XI
Is it permissible to fix upon one, any one, group of social, religious, physiological or ethical facts as the “cause” of another? “Certainly,” the rationalistic school of history, and still more the up-to-date sociology, would reply. That, they would say, is what is meant by our comprehending history and deepening our knowledge of it. But in reality, with “civilized” man there is always the implicit postulate of an underlying rational purpose—without which indeed his world would be meaningless. And there is something rather comic in the most unscientific freedom that he allows himself in his choice of his fundamental causes. One man selects this, another that, group as prima causa—an inexhaustible source of polemics—and all fill their works with pretended elucidations of the “course of history” on natural-science lines. Schiller has given us the classical expression of this method in one of his immortal banalities, the verse in which the “Weltgetriebe” is stat “durch Hunger und durch Liebe”; and the Nineteenth Century, progressing from Rationalism to Materialism, has made this opinion canonical. The cult of the useful was set up on high. To it Darwin, in the name of his century, sacrificed Goethe’s Nature-theory. The organic logic of the facts of life was supplanted by a mechanics in physiological garb. Heredity, adaptation, natural selection, are utility-causes of purely mechanical connotation. The historical dispensations were superseded by a naturalistic movement “in space.” (But are there historical or spiritual “processes,” or life-“processes” of any sort whatever? Have historical “movements” such as, for example, the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment anything whatever to do with the scientific notion of movement?) The word “process” eliminated Destiny and unveiled the secret of becoming, and lo! there was no longer a tragic but only an exact mathematical structure of world-happening. And thereupon the “exact” historian enunciated the proposition that in the history-picture we had before us a sequence of “states” of mechanical type which were amenable to rational analysis like a physical experiment or a chemical reaction, and that therefore causes, means, methods and objects were capable of being grouped together as a comprehensible system on the visible surface. It all becomes astonishingly simple. And one is bound to admit that given a sufficiently shallow observer, the hypothesis (so far as concerns his personality and its world-picture) comes off.
Hunger and Love[[174]] thus become mechanical causes of mechanical processes in the “life of peoples.” Social problems and sexual problems (both belonging to a “physics” or “chemistry” of public—all-too-public—existence) become the obvious themes of utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding tragedy. For the social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment of history, and that which in Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften” was destiny in the highest sense has become in Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea” nothing but a sexual problem. Ibsen and all the reason-poets of our great cities build—build from their very first causes to their very last effect—but they do not sing. As artist, Hebbel fought hard to overcome this merely prosaic element in his more critical than intuitive temperament, to be a poet quand même, hence his desperate and wholly un-Goethean effort to motive his events. In Hebbel, as in Ibsen, motiving means trying to shape tragedy causally, and he dissected and re-dissected and transformed and retransformed his Anecdote until he had made it into a system that proved a case. Consider his treatment of the Judith story—Shakespeare would have taken it as it was, and scented a world-secret in the physiognomic charm of the pure adventure. But Goethe’s warning: “Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson (sie selbst sind die Lehre)” had become incomprehensible to the century of Marx and Darwin. The idea of trying to read a destiny in the physiognomy of the past and that of trying to represent unadulterated Destiny as a tragedy were equally remote from them. In both domains, the cult of the useful had set before itself an entirely different aim. Shapes were called into being, not to be, but to prove something. “Questions” of the day were “treated,” social problems suitably “solved,” and the stage, like the history-book, became a means to that end. Darwinism, however unconscious of what it was doing, has made biology politically effective. Somehow or other, democratic stirrings happened in the protoplasm, and the struggle for existence of the rain-worms is a useful lesson for the bipeds who have scraped through.
With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our ripest and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the lesson of prudence. Even if we concede them their causal method, the superficiality with which they apply it is an outrage. There is neither the intellectual discipline nor the keen sight, let alone the scepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical hypotheses.[[175]] For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, and fields of force, to æther and mass, is very far removed from the naïve faith of the layman and the Monist in these things. They are images which he subjects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in which he clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a certain freedom to choose amongst several theories, it is because he does not try to find in them any actuality but that of the “conventional sign.”[[176]] He knows, too, that over and above an experimental acquaintance with the technical structure of the world-around, all that it is possible to achieve by this process (which is the only one open to natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more—certainly not “Knowledge” in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of Nature being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its “alter ego” in the domain of the extended, to know Nature means to know oneself.
If Physics is the maturest of our sciences, Biology, whose business is to explore the picture of organic life, is in point both of content and of methods the weakest. What historical investigation really is, namely pure Physiognomic, cannot be better illustrated than by the course of Goethe’s nature-studies. He works upon mineralogy, and at once his views fit themselves together into a conspectus of an earth-history in which his beloved granite signifies nearly the same as that which I call the proto-human signifies in man’s history. He investigates well-known plants, and the prime phenomenon of metamorphosis, the original form of the history of all plant existence, reveals itself; proceeding further, he reaches those extraordinarily deep ideas of vertical and spiral tendencies in vegetation which have not been fully grasped even yet. His studies of ossature, based entirely on the contemplation of life, lead him to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man and to the view that the skull-structure of the vertebrates developed out of six vertebræ. Never is there a word of causality. He feels the necessity of Destiny just as he himself expressed it in his Orphische Urworte:
“So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.
So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.
Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape
Impressed, that living must itself unfold.”
The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical observations, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian of Nature very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were concerned with experiential learning of the become, the dead, and the rigid. This is what underlies his anti-Newton polemic—a case in which, it must be added, both sides were in the right, for the one had “knowledge” of the regulated nature-process in the dead colour[[177]] while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive-sensuous “feeling.” Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and now therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all strictness.
History carries the mark of the singular-factual, Nature that of the continuously possible. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-around in order to see by what laws it must actualize itself, irrespective of whether it does happen or merely might happen—irrespective, that is, of time—then I am working in a genuine science. For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are no other laws) it is utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal infinitely often or never. That is, it is independent of Destiny. There are thousands of chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but they are demonstrably possible and therefore they exist—for the fixed System of Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling universe. A system consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts follow one another, truths follow from one another, and this is the difference between “when” and “how.” That there has been a flash of lightning is a fact and can be indicated, without a word, by the pointing of a finger. “When there is lightning there is thunder,” on the contrary, is something that must be communicated by a proposition or sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while systematic knowing can only be through words. “Only that which has no history is capable of being defined,” says Nietzsche somewhere. But History is present becoming that tends into the future and looks back on the past. Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, and it is without directional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the mathematical, and for the other the necessity of the tragic.
In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny and that of acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a Brabant tapestry warp and woof together effect the picture. Every law must, to be available to the understanding at all, once have been discovered through some destiny-disposition in the history of an intellect—that is, it must have once been in experiential life; and every destiny appears in some sensible garb—as persons, acts, scenes and gestures—in which Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive before the daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature Culture this “early” world-image is incessantly in conflict with the other, “late,” world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-feeling succumbs to the mechanizing intellect. History and nature within ourselves stand opposed to one another as life is to death, as ever-becoming time to ever-become space. In the waking consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-picture, and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only for the great Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in the opposition of Plato and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western, in that of Goethe and Kant—the pure physiognomy of the world contemplated by the soul of an eternal child, and its pure system comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard.