The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Metamorphosis of World Phenomena

[ 1 ] Goethe's view of the world reached its highest degree of maturity when he realized the two great driving forces of nature: the significance of the concepts of polarity and increase. (Cf. the essay: Explanation of the essay "Die Natur". Kürschner vol. 34, p. 63 f.) Polarity is inherent in the phenomena of nature insofar as we think of them materially. It consists in the fact that everything material expresses itself in two opposite states, like the magnet in a north pole and a south pole. These states of matter are either open before our eyes, or they lie dormant in the material and can be awakened in it by suitable means. The intensification occurs in the phenomena insofar as we think of them mentally. It can be observed in the natural processes that fall under the idea of development. At the various stages of development, these processes show the idea on which they are based more or less clearly in their outer appearance. In the fruit, the idea of the plant, the vegetable law, is only indistinctly expressed in its appearance. The idea that the mind recognizes and the perception are dissimilar. "In the blossoms, the vegetable law comes to its highest manifestation, and the rose would only be the peak of the manifestation again." The working out of the spiritual from the material by creative nature is what Goethe calls intensification. Nature is "always striving to ascend", in other words, it seeks to create forms which, in ascending order, increasingly represent the ideas of things in their outer appearance. Goethe is of the opinion that "nature has no secret that it does not somewhere present to the attentive observer naked before his eyes". Nature can produce phenomena from which the ideas for a large area of related processes can be read directly. These are the phenomena in which the increase has reached its goal, in which the idea becomes immediate truth. Here the creative spirit of nature comes to the surface of things; what in the gross material phenomena can only be grasped by the mind, what can only be seen with spiritual eyes, becomes visible to the bodily eye in the heightened phenomena. Everything sensual here is also spiritual and everything spiritual is sensual. Goethe conceives of the whole of nature as spiritualized. Its forms are different in that the spirit in them is more or less externally visible. Goethe does not know a dead, spiritless matter. Those things appear as such in which the spirit of nature gives itself an external form dissimilar to its ideal essence. Because a spirit is at work in nature and within man, man can rise to participate in the productions of nature. "... from the brick that falls from the roof to the luminous flash of spirit that rises up and which you communicate", Goethe regards everything in the universe as an effect, as a manifestation of a creative spirit. "All effects, of whatever kind they may be, which we notice in experience, are connected in the most constant way, merge into one another; they undulate from the first to the last." "A tile detaches itself from the roof: we call this in the common sense accidental; it strikes the shoulders of a passer-by mechanically, but not quite mechanically, it follows the laws of gravity, and so it acts physically. The torn vessels of life immediately give up their function; in an instant the juices act chemically, the elementary properties emerge. But the disturbed organic life resists just as quickly and seeks to restore itself; meanwhile the human whole is more or less unconscious and psychically shattered. The person who recognizes himself feels ethically deeply wounded; he laments his disturbed activity, of whatever kind it may be, but reluctantly man surrenders to patience. Religiously, on the other hand, it becomes easy for him to ascribe this case to a higher destiny, to regard it as a protection from greater evil, as an introduction to greater good. This is enough for the sufferer; but the convalescent rises genially, trusts God and himself and feels saved, seizes even the accidental, turns it to his advantage in order to begin an eternally fresh circle of life." Goethe sees all worldly effects as modifications of the spirit, and the person who immerses himself in them and observes them from the level of the accidental to that of genius, experiences the metamorphosis of the spirit from the form in which it presents itself in a dissimilar external appearance to that in which it appears in its very own form. In Goethe's view of the world, all creative forces are unified. They are a whole that reveals itself in a gradual sequence of related manifoldnesses. Goethe, however, was never inclined to imagine the unity of the world as uniform. The supporters of the idea of unity often fall into the error of extending the lawfulness that can be observed in one area of appearance to the whole of nature. In this case, for example, is the mechanistic world view. It has a special eye and understanding for that which can be explained mechanically. Therefore the mechanical appears to it as the only natural. It also seeks to trace the phenomena of organic nature back to mechanical laws. To her, the living is only a complicated form of the interaction of mechanical processes. Goethe found such a world view expressed in a particularly repulsive form in Holbach's "Systeme de la nature", which fell into his hands in Strasbourg. Matter should be from eternity, and moved from eternity, and should now, with this movement to the right and left and in all directions, produce the infinite phenomena of existence without further ado. "We would even have been satisfied with all this if the author had really built up the world before our eyes from his moving matter. But he might have known as little of nature as we do: for, by piling up a few general concepts, he immediately abandons them in order to transform that which appears higher than nature, or as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, moving, but nevertheless directionless and formless nature, and thereby believes he has gained quite a lot. "(Dichtung und Wahrheit, II. Buch.) Goethe would have expressed himself in a similar way if he had been able to hear Du Bois-Reymond's sentence ("Grenzen des Naturerkennens", p.13): "Recognizing nature ... is the tracing back of changes in the physical world to movements of atoms, which are brought about by their central forces independent of time, or the resolution of natural processes into mechanics of atoms." Goethe thought of the types of natural effects as related to each other and merging into each other; but he never wanted to trace them back to a single type. He did not seek an abstract principle to which all natural phenomena could be traced, but rather an observation of the characteristic way in which creative nature reveals itself in each of its individual areas of manifestation through particular forms of its general lawfulness. He did not want to impose one thought-form on all natural phenomena, but by living in different thought-forms he wanted to keep the spirit as alive and flexible as nature itself is. If the feeling of the great unity of all natural phenomena was powerful in him, then he was a pantheist. "For myself, with the manifold directions of my being, I cannot have enough of one way of thinking; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist, a pantheist as a naturalist, and one as decidedly as the other. If I need a god for my personality, as a moral man, then that is already taken care of." (To Jacobi, Jan. 6, 1813.) As an artist, Goethe turned to those natural phenomena in which the idea is present in direct perception. Here the individual appeared directly divine; the world as a multiplicity of divine individualities. As a naturalist, Goethe also had to trace the forces of nature in those phenomena whose idea is not visible in their individual existence. As a poet he could rest in the multiplicity of the divine; as a naturalist he had to seek the unified ideas of nature. "The law that enters into appearance, in the greatest freedom, according to its own conditions, brings forth the objective beauty, which of course must find worthy subjects by whom it is perceived." As an artist, Goethe wants to observe this objective beauty in the individual creature; but as a naturalist he wants to "know the laws according to which general nature wants to act". Polytheism is the way of thinking that sees and worships the spiritual in the individual; pantheism is the other, which grasps the spirit of the whole. Both ways of thinking can exist side by side; one or the other asserts itself depending on whether the view is directed towards the whole of nature, which is life and consequence from a central point, or towards those individuals in whom nature unites in one form what it usually spreads over an entire realm. Such forms arise, for example, when the creative forces of nature, after "a thousand and one plants", make another in which "all the others are contained", or "after a thousand and one animals, a being that contains them all: the human being".

[ 2 ] Goethe once remarked: "Anyone who has learned to understand them (my writings) and my nature in general will have to confess that he has gained a certain inner freedom." (Unterhaltungen mit dem Kanzler von Müller, . Jan.1831.) With this he alluded to the active force that asserts itself in all human striving for knowledge. As long as man continues to perceive the opposites around him and to regard their laws as implanted principles by which they are governed, he has the feeling that they confront him as unknown powers which act upon him and impose the thoughts of their laws upon him. He feels unfree in the face of things; he perceives the laws of nature as a rigid necessity to which he must submit. Only when man realizes that the forces of nature are nothing other than forms of the same spirit that is at work in himself does he realize that he is a partaker of freedom. Natural law is only perceived as a compulsion as long as it is regarded as an external force. If one lives into its essence, then one feels it as a force that one also operates within oneself; one feels oneself as a productively co-operating element in the becoming and being of things. You are you and you with all the power of becoming. You have absorbed into your own actions what you otherwise only experience as an external drive. This is the process of liberation that the act of cognition brings about in the sense of Goethe's world view. Goethe looked clearly at the ideas of the workings of nature as they gazed out at him from the Italian works of art. He also had a clear perception of the liberating effect that the possession of these ideas has on man. One consequence of this feeling is his description of the kind of knowledge he describes as that of comprehensive spirits. "The encompassing spirits, which in a proud sense could be called the creators, behave productively in the highest sense; for by proceeding from ideas, they already express the unity of the whole, and it is, as it were, afterwards the business of nature to fit itself into this idea." Goethe, however, never achieved the direct contemplation of the act of liberation. Only those who listen to themselves in their cognition can have this view. Goethe may have practiced the highest form of cognition, but he did not observe this form of cognition in himself. As he himself admits:

"How did you get so far?
They say you have done well!"
My child! I have done it wisely;
I have never thought about thinking.

[ 3 ] But just as the creative forces of nature produce "after a thousand and one plants", in which "all the others are contained", so also after a thousand and one ideas they produce one in which the whole world of ideas is contained. And man grasps this idea when he adds the idea of thought to the contemplation of other things and processes. Precisely because Goethe's thinking was always filled with the objects of contemplation, because his thinking was contemplation, his contemplation was thinking: that is why he could not come to make thinking itself the object of thinking. But the idea of freedom can only be gained through the contemplation of thinking. Goethe did not make the distinction between thinking about thinking and viewing thinking. Otherwise he would have arrived at the insight that, precisely in the sense of his world view, one could well refuse to think about thinking, but that one could nevertheless arrive at a view of the world of thought. Man is uninvolved in the formation of all other views. The ideas of these views come to life in him. But these ideas would not be there if the productive power were not present in him to bring them to manifestation. Even if the ideas are the content of what works in things, they come into manifest existence through human activity. Man can therefore only recognize the nature of the world of ideas when he looks at his activity. In any other contemplation, he only penetrates the active idea; the thing in which the activity takes place remains outside his mind as a perception. In the contemplation of the idea, the active and the effected are completely contained within him. He has the whole process completely present within himself. The perception no longer appears to be produced by the idea; for the perception is now itself an idea. But this perception of what produces itself is the perception of freedom. In the observation of thought, man sees through world events. Here he does not have to search for an idea of this happening, for this happening is the idea itself. The otherwise experienced unity of perception and idea is here the experience of the visualized spirituality of the world of ideas. The person who looks at this activity resting in itself feels freedom. Goethe experienced this feeling, but did not express it in its highest form. He exercised a free activity in his contemplation of nature; but it never became objective to him. He never looked behind the scenes of human cognition and therefore never absorbed into his consciousness the idea of world events in their most intrinsic form, in their highest metamorphosis. As soon as man arrives at the contemplation of this metamorphosis, he moves securely in the realm of things. In the center of his personality he has gained the true starting point for all observation of the world. He will no longer search for unknown reasons, for causes of things lying outside himself; he knows that the highest experience of which he is capable consists in the self-observation of his own being. Whoever is completely imbued with the feelings that this experience evokes will gain the truest relationship to things. If this is not the case with him, he will seek the highest form of existence elsewhere and, since he cannot find it in experience, will assume it to be in an unknown realm of reality. His contemplation of things will acquire something uncertain; in answering the questions that nature poses to him, he will continually refer to something inscrutable. Because Goethe, through his life in the world of ideas, had a feeling of the fixed center, within the personality, he succeeded in arriving at certain concepts within certain limits in his contemplation of nature. But because he lacked the direct perception of the innermost experience, he groped around uncertainly outside these boundaries. For this reason he says that man was not born to "solve the problems of the world, but to seek where the problem lies, and then to keep within the limits of the intelligible". He says: "Kant has indisputably been of most use by drawing the boundaries of how far the human mind is capable of penetrating and by leaving the insoluble problems behind." If the contemplation of the highest experience had given him certainty in the consideration of things, he would have been able to do more on his way than "arrive at a kind of conditional reliability through regulated experience". Instead of going straight through experience in the awareness that the true only has a meaning insofar as it is demanded by human nature, he nevertheless arrives at the conviction that "a higher influence favors the steadfast, the active, the understanding, the regulated and regulating, the humane, the pious", and that "the moral world order" shows itself most beautifully where it "indirectly comes to the aid of the good, the brave sufferer".

[ 4 ] Because Goethe did not know the innermost human experience, it was impossible for him to arrive at the final thoughts about the moral world order, which necessarily belong to his view of nature. The ideas of things are the content of what is active and creative in things. Man experiences the moral ideas directly in the form of ideas. Whoever is capable of experiencing how, in the contemplation of the world of ideas, the ideal becomes its own content, fills itself with itself, is also in a position to experience the production of the moral within human nature. He who knows the ideas of nature only in their relation to the visual world will also want to relate the moral concepts to something external to them. He will seek a reality for these concepts similar to that which exists for the concepts derived from experience. But he who is able to look at ideas in their most intrinsic essence will realize in the case of moral concepts that nothing external corresponds to them, that they are produced directly in the spirit-experience as ideas. It is clear to him that neither an external divine will nor a moral world order is effective in producing these ideas. For there is nothing to be noticed in them of a reference to such powers. Everything they express is also included in their spiritually experienced pure idea form. Only through their own content do they have an effect on people as moral powers. No categorical imperative stands behind them with a whip and urges man to follow them. Man feels that he has brought them forth himself and loves them as one loves one's child. Love is the motive for action. The spiritual pleasure in one's own product is the source of morality.

[ 5 ] There are people who are incapable of producing moral ideas. They absorb those of other people through tradition. And if they have no ability to perceive ideas as such, they do not recognize the origin of the moral that can be experienced in the spirit. They look for it in a superhuman will that is external to them. Or they believe that an objective moral world order exists outside the humanly experienced spiritual world, from which the moral ideas originate. The organ of speech of this world order is often sought in man's conscience. As with certain things in his other world views, Goethe is also uncertain in his thoughts on the origin of morality. Here, too, his feeling for what is in accordance with ideas drives forth sentences that are in accordance with the demands of his nature. "Duty: where one loves what one commands oneself." Only those who see the grounds of morality purely in the content of moral ideas should say: "Lessing, who felt many a restriction unwillingly, has one of his characters say: No one must have to. A witty, happy-minded man said: He who will, must. A third, admittedly an educated man, added: He who understands, wills too. And so one believed to have completed the whole circle of knowledge, will and must. But on the average, man's knowledge, of whatever kind it may be, determines his actions; therefore nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance at work." The following statement shows that Goethe has a feeling for the true nature of morality, which does not rise to a clear view: "The will, in order to become perfect, must in morality submit to conscience, which does not err ... ... Conscience needs no ancestor, everything is given with it; it has to do only with its own inner world." Conscience does not need an ancestor, it can only mean that man does not originally find any moral content in himself; he gives it to himself. These statements are contrasted with others that place the origin of morality in a realm outside of man: "Man, however much he is attracted by the earth with its thousand and thousand phenomena, still raises his eyes longingly to heaven... because he feels deeply and clearly within himself that he is a citizen of that spiritual realm in which we cannot reject nor give up faith." "What cannot be dissolved at all, we leave to God as the all-conditioning and all-liberating being."

[ 6 ] For the contemplation of the innermost human nature, for introspection, Goethe lacks the organ. "Here I confess that the great and so important-sounding task: know thyself, has always seemed suspicious to me, as a trick of secretly allied priests who wanted to confuse man with unattainable demands and seduce him from activity against the outside world to an inner false contemplation. Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world, which he is only aware of in himself and only in it. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ within us." The reverse is true: man only knows the world insofar as he knows himself. For in his inner being is revealed in its most intrinsic form what is present in external things only as a reflection, as an example, as a symbol. What man can otherwise only speak of as unfathomable, inscrutable, divine: this appears to him in true form in self-perception. Because he sees the ideal in direct form in self-perception, he gains the strength and ability to seek out and recognize this ideal in all external appearances, in all of nature. He who has experienced the moment of self-perception no longer thinks of seeking a "hidden" God behind the phenomena: he grasps the divine in its various metamorphoses in nature. Goethe remarked in relation to Schelling: "I would see him more often if I did not still hope for poetic moments, and philosophy destroys poetry for me, and that probably because it drives me into the object, in that I can never remain purely speculative, but must immediately seek an illustration for every sentence and therefore immediately flee out into nature." He was unable to find the highest view, the view of the world of ideas itself. It cannot destroy poetry, for it only frees the mind from all assumptions that there could be something unknown and unfathomable in nature. On the other hand, it enables it to devote itself completely to things without bias, for it gives it the conviction that everything that the mind can desire can be taken from nature.

[ 7 ] However, the highest contemplation also frees the human spirit from all one-sided feelings of dependence. Through its possession he feels sovereign in the realm of the moral world order. He knows that the driving force that produces everything works within him as in his own will, and that the highest decisions about morality lie within himself. For these highest decisions flow from the world of moral ideas, in the production of which the soul of man is present. Man may feel himself limited in individual things, he may be dependent on a thousand things; on the whole he gives himself his moral goal and his moral direction. What is effective in all other things appears in man as an idea; what is effective in man is the idea that he himself produces. In every single human individuality the process takes place that takes place in the whole of nature: the creation of an actuality out of the idea. And man himself is the creator. For at the base of his personality lives the idea, which gives itself content. Going beyond Goethe, we must expand on his statement that nature is "so great in the richness of creation as to make one after a thousand plants in which all the others are contained, and after a thousand animals one being that contains them all, the human being". Nature is so great in its creation that it repeats in every human individual the process by which it freely produces all creatures out of the idea, in that moral actions spring from the ideal ground of personality. Whatever man perceives as the objective ground of his actions, it is all merely a paraphrase and at the same time a misrecognition of his own essence. Man realizes himself in his moral actions. Max Stirner expressed this insight in succinct sentences in his essay "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum" (The Only One and His Property). "I am the owner of my power, and I am so when I know myself to be the Only One. In the Only One, even the owner returns to his creative nothingness, from which he is born. Every higher being above me, be it God or man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness and only pales before the sun of this consciousness. If I place my cause on myself, the only one, then it stands on the perishable, the mortal creator of it, who consumes himself, and I may say: I have placed my cause on nothing." But at the same time man may say to this Stirnerian spirit, like Faust to Mephistopheles: "In your nothingness I hope to find the All", for within me dwells, in individual formation, the active force through which nature creates the All. As long as man has not seen this active force within himself, he will appear to it like Faust to the spirit of the earth. It will always call out to him the words: "You are like the spirit you comprehend, not like me!" Only the contemplation of the deepest inner life conjures up this spirit that says of itself:

In floods of life, in the storm of deeds
I wall up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
Thus I create on the rushing loom of time
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

[ 8 ] In my "Philosophy of Freedom" I have tried to show how the realization that man is dependent on himself in his actions arises from the innermost experience, from the contemplation of his own being. In 1844, Stirner defended the view that man, if he truly understands himself, can only see in himself the reason for his effectiveness. For him, however, this insight does not emerge from the contemplation of the innermost experience, but from the feeling of freedom and independence from all coercive world powers. Stirner stops at the demand of freedom; in this area he is led to the most abrupt emphasis imaginable on the self-reliant nature of man. I am trying to describe life in freedom on a broader basis by showing what man sees when he looks to the bottom of his soul. Goethe did not arrive at the view of freedom because he had an aversion to self-knowledge. Had this not been the case, the realization of man as a free personality based on himself would have had to form the pinnacle of his world view. We encounter the seeds of this knowledge everywhere in his work; they are also the seeds of his view of nature.

[ 9 ] Nowhere in his actual studies of nature does Goethe speak of inscrutable causes, of hidden driving forces of phenomena. He is content to observe the phenomena in their sequence and to explain them with the help of those elements that reveal themselves to the senses and the mind during observation. On May 5, 1786, he wrote to Jacobi that he had the courage to "devote his whole life to the contemplation of those things which he can reach" and of whose essence he could "hope to form an adequate idea", without worrying in the least how far he would get and what was tailor-made for him. He who believes himself to be approaching the divine in the individual natural thing no longer needs to form a special idea of a God who exists outside and beside things. It is only when Goethe leaves the realm of nature that his feeling for the essence of things no longer holds. Then his lack of human self-knowledge leads him to assertions that can be reconciled neither with his innate way of thinking nor with the direction of his studies of nature. Those who are inclined to refer to such assertions may assume that Goethe believed in a human-like God and an individual continuation of that form of life of the soul which is bound to the conditions of the physical organization of the body. Such a belief is at odds with Goethe's studies of nature. They could never have taken the direction they did if Goethe had allowed himself to be determined by this belief. In the spirit of his nature studies, it is perfectly reasonable to think of the nature of the human soul in such a way that it lives in a supersensible form of existence after shedding the body. This form of existence means that the other conditions of life also give it a different kind of consciousness than that which it has through the physical body. Thus Goethe's theory of metamorphosis also leads to the view of metamorphoses of the life of the soul. But one will only be able to grasp this Goethean idea of immortality properly if one knows that Goethe could not have been led by his world view to an unmetamorphosed continuation of that spiritual life which is conditioned by the physical body. Because Goethe did not attempt a view of the life of thought in the sense indicated here, he was also not prompted in the course of his life to give special form to the idea of immortality, which would be the continuation of his metamorphosis thoughts. This idea, however, would in truth be that which followed from his world-view with regard to this field of knowledge. What he gave with regard to this or that contemporary's view of life, or for other reasons as an expression of a personal feeling, without thinking of the connection with his world view gained from his studies of nature, must not be cited as characteristic of Goethe's idea of immortality.

[ 10 ] For the evaluation of a Goethean statement in the overall picture of his world view, it is also important to consider that the mood of his soul in his various ages gives such statements particular nuances. He was fully aware of this change in the form of expression of his ideas. When Förster expressed the view that the solution to the Faust problem would result from the words: "A good man in his dark urge is well aware of the right path", Goethe replied: "That would be enlightenment: Faust ends up as an old man, and in old age we become mystics" (from Förster's Nachlaß, p.216). And in the prose sayings we read: "Every age of man is answered by a certain philosophy. The child appears as a realist; for he finds himself as convinced of the existence of pears and apples as of his own. The youth, assailed by inner passions, must take notice of himself, feel his way forward, he is transformed into an idealist. On the other hand, the man has every reason to become a skeptic; he does well to doubt whether the means he has chosen for the end is the right one. Before acting, in acting, he has every reason to keep his mind agile so that he does not have to grieve afterwards over a wrong choice. The old man, however, will always profess mysticism; he sees that so much seems to depend on chance; the unreasonable succeeds, the reasonable fails, fortune and misfortune unexpectedly turn out to be the same; so it is, so it was, and old age calms itself in the one who is, who was, and who will be" (Kürschner, vol. 36,2 p. 454).

[ 11 ] In this essay I have in mind Goethe's world view, from which his insights into the life of nature grew and which was the driving force in him from the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in man to the completion of the theory of colors. And I believe I have shown that this view of the world corresponds more perfectly to Goethe's personality as a whole than the compilation of sayings in which one would have to consider above all how such thoughts are colored by the mood of his youth or his old age. I believe that Goethe observed in his studies of nature, if not guided by a clear, idealistic self-knowledge, at least by a correct feeling, a free way of proceeding that flows from the true relationship of human nature to the outside world. Goethe himself is aware that there is something incomplete in his way of thinking: "I was aware of noble, great purposes, but I could never grasp the conditions under which I worked; what I lacked, I realized, what was too much in me, likewise; therefore I did not refrain from educating myself, outwardly and inwardly. And yet things remained the same. I pursued every goal with seriousness, force and loyalty; I often succeeded in completely overcoming stubborn conditions, but I also often failed because I was unable to give in and learn to avoid them. And so my life went on with doing and enjoying, suffering and resisting, with love, satisfaction, hatred and displeasure of others. This is a reflection of the same fate."