Education and instruction are especially affected by the difficulties that are engendered by the lack of a main tendency in life and of a transcendence of the superficiality of time. For the lively interest which its questions provoke, the incalculable amount of work and activity that is called forth in this department, do not produce their full result, because we do not possess enough life of our own of a definite character to be able to test and sort, to clarify and deepen, that which is presented to us. And so in conflict with one another we use up much power without making much progress in the most important matter.
Educational reform is the catchword, but we have no philosophy of education that is based upon a securely established conviction concerning life as a whole, and we trouble ourselves very little to obtain one. We wish to improve education, and yet we have not come to an understanding with regard to its ideals, its possibility, and its conditions. Education must be fundamentally different in character, according as man is regarded as a particular and exclusively individual being, or as a being in whom a new and universal life seems to emerge; according as he is only an elevated being of nature or in the highest degree possible a spiritual being; according as the higher proceeds from the lower gradually and surely after the manner of organic growth, or we must find a new starting-point and accomplish a revolution. Further, an individualistic training, as it dominated the classical systems of pedagogy, is no longer sufficient; the relation to society must also be fully appreciated, and be effective. But attention to this requirement involves us in the danger of treating the problem of education too externally, and of bringing all more or less to the same level; and this danger must be overcome. Yet how can it be overcome, unless we possess securely a depth, unless we acknowledge the presence of the infinite within the human being, as it is comprehended in our conviction of the spiritual life?
The form of instruction suffers from the ceaseless onflow of new material, the constant increase in the number of claims. In itself each single demand may be quite justifiable; but whether it is better than the others can be decided only from an idea which governs the whole. If no such idea exists, a gain in the individual departments may be a loss to the whole; and an enrichment in one department may lead to a decline of the whole. In face of that which has been handed down from the past and that which arises in the present, it is difficult to come to a balanced judgment; the parties may be right in their attacks one upon another, but this does not imply that they are right in their own assertions. The immediate impression tends to give the balance in favour of the requirements of the present; from the point of view of the immediate impression, all occupation with the past may appear to be a flight from the living to the dead. The advocate of the claims of history may reply to this that man as a spiritual being is not a child of the mere moment, and that we concern ourselves with the past not on account of what is transitory in it, but for its eternal content. But he who thinks thus must throw the eternal content into relief and separate it sharply from that which is simply temporal; he must establish a relation between this content and his own life, and make that which is externally alien his inward possession. This does indeed come to pass in a few cases; but can we say that it comes to pass generally or predominantly? We Germans in particular have far too strong a tendency to substitute scholarly occupation for inner animation, and instead of spiritual substance to offer academically correct knowledge. It is therefore not without good reason if Classical Antiquity does not so much inspire as weary our youth; yet the blame for this does not rest upon Antiquity, but on ourselves, and upon the manner in which we treat it with calm scholarship, without transforming it into our own possession. For how could that influence the whole man which does not come from the whole man? Everything points again and again to the same thing—we lack spiritual independence, inner transcendence of history and environment, we lack a characteristic life as a whole. The contact with the incalculable abundance of impressions that we experience must therefore remain an external one; and with all our increasing wealth of knowledge we threaten to become spiritually poorer.
(b) SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
Science, with its innumerable branches and its powerful penetration of life, is indisputably a strong feature of the age. Its effect is not exhausted in the abundance of particular achievements; by the objectivity of its work it has brought the world much nearer to us, has led our life to greater clearness, has made us more alert, and given us a secure dominion over things. Science, therefore, must also be a factor in the determination of a philosophy of life, and must raise the whole position of man. Of course, as soon as we survey and estimate its work from the life-process we find that there is no lack of difficult problems in science. Since the magnificent results of the natural sciences often give rise to the tendency to force their particular bent and methods on the human sciences, to which our conception of the spiritual life gives a characteristic sphere of their own, there is a danger that the balanced development of the individual sciences and the complete organisation of what is distinctive in them will be prevented. However, we do not lack energetic resistance of this danger; and ultimately it is less science itself than the movement to popularise it that falls into this danger. Further, the results of science with regard to the object easily tend to obscure the subjective element, the spiritual activity, the characteristic synthesis, which forms an organised collection of pieces of knowledge into the unity of a science. It is apt to appear as though science needs only to construct further on a given basis and in a given direction; while both of these are open to much dispute: different possibilities, prospects, types may be revealed; the work of history has run through different stages, and has certainly not already exhausted its possibilities. Nevertheless, the subjective element with its freedom, mobility, and many-sidedness is becoming more adequately appreciated, and there is no reason to fear that science will become dogmatically pursued in paths that have become fixed. Finally, the problem of the relation of thought to life is the source of much perplexity: we Germans, for example, have a strong tendency to take mere knowledge for inner appropriation of the object, and instead of spiritual substance to offer an abundance of scholarship. This, however, is not a defect in science itself, but an error on the part of man, who has no life of his own with which to meet the onflow of impressions from the environment; and so our estimate of science and our acknowledgment of its magnificent achievement cannot be affected by this charge.
Philosophy is in quite a different position: its present state cannot satisfy anyone who seeks rather for a universal science than for an academic discipline. For our philosophical efforts lack a common aim and close relation with the innermost need of the time; they do not even show any definite and energetic attempt to overcome the confusion from which our world of thought suffers. A great stream of philosophic effort came to an end with the speculative philosophy of the first decade of the nineteenth century. After a temporary ebb of this philosophic effort, we now wish to take up the work again with fresh power, but we have not yet acquired inner independence; and therefore, in sifting and collecting, we are unable to direct the age to definite aims, or radically expel the inconsistencies into which an indefinite relation to the past has led the present.
There are three main streams of thought which come to us from the past, and we can neither completely take them up nor withdraw ourselves from them: the Enlightenment, with its philosophic summit in Descartes; the critical philosophy of Kant; and speculative philosophy, with its consummation in Hegel. It has been thought that the Enlightenment, with its starting out from the subject, its unadorned intellectualism, its formal ratiocination, its rejection of everything that is not comprehended in clear and distinct ideas, was transcended at the height of German classical literature, because at that time a life rich in content was set in contrast with it. But, as a fact, no adequate settlement with the Enlightenment has been arrived at; the supposed transcendence is not final, because the elements of truth in the Enlightenment, especially its turning from history to the immediacy and independence of spiritual life, were not properly acknowledged. But to-day it is less the elements of truth of the Enlightenment that are a force than that which is trivial and narrowly human in it—the ratiocination of the subject which, the more empty it is, the more it feels itself to be the measure of all things, and, rejoicing in negation, applies the results of the natural sciences in an attempt to bring about the greatest possible suppression of all spiritual relations. In this form the Enlightenment gains acceptance by the masses, which formerly had seemed inaccessible to it; and thus it becomes an instrument by which life is dissipated and made shallow. From its position of research, philosophy looks down upon this tendency with contempt; but it produces no movement that is able to take up the struggle with this tendency to shallowness, and pass through the struggle victoriously. Kant is often lauded as the spiritual guide of our time; and it is overlooked how much that was certain for him has become doubtful; how many new facts, new problems, new prospects, which cannot be lost to the world of thought we have received from the nineteenth century with its historico-social culture and its overwhelming widening of the horizon. Kant’s critique of the reason is based on a conception of science; on a faith in the possibility of a knowledge of truth; on a conviction of a spiritual organisation of man, which are rather in contradiction than in harmony with the main tendencies of the present. His absolute ethic, the pillar of his constructive thought, is incompatible with the empirical and social treatment of morality to which the present does homage. But at the same time we cannot free ourselves from the influence of Kant. For we cannot refute his critique of the reason, breaking up, as it does, the old representation and conception of truth; and, without his ethic, our ethic would lose the appearance of truth and greatness. In the judgment of the present, Hegel experiences a treatment that is just the opposite of that which Kant receives: if in reference to the latter we do not notice what divides us, so in reference to the former we fail to recognise what joins us. For if Hegel’s exaggeration of the power of the human spirit and his identification of spirit and thought appear alien to us, yet his idea of evolution, which embraces all multiplicity, and represents all realities and conceptions as in a state of flux; his elevation of spiritual factors to the form of independent powers which develop and establish their own necessities undeterred by the preference of man; his emphasis on the fact of the power of contradiction and opposition in history—all this, often in spite of our own conceptions, exerts an enormous influence over us; and we cannot shake it off without surrendering a considerable portion of our spiritual possession.
These tendencies all whirl confusedly together and draw us now in one direction, now in another; we can get beyond the state of decadence only when we have succeeded in giving to the world of thought an independent character, which corresponds with the spiritual condition of the present, and which can do justice to the old as well as the new experiences. After the whole course of our investigation, only a brief account is necessary to indicate the directions the system of life here advocated points out to reach this; a fuller treatment would make a particular theory of knowledge necessary. We must bring into prominence three of the chief points.
(1) Only the life-process can be the starting-point of philosophy, not some kind of being more ultimate than this process, whether we conceive of such being as an external world or as a subject existing independent of the world: the ideas of “world” and “subject,” as also that of “being,” can be evolved and made clear only within the life-process; at the same time, they remain in a state of flux, and never are so directly opposed to one another as modern thought has represented them as being. Philosophy, with this starting-point, would, however, attain an independence in relation to the special sciences only if it were possible within the life-process to form a unity and a distinctive synthesis, which should deepen our view of reality and set it as a whole in a new light. (2) Such a synthesis must transcend the state of change of all the relations and caprice of men; this is possible only by the revelation and appropriation of an independent spiritual life withdrawn from the life of sense. Without such a spiritual life there is no release from the chaos of subjective experiences and opinions; only from the position of the spiritual life is it possible for a spiritual occurrence to be revealed in the province of man, so that we do not need to infer from man to the world, but that within him a universal life can be immediately experienced. (3) As, on the one hand, the spiritual life is an indispensable presupposition, so on the other it is an infinite task; the former as far as the fundamental fact is concerned, the latter in reference to its detailed content. This content can be acquired only through the movement of history as a whole; thus a constructive philosophy—and not merely a critical one—could arise only where the spiritual life as a whole had acquired a characteristic form. In this case, philosophy was not simply an offspring of life, not merely something for life to occupy itself with. By its demand for a thorough clarification of our ideas and life, and by its raising the question of absolute truth, philosophy has exercised no little influence upon the progress of life. But that which it achieved of a fruitful nature, it achieved not in detachment from, but only in relation to, life, and by interaction with it, however much this relation may be concealed at the first glance.
Such a connection of philosophy with life as a whole is by no means new; it has existed in all times. Never has the world of thought acquired a distinctive character except in close relation with life as a whole: it is only from life as a whole that thought has received its problems, the nature of its procedure, and the demarcation of its work. A survey of the history of philosophy makes it evident that the leading thinkers differ mostly, and differ from the beginning, in that which they regard as the essence of life. In what they regard as the essence of life they have found the firm point of support for their work; from that the direction of their research has been determined; and from that the questions arose to which they required an answer from the universe. And we all know that in these matters the question often implies more than the answer, that it often carries the answer within itself.