In terms of thought images, our point of departure in this study is the necessity to create a conceptual apparatus for integrating the living substances, which became visible for the first time after the dissolution of the creationist view of the world, into a philosophical system. This raises the problem of organism . . .
What unites the race theory rooted in this era with liberalism and Marxism is the will to deprive the state of history, to hand it over to the masses, to destroy the historical substance and the primal image of man in its community-forming function . . .
§ 1. Primal Images and Primal Ways of Seeing
The knowledge of man is out of joint. Current race theory is characterized by uncertainty about what is essential and a decline in the technical ability to grasp it cognitively. We turn to the history of a great idea to trace the law of its creation in happier moments of the world-spirit and to return from this immersion in its mature forms with a new firm vision and with hands now more skilled to reproduce what we have seen.
The race idea came into being at a turning point in time; its emergence is an epiphenomenon of an extensive historical process characterized by a change in the primal image [Urbild] of man. There is no one primal way of seeing and no one primal image of man maintained throughout history as the eternal norm of a perfect existence; the views and the images change with the times and nations. Though a law governs each new image, the change occurs freely; that is, we cannot fathom the ultimate reasons for the appearance of a particular image. However, we can understand the necessary conditions accompanying the first view and appearance of a new image and then trace the law of the course of its existence from its beginning to its decline and disappearance. A norm does not completely become an image unless it is realized in a historical person; and the image remains unseen in spite of its embodiment in a person if the time is not ripe for seeing it. Embodiment and fullness of time are the broadest categories of intellectual history under which we must look at the change in the image of man.
A Christian Future
The primal images in whose transformation the race idea arises are the Christian one as it became flesh in the person of Jesus and a post-Christian, pagan one. Several persons have carried the development of the post-Christian primal image without any one so far having embodied as decisively as Christ embodied the Christian one. The change is not marked by a sharp break, a clear end and a new beginning; rather, it is a blending of one image into another, a fading out of one and simultaneous intensifying of the other. The Christian image raises man out of nature; though it presents him as a creature among other creatures, as a finite being among others, it nevertheless juxtaposes him to the rest of nature; he stands between God and the subhuman world. This intermediate status is not determined by a unique formative law that would constitute man as a self-contained existence but by his participation in both the higher and the lower world. By virtue of his soul, man is united with the divine pneuma; by virtue of his body, his sarx, he partakes of transitoriness; his existence is that of being lost, an existence from which he must be freed in order to ascend to the realm of his true existence with his “authentic” nature. Man must live according to the example of Christ and follow Him: “Omnia vanitas, pater amare Deum, et illi soli servire. Ita est summa sapientia, per contemptum mundi tendere ad regna coelestia.” [All is vanity but to love God, and to serve him alone. Thus the supreme wisdom is to seek the kingdom of heaven by despising the things of this world.] It is vain to strive for riches, says the author of the Imitation of Christ, it is vain to strive for worldly honors and for a raised status, vain to wish for a long life. The world is vain, and the body a prison. The eye is not satisfied by what it sees nor the ear filled by what it hears; those who follow their senses lose grace. . . The most important event in man’s life is death; he must arrange his days with death in mid; he must seek solitude, flee form the sight and speech of other people, turn away from everything external and “intendere ad interiora et spiritualia” [turn to internal and spiritual things]. Every day is to be lived as if it were the last, and the soul should always be anxious for the world beyond the senses. Perfect calm of soul can be found only in the eternal gaze upon God—“Sed non est hoc possibile, durante me in hac mortalitate” [but this is not possible while I am in this mortal state]. Earthly existence is to be called “mortal,” not because life ends in death but because the quality of mortalitas makes the whole duration of life something contemptible, unreal, from which the soul is liberated into a higher life, a higher reality. During his earthly existence, man connects with God in the act of communion; life and death no longer needs this expedient for union with God . . .
Thus we have briefly outlined the image of man as Thomas a Kempis saw it in the Imitation of Christ This can no longer be seen in the same intensity in the transitional period to a new primal image and on the intellectual level on which the race idea arises. What has remained as the essential trait is the devaluation of the subhuman world and of human existence itself as far as its creaturely transitoriness is concerned. At the same time, a correspondingly high value is placed on a soul substance that, freed from all worldly ties, leads an afterlife without death.
A Secular Future
However, a philosophical anthropology whose first goal is no longer the rational glorification of fundamental Christian experiences but insight into the nature of man is more skeptically open to experiences transcending the horizon of Christian experience, and its own speculative movement leads it to doubt the validity of its constructions and to be willing to make attempts in other directions. As is characteristic for such transition times, we find in Kant experiences blending into each other that should be basic experiences, but for Kant they are no longer or not yet that. The undervaluing of earthly existence has remained from the Christian image of man—Kant considers it astonishing that philosophers could ever have come up with the idea that so imperfect and transitory a creature as man could ever fulfill the meaning of his life in his earthly existence and not need the hope of a life after death to perfect his faculties. However, the Christian idea of the coming of the Kingdom of God is so secularized that the kingdom of perfected man is envisioned as attainable on earth in an unending historical process; on the infinitely distant temporal horizon the kingdom evolved on earth and the one effected by God come together.
However, this raises the puzzling question why people today should have to lead such an imperfect life while those far distant generations will be allowed to lead a blessed life on earth—a question that cannot arise in the original Christian idea because there the heavenly kingdom is distinguishes toto coelo from all worldly events. Kant, who sees the kingdom of heaven as a remote, earthly one, experiences therefore “astonishment” at the unequal treatment present and future human generations receive from divine providence. Though life in this world is imperfect, a perfect existence in turn can only be conceived as an earthly existence—an otherworldly life, after careful reflection seems to Kant to be only an imperfect substitute for life on this earth. Kant’s vacillation in his basic attitude to existence corresponds to the inner conflict in his thought system. We find the strictest separation of the eternal rational substance, which he sees as the true human nature, from the sensory dimension, which he considers a subordinate, evil realm, and, contrary to this devaluation of what is natural, we get the first full view of the phenomenon of organic life as an autonomous realm between mechanistic nature and the realm of reason.
In referring to Kant we are already looking at an advanced stage of the evolution of the race idea. Kant’s system is the first step on the way to a reworking of an image of man increasingly distant from the Christian one—the vacillating attitude and the inner conflicts in the system indicate that a number of shattering blows must have been struck at the old image. Those blows were aimed at eliminating first the devaluation of subhuman nature and next that of human existence itself insofar as it belongs to that realm by virtue of being a sensory-bodily existence. As we have said, we can only record the concomitant circumstances of this process—its ultimate reasons remain beyond our understanding. Fascination with the enigmas of living nature may just as well be due to a new, extra-Christian experience of nature as to the desire to see divine providence at work even in the lowliest creatures. The attitude of the zoologist who sees the hand of God in the anatomy of a louse cannot be easily distinguished from that seeking to study the law of the living between without reference to divine manifestation. Here we are confronting questions of classification in intellectual history, and in our opinion there can be no unequivocal answer to them. Does the turn to a realistic look at nature represent a last lingering of Christian mysticism or a first step toward the new image of the world and of man?
genus proximum and differentia specifica
We can, however, trace this turn. The new understanding of living nature began with an enormous increase in knowledge of the subject matter in the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century; zoology and botany expanded their knowledge of living forms both in the number of genera and species and in the precision of knowledge about the structure of the various forms. Since the end of the seventeenth century there have been attempts to compile the knowledge of the large classes, such as birds or fishes, and to establish a system on which to base classification. The idea of a natural system emerged then as the first step to the subsequent effort at a historical classification of nature. We start with our investigations into intellectual history at the beginnings and show how the idea of a system is active in the works of the great English naturalists of the late seventeenth century, especially in those of John Ray, and how gradually the idea of a natural order of the living world came to prevail over the artificial order based on external characteristics, according to genus proximum and differentia specifica. Together with the knowledge of subhuman nature that of the physical forms of man also grew. Since the Renaissance, travel accounts, which had become more and more numerous up to the first half of the eighteenth century, had given a general idea of the variety in the bodily form of man, the broad outlines of which agree with our present-day knowledge.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century this collection of material had grown to the point of being ready for systematic classification, and thus arises the question of the significance of the body and its diverse forms for an understanding of man. Is man, as being in nature, to be classified with the animals? How can such a classification be reconciled with the Christian idea of man as an essentially supernatural, imperishable substance? Is the variety of physical forms of any significance for man’s soul and rational substance? Is his essence to be defined as that of an animal species or as a unique substance radically different from animals? If the human substance differs radically from animal substance, what are we to make of the differences in customs, convictions, and institutions that go hand in hand with the physical differences, and so on? This problem was posed in the first systems of Linnaeus and Georges de Buffon, and its various possibilities have been explored by Buffon, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant.
The new factual knowledge and the questions it raised gradually led to a readiness to see the living world and man in a new way. We can distinguish two phases in this maturation process: a first phase, in which the phenomenon of life appears as a primary phenomenon and a second, in which an image of man as an earthly, self-contained, unified figure develops. In the first phase the Christian image of nature was dissolved. Plants and animals had been seen as creatures of God, as material beings shaped and ensouled by the hand of a master craftsman. The living substance presented itself as the medium in which a plan had be realized; organized matter was understood as a construct, a machine, an instrument embodying the ingenious idea of its builder and moving according to this idea.
In the eighteenth century this image of the machine was gradually changed into that of a substance carrying the law of its construction within it, a substance that is not created or animated from the outside but that is itself a primary force, a substance that is not given its life from the outside but lives out the wellsprings of its own aliveness. It was not easy to focus on this phenomenon for the first time and to school others to see it. A thousand-year-old habit of seeing had to be destroyed, and a new one had to be acquired in its stead that was willing to accept living existence as primary and not to separate it into form and material. Buffon, Wolff, and Blumenbach had to persuade themselves and their contemporaries with the help of analogies to inorganic nature to accept what they saw as real. Nonliving matter as the building block of the world was the type of an independent and autonomous substance in analogy to which other independent substances could be conceived. Starting with Buffon, we find attempts to substantiate the principle of aliveness by referring to the forces of matter—gravity and the force of attraction—until finally Blumenbach found the expression that convincingly designate the phenomenon of life as irreducible and incapable of combination: the formative drive. With Kant’s Critique of Judgment this first phase came to a close; life by then was understood as a primary phenomenon in its full extent, as life of the organic individual, as life of the species, and as historical unfolding of the whole living world. We will discuss this part of the process under the heading “The Internalization of the Body” because the image of the living being as one constructed from the outside of matter and a planning power had changed into that of a substance living as a unified and self-contained one out of its own inwardness.
The second phase is one we have called the internalization of the person. When the image of life as internalized emerged, the Christian image of man as an immortal being chained to the sensory realm changed into the image of a unified figure living out its meaning in this earthly existence. Once again, as in the formation of the image of life, substantiating moments and the willingness to accept them as such had to combine. Just as the phenomenon of life became irresistible through increased knowledge of living beings in all their diversity, so the image of uniform man became obvious through its ideal realization in the great figures of the time. Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Grand Duke Karl August, and Goethe are the towering figures that served to train the vision of their contemporaries for what is unique and uniform in a human being. We find the traces of their influence everywhere. Kant had Frederick the Great in mind, but could not yet completely understand him. Though Kant no longer saw Frederick the Great as one figurant among many others in the development of human reason toward its perfection in the far-off future but rather as an excellent person outshining all other people, he could not yet see him as a unique phenomenon, a figure sufficient unto itself. Instead Kant integrated Frederick into his idea of development as its guarantor—this great figure was to guarantee that the development of reason was in fact progressing. However, the intuitive force and the aptness of expression which could have substantiated what was seen, were still lacking—just as the view of the phenomenon of life was still incomplete without the symbolic force of the term “formative drive” [Bildungstrieb]. After all, the new image could not be made visible within the imagination of a development toward the Kingdom of God and of the immortal rational substance imprisoned in the body.
Goethe and Schiller found the word that captures the powerful human existence in its earthly character [Erdenhaftigkeit]: the demonic. Soul and reason have a Christian hue—the soul is destined to suffer the trials and tribulations of earthly existence and ultimately to be redeemed; in accordance with the example of Christ, its existence is a Passion, not an action. Reason is the secularized bearer of the moral characteristics, of the virtues; it is the source of moral law and, its hue being more active, the source of the moral deed. The idea of the demonic, by contrast, consciously takes up pagan nuances; the sacred and the moral recede and the fertile, generative element (“the productive,” in Goethe’s terms) comes to the fore. For Goethe, the demonic nature signifies the great productivity that confers on works and deeds a condition of enlightenment, of grace; the demon is the ecstatic human being living entirely out of the center of a productive self, without tiring, without falling into periods of weakness—Napoleon is the primal image of a demon of action, Shakespeare of the demon of poetic works. Peter the Great, Byron, Mozart are listed as persons of great positive prolificacy and active energy, but the image of Napoleon always recurs, of Napoleon who followed deed with deed, whose life was filled to the brim with deeds, and who marched from one victory to the next like a demigod. The mark of productivity is not the quantity of what is produced but the intensity of life [Lebensdichte] that can be felt in all the expressions of the demonic man; he radiates a magic charm that is felt by everyone around him—it was so strong in Karl August that no one could resist him. “He attracted people by his serene presence, without having to make an effort to be kind and friendly.” Radiant attraction and positive, active energy (Mephistopheles, the negative force, is not demonic) are meaningful in earthly life; they are bound to life and body; they are divine—but not in a Christian sense of a charisma bestowed on the elected soul. The well-formed body is an essential prerequisite for the effect of the demonic nature—a weak person cannot withstand the strain of ongoing and passionate activity. Once again Napoleon is the prototype: “Just consider all that he lived through and withstood; one would expect that by his fortieth year no part of him would have been left whole, and yet at that age he still stood there as a perfect hero.” Demon and body here were still envisioned as active force and vessel or tool; happy chance, not necessity, have brought them together. Elsewhere Goethe elaborates the idea further and lets the demon take possession of the body; he speaks of the vivifying penetration of the body, of an ennobling of the body’s organization by the demon, that makes it fit for great and ongoing activity well into old age. In the idea of a recurring puberty, spiritual and bodily elements interpenetrate, forming the idea of a spirit that undergoes bodily phases and of a body that rejuvenates itself in the phases of the spirit. Youth and old age are conditions of the body as well as of the spirit—an idea that is absurd in the Christian image of the indestructible, immortal soul.
The readiness to see the demonic element was (and still is) greater among Germans than among other nations, because the Christian image of man—for reasons of national history—was not expressed strongly in the image of the homo politicus and has therefore not shaped the area of civic-political action as strongly. Because of the inconsiderable traditional formal content of the civic-political sphere, the spirit was more free and willing to turn to new primal images; to examine the internalization of the person we have analyzed the German development of the image and the problem because there we find the phases of the change to the new image of man most clearly expressed. Just as for Goethe Napoleon was the most intense and prolific person, so Goethe represented the prototype of the perfect, this-worldly person for his contemporaries. In chapters 15, 16, and 17 we trace in detail the transition form Kant’s still half-Christian image of man to the new demonic one. We have juxtaposed Schiller’s ideas on the history of mankind to Kant’s ideas so as to mark the point at which they diverge; this divergence occurs at the point where Goethe comes into view as the earthly and present realization of what for Kant still lay in the far-off distance as the eternal kingdom of reason at the end of the world. In his perfect, self-sufficient worldliness Goethe confirmed for Schiller that a meaningful human existence was possible, even if at first only for small circles. Kant, on the other hand, was no longer entirely comfortable with the results of his escapist speculation on reason but could not tear himself away from the image of a soul that is perfected only in the next world. We will trace the understanding of the finite productive person in Humboldt’s ideas and proceed from there to the perfect image of the uniform human figure Carl Gustav Carus saw embodied in Goethe—the person perfect in spirit and body, the well-born man, in whom mental health, prolificacy, physical handsomeness, and stamina combine and blend. This completes the primal image on the basis of which man's physical-spiritual unity will be understood in the future, and the race questions can be posed in their full scope, irrefutable and unshaken by arguments, because they are backed by the certainty of an image and a direct experience. Carus, who had the greatest ability for seeing things from the perspective of the new primal image, was the first to develop, compelled by the Goethean image, a more detailed race theory. Our study will conclude with the presentation of this theory.
§ 2. Thought Images and Types
By distinguishing between primal images and thought images, we break with the notion that philosophizing takes place only on the level of rational, conceptualizing science. While the philosopher forms concepts and judgments, these do not contain truth in the simple sense of an adaequatio rei ac intellectus: their meaning cannot be simply confirmed or denied as can that of scientific concepts and statements through a primary, revealing experience. Instead, the philosopher’s concepts and judgments are evaluated based on two guiding criteria: intrasystematic consistency and the breadth and depth of the primal images that are to substantiate the total system. If the primal images and primal ways of seeing change, the philosophical thought images must change with them, and if the rational requirement for consistency within the thought images cannot be met, doubt spreads out from this failure and makes careful examination of a philosophy’s primal images necessary. The change from the Christian to the post-Christian image of man is reflected in the sphere of thought images as a revision and reordering of fundamental philosophical concepts, which in turn speed up the transformation of the perception of the primal images.
The Concept of Organism
In terms of thought images, our point of departure in this study is the necessity to create a conceptual apparatus for integrating the living substances, which became visible for the first time after the dissolution of the creationist view of the world, into a philosophical system. This raises the problem of organism. In the Cartesian worldview, on which Buffon still based his thinking, the two fundamental classes of being are the disembodied soul and the soulless mechanism; now a new concept had to be found to appropriately define the living being having newly become visible, a concept that would not simply describe the phenomenon with the help of the Christian dualism of matter and soul. The eighteenth century is filled with efforts to create this new concept, which is finally developed through a change in the meaning of the word organism, most clearly seen in Wolff’s Theoria Generationis. We consider it one of the most important results of our study to have ascertained the precise point at which the word organism took on the meaning we accept today as definitive and self-evident. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word organism was still identical with that of mechanism
, namely, a piece of matter constructed from the outside according to a plan. Thanks to the work of Leibniz, Buffon, Wolff, Blumenbach, and Kant, the term gradually took on the meaning of a living substance that develops, regenerates, and reproduces according to an inner law. The more clearly and distinctly the living form appears as a primary phenomenon, the more precise and definite does the meaning of organism come to designate it.
The concept of organism, which was intended to offer a clear view of the phenomenon of the living substance with its immanent law of development, also marks the end of a heated discussion of the species issue. The living being does not exist independently for itself but as a link in a chain, namely, the species, extending from the past into the future through repeated procreation. In the Christian view, the problem of the law governing the species was solved in the same manner as that of the law governing the construction of an individual: by attributing it to the hand of a divine master-craftsman. However, this solution is no longer satisfactory when faith in the divine creation of the world is shaken. For those who no longer believe that the chain of species has a definite beginning at which its unique characteristics were imprinted on it the species dissolves into separate individuals. As a result a peculiar transitional stage appears in the history of ideas, one in which the image of a definite beginning of the chain through divine design is already receding before the new image has been established, the new image of a substance that carries its species characteristics within itself as its structural law—which is then realized in the variety of individual forms. In this intermediate stage we find attempts at solving the problem with the idea that the species-related law governing the structure of the individual was predetermined from infinity. According to this idea, the structural law of the individual does not inhere in this individual but is determined by its predecessor in the previous generation, whose structure in turn was determined by his predecessor, and so an ad infinitum. The idea of the infinite replaces the divine act of creation, and for this reason Buffon embedded a profound analysis of the infinity issue in his biological-theoretical discussion, an analysis designed to prove that infinite regression cannot explain why here and now and at any arbitrary point in the sequence of generations of members of a species appear in an unvarying, constant form. Clearly, the structural law of the substance must always be present; it cannot be explained by regress to an authority situated outside the living form itself. We consider it the second most important result of our study of this topic to have shown the function of the infinity problem in the eighteenth century as a typical transitional problem between the finitism of the creationist worldview and that of the post-Christian worldview. Speculations about infinity are not limited to Buffon’s analysis or even to the field of biology but run through the entire century and through every single scientific field: from Leibniz—who posed the problem for mathematics, atomic theory, and biology—through Buffon to Kant's critique of antinomy and to the problem of infinity in history at the end of the eighteenth century.
The species problem brings with the problem of evolution. Assuming an immanent law of the species is not an answer to the question of the beginning of the chain of generations. Knowledge of the diversity of forms draws attention to the relatedness of forms and of the possibility of arranging the species in turn in a sequence of historical origin. Speculation about the continuum of forms begins with Leibniz and ends with Kant’s idea of the immanent evolution of the living world from the simplest forms to the most complex. The third most important result of our study is the explanation of the change in thought images to the idea of the development of species and their real descent from one another; this idea is supported by the first clear view of the primary phenomenon of the formal relatedness of all life and its historical development.
The analysis of the internalization of the person reveal the origin of the new concept of man in thought images. The problem of construction is the same as that arising in connection with the origin of the concept of organism, and we can subsume both processes under the heading of change from the construction type of differential concepts to that of the unified form. The construction type of differential concepts includes all attempts to understand the unity of a being, whether of a living being in general or of man, through the thought image of passive matter formed and animated by a principle allegedly essential to being. This construction type conforms most closely to the Christian primal way of seeing. Plants and animals can be understood as pieces of matter put together for a purpose, man as a transitory animal body with an immortal soul. Here the essence of being is located in the purposive plan, in the animal or human soul. We have called these concepts of being differential concepts because they are results of a process of subtraction: the passive part, the part fulfilling the function of matter, is subtracted from the total entity and what is left is the other essential and form-determining part. The structural plan of the living being, the plant or animal soul, is envisioned as dwelling in unformed matter, which we can directly experience as such in the processes of assimilation, in the elimination of inorganic matter, and in the phenomenon of death. In metabolism and the soulless body we see the building material that, for a time, is shaped by the animating principle and then falls back into its formless materiality. Thus, the essence of the form of being under consideration can be said to be the substance or principle that evidently remains after we mentally subtract the formless matter from the entity. Similarly, the human soul or spiritual substance can be elucidated in thought images, for example as the something added to the faculties man has in common with the animals that makes him human: man is animal plus spiritual substance. The Cartesian separation of bodily mechanism and soul and the Kantian distinction of the sensory nature and rational substance are further examples of this construction type.
The other construction type, that of the unified form, gradually came to prevail over the former as the primal images changed because it was better suited to the new way of seeing, which focused on the primary, independent, autonomous aspects of phenomena. The image of the organism replaces the thought image of the machine, of the duality of matter and structural plan, or of the animated machine, the composite of artifact and animating principle. The image of the demonic figure or the well-born man replaces that of the rational being, the composite of sensory nature and rational person. In our study we have traced in detail the transition from the Kantian image of man and of history to that of Schiller because here we can see most distinctly how the new concept of man is defined as an intermediate one between non-sensory reason and non-reasoning sensory nature, how the concept of the beautiful life is defined as an intermediate one between the purely instinctual and the purely ethical life is defined as an intermediate one between the purely instinctual and the purely ethical life--just as earlier the organism was defined as the intermediate between bodiless soul and soulless matter. Even the details of the problems concerning the organism recur here on the level of the thought image of man: here, too, we find the analysis of the problem of infinity. Just as in creating the image of the organism the infinity problematic had to be replaced with a new, finite concept of organic substance, so here the ideas of the immortal soul and infinite progress in the development of reason had to be subverted until the new, finite image of man as a productive unity of the body and mind with a meaningful earthly existence emerged. As the essential result of this concluding examination of thought images, we note that the speculative situations recur on the level of the thought image of man because the basic content of the change in thought images, the transition from the construction type of differential concepts to that of the finite unified form is the same here as on the level of the problem of organism.
Let us take a look at the horizons the theory of primal images opens up for us. The constructions of thought images, we have noted, cannot be simply verified; they are not simply true or false but are attested to by the primal way of seeing to which they are integrated. These primal ways of seeing and the primal images they make visible also cannot be weighed against each other as to their truth content—they are all true, for they see what is real: the transitoriness of the sensory world, the experiences of death and of grace, these are all just as much experiences of something real as the experience of creative productivity and the certainty of living out a personal law in earthly life. The soul as the carrier of non-corporeal sacred and ethical values is just as certain as the bodiliness of all spiritual activity. There is no argument against a primal image—even when such an argument is used, it aims not so much at demonstrating the correctness or falseness of a statement of fact as at defending its own way of seeing. To penetrate further into the laws of the development of primal images and their effect on people’s minds leads us into issues of philosophy of society and of history. We see primal images arising through their embodiment in persons, and we see other persons willingly accept them and recognize them as exemplary ways of living out a human existence. We are faced with the historical fact that people have to varying degrees the character of primal images; rare men—Plato, Caesar, Jesus—have it to the utmost degree, and their images shine through the millennia; other people surround them in narrower and wider circles and receive the law of their lives from the primal image at the center; they may be more then mere followers and imitators and modify the primal image out of the wellsprings of their own aliveness and may themselves become a center, a model for others—in an infinite interlocking of circles and ranks, down to the closest connections of the present day and the example every living person is to all around him. . . .
It is thoughts of this sort that give meaning to the enterprise of a history of ideas. A presentation of philosophical propositions in chronological sequence may have value as a helpful accumulation of material—but it is not a history because it does not extend to the historical substance itself, to the lines of force in the connections among primal images. The thought images alone, separated from their historical ground, are bloodless shadows that have no effect on us and have nothing to say to us. Thought images aim to create a maximum rational order in a world basically predetermined by the directions in which persons functioning as primal images open themselves to the possibilities of experiencing the world and also by the abundance of the individual experiences encountered in these given directions. Of course, the wealth of experiences may push one off the original direction, opening one’s yes to new possibilities: we need only remember how the accumulation of botanical, zoological, and ethnographic knowledge has led to the realization of the unique lawfulness in each sphere of being; something that had previously gone unnoticed because in the original Christian world attitude the experiences of transitoriness and salvation overshadowed all other world contents . . .
The Condition of Race Theory
Compared to its classical form, the current condition of race theory is one of decay. The primal images have faded from sight, and the technical skill in forming concepts has deteriorated—aside from a few exceptions, today’s race theory engages in inauthentic thinking about man. It is not our purpose here to criticize individual scholars and theorems; it is sufficient to refer to a few fundamental elements of the classical treatment of ideas to show convincingly the wide gap between then and now. The basic biological concepts of organism, species, and evolution were created as thought images in the eighteenth century, under the pressure of the direct view of life as a primary phenomenon. The whole problematic of these three basic concepts has in the main been worked out exhaustively. It became evident that they are connected with each other as signs for the life phenomenon in its three manifestations as living individual, as an order with a constant form, and as the historical unfolding of the living substance in a context of related forms. It was made clear, especially by Kant, that the parts of the phenomenon cannot “explain” each other-—that is, the individual form cannot be “explained” by the evolution of form; morphologically and historically, life as a whole is a primary phenomenon. Today’s biological and anthropological theory is characterized by complete ignorance of the classical state of the problem. The problem of species and evolution is discussed on the basis of Darwinian theory and the post-Darwinian development of science, the sequences of species and its beginning, the descent of species, and the beginning of organic evolution without a clue. In fact, almost a century and a half after the Critique of Judgment, there is an island where this work is unknown; where people have never racked their brains over the problems presented in that volume, and where people actually believe that the theory of evolution is a highly satisfactory explanation for something or other and that through diligent study of genetic laws one will not only learn the rules for the constancy of characteristics but also gain some insight into the phenomenon of life. The deterioration lies in the substitution of “theory” for the simple view of the primary phenomenon. We do not need a theory to tell us that organisms can be divided into orders with constant forms and that these orders in turn are morphologically related to each other—we can clearly see that much. Moreover, exploration of the earth’s strata shows us the historical sequence of forms—we do not need a “theory” for all this. The desire for an “explanation” of the phenomenon arises when it is no longer seen itself, when eyes have become blind to the event of an autonomous unfolding of the living substance, when we look behind this law of evolution for another one more credible than the first. It is not this or that “theory” of evolution that seems to us more or less false, but the idea that any “theory” at all is needed. A “theory of evolution” can never do anything more than point out the external circumstances under which one form changes into another; nothing can explain the fact that a substance exists that has form or is capable of changing into another—here we confront the phenomenon we must accept unexplained. All attempts at explanation are fueled by the desire to reduce the phenomenon o life to a law of inorganic nature—or, to put it ontologically: they deny the reality of life and see only inanimate matter as the one primary phenomenon that has to explain all other phenomena. We are therefore not surprised that in spite of the enormous expansion in factual knowledge the history of biological theory since Darwin is the history of a fiasco. The explanation of the evolution of forms did not succeed, for the very good reasons we have just explained. Brighter minds no longer accept that one species evolved through the small steps of mutations out of another one, but even if evolution did take that path, this does not mean anything for the theory, for the problem of the law of life is not whether evolution took this or that path (it certainly has taken some path as we see in the results around us), rather, the problem is that living substance has a history at all and is subject to the law of development at all.
What is less clear to untrained minds is the fiasco of research on heredity. While the theory of evolution has quite evidently failed, genetics can nevertheless point to the fruitfulness of its way for formulating its questions and to the wealth of insight into the laws of heredity—here success seems to speak for itself. However, we must keep in mind that the laws of heredity are laws concerning the conservation of the form; the living form as such and the phenomenon of its invariance, by which the species is formed, are simply taken as givens, and research looks for the rules of hereditary succession for the form’s components within the scope of these givens. The laws of heredity provide us not with a theory of living forms, but only with the rules of their material reconstitution in individuals of the same form; the law of the form itself evades their grasp. How far these studies lead us from the problems of life is clear when we consider that the rules of reconstitution of form in a succession of individuals come all the more into conflict with the historicity of life the more exclusively they are understood as the laws of the organic world. The modification of forms, the formation of new species is just as much a phenomenon as the invariance of form within a species; the more w concentrate on the one phenomenon, the more incomprehensible the other becomes. Though the factual results may be correct, nevertheless it is a mistake to believe that the law of form has been found, for even the species with its invariant form is subject to a historical law: the law of the unfolding of living substance in the succession of individuals with the same form. Literally and historically the individuals thus have to be understood as indivisible entities; by their nature they are living entities and not the jigsaw puzzle of hereditary factors they appear to e in genetics. The laws of heredity are not laws of form, but in our formulation, laws of material constitution. This is not to lessen their significance but simply to put it in proper perspective. We undoubtedly owe them the insight into the hereditary transmission of characteristics, and we learn from the consequences of the transmission of a sick physis. But this cannot blind us to the fact that the understanding of the living substance as it appears in individuals, in species, and in the entire world of forms has been dulled, and in fact largely been obliterated. This understanding has been replaced by a “theory” aiming to reduce the phenomenon of life to the laws of nonliving nature, and from this concept of inorganic law a malevolent, deadly fatalism, hostile to life and spirit, radiates into the higher levels of the world of organic forms and even into the higher one of the human form of body and spirit.
Because we have lost the primal way of seeing, in which the primal image of life presented itself as a historical phenomenon with its own lawfulness, because the phenomenon of matter has eclipsed everything else, the thought images of this material realm of being have covered up the ones the great thinkers of the eighteenth century have worked so painstakingly to create; in fact, they cover the latter so completely that even the knowledge of the great achievements of these men—particularly those of Leibniz, Wolff, Herder, Kant—has disappeared from the present. I tend to believe that there are few biologists today who know that the idea of the descent of species was enunciated by Kant and immediately examined as to its explanatory value . . .
Let us now take a look at contemporary race theory—we will see an image of destruction. Nothing has remained of the contents of the primal images, and the thought images, which had made such promising beginnings, have not been cultivated further. Everything is to be understood on the basis of the primal image of matter; the materialistic concept of laws has suppressed history; Carus’ great idea of man as well born has been degraded to the concept of the eugenic, heritably healthy body—even if it is the body of a highly questionable person. Nothing has remained of Schiller’s idea of the chosen circle, of Goethe’s idea of the most intimate company. Stefan George’s new teaching of the spiritual kingdom has not been understood. The idea of the unity of mind and body, the will to see the demonic, well-born man as the center of others of the same kind, has died away. What has remained of the great conception is the certainty that spirit is not a bloodless substance and that the body is not an indifferent appendage of the person—but this certainty was broken by the liberal and Marxist ideas of the late nineteenth century. What unites the race theory rooted in this are with liberalism and Marxism is the will to deprive the state of history, to hand it over to the masses, to destroy the historical substance and the primal image of man in its community-forming function. To be sure, the liberal historical notion of human beings as equal exemplars of a species has been restricted; it no longer encompasses all of mankind, since not everyone bearing a human face is equal in the eyes of race theory, but the liberal idea is still strong enough so that everyone sharing a particular complex of physical traits is equal. Though Marxist materialism has changed its content—for it is no longer the economic conditions that determine the spiritual superstructure but the biological ones—its basic thesis (not consciousness determines reality, but reality consciousness) is not at all in doubt for the race theoreticians of this school. As in the case of the phenomena of life, a “theory” takes the place of the primal way of seeing. It is not enough that great men stand out because of their noble unity of body and mind, visible to all; they must be “explained.” And as in the case of biological theory, the “explanation” consists in the reduction of the phenomenon of man to a phenomenon of a lower level, such as animals or inorganic matter. That the members of the community of noble blood come together out of the affinity between noble spirits, that the community is governed by its own laws of people finding and recognizing each other, of leading and following, of closeness to and distance from the center, of devotion and self-preservation, of radiant enchantment and acceptance without envy—to know all this and far more requires a primal way of seeing in which the full image of man is revealed. Man as spiritual-bodily historical substance cannot be “explained” through something that is less than man himself, through his physis. Only man himself can create his sphere of action, namely, the historical community, which does not exist without men of strong imaginative force.
However, if we are blind to this reality and misunderstand the body-spirit unity as a duality of spirit and its bodily determinant, the dangerous thought arises that the historical substance could be arbitrarily generated by diligent clubs for the breeding of racially pure bodies—if only enough bodies of sufficient purity could be produced—then the result would not be bad at all! This gives rise to the dangerous superstition that the self-formation of the select community by the attraction of noble men to each other could be replaced by organization. And finally, most dangerous of all, the error arises that science could replace the innate certainty, honed through discipline, by which one man recognizes another as kindred or alien, as friendly or dangerous to his kind, that is, the faculty of reaction that holds a community together, regenerates it, closes it off and defends it. It is a nightmare to think that we should recognize the people whom we follow and whom we allow to come near us not by their looks, their words, and their gestures, but by their cranial index and the proportional measurements of their extremities . . .