural world. In utilizing the word "polarity" I am drawing attention to a process that is unrelated to the causal nexus, for neither are bodily processes the causes of psychical ones, nor are the psychical processes the causes of the bodily ones. In fact, this falsely dualistic scheme of causality was the very rock upon which Cartesian philosophy suffered its well-deserved shipwreck. There was even less truth, unfortunately, in a later theory that briefly found favor, which held 1) that the psychical (naturally confused with the spiritual!) and the bodily inhabit two completely discrete realms; and 2) in numerous instances, a higher power introduces itself into the human organism in order to establish some type of connection between the psychical and the bodily. The true state of affairs is that the connection between the soul and the body is even more intimate than has ever been suspected, since nothing can transpire on the side of the body that does not coincide with an event on the side of the soul, just as no event transpires on the side of the soul without a corresponding event on the side of the body. In other words: the body and the soul subsist in a polar connection and the most concise formula that we can devise in order to express these relations is: the body is the phenomenal manifestation of the soul, just as the soul is the meaning of the living body. This can also be expressed by analogy: interpretation discloses the lexical meaning of a word, but the word is the external, or phenomenal, manifestation, of an inner meaning.

When we ponder the causal grounds whereby we have established the validity of the substrate-concept, or, to put this somewhat less technically, when we employ our critical judgment in seeking answers as to the true nature of this substrate, we must bear in mind every distinction between essences that we have drawn as well as every definition of terms that we have formulated. Now the body reveals itself in sensuous contacts and in its reaction to such contacts, and this undisputed fact alone conclusively demonstrates that the body possesses only the most tenuous of connections to the phenomenon of distance. The soul, on the other hand, expresses its nature in vision, which enables the bearer of soul to focus upon purposeful behavior in the furtherance of achieving certain ends, just as one’s urges are obviously under the permanent sway of one’s feelings.

Let us introduce an illustration which may facilitate a comprehension of these matters: the stork in Mecklenburg has no need to acquire a road-map in order to undertake the journey of thousands of kilometers that takes the stork back to its African habitat. They are only following instincts, it is often said. However, although instinct is a word that everybody employs, it is in fact a word that conceals far more than it reveals. As we proceed on our everyday round, in the course of which we recognize the world and seek to conduct our affairs within that world, we have allowed ourselves to forget that instinct has its source in an unconscious mode of recognition that regulates with absolute certainty the constitution of its bearer, just as it regulates, to some degree, every terrestrial organism; and we must, of course, include ourselves in that grouping. The foundation upon which are established the bonds connecting an unreflective reaction with a distant goal, is the soul.

Let us charitably ignore the great prejudice that seems to inflate the breasts of those who believe themselves to be endowed with unique abilities due to their status as bearers of soul. However, we mentioned a moment ago that there is a not inconsiderable disadvantage connected with the nature of the animal, viz., the incontrovertible fact that the animal’s inner life is almost completely confined to its drive-impulses, just as the animal is confined to its destined environment under the constraints imposed by its evolutionary station. However, even within the soul of the animal there occurs a rudimentary collaboration between its near-sense (physical contact) and its innate capacity for far-seeing (sense of sight), just as the animal is able to make certain behavioral adjustments or accommodations in response to transformations in his environment, although some organisms, of course, are more accommodating, and hence more viable, than other organisms.

Thus, we come to realize that even the most talented of the animals possesses a capacity for far-seeing that is immeasurably inferior to that of man, and the crucial distinction that has to be drawn between the animal and "primordial man" is that only man is receptive to the ever transforming visions of spaces and times, just as he is indifferent as to whether these visions do or do not originate in his urges. In sharp contrast with the animal, his inner world is that of the far-seeing soul and not that of the narrowly constricted proximity in which bodily contacts (sense of touch) can occur. The development of this far-seeing capacity extends through the millennia, and the details as to the specifics of this development can be no more than rough approximations.

But then something utterly unprecedented transpired, for into the substance of man irrupted the lightning bolt of spirit, i.e., a dæmonic force that invades man and world from a realm outside the spatio-temporal realm. The progressive development of spirit took place by incremental steps that remorselessly potentiated the hypertrophic development in man of goal-oriented volition, conscious purpose, and, finally, the will-to-business. This sinister tendency has now become a blatantly destructive will-to-plunder the living world.

However, at the dawn of history, and for many subsequent generations, spirit existed in a creative symbiosis with the soul. In the course of time the balance of the poles shifted more and more towards the dominance of spirit over the soul. That development has continued all the way down to the present age. Among every people that we consider to be civilized, spirit eventually severs its ties with the soul. Grand ideas and technological discoveries have, of course, produced certain desired results; but these advances have brought a new danger in their wake. Modern man’s conscious striving for power far surpasses that of any previous epoch. Today every nation is drawn deeper and deeper into this striving for dominance, without which each nation believes that it must ultimately perish. I am thinking less of the frightful wars that we must henceforth endure and more of the disturbing fact that within all peoples, this lust for power has so infected the most diverse groups that it has fastened manacles upon life itself. Woman has always been the mother and nurturer of her house, but today she sees herself so over-burdened by the demands of her career that she is threatened with the forfeiture of one of her deepest missions in life, viz., to serve life by becoming the guardian and protector of life and tradition.

One result of this dreadful process is that man is now in danger of losing his traditional connections with his family, just as he is endangered by the conflicts that poison the relations between employer and employee, conflicts that are interrupted by truces that have only just been declared when the rancorous hostilities erupt anew.

In the service of human needs the ever-increasing mechanization has brought about the desecration of the natural world. Just recall how many species of wildlife have been annihilated by man during the last fifteen years alone! And, finally, we must realize that behind all of the obsessive striving for power to which we have alluded, the most gigantic—and at the same time the most destructive—is that for which we can find no more appropriate name than: business [English in the original text-tr.]. While our philosophers drivel away their hours in desiccated dialectical disputations that result in nothing more significant than hairsplitting irrelevancies, money has conquered the world, and there can no longer be any doubt that the vital power whose throne has been usurped by gold, i.e., the soul, is now threatened by imminent destruction.

I became convinced of the validity of these perceptions many years ago, and ever since that time I have sought to communicate my findings in brief essays as well as in comprehensive treatises. However, not even the strict adherence to philosophical principles, which has forced me to proclaim the unvarnished truth about these matters to my readers, will suffice to terminate the dangerous entity that menaces the living organism, for the dreadful things that our eyes can see are but the external reflections of perilous internal transformations that are ravaging the deepest substratum of the living organism. It is precisely at this substrate-level that we situate the destructive operations of that more than human power whose goal is the ultimate annihilation of the soul itself. [top]

GOETHE AS PSYCHOLOGIST

In addition to his genius as a poet, Goethe was also a great sage whose insights into the human soul have assured him a prominent rank among the greatest psychologists in all of history. In this discussion we wish to present a coherent portrait of this man, who is alleged to have been a man whose inner life was marked by innumerable contradictions. We can best achieve our ends only after we have familiarized ourselves with the historical, as well as with the personal, context in which his unique style of thought came to fruition.

Now three concepts ruled the spiritual landscape of Europe during the latter half of the 18th Century: nature, personality, and freedom. In the Francophone sphere, of course, these elements profoundly conditioned and informed the discourse of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in Germany the standard-bearer of these ideas was Herder.

On one side, this constellation of ideas encouraged a love of nature, which was embodied most especially in the cult of the natural landscape; whilst on the other side, there developed a growing emphasis upon the emotional life of man. Thus, the "heart" reigns over the "head," just as melancholy and sensuality are soon dominating the mere reason and understanding.

It is this very obvious emphasis on the priority of the "heart" over the "head" that accounts for the astonishing influence exerted upon European culture by Goethe’s novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther." Likewise, this period saw a marked revival of the conviction that the vital center of the cosmos is located within the stronger personalities, a creed that was also a major component of Renaissance ideology. Once more, the loftiest development of every inherited disposition and talent within a man constituted the pinnacle of life for Europeans, just as ethical restraint and "self-discipline" began to be seen as mere hindrances, roadblocks that could only interfere with the creative unfolding of the vital powers within truly great spirits.

The young Goethe participated, of course, in the revolutionary movement that we know as the Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress"); nevertheless, the young Goethe soon convinced himself that there was also a danger in that chaotic indiscipline of the young disciples of the movement, a danger that might one day wreak havoc on those personalities whose inner life is not governed by the form-giving impulses that have their source in nature itself.

Thenceforth, Goethe will sing, as no one else has ever done, the melancholy side of life; in fact, all of his tragic heroes meet their downfall in the course of their struggles with destiny: Werther, Weislingen, Franz, Eduard, Ottilie, Tasso, Egmont, Faust, Gretchen, and so on.

In his own lifetime, Goethe was already hailed as the only genius who might well succeed in his mastering life-mission, which was seen as the reconciliation of elemental nature with the laws of spirit. Goethe sought to do this by harmonizing the poles of nature and spirit, unlike the procedure insisted upon by Immanuel Kant, who placed nature and spiritual law in the sharpest antithetical contrast that the mind of man could conceive.

As a personality, Goethe embodied in the most magnificent style the collaboration between the masculine, active pole and the feminine pole, characterized by a pathic receptivity. From that feminine component in his nature stems his intense feeling for actuality, just as from his masculine component stems his unprecedented ability to recognize and to reveal the sharpest critical distinctions.

A feeling for actuality and a highly developed critical sense were often treated as identical items in polite conversation during that period, although the state of affairs was quite otherwise in formal philosophical discourse. In that arena actuality was viewed as the common possession of humanity, and one that had its source in our immediate experience, whereas the facts, on the other hand, are apprehended by the living person on the basis of the activity of spirit. Thus, as a mere fact, a stand of trees is one and the same, both when it is being gazed upon by the canny eye of the speculator who seeks to convert this segment of nature into profit or it is the living substance that forms the basis of the botanist’s research. However, as an actuality, the stand of trees in question is perpetually renewing its phenomenal aspect, which is changed ceaselessly due to the influence of various meteorological factors, among which we’ll merely mention the action of the wind, and also under the shifting radiance with which the available light garbs each tree. We might even hear the claim of a landscape-painter who seeks behind the immanent tree its primordial image.

Goethe’s unsurpassed powers of visual discrimination led him to become the modern world’s pre-eminent phenomenologist, and it may indeed be said that in Goethe we confront the essential "man of the eye."

In Goethe the operation of rational cognition transpired in harmonious accord with his feeling for the phenomenological totality. Spiritual cognition and perception of the world-image is an immediate and indivisible event, an "intuition" of fresh revelations communicated from the world without to the world within.

Whoever finds that he is able to comprehend this mode of perception and who is also able to establish his discoveries upon the most primordial realities, will not restrict his scrutiny of life’s deepest secrets to the domain of purposeful consciousness, for he is well aware of the fact that his observations are valid only whilst his cognitive forces have been brought into play. In fact, Goethe formulated the very concept of the unconscious, which he saw as equidistant from the pseudo-unconscious of the Leibniz school and from the verbal phantom bandied about by academic epistemologists. Goethe demonstrated that the unconscious was neither the working out of persistent physical processes within the organism that have merely eluded our notice, processes that reveal themselves in talented individuals as well as in the highly trained, for the unconscious was the very foundation upon which nature erected herself, to the precise extent that nature transmits "inspiration" to the conscious mind. Goethe called this unconscious power the "dæmonic," and he says of it that "every great thought that bears ripe fruit and leads to profound effects, stands far removed from the mind that would seek to control it. Man should look upon the harvested fruits of the unconscious as an unexpected windfall bestowed by heaven above. It is our affinity with the dæmonic that makes its advent seem something utterly overpowering, as it were, and often convinces an individual that this force arises from his personal impulses, whereas its primal source is actually in the unconscious substratum, a region over which, as we’ve seen, he exerts no control whatsoever."

In another place, Goethe asserts: "The dæmonic is the force that is immune to the ministrations of rational processes. It does not always reside within my nature, although I am frequently overwhelmed by it." At one point, Goethe goes so far along this line of speculation as to insist that the unconscious is synonymous with life itself: "Man cannot abide for very long in the conscious state; therefore man must often yield himself to the impulse that lures him ever deeper into that realm of the unconscious, for it is there that man has his deepest roots."

Far more significant than any evolutionist’s conceptualization of the unconscious substrata of life is Goethe’s scornful dismissal of the virtues of excessive self-observation. In the sharpest opposition to academic thought—at least as it has operated since the age of Descartes—but in consonance with the truly great psychologists of every epoch, Goethe regards the notion that we have access to immediate knowledge of the self to be a pathetic delusion: "In my opinion, man can never succeed in his attempts to know himself, since he can never install himself in the appropriate perspective from which he would be able to generate valid statements of the facts; others will always know me better than I know myself." Again: "Man can never comprehend himself with anything approaching the accuracy with which he can comprehend the world." As Goethe’s readers know full well, his collected works are filled with innumerable utterances of a similar sort.

We are now able to recognize Goethe’s discovery of these insights as being rooted in his unique capacity for perception. Now we turn our attention to the opposite pole, i.e., of his masculine activity, for it was this orientation which tempted him irresistibly to involve himself in the active realm of public affairs, even though he retained his acuity of perception—situated at the feminine pole of his character—which never permitted Goethe to ignore (or even to forget!) that these activities [at the Weimar Court] were characterized by an almost grotesque superficiality. His watchword now is formulated in his mastering motto that claims, "To be active is man’s first duty…Whenever I cannot conform myself to the demands associated with that duty, I recognize such a peculiar situation as an indication that there is a circle of endeavor to which my vocation will not grant me entrance. And I have never envisioned myself as a somnambulist." One should not too readily dismiss such utterances as expressions of Goethe’s infatuation with the whole idea of the "man of action," for what is actually at work within him during these times is Goethe-as-sculptor, Goethe as creative man whose ideal is formal excellence; what he recognized with an almost divinatory penetration was the fact that spiritual apprehension depends upon spiritual creativity! "There is no conscious experience that is not productive, enriching, and creative." "Animals are instructed by their internal organs, said the thinkers of antiquity, and I insist that man is himself in precisely the same situation."

This realization introduces us now to Goethe’s representation of the "genius," viz., one whom he regards as the bearer of a unique fund of creative power that, in its turn, arises upon the foundation provided by the self-renewing vitality of the genius. It is without connection to the management of our business affairs, just as it is unrelated to our relationship with fine art; creativity exists, in fact, quite remote from the quotidian round: the only exceptions to this rule come into play "when our thoughts, our connection with other people, and our deeds themselves enhance life itself." The person to whom we apply the name "genius" demands precedence before all others with all the irresistible force of eternal youth, for in him youth is a perpetual renewal of vitality that bursts forth like a volcano intermittently erupting with the hot powers of perfect youth." At such privileged moments, Goethe tells us, he experiences a "renewed puberty." These insights were to inspire the meditations of the German Romantics in subsequent years, and it would be the Romantics who were able to discover new territories for psychology, although their findings, sadly, have never been properly worked-out due to the contemporary academic psychologist’s superstitious faith in the all-creative power of spirit.

It is crucial to our exposition that the reader understand precisely how significant a role Goethe’s marked will-to-form played in his perception of (and reverence for) the full wealth of soul inhering in a significant human character. Likewise, Goethe was, of course, completely justified in his recognition of the iron limits set by nature—not merely over personal volition (a matter of quantity), but also, and perhaps more significantly, over the idiosyncrasies of personal, "critical" judgment (a matter of quality). No person can perceive with his senses that which cannot be grasped by the character. "The French think precisely as they do only because of the character with which they have been endowed." Our own position in any meaningful ordering of rank is utterly and completely pre-determined. It is a false belief that inspires those who claim that the glove will always grow large enough to accommodate one’s hand satisfactorily, as we must agree if the glove in question is crafted out of iron, for iron has an immanent shape. It is more correct to say that the fit is determined by the inherent characteristics of the person who is inserting his hand within the putative item. This vibrant consciousness of the iron fatality that rules our destiny is notably expressed in the first of the "Orphic Words." Likewise, to those who erroneously believe in the (imaginary) ability of education to bring about an authentic alteration in a particular character, Goethe retorts that education is but the inculcation of rational behavior, and each student’s capacity for such education is strictly governed by the talents with which he was endowed at birth. "If outstanding capacity is a pre-determined endowment, there will inevitably result the formation of an individual who is fated to achieve creative excellence in his life."

Whilst the Romantics (and later still Nietzsche) awaited the loftiest of life’s joys in those moments when an ecstatic repression or limitation of the ego had been achieved, Goethe’s own limitations were never more clearly expressed than in the quatrain in which he affirms this very limitation:

Commoner and prince and hero
Lived and died in every age;

The highest joy bestowed upon the sons of earth

Is found but in the personality.

This attitude of Goethe’s resonates quite nicely with his development of the theory of an immortal formative principle at work in nature, to which he gives the Aristotelian title of "entelechy."

Just as intimate contact with a unique life may well draw lesser mortals into its gravitational field, as it were, within which these individuals find that they actually prosper under this beneficent influence, such individuals can only be comprehended if their living context is borne in mind. The result of the process to which we refer was, in fact, the development of the Goethe-type character as it transpired in the socialized personality. To us, no one can surpass Goethe in the global treasures of richer, gentler, and nobler vitality, from which all disturbing and painful emotions have been excluded, in an ongoing synergistic potentiation of both the society as well as the individuals that comprise its components. Goethe became the most prominent apostle of good ton in 18th century Germany, the most rigid adherent of the strictest morality that, ironically, would subsequently encourage the rise of the moralistic rabble to the stature of a significant force in history, for eventually the West’s law-codes were inspired solely by a purely human conception of Eros.

In the end, therefore, we must avoid any suspicion that there is even a trace of irony when Goethe, in his later years, proclaims such platitudes as "The proper study of mankind is man." [top]

ON CARL GUSTAV CARUS

Ever since the author of these lines rediscovered the psychologist Carl Gustav Carus and was also able to demonstrate the profound relevance of his teachings for contemporary science, one does hear his name mentioned from time to time, but one must also ask: is anyone actually reading his works? It does seem, in fact, that in spite of the fact that many students now recognize his name, the true significance of his teaching goes unrecognized. Thus, before we can comprehend the intellectual situation in which Carus developed, we might mention some of the established facts in the story of his creative life.

Precisely four decades after the birth of Goethe, Carus was born in 1779 in Leipzig; his father was a master-dyer, and his mother was the descendant of a long line of brilliant natural scientists and medical men. His earliest conscious thought, he tells us in his "Memoirs," occurred during the fifth year of his life, and his recollection is so characteristic of the man, that we now repeat it. In leafing through the pages of the old "Orbis pictus" of Amos Comenius, the boy stumbled upon an illustration bearing the inscription "The Human Soul." "There I saw the drawing of a table, upon which stood a triangle adorned with the eye of God and a sketch of a human figure." This chance event immediately caused him to turn his gaze to his inner world, and in a moment he was seized by the cryptic formula: "Even you possess a soul, even you are a soul," and for many days he was unable to get these words out of his mind; in fact, they were to haunt him down to the very day of his death.

In 1804, he attended the Hochschule in Leipzig, beginning his studies with botany, all the while sketching every plant-species that he found in the district; finally, he devoted himself passionately to anatomical studies, winning his doctorate in 1811 with "An Attempt at a General Theory of Life." In 1814, he became a full Professor and Director of the maternity hospital in Dresden. He established gynecology as a discrete discipline, worked on comparative anatomy (he provided his own illustrations for his published work in this field!), and somehow managed to find sufficient time away from his medical practice to create brilliant oil paintings depicting the seasons, landscapes, and architectural monuments in which he took so much delight.

During this same period he became friendly with Caspar David Friedrich; in 1818 he inaugurated his correspondence with Goethe, whom he was to visit in Weimar on July 21, 1821. He traveled widely, visiting such places as Rügen, Prague, Switzerland, and Genoa. His studies, which were incredibly comprehensive in their scope, dealt not only with the biology of living organisms, but extended as well into such fields as geology, paleontology, cranioscopy, physiognomics, "vital magnetism," landscape painting, epistemology, metaphysics, and research into the history of literature. His final tally of published works soars to 81, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story of his productivity, for most of his works appeared in multi-volume sets!

In 1827 Carus was appointed to the prestigious position of personal physician to the king of Saxony, and he was to remain at that post down to his death in 1869.

There can be no doubt that Carus was one of the greatest scientists to emerge from the period to which historians have given the unfortunate name of "Late Romantic." The so-called "late" Romantics were, in fact, the consummate Romantics, for the "early" Romantics did not fully deserve the name. Even now the name "Romantic" has led to numerous misunderstandings, which suggest comparisons with the pseudo-distinctions that have been alleged to exist between a "Roman" and a "Foreign" spiritual tendency. Likewise, one must occasionally endure the parsonic prattle of the enemies of the Romantics, who insist that the Romantic Movement was merely a stopover on the reactionary high-road to a full-fledged revival of "Catholicism" (ignoring the fact that the charge holds true only for a mere handful of the movement’s adherents). The heart of the matter is that the Romantics’ greatest achievement was in developing a completely unprecedented vision of the world of actuality.

Likewise, the Romantics represented a completely Germanic mode of contemplation. No non-German land can seriously entertain the claim of precedence for one of their own candidates, for no non-German writer ever approached the lofty achievements of the great German Romantics.

The German Romantics formed a unified front against the mindless cult of "reason" that so agitated 18th Century Europe, in large part because, unlike their rivals, the Romantics were never animated by the obsessive classicism of the Hellenic revival, preferring instead to examine their own German past; and in this process the Romantics rediscovered, and reaffirmed, the greatness of the Gothic Middle Ages just as they opened up a whole new field of study in their research into the cultural genius of the pre-historic Germanic world. And the Romantics were not merely a band of wandering poets and dreamers, for they also created a Romantic music and a Romantic style in painting, a uniquely Romantic style of historiography, a Romantic ethnology, and even a Romantic doctrine of political economy! Transcending all these achievements was their creation of an idiosyncratically Romantic school of natural science. In every one of the fields that we have mentioned, the German Romantics became the truly significant pathfinders. Names like Niebuhr, Schlosser, Raumer, Ranke, Arndt, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, are just a few among the countless creators of that imperishable intellectual revolution known as Romanticism, and they have provided us with a rich legacy that even now is making brilliant contributions to cultural history.

And the same holds true in the scientific fields. The very first formulation of the cellular theory, in fact, was the work of Lorenz Oken. The theory of evolutionary development, which arranges all organic life into a series of transformations, has its source in the speculations of the Romantic "Nature-Philosophers." Cuvier, Goethe, Geoffrey, and Treviranus were the forerunners, von Baer and—above all—Carus, were the most powerful preservers and extenders of this tradition of evolutionary theory, which has, of course, ruled the scientific universe ever since. Finally, let us dismiss the blatantly mendacious fable convenue whispered by those fools and faddists who insinuate that the Romantics never made a genuine discovery that was not preordained by a very partisan oracle, viz., their "wish-fantasies." The Romantics justly preferred to regard them as inner convictions!

The Romantics knew full-well that they had involved themselves in a bitter war of the spirit that was already raging ceaselessly and savagely between the vital world-view of the Romantics and the dictatorship of the Enlightenment saviors, who preached that perpended world-as-machine "philosophy" that these shamans of the mechanistic apocalypse insisted would be man’s salvation.

Sadly, the mechanistic apostles had already triumphed in one campaign after another from the middle of the previous century and down to the age of Carus, but it is only fair to recognize that the mechanistic movement’s publicists and prophets were themselves probably unaware of the sinister fact that their banal theories were being remorselessly exploited in order to enrich and empower one particular social class, viz., the cash-crazed technocrats who were mounting the industrial revolution even as the Romantics waged their quixotic war against the machine-worship that was soon to enslave even the machine’s victims.

Admittedly, the Romantics had their own limitations (one of the few things that they possessed in common with the rest of "mankind"). They were also bogged down in the Platonic worship of "ideas," a crippling error that they compounded by incorporating the equally disastrous notion—probably influenced by Goethe’s adoption of the same idea—that behind the unconscious processes that transpire within the living world, there exists a type of "World-Reason" that keeps everything in line. Nevertheless, their errors have perished for the most part, or at least the influence that their false doctrines once exerted has been diminished appreciably, and nothing can ever change the fact that it is to the German Romantics that we owe the imperishable treasures that they discovered within their own visionary hearts.

When we ask ourselves what was the source of that unique vision of the Romantics, the clear and unambiguous answer resounds: the Romantic thinkers sought to follow Goethe’s example by focusing their attention less upon the causes that brought about the phenomena before them, and more upon their meaning. However, they also recognized—and in this area, in fact, they went far beyond the scope of Goethe’s research—that the universe can only be comprehended as a realm in which phenomenal essences—souls—appear. As a result their natural science entailed an attendant psychology, just as their psychology entailed a comprehensive system of natural science. No Romantic had a clearer perception than Carus of the way in which science and art led to a unified life at the deepest level of life, and this insistence upon the innermost indivisibility of science and art became a slogan that he employed on numerous occasions as a true description of his intellectual mission. Just as Carus sought to indicate the visible signatures that identify specific forms of planetary life in his landscape-painting, so also did he employ the methods of natural science in order to inscribe the nature of that planetary life in the appropriate scientific formulæ.

The richest fruit to emerge from these meditations was his treatise "Psyche: On the Developmental History of the Soul." The first edition of this treatise, which he had began to work on during 1843, was brought out by the publisher Michaelis in 1846. The second edition appeared in 1851 (Diederichs has recently brought out a reprint of this 2nd edition).

Carus was well aware of the outstanding value of this work, which in later years he would always describe as the closest to his heart of all his published treatises.

Let us now present a brief sketch of at least the main points announced in this treatise. If it is true that the soul is identical with that which the Ancients called the "principal of life" (an idea, of course, that has been forgotten since the age of Descartes), then it must be the case that the soul cannot be divided into component parts any more than it can have received its nature from the addition of discrete components that can be assembled to form a whole. Since Descartes, however, a completely erroneous doctrine has infected the science of psychology due to the reigning superstition that psychology can only achieve results by basing itself upon a program of mathematical quantification—and this is something that has long been the established practice among researchers of the "mechanistic" persuasion, a school that prospers today beyond its dreams. Carus holds that just as the organism is formed from the fertilized cell from which developmental phase it begins to differentiate itself, thus every transformation of the soul is a process of development and as such it has no conceivable resemblance to the mere collection of measurable points or to the process whereby a factory worker assembles a machine out of its discrete components.

If the soul is the principle of life, then we are justified in concluding that it cannot also be synonymous with consciousness. Every cell that makes up our body lives, but its life and experience is as devoid of the faculty of consciousness as a house-plant. When we observe life in its antithetic relationship to consciousness we discover something that Goethe was the first to comprehend and to which he gave the name "unconscious," which is the reason why Carus explicitly states on the very first page of "Psyche" that "the key to an understanding of conscious thought resides in the realm of the unconscious." Any thinker who sought to exhaust the implications of that proposition would soon discover that a human lifetime is not sufficient to permit him to achieve his goal. We will restrict ourselves here to drawing your attention to just three points.

Since the age of Descartes, philosophers have directed their attention to the nature of moods, feelings, rages, and so on; and yet after all the time they have devoted to these matters they find themselves precisely where the founders of the rationalist school of thought began: thus, feelings are perturbationes animi, or—to put it more cautiously—they are dark, chaotic thoughts. One may recall in this connection the elevation of feeling that occurs when we witness a sunset or when we listen to a Beethoven symphony. Nevertheless, there are defective doctrines at work here, all of which must be overturned before we can arrive at a purely philosophical analysis of these discoveries. It is at this precise point that one may first be struck by the intuitive conviction that the "cult of reason" and the cult of nihilism are thick as thieves with each other.

However, since the age of Carus we are able to understand that feelings, and this holds true of every conceivable species, merge their substance with consciousness from moment to moment under the governance of the overall condition of the body, which in turn experiences transformations under the impress of the impressions that fall upon the senses. The inherently unconscious processes of life exert their influence upon consciousness, and the resultant effects we call feelings, and this fact satisfactorily accounts for the obvious ability of an access of joy to improve the condition of the organism, just as an increase in sorrow or melancholy limits and diminishes the organism. Why, for instance, do intoxicating beverages produce their familiar effects? Carus understands why, and he explains that the chemical processes involved link the living organism to the condition of the soul that results from the consumption of alcohol. Therefore, there does indeed exist a "spirit of wine"!

Further, all living processes occur rhythmically; one recalls the pulses, the respiration, the alternation between sleep and waking. In addition, we must understand that every consciousness necessarily sinks periodically into the unconscious, and it is at those times that the healing processes transpire.

There can never be an identical repeat of a so-called representation. It is much more accurate to say that a representation will either fade and disappear or it will elevate itself and thereby acquire a "nimbus." One may recall the joyous blossoming of one’s youth, which remains in memory long after childhood has ended. Our consciousness bears the colors of our own nature, and our character reaches into our most sublime meditations.

Finally, the loss of awareness that accompanies a profound and dreamless sleep is not to be interpreted as a decrease in life, for in the most acute sense it represents a growth and an improvement in the vital powers. Meanwhile, the limits that divide the conscious life from the unconscious may collapse, resulting in the possibility that those limits that separate the organism from the life of the world will also disappear. It was in the pondering of thoughts such as these that the Romantics were led to investigate the phenomena of somnambulism, dreams, clairvoyance, presentiments, and also to discover whether or not an infection of the soul could be alleviated by the application of the healing powers of magic. Still, Carus would not have been the grand Apollo of the spirit that he always remained if he did not carefully protect his mind from the influence of certain incautious exaggerations to which such meditations might lead.

Nevertheless, even in his most Platonic moments, Carl Gustav von Carus stands out as one of the greatest, as well one of the last, of the authentic Romantic thinkers. [top]

NATURE VS. NURTURE

I wish to say a word or two on the omnipresent and indeed vexing question as to whether a child’s character is already formed at birth ("genetically pre-determined") or whether it is environmentally conditioned (fully "plastic," as in the "tabula rasa" [blank slate] in the strict style of English empirical thought); the woods are also home, as one might expect, to half-hearted and more tepid variants of these two which might be taken into consideration, and so we acknowledge the existence of those researchers who hold that the human personality is a little bit of this, but, refreshingly, also a little bit of that (partially gene-determined, but also partially "plastic," i.e., subject to considerable environmental conditioning). Having noted their existence, we move on.

Therefore, for the most part, we shall find one educator saying: "the character of this child is inborn and unalterable"; and he will be quite correct. Likewise, another educator will assure us that: "this student’s personality is the resultant of the numerous societal and familial pressures and influences that have been brought to bear upon him during his childhood years"; he too will be correct!

Now we intend to tease you with no cheap paradox in endorsing both of these views; rather, we are merely seeking to draw attention to the fact that the rival authorities are in fact employing the substantive "character" in two distinct denotative, or "lexical," senses. So let us clarify, as best we may, these contentious meanings, and let us see if we can do this without wandering from our psychological reservation.

We do all agree, I take it, that the character not only of man, but of every living organism upon our planet, is genetically endowed; but there are also, I believe we should also agree, other types of earthly formations whose structural integrity is an unalterable quality of their very being, viz., the molecular architecture of "rock crystal," which we feel justified in describing as "pre-determined." But the situation is very different indeed with the most highly organized form of terrestrial organism, i.e., the human being, since every person carries around with him, as if he were equipped with a virtual playing-field of evolutionary possibilities, whose precise dimensions and contours he has yet to determine. Just as surely as a man grows older with every minute that passes, and just as surely as an aged body is no longer that of a child, so surely is it that the nature of an aged man is not that of a young child. But what is it precisely that remains unaltered throughout all the changes that the body has endured as it passes through the changes from youth to old age? This is only one of those questions the answers to which will be found only after we have developed our finest powers of discrimination and our richest powers of observation in learning just how the characterologist formulates accurate judgments in his field.

One crucially important consideration must be born in mind by the student: every researcher and every educator who has been entrusted with the mission to teach the young must be strictly prevented, by the full force of the law, from illicitly gleaning information about his young charges from documents on file when his sacred trust is to be educating them in the classroom—in person.

A genuinely responsible educator devotes his life to the minds and souls of his pupils; he determines the nature of their dispositions and he estimates their adaptabilities; but—again, I must emphasize this point—he never permit himself or anyone on his staff to employ a sneak-thief’s access to a file-folder in such a way as to prejudice a student’s future, i.e., by rumor-mongering about "degeneracy," or by making cheap-shots about "flawed character structure" rooted in "unfortunate ancestry" or "violent upbringing." When a young student has come this far in his schooling, the chief question that should concern the educator is no longer whether nature or nurture rules the roost—not even the most blasé academic could feign an interest in the praxis here—all that we demand now is that the educator attempt to assist his student as he tries to achieve such results as are within his reach! [top]