Paul Asmus

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Paul Asmus (* 14 September 1842 in Pillkallen, East Prussia in today's Kaliningrad Oblast; † 5 June 1877 ibid) was a German philosopher and theologian.

Life and work

Paul Asmus was born on 14 September 1842 in Pillkallen in what was then East Prussia. His father was a town physicist. After his father's early death in 1846, his Christian, sincerely pious mother Emma Asmus, née von Zitzewitz, moved with her five children to her old home in Pomerania. Asmus attended the grammar schools of Neustettin (today Szczecinek) and Stolp (today Słupsk) and the Nikolaischule in Leipzig. Asmus remained in contact with the revered headmaster Kock in Stolp even beyond his school days.

From 1862 to 1865, Asmus studied theology and philosophy in Leipzig, Erlangen, Berlin and Halle. At the same time he also worked as a tutor. From 1869 he worked at the secondary school of the orphanage of the Francke Foundations in Halle.

Asmus gave up his early childhood wish to become a pastor and devoted himself to a strictly scientific career. In 1871 he received his doctorate and habilitation at the University of Halle with the works "De dei immutabilitate" and "De relatione, quae est inter principia agendi moralia et religiosa". As a private lecturer, he then gave lectures on logic, psychology, philosophy of religion and the history of philosophy.

The I and the Thing in Itself

In 1873, his remarkable booklet on «Das Ich und das Ding an sich» ("The I and the Thing in Itself"), which Rudolf Steiner also greatly appreciated, was published. Steiner remarks on this in "Riddles of Philosophy" (GA 18):

„Personalities who, by immersing themselves in the Hegelian type of ideas, sought a certainty for the relation of an idea about the self-conscious I to the general picture of the world, are few in number in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the best is Paul Asmus (1842-1876), who died too early and published a paper in 1873 entitled "Das Ich und das Ding an sich". He shows how, in the way Hegel looked at thinking and the world of ideas, a relationship of the human being to the essence of things can be gained. In a lucid way, he shows that in human thought there is not something alien to reality, but something full of life, something primordial, into which one only needs to immerse oneself in order to arrive at the essence of existence. In a luminous manner, he described the course that the development of the world view had taken in order to move from Kant, who had regarded the "thing in itself" as something alien and inaccessible to man, to Hegel, who believed that thought encompasses not only itself as an ideal entity, but also the "thing in itself". Such voices, however, hardly found a hearing.“ (Lit.:GA 18, p. 472)

In his work, Asmus takes as his starting point the division constituting self-consciousness into I and non-I, into subject and object, as it was primarily portrayed by the philosophers of German idealism. Starting from a fundamental presentation of the "identity of thinking and being" and the principal possibilities of cognition, Asmus sketches in it the basic features of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Aenesidemus, Jacob Sigismund Beck, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Arthur Schopenhauer, and thus at the same time draws a dynamic picture of the modern development of consciousness through his own living thinking.

The I-ness - the general, real I

Kant had denied that man could recognise the world in itself, the thing in itself, since he always overlays his thought nets on things. Kant's mistake, according to Asmus, was that he assumed the individual, special I, which was actually separate from the world and therefore could not recognise it in its true form. This particular I, however, is not the general, the real I, but only its mirror image.

„As is well known, the identity of subject and object - abstractly speaking, of thinking and being - has experienced the grossest misinterpretations. The reason for this almost always lies in the fact that behind it one has understood the identity of a certain subject and certain object. But an identity of the subject and object in general is presupposed by everyone who admits the possibility of cognition. If we believe that we can recognise real things, if we believe that we are able to grasp the truth of the object, its essence, we have assumed an identity of real being and our subjectivity. However easily understandable our conclusion from the recognition of things in themselves to the identity of subject and object may seem, most people are nevertheless inclined to regard it as a fallacy. The thing, in so far as it exists in our imagination, is then only supposed to be identical with the existing thing in so far as an ideality takes place between us and our mirror image. This objection is like so many others; the more it succeeds in dressing up the question in sensuous expressions, or actually hiding it behind them, the more irrefragable it appears; but the actual matter is not touched by it at all.“

– Paul Asmus: Das Ich und das Ding an sich, p. 3

In another form, Kant's error is found in Fichte's subjective idealism, which, as it were, attributes to the individual, special I the ability to spin the whole world out of itself. Even the equation of I and non-I, as Novalis strives for in his magical idealism, does not offer a satisfactory solution, just as Schelling's system does not completely clarify the relationship between I and non-I. Asmus sees progress in the dialectical abolition of the opposition of I and non-I in Hegel.

„The abolition of the opposition between subject and object in its gradual development is given to us by Hegel in the Phenomenology. He shows that it lies in the concept of the subject, as well as of the object, not to be taken in their isolation; that an independence of one of these moments against the other contradicts the own concept of each moment; that they are thus both, in their isolation, only abstract determinations of form, but in their unity form the absolute content, which Schelling presents as all truth.“

– Paul Asmus: Das Ich und das Ding an sich, p. 130

In 1875, Asmus published the first volume of his wide-ranging work on «Die indogermanische Religion in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwickelung» ("The Indo-European Religion in the Main Points of its Development"), in which he characterised the Indo-European original religion. This was followed in 1877 by the second volume on «Das Absolute und die Vergeistigung der einzelnen indogermanischen Religionen» ("The Absolute and the Spiritualisation of the Individual Indo-European Religions"). In it, Asmus elaborated on the ideas already touched on in "The I and the Thing in Itself". The general, real I also contains its negation, the non-I, without its particularity, i.e. its individuality, being erased, since it also contains this particular, individual, but also encompasses the spiritual content of the whole world, in which he can immerse himself through his thinking. He thus immerses himself in an ideal world common to all human beings, in which the true essence of things is revealed.

„Thus: the particularity of the I emerges from the particular relationship in which it stands to its negation; the generality of the I, the I-ness, is the I conceived in unity with the negation.... The most important thing now is: how are we to think of the relationship of the individual I to the general I? The individual I is a suspended moment because of the negation that accompanies it. Therein rests, as noted, its equality with the objects that are also suspended in our subjectivity. Now, is the relationship of the individual I to the general the same as that of the individual idea to the individual subject? If it were, there would be no connection between the individual I and the general, and the latter would hover as the bald absolute negation over the subjective and objective universe. But the difference is obvious. The individual objects, as conceptions, are simply annulled by the I, do not annul themselves; the individual I, however, has its negation in itself, annuls itself, and in this annulment of itself it is precisely the general I. And again: the general I has no reality that is separate from the individual I, but is only the unity of the individual I and its negation, and precisely the unity established by the concept of that I itself; it therefore exists only in this self-suspension of the individual I. - Let us make the matter clear: if our single I were to remain in its absolute singleness and immerse itself in nothing else, it would indeed be absolutely separate from the general I; then the communion with the other particular I's, which is based in the general I-ness, would also be missing. In the same way, we leave a man standing quietly who appeals only to his very own feeling, without giving ear to the generally reasonable reasons; the basis of communion is lacking. But the I cannot maintain itself in this absolute isolation; it is made impossible for it by its concept, which connects it with its negation. Thus we are always immersed in something else; with the best will in the world we are unable to maintain ourselves in our singleness, and even when we reflect only on ourselves, we have had to confront our I as another, an object. Thus also the statements of that man who draws only from his uniqueness are factually based only on self-deception. He remains no more enclosed in his singularity than another; only his consciousness is not yet educated enough to comprehend the generality of his I, thus its reasonableness. Now the activity of immersing ourselves in another is what we call "thinking"; in thinking, the I has fulfilled its concept, it has given itself up as an individual; therefore, in thinking, we find ourselves in a sphere that is the same for all, for the principle of particularity that lies in the relation of our I to the other to it has disappeared in the activity of self-suspension of the individual I; there is only the I-ness or reasonableness common to all. - Thus we have determined the relation of the individual to the general I to the effect that the latter, in its most original activity, thinking, is one with the latter; so this, since it does not exist apart from the individual I, but only as their activity, must be determined precisely as this original thinking, and thus our principle loses the last semblance of mere subjectivity which hitherto still clung to it through the name of the (albeit absolute) I.“

– Paul Asmus: Die indogermanische Religion in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwickelung, Vol. 1, p. 28f.

Rudolf Steiner deepened these thoughts into the development of his spiritual science and presented them to a philosophically educated audience in his 1911 Bologna Lecture.

Asmus had already been promised a private lectureship for the winter semester of 1877/78, but he died completely unexpectedly on 5 June 1877 during a holiday in his native Pilkallen.

Rudolf Steiner also writes about the work of Asmus, with whose sister Martha Asmus he was on friendly terms (Lit.:GA 28, p. 384f):

„Little has been written about Kant that equals in value what Paul Asmus has elaborated about him in his writing "Das Ich und das Ding an sich". He does complete justice to Kant; but at the same time he shows how impossible it is to stop with him, and how the great impulse which the Königsberg philosopher gave to German thought must necessarily have led to the views of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others. Kant had shown, and this act is one of the most significant in modern thought in terms of intellectual history, that the usual scientific methods of thought never lead to a knowledge of the "thing in itself", but always only to a cognitive mastery of the world of phenomena given to man. Kant, however, pointed to the "thing in itself" in a very peculiar way. He assumed that in the categorical imperative, which speaks to man in the commandment of duty, a call sounds from the world of the "thing in itself". But this call does not bring knowledge of the highest, but only a belief in the same, which gives man the direction to the moral life. If man wants to consider himself a moral being and to develop further and further in the direction of morality, he must believe in the reality of that which sends him the categorical imperative. But he cannot recognise what thus morally sustains him.

Now Fichte tried to investigate this call that resounds within the human being, and he thus arrived at his "philosophy of the I". In the "I", according to Fichte, a higher world emerges for the human being, which is just as real, indeed much more real, than the outer world of appearance. For this external world of appearance only acquires meaning and significance when the human I lets its own light shine upon it. This emergence of Fichte's thinking from Kant's is astutely portrayed by Paul Asmus. And in the same way, how then Hegel and Schelling, out of the "I", out of the human spirit, seek the answers to the great riddle questions of existence, which no external sense view can solve.

And it was from here that Paul Asmus found access to understanding the religions, these manifold attempts of humanity to grasp the working spiritual forces of the universe from the depths of the human interior. It will not be easy for many to follow Paul Asmus' significant arguments about "the Indo-Germanic religions", as he moves at a summit height of human thinking. But whoever learns to read the book through self-training of his thinking will receive an enlightenment of the purest kind about the forms of human striving for truth. Our philosopher sees everywhere through the imagery of the religions to the spiritual nuclei of thought and shows the connection and relationship of these nuclei. His book is therefore an interpretation of a great primordial thought of the Indo-European peoples. No one will study it without receiving the deepest impression of it and becoming clear about what the development of religious life is. Thus Paul Asmus belongs among those who pursue the essence of the religions and philosophies of humanity in the sense of theosophy.“ (Lit.:GA 34, p. 489ff)

Writings

  • De relatione, quae est inter principia agendi moralia et religiosa, Inaugural-Dissertation, 1871 (lateinisch) archive.org
  • Das Ich und das Ding an sich. Geschichte ihrer begrifflichen Entwickelung in der neuesten Philosophie, Verlag C. E. M. Pfeffer, Halle 1873
  • Die indogermanische Religion in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwickelung. Ein Beitrag zur Religionsphilosophie, Erster Band:: Indogermanische Naturreligion, Verlag C. E. M. Pfeffer, Halle 1875
  • Die indogermanische Religion in den Hauptpunkten ihrer Entwickelung. Ein Beitrag zur Religionsphilosophie, Zweiter Band: Das Absolute und die Vergeistigung der einzelnen indogermanischen Religionen, Verlag C. E. M. Pfeffer, Halle 1877
    • Neuausgabe beider Bände (Reprint): Die Indogermanische Religion in den Hauptpunkten Ihrer Entwickelung: Ein Beitrag Zur Religionsphilosophie, Volumes 1-2, WENTWORTH PR 2018, ISBN 978-0270960525
  • Die Willkür, bequeathed manuscript

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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