The Rudolf Steiner Archive

World of Thought, Personality, People

[ 1 ] From views that have formed in me over the course of thirty-five years about the worlds of thought of a number of German and Austrian personalities, I based some of the lectures that I had to give in Central European cities during this fateful time. I wanted to talk about such personalities, in whose thoughts the pressing questions of life seek a solution and in whose spiritual struggle the essence of the German nation is revealed at the same time. I would like to make what I have said in this way the guiding principle of this publication. It is intended to speak of the human spirit's search for knowledge of its essence in connection with such seekers, who do not pursue personal knowledge hobbies or aestheticizing inclinations born of arbitrariness, but thoughts that arise from an irresistible healthy urge of human nature and that are grounded in the emotional needs of the people despite the spiritual height to which they aspire. However, we will be talking about personalities who are often denied a sense of the realities of life by those who do not want to recognize that man is confused by the surface of reality and made unfit for life if he cannot face it with views of the spirit that reigns in the depths of reality. Thoughts that struggle for knowledge of the spirit often repel a state of mind that would all too gladly invoke Goethe by countering such thoughts with: "Gray, dear friend, is all theory, - and green the golden tree of life." She pays no attention to the fact that Goethe's humor uses these words to put a lesson into the devil's mouth, which he finds good for a pupil. - A life-bearing thought is not affected by the fact that a view that flatters the comfort of human thought regards it as gray, because it accepts the grayness of its own theory for the golden splendor of the green tree of life.

[ 2 ] It is contrary to the feelings of some people to speak of the influence of a people on the world views of the personalities who have sprung from this people. For they think that this would contradict the self-evident truth that knowledge of the true is a life-good present in the same way in all people. That this is so is really as self-evident as that the sunshine and the moonlight shine equally on all men on earth. And it is as indisputably true of the highest thoughts of the world view as it is of the "two times two is four" of everyday life that truth cannot be different according to the nature of men and nations. But precisely because this is so self-evident, it should not be taken for granted - without further consideration of what is meant - that someone would disregard this self-evident fact if he were to search in the nature of the thinkers of a people for the roots of the ethnicity from which they originate. The human spirit does not only live in the abstract coinage of certain concepts; it also draws its life from the forces that souls allow to resonate from their most intimate experiences with the insights born of them. Goethe felt this way when he wrote to a friend: "After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a journey to India, not to discover new things, but to see what I have discovered in my own way." Goethe knows how even what has already been discovered can be rediscovered in a new light if it is seen in a new way. And the thoughts that humanity develops for its spiritual life about questions of knowledge speak not only of what people are searching for, but also of how they are searching. In such thoughts, the receptive person feels the pulse of the soul that announces the life from which they radiate into reason. As true as it is that in a thought one also gets to know its thinker, it is equally plausible that in a thinker one can see the people from whom the thinker has arisen. - What truth content is inherent in a thought and whether an idea has grown out of the roots of genuine reality: surely only the powers of cognition independent of time and place can decide this. But whether a certain thought, whether an idea that steers the human spirit in a certain direction emerges within a nation, depends on the sources from which the spirit of this nation may draw. Karl Rosenkranz certainly did not want to prove anything about the truth of Hegel's thoughts from the fact that he connected these thoughts with the German national spirit when he wrote his book "Hegel as a German National Philosopher" in 1870. He held the view that he had already expressed in his description of Hegel's life: "A true philosophy is the act of a people... But for philosophy, in so far as it is philosophy, the peculiarity of its popular origin is not at all important. Here only the generality and necessity of its content and the perfection of its proof are important. Whether the true is recognized and expressed by a Greek or a Germanic, by a Frenchman or an Englishman, has no weight for it as true. Every true philosophy is therefore, as a national philosophy, at the same time a general human philosophy and an indispensable link in the great course of humanity. It has the capacity of absolute dissemination through all peoples, and the time will come for each one when it must appropriate the true philosophy of other peoples if it wishes otherwise to secure and promote its own progress."

[ 3 ] The feeling that one has against the popular aspects of worldview ideas can also be of a different nature. One can form an objection to the cognitive value of such thoughts by recognizing their popular nature. One may think that this relegates them to the realm of fantasy and that one must speak of them as one would speak of German poetry, while it is inadmissible to speak of German mathematics or German physics in the same sense. There are people who see in every world view - every philosophy - a conceptual poetry. They do not need to concern themselves with the objection that arises from the implied sentiment. But the remarks in this paper are not written from such a point of view. It is based on the other, that no one can seriously speak of a world-view who does not ascribe to it an epistemological value which does not presuppose that its thoughts originate in realities common to all men. It may also be said that this is generally true; but a world-view common to all men is an ideal which has not yet been realized anywhere; all existing world-views bear in themselves what is imposed upon them by the imperfection of human nature. A discussion of the imperfection of worldviews for this reason can be dispensed with here. This is because we are not seeking excuses for the weakness of worldviews from their popular nature, but rather reasons for their strength. Therefore, the assertion that thinkers are dependent not only on their personal standpoints, but also on what is attached to them from their nationality, and that for this very reason they cannot penetrate to a general human worldview, can be disregarded here. This paper speaks of a number of personalities in the sense that their thoughts are really recognized as having general human validity. Of what is characterized as errors or one-sided views, only insofar as one can see detours to the truth in them. If an absolutely valid objection could arise from the aforementioned sentiment, it would be justified with regard to the way in which worldview ideas are associated with the nature of the German people in this writing. However, one can only see through the objection to this sentiment if one can dissuade oneself from a belief that also gives rise to serious deceptions in other directions. It is the belief that the many different thought forms of thinkers researching worldview issues are really just as many different worldviews that cannot exist together.

[ 4 ] From this belief, the scientifically-minded often fight the mystic, the mystic fights the scientifically-minded. The one believes that scientific findings are the only true results of research into reality; from them one must gain the thoughts that can bring understanding of the world and life, as far as this understanding can be attained by man. The other professes the view that the true nature of the world is only accessible to mystical experience, and that the thoughts of the scientifically minded cannot approach true reality. The "monist" is only satisfied if a unified basis for the material and spiritual world is presented. Either one type of monist sees this basis in the substances and their effects, so that the spiritual phenomena become revelations of the material world for them. Or other monists concede true existence only to the spirit and believe that everything material is only a kind of the spiritual. The dualist sees such a unification as a misunderstanding of the nature of both matter and spirit. In his view, the two must be regarded as more or less independent realms. - It would be a long series if one wanted to characterize even the most outstanding of these supposed world views. Now there are many people who believe that they have moved beyond all talk of worldviews. They say: I base my knowledge on what I find in reality; I don't care what a worldview thinks of it. They believe this, but their behavior shows something completely different. More or less consciously, or even unconsciously, they profess such a world-view in the most differentiated way. Even if they do not express or think it directly, they develop their ideas in its direction and fight, reject or treat the ideas of other people in a way that corresponds to such a "world view".

[ 5 ] The conscious or unconscious belief in such supposed worldviews is based on a deception about the relationship between humans and the non-human world. The person caught up in this delusion does not quite distinguish between what man receives from the outside world for the formation of thoughts and what he extracts from himself when he forms thoughts.

[ 6 ] If one notices that two thinkers express different thoughts about the questions of life, one all too easily has the feeling that if the two were expressing true reality with their thoughts, they would have to be saying the same thing, not different things. And one thinks that the difference cannot have its reasons in reality, but only in the personal (subjective) way of understanding of the thinkers. Even if this is not always openly acknowledged by people who talk about world views, this opinion is more or less consciously or unconsciously at the basis of the spirit and attitude of their speech. Indeed, the thinkers themselves usually live in such a bias. They express their thoughts about what they consider to be reality, regard these thoughts as their "system" of a correct world view and believe that a different direction of thought is based on the personal idiosyncrasy of the thinker. - The presentation of this writing is based on a different view. (At this point, however, this view can only be put forward as an assertion. I hope that one will be able to find some justification for it in the writing itself. In a large part of my other writings I have endeavored to contribute much more to this justification). Two different schools of thought can often only be understood in their essence by looking at their difference in the same way as the difference between, for example, two pictures of a tree taken from two directions by a photographic apparatus. The pictures are different; but their difference is not due to the nature of the apparatus, but to the position of the tree in relation to the apparatus. And this is something just as external to the apparatus as the tree itself. The pictures are both true views of the tree. The divergence of two world views does not prevent both from expressing the true reality. - The confusion of ideas arises when people do not see through this. When they make themselves materialists, idealists, monists, dualists, spiritualists, mystics or even theosophists, or are made so by others, and thus express that one would only arrive at a true view of the sources of life if one attunes one's whole way of thinking in the sense of one of these concepts. But it is reality itself that wants to be recognized from one side by materialistic ideas, from another by spiritual ones, from a third as unity (Monon), from yet another as duality. The thinking person wants to grasp the essence of reality through a mode of conception. And if he realizes that he undertakes this in vain, he helps himself by saying: all ideas about the roots of real life are personally (subjectively) formed, and the essence of the "thing in itself" remains unrecognizable. - How many confusions in the life of thought have led to the realization that many a person speaks about a world view that differs from his own in the same way as someone who knows the image of a tree taken from one side and who, when placed in front of an image received from another side, does not want to admit that this is a "correct" image of the same tree!

[ 7 ] Many who consider themselves practitioners of life comfort themselves over such agonizing questions of worldview by saying: let those argue about these things who have the leisure and desire to do so; true life is not harmed by this; it need not worry about it. But only those people who have no idea how far removed their ideas are from the real driving forces of life can speak like this. These are the people whose image stood before Johann Gottlieb Fichte's soul when he spoke the words: "While in the circle which ordinary experience has drawn around us, one thinks more generally and judges more correctly than perhaps ever before, most people are completely deluded and blinded as soon as they are supposed to go even a little beyond it. If it is impossible to rekindle in them the once extinguished spark of the higher genius, they must remain quietly in that circle, and in so far as they are useful and indispensable in it, their value in and for it must be left undiminished. But if they therefore demand that everything should be brought down to them to which they cannot rise, if, for example, they demand that everything printed should be usable as a cook-book, or as a book of arithmetic, or as a set of official regulations, and denounce everything that cannot be so used, they themselves are greatly mistaken. - That ideals cannot be represented in the real world, we others know perhaps as well as they do, perhaps better. We only maintain that reality must be judged by them, and modified by those who feel the power to do so. Supposing they could not convince themselves of this either, they lose very little by it, once they are what they are; and mankind loses nothing by it. This merely makes it clear that they alone are not reckoned with in the plan for the ennoblement of mankind. The latter will undoubtedly continue on their path; may kind nature rule over them and give them rain and sunshine at the right time, beneficial nourishment and undisturbed circulation of the juices, and at the same time - wise thoughts!" - A disastrous thing lies precisely in the fact that the ideas of individual world views that fertilize life are kept away from this life by the belief that their diversity proves that they are altogether subjectively colored by the conceptions of their thinkers. Thus a semblance of right is cast on the speeches of the characterized opponents of ideas. It is not what they contain that condemns the world-views of the thinkers to unfruitfulness for life, but the belief, usually appearing in their wake, that either one school of thought must reveal the whole of reality, or that they are all merely personally colored views. - This paper aims to show to what extent truth lives in the ideas of individual thinkers despite their differences, and not merely personally colored views.

[ 8 ] Only by trying to recognize the extent to which reality itself reveals itself in its relationship to man through different types of conception does one also struggle through to a well-founded judgment of that which comes from the nature of the thinker observing the world. One sees through how one thinker's essence pushes more towards the one, the other's more towards the other relationship of extra-human (objective) reality to man. First of all, one sees the sharply defined personal direction of a personality's thinking. One is tempted to believe that their world view is also only a personal (subjective) way of thinking because one notices how it has its foundations in the personal direction of thought. But if one recognizes how this personal way of thinking causes the thinker to place himself on a certain point of view, through which the extra-human (objective) reality can place itself in a special relationship to him, then one escapes the confusion into which one can be brought by the sight of the different world views.

[ 9 ] Some will perhaps say to what has been said: yes, but from a certain point of view it is all quite self-evident, and therefore it is superfluous to put it forward first. But those who say this will often be precisely those who, in their judgments and actions, violate this view of truth and reality everywhere.

[ 10 ] This view, however, is not intended to justify every human opinion that regards itself as a world view. Real errors, falsity of the sources of knowledge, points of view from which only a clouded imagination wants to create worldview thoughts: all this will show itself precisely in the light to which this view penetrates. By seeking to discover the extent to which the one reality is revealed in divergent human thoughts, it can also hope to gain an insight into where a human opinion is rejected by reality itself.

[ 11 ] If one perceives how the forces of the people work in the thinkers of a nation, this perception is in full agreement with the view expressed here. The people do not want to decide how a thinker shapes his thoughts; but together with other forces that determine his point of view, they influence the relationship to existence through which reality reveals itself to him in one direction or the other. It need not cloud his faculty of vision; but it may prove particularly suitable for placing the thinker who belongs to it in a place where he can develop a certain way of conceiving the truth common to mankind. It does not want to be his judge of knowledge; but it can be his faith-promoting advisor on the path to truth. The extent to which this can be felt by the German people should be indicated in this writing by describing a number of personalities who have risen from this people. The author of this writing hopes that one will recognize from it his feeling that a loving, recognizing immersion in the spiritual character of a people need not lead to the misjudgment and disregard of the nature and value of other peoples. It would be unnecessary to say this in particular at another time. Today it is necessary in view of the feelings that many people have towards the German character.

[ 12 ] To speak of the contribution of both German and German-Austrian personalities to intellectual life is particularly appropriate for the author of this essay, as he is a German-Austrian by birth and upbringing, having spent the first three decades of his life in Austria and then a period - soon to be just as long - in Germany. - In his book "Die Rätsel der Philosophie" (The Riddles of Philosophy) he has expressed his opinion on the position of most of the personalities discussed in this book in the general intellectual life. It was not his intention to repeat what he said there here. He can well understand that someone may disagree with him on the selection of the personalities described. But, without aiming for completeness in any direction, he simply wanted to describe some of what has become his view and life experience.

Berlin in May 1916
Rudolf Steiner

Addition to the foregoing preface for the new edition of 1918

[ 13 ] If, as an observer, one is confronted with the "thinking, seeing and sensing" of a personality, one may have the impression that one is observing active forces in the soul of such a personality which give direction and particular characterization to its way of thinking, but which are not made the content of its thinking by the personality itself. Such a feeling need not be connected with the vain opinion that as an observer one can place oneself above the observed personality. The fact that the observer has a different point of view from the person being observed makes it possible to express what the other person has not expressed. What he has therefore not expressed, indeed, what he has not brought before his own thinking, but has left in the unconscious life of the soul, because through this non-expression what he has said has attained its full meaning. The more significant what a person has to say is, the more extensive is that which is unconsciously active in the depths of his soul. In the souls of those who immerse themselves in the thinking, the sensing of such a personality, however, this unconsciousness resounds. And they may also bring it up into consciousness, because it can no longer become an obstacle to what is to be expressed.

[ 14 ] The personalities referred to in this book are particularly likely to be those who give rise to the need to penetrate from what they have expressed to what they have left unexpressed. For this reason, the author of this book believed that the "outlooks" which form the conclusion of the book would only make its presentation complete from the point of view adopted. He is of the opinion that he has not thereby introduced something unauthorized into the views of the personalities under consideration, but has sought that from which they have flowed out in the true sense of the thought. In this case, the unexpressed is a soil rich with seeds from which the expressed has sprouted as individual fruits. If one observes these fruits in such a way that one becomes aware of the seed-bearing soil on which they have ripened, then one becomes aware of precisely how that which the soul must experience with the most significant human riddles can find profound stimuli, powerful pointers in unerring directions and strengthening forces for fruitful insights in the personalities described in this writing. Through such contemplation one will get over the shyness of the apparent abstractness of the thoughts of these personalities, which prevents many from approaching them at all. It will be seen that these thoughts, properly considered, are full of unlimited warmth of life, a warmth which man must seek if only he really understands himself properly.