Читать книгу The philosophy of life, and philosophy of language, in a course of lectures - Friedrich von Schlegel - Страница 9

But the previous question, whether the knowledge of God, which we either possess or are capable of possessing, be a science of absolute reason, or rather an understanding of given data, and consequently a science of experience, and resting, ultimately, on revelation—this certainly falls within the scope of philosophical investigation. Indeed, it forms the chiefest and most essential problem of philosophy, inasmuch as it is properly the very question of being and non-being—of a true and human, or of an empty and imaginary science—that is here to be decided. On this account, a precise and correct phraseology is of the utmost importance toward a right solution of this leading topic of philosophical inquiry. Now, it is a fact deserving of remark, and well calculated to arrest our attention, that nowhere in Holy Writ, nowhere in all antiquity, or in any of the great teachers and philosophers of olden time, is there any mention made of God’s reason—but universally it is intelligence or understanding, an omniscient intelligence that is ascribed to Him. The wrongful interchange of the two words was reserved exclusively for our modern times, and for the epoch of the absolute rule of reason, and of the worse than Babylonish confusion of scientific terms which has arisen out of it. The only exceptions from the previous remark, which may be found in antiquity, are confined to one or two of the Stoics. But when we reflect how greatly their whole chapter on the Deity labors under the evil influence of that doctrine of an inevitable necessity and blind fate, which forms the reproach of the whole Stoical theory, this apparent exception serves to confirm the general rule, that a wrong use of language invariably has its source in a rationalistic basis of speculation, or, perhaps, is itself the spring and occasion of that erroneous point of view. God is unquestionably the author of reason. If, therefore, any one be disposed to call the divine order of things (which, however, is not the Deity himself) a divine reason, this is a mere matter of indifference. Only in such a case the question to be agitated would not involve the mere expression, but rather the meaning which is associated with it. But, for my part, I should prefer to avoid a mode of speaking which might give rise to great misconception. And this is the more desirable the more needful it is at all times carefully to distinguish between the true and sound reason and its contrary. God is the author of the sound reason, i.e., of the reason which follows and is obedient to the divine order. But the other, the rebellious reason, has for its source that spirit of negation which every where opposes God, and has drawn so great a part of creation after him in his fall. For, having lost his true center, and finding none in himself, that evil spirit, with indescribable desire and raging passionateness, seeks to find one in the disordered world of sense, and in its noblest ornament—even in the soul of man, the very jewel of creation. And this is even the origin of the rebellious reason. And it is rebellious even because having wandered from its center in the loving soul, which again has its center in God, it has thrown off the obedience of love, that holy bond which retains the soul in subjection to the divine order. How far in the present day, amid the fermenting rationalistic medley which constitutes the spirit of the age, that sound reason which willingly follows and observes the divine order, or that rebellious reason which is absolute in itself, has the upper hand, and forms the predominant element, is a question easy of solution. It is one which I am content to leave to the decision of all who are in any degree acquainted with the prevailing tone of science and of life.

The philosophy which I have here undertaken to develop, setting out from the soul as the beginning and first subject of its speculations, contemplates the mind or spirit as its highest and supreme object. Accordingly, in its doctrine of the Deity, directly opposing every rationalistic tendency, it conceives of Him and represents him as a living spirit, a personal God, and not merely as an absolute reason, or a rational order. If, therefore, for the sake of distinction, it requires some peculiar and characteristic designation, it might, in contrast with those errors of Materialism and Idealism which I have described and condemned, be very aptly termed Spiritualism. But our doctrine is not any such system of reason as the others pretend to be. It is an inward experimental science of a higher order. Such a designation, consequently, bespeaking as it does, a pretension of system, is not very appropriate, and is, at all events, superfluous. It is best indicated by a simple name, such as we have given it in calling it a philosophy of life.

Moreover, the revelation by which God makes himself known to man, does not admit of being limited exclusively to the written word. Nature itself is a book written on both sides, both within and without, in every line of which the finger of God is discernible. It is, as it were, a Holy Writ in visible form and bodily shape—a song of praise on the Creator’s omnipotence composed in living imagery. But besides Scripture and nature—those two great witnesses to the greatness and majesty of God—there is in the voice of conscience nothing less than a divine revelation within man. This is the first awakening call to the two other louder and fuller proclamations of revealed truth. And, lastly, in universal history we have set before us a real and manifold application and progressive development of revelation. Here the luminous threads of a divine and higher guidance glimmer through the remarkable events of history. For, not only in the career of whole ages and nations, but also in the lives of individuals, the ruling and benignant hand of Providence is every where visible.

Fourfold, consequently, is the source of revelation, from which man derives his knowledge of the Deity, learns his will, and understands his operation and power—conscience, nature, Holy Writ, and universal history. The teaching of the latter is often of that earnest and awful kind, to which we may, in a large sense, apply the adage, “Who will not learn must feel.” How often does it show us some mighty edifice of fortune, which, having no firm basis in the deep soil of truth and the divine order, owed its rapid growth and false splendor to some evil influence, falling suddenly in ruins, as if stricken by the invisible breath of a superior power. On such occasions the public feeling recognizes the hand which sets a limit to every temerity in the history of the world—to every extravagance of a false confidence—and appoints it its ultimate term. And the olden notion (which, with men of the day, had become little more than an antiquated legend) of God’s retributive justice, resumes its place among the actuating sentiments of life, with new and intense significance. The sublime truth, however, is only too soon forgotten, and the temporary alarm subsides but too quickly into the habitual calm of a false security—that old and hereditary feeling of human nature.

The volume of Holy Writ, as it is transmitted to us, and was first commenced about three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the possibility of an earlier sacred tradition in the twenty-four centuries which preceded it. So far, indeed, is the supposition of such an original revelation from being inconsistent with Scripture, that, on the contrary, it contains explicit allusions to the fact, that such a manifold enlightenment was imparted to the first man, as well as to that patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants, was the second progenitor of mankind. But as this divine knowledge, derived immediately from the primary source of all illumination, flowed down in free and unconfined channels to succeeding generations, and to the different nations which branched off from the parent stock, the original sacred traditions were soon disfigured and overloaded with fictions and fables. In these, however, a rich abundance of remarkable vestiges and precious germs of divine truth were mixed up with Bacchanalian rites and immoral mysteries. And thus, amid a multitude of sensuous and stimulating images, the pure and simple truth was buried, as in a second chaos, under a mass of contradictory symbols. Hence arose that Babylonish confusion of languages, emblems, and legends, which is universally to be met with among ancient, and even the most primitive nations. In the great work, therefore, of purification, and of a restoration of true religion (which we may call a second revelation, or, at least, as a second stage thereof), a rigid exclusion of this heathenish admixture of fable and immorality was the first and most essential requisite. But those older revelations, imparted to the first man and the second progenitor of mankind, are expressly laid down as the groundwork of that evangel of the creation, which forms the introduction to the whole volume of Scripture, and furnishes us thereby with a key to understand the history and religion of the primitive world—or, to speak absolutely, the true Genesis of the existing world, its history and its science. This double principle, expressly recognizing, on the one hand, an original revelation and divine illumination of the first progenitors of the human race, of which the olden and less corrupted monuments of heathenism still retain many a trace; and, on the other, strictly rejecting the additions of a corrupt and degenerated heathenism, with all its tissue of fables and false, godless mysteries, must be kept steadily in view in examining the earliest portions of the sacred Scriptures. For the neglect, or imperfect consideration of it, has already led, and is ever likely to give rise to many complicated doubts and perverted views, which imperil not only the simple understanding of the whole body of revealed Scripture, but even the right conception of revelation.

It would seem, then, that not only philosophical, but absolutely every higher species of knowledge is an internal science of experience. For the formal science of mathematics is not a positive science for the cognition of a real object, so much as an organon and aid for other sciences, which, however, as such, is both excellent in itself, and admits of many useful applications. We may, therefore, on this hypothesis consider each of these four faculties of man, which I have called the principal poles or leading branches of human consciousness, as a peculiar sense for a particular domain of truth. For all experience and all science thereof rests on some cognitive sense as the organ of its immediate perceptions. Now, the reason, which, in its form of conscience, announces itself as an internal sense of right and wrong, is, as the faculty for the development and communication of thought, usually named the common sense. It constitutes the bond of connection between men and their thoughts, which is dependent on and conditioned by language and its organ, and may be called the sense for all that is distinctively human. In this respect it forms the foundation and first grade of all other senses for, and immediate organs of, a higher knowledge. Fancy, again, being itself but a reflection of life and of the living powers of the natural world, is the inward sense for nature, which, as will hereafter be more fully shown, first lends and assures to natural science its due import and true living significance. And, inasmuch as the perfect intellection of a single object results from the totality alone—the significance and spirit of the whole—therefore the understanding is the sense for that mind [geist] which manifests itself in the sensible world, whether this be a human or natural, or the supreme Divine intelligence.

Now, if we may venture to consider the fourfold revelation of God in conscience, in nature, in Holy Writ, and the world’s history, as so many living springs or fertilizing streams of a higher truth, we must suppose the existence of a good soil to receive the water of life and the good seed of divine knowledge. For without an organ of susceptibility for good to receive the divine gift from above, no amount of revelation would benefit man. Now, the soul, so susceptible of good on all sides, both from within and from without, is even this organ for the reception of revelation. And this function of the soul, together with its creation of language as the outer form of human knowledge, constitutes its contribution to science, and especially to internal science. And even with the understanding, as the sense which discerns the meaning and purport of revelation, the soul is co-operative—since nothing divine can be understood merely in the idea, and of and by itself alone, but in every case a feeling for it must have preceded, or, at least, contributed toward its complete understanding. The soul, consequently, which is thus susceptible of the divine, is ever informing itself about, or co-operating in the acquisition of a knowledge of the Godlike. And this, the soul’s love and pursuit of divine truth, when, unfolding itself in thought, it comes forth in an investiture of words, is even philosophy—not, indeed, the dead sophistic of the schools, but one which, as it is a philosophy of life, can be nothing less than living. And the soul, thus ardently yearning for the divine, and both receiving and faithfully maintaining the revealed Word, is the common center toward which all the four springs of life and streams of truth converge. In free meditation it reconciles and combines them.

On this account the oldest and most natural form of philosophy was that of dialogue, which did not, however, exclude the occasional introduction of a simple narrative, or the continuous explanation of higher and abstruser questions. Philosophy, accordingly, might not inappropriately be defined as a dialogue of the soul in its free meditation on divine things. And this was the very form it actually possessed among the earliest and noblest of the philosophers of antiquity—first of all really and orally, as with Pythagoras and Socrates, and lastly in its written exposition, of which style Plato was the great and consummate master. But it was only to the noblest and best of all ranks, though without distinction of age or sex, that these the greatest men of antiquity communicated their treasures of philosophical wisdom. In this course Pythagoras first set the example, which, on the whole, was followed also by Socrates and Plato. For, in general, the latter confined their philosophical teaching to a select circle, and imparted it, as it were, under the seal of friendship, to such only as in the social intercourse of life they admitted to close and familiar intimacy. Occasional exceptions were, perhaps, furnished by their disputes with the sophists, in the course of which they were constrained to adopt, not only the weapons, but also the method of their adversaries—a license of which Plato, perhaps, has too often availed himself, even if he has not sometimes abused it. For about this time the sophists introduced a practice as erroneous as their doctrine was false. Publishing their philosophemes to the whole people, they treated it and quarreled about it in the market-place as a common party matter. Such a procedure was in every sense pernicious, and one which must have brought even truth itself into contempt. Lastly, Aristotle comprised in his manuals the collective results of all earlier philosophical speculation, and intrusted his treasury of mature knowledge and well-sifted and newly-arranged thoughts to the keeping of a school. Now, we should be far from justified were we to make this a reproach against this master of subtlety and profoundest of thinkers; for at this time all true intellectual life had, together with public spirit, become extinct among the Greeks, amid the disorders of democracy, or under the pressure of the armed supremacy of Macedonia. Still it must ever remain a matter of profound regret. For philosophy, as standing in the center between the guiding spirit of the divine education of man and the external force of civil right and material power, ought to be true mundane soul [Weltseele] which animates and directs the development of ages and of the whole human race. Deeply, therefore, is it to be deplored whenever science, and especially philosophy, are withdrawn from this wide sphere of universal operation, and from human life itself, to remain banished and cooped up in the narrow limits of a school.