I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion — that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or think without embracing both.
It is difficult to summarize Baader's philosophy, for he himself generally gave expression to his deepest thoughts in obscure aphorisms, or mystical symbols and analogies (see Ed. Zeller's _Ges. d. deut. Phil._ 732, 736). Further, he has no systematic works; his doctrines exist for the most part in short detached essays, in comments on the writings of Boehme and Saint Martin, or in his extensive correspondence and journals. At the same time there are salient points which mark the outline of his thought. Baader starts from the position that human reason by itself can never reach the end it aims at, and maintains that we cannot throw aside the presuppositions of faith, church and tradition. His point of view may be described as Scholasticism; for, like the scholastic doctors, he believes that theology and philosophy are not opposed sciences, but that reason has to make clear the truths given by authority and revelation. But in his attempt to draw still closer the realms of faith and knowledge he approaches more nearly to the mysticism of Eckhart, Paracelsus and Boehme. Our existence depends on the fact that we are cognized by God (_cogitor ergo cogito et sum_). All self-consciousness is at the same time God-consciousness; our knowledge is never mere _scientia_, it is invariably _con-scientia_--a knowing with, consciousness of, or participation in God. Baader's philosophy is thus essentially a theosophy. God is not to be conceived as mere abstract Being (_substantia_), but as everlasting process, activity (_actus_). Of this process, this self-generation of God, we may distinguish two aspects--the immanent or esoteric, and the emanent or exoteric. God has reality only in so far as He is absolute spirit, and only in so far as the primitive will is conscious of itself can it become spirit at all. But in this very cognition of self is involved the distinction of knower and known, from which proceeds the power to become spirit. This immanent process of self-consciousness, wherein indeed a trinity of persons is not given but only rendered possible, is mirrored in, and takes place through, the eternal and impersonal idea or wisdom of God, which exists beside, though not distinct from, the primitive will. Concrete reality or personality is given to this divine _Ternar_, as Baader calls it, through _nature_, the principle of self-hood, of individual being, which is eternally and necessarily produced by God. Only in nature is the trinity of _persons_ attained. These processes, it must be noticed, are not to be conceived as successive, or as taking place in time; they are to be looked at _sub specie aeternitatis_, as the necessary elements or moments in the self-evolution of the divine Being. Nor is _nature_ to be confounded with created substance, or with matter as it exists in space and time; it is pure non-being, the mere otherness (_alteritas_) of God-his shadow, desire, want, or _desiderium sui_, as it is called by mystical writers. Creation, itself a free and non-temporal act of God's love and will, cannot be speculatively deduced, but must be accepted as an historic [v.03 p.0088] fact. Created beings were originally of three orders--the intelligent or angels; the non-intelligent natural existences; and man, who mediated between these two orders. Intelligent beings are endowed with freedom; it is possible, but not necessary, that they should fall. Hence the fact of the fall is not a speculative but an historic truth. The angels fell through pride--through desire to raise themselves to equality with God; man fell by lowering himself to the level of nature. Only after the fall of man begins the creation of space, time and matter, or of the world as we now know it; and the motive of this creation was the desire to afford man an opportunity for taking advantage of the scheme of redemption, for bringing forth in purity the image of God according to which he has been fashioned. The physical philosophy and anthropology which Baader, in connexion with this, unfolds in various works, is but little instructive, and coincides in the main with the utterances of Boehme. In nature and in man he finds traces of the dire effects of sin, which has corrupted both and has destroyed their natural harmony. As regards ethics, Baader rejects the Kantian or any autonomic system of morals. Not obedience to a moral law, but realization in ourselves of the divine life is the true ethical end. But man has lost the power to effect this by himself; he has alienated himself from God, and therefore no ethical theory which neglects the facts of sin and redemption is satisfactory or even possible. The history of man and of humanity is the history of the redeeming love of God. The means whereby we put ourselves so in relation with Christ as to receive from Him his healing virtue are chiefly prayer and the sacraments of the church; mere works are never sufficient. Man in his social relations is under two great institutions. One is temporal, natural and limited--the state; the other is eternal, cosmopolitan and universal--the church. In the state two things are requisite: first, common submission to the ruler, which can be secured or given only when the state is Christian, for God alone is the true ruler of men; and, secondly, inequality of rank, without which there can be no organization. A despotism of mere power and liberalism, which naturally produces socialism, are equally objectionable. The ideal state is a civil community ruled by a universal or Catholic church, the principles of which are equally distinct from mere passive pietism, or faith which will know nothing, and from the Protestant doctrine, which is the very radicalism of reason. Entry: BAADER
In this double-barrelled criticism it is important to distinguish what is really relevant. Whatever the shortcomings of individual writers may be, modern idealism differs, as we have seen, from the arrested idealism of Berkeley precisely in the point on which dualism insists. In all knowledge we are in touch not merely with the self and its passing states, but with a real object which is different from them. On this head there is no difference, and idealism need have no difficulty in accepting all that its opponents here contend. The difference between the two theories does not consist in any difference of emphasis on the objective side of knowledge, but in the standard by which the nature of the object is to be tested--the difference is logical not metaphysical--it concerns the definition of truth or falsity in the knowledge of the reality which both admit. To idealism there can be no ultimate test, but the possibility of giving any fact which claims to be true its place in a coherent system of mutually related truths. To this dualism opposes the doctrine that truth and falsehood are a matter of mere immediate intuition: "There is no problem at all in truth and falsehood, some propositions are true and some false just as some roses are red and some white."[15] The issue between the two theories under this head may here be left with the remark that it is a curious comment on the logic of dualism that setting out to vindicate the reality of an objective standard of truth it should end in the most subjective of all the way a thing appears to the individual. The criticism that applies to the first of the above contentions applies _mutatis mutandis_ to the second. As idealism differs from Berkeleyanism in asserting the reality of an "external" world so it differs from Spinozism in asserting the reality of difference within it. Determination is not merely negation. On this head there need be no quarrel between it and dualism. Ours is a many-sided, a many-coloured world. The point of conflict again lies in the nature and ground of the assigned differences. Dualism meets the assertion of absolute unity by the counter assertion of mere difference. But if it is an error to treat the unity of the world as its only real aspect, it is equally an error to treat its differences as something ultimately irreducible. No philosophy founded on this assumption is likely to maintain itself against the twofold evidence of modern psychology and modern logic. According to the first the world, whether looked at from the side of our perception or from the side of the object perceived, can be made intelligible only when we accept it for what it is as a real continuity. Differences, of course, there are; and, if we like to say so, every difference is unique, but this does not mean that they are given in absolute independence of everything else, "fired at us out of a cannon." They bear a definite relation to the structure of our physical and psychical nature, and correspond to definite needs of the subject that manifests itself therein. Similarly from the side of logic. It is not the teaching of idealism alone but of the facts which logical analysis has brought home to us that all difference in the last resort finds its ground in the quality or content of the things differentiated, and that this difference of content shows in turn a double strand, the strand of sameness and the strand of otherness--that _in_ which and that _by_ which they differ from one another. Idealism has, of course, no quarrel with numerical difference. All difference has its numerical aspect: two different things are always two both in knowledge and in reality. What it cannot accept is the doctrine that there are two things which are two in themselves apart from that which makes them two--which are not two _of something_. So far from establishing the truth for which dualism is itself concerned--the reality of all differences--such a theory can end only in a scepticism as to the reality of any difference. It is difficult to see what real difference there can be between things which are differences of nothing. Entry: I