The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning.
Interpretation
The pursuit of knowledge should be deep and theoretical to enrich action with meaning and vigor.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling argues that a superficial rush to practical action without deep theoretical understanding leads to shallowness in both knowledge and behavior. He emphasizes the importance of a rigorous study of philosophy and ideas, suggesting that such intellectual engagement is essential for meaningful and vigorous action in the world.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of theoretical knowledge in education.
One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
All religions begin with the cry Help.
The whole of life has become an institution, a madhouse in which duties are to be fulfilled not love; in which you have to behave, not be spontaneous; in which a pattern has to be followed, not the overflow of life and energy. That's why the mind thinks and decides everything, because there is danger.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life.
I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.
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