[p. 260]
|260| matter itself, already contains its foremost compartments, into which one therefore needs, so to speak, only to place the external existence, and is thus able to apprehend it much more easily and correctly.
The opposite of not knowing how to judge is that one judges hastily about everything without understanding it. Such a hasty judgement is based on one’s grasping indeed a point of view, but a one-sided one, and thereby overlooking the true concept of the matter, the remaining points of view. A cultured human being knows at the same time the limit of his capacity for judgement.
Further, the sense for the objective in its freedom belongs to culture. It lies in this, that I do not seek my particular subject in the object, but consider and treat objects as they are in and for themselves, in their free peculiarity, that I take an interest in them without a particular utility. – Such a disinterested interest lies in the study of the sciences, namely when one cultivates them for their own sake. The desire to draw utility from the objects of nature is bound up with their destruction. – The interest in fine art is also a disinterested one. It presents things in their living independence and strikes off from them what is meagre and stunted, as they suffer from external circumstances. – The objective action consists in this, that 1. even according to its indifferent side it has the form of the universal, without arbitrary will, whim and caprice, freed from the eccentric and the like; 2. according to its inner, essential side it is the objective when one has the true matter itself as one’s purpose, without selfish interest.
§ 43
Practical culture includes that the human being, in the satisfaction of natural needs and drives, show that prudence and moderation which, within the limits of their necessity, namely of self-preservation,
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