From the point of view of spiritual culture the movements in the direction of Realism also may be regarded as of value, if only they do not desire to dominate life and to impress their form directly upon it. The tendency to place a low estimate upon the natural and material conditions of life and of human social relationship has everywhere revenged itself upon the spiritual life, since it has allowed that life to fall into a state of weakness and effeminacy, and prevented it from realising its full power and strength.
The acknowledgment of the multiplicity of tasks that are involved in all the departments must be a source of great danger to life, if every department of human experience does not serve the development of an independent spiritual life. The more power the spiritual life acquires, the more securely will it tend to prevent division. Nevertheless, everything is in a state of movement; man must first win a coherent character for his life. But it is already a great gain that we are not defenceless in face of the antitheses within the human sphere, that the presence of an independent spiritual life elevates us inwardly above them and only allows an inner unity to take up a conflict.
We may also briefly consider how the conception of the spiritual life as a coming of reality to itself, as a formation and development of being, must tend to deepen and strengthen the work of culture. How much more this work must become to us, how much more indispensable must it be, if it is not simply a matter of giving an existent material a new form, of arousing dormant powers, but if in it we first advance from a life that is only a half-life and a life of pretence to a real and genuine life; if we struggle not for one thing or another within existence, but for our being as a whole! If once life is awakened to reflect upon itself, and if at the same time it makes a claim to self-consciousness and a content, it cannot doubt the poverty of the life of mere nature and just as little that of the life of mere society; in the former, as in the latter, there are only suggestions of a genuine life, only possibilities, most of which do not come to be realised. Not suffering, but spiritual destitution is man’s worst enemy. From this position the outlook of the life of the majority can be only a cloudy one, its value only mean. If we abstract from the experience of man that which is due to the necessity of self-preservation and to social training, how much inner movement, how much life of his own, how much that is spiritual remains in him! How many dead souls there are in all classes of society; how many who, allowing their powers to lie dormant, drift about aimlessly! Nevertheless other possibilities exist in man, and even if they are not positively developed, still they prevent him from feeling satisfied in that state of spiritual poverty, and always keep him in an insecure state of suspension.
The less we think of the immediate welfare and capacity of man, the more will the spiritual life transcend us and the more urgent will the task of the spiritual life become—to preserve to human existence in the midst of all externality and pretence some kind of substance and some kind of soul. However, we have already occupied ourselves with the question of the nature and significance of truth and reality in the spiritual life.
(b) THE ORGANISATION OF THE WORK OF CULTURE
A problem from which no system of life can escape is that of the organisation of culture, the question how the work of culture can be divided into different departments and at the same time preserve a unity. To-day we are in a state of great perplexity in this matter; an old solution has become untenable, and a new one has not yet been found.
The Middle Ages handed down to us a system of culture that may be described as a hierarchy, in the widest sense of that term. The multiplicity of life was united into a whole; but this whole was dominated by distinctive religious and philosophic convictions, which assigned to each individual department its place in the whole and set it its task; these departments attained to a complete independence as little as that system had an independence for individual forms. The Modern Age has evolved and has realised a system of freedom in increasing opposition to the earlier system. How this everywhere effects an emancipation is demonstrated by our problem of the increasing development to independence by the individual departments of life. The state and society, science and art, find their tasks more and more within themselves, in their own development; they engender distinctive laws and methods of their own; they seem to be able to reach their aims of their own capacity. Effort is directed more and more into individual departments, and there is a feeling of complete satisfaction in this tendency. Our life has gained immensely in comprehensiveness and breadth by the transition to this modern system: it comes more closely into touch with the realm of fact; it produces a greater diversity of movement, since the different departments have their own starting-points, enter upon distinctive paths, and direct their powers into these paths. The attainment of independence by the individual departments of life constitutes one of the chief gains of modern culture, and it cannot again be given up.
But the attainment of independence by the individual departments brings great perplexities with it, which make a definite counter-movement necessary. At first the tendencies characteristic of the individual departments directly contradict one another; indeed, this is inevitable, if they are not systematised in some way. For, particular experiences of human life are present in each department: one feels our greatness more, another our weakness; one is moved more by the harmony of existence, another more by the antitheses; one tends rather to exert power upon the environment, the other to concentration in itself; from these experiences there must originate different modes of life and different representations of the world. In this condition of life it is impossible for the different tendencies not to cross one another and to clash together; and this threatens to divide our life, and to rob it of all its inner unity. A glance at the condition of life in the present is sufficient to convince us that such dangers are more than fancies.
To the difficulty in respect of the relations of the different departments among themselves, we must add another, if anything greater, in respect of the relation of each department to life as a whole. To be well organised each department needs a co-operation of form and content, of the technical and the personal; the former gives the department its particular nature; for the latter a relation with life as a whole is necessary. The work of science, for example, follows certain forms of thought, which it evolves from itself, and which are equally valid for all times and parties. But even the most conscientious following of these laws does not give to science a content and a character; science can acquire these only in relation with a movement of life as a whole, which, in its striving from whole to whole, takes up the experiences of humanity and unites them into a whole. Only in this way does science, from being simply an arrangement and accumulation, become knowledge, an inner appropriation of things. If in accordance with this the individual departments are detached more and more from life as a whole, and are made dependent solely upon their own capacity, it can hardly be otherwise than that in the midst of all perfection in execution they lose more and more all spiritual content and all definite character. At the same time, it may soon follow that the effect upon humanity as a whole will become subsidiary and a matter of indifference; the individual departments will become exclusively a matter of a circle of specialists, and strive for an effect within this circle only. In this way an art arises which, in the artist, forgets the man, and which does not so much convey new content to human life, or help the time to attain to a characteristic feeling of life, and elevate it above the meaninglessness and the confusion of commonplace everyday experience, but which is for the most part mindful of refinement in execution, and so, easily degenerates into the complicated and the virtuoso. In the case of science we find the same thing. It may, through exaggerating the independence necessary to it, assume an air of proud self-satisfaction, and, by detachment from the movement of life as a whole, that which is its main concern, namely, knowledge, may suffer. For it soon tends to become mere erudition, which treats problems as something half-alien, gains no inner relation to things, does not understand how to animate reality, indeed even rejects, as unscientific, all striving after such animation. This tendency produces, to use an expression of Hegel’s, excellent “counter-servers,” who do not look after business of their own, but only that of others.
No people are more threatened by the danger of this tendency than we Germans; more especially because the tendency is closely related with a most advantageous quality of our nature—willing subordination to the object, fidelity to and conscientiousness in our work. But since we follow this one tendency, aspects and tendencies which are absolutely necessary to a complete life stagnate and decay. We do not sufficiently develop a personal life independent of the object; we do not encompass and transform it from its very base by a transcendent life-process; and so we are occupied too much with the material, and do not completely spiritualise it; we do not bring into relief simple lines in the infinite abundance, which we require and must maintain complete. How many excellent scholars our time possesses, who are equipped with an astonishing capacity for work, who are masters of even the most complicated technical matters, and yet how few spiritual types there are among them; how few who have anything to say to humanity, and who will exert their influence in this way beyond the present! The history of German formative art also indicates a painful divergence between the amount of untiring work and the carefulness of execution, and the creation of simple and pure forms that would increase the spiritual possessions of humanity, and be permanent factors in its movement. However, the trait is rooted far too deeply in our being for even the most determined resolution to be able directly to achieve much to counteract it. Nevertheless, it is not a matter of indifference whether we give ourselves complacently up to this one-sidedness, and fortify ourselves proudly in it; or whether we oppose it to the best of our ability.