Johann Friedrich Herbart
It is almost incomprehensible to me how I could fall in love with one of the ancients, from whom I had to learn that Plato expelled poets from the Academy, where I must almost feel confined. A man, too, who shunned any jest and play as a dilution of the seriousness of the days, which at his time were probably those of Vormärz. However, he did not seem to be a political man because such daily questions were detrimental to pure science, which he had to cultivate at two of its strongholds where he stayed, in Göttingen and Königsberg. Childless himself, he dedicated himself to psychology and pedagogy, upon which his fame still rests today, but which seem utterly impenetrable to me, where one can only throw in the towel under today’s conditions, under which people are generally and systematically mentally ill, and pupils seem hopelessly addicted to gaming. One cannot counter this with concepts anymore; one can only make personal sense of it and try to do something.
And then there is metaphysics, which escalates into logical constructions about matter and consciousness, which are verbose and presented in the physical conceptions of the time as almost infantile, and upon which the entire burden of scholasticism still weighs. All this could still be delivered to an audience that was sufficient for lucrative lecture fees, and one can doubt today whether universities, which are geared towards external brilliance and where each individual tries to sell themselves as well as possible, can still be considered the strongholds of original ideas. Today, everyone, if they want to use their gained free time for it, has the opportunity to write, and the problem rather consists in the fact that there are now more writers than readers.
In his metaphysics, Herbart sets out a model that comes very close to my ideas. Not only does he reject idealism and claims to have refuted it, but he also fully sees the conditionality of perceptions and yet suspects real things behind the appearance we always deal with, including space and time. These real things, according to him, are simple beings, which should be the only real entities.
These simple beings could be elementary particles if we take modern physics, which suggests that even the vacuum is filled with particles that compensate each other and can emerge from it with energy supply, thus becoming accessible to our senses and instruments. He cannot quite clarify what he means by simple beings, but a reviewer has deduced it: “How little we are inclined to reject the derivation of external relations from the internal states of simple beings, and thus to abandon a promising explanation from the outset: we cannot convince ourselves that it should suffice by itself for the derivation of spatiality and its phenomena.”
According to his metaphysics, which truly deserves this name in this regard, these simple beings offer us phenomena, that is, an image of themselves, which is no longer and thus not attributable to reality, and spatial and temporal relations would then be a construction of the subject, or as the fashionable term of the time was, the self. These simple beings should, and simple they should be since they only possess one quality, which is self-preservation, nonetheless generate the manifold phenomena we deal with in nature, which one should then regard less as mere thought constructs. Such little magicians, who should also make up reality, could hardly be esteemed enough.
I am of the opinion that the effect of simple beings extends into all the phenomena we deal with. Then the condition that they must be simple and only possess the quality of self-preservation no longer applies, then they can be entire worlds; imagine, each particle of the microworld could be a whole world.
Gustav Theodor Fechner, whom we recently had as a virtual guest in Berlin and who at least acknowledges poetry, now condensed matter into atoms, which according to his ideas are mathematical points, leaving no room for any quality, but sees such only in the relationships between atoms.
Fechner’s favorite poet is Friedrich Rückert, and I would like to paraphrase some verses from him: The world is not finished; it is in eternal becoming /And its freedom would not endanger yours /With dead machinery, it does not interfere with you /You are a vital drive to it, great or small /It strives towards its goal – struggling with all spirits /And only if your spirit helps it will it succeed.
This is very close to the responsibility of humanity for nature discovered by Dante in his Monarchia, that is, all that humanity is and surrounds it.
We also want to bring an unknown person from obscurity, whom Fechner quotes in his book Zend Avesta, a certain Schaller: It is not just a poetic license when the whole natural environment of man is depicted as sensitive when man calls on nature for sympathy, questions it, and communicates his joy and sorrow to it.
To a religious person, it might seem unusual to turn to nature instead of God with a plea for sympathy, and it is perhaps a relapse or a return to times when deities were worshipped in nature. As nature was increasingly understood, conceptions of God became more and more spiritualized, and no one probably imagines him today floating on a cloud with his angels beside him. Nevertheless, the Sistine Chapel with the awakening of Adam by God certainly expresses something true.
Fechner is also very devout and cautiously includes the elements of nature, such as Mother Earth, while in Herbart’s metaphysics, God is not mentioned at all.
Should we go so far as to attribute reality only to simple beings and perhaps even regard these as Leibniz’s monads, these windowless beings, in which it would by no means be so simple. In practical terms, it does not really matter. Even if we lived in a world of illusion, which is mirrored to us by these beings, we would still derive a different responsibility from it, and comfort would come to us only from subjects that we also recognize as such.
Then rather closer comfort and responsibility, tangible and experienced by everyone, starting from our own mind and body, through our pet or houseplant to climate change, and not to forget the other selves, on whom we have been practicing all this for a long time if we possess a moral sense, and who should serve as a foil for us to imagine the smallest and the largest.
C. R. 20.4.2023