Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

inside a plant as we have grown inside nature, and has formed its own being inside itself from all the wealth of the plant as we have formed our own individualities and our world from all the wealth of nature, but is now over-full and can absorb no more and grow no more. It now needs to be sown and to burst open and sprout in the ground in order that it may emerge as a new plant. Ifit tries to grow any more or refuses to burst itself open, it will rot and become mere dust. There is a whole new realm before us, affirms Gutkind, beyond Nature and beyond World. But we must be prepared to make a leap into the unknown. Such a leap Nietzsche spoke of into Superman, and Max Stirner into the life of the unique self. The leap envisaged by Gutkind has much in common with both these great men, but it is still more revolutionary. The assumptions on which world was built must be wholly overturned and we must abandon any idea that we have anything at all to hope for from it. But this is not to escape from the world as some religions would have us do. Gutkind is not preaching some other-worldly life beyond. Rather it is to seize the world and overcome it; to realise that ‘world’ is after all a human creation and decide that we will no longer let it dominate us, but that we shall conquer it as we conquered nature. We shall give up the security of our small egos and the rigidity of our thinking which is always looking for some point of certainty, for these are now no longer necessary props, but rather intolerable restrictions.

Butin fact this world, which we once thought so firm and certain, is dissolving before our very eyes. The old God in heaven to whom we used in a childlike way to pray to give us what we wanted, the morality which appeared fixed for ever and decreed by heaven, our established order of society—everything scems to be falling to pieces. But this is all merely an outer sign of what is really happening. Gutkind wrote Siderische Geburt sixty-five years ago when religions, morality and the social order seemed comparatively stable. All great human developments start in the realm of thought, and this dissolution was started nearly two hundred years ago by Immanuel Kant, whom Gutkind calls the great Liberator—with the warning nevertheless that ‘to understand Kant means to go beyond him’. Kant showed that although we conceive knowledge or perception as a process which takes place between a person, who is the subject, and an outer world, which is the object, yet we never

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