Part 28

The antithesis of a nature which is operative within the world and which elevates above the world must permeate life as a whole and must give rise to opposite tendencies in every part of life. On the one hand, there is a distinct formation in finite relations, an insistence upon plastic organisation and complete consciousness of life; on the other, an aspiration towards the infinite, a more submissive faith, a more unrestrained disposition, a higher estimate of the naïve and the childlike. In the former, man, full of confidence in his own power, himself produces a rationality of reality, and disdains all aids alien to himself; in the latter, life is sustained by a trust in an infinite good and power which, in a way transcending the capacity of man, guides to the attainment of the best; in short, as a whole and in its individual aspects each is a fundamentally different type of life from the other.

The type of life advocated by Christianity has resulted in a great deepening of life; it cannot possibly be given up again in favour of an earlier type. But this Christian type also does not suffice for the moulding of life as a whole. Most severe complications would ensue if the position of Christianity were taken up as an ultimate conclusion and an absolute evaluation in the conditions which at present exist, and its principles without further consideration were applied to our life as a whole. The annulling of all differences, even of spiritual capacity; the displacement of justice through pity; the cessation of the conflict against evil; the low estimate of man's own power, would all endanger most severely the rational character of life; an adoption of this type of life in its entirety would lead to the discontinuance of the work of culture; in particular, it is inconsistent with any kind of political organisation. Finite conditions are not to be judged by infinite standards; and we men are, after all, in the finite and remain so.

And so, from the earliest times since Christianity, from being merely one of opposing systems, became the dominant power, compromises have been sought. The system of the development of power and of justice has nevertheless asserted its influence, and though Christianity has had an external supremacy, this system has forced characteristically Christian life to be regarded as a matter of mere subjective disposition and of private life. But as such compromises do not fully and truly express spiritual necessity, they easily lead to falsity. To rise above this tendency to make such compromises, the acknowledgment of the right and of the limits of each type, the acknowledgment of the necessity of both within a comprehensive whole, is necessary. Such a whole and along with it a common ground, upon which the movements meet together, and can strive to understand one another, is given to us by the spiritual life, acknowledged in its independence. It is not for us to force our life into a finished scheme, but to develop fully and to acknowledge the movements and oppositions which exist in our life. True, life will ever remain unfinished, but can we wish to make it more complete than it can be, and can the incompleteness cause us anxiety, when we are sure of its main direction?

III

APPLICATION TO THE PRESENT

CONSEQUENCES AND REQUIREMENTS

_Introductory Considerations_

With a consideration of the present we set out: to the present we now return. The convictions at which we have arrived, and which have led us to a characteristic philosophy of life, must now be considered in relation to the needs of the present; we must see whether this philosophy proves to be true in this connection, and this by its own development, as well as by the simplification of the condition of a time, which, as it is immediately experienced, is confused in the highest degree.

But, at the outset of our treatment of this problem, we perceive how difficult it is for the acknowledgment of an independent spirituality to determine our relation to the temporal environment; we see how this acknowledgment transforms that relation into a problem. The conception of the "present" is by no means simple and certain, even as far as its external boundary is concerned. The mere to-day is obviously too short a period to constitute the present; but how much is to be added and where must it cease in order that we may have a genuine present? True, the present must involve a characteristic content that associates the moments and unites them so as to produce a common effect; but does our time give us such a content? The first glance at the state of life in our time reveals a chaotic confusion, which includes the most diverse endeavours, now in passionate union, now in complete indifference to one another, and yet again in harsh hostility; further, there is a constant displacement of the individual elements by a process of elevation and of degradation. Even if something common and permanent is operative in the present, its close amalgamation with this change and movement prevents it from being purely developed: the truth contained in the present state of life is inseparably mixed with human error and passion.

And yet this is not an experience simply of the present, but one common to all ages. For fundamental spiritual creation has always been effected in the direst contradiction to the social environment. What harsh judgments, and judgments that set its value at nil, have been passed upon society with regard to its capacity not only in religion but also in philosophy and art! How severe a conflict has been carried on in all departments of life against the presumption of society! The present, especially, is troubled by these problems, because, as has become evident to us from the beginning of our investigation, it carries within it movements of a diverse and contradictory nature, so that it can hardly produce a consistent impression of the whole, still less attain to a definite character. Human interests and parties seek with all their energy to impress upon the time their own character; they call that modern which is useful to and in harmony with themselves. The most diverse tendencies cross one another; experiences in particular departments of life determine the conception of the whole; the different classes of society follow different courses in accordance with their different interests; much that is accidental is regarded as vital and is allowed to influence us: the extreme has the advantage of being able to make an impression upon us; and the superficial and the negative creep into favour through the easiness of the conclusion presented by them: in short, in this state of the time, that which arises in human opinion is incapable of offering to spiritual endeavour a secure support and an orientation concerning its aims.

This uncertainty cannot be removed by turning our attention to history, by taking an interest in past ages. For, with whatever clearness a highly developed science of history may present the whole course of the ages to us, to believe that our own life is enriched and made more stable by this, we must confuse knowledge and life, the mere present representation of earlier times and the appropriation of them by our own activity--a danger into which the purely academic mode of thought easily falls. The power and the tendency of life in the present determine the nature of our appropriation of the past and of its transformation in self-determining activity. If this life stagnates, then we are helpless in face of the stream of earlier systems of thought. Even if these systems attract us to themselves, and carry us with them for a time, finally they will manifest their antitheses and throw us back again upon ourselves: we cannot escape from ourselves; we can never find a substitute from outside for want of conviction and power of our own. It is a fundamental error, not, indeed, of historical research but of a feeble historical relativism, to expect us to form a conviction of our own by concerning ourselves with the past; and to think that the later stage in history proceeds from the earlier as a self-evident final result. By taking such an attitude to the past we should only fall into the half-will and half-life common to an age of decadence. If the present is thus uncertain in the heart of its spiritual nature, and it is not possible to escape from this uncertainty by resorting to the past, it may appear to be essential that we should be completely delivered from the tyranny of time, and that we should take up an attitude of entire unconcern of its affirmation and its negation of spiritual endeavour.

But a rejection of the immediate relation to time by no means settles the matter. If spiritual work were completely dissociated from the temporal environment and the historical movement, it would be dependent solely upon the capacity of the mere individual and upon the passing moment; all relation, all community of work, would thus be given up, and the performance of others could not be anything to us, nor our achievement anything to others; there would be no inner building up of life, and no hope of reaching greater depths. Not only is it impossible to abandon such aims, but our experience of spiritual work itself contradicts the disintegration of life into nothing but isolated points. If all spiritual creation is effected in contradiction to time, what is denied in this contradiction is rather that which lies upon the surface of time than that which is deeper; rather human accommodation to than the spiritual content of time. All who believe that distinctive human history is sustained by the activity of a spiritual life will attribute to time such a spiritual content.

Every age, therefore, in virtue of the presence of this spiritual life, will contain characteristic spiritual motives, movements, and demands, and will be especially qualified to convey certain contents to man, to open up certain experiences to him, and to point out certain directions. All these must be appropriated by anyone who wishes to transcend the original state of emptiness, and to advance to spiritual creation and to a spiritual fashioning of life. In consequence of this a more friendly attitude may be taken up towards time; and we shall be far more grateful to it--though perhaps not with explicit consciousness, perhaps even in contradiction to definite purpose--than we could ever be with regard to the experiences on the surface of time. However low, for example, the estimate Plato may have formed of "the many" around him; and though with the whole passion of his soul he may have insisted upon a transformation of the immediate condition of life, what he offered of his own and the new that he required, with all its originality and uniqueness, contradicts neither the natural spirit of the Greek nor the contemporary Greek culture: Plato can be regarded only as a Greek of a particular time. His conflict with the time is not the conflict of an incomparable individuality with his environment, but a selection and a unification of the possibilities existing in time; it is an arousing to life of the deeper realities of time against its superficialities, of spiritual necessities in opposition to the conduct and interests of men. In this manner the great man also is a child of his age, and is unintelligible out of relation to it. Could one think of Goethe as living in the Middle Ages, or of Augustine as living in the age of the Enlightenment? Indeed, we may carry our contention further, and say that the great has been just that which has had the closest relation with the time; and that it has reached a permanent significance, just because it expressed the unique nature and the inner longing of the time, that which was incomparable and inderivable in it. That which has been able to work permanently beyond the time in which it made its appearance was born not from a timeless consideration of things, but from the deepest feeling of the needs of the time; only thus can we escape from the feeling of unreality which otherwise accompanies the striving after spirituality. This consideration must commend to spiritual work the closest possible relation with the time, and the spiritual life may hope for an essential advance of its own striving as a result of this relation.

Still, the matter is not so simple as it is often thought to be. The spiritual content of the ages is not a complete fact that permeates life with a sure and definite effect, so that it could be taken up by activity. Rather, that which is great and characteristic in the ages is found only in creative spiritual activity, abstracted from which it is no more than a possibility; a suggestion that is inevitably lost, if an advancing spiritual activity is lacking. Spiritual creation is not a mere copy, an employment of an existent time-character. Rather, time first attains a spiritual character through spiritual activity, and by spiritual creation possibility first becomes complete reality. This spiritual creation is not simply a summation but a potentialisation, an essential elevation of that which exists in time. Without this activity the spiritual elements in time remain merely coexistent, and have no living unity; they realise no life of the whole, no being within the activity, nothing that means to us development of being. Temporal life then remains only a half-life, a life of pretence; it lacks complete self-consciousness and true stability and joy, and at the same time it lacks a genuine present. To attain such a present thus appears to be a difficult task, the performance of which is not so much presupposed by the different branches of spiritual life as is an object of their work. Art, for example, is rightly required to express the feeling of the life of the time; yet it does not find such a feeling of life already existent, but it must first wrest it from the chaos of the general condition of life. Art is great in giving to the time that which it did not already possess, but which is, nevertheless, necessary to the complete reality of its life. Spiritual work, therefore, is not something just added in time, but that which first gives to time a genuine life and a genuine present. This task may be achieved with quite different degrees of success; it is not all times that reach this elevation and attain to a genuine present; those that do so we call great and "classical" times. The general state of our life--which, however, does not imply time as a whole--appears from this point of view to be especially afflicted with the defect and fault of insincerity; our age does not so much live a life of its own as a strange life; and yet this life is represented as being a life of our own. And it is especially so in our own time, when along with a state of division in our own purposes we are inundated by systems of thought alien to us. We are thus in danger of becoming half-hearted and living a life of pretence: in religion we assert the profession of faith and the feelings of times long gone by to be our own conviction and feelings; we build our cathedrals in styles that correspond to another spiritual condition and another tendency of life; in philosophy we hang upon systems and problems of other times; in everything we lack sincerity. But why is this so, and why do we renounce all claim to a life in accordance with our own nature? Certainly not because our time lacks problems and tasks of its own, or because it is deficient in spiritual possibilities and necessities; for, of these there is an abundance; in this matter our time is not behind any other. But there predominates a wrong relation between these tasks and the central power of the spiritual life, which is equal to cope with them and out of the possibilities create a reality.

In any case spiritual work has a great deal to do with the time; and in regard to this it finds itself in no simple situation. Spiritual work must acknowledge a given condition, which it cannot alter to suit its own preferences; but it can make something else out of this condition and also see something else in it than immediately meets the eye. The possibilities of a time are revealed only in spiritual work, and through it alone are they separated from the human additions that usually overgrow them. These possibilities cannot become clearly evident, unless a close relation to history is won: they are not suggestions simply of the moment, for they have been prepared by the whole work of history. History acquires quite a different--a far more positive--meaning when the spiritual life is acknowledged to be independent, and when it is admitted that spiritual life is not just the embellishment of a reality other than spiritual, but the formation of the only genuine and substantial reality, the transition to a self-consciousness of life. For, as such a formation of reality, this creative activity extends beyond the particular time in which it originates, and becomes part of a time-transcending present. True, this activity always appears in a garment that seems simply temporary; but this garment does not constitute its being: the imperishable in it, its fundamental life, remains inwardly near and present even after great changes of temporal condition; and within the sphere of spiritual work is always capable of new effect.

Christianity, for example, in spite of the attacks that are and have been made upon it, still asserts itself as a living power. Yet there cannot be the slightest doubt that in everything that lies on the surface of our life we are as far as possible removed from the centuries of its formation; that not only the view of the world but also the tasks of life and the nature of feeling and disposition have become radically different. But life is not exhausted in these activities on the surface, which must be regarded as external manifestations that proceed from an inner unity. That which these centuries have performed for the essence of life: the realisation of a freedom of spiritual inwardness, the acknowledgment of an independent spiritual world with great aims and tasks, may, indeed, become obscured for the consciousness of individuals and of whole periods; it remains, however, an essential part, a presupposition of all further spiritual life.

As in this manner in the case of Christianity, spiritual reality has also been evolved otherwise in some creative epochs; and in the movement of history they have all together produced a certain condition of spiritual evolution which constitutes the invisible basis of our own activity, and from which it is first possible to elucidate the spiritual nature of a particular time. This universal, historical state of spiritual evolution indicates a level, to which must correspond all work, which desires not simply to attain the aim of the moment but also to serve in the building up of a spiritual reality within the domain of humanity. This historical condition of the spiritual life is not conferred upon us by history; rather history only mediates an incentive that must first be transformed by our own activity and conviction. Only a mode of thought which transcends the movement of history can recognise a spiritual content in history and in our own time, and use this content for our own striving.

Spiritual work, therefore, and philosophy as part of it, has a twofold relation to time, a negative and a positive: it must possess an independence of time, and it must seek an intimate relation with it. The "modern," according to the sense in which it is taken, will arouse us at one time to energetic opposition, at another to the closest intimacy; the former when it desires to subject us to the contemporary conditions with all their contingency, the latter when it champions the spiritual possibilities of the time and the state of spiritual evolution in contrast with the human. We are concerned in a conflict for genuine against false time; we are to distinguish clearly between the merely human and the spiritual present; the spiritual life must first give a genuine reality to time, and in doing this must advance in itself.

Every particular philosophic conviction must justify itself in its treatment of this problem; it must be in a position to wrest the truth from the error in time; to understand and to estimate the endeavour of the time without yielding to it; to comprehend as a whole the manifold elements of truth in the life of the present, and to elucidate them from a transcendent unity. Without doubt great problems and fruitful possibilities exist in the time, but we often feel the most painful contrast between their demands and the achievements of man. To diminish this divergence; for the time to attain more to its own perfection and become a genuine present, is an urgent task in the performance of which philosophy also must co-operate; and by this endeavour philosophy can also gain much for itself.

I. REQUIREMENTS FOR THE FORM OF LIFE AS A WHOLE

(a) THE CHARACTER OF CULTURE

The term "culture" received its present meaning in the latter half of the eighteenth century; culture itself reaches back to the beginning of the Modern Age. The whole evolution of the Modern Age is a striving beyond the religious form of life which prevailed in the Middle Ages, and which began to be felt to be narrow and one-sided. In opposition to this type of life a new type arose, increased in strength, and finally we became fully conscious of it in the idea of culture. The new type has been felt to be far superior to the old in many ways; it is not limited to one side of human nature, but desires to take it, and to develop it as a whole; it does not refer man to any kind of external aid, but makes his life depend as much as possible upon his own power, and finds an aim fully sufficient in the limitless extension of this power; it directs man's perception and endeavour not so much beyond the world as to it, and hopes by this means to give a stability to his striving, and a close relation with the abundance of things. The movement has brought about a far-reaching transformation of life: that which was lying dormant has been aroused; the rigid made plastic; the manifold woven into a whole of life; the whole range of life has acquired more spontaneous freshness and inner movement. The result of the work of history now becomes for the first time a complete possession, since above everything contingent and accidental it elevates an essential, and above everything tending to separation and hostility, a common humanity.

The animating and ennobling influence of modern culture is nowhere more manifest than in the life-work of Goethe. For we recognise the greatness of his nature primarily in that, with the acutest vision and the greatest freedom, he entered into the multiplicity of experience and events; with placid yet powerful dominance stripped off all that was mere semblance and pretence, all that was simply conventional and partial, and fully realised the genuine, the freshness of life, and the purely human. (_V._ "The Problem of Human Life.") His treatment of Biblical narratives is a good example of this: that a king reigned in Egypt who knew not Joseph suggests to him how quickly even the most magnificent human achievements are forgotten; that Saul went forth to find his father's she-asses, and found a kingdom, symbolises to him the truth that we men often reach something totally different from, and also much better than, that for which we strove and hoped; the miracle of the walking on the water is to him a parable of unflinching faith--the holding fast to apparent impossibilities--without which there can be no great creation.