An Anthropological Model

Abstract

Those engaged in the pursuit of philosophy in Germany in the year 1935 may still have cherished metaphysical ambitions or the desire for a “great system,” for at that time Nietzsche’s influence still lingered on, Bergson had just published his last major work and Nicolai Hauptmann’s Grundlegung der Ontologie was the talk of the day; and yet it was scarcely possible to suppress the sense of working for a cause whose days were numbered. For under no circumstances might a philosophical system lose contact with the sciences, and the structure of the sciences was then being daily extended in all its dimensions, so that it was no longer possible to form a comprehensive view of the whole field from any one vantage point. It was this which had prompted the metaphysicians to seek an exclusive method, one which they could call their very own, but which would at the same time provide them with a master key to every sphere in that universal structure: Schopenhauer had fixed upon “the will” as the solution of the great riddle, whilst Bergson had advanced a specific “intuition” in order to establish legitimate grounds for his voluntaristic metaphysics. And yet in his new work, Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion (1932; English translation: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1935), he had little recourse to his earlier metaphysics; instead he appeared to be seeking new paths and was in fact on the point of approaching mysticism. If at that time metaphysics still had to work with a specific method and if this method was to be found only in the inner experience of the philosopher, then, of course it was obliged to operate within the same sphere as psychology; and although psychology had combined the tremendous initial successes, which are the natural concomitant of any new science, with an excessive degree of optimism, which is also not uncommon in such circumstances, its achievements were nonetheless so considerable that it no longer seemed probable that the Castalian Spring, the source of the oracle, could be found within its province.