Here
under follows the transcription of the chapter Bruno of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant, published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1914.
Bruno
From an old
Engraving
|
309
BRUNO
CRITICISM AND DOGMATISM
WITH AN EXCURSUS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Upon
the boundary between time
and
eternity,
between primeval re-
presentation and single creatures,
between the world
of thought and
the world of the senses, sharing
the essence of both,
and,
as it were,
filling the gap between the ends
which fly apart — set up
upon
the
horizon of Nature — stands Man.
Giordano
Bruno.
310
(Blank page)
311
BRUNO
AT
the close of my last lecture I
hinted
at a day of dreams: this may well have seemed strange to you; for
Giordano
Bruno, who was born in 1548, five years after the publication of
Copernicus' work upon the subject of
the movements of the heavenly bodies, is the first great thinker who
grasped
and assimilated the new interpretation of the cosmic universe, — the
new
idea of countless planets circling round innumerable star-suns, — and
that
with such passionate enthusiasm that he makes it his starting-point for
every series of thoughts in his many-sided undertakings. In a certain
sense
we might therefore not without justification affirm that he was the
only
man who was awakened in a world which was still dreaming the old
Egyptian
dream, more or less tricked out with Christian decorations, and vamped
up by science — the dream of Heaven above, the Earth in the middle,
Hell
below. And yet it was he who was the dreamer, while many a man who in
opposition
to him held fast to the belief in the immovability of the earth, was a
mere prosaic realist. 1
What we have to distinguish is this: who was it
that made it his first business to look out upon the world of
empiricism
in the earnest endeavour clearly to grasp its concrete visible
phenomena?
And who was it that made it his first duty to look into his own inner
self,
and consult his reason as to the question of the essence of the world?
In the first case we may cite Descartes as the example, in the second
Bruno.
Both might be dreamers, the first perhaps more so than the second; for
dreams
312 BRUNO
are
fed by phantasy, and phantasy in
its turn is fed by nature; the man whose mind is turned actively
outwards,
will possess a rich inner store of ideas, and with them food for daring
dreams: still, dreams of that kind depend upon reality, whereas the
true
dreamer in the usual popular acceptation of the word, busies himself
less
with reality itself than with his own thoughts about it, and looks upon
these thoughts as the most real of realities. While a Descartes looks
upon
his own thought as he would upon any obvious phenomenon of nature, and
pursues his anatomical studies of the brain in the hope of discovering
special organs of memory, of judgment, and so forth, — a Bruno is
rather
inclined to mistrust the evidence of the senses — il senso non e
principio
di certezza — and to
presume that truth exists only
in Reason and springs from the fire of dialectical argument. 2 This last
mode of thought, the purely scholastic, is one which we have not yet
come
across in our lectures; for neither Goethe, nor Leonardo, nor Descartes
is concerned with it; and I think we shall learn much that will be new
to us about that which is distinctive in Kant's intellectual
personality,
if we compare it with this scholastic mode of seeing and thinking. For
it is a certain fact that Kant was a specific thinker, a man who, like
Bruno, devoted the greatest part and the best powers of his life to
investigation
by means of thought, and that so far he too might be called a
schoolman,
and so appears to belong to the same group as Bruno; and yet in spite
of
that Bruno is further removed from Kant than Goethe, and Leonardo, and
Descartes are. Here, therefore, we are compelled to have recourse to
analysis,
and in accordance with our principles this analysis must rest upon
perception
and not upon the abstract: we must always use our eyes in the matter:
otherwise we cannot be sure whether we are thinking thoughts, or merely
stringing words together. We must, however, carefully consider how we
are
to
313 BRUNO
go
to work in order to arrive at a
perceptible
side in the scholastic mode of thought. Here we must less than ever be
afraid of taking the long way round if it will but lead us to this
desirable
result. I think that what I have said about the dreamer, and the
briefly
sketched distinction between the dreaming of a Descartes and the
dreaming
of a Bruno, are well fitted to guide us in the right way.
As a matter of fact,
in every
philosophy involuntary dream-shadows play an important part: without
them
no philosophy can come to anything. These dream-shadows are certain
general
forms, peculiar from the very outset, springing out of the inborn
nature
of the intellect of every thinker; and even though their possible
individual
combinations may be so inexhaustible both in numbers and variety that
it
would be ridiculous to believe that the one personality and its
thoughts
could in any way be satisfactorily characterised by being drawn up into
a Scheme, — still, by comprehensively and keenly observing the
phenomena,
we may be able to refer the possible primary forms of philosophies to a
few heads, just as we are able perspicuously to comprise more than a
million
forms of animals in eight or nine clearly definable types. Indeed, I
believe
that some such investigation of the possible principal aims of all
human
philosophies, thought out according to the principles of natural
science,
with systematic classification, would be an indispensable complement
for
every history of philosophy: for while the essence of all history is
the
giving prominence to that which is conditioned by time, the stress laid
upon that which is necessarily eternal constitutes the essence of true
science.
I should like,
therefore, at the
outset of this lecture, to introduce the analytical excursus which will
give us a general view of abstract things. I promised you a day of
dreams: many dreams will pass before you, and you
314 BRUNO
must
not be impatient if sometimes we
seem to go far astray: I shall never for a moment lose sight of the
goal.
And if we reach so far that we are able clearly to distinguish the
various
specifically different myths and dreams from one another, then the
comparison
between Kant and Bruno, which is no exposition of doctrines, but an
exact
comprehension of personal intellectual aptitudes, will be easy to
effect
quickly and surely; and I hope that it will be of great service to us,
since it teaches us to distinguish with perfect clearness and sharpness
between Dogmatism and Criticism. You will henceforth see how Kant, and
with his exception Plato alone, stand upon a different footing from all
other philosophers. You will seem to be crossing over from one world
into
another, and that other world is nothing more than the world as Kant
viewed
it.
* * *
*
* *
In the dream of sleep
there
arises
a medley of what the eyes have seen by day, and of the discoveries of
our
free thought: each of these two elements is inseparably joined to the
other: without the fusion of the two no dream could occur. What takes
place
here in the passive function of the brain of the sleeper, recurs at
every
step of intellectual potentiality. The whole life of thought is, as we
showed in detail in the previous lecture, a product, that is to say,
the
result of at least two components: and here, as Aristotle taught us
(see
p. 101), we can always
distinguish between an “activity“ and a
“passivity.“
But nowhere does this manifest itself so clearly as in that extreme
object
of comparison with the dream of the sleeper, — the fully conscious,
creative
philosophy of important intellects. What in the one we called dream, we
may here call myth: dream and myth are intimately related, as you will
have many opportunities of seeing more exactly in the course of
to-day's
lecture.
315 BRUNO
Aristotle
rightly derives all
philosophy
from the invention of Myths, and pronounces it as his opinion that
every Philo-Mythos must of necessity be a Philo-Sophos, — that is,
whoever views the world in the
sense
of the myth, will be able to think of the world in the sense of
philosophy. 3
To be sure, Aristotle regards that as nothing more than a first step,
and
he looks upon himself as having quite outgrown the myth stage, and as
having
reached the positive final truth; and yet to-day we all smile at the
simplicity
of the great man whose views of nature swarm with demonstrable
blunders,
so that no natural science was possible until his fatal authority had
been
broken down. The man who soars high enough will perceive that Aristotle
simply replaced one myth by another, just as later the Aristotelian
myths
were crushed by other new ones, — since absolutely no philosophy,
however
empirical it may be, can dispense with myths, not only as helps and
stopgaps
here and there, but as a fundamental element pervading the whole. We
are
not all possessed of Aristotle's keenness of intellect, and if we see
philosophy
growing out of the myth which is akin to the dream, we still all
incline
to the Aristotelian simplicity, and believe that the myth has at last
been
conquered by science, — whereas, as a matter of fact, the investigation
of
Nature has only resulted in the multiplication of Myths.
It is only the
so-called “positive
intellect“ which can content itself with few fictions, and is proud of
it: but what distinguishes the positivist is not that, as he imagines,
he is living in pure “reality,“ but, on the contrary, that he contrives
to get on with a minimum of “reality“; he takes his stand upon the
domain
of indifference, in the inner middle space between empiricism and
reason,
perception and thought, dream and fiction, so that all impressions and
intellectual impulses are reciprocally neutralised in him, and that all
that which
316 BRUNO
has
been so bountifully bestowed upon
us men emerges as summa summarum,
Zero. Apart from this pseudo-vegetative
filling of maw and purse,
called positivism, men are all dependent upon myths, as much to-day as
they
were thousands of years ago. And this because doubleness, twofoldness,
is a fundamental phenomenon of the human being, and because we have no
other means of bridging over the gulf between perception and
understanding,
between nature and the Ego, than by myths more or less consciously
invented
or dreamt. I set that out now without further explanation, because you
have already seen in the previous lecture that we are always forced to
schematise our perceptions and to symbolise our thoughts, without which
we should have neither perceptions nor thoughts. Our whole thought-life
is based upon a violent
and,
so to speak, artificial activity.
In the meantime it is enough that I should have called your attention
to
the gulf which is present everywhere, and to its bridging over by the
Dream-ideas
of man. This bridging over, when it exists in the largest, most
comprehensive
sense, with a view to the creation of a unified world-picture, is a
myth.
The myth, this
conscious waking
dream, like the dream of the sleeper, has always a double root. On the
one hand it grows from contemplation of nature, while on the other hand
it springs from man's reflections upon his own Ego. The myth is
therefore
not only a picture but also a thought; it contains an element of the
senses
as well as an element which is not of the senses. How right Aristotle
is
with his equation Philomythos-Philosophos, how demonstrably true it is
that philosophy develops itself out of mythology, we shall see with
perfect
clearness when we go back to the old Aryan Indians. The great vault of
heaven, the sun in its daily course, the blush of the dawn, the moon,
the
stars, the winds, the clouds, the lightning, the bounteous rain falling
upon earth, the flame that rises heavenward from the homely
317 BRUNO
hearth,
all, in short, that the eye sees in
its
simplest lines, is the foundation, — the whole foundation — of the rich
myths
which we meet in the Rig-Veda.
But these faithfully observed outer
conditions
of nature become thoughts and religion through the relation which they
bear to man and which man bears to them. What the eyes perceive
outwardly
is conceived as a reflection of what is experienced within, and the
inner
experience seems in its turn to be a reflection of what takes place
outwardly;
and so eternally the pendulum swings to and fro. The unconsciously
arrived
at and utterly simple presumption is that the Cosmic and the Human are
similar, that they reciprocally penetrate one another, that the
macrocosmos
might, without more ado, be indicated and understood by the
microcosmos;
“nothing is within, nothing is without; for what is within, that is
without.“
Nature is identical with man, man identical with nature. Any thought of
a distinction does not yet exist. Such was the prayer which the old
Aryan
herdsman addressed to the gods of the dawn, — the knightly Ashwins,
forerunners
of the Hellenic heavenly twins, — in the days when he dwelt in the
highlands
and possessed nothing resembling an abstract philosophy: not only did
he
pray for help against the dangers of the night, but also for knowledge,
for wisdom; how would it be possible that the conqueror of the dangers
of the night, the morning herald of the Sun, should not also be a
conqueror
of the night of ignorance, a giver of spiritual enlightenment. Not only
does such a prayer say, “awaken the joy of courage in us,“ a thing
which
the least imaginative of mankind might expect from the fresh breath of
morning, but it says at the same time, “and bring us knowledge.“ 4 In
the
same way to the Sun-god Savitar is addressed the prayer, not only that
he may bestow upon mankind the light which is the object of his desire,
but also that he may “give furtherance to
318 BRUNO
thought.“
5 When the Sun rises
I
become
wise: I have but to open my eyes and to perceive everything; I find
myself
illuminated in surrounding nature, and nature illuminated in me. As the
Rig-Veda says, “In the heart
Varuna created Will, in Heaven the Sun.“
Of
the same nature are both.
What is before us
here is
precisely
the same as that which we to-day in our abstract and circumstantial
train
of thought call the “identity of thinking and being,“ that which once
more
came to high honour through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but which
also
is the hidden foundation of Schopenhauer's doctrine, and amongst our
contemporaries
is not less conspicuous in such widely different intellects as
Dühring
and Wundt. What is with perfect simplicity set out by metaphysically
gifted
but primitive peoples, — seeing that the very thought of the
possibility
of a distinction between world and man, between that which is seen and
that which is thought, does not occur and could not be understood, — is
introduced
afresh as doctrine by these philosophers. For instance, Giordano Bruno,
who in this, as in most things, approaches nearly to Plotinus, teaches
expressly that the ladder of the emotions of the mind (affetti) exactly
corresponds to the ladder of nature, and so mirrors all the modes of
Being
(mostra tutte le specie de lo ente).
6
It is essential to
our work to-day
that in this identification of that which is seen and that which is
thought,
and, if it be carried further, of Nature and Understanding, we should
recognise
the primeval Myth of all Myths: it
is an identification which, from
the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, has possessed a
great
significance for the philosophy of the Indo-European race. As a matter
of fact, there is here a yawning gulf, and it is not only a cleft
between
world and man — considered as two separate entities — and between
perception
and thought — looked upon as two different
319 BRUNO
functions
— but it is also reflected in
Seeing
and Thinking, and
is the cause
of our neither being
able purely to perceive the world, nor purely to think, nor to look
upon
our own special self fully as subject or fully as object. That is the
fundamental
fact of our whole intellectual life, as it has been once for all
established
by Immanuel Kant. But man, when he was still completely
unsophisticated,
was not conscious of this fact, and connected the sides of the gulf by
a bridge, which was no less obvious and iridescent than the rainbow
upon
which the German gods entered the Valhalla, but which was equally
devoid
of objective capability and carrying power. It is over this same bridge
that mankind still wanders to and fro, though some engage as their
guide
the giant Schopenhauer, others the dwarf Büchner,
while the
greater
number take any one of the numerous Dii
minores. Looked at from a
sufficient
perspective distance, the difference between the unsophisticated creeds
of an ancient Aryan contemplative herdsman, and the highly elaborated
tenets
of a Hegel, will resolve itself into a difference of degree; the
critical
solution is the only complete solution of the eternal riddle.
Since then this
primeval myth
was a fiction, — a violent assumption, — it was impossible to rest
content
with it. As in sleep dream begets dreams, so was it necessary that from
the one myth others should be born, otherwise the bridge in mid-air
would
vanish, and the precipice would yawn at our feet. So, in the first
place,
we observe that the stem of the most primitive all-embracing myth forks
into two main branches, just as inclination prefers to lay chief stress
upon that which is thought, or upon that which is seen; speaking from
the
point of view of looking Upon man as epitome and conception of the
world,
or, on the contrary, upon the world as the unfolding and visible
representation
of man. In the last case, — that is to say, where precedence had been
given
to the Seen
320 BRUNO
over
the Thought, in course of time
men
reached an artificial philosophy, as happened in Greece, where the
abstract
thinkers everywhere held to that which is visible and capable of being
represented, and always appeared in the character of creators or
formers.
Think of Democritus who invented the evidence of the atoms in the
interests
of an abstract cosmic mechanism, and Aristotle who brought the logical
functions of our intellect into visible schemes. In the first case,
that
is to say, where men were inclined to lay stress upon thought alone,
the
result was that by degrees nature (apart from man) and the visible
world,
which had served as starting-point for the primeval myth, were lost to
sight: their very existence was as far as possible denied, and every
perceptible
thing was more and more degraded in the thoughts of men, as in India
when
the Brahmans were at their zenith, where at last thought alone, pure
and
bare of all ideas, remained, the Ego in its highest potentiality, the
all-embracing,
unindividual Self (Paramâtman). 7 Greeks and Indians have in
all
probability
a common ancestry, and yet how different are the goals which they
attain!
You see how the direction of mythical thought and the direction of the
development of culture go hand in hand.
But we must still
linger for a
moment over this first branching into two essentially different
directions
of the primeval myth of the identity of thinking and seeing; for we
shall
soon have to consider a variegated series of most highly complicated
networks
of thought, and these will only remain perceptible if we have from the
beginning fixed our eyes clearly upon the mythical element. We are now
acquainted with the great primitive myth, and we have just seen, how
that
same myth can give birth to two such different modes of contemplating
the
world, that nearly related peoples reach the opposite ends of the scale
of thought. But it is easy for us to show the existence of these two
chief
branches in the souls of our
321 BRUNO
thinkers
down to the present day, and
so to learn to recognise the perceptibly mythical where we imagine
abstraction
to be at work in its utmost potentiality.
If I have up to the
present spoken
of man and world as in opposition to one another, I have done so
because
that is the conception with which we are chiefly concerned to-day. But
these conceptions are too complicated and too abstract for
unsophisticated
nations; the first distinction, demonstrable even in the most primitive
peoples, — a proved ethnological fact — is that which exists between
those
who are gifted with souls and those who are not so gifted. And since
the
idea of a soul is everywhere connected with that of breath, while
breathing
is the most important symptom of life, so the distinction between the
man
of soul and the man of no soul, is fused into that between a man who is
alive and a man who is not alive. I, the man, the thinker, am gifted
with
soul and gifted with life; the stone that lies in my hand, the thing
seen,
the piece of nature, is evidently soulless and lifeless. But, upon more
penetrating reflection, out of the primitive myth which makes the
comparison
of man and nature the foundation of all philosophy two opposite
conclusions
arise; for one school says, “I live and am gifted with soul, therefore
everything lives and has a soul“; whereas the others have come to this
conclusion:
the world around me is a piece of
mechanism,
without life and without soul, therefore the Ego is the same. We will
begin
by making ourselves further acquainted with these two doctrines by
examples;
that will lead us to the workshop where the philosophies are hammered
out.
The group of the
older Hellenic
thinkers, however much their opinions may differ, are usually included
under the name of Hylozoists, men who considered that all matter, that
is to say, the whole Cosmos, was gifted with life. The often quoted
saying
of Thales that everything is full of Gods, 8 finds an exactly
corresponding
322 BRUNO
formula
some 2250 years later in
Bruno
when, in the Spaccio, he
says: la natura, come devi sapere,
non
é
altro che Dio nelle cose, “Nature, you must know, is nothing
else than
God in things.“ Bruno, the dreamer, the man whose glance is altogether
directed inwards and who therefore fancies that he discovers an “inner“
everywhere, — Bruno cannot imagine that even stones can be without
senses
and souls (non est, crede, lapis sine
animâ et sine in suo
genere
sensu, I², 158). 9
And in the nineteenth century there lived an
important,
exact investigator of nature, Fechner, who pretended to have nothing to
say to the phantasies of mythicism and mysticism, and who in spite of
that
looked upon the universe as a “Cosmorganism,“ and upon the
constellations
as half-way stations between their inhabitants and the “psycho-physical
all-being“ God. 10
You can see how the myth, “I
live, therefore everything
lives,“
may lead to the most widely different thought, from the pure scholastic
to the pure natural-scientific. Yet investigators and thinkers of equal
importance created, and have created from the beginning of time, out of
this same instinctive comparison of thought and seeing, a perception in
contrast to it, that is to say, perception itself: nothing is
alive, — nowhere
in embodied nature are there any Gods. Such men direct their attention
in the main to nature, and thence pay the more heed to the mechanism of
occurrences; as a matter of consequence, in their view the part played
by the soul shrinks away more and more. We need only think of the view
held of nature by our exact science of to-day, and of the oscillations
of the aether as they were treated of in the Leonardo lecture; that
which
is alive in light, that which in light is of direct significance for
the
human soul, — namely colour, entirely disappeared before our eyes;
colour
became in the end a superfluous, very inaccurate name for a number;
then
came the most advanced of the physicists and said, “we do not want
323 BRUNO
your
whole visible Cosmos; an empty
space
with energy is enough for us“ (see p.
130 seq.). The man who
was the
absolute
first to bring forward the idea of oscillations, Descartes, had the
consistency
to penetrate further inwards, and by the setting up of his famous
theory
of automata, to quash the idea of life not only in stones and
constellations,
but even of life in living beings. The body of animals, and a fortiori
the form of plants, is, according to him, a machine: Je ne reconnais
aucune
différence entre les machines que font les artisans et les
divers
corps que la nature seule compose; all motions can be explained en
même
façon que le mouvement d'une montre est produit par la seule
force
de son ressort et la figure de ses roues (Les passions de l'âme,
XVI), and so Descartes reaches the firm conviction, that, with the
single
exception of mankind, all animals are automata, that is to say,
unconscious,
that they possess no in any way formed anima and no sensus; — in short,
that they have no life. But Descartes goes further, or at any rate he
is
inclined to go further. In his Passions
de l'âme, he confines
even
the soul of man to the action of the Will, and to those sensations
which
find a response in the will, and not long before his death he confessed
to a specially insistent correspondent that he only referred the whole
understanding of the senses (l'imaginer)
and sensation (le sentir) to
the
living soul, in so far as they were bound up with the body; pure
thought
thus remains alone as something living, belonging to the soul, — a
thought
that neither imagines nor feels. 11 That is hardly more than
an
unthinkable
phantom, a mere vindication of the soul. It would be difficult to
explain
what this man, who fought so hotly and unceasingly for pure perception,
had in his mind here; difficult to explain at any rate as what it was,
namely the mere reversal of the unsophisticated mythological Hylozoism,
unless India had once more furnished us with the full clue through the
development of the same
324 BRUNO
idea
pushed to its utmost
possibilities, — Being
insisted upon as opposed to Thought, Nature as opposed to Man. A
thinker
named Kapila, who lived some 2500 years before
Descartes, and may have been
almost a contemporary of Thales, taught as “a final, refined,
infallible,
absolute recognition“ the sacramental words, I AM NOT.
Not only is everything not full of Gods,
not only are neither stones nor beasts alive, — no — man himself is not
alive,
even I, who am thus thinking, am not alive. “With these words, I
AM
NOT,“
as an Indian commentator observes, “all that takes place inwardly, the
distinctions of the organ of judgment, the delusions of the subjective
organ, the consolidation of the inner sense, and the perceptions of the
other senses, together with the outer functions of the body, are denied
to the Ego.“ 12
But if both that which takes place within and that which
takes place without are denied to life, then of all that is apparent
only
the original matter, the “root — primary-form,“ as Kapila calls it,
remains,
and my own body, together with the thoughts of the brain, and the
feelings
of the nerve-system, is a mechanical Automaton. Kapila was a freer man
than Descartes, he did not live under the tyranny of Christian
compulsory
beliefs, and so he could dare to follow mechanical thought to its
furthest
possibilities, and said to himself: even that which chiefly
distinguishes
man, the power of coming to logical conclusions, to form judgments, is
still bound up with a material organ, and this organ, the brain, is
“since
it belongs to matter, non-intellectual, and therefore that which it
establishes
(i.e. the conclusions) becomes just as unintellectual as a pot and
other
objects.“ Life becomes a mere hoax, since “the unintellectual inner
body
is perceived as apparently intellectual, and in the same way the soul
which
has
no share in activity is represented as active.“ 13 This soul that has no
share in activity is the pure Self free from all dross,
325 BRUNO
from
which all that is implied by doing
is excluded; it is unconditioned and absolutely isolated, that is
separated from
matter,“ and as
soon as
the “delusion of subjectivity,“ as Kapila calls it, has lost
itself,
“it looks upon matter
immovable
and contented.“ 14
That corresponds with tolerable accurary to Descartes' idea of the pure intellection (II, 257) of the moi (literally the Self of the
Indian),
qui est entièrement distinct
du corps, 15
of a soul (Descartes
prefers
the word Intellect), which is something else
than the phantasy of the
Senses (l'imagination purement corporelle, XI, 266). It
may be a matter of surprise to you to meet with the expression soul or
intellect here. Do not be too hasty
in your judgment. I reminded you just now of the empty space of our
physicists:
here you have the exact counterpart, the empty soul, the empty Ego.
That
idea of the empty space with nothing in it but motion is no mere joke,
no extravagance of thrashers-out-of-thought gone mad, but on the
contrary
a theoretical acceptation to which prosaic, positive, antimystic
investigators
of nature are driven; just as little is this empty soul of Kapila and
Descartes a purposeless image of
thought;
follow to the end one of those two paths which branch out from it,
and it becomes far rather the
inevitable,
necessary result of that first unconscious act of power, of the
contrast
between man and nature, between thought and perception. 16
These
examples
are enough to show you how deeply
the simple primitive myth in all times,
and even in the supposed newest results of human thought, reaches into
the very inmost core of our
philosophies.
Whether the creation of form or the annihilation of form, whether the
inclination to bestow a soul upon
matter,
or the inclination to materialise that which belongs to the soul be
predominant; — both tendencies may be referred to dreamy mythical
presumptions, from
which they of necessity proceed. But I think that we are now able to
326 BRUNO
observe
in detail how far even series
of thoughts, that are in appearance perfectly abstract, always go back
to natural myths. We must in the first place take for our instruction a
consistent concrete example, and it will be wise to confine ourselves
to Greece, since Greek philosophy is universally known, and may be
viewed
in perspective from a sufficient distance: I must of course set to work
with aphoristic brevity. But if once we obtain a clear idea of the
development
from Thales to Aristotle in main lines, we shall, I hope, be enabled to
gain a complete perception of all those philosophies which are based
upon
myth, so that nothing will remain but the purely critical comprehension
of the world-problem as opposed to every form of dogma, — that
comprehension
which Plato guessed at, and Kant developed in full perspicuity.
Thales, who looked
upon the world
as full of the deity, nevertheless did not make use of the Godhead like
the Jews as a Deus ex machinâ
for the creation of the world:
the belief in Gods with whom he
afterwards
peopled nature was rather the creation of his own soul. But when once
he
began to look not into himself but into nature, he saw, like Homer,
that
everything must take place according to the immutable laws of
mechanical
necessity, and he held the opinion that the world must have developed
itself
out of some primitive element or primitive matter (στοιχείον),
and
that
this primitive matter, the first cause of all visible things, was
Water.
Whence did he get this idea? Aristotle saw its origin in the primeval
Hellenic
myth of Oceanus and his consort Tethys, the first creators of all
things,
and now we are in a position to point still further back, namely to the
myth of creation of the Rig-Veda,
according to which the earth, with
its
life and love, was in the same way developed out of the dark flood of
the
waters. Something of the same sort, but expressed in somewhat different
words, is the doctrine of modern natural science.
327 BRUNO
There is then no actual conscious
difference
between man,
God, and the World;
the identity of
that which is gifted with soul and that which is not so gifted, still
seems a quite unsophisticated
expression:
everything possesses soul, everything is full of Gods, and at the same
time everything is purely substantial and developed mechanically out of
matter.
Inasmuch as it
already contains
rather more logic and rather
less perception, Philosophy
becomes much more complicated in the first Hellenic thinker who
markedly turns away from Thales.
In theory
Heraclitus is just as monistic and just as hylozoistic as Thales, but
if
we follow up the course of his thought we see that he takes
Man as his centre, — and
distinguishes
below him the World,
above him
the Divine. We may
even say that Heraclitus is rather a thinker than an observer of
nature, though
that should
not, as our
manuals
tell us, be considered as
progress; it is simply
a question of personal disposition. Heraclitus exactly grasps at the
primeval
mythical idea of Breath, of the Breath of life, which is common
to all Indo-Europeans, as the
fundamental principle of the universal All. The Indian word
prâna has
exactly the same meaning as the Greek
synonym of Heraclitus πνεύμα, in
the first place wind, air, then
breath, and thence also life, and
finally,
looked upon as the invisible part
of life, intellect or soul.
Even the hagion pneuma, the
Holy Ghost of Christian mythology, is the
descendant
in a straight line of the sacred Prâna of the Vedas. You see
how these two, Thales and
Heraclitus,
stand opposite to one another in the plainest mythical simplicity. The
one looks out upon nature, and says,
“there must be a fundamental element, — water“; the other looks inward
into himself and says, “here there
must be a fundamental element, the breath of life.“ That is much the
same contrast as you saw before between
Descartes and Bruno.
328 BRUNO
Now, however, we must go a step
further, in the endeavour to investigate how Heraclitus out of this
unity
developed something double, that is to say, the world and that which is
above the world.
The fundamental
element, the
breath
of man, the invisible principle of life, condenses itself according to
him downwards into a visible world, — upwards into the empyrean,
purified
into a conception of Divinity; for both purposes Heraclitus again
clings
to mythical ideas. Fire he praises as the material bearer of the breath
of life, and so far the Creator of the perceptible All, since for him
the
primitive being is called πνεύμα και
πύρ, Breath and Fire. That too
is
a primeval Aryan myth, taken from a hundred observations of nature,
followed
by a comparison of thinking and action: Fire in heaven as daylight and
warmth, Fire in lightning, Fire on the hearth, and as consumer of the
sacrifice, — again the warmth of the body in life, in contradistinction
to
the cold of death; the glow of the flowing blood, and the warm bowels
of
the newly killed sacrificial victim, — is anything more wanted to prove
that
fire and life are one? Small wonder that the old Indian books expressly
teach the equal significance of these two pneuma kai pur, “That fire
which
is this world, is also the Prâna, the breath of life.“ 17
And now for the idea
of Heraclitus
as to the Godhead. It is wonderfully exquisite. Heraclitus is, as you
have
seen, fundamentally a monist: the meaning of his pneuma kai pur is
this, — the
essence of the invisible Ego (the breath of life) and the essence of
the
visible world (fire) is one and the same. This harmony between the
invisible
and the visible, between that which is thought and that which is
perceived,
is identical on one side with that which I feel as Destiny in the
apparent
accidents of my life, and on the other side with the inviolable divine
necessity of that which has occurred, which I see in
329 BRUNO
nature:
if I look out upon nature
(fire),
I call that universal harmony the order of the world (cosmos), — if I
think
upon
it in my Ego (in the breath of life), then I call it
Logos, the Word that is from the
beginning. 18 For
sentient philosopher these different names are Harmony,
Fate, Necessity, Order of the
World, Logos, — all nothing but different designations for the one
Divine principle: but if a man takes his stand not upon the
point of reflection, but of practical
and political life, then he must honour this Divine principle under the
idea
of Zeus. That is why Heraclitus
utters
that deep simple, and for that reason only much-disputed, and in many
ways misunderstood, saying, “The
one,
the only one that knows, may not, and yet may well be invoked under the
name Zeus.“ 19
That is the way in
which the best men
of Greece thought about God some five hundred years before the birth
of Christ; it was a lofty
and beautiful perception, hovering in harmony between nature as seen by
the eyes and the invisible Ego, and full of incitements to thought.
But then came the great split. In
Greece up to that time the Ego and the world had been held without any
more ado to be identical: not in
any way as if men had dogmatised
over this identity, but
it was looked upon as an
open
fact, and not a matter brought
in question. It was possible to insist with Thales on the visible
element
of Nature, or with Heraclitus upon breathing thought;
but that there was or might be a double
possibility, that was a point upon which there was as yet no mistake.
Then
came reflection, and so it was that Nature and the Ego separated. The
desperate
attempts of the Eleatists, who
shrank before no sophistry,
to enforce the mathematical unity of all existence as dogma, are
chiefly
interestIng to us as a symptom of the rupture which had taken place and
could never again be satisfactorily adjusted. And
just as the Ego and Nature
had fallen asunder, so
330 BRUNO
too
did now God and the World;
consequently
new conceptions had to be hammered out, new philosophies to be built
up.
But, in spite of all, visible nature never lost her dream-awakening
power
over our phantasy, and the fundamental myths held their own, as you
will
soon see, with slight and merely superficial changes. But from now on
attention
becomes necessary in order to disentangle the mythical element as such
out of the fray.
As you doubtless know
it was
Anaxagoras
who, with his idea of νούς,
founded a new conception of the
Divinity.
Nous is generally translated,
though in admittedly unsatisfactory
fashion,
by “thinking essence,“ or more shortly by “reason.“ If I understand
the
explanations of the professed savants it corresponds more to the Latin
mens, the English mind, translated by the French as intelligence.
Really
the exact translation is a matter of small importance: what you have to
understand is this, that the nous
signifies the exaltation of the Ego
to
the prejudice of Nature, and that means the exaltation of logical
reflection
at the expense of Seeing and Observation. Just as logic orders the
thoughts
of men, so Reason orders the world; “in the beginning everything was
confusion
(μιγμα),
then came Nous and created
the order of the
world.“ You
perceive
that the primitive myth of chaos to a certain degree furnishes the
foundation
for this new belief of reason, but now rationalism assumes the
autocracy,
and it is not the forces of nature, but the powers of reason outside of
nature, that bring the world into existence. That is why Anaxagoras is
justified in calling his Nous άυτοκρατής — an
autocrat. It is
really
remarkable to see to what a distance this new God is at once removed.
Thales
had seen Gods everywhere, Heraclitus had felt the presence of the
divinity
at every step; but now the Godhead, always invisible, fades away to
the
extreme boundary of the universe; it is only the
331 BRUNO
“ordering
power,“ the first
“originator
of movement,“ hardly more than a mere thought; and indeed not a mystic
thought symbolising nature
like Vâc-Logos, but abstractly concrete thought: itself as yet
only
immaterial unformed thought, not a form evident to the senses, but so
far as
the
world is concerned a simply mechanical,
not subjective, necessity.
You will see directly
what I mean.
You remember that
Descartes and Kapila
by distinguishing the soul entirely from matter had, so to speak, at a
purer,
completely mechanical nature. The
thing
occurs here. Anaxagoras, by
creating
a God and outside the world, strips nature of its divinity, and
considers it as more purely
mechanical
than his predecessors did: that is the salient point. For Anaxagoras
himself
the invention of Nous had not
much more significance than the cogito,
ergo
sum had for Descartes. But
our professional philosophers to whom
everything abstract seems to be something specially exalted have
manufactured an Anaxagoras, to whom
the true one bears but slight relation: they sing praises like the
priests of the temple in honour
of the
discoverer
of “a higher
purely spiritual
conception
of God,“ and do not see that Anaxagoras simply had in view a rational
natural science, and only makes use of the God of his thoughts, in
order to be
quit of the Gods of direct perception. For his eye is fixed upon the
World,
not upon God; his mode of thought is entirely mechanical. He himself
confesses
simply that he only appeals to his God, when he is at a loss to know
how
to get on without him. In so far as he cannot
imagine the rise of an orderly
system without a Reason
to
create the order, he needs
his God in the abstract: but he wastes no time over this rationalistic
reflection, but hurries away to the visible world in which he now needs
his God in the concrete, because he does not know how without him he
can
explain the cause and
332 BRUNO
maintenance
of the first
all-comprehensive
rotary movement: in no other way does he make any use of his God
— Nous.
Here then there
exists a very
important departure from the completely unsophisticated identification
of Thinking and Seeing. But how closely, in spite of that, Thought and
Seeing
here hang together, has been shown by Wilhelm Dilthey in his
Einleitung
in die Geisteswissenschaften. Anaxagoras, like Thales before
him, was
a passionate watcher of the stars. When he was asked why man should
prefer
Being to Not-being he answered: on account of the starry heaven. But
with
him it was no mere question of sentimentality. It was rather that he
possessed
far more correct views of the cosmic relations than Aristotle. For
example,
he knew that the moon is great, and believed it to be inhabited: he
knew
that its light is light reflected from the sun, and he knew that the
sun
is more remote from the earth and greater than the moon. But above all
there were two facts in the starry heaven which captivated his
reflection:
he saw, as his seafaring fellow-countrymen had done from immemorable
times,
the fixed star at the north pole of the firmament, and he then observed
that the stars in its immediate neighbourhood revolved round it in very
small circles, while the further stars moved in ever larger circles,
and
so he came to the idea that the whole heavenly globe moved round one
axis.
That was already an observation of fundamental importance. But besides
this Anaxagoras possessed a sound physical instinct, such as perception
alone can give, but thought never can. Gravitation was known to him,
and
inasmuch as he held the sun, the moon, the stars, not as Aristotle did
later, as fixed to concentric spheres, but as independent bodies moving
in space, he came to the conclusion that they must necessarily fall
upon
the Earth, unless the same centrifugal force which once drove the
primeval
elements asunder, swung them
333 BRUNO
continually
in a circle, “as we swing a
stone in a sling.“ You see what a mass of truly scientific mechanical
perception
of Nature is at work here. Listen again. Dilthey informs us that “the
northern
final point (of the axis of the heavens) is the cosmic point, from
which
out of the nous of
Anaxagoras, the circular motion in matter
started, and from which it still at the
present time woks.
The nous began on a small
scale;
the point where
that took place
was the
pole;
from that point the
circling
became wider and wider,
and will continue so
widening,
and it was thence that at
the same time with the
revolutions the division of the
atoms took place.“
When we think
of the state of
knowledge
of that time, we
may well rank
this idea as a
scientific
contribution to thought
in a
parallel line with
the so-called Kant-Laplace hypothesis:
the fundamental
observations
are few in number
and not quite
correct, but the
prophetic conception of the state of facts is striking. For our theme
to-day the one point of interest lies
in the fact that the
God of
Anaxagoras and the unity of
that God is not a metaphysical
deduction, as is the
case with Bruno and all monists, but that this contemplator of the
world comes to his conclusion inductively out of the necessity for a
First Being who should set the
cosmic machine in motion, and out of the observation of the one and
only axis of the starry heaven.
You see
that the
great cleft of which
I spoke a while ago was as yet relatively not very deep. This divine
reason, — of
which the ordering activity consists only in the
maintenance of a common
centrifugal
motion, while all else occurs automatically, — is hardly more than a
hypostatised
fundamental force of nature. And yet the step which had here been
taken,
was one of great importance. The divine had been isolated from the
world,
and had been contrasted with it as an intellect without body in
contradistinction
to bodies without intellect; and that
334 BRUNO
introduced
firstly the method of
Analysis,
that is to say, of dissection, and secondly paved the way for
considering
the human intellect as related to the Nous,
so that a loftier wisdom
might
be created directly out of it than out of the faithful contemplation of
nature. Analysis at once does away with myth; for the latter is
essentially
combination, whereas the former is separation. The rationalistic
importance
assigned to logic, as if it were the fundamental law of nature, equally
abolishes the myth, and replaces it by syllogisms. But inasmuch as
without
the myth to serve as bridge, without the assistance of some dream-form
no unity and therefore no philosophy can be arrived at, the consequence
was not that myths really disappeared, but that they were from that
time
forward introduced more clandestinely and violently. The old Indians,
for
instance, had expressly declared that their accounts of the creation
were
only to be taken figuratively, — only as an attempt to represent
symbolically
that which is unknowable; 20
these people then upon whom we think
ourselves
able to look down, knew precisely that their myths were myths, they did
not demand for them that stupid belief which is required of us in
religion
and science. In the same way we find the Hellenic myths flowing
steadily
until the great break comes: from that time forth reason is dominant,
believes itself to be of divine origin, sees nature at its feet, and
deludes
itself into the belief that it knows: that is why its assertions are
dogma,
and faith is demanded for its dreams. With the help of Socrates and
Aristotle
this connection of events will be made clear to us, and we shall see
how
in this way men became in a higher degree the slaves of their mythical
ideas than their ancestors had been. What we call “Progress,“ a word
with
which childish unreflecting minds intoxicate themselves, is always
dearly
paid for.
In the Phaedo there is a
passage
towards the end (96, seq.)
335 BRUNO
which
gives me the impression of a
really
historical report of remarks which probably often fell from Socrates;
immediately
upon that Plato steps in again with his doctrine of ideas; but what
Socrates
objects to in the doctrine of Anaxagoras
proceeds from Socrates
himself. The latter tells us how in his youth he studied natural history
zealously; but that his hope thereby
“to discover the causes
of
things,“ and to learn
“whether
animals arose out of putrescence,“ how their growth took place, and so
forth, was disappointed; that he
discovered
that he himself “had no aptitude for such investigations“; but
that afterwards he comforted
himself
by the discovery that “the real essence of things lay in our human
thoughts about them,“ and that men should guard themselves “against
injuring
their
eyes“ by the contemplation of things themselves! 21 And so he laid hold
upon the writings
of Anaxagoras,
because he
had been informed that this philosopher had represented reason as the
ordering law of all things,
and this led him to hope, that in
Anaxagoras he would find the
solution
of all the questions of nature. For if, for example, a man should wish
to know whether the earth is round or flat, it “would not become
him“
to establish this by investigation of the
facts, but he need only ask
himself, — which
is the more reasonable? which is the more advantageous for mankind?
This must of necessity be right, because it was reason (the Nous)
that
organised the world. In the same way the question as to whether the
earth
is stationary in the middle of
the universe, or whether,
as the Pythagoreans
had already
long taught, it moved in
space round a centre, could only be answered by the weighing in reason
of the pros and cons of the
advantage to be
gained. “Is it better
that the
earth should stand
in the middle?“ That, according
to Socrates, is the
question to be asked. “If Anaxagoras made this clear to me I made up my
mind never again to listen to any
other manner of proof.“
336 BRUNO
Socrates
soon came to grievous
disappointment.
For Anaxagoras looked upon the nous
(as against nature) as a mere first
cause of motion: beyond that he was dominated by purely scientifically
conceived physical laws. “And so I fell right down from my wonderful
hopes,“
Socrates complains, “when I saw that the man with his Reason
establishes
nothing, but brings forward all sorts of stories about air, and aether,
and water, and similar wonderful things.“ That is the historical
turning-point. Thus it was that mankind turned their backs upon nature,
until
in
the thirteenth century the Teutonic renaissance burst into life.
Socrates
might well have deserved to be raised to the dignity of a Father of the
Church. It is true that with the Epicurean Lucretius a reaction took
place,
which at least taught the love of nature, and the neo-Platonist monists
worshipped it as the living Godhead; but no one took the pains to
consult
nature, to observe it, to copy it in thought with love and obedience,
and
in that way to wrest its secrets from it.
Then there appeared
the man for
whom Socrates had longed but had not found, the man who “made reason
the
beginning of all things,“ and who to every question gave the apodictic
answer, “as it had to be,“ without first attempting to see what it was
in reality. Aristotle demonstrated that the earth must be a sphere, not
in any way because he attached any special value to the observations
which
were already to the fore in his time about the height of the sun in
different
latitudes, but because it was the most perfect of all forms and
therefore
the undoubted property of the earth, to which he added the further
precious
reason, that the spherical form is peculiar to those bodies in which
all
movement is absolutely wanting. As forcibly he demonstrated that the
earth
was stationary and in the middle of the universe, and that there
neither
was nor could be any second constellation, but only luminary bodies
attached
to hollow spheres
337 BRUNO
which
circled round the earth, and so
forth. But you must know that a
hundred years before
Aristotle,
Philolaus had taught that the earth turned upon its axis, and
that it circled round some unknown
centre,
and that the
better informed of
Aristotle's
contemporaries knew that this centre was the Sun, even though the
mathematical
proof of the heliocentric system was not given till some
seventy years after his death by
Aristarchus of Samos; 22
it is not until you reflect upon this that you will
realise what a fateful influence was
exercised upon the culture of Europe by that supremacy of thought over
seeing which was heralded by
Anaxagoras,
promoted by Socrates, and brought to perfection by Aristotle. From that
time forth empirical proofs were of no account, — absolutely none;
what
Socrates had preached — never again
to listen to any other mode
of proof than that
which was
logically rational, had
become an iron law for the
cultured world; ratio locuta
est, reason has spoken; the
age of the tyranny of intellect
had begun, — the domination of blind, sightless reason. What had taken
place in the idea of the Cosmos, naturally happened also in
the idea of the Divinity: it was
fixed dogmatically:
as
Cicero in his historical retrospect
of philosophy says: mentem volebant
rerum esse judicem, solam
censebant idoneam cui crederetur; “they asserted that mind
should be
the
judge of all things, that mind alone was worthy of credence.“ 23 The
nous
of Anaxagoras was now on a more exalted throne, and other authorities
were
regarded as its delegates. In every single particular, Aristotle
defined
to a hair's-breadth, what, and how, and where, and why the intellect
existed:
and so the nous, after it had
assimilated itself to the Jewish Jehovah,
became God to the European world, — laying down the law for all
Christian
theology down to the present time. Kant dethroned the Nous-Jehovah for
ever, a fact which the world does not yet realise, but will learn by
degrees.
338 BRUNO
What must specially interest us
in the connection of these achievements is the circumstance that
although
Aristotle, in the consideration of God and the world, went to work in
so
abstract and rationalistic a fashion, he too drew upon the collected
material
of perception and upon a purely mythical comparison between thinking
and
seeing, for his fundamental ideas and for everything that possesses
power
of formation and living energy in his conceptions. That his nous is
rooted
in the nous of Anaxagoras he
himself confesses, and that may be taken
as
an indirect connection with nature. Even Aristotle looks upon God as
before
all the “unmoved first cause of motion“; he considers God as first and
foremost the cause of the revolutions of the heaven of the fixed stars.
But Aristotle as a keener analyst perceives something of which
Anaxagoras,
the more physical observer, had not thought; that is to say, that it
is
difficult to bring this extramundane bodiless intellect into union with
the world of matter; certain intermediate steps are here necessary to
bring
into inner harmony the first and outermost motion. Thus Aristotle looks
out upon the heavens, or rather he looks into the books of the
astronomers,
and sees that there is no unity in the movement of the constellations:
between the fixed stars, the sun, the moon, and the planets move with
all
manner of shiftings forwards and backwards, standing still and so
forth.
Beside the comprehensive movement of the heaven of fixed stars, which
alone
Anaxagoras had taken in view, there are also other eternal motions
which
equally can only be ascribed to immovable intellects, even though they
should be bred of the highest Nous;
obviously there must be as many of
these intellects as there are different visible motions in the heavens,
and these reach one another reciprocally from the highest and outermost
to the lowest and innermost. But Aristotle allows the method of reason,
with its inclination to structures in
339 BRUNO
harmony,
to go still further. The
world
must be built up of just so many substances, no more and no less, as
there
are motions and intellectual causes of motion; and we must be able to
distinguish
just as many aims as active in
nature. 24 You see
what an
endlessly
artistic, and, at the same time, artificial, structure is set up here
under the mask of reason. The
next matter
was to decide how many
of these
motions,
intellects,
substances, and aims are there? The answer to this question turned
out to be more complicated than you might at first suspect. You might
say to yourself, the Greeks recognised five planets, the sun and the
moon, so we shall probably be right if we reckon upon seven
motions,
intellects, substances, and aims, adding to these the heaven of fixed
stars
as an eighth sphere. You would be far out. Sophistry is intolerant
of simple solutions. The
truthful perception of Anaxagoras and many of his contemporaries that
every single fixed constellation is floating in space had been
rejected
at the outset by Aristotle as contrary to reason. There can only be
one
earth, and that must rest immovable in the centre of the All; that is
dogma, for that is demanded by reason. But out of this postulate of
reason the necessity arose once more to bring to the front the
old fable of Anaximander of the heavenly spheres and the luminary
bodies
attached to them. But since the
wandering stars, sun, moon,
and planets apparently carry out extraordinarily complicated motions
between the
fixed stars, and it
was
nevertheless a dogma that all the motions in heaven complete
themselves
in perfect circles,
25 you will
understand
that
in order to explain the phenomena in this way, it was necessary to
accept
the idea
of spheres rather than
of
stars.
In order to explain the motions of each separate wandering star between
the fixed stars, it became necessary to accept the idea of several
spheres,
contained within one another, set in motion in various directions. So
the question was not, —
340 BRUNO
how
many different wandering stars do
we see in motion? but, — how many invisible spheres must we assume, in
order
to explain the motions which we observe in the visible fixed stars? It
was necessary to assume at least four spheres for the relatively simple
motions of the sun between the fixed stars, and correspondingly more
for
the other wandering stars, and so without reckoning the outermost
all-embracing
sphere of fixed stars, three-and-thirty spheres came to be assumed,
“within
which the stars really move.“ Yet even that was not sufficient
mathematically
to explain the movements of the planets according to the dogmatically
immutable
presumptions. Two-and-twenty auxiliary spheres had to be assumed in
addition,
in order, as Aristotle puts it, “to pack up the other spheres.“ 26 Think
of the Plateforme roulante of
the century exhibition at Paris, set up
in
a complete circle, and upon this regularly and symmetrically rotating
platforms,
a number of incandescent lamps securely nailed to it, — that would be a
representation
of the heaven of fixed stars. Now imagine to yourselves seven wheels of
different sizes, running round at different speeds upon this disc; to
every
wheel a second wheel is attached in some special eccentric corner with
a direction and speed of its own; on this wheel is placed another, and
so on, and it is not until the last is reached that the illuminating
body,
alone visible to you out of this whole mechanism of wheels, comes into
play: but you stand in the middle and watch the movements of the many
luminous
bodies circling round you with unalterable regularity, and of the seven
other lights which move irregularly: in this way you will have an
approximate
idea of the spheres as Aristotle conceived them, with the exception
that
he was dealing with hollow balls, not as in this simile simple discs.
Aristotle
imagines to himself 55 of these balls partly boxed in one another,
partly
fixed to one another, and with different movements, and to
341 BRUNO
these
he adds one outermost 56th
ball.
From this strictly logical deduction he concludes that there are just
as
many “intellectual powers“ at work, that is to say, 56, creating
motion, — an
equal number of “substances“ building
up the world, — an equal number
of “aims“ whose decision settles all that happens.
You will have remarked that even
in this rationalistic cobweb of the brain which to-day seems to us so
mad, the observation of Nature is nevertheless also co-operating and
informing, and we evermore find Thinking and Seeing placed in
direct
relation to one another, in accordance with precisely the same
presumption
of identity between the two which we observed in the Indo-Aryan
herdsmen.
If the latter hungered after wisdom, they turned to the Sun:
if
Aristotle wishes to search out the numbers of the active “aims,“ he
consults
the stars. And it is precisely through
Aristotle
that one of the most primeval ideas of all Indo-European mythology,
prettily tricked
out with scientific
frippery,
once more comes to
great honour: — Varuna, in Greek ουρανος,
that is to
say, the “all-embracing,“ the true
God of heaven, in whom
as the Rig-Veda expresses it,
“the heavens are locked,“
literally as in Aristotle
all the spheres are internally imprisoned in the outermost sphere of
heaven. Not
God alone is unconsciously
borrowed from the myth, but also Substance, Matter, the idea which
is
set up in opposition to God. The Nous-God, the only completely
purely
intellectual Being, rests outside of the world, beyond
the heaven of fixed stars.
The primeval substance on
the contrary (υλη πρώτη),
that is the completely unintellectual matter, has its lair in the
inmost
depths of the world. So now the two extreme points, God and the World,
stand contrasted in full logical clearness; between them are the 56
intermediary
stages, the outer ones by increasing ratios more intellectual and less
material, the inner ones by increasing ratios more material and less
342 BRUNO
intellectual.
The Nous-God, the pure
intellect, is without matter and immovable; its being is only a
thought,
and it thinks no thought, for that would be transient, but “its thought
is a thought of thought“; but the πρώτη υλη is so
entirely matter that it
neither
has nor produces forms — for these would at once be thoughts — but only
contains
the inexhaustible power (δύναμις)
of formation; just as thought
could
not think thoughts but only the process of thinking, so this material
cannot
be things, but only that which is no thing: in imitation of the
Aristotelian
language we might say of the primeval substance: its being is a being
of
being. It is impossible to push utter senseless scholastic abstraction
further. But just as that God, looked at more closely, appeared as the
old Varuna of the myth common to Aryans, and even now current with
children
as the Heavenly Father, so we may easily carry back the πρώτη υλη
of
Aristotle to the mythological ideas out of which this so-called purely
logical comprehension arose. Among the Aryan Indians this primeval
substance
was called asad; they define
it as the “non-being being,“ and with those
three words you have exactly the idea upon which Aristotle wastes pages
and pages of senseless dialectics. Under the guidance of this asad you
reach the familiar primeval idea of chaos as a world not yet ordered by
thought, or to speak more correctly, not yet disentangled inside any
thought.
Uranos and chaos are thus the perceptions out of which these apparently
pure abstractions draw that modicum of the sap of life without which
even
shadows cannot enter upon existence. 27 As forms of conception,
however,
Nous and prote hyle (or God and World) are
no more than the attempt to
distinguish between Thinking and Seeing, in other words the dissection
of the primeval myth of all myths into its component parts. But as we
saw
in the former lecture and shall soon explain again from another
standpoint,
something impossible is here
343 BRUNO
demanded
of human nature; and so the
paradoxical result arises that the pure object of thought (God) no
longer gives us the smallest point for thought to lay hold of, and can
only be
perceived in the visible rotary movement of the starry heaven, whereas
the object of sight (the primeval substance) becomes imperceptible to
the eye, and only has a sort of
imaginary
existence
as a conception devoid of idea.
With this we may
claim to have
left behind us the
second stage
of the road along
which
this excursus leads
us. First,
in Bruno and Fechner on
the one side, in Descartes
and
Kapila on the other,
we have seen how the dream-born identification of thinking and seeing
can
lead us either to endow all nature, — every constellation and every
stone — with life and with soul,
or else to look upon even living beings as mechanical automata, and
indeed
to say of our own Ego, I am not. We have now studied one of the
possible
developments of the primeval myth in a series of consecutive thinkers,
and we have seen how in Greece in the course of some 250 years the
distinction
between Thinking and Seeing, the two roots of our
human Being and so also of our
Senses,
was continually being more and
more clearly felt,
and more keenly worked out,
until at last here also a perfect
Paradox was brought into being, and the pure object of thought (God)
could only
be seen, — the pure
object of sight
(the substance of the
World)
could only be
thought. As I have already pointed
out, it is the dream-nature
of our senses, as opposed
to
true critical
reflection, which is ultimately responsible
for contradictory results
of that sort; we may admire and
sing the praises
of the bridge of
the rainbow,
but we can hardly
hope that it will carry
us over
the yawning abyss.
I think you will admit at once that the nous and the prote hyle of
Aristotle
are just as much dream-pictures as the Gods wandering upon earth, the
world-creating
primeval
344 BRUNO
water
of Thales, or the Pneuma-Logos
and the fire of Heraclitus.
Now I shall call upon
you to face
a third and more comprehensive consideration. I think that I shall be
able
to convince you that the fixed inter-relation between Seeing and
Thinking, — the
manner and way in which that original comparison takes place in every
brain,
or to retain our metaphor, the way in which the mythical rainbow
bridge forms itself and of necessity must form itself in every one of
us according to the capabilities of his brain, — is the determining
power
which influences the manner of thought in every individual. The
possible
forms of philosophy are all as it were ready to our hand, that is to
say,
prefigured: they are given by the nature of the human intellect;
whoever
analyses to its foundations that which is personal, will reach that
which
is beyond personality. And just as in biological sciences the
recognition of the species helps
the study of the individual, so will the recognition of the generally
possible “species of
philosophies,“ in
opposition
to eternal history with its eternally crooked judgments, be of great
service
in the accurate investigation of the individual.
You must in no wise
believe that
what you have seen in Hellas, the issue out of the concrete into the
abstract,
and of simple monism into maturely considered dualism, is a necessary
development. Such conceptions with which we have been tarred and
feathered
since Hegel's time, and under the influence of the prevailing
Darwinism,
hinder all true comprehension. We pronounce the magic word
“development,“
driving the phenomenon into boundless distance, and when we have lost
sight
of it, we believe that we have “explained“ it. What “develops itself“
is always the subsidiary, whereas what we want to arrive at is the
essence
of the thing itself. The progress of the so-called “development“ may
quite
well be exactly the contrary in the gradual reversal of the philosophy
of a
345 BRUNO
people.
Amongst us moderns we can see
both at once:
a progress towards more and more
abstraction
(Hegel and the new school), a
progress towards
the more and more concrete (Descartes and the investigations of
Nature);
in Greece also Democritus laid the foundation of scientific empirical
materialism at the very time when
Socrates was paving the way for the
autocracy
of logic. There can never be any
true
understanding
of phenomena when that which is mutable in them is taken as the
foundation
instead of that which is stable and eternal. That is why, fortified by
the historical example of Greek mental achievements, we must now go
further,
analyse more
exactly, and
endeavour to reach
the eternal super-personal
foundation out of which,
as the necessarily constant ground of all human Thinking and
Seeing,
the differently
natured, and yet
again
imperishable, philosophies, so peculiarly inter-chained the one with the
other, proceed. Everywhere in
nature,
if we are unprejudiced and yet keenly observant, we can discover great
simple relations: the same holds good with our brains;
once these relations are
clearly recognised and distinctly
formulated, then we can
the better penetrate the
numberless eternally new
phenomena of the Personal.
With
this view I
will now propose
to you a Scheme
— a Scheme of the possible ways
of Seeing and Thinking, and
of
their possible combinations;
you will see how exactly
our
different philosophical
systems
are conditioned by
these inborn
aptitudes, and
therefore
by what we have hitherto for brevity's sake called the Manner of
Seeing.
My previous lectures
have shown
you what I think about Schemes. A Scheme must be schematic, it must
never
shift its ground into the place of living insight, of which it must
only
be the handmaid. You already possess a certain store of living insight,
and the rest will
346 BRUNO
follow
by degrees, until the skeleton
of the scheme is clothed with flesh and blood as in the case of
Descartes.
I offer you a twofold
dichogamy,
a double branching. The primeval simple myth of the complete identity
of
Thinking and Seeing forks in the first place into two chief branches,
according
as the balance leans towards Thinking or Seeing; that we have already
fully
explained by many examples: then the Thinking and Seeing themselves
fork
each into two branches, as will immediately be more nearly set out as
soon as we have sufficiently made the first great division intelligible:
Analysis then, in the
first
place,
gives us the distinction between men who are mainly Seers and those who
are mainly Thinkers. For simplicity's sake I put it in this way; the
contrast
may be looked upon more narrowly or more broadly without being done
away
with, so that it comprises domains not necessarily differing in size,
but
different in general. That, however, need not trouble us here; each of
the different possible contrasts is an exact symbol of the other; the
contrast
is clear and sharp; it is that between understanding and the power of
the
senses (see the previous lecture), between
347 BRUNO
reason
and empiricism, between the
invisible Ego and the visible
world, between
ratiocination
and observation, between the abstract and the concrete; Thinking and
Seeing comprise all these contrasts.
I do not think that will ever fall into doubt, or at any rate that you
will ever
remain in doubt, as to
which
of these two classes
any
pre-eminent intellect belongs to.
You have seen how instructive was the contrast between the Seer
Anaxagoras
and the thinker Socrates: just in the same way Democritus and
Aristotle,
Descartes and Duns Scotus stand opposite to one another. Among the
Indians,
even among those who appear as atomists, Thinking is with all of them
the
preponderant branch, whereas with a Goethe, Seeing, in quite as
extraordinary
a degree, gives the casting vote. In this relation Goethe stands upon
the
same footing as the old Hellenic hylozoists, — on the footing
to which alone Kant allows
any value in the investigation of nature; while, on the contrary,
Bruno far outdoes even Aristotle in giving the preference to thinking,
and
so must be reckoned with the Indians, and Plotinus and Hegel among
the
one-sided Thinkers. Those pre-eminent
intellects then with
whom Thinking is markedly preponderant, deserve in a closer sense the
title of Philosopher, and also enjoy the outspoken preference of our
schoolmen, whereas those in whom Seeing is predominant
are often not looked upon
as philosophers, though they are certainly what the Germans call
Weltanschauer,
“observers of the world,“ and not seldom in a more
prominent degree than the
others.
Here I must put in a
caution against
misunderstandings.
The
distinction between Thinkers
and Seers, however
real it may
be, only points to a
greater or lesser, or to put it better, a preponderant direction of the
mind. Just in the same way as understanding and the senses grow
together
so inseparably that neither can exist without the other (see p. 276),
so
all Thinking is rooted in Seeing
348 BRUNO
—
(as you perceived just now in the
most
abstract thoughts) — and no Seeing can exist without being bound up
with
Thinking. A man may be as specific a Thinker as he pleases, or as a
Seer
of the world busy himself ever so passionately with all possible pure
Seeing,
still that Thinker must at every step See something, and the Seer can
never
succeed in purifying what he sees from the element of Thought,
otherwise
the one would have mere empty thoughts, and the other would have blind
perceptions (p. 226). Even
the author of the Brihadâranyaka
Upanishad
can
only speak in diagrams, and Goethe is compelled to repeat his
perception
of primeval forms as thought. In every personality then we have the
two,
a Thinking and a Seeing, and as we are only taking into consideration
the
master-intellects, we may expect to find both supremely developed; our
distinction only should serve to express the predominance of the one
element
over the other. This predominance, however, is a fundamental fact,
perhaps
the weightiest of all in gauging the intellectual personality.
Still, in spite of
all that, the
knowledge of this fact alone does not lead us to the more exact
appreciation
of the single individuality, since the mental horizon defined by the
preponderance
of Seeing or Thinking is very wide, and embraces very variously
constituted
intelligences. Thus, for example, Aristotle and the Indians come
together
as specific Thinkers, and are yet fundamentally different; while, on
the
other side, the extreme Thinker Bruno, and the Seer Democritus, the
master
of Form, are in harmony in certain important doctrines. We must
therefore
carry our analysis further, by which means we shall discover not only
that
each one of the main branches, Thinking and Seeing, is again split in
two, but also that the special form of intellect is quite remarkably
determined
by the relations between Thinking and Seeing. It is just in the
specific
Thinker that it is
349 BRUNO
important
to know how his Seeing is
constituted,
and in the specific Seer in what lines his Thinking runs. With the help
of our simple scheme you will soon
gain a clear insight into these relations.
As the result of a
very simple
observation
we find, as I have said, a new forking of each of our two main
branches, Thinking and Seeing,
into two side branches.
If I might
express myself figuratively I should
say that Thinking may be directed inwards or outwards; Seeing can in
the same
way be adjusted in one or other of these two directions, inwards or
outwards.
Thinking can look towards itself and, turning its back on nature, see
only
the Ego, or — since seeing is
in this case impossible, — ponder upon it; or
else Thinking can be turned upon perception and, in spite of all
abstraction,
raise itself aloft in Nature. In the Indian doctrine of the
Vedânta,
in which at last everything — even Brahman — the all-embracing Divine —
resolves
itself
into the Ego (Atman), the
first of these, Thinking directed inwards, is
characteristic;
while Aristotle, who formed his conceptions of
substance on exact observations of the
movements of the stars, affords us a pre-eminent example of the second
case, Thinking directed outwards.
In
Seeing the same distinction takes place, and that in a most striking
way. For example, the Seeing of Democritus is entirely directed
inwards, that means towards Thinking: it is true that this sage is a
characteristic
Seer, who takes nature, not thought,
as his starting-point,
indeed he violates Thinking where it is necessary: in spite of that,
his atoms, his empty space, his mechanical explanation of the soul, are
all “perceptions of thought“;
that is what constitutes their value, and at the same time their
worthlessness; that
is why they
are so practical
for methodological appreciation, and so inadmissible as soon as we
grasp
them with pure perception. Descartes' eye, on the contrary, looks in
the
other direction, outwards and away
350 BRUNO
from
Thinking. It is very easy to
laugh
over Descartes' crotchets, his Vortices, and so forth, to reproach him
with inadequate thought and the violence of his combinations in his
symbolical diagrams; he was a man who needs must see everything in
actual
fact; he knew no rest till he had taken in a combined Whole with his
eyes;
it was impossible for him to think unless he saw.
We can therefore
distinguish a
method of Thinking inwards and a method of Thinking outwards; a method
of Seeing inwards and a method of Seeing outwards.
With a view to the
practical proof
of this distinction, I will at once call your attention to the fact
that
the distinctive intellectual attitudes, where they appear with any
measure
of consistency, must lead to fixed philosophical methods — they must do
so,
there is no way out of it, — and these philosophical opinions can in
turn
in doubtful cases render us good service for the detection of the inner
tendency of a particular thinker, and give us the possibility of an
unerring
diagnosis. Thinking which is directed inwards will always lead to a
more
or less clearly formulated monism: the Ego, though perhaps not a
uniformity
(which is contested by certain psychologists), is nevertheless an
organic
unity, indeed the only one which we know by experience; the man whose
Thinking
is directed upon the Ego may not always reach the Atman, but he will
always
reach some variety of the Alone: the thinking which is directed
outwards
is in the same way of necessity pluralistic, inasmuch as nature is
manifold.
You need only think of the fifty-six substances of Aristotle; every
man
who thinks inwards, a Çankara, a
Parmenides, a Plotinus, a
Bruno,
a Hegel, looks upon an idea of that sort, with the whole argument that
leads to it, as an abomination: if such a thinker needs numbers, he
brings
them forward in a Pythagorean manner as magic-working symbols for
thoughts
which
351 BRUNO
impose
laws upon nature, but accept
none
from her. Of Seeing we may say, that Seeing which is directed inwards,
that
is towards thinking, leads with precisely the same necessity to
Atomism,
and that Seeing which is directed outwards, or away from thinking,
leads
to the idea of an
Organism, that is to say, of a
universe
complete without a
lacuna, not
falling into separate
parts. It is true that
Nature, as I have already remarked,
shows a manifold character, and yet at the same time a flawless unity:
the
idea of the atoms does away with
both.
The calculating man, a Newton, and the Greek who cannot cease reasoning
(a Democritus), will always reassert the theory of atoms and empty
space;
in that way he learns and teaches mastery over nature; but the man with
eyes fixed open upon living nature, the man who in the process of
perception
resolutely, and with distrust, turns his back upon Thinking (a
Descartes,
a Goethe), will never be reconciled to “forces working at a distance,“
and “the breaking up
into
atoms“; he must have a Whole,
of which the manifold character is not a mechanical but an organic
unity.
352 BRUNO
Let
me impress this upon you by a
tabular
statement:
| Thinking |
{
|
Inwards
— Monism
(Domination of the soul)
|
Outwards
— Pluralism
(Dualism of body and soul) |
|
|
|
| Seeing |
{
|
Inwards
— Atomism
(Mechanism)
|
Outwards
— Organicism
(Dynamism) 28 |
and with this I add for the
further
explanation
of our table, that monism always leads, sooner or later, to the
acceptation
of the domination of the soul in nature, whereas pluralism achieves its
first and most important separation in the severance of body and soul;
that the idea of Atoms of necessity involves the purely mechanical
significance
of phenomena — (that is to say, by pressure and impact), — whereas the
organistic
view leads you to that significance which Kant called the “dynamic,“
and
which ultimately allows all that happens to be conditioned through the
figure, that is form, comprehensively imagined, and therefore through
the
shape of the universe as a whole. 29 Looked at from the point
of view
of
Seeing, it is just the Ego (upon which Thinking inwards is directed),
which
represents that which is entirely without form, whereas nature
represents
unconditional form:
hence atomism, which arises out of
Seeing
inwards, disintegrates all form, whereas Organism (born of seeing
outwards)
proceeds from the fact of form.
In order that you may
at once
picture to yourselves something intelligible in this last distinction
which
may perhaps offer some difficulties to those who have had no training
in
natural science, I will refer you to the following example, which,
complicated
as it is, you may yet be able to grasp, and which is at any rate
stimulating:
Darwin,
353 BRUNO
the
Democritus of organic science, a
man whose Seeing, like
Newton's,
is always directed inwards,
and therefore has
no pure view
of Nature, while
at the same time he
utilises
her practically and
logically, — Darwin
is an atomist
in the domain of
Organism.
In his view every being, every individual, stands as it were alone. All
organisms vary into infinity
in all directions, and it is only the accident of surroundings, which
contain
all manner of hindrances and stimulants, which causes a temporary
misleading
permanency of forms. For instance, if
our butterflies have a very long
proboscis, that arises out of the fact that those with a
shorter
proboscis can draw
no honey from
those flowers
with high funnel-shaped blossoms (Lilium, Paradisia, Crocus, Dianthus)
which they delight in visiting, and must consequently die or else,
adapting themselves to other flowers, develop themselves into another
species. In that way Darwin attributes to the flower the evolution of
the long proboscis. And his pupil, Hermann Müller, says the same
in another form, when he writes in his treatise on Alpine plants (Alpenblumen, 1881, p. 509): “The
butterflies have the advantage of having been
able
with their long, thin proboscis to raise a breed of plants.“ It little
matters whether the butterfly breeds the flower, or the flower the
butterfly, if you only learn to see how in this conception
atomistically
every single living individual stands in relation to every
other. 30
That is why Darwin constantly uses
the expression “a species
is being manufactured,“ 31
and gives it as his opinion that it
is unlikely that such a manufacture, or any one of its parts, should
suddenly have come into perfect existence. 32 On the other hand, an
organic
conception of the forms of
life must represent
form as its
primary condition. It
would look upon perfection
and
imperfection as a
human fiction; it would
never admit that nature could
by practice produce to-morrow what it is incapable of producing to-day;
354 BRUNO
rather
should the whole life upon
earth
be regarded as an organised Whole, in which every part stands in
relation
to every other part, and in which neither the flower breeds the
butterfly,
nor the butterfly the flower, but both arise at one and the same time
out
of the form and the motion of the Whole. Just as when one organ of a
living
being undergoes changes, remote organs are brought into sympathy by
so-called
“correlation,“ 33
— so according to such an organic conception a
correlation
would take place between all different living beings, that is to say, a
correlation within the universal manifestation of life. This is a
perception
which unfortunately we do not possess for the kingdom of life in
general;
but it will not be for long that it will be wanting, and it will bear
glorious
fruit. In the meantime Descartes, as you have seen in the previous
lecture,
has made a beginning in his Symbol of the Aether, and his Schematism of
the laws of motion with the organisation of space, Kant and Laplace
with
the organisation of the world of stars, — and lately Hertz, with his
introduction
of so-called “unseen masses,“ and “unseen motions“ into mathematical
physics,
has prepared the way for an organisation of forces, whilst Lothar Meyer
and Mendelejef by their investigations into the so-called “periodic
system
of the elements“ have attacked the problem of the organisation of
matter.
So much for a
preliminary
understanding
of these conceptions of “Atomism“ and “Organicism“ as terms for
distinct
directions of perception.
But there is still a
point upon
which I must offer a few words of explanation, before we take into
consideration
the important subject of the relations between fixed Seeing and fixed
Thinking.
It will no doubt have struck you, and it will perhaps to a certain
extent
have puzzled you, that Thinking directed inwards enters into a certain
relation with Seeing directed outwards, and in the same way Thinking
directed
outwards with Seeing directed
355 BRUNO
inwards.
For the two last, Thinking
outwards
and Seeing inwards, lead to a plurality (plurality and atomism), and
the
two first, Thinking inwards and Seeing outwards, end by
leading to a strictly unified
idea (monism on one side, organism on the other). I think we can
explain
that well to ourselves if we abide by our diagram of inwards and
outwards, and say to ourselves, Thinking
directed
inwards is a purer Thinking,
that is a
Thinking
less dependent upon Seeing; Seeing directed outwards is a purer form of
Seeing
less permeated with elements of Thinking; the opposite
holds good with Thinking
directed outwards and Seeing
directed inwards; hence
the relation between the
apparent
contradictions. The man whose
Thinking is
directed purely upon
the introspection
of his own self, his Atman, strictly speaking, sees no
unity, but only the organic unity, κατ'
έξοχήν, that by which indeed all
is
brought
into union, the Ego, the whole activity of which consists
in the constant reconstruction
of unity, for which reason we are justified in calling it the
“organising unity“:
on the other
hand, it is only
in the first instance that the man whose vision rests purely upon
nature
perceives plurality; but if this gaze of his remains constant, then
the seer will behold, not
indeed
an inner, but an outer unity, the organised unity of which we spoke
just
now.
The organising unity is that which Kant
called the “unity of apperception,“ the unrealisable inner Something
through which all perceptions and all Thoughts are drawn together
into
a single central point, and only
the
idle word-splitter will forbid us
to call this central point — which is metaphysical and yet the author
of all reality, — by the name of Ego. Organised Unity is that “Nature“
which could not exist
for us at all unless everything stood in relation to everything else,
thus
creating one complete and consistent form. It needs an intensive
esoteric
manner of thought to realise the organising unity as the Indians did:
it
would demand a
356 BRUNO
passionate
devotion to nature,
striving
as Goethe strove, in order to perceive the organised unity everywhere.
That
is the goal to which those two roads lead, the Thinking directed
inwards
and the Seeing directed outwards, and therefore they possess one common
criterion, unification. That method of Thinking, on the contrary which,
as in Aristotle, is turned towards perception without possessing the
pure
force of true Seeing, necessarily remains enmeshed in manifoldness and
plurality, and that method of Seeing which as in Democritus turns
towards
Thinking, must necessarily be inclined in accordance with thought to
individualise
the plurality which it holds, that is to say, to create atoms,
“indivisibilities,“
In-dividuals, which all stand side by side immutably, and only
mechanically
come into relation with one another.
Now we come to the
most important
use which we can make of our Scheme, that is to say, to the
investigation
of the different connections which are possible between Thinking and
Seeing
in a human brain.
It may happen that
the man who
Thinks outwards may also See outwards, as for example is the case with
Aristotle, or yet it can happen that the man who Thinks outwards may
See
inwards, like Newton and the majority of our investigators of nature;
and
in the same way Thinking directed inwards can be united to Seeing
inwards
or Seeing outwards. This gives rise to a rich manifoldness; for as, on
the one side, all specific Thinkers constitute a group of men in
relation
to one another, contrasted with the specific Seers of the universe; so
the Seers who, like Goethe, are possessed of a method of Thinking which
is directed inwards, are more nearly related in many ways to those
specific
Thinkers whose Thinking, like that of Bruno, is equally directed
inwards,
than these are to those whose Thinking is directed outwards. So, for
example,
a Bruno, in so far as he is an extreme Thinker,
357 BRUNO
is
certainly more closely related to
the Thinker Aristotle than to the passionate Seer Goethe; on the
other
side, it can be shown that Bruno in certain relations stands nearer to
a Goethe than to an Aristotle, — indeed that he is actually
a blood-relation; and
that arises out of the fact
that
Goethe's Thinking is
directed
inwards exactly like that of
Bruno, — that of Aristotle,
on the contrary, is directed
outwards. The systematic
discussion of a series of examples will make that quite clear to you.
But
before going over to that let me add one more word
about our diagram — for here too
perception
renders yeoman's service to Thinking.
Here in the middle we
have “the
common Root“ as Kant calls it: we
have allowed
Thinking
to
branch to the right, Seeing to the left. I think that in order to
delineate
our diagram correctly we must draw that method of Thinking which tries
to escape from Seeing and bends back upon itself, as pointing
downwards,
in the effort to reach the common root. We must act in the same way
with
the Seeing which is directed outwards. We thus give expression to the
fact
that these two extreme directions are, as we have already briefly
stated,
358 BRUNO
in
certain relations striving against
one another. On the other hand, the Thinking which is directed outwards
and the Seeing which is directed inwards must be so drawn that they
visibly
leave the common root, and then incline towards one another. Here we
make
directly perceptible that which it would otherwise be difficult to make
comprehensible: that is to say, how far the inner Thinking and the
outer
Seeing, although far removed from one another, still stand
symmetrically
in relation the one to the other, and in a certain sense travel in the
same direction, — as in the same way do the inner Seeing and the outer
Thinking.
But there is more yet which may be gathered from such a graphic Scheme
provided that it be correctly drawn. For example, our Scheme shows you
at once that out of the connection of Thinking directed inwards and
Seeing
directed outwards extraordinarily wide and harmonious personalities
must
presumably proceed, for this is patently the most comprehensive of all
possible outlines: out of the connection of Thinking directed outwards
and Seeing directed inwards, there will result in the same way
relations
harmonious and strong, but probably specially limited intelligences:
as
against which the two cross connections, in which both parts are
directed
outwards, or both parts are directed inwards, promise us very rich but
in a high degree contradictory natures, since tendencies which are
fighting
against one another are united in the same brain.
You will see the
practical use
of this manner of observation if I now name a few examples; and here I
will in the first place furnish you with a cut-and-dried list in order
that you may retain the different names, whilst I add a few explanatory
remarks. In the first place I write down the different possible
combinations,
and then on the left set as examples the names of philosophers in whom
Seeing is preponderant, on the right those who are in the main thinkers.
359 BRUNO
| Goethe |
{
|
Thinking
inwards
Seeing outwards
|
}
|
Schopenhauer |
| Democritus |
{
|
Thinking
inwards
Seeing inwards
|
} |
Bruno |
| Descartes |
{ |
Thinking
outwards
Seeing outwards
|
} |
Aristotle |
| Newton |
{ |
Thinking
outwards
Seeing inwards
|
} |
? |
You
see above we
have, where I
have named Goethe and Schopenhauer, the broadest intellect which we can
imagine: Thinking directed inwards, Seeing directed outwards. 34 Below,
on the contrary, stands the narrowest thinkable intellectual aptitude:
Thinking turned away from Thinking to Seeing, and Seeing turned away
from
Seeing to Thinking; that is to say, Thinking which is not pure Thinking
and Seeing which is not pure Seeing:
whether any master-thinker ever
possessed
a talent of this kind, I should be inclined to doubt, at any rate I can
name none; and yet this is the ground upon which Newton and almost all
natural science stand; I look upon this position as the strongest that
the average man can occupy. Between these I have inserted the two
intellectual
aptitudes out of which the greatest part of what is in the scholastic
sense
commonly called “philosophy“ has issued. Thinking and Seeing, both
inwards,
or Thinking and Seeing both outwards: we shall see as we go on, wherein
the power of these aptitudes for the work of thought lies. We will now
look more closely at each one of these great intellects from the point
of view of our Scheme.
From our first
lecture we learnt
the preponderant power of Goethe's eye; seldom has the world had any
experience
of so pure an eye, that is to say, of one so entirely directed
outwards.
Therefore it is the relation
360 BRUNO
of
things to one another and their
combination
into an organised Whole that he sees everywhere. “An inner and primeval
community of all organisation is the foundation“: that is his creed:
it
is as you see the doctrine of organicism, * as I have called it, in its
perfected form, “the community of all organisation.“ Pure Seeing can
judge
in no other way, and it is laughable to assert that the man who all
through
his life so passionately fought against the atomist Newton, would, if
he
were alive now, sing paeans in honour of the atomist Darwin. His very
doctrine
of colour, as I showed in the second lecture, is a piece of
constructive
work, and that means nothing else than an attempt to follow the
organisation
of Nature, instead of breaking up nature into a mechanism of
infinitesimal
particles, after the manner of our scientific optics. Such then is
Goethe's
method of Seeing. Goethe's method of Thinking, on the contrary, is
oriented
inwards. Hence the mystic inclinations of his youth and the
misunderstanding
which led to the fuss over Spinoza: hence the tendency to grow quite
blind
in the after-feeling of religious ecstasy. “My soul has only antennae
and no eyes: it gropes its way and does not see.“ 35 Hence the
assertion: “I was born in the school of identity,“ that is to say, in
the
school
which must deny every separated individuality, in opposition to the
poet's
own words:
Es
gilt,
man stelle sich wie
man
will,
Doch endlich die Person —
“one
may
place oneself as one will, in the end it is personality that counts.“
Hence the inspiration
of the soul
which comes to the front from every nook and corner, “Nature is to the
very core divinely alive“ (Letters,
14, 8, 12), an intellectual
* Organicismus. A word coined
by the author in order to express the notion that a special theory is
implied.
Organism would represent
something concrete, and would not give the
author's
meaning.
361 BRUNO
character
which sometimes transiently
seduces him into errors of natural philosophy: hence the abstract
scholastic doctrine “Life
is the
rotatory motion of the
monads round
itself.“ 36
This comprehensive
talent‚ — Thinking
inwards Seeing 0utwards, is I believe, fairly rare. Exclusive of Plato
and Kant, whom I leave out at present
for reasons to be given
hereafter, Schopenhauer is probably
the best known example among the famous thinkers; as an expressed
antiatomist and equally
expressed monist, he belongs unquestionably to this class. Had
Schopenhauer
been merely a promulgator of the mystic unity, rechristened Will, he
would
not have been able in direct contradiction to the Indians whom he so
often
invokes, to produce the most brilliant writings which ever flowed from
the
pen of a philosopher, — instead of formless stammering
attempts at expressing
that which it is impossible to express. That was the result of the
Seeing outwards which shows him as closely related to Goethe. For
perception
alone
furnishes our phantasy with material; but the nature of the thing
involves
the fact that the pure, and especially the intensive inward, thinker,
generally Sees
little and is
hardly more than
a dialectician; you that in the Indians, whose philosophical writings,
the further
they are removed
from the Rig-Veda,
become more and more poor in the power of making themselves clear:
you see it in Aristotle, who at every moment loses himself in
mental tangles in which
no man is able to achieve a
thought, because hardly a
trace
of perspicuity
remains; it is those who perceive that
lend material to philosophy, and here too you have at once an example
to your hand; for if Descartes bears the title of “Father of
Modern Philosophy,“ he has earned
the name less by the metaphysical mental work, which he has given us,
than
by the enormous material for perception which he has
created for us. Schopenhauer is
to a certain extent
362 BRUNO
a
Brahman gifted with Eyes: all his
life
he showed a passionate interest and deep understanding for the organic
sciences (the inorganic sciences were remote from him on account of
their
more abstract nature), so that he has the power not only like the
Indians
to look upon organism as the objectification of Will, but, as the
Indians
never could, to follow this organism in many particulars of its
manifestation.
That is why the most abstruse philosophy which ever was invented by
mankind
gains fresh life at his hands, and becomes so fascinatingly interesting
that even our most frivolous worldlings read these volumes. And just
because
he with his Seeing directed outwards is a specific thinker of the first
importance, he avoids falling into Goethe's mistake of seeking
salvation
in the abstract monads, which he declares are “a monstrous
identification
of two nonentities.“
A special
distinguishing mark
of this rare form of intellect, born of the amalgamation of Thinking
inwards
and Seeing outwards, is the direct juxtaposition of apparent
contradictions
as well in thinking as in character: that
is as true of Goethe as it is of
Schopenhauer: in Goethe, for example, the ecstasy of the poet cheek by
jowl with comparative osteology, in Schopenhauer physiological acumen
in
the phenomena of life, with the belief in magic and spiritualism.
The relationship
which our tabular
statement reveals between Democritus and Bruno has now and again struck
the more discriminating observers, still I do not think that it has as
yet been traced back to its origin. Windelband, for instance, believes
that he can discover in Bruno from his youth up the germs of two
opposite
“tendencies,“ and considers that the one comes to the front most in one
half of his life, the other in the second half; 37 an essentially
correct
observation which distinguishes itself advantageously from the attempts
forcibly to banish out of the world the many contradictions in
363 BRUNO
Bruno,
and also from the usual
phrase
of a “development,“ by means of which the original monist by degrees
quietly
became an Atomist. Windelband saw more keenly
here than most of his
colleagues.
Still it remains a
riddle for
the reader how it can have
been possible that apparent contradictions should have germinated in
the brain
of a great thinker at the same time. In truth there is no contradiction
between
Monism and Atomism, at any rate no organic contradiction, but at the
most,
so far as I for my part can admit, a logical contradiction. Monism, in
which
the soul is all in all, is a thought,
Atomism
(mechanism) is a perception even
though it should only be an abstract perception. And these two men of
genius,
Democritus and Bruno, are sufficient proof that a Seeing inwards may
well
exist together with Thinking inwards, and as a consequence Monism with
Atomism: it is certainly no inharmonious condition even if, as our
diagram
shows, we may expect tolerably steep difficulties to cross over.
Now
let us look at
Bruno.
It is impossible to
imagine the soul
having greater power than it has in him. Sono tutte le cose animate ... sia pur cosa
quanto piccola et minima
si vogla, ha in se parte di sustanza spirituale ... perche spirto si
trova
in
tutte le cose et non é minimo
corpusculo che non contegna cotal
portione in se che non inamini
(De la Causa, p. 236); that
the stars revolve in their courses is not
the
result of physical causes, but happens because these piu divini animali
dell' universo choose to revolve (vult animae vis moveri); their
movement
is the symptom of their life.
Hic etenim effectus vitae est,
vitae hoc quoque signum. 38
And his monism is
just as
unqualified;
for these souls are not many souls but one soul: anima ubique est una;
l'anima del mondo ... é tutto in tutto‚ onde al fine (dato che
sieno innumerabili individui) ogni cosa é uno et il
conoscere
questa unitá é il scopo e termine di tutte le
364 BRUNO
philosophie
e contemplazioni
naturali.
And yet as soon as Bruno, from his youth up — (be it remembered that he
disappeared
at the age of 42) — begins to See rather than Think, he becomes an
Atomist,
and that because he cannot do otherwise, because his Seeing is never
purely
directed upon the phenomena of nature, but is always a mental Seeing,
and
mental Seeing leads to Atomism as inevitably as Thinking without
perception
leads to Monism. And so with the dogmatic keenness which is peculiar to
him he declares that the man who ignores Atoms can make no magnitude
intelligible:
where there is no indivisible unity there can be nothing; all
investigation of nature must proceed from the Atom, 39 consists of observations
of
the Atom, and ends in the science of the Atom. 40 So you see Bruno
is
at the same time a dogmatic Monist and a dogmatic Atomist.
The position of
Democritus follows
on corresponding lines. I need not waste words over the Atomism of
Democritus — he
is known universally as the inventor or, at any rate, as the perfecter
of the doctrine of atoms — nor do I need to argue how much more
realistically, more concretely, and more visibly the atoms appear to
him than they do
to Bruno; his intellectual aptitude is responsible for that, inasmuch
as
it starts with Seeing, whereas Bruno was and remained a scholastic
Dialectician.
Our histories do justice to the specific Seeing of Democritus: the
same cannot be said of his Thinking:
there is, on the contrary, as it seems to me, much misunderstanding
upon
the subject of his doctrine of the soul, and that because under the
domination
of Aristotelian-religious dualism, we have unlearnt the art of doing
justice to Ideal complexes which are altogether differently
constituted. When we men of to-day hear the word soul, we think of
something
utterly
separated from all corporeal manifestations,
— the ψύχη
of Aristotle, and the
Pensée of Descartes
opposed to all expansion. How could any true
monism
365 BRUNO
be
purely expressed within such a
mental
Scheme as this? When Democritus says that even the soul consists of
Atoms, he must be taught by Professor
Zeller that such a soul as that is really no soul, but only “the
material
of which souls are made“: to which is appended the further deep remark,
“spirituality
is considered by him
not as the
power over the whole
material,
but only a part of the material.“ Such a reproach would certainly
start Democritus in an outburst of his
proverbial laughter, and he would answer: “Most honoured Geheimrat, all
respect to your immense learning!
But inasmuch as I,
like my
predecessors the Brahmans, my
contemporaries the Eleatics, my followers Plotinus, Bruno, Hegel, and
many
others,
found it more correct and to myself personally more tolerable, to
explain
the world as consisting of
one principle, and not of two or
more, — what could I or any
other monist do but regard
matter
as spirit or else spirit
as
matter? And as Seeing was my
starting-point I
preferred the
latter alternative.“ This
one reproach of
Zeller's
suffices to give us an
insight which is as bright as
day before our eyes, and yet one
which in the dust-storm of learned discussions no one sees, namely,
that
Democritus
was fundamentally a monist, not of course with the dogmatic keenness of
a Bruno, and yet quite as clearly
so, since he rejected
all dualism. Aristotle saw that right well when he said of him, “the
man
who assumes a single substance also assumes a single soul — not
several souls.“ 41
The words Soul
and Matter lose their absolute significance as soon as only the One is
assumed; a minimum of philosophic knowledge should suffice for this
insight.
It is the same with the ideas of Democritus as to the Godhead.
Schwegler
tells us in his unfortunately still much-read manual that “unity, the
spiritual
bond of the universe, was lost“ in Democritus, and as a punishment
he puts him back a hundred years,
behind Xenophanes! In Zeller as with the rest we are everywhere
366 BRUNO
told
that the wicked man was an
Atheist.
The truth is that he taught the importance of the soul as all in all,
and
a divine nature, like Bruno and like Goethe. He held that all the forms
of the earth consisted one half of soul (the animus of Lucretius); he
was
wont to call the human body a tent, a mere night refuge on a journey.
And
if he energetically threw aside the extra-mundane Nous of Anaxagoras,
he
still held that the Divine “dwelt in all things.“ 42
To me this comparison
between
Bruno and Democritus seems to explain much. Democritus, the
investigator
of nature, atomises everything, even the soul; Bruno, the abstract
philosopher,
in spite of his poco curante
doctrine, finds himself compelled to
accept
the Atoms, — but he endows them with soul, just as he had done the
stones,
and so becomes the regenerator of the neo-Platonist monads. These two
intellectual
achievements, the atomisation of the world, including the world of the
soul, by Democritus, and the endowment of the atoms with souls by
Bruno — thus
referring them to one single primeval monad, God, — arise from a nearly
related
intellectual aptitude; Seeing inwards in combination with Thinking
inwards;
only that in the one case the philosopher sees more than he thinks, in
the other thinks more than he sees. This mental tendency is, as I
think,
hardly rare, only it does not seem easily to further results of the
very
highest order; in the nineteenth century we might name Fechner as the
representative
of Seeing in this fashion, and Lotze as the representative of the more
abstract Thinkers. It is true that Fechner speaks of a cosmic organism
and so forth, but that is quite in a different sense from that of Kant
and Goethe; the unity is with him a thought, not a perception; when it
comes to perception he is a dogmatic atomist, and builds his whole
representation
of the world upon the acceptation of forces working at a distance. 43 In
Lotze as in Bruno we have
367 BRUNO
mechanical
atomism pushed to the
extreme,
bound up with
the doctrine of
monads and the
universal
endowment of soul, — everything that is real is spiritual.
Of even greater
importance for the
history
of human thought is the other one-sided intellectual aptitude; Thinking
outwards and Seeing outwards.
The equations which
proceed here
between Seeing
and Thinking seem to be in all cases rich and full of living power. For
a man who Sees outwards like Descartes, whom we have named in our
diagram
as a pre-eminent representative of this tendency, instead of contenting
himself with the barren insignificance of the formless atoms; feeds his
phantasy
with ever new superhuman nourishment, and the Thinking
which is directed
outwards,
which associates itself with Seeing, does not immediately sublimate
everything
back into the formless primeval unity, — as is the case with Thinking
directed
inwards — as in Goethe, for
example, — but consolidates it, perhaps
artificially, perhaps high-handedly, and yet practically. If, however,
in
such a man
it is not Seeing but
Thinking
that
is preponderant, as in our example Aristotle, then we see that this man
also has an open eye for the facts of
nature; he may force the facts by the assumptions of his intellect —
but
at
least he leans upon them for support; and because his eye
preferentially
sees that which is organic, so in his Thinking he will organise and
create
form. In both cases we may expect systems of philosophy that shall be
firm,
broadly designed, often dogmatic, but consistent.
There
is no need for
me to exhibit
Aristotle as a man whose Thinking is directed outwards; he is the
pluralist par excellence; he
is always dissecting. Still, when I use the word
dissect,
I must at the same time point out that he does not dismember: remember
that the mere idea of atomism signifies a destruction of form: the
atoms
are not a mere thought-analysis of that which exists, but its practical
dissolution; that is why the abstract monist
368 BRUNO
so
easily harmonises with this view
which
we praise as concretely natural-scientific, and teaches with Bruno:
ogni
volto, ogni faccia é vanitá é come nulla,
every countenance,
every special form is a vain nothing. Very different was Aristotle. For
him it is precisely form (μορφή)
by means of which a thing enters into
the daylight of Being (ευτελέχεια)
out of the night of non-existence
(στέρησις). The whole of his
achievements in the domain of pure
thought
(Logic, the categories, and so forth) is a taking to pieces with a view
to reconstruction. But that his view of Nature is purely directed
outwards
you can gather with certainty from the one symptom that he is a
declared
antiatomist. Here the position of Aristotle is the exact reverse of
that
of Bruno. Bruno maintains that the universe has no bounds, that it is
absolutely
infinite, 44 but,
on the other hand, looking downwards there must be a
boundary,
for if there were no atoms there could only be nothing. Aristotle's
teaching,
on the contrary, shows that, looking upwards there are real
individuals,
and that means form, and that again means something which is bounded;
and
so the world of the stars must have boundaries, otherwise it would be
formless,
and that means nullity; 45
but downwards everything is one continuity
(συνεχής),
and therefore boundlessly divisible. 46 These two primary ideas
of
Aristotle,
the individual and the continuous, arise, to hold by our formula, out
of
pure Seeing outwards: they form the exact contradiction of the
universal
all-one and the atom.
In the same group on
our table,
but with preponderant insistence upon Seeing, we find Descartes. In
Descartes
no one will question the fact that the Seeing is directed outwards: he
organises space: that is the aim of his Principia. Like Aristotle, he
is
a deadly foe of the Atoms, of empty space, and of the forces working at
a distance; that is to say, he is a representative of the
369 BRUNO
organistic-dynamical
standpoint in
opposition
to the atomistic mechanical. 47
And here you must take care not to
stumble
against a stone of offence, for you have already heard that Descartes
looks
upon all living beings is “machines,“ and now we see that he is a sworn
enemy of the mechanical school. You must accurately understand what it
is that Descartes means by machine. Just because in Descartes not
Seeing
alone but Thinking also is purely turned outwards, he is the bluntest
dualist
that ever lived: Aristotle does not come up to him in this. Now this
Seeing
combined with this Thinking necessarily leads him entirely to
distinguish
the so-called intellect — prana,
vâc, pneuma, psyche, nous,
logos,
etc., from concrete nature. The Monist, if you watch him closely, will
always try to smuggle in a second idea, while the strict Dualist,
Kapila
in India, Descartes in Europe, maintains perfectly “pure nature,“ if I
may so express myself, and can therefore far more consistently treat
her
as monistic than the true monist, who has always something of the Janus
bifrons about him. So it comes to pass that Descartes' natural
science
is
out and out materialistic, as all exact science should be; it is true
science
as we became acquainted with it in the second lecture, and in
contradistinction
to Goethe's perception of nature. And this science can proceed in no
other
way than according to Kant's maxim: “I must always reflect upon all
forms in material nature in accordance with the principle of the mere
mechanism
of nature, and so far as I can investigate it, because unless we base
the
investigation of nature upon it as a fundamental principle, there can
be no true knowledge of nature.“ (Ur, § 70.) That, however, gives
rise
to some misunderstanding; for we pay too little attention to the fact
that
the conception “mechanism“ occurs in two different senses. The man who
accepts
atoms and empty space believes that through the union of atoms, whether
necessary or accidental, transient forms come into
370 BRUNO
being
which consequently are only a
manifestation
of the fundamental movements of infinitesimal particles, and are
therefore
also of subordinate importance, which is the distinctive mark of all
our
atomistic science; but the man who, on the contrary, assumes a space
which
is filled explains all movement within it as conditioned and required
by
form. The difference corresponds pretty nearly to that which is
established
in physics between Kinetics and Kinematics. Kinetics investigate the
movement
of causative powers, with respect to the masses of bodies, etc., and
are
of their essence arithmetical. Kinematics investigate the reciprocal
positions
of different parts, in other words the form of a Whole, and the
movements
which necessarily result from it, and are consequently essentially
geometrical.
From this comparison it is perfectly clear how far the one
comprehension
of “machine“ may be abstract, the other concrete — the one a mere
thought,
the other a perception. Descartes under the word “machine“ understands
something concretely perceptible. If he speaks of machines with
reference
to living beings, he means thereby that he needs no intellectual
principle,
no soul, for the explanation of what takes place in nature, but
confines
its phenomena to a completely isolated domain, whereby he not only
fundamentally
rejects the spiritualist, but above all the scientific monist, who
everywhere
brings in the Soul. We must unconditionally admit that Descartes'
machines
are even more “mechanical“ than those of a Democritus, a De la Mettrie,
or a Ludwig
Büchner: at the same time we must lay stress on the
fact
that the idea is a different one. Here philosophies differ in spite of
a manifold common terminology. In this case the criterion is very
simple,
even though it should require the accurate knowledge of a thinker to
apply
it with certainty. In order to distinguish machine from machine, it is
only necessary to ask
371 BRUNO
oneself:
does this philosopher
consider
organism to be a machine, or is the machine in his view an organism?
That is as much as
need be said
about Descartes' method of Seeing. His dualism is proof enough that his
Thinking also was directed outwards. He certainly never possessed the
stiff
one-sidedness with which he has been accredited;
just as much as Kant
he admitted the possibility of a “common root“: 48 but he saw the
immense advantage that perception as well as thought would
derive through being scrupulously
separated
from one another. Consistent materialistic science is impossible
without
dualism; without it the Ego fades away and with it we lose the last
point
of support, — the si fallor sum
of St. Augustine, the cogito, ergo
sum
of Descartes, — without which it is utterly impossible for us to speak scientifically
of a world and of
knowledge
of the world. On the other hand, after Descartes had taught us clearly
to distinguish between thought and expansion, the old familiar
equation
between Thinking and Seeing could never again be maintained with its
unsophisticated
effrontery. 49 It
was thanks to this splendid man that natural science
threw off the shackles of the Socratic adulteration of reason and
teleology;
and thought, freed from the servitude of a monstrous natural
symbolicism,
was now guided on the road to criticism. 50
One word more before
we close
our observations upon this interesting intellectual character. The
immense influence of an Aristotle and a Descartes upon the thought
and investigations of Europe
is openly manifest, but none the less have these very men been
passionately
attacked in all times, and indeed often by the best intellects. In
order
to be thoroughly aroused, philosophy and the investigation of nature
were
forced energetically
to shake
themselves free of
Aristotle, — all
stood up against him — the monists, the dualists, the mechanists,
and the dynamists; how Descartes was
treated on all
372 BRUNO
hands
I have set out in the previous
lecture. It seems to me that this is accounted for in the following
way.
There is something violently arbitrary in this disposition to
comprehend
nature purely as nature, and Thinking also as nature. I hardly know
whether
you will understand me if I say that by this direction of thought
the road to Ideas is blocked, that is to say, to those Ideas with which
our
first lecture, calling in Goethe as a support, dealt with, and which as
Kant puts it beam back upon us out of the focus imaginarius. But it is
just these ideas that are the true parents of Thinking in relation to
Nature:
it is here that the myth is born, the myth which expresses pure Truth,
a Truth that never could have been inverted, like Goethe's
Metamorphosis
and Kant's Freedom, — whereas Thinking which is directed severely
outwards
rather analyses than observes, and rather organises than gives life.
Goethe
the great Seer, perceived that in full clearness without, however,
having
brought it together into a systematic connection. He complains that in
Aristotle — the architectural man as he calls him — the comprehension
at
once
reaches empiricism without any intermediary; 51 I think you must
understand
by now how in a thinker with such tendencies it could not be otherwise:
it is only a bold leap that can lead from Thinking outwards to Seeing
outwards.
You have seen what pains Aristotle took to act as intermediary between
God and the World: he met with but scant success. Of Descartes, who in
contradistinction to Aristotle started from empiricism, Goethe opined
that
he did not succeed in finding the connection with comprehensions. “He
seems
to be lacking in imagination and elevation: he finds no intellectual,
living
symbols, in order to bring near to himself and to others phenomena
which
it is difficult to express. He makes use of the crudest mental parables
in order to explain that which cannot be grasped, even the incom-
373 BRUNO
prehensible.“
52 That exactly
hits
the
mark, and from the
same
standpoint as in the case
of Aristotle, only that the
one
stands on one bank, the other
on the other bank.
And so we all
of us as thinkers and
investigators come to rebel
against these two men in both
of whom Thinking and
Seeing are
directed outwards.
Architects they are, but they set to work with their materials crudely
and arbitrarily;
they are
wanting in
the keenness and consistency of the Democritus-Bruno group (Thinking
and Seeing inwards) as well as in the premonition and gentle intuition
of the Goethe-Schopenhauer group (Thinking inwards, Seeing outwards)
and
the compact logical exclusiveness of the Newton group (Thinking outwards,
Seeing inwards), at which
we are now arriving. Still, they do not allow themselves to be finally
routed and pushed on one side; for we can dispense neither with the
organisation
of thought, nor with the organisation of that which is perceived, and
no
one is so fitted for such organisation as these two very men.
One combination still
remains
to be spoken of: that of Thinking outwards and Seeing inwards. This is
the true disposition to natural science; the method of perception
which
results from it is reckoned by investigators of nature as of almost
dogmatic
value, and so far science has
fared well under the limitations
thus tyrannically imposed:
every
rebel has succumbed.
I have already shown
how here
the two-sided
limitation
is the principle of intellectual life; it is also shown by our
scheme-diagram.
Thinking in this case does not in any way reflect upon itself, but
addresses
itself only to that which is perceived: but Seeing only takes count of
so much in perceived nature as associates itself conveniently with
Thinking; all the rest it passes by
with closed eyes. As Goethe says so pointedly of the investigators of
nature:
“in such people everything quickly turns
inwards“
This process of Seeing and this process
of Thinking we
374 BRUNO
studied
in detail in the second
lecture
in the example of physical optics. It is anthropomorphism in its
highest
potentiality, for here we only think of what can reach the brain
through
the senses — the whole world of the invisible remains unobserved — and
perception
only takes place in such a manner as the mechanically combining logic
of
the human brain chooses, — the whole world of that which is truly
visible
remains equally unobserved. Here all wisdom rests upon the needle-point
of the Anthropos and his special interests. Still, I would call
attention
to the great power which lies precisely in this. In Thinking which is
entirely
directed upon Seeing there can be no empty thoughts. In Seeing which is
entirely directed upon Thinking “blind perceptions“ are out of the
question.
Here everything is to the purpose, each part fits exactly into the
other,
it is the perfection of equilibrium.
As for what concerns
the specific
Thinking of the investigators of Nature, it is to be observed that in
most
cases they content themselves with a minimum. I have already called
attention
to the special limitation in Newton's thinking, and have shown how
advantageous
this limitation was for the work which he had in hand. Much might be
said
about the difficulties which many of the most important investigators
of
nature, indeed we might say the majority of them, experience in
understanding
philosophical thoughts, even the formulation of the question upon which
all philosophy is based; it is a melancholy chapter, for in consequence
of this shortcoming the just respect which famous investigators enjoy
among
us has at the same time led to a widespread philosophical dullness,
which
is in its turn a great danger for the universal position of culture.
That
even a Helmholtz
should have shown himself to be utterly incapable of
really understanding the aim and methods of Kant's critical
investigation
of the human intellect, is the fact that I have
375 BRUNO
already
discussed, referring you to
Classen's
irrefutable arguments. What are we to say of Lord Kelvin whom years ago
Zöllner attacked on this point, and of all the so-called English
natural
philosophers in a body? I prefer to call attention to a last new
example,
the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, for we cannot afford to pass over in
silence
the incurable limitation of this order of thought.
Every friend of
science honours
the name of Ostwald. Out of the chaos of chemistry, Ostwald has known
how
to construct a perspicuous erection, and his little book,
Wissenschaftliche
Grundlagen der analytischen Chemie (“scientific foundations of
analytical
Chemistry“), is the delight of all those who, like myself, have had to
build up their knowledge of chemistry in the laboratory out of a
thousand
disconnected fragments, without a trace
of any intellectual bond of
union.
This learned man, whose methodological talent is so pre-eminent, has
recently
gone over to philosophy. Of his “lectures on natural philosophy“ in
which
he develops his own philosophy, I will say nothing; that would lead
us
too far:
but he is now publishing a periodical,
Annalen der Naturphilosophie,
and the first number is adorned by a
special
critical study of Kant. What is offered here surpasses all imagination.
Listen only to the following sentence: “to Kant's leading question, how
are synthetic judgments possible a
priori? we answer, judgments a
priori
are indeed impossible, and all knowledge arises out of experience.“ 53
Pray
do not take alarm at the expression “synthetic judgments a priori“: we
are dealing with something which the properly trained man can easily
grasp,
and for which Kant, as was his wont, used a scholastic term; the whole
conclusion of our lecture on Descartes has shown you that in order to
perceive
things, there must be a form of perception, — and the same is the case
with
thought — so that as Kant says, there must be “conditions of
experience“; it is to this
376 BRUNO
that
the somewhat irritating
expression
“synthetic judgments a priori“
refers. Sometimes Kant substitutes for
it
the more descriptive word erweiterungs
urteile, by which it is implied
that we add to the perception something more than the perception itself
contained, before the so-called experience comes into being. For the
moment,
however, the remark will suffice that the one and only question out of
which the whole Kritik der reinen
Vernunft arises, is this, How is
experience
in general possible? That all knowledge arises only from experience,
that
is the impregnable conviction for which Kant gave his whole life; he
maintained
this view against a whole world of theological prejudice and
Aristotelian
scholastic dogmas of reason, and at the same time he brushed away the
insufficient,
halting, metaphysically unsatisfactory attempts of Descartes, Locke,
and
Hume; he is the first and only one who taught and proved that all
knowledge
springs from experience; he it is who once for all deprived of their
deceptive
brilliancy the lume interno
and the divino sole intellettuale
of
Bruno 54
and his modern partisans, and in the place of all so-called inner
illumination
substituted the dictum “all recognition of things out of pure
understanding
or pure reason is nothing but mere moonshine, and only in experience is
there truth.“ (P. Anh.) But here it is necessary to make a distinction.
For if by experience we understand only pure empirical experience, only
the evidence of the senses without any intellectual assistance, then
obviously
we can by these means alone arrive at no clear perception of anything.
Of experience so understood Kant says on the very first page of the
Reine
Vernunft: “But although all our recognition may begin with
experience,
still it does not all spring out of experience. For it might well be
that
even our recognition of experience might be a compound made up of what
we receive by impressions, together with what our own power of
recognition,
merely following
377 BRUNO
on
impressions of the senses,
automatically
gives out, — an addition which we do not distinguish from that
fundamental
material until long practice has made us careful to observe it and
clever
at defining it.“ I refer you to our first
lecture (p. 86 seq.), where
I gave you detailed information
upon this, and showed you that
we might quite justly call The
Critique of Pure Reason the “preparatory
school of experience.“ And now comes our bold chemist, and thinks
himself
compelled to aver against Kant that all knowledge originates in
experience!
That is just what has got to be proved and what can only be irrefutably
set out by a systematic metaphysical analysis of experience, — a
dissection
of every apparently simple experience into its component parts, and an
exact following up to its origin of every component part, that is to
say,
a complete exposition of the proceeding of our human
recognition. “The most difficult
part of all criticism is the analysis of experience and the principles
of the possibility of the latter,“ — so
writes Kant to his
pupil Beck.
(20. 1. 1792.) It was
for this, — for the sake of the proof, only to be gained by an analysis
of
experience, that all knowledge without exception comes from experience,
that Kant wrote his critiques. And in them he shows with
mathematical precision that what
is called experience, could in no way come into being, unless our
intellect
were organised for the pronouncing of fixed judgments, 55 through which
unity is first achieved between the numberless meshes of perceptions
(just
the judgments a priori) and
from that he at once deduced that these
very
judgments can only be used for perceptions, and have no in any way
qualified
significance outside of the domain of experience. So that he asserts
with
apodictic certainty:
“unless we begin with experience, or
unless we proceed according to laws of the empirical connection of
phenomena,
we make a poor show of trying to guess at or investigate the existence
of anything.“ (R.V. 274.) That
378 BRUNO
was
the blow with which he once for
all
felled all obscurantism — religious obscurantism and scientific
obscurantism.
For so long as it is not made clear that the immovable boundaries of
our
knowledge and thought are given in our own human nature, the door is
thrown
wide open to fanaticism and dogmatism. Here, as Kant says, “the nihil
ulterius
must be placarded on the pillars of Hercules which nature herself has
raised
in order to carry the voyage of our reason only so far as the
ever-receding
coasts of experience can reach.“ But now there arises a new species of
the exterminated obscurantists; they have left the cloisters for the
laboratories,
and from thence, in the name of science forsooth, they desire to
annihilate
the most precious conquests of our whole culture and to replace
criticism
by a modern dogmatism, the dogmatism of an antimetaphysical
pseudo-scientific
“experience.“ Kant had already exercised his wit upon them; “various
natural-history
professors of modern times think that they can catch the eel of science
by the tail“ (Tr. II. Anf.); Ostwald belongs to that class. It is just
forty years since that eminent man who was so genuinely a strict
empirical
thinker, to whom we owe so much, Friedrich Albert Lange, attacked
precisely
the same narrowness of conception in John Stuart Mill: he showed that
Mill never understood what Kant was talking about, since “Kant begins
where Mill leaves off,“ and very rightly remarked that Mill was
perfectly
satisfied where for Kant the question, “how is experience possible?“
first arises. 56 But it was of no use;
this Thinking that is not pure, combined with Seeing that is not
pure,
in a systematically one-sided development, breeds a limitation so
peculiar,
that these people end by becoming practically unable to grasp a real
thought.
You can read further in Ostwald's treatise. Anybody with a glimmer of
Kant's
aim and achievements, cannot believe his eyes, and balances between
ringing
laughter and angry displeasure.
379 BRUNO
I have several times studied
the
treatise to see whether
Ostwald in any passage, I will not
say
grasped a single thought of Kant's, that would be too much to expect,
but whether he ever approximately
suspected its true
meaning, — whether he ever remarked what
it was that Kant
actually was
speaking of: — the
result was negative.
And that is
the sort of stuff that
is written, printed, read,
and which whoever wishes to be
up-to-date
must buy.
A deeply mortifying phenomenon! It would
not matter if our chemists, like Ostwald, or our zoologists, like
Haeckel,
were unable to understand the first principles of all philosophy: their
own domain is wide enough, and as
Kant a hundred and twenty years
ago answered an Ostwald of those days, “it really is not necessary
that every man should study metaphysics“; 57 still, in a country like
Germany,
where famous specialists possess such enormous influence, the unhappy
dilettantism of these people who leave their retorts and microscopes,
in
order to develop systems of philosophy in the course of a night, is apt
to grow into a cultural danger. So it is here. Kant was a pioneer of
freedom; his lifework of criticism is such a fruitful destroyer of
all
superstition and all historical dogmatism, that Rome itself trembles
before this
man. But now our
freedom, our
innermost freedom, the release from the delusions of many thousand
years, is
once more being
cruelly
threatened;
the enemy is under arms along the whole line. We Teutons have not only
subjected the whole surface of this planet to our commerce, but have
determined
to rise to new ideals, worthy of free men, to ideals purged of Judaism
and Egyptology: but how are we to conquer if to the religious fables
of antiquity, and the grandiose
thought-structures of the clerical philosophers, we have nothing better
to oppose than the poor stammerings of the Ostwalds and Haeckels?
So much for the
Thinking of the
investigators of
380 BRUNO
nature.
You know that there are many
who are not of the same mind as these somewhat arrogant spokesmen,
indeed
that many of our most successful investigators are on Kant's side; one
of our most sturdy practical zoologists when he had read Ostwald's
above-mentioned
treatise threw it into his waste-paper basket, with the indignant cry
“philosophical
barbarism“! Still, it is striking that the more deeply thinking
investigators
of nature have rare and small influence upon the ear of the majority of
their colleagues, and consequently of the public. A Descartes is more
stimulant
in philosophy than in natural history, and a Heinrich Hertz remains
under
the suspicion of his colleagues on account of his acceptance of unseen
motions. I think that that is connected with that universal disposition
with which you are now acquainted, and which is alone profitable in
what
is called “exact investigation.“ The best aptitude for such
investigation
is abstract Seeing combined with concrete Thinking; manifestly it must
be the most unfavourable disposition for all philosophy. You know what
electricians call short circuit? Instead of completing its course and,
for example, setting alight all the lamps in a house, the electric
current
jumps from one branch of the circuit to another and goes back
purposelessly
to its starting-point: as soon as the typical investigator of nature
tries
to leave the domain allotted to him, this short circuit manifests
itself
in him: he can neither force his way to the
subject either on the side of Thinking nor on that of Seeing, but
circles
aimlessly round and round inside of the narrowest horizon that can be
imposed
upon the human intellect. Thinkers after the manner of an Ostwald and a
Haeckel, when they leave the ground of their uncontested and
unboundedly
admirable mastery in order to tinker at metaphysics, may as, it seems
to
me, be excellently well defined as
“short-circuit
philosophers.“
381 BRUNO
It is hardly necessary to
expatiate
more closely upon the method of Seeing in this form of intellectual
capacity,
for the subject was treated in detail in our second lecture. From
that lecture it is possible for
us to give a mathematically exact definition of this method of
Seeing:
it is the
manner of Seeing which, as
far as possible, is concerned only with the pure form of perception,
while, on the contrary, it takes as little notice as may be of the empirical
side of perception. Here
then we again see the utmost limitation as regards that which is only
human,
and a fundamental neglect of that nature which is extra-human. There
are
certainly still sciences in which description
plays a dominant part,
because it is needful in the first instance to gather up the facts; but
the necessary
tendency of all exact
science
is, as already shown, the elimination of the empirical; it is only in
that
way that it can become “exact.“ I have already brought to light the
special
force which lies in this combination of abstract Seeing with concrete
Thinking,
and I showed it in the example of scientific optics. Here Thinking and Seeing
directly join hands, and weave
themselves into one another in such a fashion, that the average
investigator
of nature is quite unable mentally to distinguish between that which
is only thought and that which is really seen.
Whether there could be any
specific
thinkers who could belong to this group seems to me doubtful; I
search
my memory and cannot name one. It is only in the realm of natural
science,
only with Seeing as a starting-point, that this intellectual
disposition
can achieve great intellectual feats, as for example in the case of
Newton; the specific thinker, on the contrary, must, one would imagine,
at
once
be suffocated.
We have now come to an end of
the
analytical examination of our Scheme: I must, however, ask leave to add
a few words by way of general orientation.
382 BRUNO
In the first place let me point
out that in this Scheme I have only had in my mind the Indo-Europeans,
and even amongst them only those thinkers who elevate themselves to a
school
of philosophy.
A
man like Spinoza, for instance,
belongs to another world, and that for one special reason: in him the
spirit
of mythicism is wanting. Whereas the Indians had taught that the very
Gods
themselves could not fathom the secret of existence, and Aristotle,
with
his very positive intellect, made all philosophy have its origin in
self-amazement,
and go off into countless αποριαι,
that is to say, questions
incapable
of solution, — Spinoza recognises no mysterium, he is astonished at
nothing,
saying expressly that no question rises above the human power of
comprehension,
and everything can be explained in the most convenient manner
(commodissime
explicari). What is wanting here is that fountain-head of nature
out of
which not only all mythology, but moreover, all science and all
philosophy
spring: namely Phantasy. “In the hands of the Semites,“ says Renan,
“the
myths are all transformed into flat historical reports.“ 58 Here is a
case
in point: Spinoza is the dreamless man. Let us open Descartes'
correspondence.
We hear much there of his glorious dreams “which carry him into woods,
gardens, and magicians' castles, where he lives all the joys that poets
ever imagined,“ he tells us too how “the day-dreams at his waking
become
unconsciously fused with the dreams of the night.“ 59 Whereas the man to
whom the night reveals nothing is incapable of seeing that the morning
sun adds to the nightly secret of the true Ego the thousand insoluble
secrets
of the non-Ego. The man who is dreamless can never understand the men
who
are rich in dreams. So much the more questionable does it become when
the
former takes all that is marrow and bone in him from the latter, as is
the case with Spinoza: for of his two principal works the one is
383 BRUNO
entitled
An Exposition of the
Principles
of the Philosophy of Descartes, while the other, the Ethics, certainly
does not bear Bruno's name, but derives all its fundamental principles
from him, and demonstrably out of an intimate familiarity with his
chief
works. 60 To have
brought Descartes and Bruno, the two
diametrically
opposed intellects, under one roof is certainly an achievement; but it
is one in which only a man totally foreign to both of them could
succeed, — a
man who never grasped their living
personality, but only certain
formal moments in the texture of their methods of thinking. The mere
title
of the work on Descartes shows how little real understanding of our
philosophers
Spinoza possessed: he says that the “Principles“ are more geometrico
demonstrata, demonstrated or proved geometrically. But you know
from
our
former lecture that Descartes, great mathematician as he was,
nevertheless
saw in mathematics “only the husk of the (philosophical) method,“
l'enveloppe
de cette méthode, not the method itself, and that he,
like
Plato,
only recognised in mathematics the significance of a training of the
understanding,
“of a means of cultivating philosophical thought, and a road leading to
knowledge.“ 61 You
know also what was his opinion of definitions and
syllogisms,
qui embarrassent en pensant conduire,
and which are only fitted to
make
what is clear dark, and to block the road to true insight. And now
comes
a man, and undertakes to adapt Descartes to our taste by beginning
every
section with a whole series of definitions, axioms, and corollaries;
and
then strides from one proposition to another in a strictly syllogistic
path. And we blue-eyed, fair-haired, short-sighted, homines Europaei,
stand
there gaping, and wonder at the clever, presumptuous Jew, and applaud
him
for his mishandling of a grand philosophy. 62
Much
might be added here, but
it would take us too far away from our subject: against one thing I must
384 BRUNO
warn
you: do not let yourselves be
led
away by the persistent preference for Spinoza of our professional
philosophers.
They are attracted by what is really his chief fault, the logically
systematic
tendency, the enemy of all living perception, arbitrarily destroying
all
the contradictions which truth offers. Only see how gloriously
Descartes
lives his life! One day he hunts with Wallenstein over the plains of
Bohemia,
the next day he writes a treatise on acoustics, the day after that a
comedy, —
one day he constructs a telescope to search the depths of the heavens,
the next day he dissects animals to fathom the secret of the
circulation
of the blood, the day after that he makes experiments upon the weight
of
air and refraction of light; one day he discovers the aether, the
second
day analytical geometry, the third day the Scheme of bodies in motion.
That is the life of lives, an unbroken intercourse between Man and
Nature.
The “noble“ Baruch, * on the contrary, from cradle to grave sits in his
little back room, thinks over what he has read in Descartes and Bruno,
and out of it with incomparable cleverness weaves himself a web of
syllogisms.
The consequence is that nine-tenths of Descartes' services remain
unnoticed
by our philosophical schoolmen; for they do not understand them, they
do
not belong to their department; but the further disadvantage is that it
leads to their seeing the remaining tenth in a wrong perspective, while
no iota of Spinoza's lifework is lost by them. But we may draw this
conclusion
from it, that here we have before us a man of another race, a sort of
Ideal-Rabbi, 63
whereas all our own great thinkers, without exception, were men of
action: Plato, Aristotle, Democritus, the Brahmans (who were forbidden
to
give
themselves up entirely to meditation before they were grandfathers),
Bruno,
Leibniz, Bacon, Hume; all of them work and build with eyes and hands,
and
are the lords, not the slaves, of Reason.
*
Benedict Spinoza. Benedict is the
translation of Baruch.
385 BRUNO
Only
a most superficial delusion
could
lead us astray about Kant in this respect: in his case too, natural
science,
geography, anthropology, politics, the art of war, were his chief daily
food; in his investigations of the mysteries of nature he was more like
a Galilei than a Spinoza, and so brought to light more truth than
incontrovertible systematics.
But
even within our group of
nations
we must know how to distinguish between men who develop a philosophy of
their own, and those who, as so-called “philosophers,“ only occupy
themselves
with the technicalities and history of thought; to the latter our
scheme
is not to be applied. For instance, John Stuart Mill confesses in so
many words that he always knew that as an “original thinker,“ that
is
as a creative thinker, he was scarcely endowed with the most modest
gifts, and
was only fitted for abstract science and for the critical analysis
of
the thoughts of others. He was over thirty years old, as he tells us,
when
for the first time in his life he began to understand that art and
poetry
are elements of culture! This thoroughly noble and high-minded man
was
systematically brought up just as if the object were to make a blind
man
of him, and we now know precisely why, under such conditions, even the
most gifted of men could by no possibility become an “original
thinker.“ 64
After
these caveats against that
which is physically and, therefore at the same time intellectually,
foreign
to us, as well as against much that is really related to us, — caveats
necessary to an understanding of the whole — I would fain add yet a few
general
remarks which may recapitulate and sum up our schematic endeavours.
You
will be able clearly to grasp
the fundamental difference between the typical Thinker and the typical
Seer if you compare the two fellow-countrymen and contemporaries,
Socrates
and Democritus. Socrates says,
386 BRUNO
in
order to explain nature we must
exclusively
consult the principles of reason; Democritus says, in order to explain
reason we must exclusively consult what takes place in nature.
There
you have the principle.
Now if you wish to see the two categories of men at work, you have only
to contrast Democritus as Seer, although his Seeing is directed
inwards,
with Aristotle as Thinker, although his Thinking is directed outwards:
in Democritus all notions are simple, palpable, indestructible: empty
space,
the atoms, — every perception of the senses a matter of touch
— all
change a combination or a
separation — all
that happens a necessity — causes of motion the only ones, etc.
Whatever
form of abstraction plays a part in Democritus, it is still always an
abstraction
rooted in perception. In Aristotle, on the contrary, the notions are
either
so endlessly entangled (like that of the substances painfully derived
from the motions of the stars), that no man on earth can grasp them; or
else they are so far removed from all perceptibility that nothing
remains
but almost bare logic, as, for example, in his supreme final aim,
towards
which everything strives, and the existence of which consists of pure
Thinking,
but not of a Thinking of thoughts — even in that there would be too
much
colour — but of a Thinking of Thinking: in the same way in his abstruse
notions
of possibility, reality, realisability, etc. This is the distinction
between
the Seer and the Thinker. The following too is interesting: the Seer
Democritus
does not trouble himself as to whether Thinking can or cannot work with
him: an empty space, an indivisible magnitude, a material spirit, are
unthinkable:
if a man imagines that he is thinking anything in all this, he deceives
himself; these are pure perceptions arising by analogy out of what man
sees in nature, namely out of the air-space, the diminutive particles,
and the animal world; in the specific thinker, on the contrary,
387 BRUNO
reason
is the autocrat (p. 330),
and
he would prefer to adopt a demonstrably false acceptation rather than
an unthinkable one. In the construction of the inevitable equation
between
Thinking and Seeing, the observer of Nature is rather inclined to
violate
Thinking than Seeing: with
the Thinker the reverse holds
good; so long as the matter has the ring of logic, for aught he
cares
it may in every other way be a nonentity. Violence is a matter of
necessity
to both: the reason has been shown in the former lecture.
In
the case just brought forward
we contrasted the man whose Thinking is directed outwards with the man
whose Seeing is directed inwards: the contrast of the Thinker
inwards with the Seer
outwards
is even more paradoxical.
The
pure Thinkers, the men who,
like Bruno, prize the dialectical
proof of the eternity
of the world higher than the
witness of the telescope, and
who would prefer to
pass
sleepless nights in order logically
to arrive at a
fraudulent
conception of the existence
of atoms, rather
take
advantage of this hypothesis of
the atoms — a working hypothesis — in order to render some service to
empirical
science, — these men have for the most part in spite of all a specially
lively
feeling for nature: they are enthusiastic
about her, they are in
love with her, they adore her. Of the mystics you know that full well;
but even
Bruno, who cannot be numbered
among the religious mystics, says of nature:
Est
animal sanctum, sacrum et venerabile,
mundus. 65
With
rapture these men drink in the
world-picture in its great as well as in its small and smallest
revelations.
Plotinus makes a sophist enquire of nature why she works? She answers,
“because I am a nature that takes delight
in seeing.“ 66
Such men stand
as it were upon a high mountain over against the visible world, and gaze
388 BRUNO
and
look upon it sometimes with
extraordinary
clearness “The world is a universal figure of the intellect, a
symbolical
picture of the same,“ says one of them, Novalis: 67 does not that
remind
us of the rising Sun of the Indians in the striking glory of which
spiritual
illumination was sure to be found? That is why intelligences of that
nature
are often very precious for the recognition even of the outer world; it
is true that sometimes the reciprocal relations of the positions of
things
and their directions are interchanged, because they see everything in
the
camera obscura of their intellects; still in that camera everything is
rich in colour, sharply outlined, and intoxicated with truth like a
dream.
That accounts, for example, for the incredible intuition of the Cosmos
with which Bruno not only left Copernicus behind him, but even
overhauled
Galilei and Kepler, who were born after him. Note well too that the
extreme
thinker sometimes sees the visible world better, and furnishes a truer
picture of it than the investigator of nature, who, as every man who
has
passed the natural-science schools can bear witness, often sees
nothing,
nothing but his microscope, and his reagents, and formulae, and
calculations
and cramped theories. But how often the reverse takes place, how often,
I mean, it happens that the man whose Seeing is directed outwards casts
a penetrating glance into the inmost secrets of Thinking, is a matter
which
will not have escaped your observation. The antimystic intellect which
starts boldly upon the conquest of Nature, sees itself soon compelled
to
reckon with a mightily disconcerting adjunct, namely with the Ego,
which,
like the queue in Chamisso's Tragische
Geschichte (tragic story) always
hangs behind him, turn which way he will. Nolens volens he must study
metaphysics: in no other way can he reach the shore, or set quietly to
work. And
so
we experience the marvellous fact that it is the opponents of pure
thought
and of all scholastic philosophy
389 BRUNO
who
cause our whole modern thought to
bear fruit, and who act as its guides. Descartes feels a frank
antipathy
to all true philosophising: “only very few hours in the year do I
devote
to questions of mere reason,“ he says of himself (IX, 132); he does
it hastily and peevishly, just to be quit of it; he consistently
mistrusts
the learned studies
and exercises of the
professional
philosophers: les formes et syllogismes ne servent
de rien pour découvrir la vérité des choses
(XI, 294); the professors are, according to
him, “in consequence of their
philosophical
studies less able to attain wholesome rational views, than they would
be
had they never busied themselves with such things.“ Again, “the less a
man has learnt of so-called philosophy the fitter he is to understand
the true philosophy“ — “the more pains he has taken in the old
philosophy
the less capable he will be as a rule to grasp truth.“ 68 The methods
in which a Bruno revels, the atmosphere of abstraction and dialectics
and
hair-splitting which to this day surrounds all scholastic philosophy,
are to him repulsive: nous ne
reconnaissons aucun des êtres
philosophiques qui ne tombent pas
réellement
sous l'imagination (XI, 299). Away with it all! He will have
none of
it.
What cannot be perceived is all a mere jingle of words!
A
man like Descartes deals with
metaphysics
solely in order to get rid of them, solely in order not to become a
metaphysician.
And yet it is just he who gives a new direction to our metaphysics, —
he
who has illuminated the problem of thought as deeply as Bruno, the
dialectician,
has illuminated the night of the Cosmos by which we are surrounded.
So
much for the pre-eminent
Thinkers
and Seers in contrast to one another. With reference to the manner in
which
the equation between Thinking and Seeing is carried out in every single
brain, according to the combination which has the greater influence
with
it, I should like to call attention to what follows.
390 BRUNO
Actual
formation always
proceeds
from the part which is directed outwards. That is why in cases where
both
parts are directed inwards there is a disintegration of all form. In
Democritus,
since he is a Seer, that happened concretely: he laid form in ruins and
replaced it by the bodily conceived atoms: in Bruno, the Thinker,
matters
took an abstract course, he fused everything into a unity of which he
had
to admit non é figurato ne
figurabile, non é terminato ne
terminabile; non é forma perche non informa ne figura altro,
etc. 69
Where, on the contrary, both parts are directed outwards we at once
find
an excessive demand for formation. The informing power of an Aristotle
is at once magnificent and fatal: an uncertain outline is intolerable
to
him, a thing of which it could be said that non é terminato ne
terminabile
would in his view be a monster; that is why he is the Lord of Schemes;
he gives form to the abstract, he schematises that which is capable of
being known, and for that which may not be known he sets up Dogmas.
Very
similar is the way in which Descartes goes to work, only that in him it
is Seeing that is preponderant, so that he finds himself face to face
with
problems of which Aristotle never suspected the existence: yet the
principle
is the same; he is bound to take everything into his clutches, to give
form to everything, from the relations between God and man, between
expansion
and thought, down to the shape of the particles of the aether, and the
mechanism of the transmission of light. Such men really produce
panoramic
pictures, since their power of informing embraces both worlds. On the
other
hand, it is characteristic of Newton and of the investigators who rally
round him, that although they pride themselves upon setting to work on
strictly empirical principles, it is Thinking alone which has an
informing
influence, because thought alone is in them directed outwards; whereas
their Seeing being directed inwards is blind to form; for which reason
391 BRUNO
our
exact science according to them
might
be called the formation in thought
of that which is to the eye
formless.
It is a question of Thinking of phenomena, not a true Seeing of
phenomena.
It observes much, but only with the help of instruments which Thinking,
so far as human power goes, has invented, and only by taking for its
foundation
theories which have the property of at once transforming into thoughts
all that is seen. It begins by taking the phenomenon to pieces, and
then
builds it up again into thoughts. That is what in a former lecture (p. 180) justified us in
describing science as systematic anthropomorphism.
How ridiculous is the often repeated assertion that our ancestors were
“simple anthropomorphists“: the man who looks out
upon free nature, and feels himself at one with her, — only think of
Homer! —
is far less of an anthropomorphist than the man who talks himself
into the belief that colour
is the duration of oscillations. Yet this criticism, however
justifiable,
must
not
be allowed to shut us out from the
recognition of the fact that no intellectual disposition is so powerful
as this forcible packing of man into the central domain, as far removed
from pure nature as from the pure Ego, where every thought is concrete
and every perception is abstract. The most exact contrast to this is
afforded
by Goethe, in whom the informing principle, inasmuch as his Thinking is
directed inwards, is rooted in the Seeing which is directed outwards:
hence the special impulse and power of projecting outwards into the
world
of the eye ideas to which a clear shape has been given. Since ideas
apparently
arise in our reason out of a reflection of nature, thanks to the
energies
of reason from which there is no escape, ever striving to introduce
“unity
into the special recognitions,“ as Kant says, that is to say, unity
into
the manifold, — it is evident that it is precisely a Thinking inwards
which
always strives for unity, combined with Seeing outwards which clearly
perceives
the manifold, —
392 BRUNO
which
must lead to working with
ideas.
If we were to take up again the conflict between Idea and Experience,
between
Goethe and Schiller, we should arrive at much more exact results. In
Schopenhauer
the matter presents itself somewhat differently from what it does in
Goethe,
because the former starts from the standpoint of abstract thought;
whereas
in Goethe thought reflects nature as perceived, in Schopenhauer it is
nature
that reflects thought. But this relationship works wonders for the
communication of thoughts, born in the very darkest depths of a reason
half unconscious because unimaged, and entirely barren of form: and if
Schopenhauer's idea of the Will never becomes really capable of being
grasped, but rather lies like a shadowed image upon things, he finds
himself
much in the same position as Goethe with his metamorphosis, which also
floats hither and thither between perception and thoughts. In contrast
to
the Newtonian principle which embodies all nature in the human
intellect,
this principle has the tendency to expand the human intellect over all
nature. Herein are rooted both the sympathy and the antagonism of the
two
aims; a Goethe and a Schopenhauer feel themselves to be passionately
attracted
and as passionately repelled by empirical science; they are in just the
same position with regard to abstract science. But we who in
considering
the subject desire to take a bird's-eye view of all parties, recognise
in both feelings, — in that of love and in that of hatred, — the
symptoms
of
a certain undeniable relationship between the Goethe group and the
Newton
group — les extrêmes se
touchent — while the Aristotle-Descartes
tendency,
and the Bruno-Democritus tendency, lie apart from both, and in their
turn
are interrelated to one another. A certain inclination of the Goethe
group
towards the Bruno group, and of the Newton group towards the Descartes
group, need not mislead us, for it never amounts to more than a half
agreement.
393 BRUNO
This
last remark is very
important
for the disentanglement of the manifold philosophical systems which
cross
one another. In connection with our lecture of to-day it leads us to a
lesson which will furnish an important conclusion to this excursus, a
lesson
upon the origin of our mythical ideas.
We
know that myths arise
everywhere
in the equation between Thinking and Being, since only the rainbow
bridge
born of phantasy pregnant with dreams is able to unite the two shores:
but now that our sight has been sharpened by thorough dissection, we
observe
that this structure of myths embarks upon very different ways in the
four
chief tendencies which must be distinguished in the human intellect. In
regard to the discovery of new myths only those tendencies have any
power
in which Seeing and Thinking are either both directed outwards, or both
directed inwards: the two other tendencies shown in our diagram,
Thinking
inwards, Seeing outwards, Thinking outwards, Seeing inwards, are
certainly
as regards a fully harmonious, satisfying, and therefore lasting power
of informing, superior to the others; some are most apt for producing
ideal,
others mathematical structures; but so far as true invention is
concerned
they are weak. A single glance at our general survey scheme (on p.
352)
will suffice to convince you on this point. You perceive there the two
great primitive myths of Thinking, — Monism and Pluralism, and the
two
great primitive myths of Seeing, — Atomism and Organism; from these
fundamental
perceptions you see the resulting main doctrines of the universal
endowment
of soul, of the dualism of body and soul, of the mechanical movement of
pressure and impulse, of the dynamic movement which is the result of
form;
and now pray consider by whom these myths were discovered. Exclusively
by men who belonged to the Aristotelian or the Bruno group. Monism and
atomism both came to us from
394 BRUNO
India,
the land of those in whom
Thinking
and Seeing are directed entirely inwards: for pluralism and organism
our
thanks are in the first place due to the Greeks, to the people in whom
Seeing and Thinking were directed outwards. This also holds good of the
further systematic development: without Bruno, Aristotle, Democritus,
Descartes,
we should not possess the same clear view of these conceptions, and
these
men all represent intellects energetically directed either inwards or
outwards.
On the other hand, the two other groups gain the mastery of these
myths,
and by uniting things which originally had no connection with one
another,
obtain possession of, as it were, a rich building material with which
they
are able to erect the boldest and most ingenious structures. But for
that
reason, I mean because in such cases we cannot see the origin of these
myths but only their application, we often fail to observe the source
of
the myth. Nothing has ever made so much use of myths as our modern
natural
science: even the religions are modest in comparison: unconcerned
about
origin and connection, it throws all dreams into the common stock, so
long
as they help notions and thought: the atoms and empty space must make
common
cause with the space-filling aether and the dynamic first principles:
in
practice the investigator, without exception, gives the dominant power
to the dualistic notion of power and matter; in theory he preaches
monism.
We see the same thing, but less clearly exposed to view, in the Goethe
group. Thus it is the special characteristic of Schopenhauer's system
to
be at the same time dogmatic monism and dogmatic dualism: and by this I
do not wish to reproach this grandly consistent thinker with
inconsistency
and to hold up before him the usual bugbear of the profession
— the
so-called contradictions — but I only
desire to call attention to the fact that he would not have been able
to
construct his own world of thought, and to furnish it with
395 BRUNO
such
fabulously plastic beauty,
without
these myths proceeding from two violently opposed methods of
perception.
Goethe does precisely the same with organicism and atomism; his
perception
of nature glitters in both colours. He so entirely absorbed the notion
of organisation that he taught that we must recognise in the whole
world
of organisms one single interdependency of multitudinous components,
and
he premises that “we must ultimately look upon the whole animal world
only
as one great element, where one race either springs or maintains itself
out of or upon the other“: at the same time he makes use of the
opposite
notion of the monads, that is to say, of organic atoms, and defines
life
purely mechanically as the “circular motion of the monads round
themselves.“ 70
And that which, in such passages, can be proved incontrovertibly
penetrates
him through and through in every single particular. You will remember
how
our study of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis showed us the
simultaneous
and the consequent, rest and motion, unity and plurality represented
together: that all proceeds from the fact that a man whose being is at
the same
time directed inwards and outwards attracts to his philosophy twofold
myths,
twofold equations between Thinking and Seeing. Just as the
investigators
of nature derive more power from the possession of two-sided
capacities,
so do men like Goethe and Schopenhauer gain more subtleness and
appropriate
ideas in what they prescribe by means of the richness and variety of
the
mythic element, than falls to the lot of the men of the two groups
whose
minds are directed to one side only. Still — I repeat it — only those
men
whose direction is entirely inwards or entirely outwards are the
discoverers
of myths, and even a Goethe could only set up the idea of
metamorphosis,
because the very word itself and the image of the metamorphosis, as
well
as the scientific fact of comparative anatomy, were
396 BRUNO
at
his hand, and so only the idea,
quâ
idea, had to master them; on the other hand, he never succeeded in
reducing
to a comprehensible image the idea which led him on for forty years in
his studies of the doctrine of colour, and so the aim which he had in
view
remains unknown, and the world only recognises the abstract word
“doctrine
of colour.“ There was no lack of the power of giving form, but only a
lack
of the bold masterfulness which is the characteristic of a true framer
of myths.
How
much might be added to this! but
I have already spent more time over this excursus than I can really
justify: I shall be pleased if it has awakened some of the interest
which
emanates
from the subject. Let me in conclusion remind you of that wonderful
verse
in the Kâthaka Upanishad
—
There is one eternal Thinker thinking
non-eternal
Thoughts. 71
We
children of the world of the
twentieth century are inclined to reverse the saying of the sage, and
say,
“There are many non-eternal thinkers thinking eternal thoughts.“
Special
intellectual and sentimental dispositions of distinct racial
combinations,
climatic and social surroundings, the specially crystallised forms of
former
religions, and specially the condition of positive science — upon which
depends
in the first place the mode of interchange between Nature and the
Ego, — all
this, and more besides, is the reason why the same notions are
continually
coming to light in new and redecorated shapes: and this very novelty is
a matter of congratulation, for it is just that which gives colour to
life;
yet we must bear in mind that in the realm of thought, as in the realm
of creation, that which may be called development, that which alone
seemed
of any value to a Hegel and a Darwin, is a mere superficial appearance,
in a great measure the craze of short-lived men: the foundation is that
which is eternal, steadfast, immovable. If you have
397 BRUNO
grasped
these remarks about the
“eternal
thoughts,“ not in the misleading simplification of everything that is merely
thought, but with the rich
many-sidedness
of true perception which comprehends all that is complementary, contradictory
and supralogical, — then
you are in possession of the first elements out of which there
results
an understanding
of our whole
Indo-European
philosophy from the Rig-Veda
to the present day.
And
now that we have not only cleared
the way for our work upon the difference between criticism and dogma,
but have also travelled over a great part of the road, we may draw a
line
and proceed to the contrast between our two Heroes, the dogmatist Bruno
and the critic Kant.
You
will, no doubt, have noticed
that in this excursus upon the history of philosophy there are two
great
philosophers whom I have not named, Plato and Kant. It must not be
supposed
on that account that these thinkers could not with full confidence be
included
in our Scheme; but they stand on a higher stage of circumspection than
all the other philosophers: in virtue of that they as it were grow
outside
the bounds of personality, and so instead of the usual human
superficial
portrait there arises a perfectly plastic, outstanding form, which we
can
see all round and view from various sides, and in various, symmetrical
and yet essentially
different
aspects, — and that
because these men themselves
possessed the power
to conquer the inborn preponderating
influence of an intellectual
capacity which tolerates
only one direction, to break up the matrix in which every man is cast
by
nature, and so to set themselves free from their congealing
surroundings.
In this relation, that is to say in regard to personal intellectual
freedom,
Aristotle is just as great a falling off after Plato as Hegel is after
Kant. The successors of such men as these, supposed to be carrying on
and
amplifying their work, have just the effect of
398 BRUNO
veiling
that which is incomparable in
their personality, and so hide them from our eyes. All the material of
life
which we find in Aristotle as philosophical thinker is derived from
Plato, — that
is admitted by every competent historian: but the true Plato fades
away
under his hands; the same has taken place in Kant's case through
Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, and — do not let your admiration blind you to the
fact — through
Schopenhauer; every one of them lays hold of the side view that suits
him,
and works it up to a new superficial portrait. It would be an easy
matter,
without more ado, to fit these superficial portraits into our scheme;
but
the man who recognises what is unique in these two men, Plato and Kant,
who can absolutely only be compared with one another, will not be in
too
great a hurry to go to work. Kant, for instance, is at the same time
mechanist
and dynamist, atomist and organisist, 72 — not materially as in
the case
of the investigators of nature who directly place contradictory notions
side by side (p. 393 seq.),
but because all these conceptions in the
presence
of the highest order of critical deliberation lose their absolute
significance.
It needs, therefore, a more exact critical reflection to distinguish
the
physical capacity, so to speak, from the plastically many-sided
conviction
which is arrived at by the most deliberate freedom of judgment.
In
the interest of clearness I
will say at once that Plato, as well as Kant, naturally belongs to the
Goethe-Schopenhauer group, Thinking inwards, Seeing outwards, — yet it
is
only by degrees in the course of the exegeses which are to follow that
you will understand exactly what is the meaning of this and of the
premised
remarks. With Plato we shall occupy ourselves in the next lecture;
to-day
we will hold fast to Bruno in order to arrive at an explanation,
however
cursory, of a difficult because fully plastic subject.
Unfortunately
at the outset
prejudice
again hinders
399 BRUNO
our
work of comparison: for we are
wont
to form a false conception of Bruno as well as of Kant.
Bruno
is, indeed, not the herald of a
new science, the martyr
of enlightenment, as he
is usually represented, but rather is he through and through a
schoolman:
while Kant, far from being the abstruse
philosophical professor dragging himself painfully over dialectic
pinsheads
to an incomprehensibly abstract “Thing in itself,“ is rather a man who
is all perception, all observation, all investigator of nature, with
the
proviso that his Seeing is
pre-eminently directed upon the Ego,
his observation upon the dissection of the soul's life, his
investigation upon
the inner being of man. Bruno's
philosophy indeed quite abstract; it knows nothing of the observation
of
nature, inner or outer, its arguments are exclusively
dialectical:
Kant's aim, on the
contrary,
is from the outset — to borrow a phrase often used by him — the setting
free
from “sophistry and super-sophistry.“ Bruno is the typical bookworm
and
schoolman, who has at his finger-ends all the authorities for and
against every argument, and whose memory in quotation is so fabulous
that his contemporaries
looked
upon it as magic, whereas
Kant, on the contrary, seldom,
and only in passing, names any philosopher. Of the dialecticians of
Bruno's
nature, Kant says, “the athletics of the learned are an art, which may
in
some
ways be very useful, but
which
adds little to the advantage of
truth“; 73 and
when some one applied the word “dialectics“ to his
Critique
of Pure Reason, he answered indignantly, “and yet my critical
endeavours
are all directed to setting free and destroying for ever the inevitable
dialectics with which pure reason, everywhere else carried out
dogmatically,
is caught and entangled in its own net.“ 74
You
see what contrasts face one
another here. But there might be much more to be said yet. For the
Bruno that you find everywhere, the Bruno whom our journalists
400 BRUNO
of
antichristian tendencies believe
to be inspiring them,
— the
Bruno whom the apostles of progress
hail as the “morning star of the religion of science,“ — the Bruno to
whom
a statue has been erected in Rome, and whom the Papists full of hatred
would fain have called to life again for the sheer pleasure of burning
him once more, and more thoroughly — that universally known,
conventional
Bruno has not much more than the name in common with the real man. And
the other Bruno likewise, whom Eugen Dühring and his disciple
Heinrich
von Stein have given us, the man of phantasy and the poet, is rather
the
creature of their own phantasy and poetry than of an objective
appreciation
of the forerunner of Spinoza and Schelling. It is impossible for me to
go more deeply into this; but if you wish to know Bruno's methods in
philosophy,
open his Latin writings where you will; or if that should seem too hard
a task, see in his Italian writings, which are relatively less
scholastic,
the analysis of truth at the beginning of the second dialogue of the
Spaccio
della bestia trionfante. 75
After this test you will easily understand
that
for this man Logic must be the science of all sciences, in brief, the
modus
sciendi, and that there were only three educational subjects
which
floated
before him as the ideals of culture — Grammar, for the concipere,
Rhetoric,
for the enuntiare, and
Dialectics, for the argumentari.
76 But time
presses,
and of much that I would fain have said upon this subject I will
briefly
mention only one thing, because it belongs indirectly to our Theme. You
must not imagine that Bruno's enthusiasm for the Copernican cosmology
was
the result of industrious astronomical observations, or in any way of a
penetrating insight into truth, such as we admire in Leonardo who lived
a hundred years before Bruno; the boundlessness of space belonged
rather
to the logical postulates of reason, which Bruno defended against
Aristotle
with arguments like the following: Since the
401 BRUNO
human
phantasy cannot conceive an
end,
nature must be boundless, otherwise it could not comprehend this
phantasy! 77 and
for that reason Copernicus is so passionately welcomed by Bruno,
he is so true, so victorious because this postulate of reason, taken
from
the neo-Platonists, at once obtains a practical footing. For Galilei
the
achievement of Copernicus means the liberation of
the intellect for the building up
of a new system of mechanics and cosmology; for Bruno it means
the
materialising of an abstract thought, and at the same time the victory
of
the principle of the setting free of all form which he championed
against
the principle defended by Aristotle of form as organising everything.
And
now, as a complement to what has
gone before, let me add to these few words about Bruno an equally
hurried
notice of Kant's relation to the wisdom of the schools.
Kant's
comparatively scant
attention
to the writings of the philosophers has already struck more than one
enquirer.
In the whole Critique of Pure Reason
hardly twenty names are mentioned,
and these for the most part cursorily. Only Plato, Hume, and Leibniz
are
once or twice noticed rather more at length: in the Critique of the
Power
of Judgment not ten Philosophers are alluded to, — and most of
them only
once in a single sentence. 78
It is, moreover, specially significant
that
Kant only refers to the most important thinkers of mankind, — the
others
he passes over. “The learned multitude knows nothing, understands
nothing,
but it talks of everything and prides itself on what it says“ — that is
Kant's opinion. 79
Bruno, on the contrary, assures us that he loves the
works of Thomas Aquinas “like his own soul,“ 80 he knows by heart every
schoolman
of ancient and modem times, and does not disdain to quote as
authorities
the muddiest apocryphal sources of mystical bogus philosophy and
theological
sophistry — an Apollonius, a
402 BRUNO
Hermes
Trismegistus, and gives up half
his life to the Spanish mountebank and conjurer Ramon Lull who
professed
to arrive at knowledge by the help of revolving discs, and extols him
as
omniscium propemodumque divinum,
omniscient and almost divine. Kant,
however, tells us that he looks upon the voluminous elucubrations of
the
professional philosophers “with repugnance, with a certain hatred“
(Letters,
8, 4, 66); and his amanuensis for many years, Jachmann, reports that
“Kant
found everything in himself, and so lost the capacity for finding
anything
in others. At the very moment of the fullest ripeness and power of his
intellect, when he was working up critical philosophy, nothing was more
difficult to him than to think himself into the system of another. Even
the writings of his adversaries he could only grasp with the utmost
pains,
because it was impossible to him even for a while to distract himself
from
his original system of thought.“ 81 Jachmann's commentary is
a little
shaky,
but his ingenuous, honest testimony is all the more valuable. Kant was
simply never at any time of his life able to take an interest in the
peculiar
philosophy of the schools. He who in his most advanced old age read
every
book of travels, he who followed all that concerned natural science
with
the most enthusiastic attention, — could only read the writings of his
learned
brother professors “with the utmost pains,“ and since, when every now
and
again he did take these “utmost pains,“ he still had not the power to
find
anything in these works, he preferred to leave them unread. There is no
need to make any excuses for him. If there were a Kant to-day he would
do the same. But we learn here how little justification there is for
reckoning
Kant straight away among the scholastic philosophers: it sets aside the
whole picture of his intellectual personality. It is only the man who
looks
upon Kant from the right point of view, who can understand why to the
end
of his life he felt compelled to take the field against the professional
403 BRUNO
philosophers
who were already
beginning
to introduce their
own vagaries into his
critical
philosophy, — against “the
metaphysics of the schools
which tear reason to
tatters,“ and against the university
professors whose chief
business it is “industriously
to convert the simplest thing in the world into the most difficult“:
in
opposition to all these fruitless subtleties, Kant maintains that his
philosophy
“can be understood from the standpoint of the common understanding,“
and
only exacts that this common understanding shall “cultivate itself
adequately“
to the business of Criticism. Kant looks upon the metaphysical analysis
of our thought as a fundamental cultural
exercise of the most
universal
importance, “indispensable to all future times for the highest aims of
mankind,“ which means in contradistinction to its being regarded as
mere
abstruse, learned, professional discipline. 82 Hence his assertion that
“the practical philosopher is the true philosopher“ (Logic, III) —
hence
the touching appeal in the middle of the Critique of Pure Reason to
“those
who have philosophy at heart, which is
oftener said than met with“ (p.
376).
What
I have specified here upon the
subject of Kant's relation to the schoolmen is at the same time a
symptom
of a more deeply ingrained peculiarity of his personality, namely of
the
stress which it laid upon the necessity of perception. Until a man has
recognised this he knows nothing of Kant. On one occasion he talks of a
drop of water and of its swarming life of minute creatures, and then
goes
on: “if from that I lift my eyes to heaven in order to see the
immeasurable
space teeming with worlds like grains of dust, no human speech can
express
the feeling which
such a thought arouses, and
all subtle metaphysical dissection is far removed from the sublimity
and
dignity which belongs to such a perception.“ 83 This sublimity and
dignity
of the perception is the scarlet clue which, threaded through his whole
life-work, was the only thing
404 BRUNO
which
enabled him, — the only thing
which
enables us also — to find a safe path through the stifling world of
thought.
In the same way in the realm of practical philosophy, which, as I said
just now, Kant had chiefly at heart, and in which his theoretical
abstraction
was often cast in his teeth, — with reckless vehemence by Schopenhauer
for
instance, — he teaches us that “Goodness has an irresistible power,
when
it is perceived.“ 84
Where Kant is very hard to understand is not
really,
as is the case with other philosophers, because the abstraction becomes
two subtle for it to be possible to fasten any notion upon it, but, on
the contrary, because though he sees with the utmost perspicacity (with
that perspicacity to which I alluded in the first lecture) the
relations
of the human intellect, no means exist of communicating this perception
except by a whole ponderous structure of abstraction piled upon
abstraction.
Hence the many repetitions which are characteristic of Kant's writings
and often lead a beginner astray; for he thinks to himself, Here is
something
new, whereas Kant is for ever labouring to communicate the same
perceptible
knowledge by means of new thoughts and new words until we become
familiar
with it and see it, instead of merely thinking it. So far as I am
aware,
no teacher of philosophy has called attention to this fundamental fact
which is so conclusive for the apprehension of Kant's style. Every man
who has had the advantage of a certain technical training can
understand
purely logical combinations of thought, and can, if he so desires,
himself
explain them; but the previous lecture will have shown you how
monstrously
difficult it is to communicate a conviction arrived at by the loftiest
power of conception, —
that
the elementary conceptions of
understanding, the primitive forms of all judgment, can only be
distinguished
from the side of perception, but are incapable of being defined by
words — and
for the very reason that they are
405 BRUNO
themselves
the primitive conceptions
(p. 295). Equally difficult is the communication of Kant's conception
of
freedom. Here the direct inner experience of every individual must be
revealed
in connection with the inexorable all-uniting sum-total of Nature; but
the language of logic fails, for such an insight oversteps the
boundaries
of its competence. So it is with the “Thing in
itself,“ with the ideality of time
and space, with the representation of God as “the regulating principle
of reason,“ and so forth. This is no mystical enlightenment, no
“intellectual
perception,“ as Hegel calls it, no “supersensual perception,“ as
Schilling
says. Kant loathes all such conceptions. “I ask for your opinion, but
as
far as possible in human language. For I, poor son of earth, am in no
way
organised for the divine language of perceptive reason. That which may
be spelt out for me according to the rules of logic out of common
conceptions,
that is well within my reach.“ So wrote Kant to Hamann (6.
4. 1774). Far rather, as I have
said, does the difficulty lie
in the fact that our words in
the first place refer to conceptions, and that conceptions can only
indirectly
awaken perceptions. A whole book upon the colour white and its
properties
does not tell me what white is: in order to experience it I must open
my
eyes and look upon white: that
is the example which Descartes
uses: it is the same
with the facts which Kant saw in the
inner man; until we have seen them ourselves it is not only difficult
but
impossible to understand Kant. So it follows that whoever has only
grasped
the word, not the perception, in Kant, — only the logical structure
without
the facts which led to it, — has gained little or nothing. 85 You,
gentlemen,
will in future know exactly what it means when of those who wish to
work
at philosophy, as a foundation, Kant requires not in the first place
logical
and dialectical studies nor historical knowledge, but “exercises in
the
judgment of experience,“ and “attention to the compared sensa-
406 BRUNO
tions
of the senses,“ in other words,
a schooling in Seeing inwards and outwards. 86 And you will
understand
why Kant warns us against the “teaching of the philosophers“ and
against
“definitions which are so often misleading,“ whereas “the true method
of
metaphysics is in principle one and the same with that which Newton
introduced
into natural science,“ that is to say, the method of “sure
experiences,“
which here certainly means “inner experience,“ yet none the less
experience
“directly visible to the eyes.“ 87
I also think that you will now begin
to understand why we may, and indeed must, say of this man that his
Seeing,
like that of Aristotle, Descartes, and Goethe, was directed outwards
and
not inwards; while his Thinking was directed entirely inwards, and so
overwhelmingly,
so intricately complicated, that his physical eyes had little power
left
to look out upon the world. Even in the darkest depths of the inner man
what he saw was everywhere organisation. You will also understand what
is meant when Kant in a posthumous fragment asserts, “I am myself by
inclination
an investigator,“ 88
and when he writes to the anatomist
Sömmerring,
and says, that just as Sömmerring busies himself with the
dissection
of what is visible in man, so he, Kant, busies himself with the
dissection
of what is invisible in man. It is certainly important for the
knowledge
of Kant's personality to remember that of Kant's sixty-five works,
almost
one-half, namely twenty-nine, have no philosophical purport, and that
in
the period of his progressive development up to his fortieth year, he
only
published six works dealing with metaphysical subjects, as against
thirteen
upon physics, mathematics, geognosis, meteorology, astronomy and
anthropology.
Here you have the diametrical opposite to Bruno, in whom the most
glorious
of all objects of perception, the boundless heaven of stars, only
serves
for a logically dialectical system of thoughts, whereas in
407 BRUNO
Kant
it is the thoughts themselves
that
rest upon perception, and for that very reason struggle painfully for conceptive
expression. 89
With
this is connected Kant's
strict delimitation of the
significance of his logic. Bruno,
as you have already heard, held it to be the science of all sciences,
the
true fountain-head of recognition. His ideal of absolute recognition
is that which reason,
purified of all contact with the world of sense (intellectus purus),
perceives
by mere introspection, that is looking into itself, omnia in se ipso
videndo,
whereas it sees nothing outside of itself (non extra se
speculando). 90
And if he ascribes such a fully pure recognition to God alone, that has
no great significance, since in principle Bruno recognises only one
all-embracing
monad into which every intelligence crosses over by stages, and so is
essentially
related to it. 91
Thus it comes to pass that in the end the definition
of
truth is “the law of intelligence reflected in things,“ veritas est
ipsa
lex intelligentiae observata in rebus. 92 The same principle
emboldened
Hegel
to utter the monstrous definition, “Logic is the science of God.“ As
against
this Kant has shown once for all that logic is only a formal science,
touching
those combinations of conceptions which, in the previous lecture, have
been shown as a necessary function of the human intellect. “But,“ as he
says, “since the mere form of recognition, however much it may agree
with
logical laws, is still far from adequate on that account to determine
the
material (objective) truth of recognition, it follows that no one can
dare
to form judgments upon subjects with the help of logic alone, or to
assert
anything without having previously made fundamental enquiries outside
of
logic, in order afterwards to attempt their utilisation and combination
in a consistent whole according to the laws of logic.“ To take a
practical
perceptible image. With the help of crucibles, hammers and files
408 BRUNO
man
can at will manufacture for himself
golden ornaments; but the gold itself is produced outside in nature,
and
is brought to the light of day with axe and spade. And so Kant goes on
to write, “now we may take it as a sure and useful warning: that
universal
logic looked upon as organon is always a logic of appearances
(dialectic).
For since it teaches us nothing about the contents of recognition, but
only the formal conditions of agreement with the understanding, which
moreover
are quite immaterial in view of the objects; so the demand to use them
as our tools in order to widen and extend our knowledge, at any rate so
far as profession is concerned, can end in nothing but idle chatter in
order to assert or to attack whatever we please with a certain show.“
You
see how clearly and sharply
Kant distinguishes himself from all the schoolmen, from all the
rationalists
in the true sense of the word, from Socrates, Bruno, Hegel, how
differently
from these men he sees and judges the importance and limitations of
human
reason. Never again will you be led on account of a certain apparent
similarity
of language to associate him with those philosophers from whom he
really
differs entirely in his whole manner of Seeing, his principles, his
methods
and his aim.
I
have said thus much as a
preliminary
orientation of Kant's position as contrasted with that of Bruno, in
order
to arrive at a more correct view of it than that which commonly
obtains.
We will now take a cursory view of Bruno's philosophy in its principal
outlines in order to reach a further stage in our knowledge of Kant's
personality.
We
must not believe that Bruno
was a specially inventive genius. Almost all his doctrines were taken
directly
from the German Nikolaus Krebs of Kues on the Moselle, better known
under
the romanised name of Cardinal Cusa, amongst them those of the
boundlessness
409 BRUNO
of
space and the numberless inhabited
worlds, as well as the other doctrine of the finality of
divisibility — the
atoms, and that of the philosophical significance of numbers, of the
stage
ladder of things and beings, of the identity of contradictions, of
complication
(for thought) and explication (for matter) * and so forth. Even that
perception
which is the most original of all his notions, the doctrine of monads,
is an old possession of the neo-Platonists, and the very saying that
God
is “the monad of monads“ (monadum
monas) occurs in Synesius of Cyrene a
thousand years before Bruno. 93
At
bottom the philosophy of Bruno
is simple, grievously simple; there is one single thought which ever
and
again arises on all sides, that of the pantheism. We might, indeed — at
least
if we desired to borrow logical consistency from the Panlogicians —
make
no distinction between Nature and the Ego, and between both those and
God.
I have already quoted the saying that “Nature is God in Things“; in the
same way the Ego is fused with God and with Nature; as God is the
Nature
of Nature, so he is also the Ego of the Ego, “the Soul of Souls, the
Life
of Lives; more intimate, nearer, more closely related to us than we can
be to ourselves“; and is it not the last conclusion of wisdom that
there
is “only one Being, one single and identical Thing“? 94 What we could
distinguish
as God, world, and Ego, is only a species of motion or pulsation inside
the one universal spirit; from God down to Nature and to the Ego,
ascending
again from the Ego to God through Nature. Influit Deus per naturam in
rationem;
ratio attollitur per naturam in Deum. 95 In strictness we ought to
say
that
there is only one unity without distinction; we might call the Divinity
absolute unity without any sort of formation, unitá
*
Terms for which Cardinal Cusa
is responsible. The idea is that thought arises from folding down and
inwardly — matter
arises more and more from unfolding.
410 BRUNO
assoluta
senza spezie alchuna; but we
may leave out the conception “God,“ and say Nature is the All, and is
its own
creator — natura ipsa est fabrifactor
(De. imm. viii. 10, 11); or again
we
need speak of neither God nor of Nature, but only accept the immovable
boundlessness of the universe — infinito
immobile — in which there
are no distinctions, where the mathematical point is the same as the
whole
body, the centre the same as the circle, the limited the same as the
unlimited,
the great as the small, the whole as the part, light as darkness,
hatred
as love, the formless as that which has form; here then there exists no
difference between a man and an ant, between an ant and the sun; the
soul
of a flower, of an oyster, of a fly, of a man, are of a similar entity
in species and genus. 96
In this God-Cosmos-Ego, the boundary is at the
same
time no boundary, form no form, matter no matter, soul no soul, and
even
error is “latent truth“; for everything is at once everything,
without
distinction, since everything is only one single unity; 97 here one
name
is sufficient to comprise everything; here there is only one reason
which
thinks, only one will which desires. 98 Contradictions viewed
from this
standpoint there are none, they are rather fused together like twins:
quae in se ipsis diversa sunt atque
contraria in ipso simplicissimo
principio
sunt unum et idem; 99
indeed, all things are made up of apparent
contradictions, tutte le cose
constano de contrarii; 100
but for the man who is gifted
with recognition distinctions are wiped out, they coalesce in the
coincidentia
oppositorum. If the One Undifferentiated unfolds itself as it
were,
then
there arises the All with its unnumbered creations; if the All folds
itself
together, then the Undifferentiated One arises once more. 101 Thus
the
birth of a thing is the expansion of a centre which is imperceptible
and
only to be grasped by our thoughts; its existence is the lasting
duration
of the sphere so born; its death is its shrinking together to the
original
centre. 102
411 BRUNO
One
remark in passing. This
doctrine
of the Universal Unity is as old as the Indo-European race, and
therefore
really worthy of respect. But it is only to be found in perfect purity,
and therefore also really intelligible and sympathetic, among the
Brahmans, — less
satisfying and yet always beautiful, sometimes even enchanting, — among
our
European mystics. In order to be capable of acceptation it needs must
stand
upon a religious foundation:
the
religious myth then surrounds it
with images, and the moral aim of a practical union of man with God
lends
it an august dignity. Where, on the contrary, — as to a certain extent
in
Plotinus, and more outspokenly in Bruno, — it presents itself not
supralogically,
but rationalistically, not as a suggestion but as argument, — where it
aims
not at the intensive raising of the individual, but at the irrefutable
dialectical proof of empirical truths, — there the doctrine of the
universal
unity becomes frankly intolerable. For the sake of a miserable logical
trick it annihilates form, personality, analytical science. That such
things
should again be stirring among us, befooling weak brains, is very
lamentable.
In religion mysticism is indispensable, for it is through mysticism
that
the myth first becomes living experience: in philosophy it is poison.
Without
going any further into
principles, I may here call attention to the fact that the weakest
point
in Bruno's philosophy is the scanty stress which he lays upon the Ego.
For it is only from the point of view of absolute subjectivity that the
doctrine of Universal Unity possesses any real justification. The
Brahmans
taught that “there is no possible proof of the existence of a dualism,
and the Atman (the self)
devoid of all dualism is alone capable of
proof,“ 103
and even the man who takes his stand upon the flattest empirical
science
is not in a position compulsively to prove the contrary. But upon this
there follows at once, “Here, in the depths of the
412 BRUNO
heart,
lies the Lord of the universe,“
and “our soul is this world.“ 104
God and the world united in the Ego
and
overflowing the one into the other: that is a consistent standpoint,
and
inasmuch as it rests upon secure facts, even though they should be
grasped
one-sidedly, it is rich in results. Whereas when definition and
argument
put God and nature on a level, only dragging in the Ego in an inferior
character as “reason“ or “thinking substance,“ as of a wavering essence
which everywhere stands in the way, and of which therefore the less
said
the better, the perception is obviously one whose roots do not go very
deep; for whence do all these arguments come if not from the Ego?
Bruno
stands precisely where the priests stand: but the latter have dogma for
their foundation and practical reliability as their aim, whereas the
man
who goes to work in the same way in a subjectively-rationistic manner,
but
who replaces the dogma of faith by the dogma of reason, and takes for
his
aim the recognition of absolute truth, is hovering in mid-air. In the
one
case, that of the true mystics, we have an experience that has been
lived,
in the other case, that of the dialecticians, a cobweb of the brain.
The
Deus sive natura, brought
forward by Bruno and geometrically described
by Spinoza, is a phantom of the conception, an artifice of the
schoolmen
welded together out of superstition and the “logic of pretence,“ as
Kant
calls it. God is not to be seen in nature, nor can He be demonstrated
from her; only the man who carries Him in his heart will also be able
to
track Him in the outer World. Our deep-thinking German mystics knew
this
and said, “Whoso wishes to perceive God must be blind.“ 105 But in truth
Bruno's God is seen neither in nature nor in the heart; this monad of
monads
from which “proceeds that other monad which is called Nature,“ is a
mere
abstract thought. 106
All attempts to sing his praises as Ens,
Unum,
Verum, Fatum, Ratio, Ordo, and as the foundation
413 BRUNO
of
all things which we in the first
place
hold to be the creations of nature, are of little consequence. 107
The
God of the true mystics, on the other hand, springs out of direct
experience,
and the God of Descartes who Saw outwards was just as much a
dialectical
artifice as Bruno's, but obtained by deliberation and with the
intention
to enlist this conception in the service of empirical investigation, so
that here, if ever, we have the
right
to say “the end justifies the
means.“ 108
Here
I must set a limit to these
short remarks. I am no more able to do justice to Bruno's complex of
thoughts
than I was to develop the philosophy of Descartes; I must be content if
you are able to grasp clearly and correctly the method and way in which
this man looked inwards and outwards upon the world and upon himself.
But
our aim for the moment
requires
that I should once
more call your attention to the
two main pillars of Brunonian thought which together with the universal
unity of the divine nature carry the whole structure: a tendency to
boundlessness
upwards, a tendency to strict limitation downwards (pp. 364-378);
these
at last complete the picture and bring clearly into view the contrasted
method of perception in Kant. There is no
need
to repeat what has already been
said upon the point, I refer you to it and will only ask you to observe
how here again, as in the representation of God and the world, it is
scholastic
and theological conceptions, not perceptions, that are decisive. God
must
of necessity be infinite, because the conception of Him excludes every
limitation: Io dico Dio tutto
infinito perche da se esclude ogni
termine.
But since God is infinite so too must the world be infinite, for it
would
be unworthy of a
Divine
power to create a finite world: Io
stimavo cosa indegna della divina bontá e possentia che possendo
produr
oltra questo mondo un altri e altri infiniti, producesse un mondo finito
(Berti, p. 353). These are purely theological
414 BRUNO
arguments,
which are only forcible
when
the God whose existence they prove has already been assumed. Those
arguments,
on the contrary, by means of which limitation downwards, that is to
say,
the conception of the Atom, is irrefutably set forth, are
scholastically
dialectical. Above all it is the Pythagorean symbolism of numbers which
turns the scale: “Unity is the substance of numbers,“ that is to say,
that out of which numbers arise and of which they consist, and
therefore
“unity is at the same time the essence of all things“: Unitas est
substantia
numeri et essentia omnis. But unit signifies the lowest of all
numbers,
and what we in calculating call unit that, as Bruno argues, we may call
in matter a least measure or minimum, so that just as we may call the
arithmetical
unit numeri substantia so we
may regard the material unit, the Atom, as
rerum substantia, as the
essence of things. 109
In the Spaccio Bruno
uses
a charmingly popular expression: le
cose grandi son composte de le
picciole
e le picciole de le picciolissime e queste de gl' individui e minimi.
If divisibility were not to come to an end there would be just as much
illimitedness downwards as upwards: si
minimum non subsistit nihi il
subsistat
oportet. Without limited, indivisible, minimum-unities there
could be
no
world. Here the argument is purely dialectical, and therefore it is far
more powerful than the first, and Bruno himself confesses that it would
be easier for him to give up the infiniteness of the world than the
finiteness
of the atoms: potius ratio et natura
potest absolvere minimum a maximo
quam maximum a minimo. 110
So
the dogmatic Infinite and the
dogmatic Finite join hands, and once more it is the Ego, the first
great
fact of all recognition, which comes off second best, or rather remains
altogether ignored, penned in between animated atoms, called monads,
and
a soul of the world, l'intelletto
universale, l'anima del mondo. And in
order to rivet into
415 BRUNO
a
unit this perception which consists
of two antagonistic parts, there happens once more what occurred in the
case of God and nature: Bruno declares right out: the maximum and the
minimum
are identical, il massimo e il
minimo convegnono in uno essere and
maximum
nihil est aliud quam minimum. The following attempt at a logical
deduction
from the proposition that the minimum and the unlimited maximum are
equal
to one another is worth bringing forward as a specimen of the method of
thought of such men, “The power of all bodies is perfected in the
sphere,
the power of the sphere is rooted in the circle, the power of the
circle
in its centre. It follows that the power of all visible things rests in
the invisible. A minimum in multitude is a maximum in power, just as
the
power of the whole fire springs out of the power of the single spark.
So
it follows that all power rests in the minimum even though it should be
hidden to the eyes of all, even of the sages, perhaps even of the gods:
thus the minimum itself is the maximum of all things.“ 111
Clearly
Kant was right when he
said that Logic used as an organon, that is as an instrument for
acquiring
new knowledge, has for its object the power of asserting anything
in the world with a certain amount of plausibility. But it is equally
evident
how powerful those inborn tendencies of the particular individual, of
which
we treated in the excursus, are in leading it naturally and of
necessity
into fixed grooves. We have no freedom in the choice of the myths which
appeal to us. Thinking inwards leads to Monism, to the Universal Unit,
and at the same time to the uprooting of all boundaries, that is to
say,
to the Infinite; Seeing inwards leads, whether we will or not, to
Atomism,
to the acceptation of indivisible minima. The man who, like Bruno,
binds
the two things together by sheer force, and is not frightened to say
minimum
est maximum, the limited is unlimited, gives proof there of a
great
power
of inner truthfulness:
416 BRUNO
such
an intellect was worthy of being
brought to the stake. At the same time you will, I think, henceforth
understand
Kant's saying, “the doctrine of atoms is in itself a contradiction.“ 112
We
have now gathered together
all that we need in order rapidly, easily, and surely to understand
Kant's
method of perception as compared with that of Bruno.
That
which characterises Kant's
manner of looking into the inner mysteries of man may be summed up in a
single word — criticism. Still, it is necessary to know exactly what is
to
be understood here by criticism; for the word is used in two different
senses: “I do not mean by this a criticism of books and systems, but
that of the power of reason in general,“ — so writes Kant in the
beginning
of the preface to the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. The
difference is the same as that between the criticism of a historical
work,
and the so-called “historical criticism“ of the matter on which the
book
is founded; in the one case it is the exposition of a given author, his
opinions, his conceptions, his deductions which are judged and
censored,
in the other it is the proofs themselves upon which all the
expositions,
however they may differ from one another, depend, — inscriptions,
books,
letters, state documents, etc., which are tested for their origin,
their
importance, their reliability, and their value. It is in the latter
sense
that Kant understands the word Criticism. It is a test, not of the
opinions
about reason, or in any way of the doctrines to which reason has given
rise, it is not a test of the opinions on experience, on the power of
judgment,
on morals, etc., — but it is a test of the inmost soul of man by direct
dissection and observation, exactly as the surgeon with scalpel
investigates
the condition of the inner body. In an often-quoted passage, Kant
writes,
“The first step in matters of pure reason, which shows how it is still
in its childhood, is dogmatic. The second ...
417 BRUNO
step
is sceptical and testifies to
the
prudence of the power of judgment sharpened by experience. But there is
yet a third step necessary which only occurs in the ripened and manly
power of judgment, namely the
appreciation not of the facta
of reason, but of reason itself according
to its full
power, which is not censure but
criticism of reason.“
I am very anxious that you should arrive at an
absolutely
precise understanding of this
critical faculty and
method, for Kant is besides Plato
the only critical philosopher of all times: how then could you do
justice
to his individual personality unless this most special feature were
clearly
before your eyes? With this intent I must now
make use of an image which will
gradually lead you to a systematic recognition. In this connection I am
haunted by an unforgettable recollection of my youth, which
dates from the time when I first
heard Kant's name:
it will help us to produce a
plastic representation.
Let us suppose a man born in the deeply cut
valleys
of the
Maritime Alps, and that an
ordinance
of fate should have
so locked him and his countrymen
to the neighbourhood, that no inhabitant should have succeeded in
making
his way out to the shores of the Mediterranean. You must know that the
mountains are so extended in échelon that one needs to climb
very
high — up to the perpetual snow of the highest peaks, before one can
see
the sea. That man asks himself, as so many before him and around him
have
done, whence comes the water which the clouds give off upon the
mountains
in such inexhaustible measure that even during the long, dry, hot
summer
the brook incessantly rushes down to the valley bringing coolness from
snow and ice? Among the dwellers in the valley all sorts of theories
are
current. The pastor teaches that God in his mercy is for ever creating
new rain clouds, — especially if his flock are diligent in their
attendance
at church. The apothecary has made up a highly complicated scientific
theory
of a
418 BRUNO
catalytic
combination of oxygen and
hydrogen in the low pressure of the highest regions of the air under
the
influence of the sun's rays. The schoolmaster is busy hunting up
explanations
in the classical authors, but as he has never seen the sea, he
understands
the ocean in the old sense of the okeanos
potamos, a river with side
streams, and so gets entangled in a feud about suffixes with the
pedagogue
of the neighbouring village, in which feud both lose sight of the
original
problem. The village philosopher's doctrine is that every investigation
of the question remains barbarously empirical and objectless, so long
as
it is not determined whether water is to be regarded as
substance, — hypokeimenon —
or
as attribute
— symbebekos,
which, however, assumes
the solution of the first question whether substance is really an ens
per
se subsistens, or a mere foetus
imaginationis. Meanwhile our friend
actively
climbs uphill, is undaunted by failures and fatigue, and at last,
thanks
to his practice in mountaineering, reaches close to the highest peak.
Not
more than two or three had got so far before him; but these few, keenly
absorbed in their search after causes which seemed plausible to them,
had
clung to the rocks and tried to shovel away the snow in order to see
what
lay underneath. They thought that if they found a spring breaking out
of
the rocks everything would be explained. They were mere empirics. But
he
thinks otherwise, and when he has climbed as high as his strength will
carry him he turns round. He turns his back to the brook and the
glacier
and looks over the successions of écheloned mountains, and
there,
further than he had ever allowed his thoughts to range, there in all
its
glory, there in the golden reflection of the midday sun, lies the
immeasurable
sea. He sees the rivers hurrying to it from all sides, and he sees the
mist rising from its waves, consolidated into clouds, and flying with
the
evening breeze to the mountains.
That
is something like the
position
of Kant amongst us
419 BRUNO
thinking
men. And even if every one
of
my images should be failures, this one is quite in tune, and I should
like
to impress it permanently upon you in this way:
in
Kant the one essential point is a
turning round as it were on the pivot of the intellect, so that the
mind
looks in a new and opposite direction, and so obtains a sight of that
which
was up to that time unsuspected. The man who climbs just as high and
does
not turn round will never have a share in the revelation of a fully new
fact: but the man who turns round before he has reached a certain
height
which will make him competent to enter upon intellectual deliberation,
will find himself disappointed: for he will see no more on the height
than
he did in the valley. Mark this too! no dialectical art, were it never
so subtle, and no power of phantasy, could have discovered the sea,
whereas
without logic and without phantasy it is seen at once if the man only
understands
the right standpoint from which it of itself strikes the eye. Kant is a
discoverer, just as Columbus was, or like his own favourite Captain
Cook.
And it is absurd to believe that what this unheard-of and unique
critical
power of perception discovered and revealed, could be discredited by
any
given man, simply because he is not competent, and has not made himself
competent, to see it, Our friend who saw the sea with his eyes will
hardly
be convinced by the professor in the valley that it does not exist; it
is in this sense that you must understand Kant when he says of his
critical
results, “In this case there is no danger of being refuted, the danger
is of not being understood“ (R.V. xliii).
The
picture which I have set
before
you not only gives an expression easily understood to the fact itself,
but also to the result of the Kantian method of Criticism. For there is
no more important result of these discoveries than that of the strict
and
relatively narrow limitation of the competency of our reason, — that
limitation
which
420 BRUNO
was
cursorily indicated in a former
lecture
as a double wall. Once our mountaineer sees the ocean, he has before
him
the whole circulation of the water, and the whole horizon of his
knowledge
of this subject is effectively widened and yet once for all ideally
confined
within limits. So long as he was unaware of this circulation, this
giving
and taking, this motion hither and thither between close boundaries,
there
were no limits set to his philosophical and mythological phantasy, the
tendency of which was necessarily to lose itself backwards as well as
forwards in the infinite; whence should that inexhaustible supply of
water
come? whither should it go? Now at one stroke the whole problem is
solved,
or rather shown to be non-existent. The water was returning whence it
came,
and came from whither it went; it did not spring from the hidden bowels
of the earth, nor did it flow into boundless space. At the same time,
however,
there was an end of all hope of an absolute “explanation“ such as had
flitted
before the minds of the simple folk. Of course it was always possible
to
ask with the old philosophers, whether water was attribute or
substance,
and whether the substance was an ens
per se subsistens, or a foetus
imaginationis;
but this dialectical consideration had ceased to bear any relation to
the
water problem, and was unmasked as a matter of pure metaphysical
speculation.
It was now possible to be concerned with the investigation of the
details
and the utilisation of the circulation which had been discovered: the
ideas
of the pastor and the apothecary and the schoolmaster and the others,
whoever
they might be, were all swept away: they were henceforth not only idle
but demonstrably false.
One
more picture by way of
amplification.
Four
centuries ago there were
no boundaries to our planet earth. Each man was free to imagine it
according
to his own pleasure. Above it in Heaven was the place
421 BRUNO
of
the blest, below it in Hell was
the
place for the damned,
— room
for all. Then came Columbus and
his followers, and it turned out that the earth was a sphere measured
through
in all directions, upon which if a man sailed on westward he came back
to his starting-point from the east, a prison from which there was no
escape.
Magellan's men had even feared that they were reaching the rim of the
world
and would topple over; now every one knew that we, at any rate so long
as this life lasts, are chained to our dust-speck of a planet, and that
every fall means falling back upon the earth. And then came Copernicus,
and robbed us of all space for our dreams; for God who is in Heaven
there
was no place left, no place for the eternal fires of Hell — indeed, as
soon as space became recognised as boundless there was no Above and no
Below, no Here and no There. The service rendered to human thought by
Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason is
throughout analogous. It sets free and at
the
same time imposes limits. “The age is no longer to be held back by sham
knowledge.“ So Kant sets out upon his voyage of discovery; his aim is
to
achieve true knowledge instead of sham: the result is, however, that
our
reason, like our earth, is represented as a sphere moving freely,
limited
all round, and by itself. Here too there is no “rim“ from which a man
can
reach a space beyond, either upwards or downwards; rather does every
road
over which our thoughts travel only lead in a circle on this small
Sphere
of Reason: it is only upon the ocean of experience that we can
circumnavigate
it, and if we boldly press further and further ahead, we once more come
back to the place whence we started. Earth-born we are, and to earth
confined.
That is why our reason as Kant says, “can never go beyond the field of
possible experience,“ and can never undertake to escape from this
domain
which has been assigned to it, because beyond it there is “nothing for
us but empty space.“ 113
422 BRUNO
Thus
hand in hand with the
Copernican
expansion goes the Copernican limitation. Since we are confined to
experience,
all those doctrines which attempt to fly over it fall at once and for
all
time. So, for instance, Kant annihilates all so-called “proofs“ of the
existence of God down to their deepest roots; God is a practical
postulate,
something which we believe, not something which we can know or in any
way
imagine. And on the other hand, in opposition to the many dogmas of
natural
science, which, as I showed in my first and second lectures, outstep
experience
in every end and corner, Kant shows that every doctrine of bodies ends
with emptiness, and therefore with that which is unintelligible, and
that
there is therefore nothing left for reason in this domain, “but
instead
of investigating the utmost bounds of things, to investigate and fix
the
utmost bounds of its own unaided power, left to itself with no help
from
outside.“ As for what concerns the sophists after the manner of Bruno,
and to be just, of all the school-philosophers from Aristotle to
Hegel, — how
they take the field against one another with their armies of
definitions
and syllogisms, and prove with keenest precision either that God is
identical
with nature or else is essentially different from nature, that there
are
atoms or that there are no atoms, that the world must be infinite or of
necessity finite, and so forth, Kant pronounces judgment from the
standpoint
of criticism; “There is thus in reality no room for polemics in the
field
of pure reason. Both sides are flogging the air, puffing themselves out
with their own shadows: for they go beyond nature, in which there is
nothing
for them to lay hold of: they may fight as they will: the shadows which
they cut down grow together again in a moment like the heroes in
Valhalla,
in order to be able to make merry again in bloodless contests.“ 114
I
think you must see clearly what
it is that differentiates the view which Kant's eye takes of the world
from the
423 BRUNO
view
of the typical schoolman and
fanatic
of reason, Bruno. The one fathers criticism, the other dogmatism. The
fact
that Kant soared higher with his thoughts than Bruno, would only
constitute
a relative difference; but
the
fact that he possessed that higher
discretion of which I spoke at the beginning of this section, and which
I tried in our parallel to illustrate as a turning round of a man's
self,
forms a fundamental difference. Here he becomes something more than a
philosopher,
he becomes
a
scientific discoverer; his view has
brought to all the more gifted of mankind a revelation the result of
which
is a totally new comprehension of human life and of human ideals.
But
we must take a further step
before we make an end of this lecture. What I said a while ago about
Bruno's
conception
of the Ego, Nature and God,
together with the previous reflections upon mythology and Hellenic
philosophy,
and all this in relation to our former lectures, allows us now to
obtain
a deeper and more exact insight into the personality of Kant. You know
how I am tied down: I cannot take Kant's philosophy as known, nor can I
work with scholastic conceptions. That is why my characterisation of
Kant's
critical method has penetrated so little into detail, remaining little
more than an illustration of an intellectual attitude; a closer
inspection
of Kant's method must be reserved for the last lecture. Still, I think
that we have now sufficient material to take a bold plunge into the
deepest
water without any fear of being drowned in pure abstractions — we shall
be buoyed up by many concrete notions.
Kant
attaches great weight to
the fact that he “not only suspects, but has proved“ the impossibility
of knowing anything outside of experience. Do you know how it became
possible
to add cogency to this proof? Through the criticism of experience
itself,
through the proof that our experience is composed of various recipro-
424 BRUNO
cally
conditioning parts, so that
neither
that which we perceive as the “World“ nor that which we think of as
“Ego“
is of itself simple, and thus perception blocks up thought, and thought
blocks up perception, each preventing the other from seeing out into
that
which lies beyond our limited human experience. The dogmatist has no
suspicion
of this. If I leave the contemplation of the starry heavens with
Anaxagoras
in order to deduce that it is God who sets them in motion, then,
through
the intermediary of a mere inference of thought, I leave something
perceived
in nature to arrive at something which is impossible of perception.
Precisely
the same is the case with the God of Aristotle and his fifty-five
heavenly
spirits or aims: the painfully exact observation of empirical facts is
fundamental, but the thinker strides out over these facts from one
logical
inference to another until its want of consistency and conclusion is
satisfied.
A Bruno, who must serve us as the type of the whole second army of
thinkers
from Yâdjnavalkya to Schopenhauer, sets to work in a different
way,
for whilst Anaxagoras and Aristotle stride outwards on the path of
perception,
and take God as at most the mechanical author of all motion, Bruno, on
the contrary, at once works inwards on the path of thought, and finds
God
as the very inmost conception in all things, setting them in motion
from
this “inmost“ and not from outside. Da
noi si chiama artefice interno
perche forma la materia e la figura da dentro, “we call him the
builder
from inside because he forms matter and form from within outwards.“
Motor
ab internis is God. 115
In the same way the Indians called God the inner
director. Here the world does not become intelligible until we see God
at work; in the other case God was deduced from the conception of the
world.
You no doubt observe that in these two opposite methods of thought,
with
the direction outwards and the direction inwards, and the two divine
myths
which
425 BRUNO
result
from them, God in the
outermost,
God in the inmost, there is one fundamental acceptation common to both.
Both put in the foremost place that identity of thinking and being, or
thinking and seeing, of which I spoke at the beginning of my lecture,
and
which I recognised as the fundamental myth of all philosophising: for
if
this identity did not exist these thinkers would have had no right upon
the path of mere logical consideration to arrive at the conclusion of
the
invisible from the visible, from the perception of motions to the
necessity
of a moving power. And it is this common foundation of all different
doctrines
which Kant lays in ruins by his criticism of experience, and of which
Plato,
full of prescience, two thousand years earlier, but without being
understood,
had exposed the untenability. Kant's criticism proves that our Thinking
and our Seeing are so interdependent and interwoven that neither dare
take
a single step without the other. “Understanding and sensibility can
only
determine subjects in us (mankind) when they are in combination.“ If we
separate them, we have perceptions without conceptions, or conceptions
without perceptions; but in either case notions that we can refer to no
fixed subject. Between the canopy of heaven and the invisible God whom
we believe to have created it and to cause it to move in circles, there
lies only a chain of thoughts without any perceptible foundation;
between
the Atman-Pneuma-Soul in my living consciousness and God, both living
in
all things and inspiring them with souls, there lies a mere analogy of
the material of perception, an aërial rainbow-bridge, leading from
the
known across to the unknown: both are equally inadmissible, reason
dupes
itself. For thinking outside the domain of experience marked out by
perception
(like God “over the canopy of heaven“) is mere “toying with notions“
(R.V.
195), and the pretended perception of something which cannot be
perceived
(as for instance of
426 BRUNO
the
inner Deity) is a fiction surpassing
all imagination, — a “mere freak.“ The critic will not allow what both
the
monist and the dualist have the impertinence to do, — the splitting up
of that complex whole upon which our experience depends, — the
Ego-Nature
or the Nature-Ego, call it what you will, — and so where the one part
cannot
co-operate permit the other to be pressed forward alone. Thoughts, even
when they are born of the Ego, only depend upon perceptions in nature,
perceptions which even when they are borrowed from nature have no
existence
unless they are intelligibly accessible to the Ego. In
contradistinction
therefore to the assumption of two absolutely separate, but therefore
absolutely
equally valuable component parts, — Thinking and Seeing, the Ego and
the
World, — the critic points out that both parts are organically
interdependent,
something in the same way as the nervous system and the heart: without
the functions of the nerves there can be no action of the heart,
without
heart-action no function of the nerves — so that it is impossible to
advance
a single step with the one without the other. It is thus that the
primeval
myth of all mythology and of all pre-critical philosophy falls to the
ground.
Do
you observe how there lies
before us here a second relation of reciprocal conditioning and being
conditioned,
directed more inwards? Without given, immutable, forms of Thinking and
Seeing from which there is no escape, there can be no possible
experience
of empirical things; on the other side, however, without empirical
experience,
and that means without any “matter for recognition by the senses,“ —
without
something given outside of the perceiving Ego, no Seeing, and without
empirical
perception no Thinking and therefore again no experience. Each of the
two
parts is at the same time conditioned and conditioning; and since that
is so I as man can never attain to anything which is indepen-
427 BRUNO
dent
or free from condition or absolute:
there is no possibility of reaching a place of vantage in that
direction.
It is impossible for me ever to comprehend the Thing, purely as such,
and
stripped of all forms of human perception and thought; for that which I
conceive as Thing is through and through amalgamated with an
inseparable
alloy out of my own inner self; so much so that if I try to brush away
all that is subjective (the impressions of the senses and the
categories
of thoughts), I end by reaching not the notion of a Thing, but a mere
abstract
conception, the conception of substance, the shadow of a shadow
thought,
and even that I must abandon because it is after all only an
indispensable
formal conception, not a true perception. I fare no better when I try
to
grasp the Ego purely as such with its inborn laws of Seeing and
Thinking;
for it is so thoroughly real — the form of sensibility, all the
possible
series of thoughts, time as the intermediary between both, — this whole
complicated
intellectual organisation is so exclusively coined upon objects of
concrete
experience, that when I try to remove all that is corporeal, and to
reflect
upon my mere Ego-consciousness, I at last reach not a thought, but a
bare,
poverty-stricken because entirely empty, perception, without
comprehension
and without ideas. 116
Here the result is a double insight. First, “if I
remove the thinking subject, the whole corporeal world must collapse“;
secondly,
“if I remove the corporeal world perceived by the senses, the thinking
Ego fades away.“ Nothing can prevent me from distinguishing
analytically
my own Thinking and my own Seeing as two different functions of my
power
of recognition, just as I distinguish between heart and brain; but I am
not in a position even in thought to isolate a pure Ego, freed from all
empiricism, from a pure, entirely objective, corporeal world, for in
that
case there would remain mere phantoms, empty words without sense. And
of
course you already under-
428 BRUNO
stand
that this single examination
suffices
to expose as “freaks,“ as Kant says, all the philosophies which
nevertheless
found their structures upon this separation, or, as we would rather
say,
as interesting but violent mythologies. For whether I try in common
with
the thinkers of the Bruno group to consume the corporeal world by the
Ego-world,
giving a soul to everything, denying all individuality, annihilating
all
form, till I can say with Plotinus, “Nature is Soul,“ and with Bruno,
“it
is a single divine Monad“; or whether like Democritus I win over the
Ego-world
to the corporeal world, and declare with Kapila “I am not“; or whether
with Aristotle I undertake to separate the two entirely from one
another — on
the one side, the Nous-creator related to the Ego, on the other, the
corporeal
world related to my body, 117
— I know all the same that in every one of
these
attempts I am undertaking an impossibility, for every one of them
presumes
an archimedean point which in reality does not exist. It is with Kant
that
at last man becomes conscious that he has all along been a mere creator
of myths. Kant's critical work is the Copernican turning-point in the
history
of our intellectual life.
But
with this not only does the
more or less consciously dreamed philosophic myth collapse, but also
the
entirely unconscious presumption of our daily life, the unsophisticated
prime dogma of all dogmas, that our perceptions correspond to things.
According
to Kant's view, which I have just set forth, Thinking and Perception
behave
far more like two mirrors set the one over against the other, from
which
each throws back the pictures to the other from which it has received
them
and neither can see whether the picture which is formed in it, which it
can only see in the other mirror, exactly corresponds to an externally
present concrete object. This recognition, which we are able to
maintain
proceeds from Kant's method of viewing the world, has been summed up by
429 BRUNO
the
Sage into one word, the meaning
of which must be clear and familiar to you, — the word Erscheinung,
phenomenon.
It is only when this word has acquired a living meaning for you that
you
can know exactly how Kant's eye viewed the world. I should like to sum
up in a formula what is to be said about this.
What
in our everyday life we call
Things are phenomena. What we suspect behind the phenomena are, Things
of thought, that is to say, empty conceptions in which it is impossible
to think anything because we cannot conceive in them anything
perceptible,
therefore a nonentity. It is impossible to separate the Ego from the
Things:
The Ego also is a phenomenon, and what we seek for behind it is a Thing
of thought, or to speak more accurately, a blind notion, a nonentity.
I
should wish these words to be
considered until they have perceptibly laid hold of your mind, so that
you may understand that all that surrounds us and all that we ourselves
are and in which we live and work are literally similitudes, as the
poet
says, and phenomena (not Things in themselves), as the philosopher is
compelled
to express himself.
So
of the Thing we know nothing,
we only know phenomena. And of the contrast between the universal body
and the Ego-body, so often touched upon, you know that they both
correspond,
and that therefore what holds good of the one is equally applicable to
the other: I am only conscious of myself when I am conscious of other
Things,
I am therefore just as much a phenomenon as they are. But that this
whole
appreciation is not a “mere sham“ you can perceive from the following
explanation
of Kant's, “the doctrine of all true idealists from the eleatic school
to Bishop Berkeley is contained in this formula: all recognition by the
senses and by experience is nothing but mere sham, and it is only in
the
ideas of pure understanding and (pure) reason that
430 BRUNO
truth
exists. The principle which
entirely
rules and pervades my idealism is, on the contrary, — all recognition
of
Things out of mere pure understanding, or pure reason is nothing but
utter
sham, and truth exists in experience alone.“ 118
I have been at some
pains to look out this last quotation, for I foresaw full well that you
would cast it in my teeth that all this might well be an incontestable,
but at the same time perfectly superfluous, subtlety; for if all which
we call Things, ourselves included, are in reality phenomena, not
shams,
but realities as firm as rocks, now everything would end by remaining
in
the old, most wholesome and most popular realism. With reference to
that
Kant himself will not find fault with you: he says, “what Things may be
in themselves I neither know nor need to know, because a Thing can
never
appear to me otherwise than as a phenomenon.“ (R.V. 332 seq.). He,
moreover,
teaches expressly the “reality, i.e. the objective value of space in
view
of all that which can appear to us outwardly as object.“ (R.V. 44.) But
this very thing, the henceforth irrefutable objective value of space,
is
an important result of criticism; for it is precisely this objective
value
of space and of things in it that has been often enough threatened by
the
philosophers:
Kant
fights here for the unconditioned,
unbounded, law-abiding value of all science of nature, and in general
for
that which we may in its noblest meaning call “common sense.“ But the
point
of this critical analysis of the human intellect is, as you see, turned
in another direction. In order to assure the permanent authority of
objective
experience, of science, of common sense, they must not only be raised
to
the throne, but their enemies, continually springing up anew, must be
destroyed,
and here we are served by the recognition that we only have to deal
with
phenomena. For out of mere phenomena we cannot arrive at absolute
recognition.
That is the great result
431 BRUNO
of
criticism, a result which was bound
to transform our whole conception of the being of man from the very
foundations,
if it should ever be possible to preach it among all cultured people.
Kant
shows, with an overwhelming mass of proofs, that as soon as our
Thinking
flies or tries to fly or professes to fly (it is all the same) above
the
domain of experience to which our Thinking as well as our Seeing is
alone
directed, it gets into a tangle of nonsense and contradictions, and
that
only the might of dogmas incapable of proof and in reality senseless
can
apparently save it from unavoidable bankruptcy. And Kant shows, what no
man had suspected before him, why that occurs and how it happens and we
always hear the tag, — the mistake is that we take mere phenomena for
Things,
and that we hold mere conceptions coined upon phenomena alone, as the
appreciations
of reason, and so apply them as if their value reached beyond all
experience.
The greatest philosophers contradict each other, and with their
contradictory
assertions one set of them is just as right and just as wrong as the
others.
If you carry our historical excursus of to-day in your mind, you know
exactly
how this hangs together. The different possible fundamental conceptions
of mankind are ever legitimised: but the delusion of a fight for the
mastery
has vanished, — vanished also is the fallacy of a so-called development
through
error to truth. Kant has mown down the Dogmas for all time. Idealism,
Realism,
Materialism, Scepticism, Monism, Dualism, Pantheism, Solipsism, Theism,
Atheism, — all the “isms“ that ever were or ever will be! The chatter
of
decades of centuries is swept away! For we are encircled all round by
mere
phenomena; Goethe's “all that is transitory is but a similitude,“ is
the
quintessence of what the poet had learnt in Kant. We are not competent
to attain to Things, we can do nothing with them: we do not know
whether
the corporeal world is a unity or a plurality, whether it is
432 BRUNO
mutable
or immutable, transient or
permanent,
finite or infinite; we do not know whether the Ego of the soul and
material
nature belong to a common substratum or are twofold; we cannot
therefore
decide anything as to whether Thinking and Expansion belong to
different
essences, or are only different conditions of one identical essence; we
possess no organ, no capacity ever even to arrive at the consideration
of such questions — except in the blindness of uncritical ignorance. 119 We
may maintain that our power of judgment enjoins on us always to proceed
on the assumption that there exists a certain fitness between nature
and
our human reason. But we can never discover how far this fitness in
reality
reaches. And so Kant is able at the end of his critical masterpiece to
utter the proud, artless words, “the greatest and maybe only use of
all
philosophy of pure reason is therefore perhaps only negative, inasmuch
as it does not serve as an organon for expansion, but as a discipline
for
fixing boundaries, and instead of discovering truth has only the silent
merit of warding off errors.“ Kant's achievement is the final
annihilation
for all time of those dogmas which fly above the bounds of experience,
as well of all religious dogmas as of all those of philosophy and
natural
science.
It is when you
penetrate
deeply into Kant's works that you will acquire a detailed and
convincing
knowledge upon these points. I must be content if I have shown you
distinctly
how sharply and in what a purely scientific way this eye of Kant's, in
contradistinction to all philosophical subtilisations, penetrated and
illuminated
the inmost network of the mind. That is the individual momentum which
we
must strive to realise. Kant bases himself upon facts, — upon facts
which
we must see with our eyes, — not upon definitions and terminological
hair-splittings
and syllogistic demonstrations. Kant speaks out bluntly: “as a matter
of
doctrine, philosophy seems
433 BRUNO
to
be quite unnecessary, or rather
out
of place, because after all the attempts that have been made with it up
to the present time little or no ground has been gained“; and I think
that
you will be amazed at the precipice, the all-devouring abyss of
misunderstanding,
to use no harder word, when you see Kant's most famous pupil, Fichte,
draw
his well-known Entweder-Oder
(one thing or the other) as a result from
the teaching of the master, and so in Kant's lifetime pave the way for
the reaction of the dogmatists and philosophical professors against the
work of critical liberation. For Fichte wrote to Kant himself, “we have
no right to banish scholasticism“; he reintroduces the “absolute“ into
philosophy, and deduces from Kant's critique, that either the Ego must
be explained out of the world, or as he expresses it the Non-ego, or
conversely
the world, out of the Ego; and so he chooses the latter, and builds up
the monstrous system from which Kant solemnly and publicly dissociated
himself, and which he with his usual felicity describes as “a sort of
spectre,
which, when one thinks that one has grasped it, vanishes, so that one
finds
before one no object but only oneself, and even of oneself only the
hand
which clutched at it.“ 120
That was the road over which German
academical
philosophy was to travel to the present day, as if Kant had never
lived.
And in order that Kant should fade out of the living consciousness of
student
youth, and of the working and enquiring and practically active men
apart
from the professorial chairs, there was drawn up that series of
classical
heroes that you find in every German book: Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
Hegel,
Schleiermacher,
Herbart, as if there were any single tie of inner
relationship
binding Kant to any one of these men, and as if his anti-dogmatic
life-work,
aimed at the eternal annihilation of all scholastic wisdom, had
anything
in common with the achievements of these doughty men, — in some sense
also
men of genius, — but who might as well
434 BRUNO
have
lived a thousand years before Kant,
for any trace that his work left upon them.
There
will be many who will wish
to add a name here; they will say that Schopenhauer was the complement
of Kant. And yet it was precisely Schopenhauer who attempted more than
the others, and by virtue of his brilliant gifts effected more, towards
demolishing the peculiar critical and methodically scientific thoughts
of Kant. Between Kant's critique and Schopenhauer's dogmatics there is
no bridge.
You,
on the other hand, gentlemen,
have, unless I am mistaken, now fully realised that since Kant's
critique
has enlightened us as to the metaphysics of our inner man, it is
unpermissible
to speak of the World and of the Ego as if they were two different and
distinguishable “Things“ which it would be possible to contrast with
Fichte's
“one or the other“ of Ego and World, or as Schopenhauer expresses it of
Will and Conception (Wille und
Vorstellung). The distinction between
World
and Ego is a necessary method, but not the establishment of a fact. 121
But you would only have half understood if you did not grasp that it is
at the same time impossible dogmatically to come to a conclusion as to
the unity of the two, as do Fichte as well as Schopenhauer. The
fundamental
point here lies on the hither side of unity and plurality, for what we
conceive as World and as Ego are simply two ideas, and indeed the two
primary
ideas which embrace all others. 122 And since, as we have
seen, it is
not
possible to make a clean separation between the corporeal world and the
Ego world, all the elements of both being intertwined round one
another,
we may maintain that these two ideas issue from one point, one single
focus
imaginarius indicated in the first lecture. And so a more exact
analysis
joins together again what analysis had severed. Still, this unity of
Kant's
has nothing in common with the deduction accepted out of a
435 BRUNO
common
unified principle, and it is
the opposite contradiction of the universal unity preached by Bruno. For
in
the latter, in spite of all its
tricked-out
finery of logically dialectical arguments, we saw nothing less, but
also
nothing more, than a grand and yet arbitrary representation of myths,
as
one of the various dreams by which we men are haunted when we give the
reins to our reason and to our phantasy. The unity revealed by Kant, on
the contrary, is a result of the critically deliberated analysis of
experience.
I
believe that we have reached
the goal which I had proposed to myself in this lecture: I have
ferried
you across from one World into the other, out of the world of dogmas
into
the world of the critical analysis of experience and of scientifically
methodical thought. And if you
cast your thoughts back upon our
schematic survey, you will surely agree with me if I repeat my
contention
that Kant belongs to the Goethe-Schopenhauer group with its Thinking
inwards
and Seeing outwards. Yet while all the others, with the exception of
Plato,
remain fixed in their inborn method of tendency and
one-sidedness, — Kant,
as you have now seen, by his scientific, and in a certain sense
anti-philosophical,
critique of the human intellect, overpowers this individual dogmaticism
which is, so to say, the birthright of us all. He utterly shakes off
the
fetters in which his predecessors and followers are enchained. But this
highest wisdom demands at the same time a high moral courage, for, as
you
will see in our last two lectures, every step means renunciation:
renunciation of so-called knowledge,
renunciation of the delusions of decades of centuries, renunciation of
any help that might be hoped for from without. It requires, moreover,
great
qualities of character, an incorruptible love of truth, a most intimate
power of belief, a fulfilment of duty apart from all other
considerations;
without these it would be hardly possible even transiently to under-
436 BRUNO
stand
Kant's standpoint and to
view the world as he saw it; for we are dealing here more with a
question
of fact than of thought. Yet the reward is not wanting. Between nature
and personality, between the recognised necessity and the experience of
freedom, between must and should, between world and God as the unknown
uniting power, as nodus et vinculum
mundi, standing as the point where
the Universal crosses and meets, — so, set up between horizons ever
flying
apart, stands the power of reason as Kant's critical eye sees it. Man
can
never lack matter for investigation, for poetry and for dreaming, above
all for dealing with, and conscious equipment of, himself. Kant's whole
Thinking is rooted in the practical: that we shall see more and more
in
the two last lectures. It was necessary in the interests of the
practical
aims of the free man that dogmatics should be annihilated. Ripe for
high
destinies. That is man as Kant saw him.
In
the two final lectures we shall
be moving in this new philosophy of Kant's, only here once more for the
study of the personality and its peculiar character, not of systematic
details, still moving essentially with greater freedom owing to the
higher
level which we have attained. Plato will render us good service in the
endeavour to contemplate nature through the eye of Kant: these two men
stand very near to one another, and the unschooled, childlike loftiness
of the one will make it easier to understand the method of perception
of
the other, scholastically dressed up as it is, and disentangling itself
out of thousands of years of ratiocination. This survey of nature will
lead us to the final survey of the inner man: there Kant alone can give
us the lead.
END
OF VOL. I
End of page.
Last update November 14th, 2004
