The Doctrine of Right, Duties and Religion for the Lower Class

[p. 259]

§ 42

Theoretical culture includes, besides the manifoldness and determinateness of knowledge and the universality of the points of view from which things are to be judged, the sense for objects in their free independence, without a subjective interest.

Explanation. The manifoldness of knowledge in and for itself belongs to culture, because through it the human being raises himself from the particular knowledge of insignificant things in his surroundings to a universal knowledge, through which he attains a greater community of knowledge with other human beings and comes into possession of objects of universal interest. As the human being goes beyond what he immediately knows and experiences, he learns that there are also other and better ways of behaving and acting and that his own is not the only necessary one. He removes himself from himself and arrives at the distinction of the essential and the inessential. – The determinateness of knowledge concerns its essential difference, the differences which belong to objects under all circumstances. To culture belongs a judgement on the relations and objects of actuality. For this it is required that one know what matters, what the nature and purpose of a thing and of the relations to one another are. These points of view are not given immediately through intuition, but through occupation with the matter, through reflection on its purpose and essence and on the means, how far these reach or not. The uncultured human being remains at immediate intuition. He has no open eye and does not see what lies before his feet. It is only a subjective seeing and apprehending. He does not see the matter. He knows only roughly how it is constituted, and that not even properly, because only the knowledge of the universal points of view leads to what one must essentially consider, or because it is already the principal part of the

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