Karl Fortlage

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Karl Fortlage (* 12 June 1806 in Osnabrück; † 8 November 1881 in Jena) was a German philosopher.

Life and work

Karl Fortlage became a private lecturer in Heidelberg in 1829 with his Inaugural treatise "Ueber die Denkweise der ältesten Philosophen", in Berlin in 1845 and was appointed professor of philosophy in Jena in 1846.

Originally a Hegelian, as evidenced by his juvenile treatise "Die Lücken des Hegelschen Systems" (Heidelberg 1832), he moved, prompted by the study of Kant and especially Fichte and Beneke, to a fusion of the Science of Knowledge with empirical psychology and to a standpoint which he himself called "transcendental pantheism".

His two main philosophical works are: "Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant" (Genetic History of Philosophy since Kant, Leipzig 1852) u. "System der Psychologie" (System of Psychology, Leipzig 1855, 2 volumes).

Rudolf Steiner pointed out that Fortlage had already recognised that consciousness is based on a process of consumption opposed to life. In his "Eight Psychological Lectures" (1869) Fortlage wrote:

„When we call ourselves living beings, and thus attach to ourselves a quality which we share with animals and plants, we understand by the living state necessarily something which never leaves us, and both in sleep and in waking always continues in us. This is the vegetative life of the nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain makes an exception here in that this life of nourishment, this life of sleep is outweighed by the life of consumption in the pauses of waking. In these pauses the brain is exposed to a predominant consumption, and consequently falls into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute debilitation of the body or death. The state of consciousness and personality therefore comes about only when the center and the original source of our nervous power, the brain, suffers from the danger of death. However, in this way the danger of life is always advanced only as far as it is compatible with the preservation of the whole organism ...“ (Lit.: Fortlage, p. 35f)

Rudolf Steiner has repeatedly emphasised the significance of this statement by Fortlage:

„If, for example, we take in hand the writings of a soul researcher like Fortlage, who was active into the sixties of the nineteenth century, we still find a strange characteristic of human consciousness in Fortlage, the psychologist who worked in Jena and other places. He gives us a definition of consciousness which, I would say, today's philosophers find very reprehensible. He once said, in 1869, that human consciousness is related to death, to dying, and that by developing consciousness in the course of life, we actually develop in ourselves - slowly, one after the other - the forces that come to us all at once at the moment of death. Thus, for Fortlage, the moment of dying is an infinitely multiplied act of consciousness. For him, consciousness is, one could say, a slow life from dying. It is not life that is a life of dying, but consciousness in man is a life of dying, and death is a consciousness compressed into a moment.

This is a tremendously significant remark by a psychologist. It is a remark, as I said, which today's philosopher already censures as unscientific. That is, after all, what has happened.“ (Lit.:GA 176, p. 285f)

„Here we come to see a view as the correct one, as the one given directly by experience, which has been spoken of extraordinarily seldom in the theory of the soul up to now, but nevertheless once very beautifully, namely by the far too little respected soul researcher Fortlage. Here we stand at one of those points which are so interesting for the development of that which today wants to appear in summary as spiritual research. This is not something entirely new, but something that is only to be built up in systematic summary, for which, however, the beginnings have already come to light in those who have struggled with knowledge in this field here or there. Fortlage once spoke of it, and Eduard von Hartmann therefore rebuked him, that actually the ordinary consciousness of the human soul is a perpetually attenuated dying. It is a strange, bold assertion, but an assertion that can be substantiated by natural science, although natural science misinterprets the corresponding facts; read, for example, the investigations of Kassowitz. Fortlage comes to see that what gives rise to consciousness is not based solely on the emergence of growing, sprouting, thriving life, but that precisely when conscious life emerges in the soul, the sprouting, growing, thriving life in the human organism must die, so that we carry death partially within us throughout our whole life, in so far as it is a conscious one. In forming ideas, something in our nervous system is destroyed, but immediately afterwards it is formed anew. The degradation is followed by a rebuilding. The conscious life of the soul is based on processes of degradation, not on processes of sprouting and building up. Fortlage says very beautifully: "If that which always occurs in a part of the body, in the brain, during the formation of consciousness, the partial death, were to seize the whole body each time, as physical death does, then man would have to die continually. For Fortlage, physical death expresses only once in sum that on which consciousness is continually based. Therefore Fortlage can, admittedly only hypothetically, because he does not yet have spiritual insight, proceed to the conclusion that if we have to do with a partial death every time our ordinary consciousness emerges, then the general death is the emergence of a consciousness under different conditions, which the human being then develops for the spiritual world when he has passed through the gate of death. There, like a ray of hope, it clearly appears what spiritual science will develop more exactly and ever more precisely by applying its methods of observation to the human being.“ (Lit.:GA 67, p. 124f))

Works (selection)

  • Ueber die Denkweise der ältesten Philosophen (Inaugural-Abhandlung, München 1829) archive.org
  • Die Lücken des Hegelschen Systems der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1832) archive.org
  • Darstellung und Kritik der Beweise für das Dasein Gottes (Heidelberg 1840)
  • Gesänge christlicher Vorzeit (Berlin 1844) archive.org
  • Das musikalische System der Griechen in seiner Urgestalt (Leipzig 1847) google
  • Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant (Leipzig 1852) google
  • System der Psychologie (Leipzig 1855, 2 Bde.) Band 1
  • Acht psychologische Vorträge (Jena 1869, 2. Aufl. 1872) archive.org
  • Sechs philosophische Vorträge (Jena 1869) google
  • Vier psychologische Vorträge (Jena 1874) archive.org
  • Friedrich Rückert und seine Werke (Frankfurt 1867) archive.org
  • Beiträge zur Psychologie als Wissenschaft aus Spekulation und Erfahrung (Leipzig 1875) archive.org

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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