Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

experience either the ego as such or the outer world as such. All that is ever experienced is the perception itself, in which ego and world exist only in relation to each other, never in isolation. Or, as Gutkind expresses it, ‘Subject and object are not two halves which unite to form a whole, but two different points of view.’ For ‘what would hardness be without our sense of touch? If our strength were to increase gigantically marble would become soft as wax and thinner than air. What would light be without our eyes? And the laws of our mathematics depend on us—on the fact that our spatial and spiritual sight is so constructed as to be aware of three dimensions.’

Thus what Kant liberated us from was the authority of merely speculative ideas beyond all possible experience, and the oppressive domination of an objective world of things. The intellect of European man had made both God and world into things which appeared to exist on their own, holding us in subjection, and the ego into an object as fixed and limited as a hard little pebble. Kant freed

man from the oppression of objectivity, and showed in the Critique of Practical Reason that man’s reality rests not in some hypothetical existence, but in the exercise of his free spirit.

And now even the most materialistic, because the most intellectually orientated, branch of modern science, physics, which is the stronghold of objectivity and of the reality of the tangible, can no longer give us a firm resting-place. There used to be ‘things’ called atoms which were real indivisible bits of stuff, but now these too have been dissolved and there is no hard core of ‘thingness’ in anything. Only continuous motion. And indeed in our ordinary experience there is no rest or permanence in the realm of matter. Everything is perpetually changing. As long ago as the fifth century B.C., Zeno demonstrated that by the laws of our thinking motion is impossible. He did this most concisely in the example of the flying arrow, which at every infinitesimal moment of its flight is where it is—so how does it get to where it is not? Of course, it never is where it is while in flight, but only when it stops; for motion, as Bergson pointed out, is continuous and not, like space, infinitely divisible. And since we know motion to be a fact, for there could be no change at all without motion, we have to admit that the logic by which we normally think does not serve to give us knowledge of the real world, only the ability to use it for our own ends. This logic can only turn nature into ‘world’, and use it by

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