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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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reason
and empiricism, between the
invisible Ego and the visible
world, between
ratiocination
and observation, between the abstract and the concrete; Thinking and
