[297] The world was split in[to] these two realms. Kant^a himself didn't feel able to overcome definitively this fundamental split, which expresses our whole situation in industrial society---I will return to this. But he said there are at least possible ideas, postulates, which may indicate possible reconciliations. The one is the organic matter: in organisms, in nature, there is an element of meaning in spite of the fact that they also are subject to the laws of nature. We have that problem through the whole 19th and 20th centuries, and we have it today in biology as the fight between those who approach biology

in terms of mechanical equations and those who approach it in terms of a gestalt^b biology and psychology--- Gestalt = living structure, a living whole, but the word "gestalt" is usually in English also. This is the one realm, in which mechanical necessity and ethical freedom and meaning are partly united. Kant^c didn't say they ARE; his criticism was much too cautious to make a dogmatic statement about it, but he says they can be considered AS IF they were a reconciliation. The other realm, in which he saw this reconciliation, was the artistic^d. In the artistic realm there is also empirical reality, experience of our world in all its finitude, which is subjected to the laws of nature, which is used in order to express meaning. And that is what art does; therefore a work of art has the same character as a living being: in them, purpose is actualized (or as we would say today, better, meaning is actualized). It is the union of the theoretical and the practical. Now this was the idea of the Neo-Kantian school,^e which derived from this its theories of art. These theories are thoroughly idealistic---also a word which needs different ways of salvation!---