The Story of My Life
GA 28
Chapter XII
[ 1 ] The time that I consumed in the setting forth of Goethe's natural-scientific ideas for the introduction to Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur was very protracted. I began this task in the year 1880, and I had not finished even when I entered upon the second phase of my life with the removal from Vienna to Weimar. The reason for this lay in the difficulties I have described in connection with the natural scientific and the mystical form of expression.
[ 2 ] While I was labouring to reduce to correct forms of thought Goethe's attitude to the natural sciences, I had to advance also in the formulation of that which had taken shape before my mind as spiritual experience in my perception of the world process. I was thus constantly driven from Goethe to the representation of my own world-conception and back again to him, in order the better to interpret his thoughts by means of the thoughts to which I myself had attained. I felt that the most essential thing in Goethe was his refusal to be content with any sort of theoretically easily surveyed thought-pictures as contrasted with the knowledge of the illimitable richness of reality. Goethe becomes rationalistic when he wishes to describe the manifold forms of plants and animals. He struggles for ideas which manifest themselves as active in the evolution of the earth when he wishes to grasp the geologic building of the earth or the phenomena of meteorology. But his ideas are not abstract thoughts; they are images living in the form of thoughts within the mind.
When I grasped what he has set forth in such pictures in his natural-scientific works, I had before me something which satisfied me to the bottom of my soul. I looked upon a content of ideal images of which I could not but believe that this content – if followed further – represented a true reflection within the human spirit of that which happens in nature. It was clear to me that the form of thought in the natural sciences must be raised to this of Goethe's.
[ 3 ] But at the same time, in this grasping of Goethe's knowledge of nature, there came the need for representing the content of ideal images in relation to spiritual reality itself. The ideal images are not justifiable unless they refer to a spiritual reality lying at the foundation of the things of sense. But Goethe, in his holy awe before the immeasurable richness of reality, refrains from entering upon a presentation of the spiritual world after having brought the sense-world to the form of a spiritual image in his mind.
[ 4 ] I had now to show that Goethe really experienced the life of the soul in that he pressed forward from sense-nature to spirit-nature, but that anyone else can comprehend Goethe's soul-life only by going beyond him and carrying his own knowledge on to ideal conception of the spiritual world itself. [ 5 ] When Goethe spoke of nature, he was standing within the spiritual. He feared that he would become abstract if he proceeded further beyond this vital standing-within to a living in thoughts concerning this standing-within. He desired the experience of being within the spirit; but he did not desire to think himself within the spirit.
[ 6 ] I often felt that I should be false to Goethe's way of thinking if I only gave expression to thoughts concerning his world conception. And in regard to every detail which I had to interpret concerning Goethe I had again and again to master the method of speaking about Goethe in Goethe's own way. [ 7 ] My setting forth of Goethe's ideas consisted in the struggle, lasting for years, gradually to achieve a better understanding of him with the help of his own ideas. When I look back upon this endeavour I have to say to myself that I owe to this in large measure the evolution of my spiritual experience of knowledge. This evolution proceeded far more slowly than would have been the case if the Goethe task had not been set by destiny on the pathway of my life. I should then have followed my spiritual experiences and have set these forth as they came to light. I should have broken through into the spiritual world more quickly; but I should have had no inducement to sink down by actual striving into my own inner self.
[ 8 ] Thus by means of my Goethe task I experienced the difference between a state of soul in which the spiritual world manifests itself, so to speak, as an act of grace, and one in which step by step the soul first makes its own inner self like the spirit, in order that, when the soul experiences itself as true spirit, it may then stand within the spiritual of the world. But in this standing-within man first realizes that the human spirit and the spiritual world may come into union one with the other within the human soul.
[ 9 ] During the time that I was working at my interpretation of Goethe, I had Goethe always beside me as an admonisher who called inaudibly to me: “Whoever too rashly moves forward on the spiritual way may attain to a narrowly restricted experience of the spirit, but he enters into a content of reality impoverished of all the richness of life.”
[ 10 ] In my relation to the Goethe work I could observe clearly “how Karma works in human life.” Destiny is made of two forms of fact-complexes which grow into unity in human life. The one streams from the struggle of the soul outward; the other comes from the outer world into man. My own mental impulses moved toward the perception of the spiritual; the outer spiritual life of the world brought the Goethe work to me. I had to reduce to a harmony within my consciousness the two currents which there met. I occupied the last year of the first phase of my life in justifying myself alternately in the eyes of Goethe and then in my own eyes.
[ 11 ] The task I set myself in my doctor's dissertation was an inner experience: that of bringing about an “understanding of man's consciousness with itself.” For I saw that man can understand what the genuine reality in the outer world is only when he has perceived this genuine reality within himself.
[ 12 ] This bringing together of the genuine reality of the outer world and the genuine reality of the inner life of the soul must be achieved for the knowing consciousness through tireless spiritual activity; for the willing and the acting consciousness it is always present when man in action experiences his own freedom.
[ 13 ] That freedom exists as a matter of fact for the unprejudiced consciousness and yet becomes a riddle for the understanding is due to the fundamental fact that man does not possess his own true being, his genuine self-consciousness, as something given from the beginning, but must first achieve this through an understanding of his consciousness with itself.
That which makes man of the highest worth-freedom can be won only after appropriate preparation.
[ 14 ] My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is based upon an experience which consists in the understanding of human consciousness with itself. In willing, freedom is practised; in feeling, it is experienced; in thinking, it is known. Only, in order to attain this last, one must not lose the life out of thinking.
[ 15 ] While I was working at my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it was my constant endeavour in the statement of my thoughts to keep my inner experience fully awake within the very thoughts. This gives to thoughts the mystical character of inner perception, but makes the perception like the perception of the outer physical world. If one forces oneself through to such an inner experience, then one no longer finds any contradiction between knowledge of nature and knowledge of spirit. It becomes clear to one that the second is only a metamorphosed continuation of the first. Since this appeared thus to me, I could later place on the title-page of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity the motto: Seelische Beobachtungsresultate nach naturwissenschaftliche Methode.1The Results of Spiritual Observation According to the Methods of Natural Science. For, when the natural-scientific methods are truly followed in the spiritual sphere, then these lead one in knowledge into this sphere.
[ 16 ] There was great significance for me at that time in my thorough-going work upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, which forms the conclusion of his Entertainments of the German Wanderers. These “riddle tales” have had many interpreters. I was not at all interested in the “interpretation” of the content. I wished simply to take that in its poetic, artistic form. I always had an antipathy to shattering the dominant fantasy with intellectual interpretation.
[ 17 ] I saw that these poems of Goethe's had arisen out of his spiritual intercourse with Schiller. When Schiller wrote his Briefe fur Förderung der aesthetischen Erziehung des Menschen,2Letters on the Advancement of the Aesthetic Education of man. his mind was passing through the philosophical phase of its evolution. The “understanding of human consciousness with itself” was a mental task which occupied him most intensely. He saw the human mind on the one side wholly absorbed in intellectual activity. He felt that the mind dominant in the purely intellectual was not dependent upon the bodily and sensible. And yet he found in this form of supersensible activity something unsatisfying. The mind is “in the spirit” when it is given over to the “logical necessity” of the reason, but in this activity it is neither free nor inwardly spiritually alive. It is given over to an abstract shadow-image of the spirit, but is not weaving and ruling in the life and existence of the spirit. On the other side, Schiller observed that, in an opposite sort of activity, the mind is wholly given over to the bodily – the sense-perceptions and the instinctive impulses. Then the influence out of the spiritual shadow-images is lost from the mind, but it is given over to natural law, which does not constitute its being. [ 18 ] Schiller came to the conclusion that man is not “true man” in either of these activities. But he can produce through himself that which is not given to him by nature or by the rational shadows of the spiritual coming to existence without his effort. He can take his reason into his sense-activities; and he can elevate the sensible into a higher realm of consciousness so that it acts like the spiritual. Thus he attains to a mood midway between the logical and the natural compulsion.
Schiller sees man in such a mood when he is living in the artistic. The aesthetic conception of the world directs its look upon the sensible, but in such a way that it perceives therein the spirit. It lives in shadows of the spirit, but in its creating or its enjoying it gives to the spirit a sensible form so that it loses the shadow existence.
[ 19 ] Years before had this endeavour of Schiller's to reach a conception of the “true man” attracted my attention; now, when Goethe's “riddle fairy-tale” became itself a riddle to me, Schiller's endeavour occurred to me again. I saw how Goethe had taken hold of Schiller's conception of the “true man.” For him no less than for his friend this was a vital question: “How does the shadowy spiritual find in the mind the sensible-corporeal, and how does the natural in physical bodies work itself upward to the spiritual?”
[ 20 ] The correspondence between the two friends and all that can be learned otherwise about their spiritual relationship indicates that Schiller's solution was too abstract, too one-sidedly philosophical for Goethe. He created the charming picture of the stream which separates two worlds; of the will-o'-the-wisps who seek the way from one world to the other; of the snake which must sacrifice itself in order to form a bridge between the two worlds; of the beautiful lily who can only be surmised as wandering in the spirit on the “far side” of the stream by those who live on “this side,” and of much more. Over against Schiller's philosophical solution he places a poetic vision in fairy-tale form. He had the feeling that, if one attacked with philosophical conceptions the riddle of the soul which Schiller perceived, such a person impoverished himself while seeking for his true being. He desired to approach the riddle in all the wealth of the soul's experience.
[ 21 ] The Goethe fairy-tale images hark back to imaginations which had often been set forth before the time of Goethe by seekers for the spiritual experience of the soul. The three kings of fairy-lore are found in some resemblance in the Chymische Hochzeit3Chemical Marriage. by Christian Rosenkreutz. Other forms are revivals of those which had appeared earlier in pictures of the way of knowledge. Only in Goethe these pictures appear in a more beautiful, noble, artistic form of fantasy, whereas they had until his time borne a less artistic character.
[ 22 ] In these fairy-tales Goethe carried this fanciful creation near to the point at which it passes over into the inner process of the soul which is a knowing experience of the real world of spirit. I felt that one could see to the utmost depths of Goethe's nature when one sank down into this poetry.
[ 23 ] Not the interpretation, but the stimulus to the experience of the soul, was the important result that came to me from my work upon the fairy-tales. This stimulus later influenced my mental life even in the shaping of the mystery dramas which I afterward wrote. As to that part of my work which related directly to Goethe, I could gain but little from these fairy-tales. For it seemed to me that Goethe in their composition had grown beyond himself in his world-conception, as if impelled by a half-conscious life of the soul. In this way there came about for me a serious difficulty. I could set forth my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur only in the style in which I had commenced this; but this in itself did not suffice me at all. For I said to myself that, while Goethe was writing the “fairy-tales,” he had, as it were, looked across the boundary and had seen into the spiritual world. But nevertheless what he wrote about natural processes gave no attention to this glimpse. Therefore he could not be interpreted on the basis of this insight.
[ 24 ] But even though I obtained nothing at once for my Goethe writings from sinking down into the fairy-tale, yet I gained much mental stimulus from it. What came to me as mental content in connection with the fairy-tale became most important material for meditation. I returned to this again and again. By this activity I prepared myself beforehand for the temper of mind into which I entered later during my Weimar work.
Chapter XII
[ 1 ] Die Zeit, die ich mit der Darstellung von Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Ideen für die Einleitungen in «Kürschners Deutscher National-Literatur» brauchte, war eine lange. Ich begann damit im Beginne der achtziger Jahre und war noch nicht fertig, als ich in meinen zweiten Lebensabschnitt mit der Übersiedelung von Wien nach Weimar eintrat. In der geschilderten Schwierigkeit gegenüber der naturwissenschaftlichen und der mystischen Ausdrucksart liegt der Grund davon.
[ 2 ] Während ich daran arbeitete, Goethes Stellung zur Naturwissenschaft in die rechte Ideengestaltung zu bringen, mußte ich auch im Formen dessen weiterkommen, was sich mir als geistige Erlebnisse in der Anschauung der Weltvorgänge vor die Seele gestellt hatte. So drängte es mich immer wieder von Goethe ab nach der Darstellung der eigenen Weltanschauung und zu ihm hin, um mit den gewonnenen Gedanken seine Gedanken besser zu interpretieren. Ich empfand vor allem als wesentlich bei Goethe seine Abneigung, sich mit irgendeinem theoretisch leicht überschaubaren Gedankengebilde gegenüber der Erkenntnis des unermeßlichen Reichtums der Wirklichkeit zu befriedigen. Goethe wird rationalistisch, wenn er die mannigfaltigen Formen der Pflanzen- und Tiergestalten darstellen will. Er strebt nach Ideen, die im Naturwerden wirksam sich erweisen, wenn er den geologischen Bau der Erde begreifen oder die Erscheinungen der Meteorologie erfassen will. Aber seine Ideen sind nicht abstrakte Gedanken, sondern auf gedankliche Art in der Seele lebende Bilder. Wenn ich erfaßte, was er an solchen Bildern in seinen naturwissenschaftlichen Arbeiten hingestellt hat, so hatte ich etwas vor mir, das mich im tiefsten meiner Seele befriedigte. Ich schaute auf einen Idee-Bilder-Inhalt, von dem ich glauben mußte, daß er - in weiterer Ausführung - eine wirkliche Spiegelung des Naturgeschehens im Menschengeiste darstellt. Ich war mir klar darüber, daß die herrschende naturwissenschaftliche Denkungsart zu dieser Goethe'schen erhoben werden müsse.
[ 3 ] Zugleich lag aber in dieser Auffassung der Goetheschen Naturerkenntnis die Anforderung, das Wesen des Ideen-Bilder-Inhaltes im Verhältnis zur geistigen Wirklichkeit selbst darzustellen. Die Ideen-Bilder haben doch nur eine Berechtigung, wenn sie auf eine solche geistige Wirklichkeit, die der sinnenfälligen zugrunde liegt, hindeuten. - Aber Goethe in seiner heiligen Scheu vor dem unermeßlichen Reichtum der Wirklichkeit vermeidet es, an die Darstellung der geistigen Welt heranzutreten, nachdem er die sinnliche bis zu einer geistgemäßen Bild-Gestalt in seiner Seele gebracht hat.
[ 4 ] Ich mußte nun zeigen, daß Goethe zwar seelisch leben konnte, indem er von der Sinnes-Natur zur Geist-Natur erkennend vordrang, daß ein anderer aber Goethes Seelenleben nur ganz begreifen kann, wenn er, über ihn hinausgehend, die Erkenntnis bis zur ideengemäßen Auffassung der geistigen Welt selbst führt.
[ 5 ] Goethe stand, indem er über die Natur sprach, im Geiste drinnen. Er fürchtete, abstrakt zu werden, wenn er von diesem lebendigen Drinnenstehen weitergegangen wäre zu einem Leben in Gedanken über dieses Drinnenstehen. Er wollte sich selbst im Geiste empfinden; aber er wollte sich selbst nicht im Geiste denken.
[ 6 ] Oft empfand ich, ich würde der Goethe'schen Denkungsart untreu, wenn ich nun doch Gedanken über seine Weltanschauung zur Darstellung brachte. Und ich mußte mir fast bei jeder Einzelheit, die ich in bezug auf Goethe zu interpretieren hatte, immer wieder die Methode erobern, über Goethe in Goethes Art zu sprechen.
[ 7 ] Meine Darstellung von Goethes Ideen war ein Jahre lang dauerndes Ringen, Goethe durch die Hilfe der eigenen Gedanken immer besser zu verstehen. Indem ich auf dieses Ringen zurückblicke, muß ich mir sagen: ich verdanke ihm viel für die Entwickelung meiner geistigen Erkenntnis-Erlebnisse. Diese Entwickelung ging dadurch viel langsamer vor sich, als es der Fall gewesen wäre, wenn sich die Goethe-Aufgabe nicht schicksalsgemäß auf meinen Lebensgang hingestellt hätte. Ich hätte dann meine geistigen Erlebnisse verfolgt und sie ebenso dargestellt, wie sie vor mich hingetreten wären. Ich wäre schneller in die geistige Welt hineingerissen worden; ich hätte aber keine Veranlassung gefunden, ringend unterzutauchen in das eigene Innere.
[ 8 ] So erlebte ich durch meine Goethe-Arbeit den Unterschied einer Seelenverfassung, der sich die geistige Welt gewissermaßen wie gnadevoll offenbart, und einer solchen, die Schritt vor Schritt das eigene Innere immer mehr dem Geiste erst ähnlich macht, um dann, wenn die Seele sich selbst als wahrer Geist erlebt, in dem Geistigen der Welt darinnen zu stehen. In diesem Darinnenstehen empfindet man aber erst, wie innig in der Menschenseele Menschengeist und Weltengeistigkeit mit einander verwachsen können.
[ 9 ] Ich hatte in der Zeit, da ich an meiner Goethe-Interpretation arbeitete, Goethe stets im Geiste wie einen Mahner neben mir, der mir unaufhörlich zurief: Wer auf geistigen Wegen zu rasch vorschreitet, der kann zwar zu einem engumgrenzten Erleben des Geistes gelangen; allein er tritt an Wirklichkeitsgehalt verarmt aus dem Reichtum des Lebens heraus.
[ 10 ] Ich konnte an meinem Verhältnis zur Goethe-Arbeit recht anschaulich beobachten «wie Karma im Menschenleben wirkt». Das Schicksal setzt sich zusammen aus zwei Tatsachengestaltungen, die im Menschenleben zu einer Einheit zusammenwachsen. Die eine entströmt dem Drange der Seele von innen heraus; die andere tritt von der Außenwelt her an den Menschen heran. Meine eigenen seelischen Triebe gingen nach Anschauung des Geistigen; das äußere Geistesleben der Welt führte die Goethe-Arbeit an mich heran. Ich mußte die beiden Strömungen, die in meinem Bewußtsein sich begegneten, in diesem zur Harmonie bringen. - Ich verbrachte die letzten Jahre meines ersten Lebensabschnittes damit, mich abwechselnd vor mir selbst und vor Goethe zu rechtfertigen.
[ 11 ] Innerlich erlebt war die Aufgabe, die ich mir in meiner Doktorarbeit stellte: «eine Verständigung des menschlichen Bewußtseins mit sich selbst» herbeizuführen. Denn ich sah, wie der Mensch erst dann verstehen konnte, was die wahre Wirklichkeit in der äußeren Welt ist, wenn er diese wahre Wirklichkeit in sich selbst geschaut hat.
[ 12 ] Dieses Zusammentreffen der wahren Wirklichkeit der äußeren Welt mit der wahren Wirklichkeit im Innern der Seele muß für das erkennende Bewußtsein in emsiger geistiger Innentätigkeit errungen werden; für das wollende und handelnde Bewußtsein ist sie immer dann vorhanden, wenn der Mensch im Tun seine Freiheit empfindet.
[ 13 ] Daß die Freiheit im unbefangenen Bewußtsein als etwas Tatsächliches lebt und doch für das Erkennen zur Rätselfrage wird, ist eben darin begründet, daß der Mensch das eigene wahre Sein, das echte Selbstbewußtsein nicht von vornherein gegeben hat, sondern erst nach einer Verständigung seines Bewußtseins mit sich selbst erringen muß. Was des Menschen höchsten Wert ausmacht: die Freiheit, das kann erst nach entsprechender Vorbereitung begriffen werden.
[ 14 ] Meine «Philosophie der Freiheit» ist in einem Erleben begründet, das in der Verständigung des menschlichen Bewußtseins mit sich selbst besteht. Im Wollen wird die Freiheit geübt; im Fühlen wird sie erlebt; im Denken wird sie erkannt. Nur darf, um das zu erreichen, im Denken nicht das Leben verloren werden.
[ 15 ] Während ich an meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» arbeitete, war meine stete Sorge, in der Darstellung meiner Gedanken das innere Erleben bis in diese Gedanken hinein voll wach zu halten. Das gibt den Gedanken den mystischen Charakter des inneren Schauens, macht aber dieses Schauen auch gleich dem äußeren sinnenfälligen Anschauen der Welt. Dringt man zu einem solchen inneren Erleben vor, so empfindet man keinen Gegensatz mehr zwischen Natur-Erkennen und Geist-Erkennen. Man wird sich klar darüber, daß das zweite nur die metamorphosierte Fortsetzung des ersten ist. Weil mir das so erschien, konnte ich später auf das Titelblatt meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» das Motto setzen: «Seelische Beobachtungsresultate nach naturwissenschaftlicher Methode». Denn, wenn die naturwissenschaftliche Methode treulich für das Geistgebiet festgehalten wird, dann führt sie auch erkennend in dieses Gebiet hinein.
[ 16 ] Eine große Bedeutung hatte in dieser Zeit für mich die eingehende Beschäftigung mit Goethes Märchen von der «grünen Schlange und der schönen Lilie», das den Schluß bildet seiner «Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter». Dieses «Rätselmärchen» hat viele Ausleger gefunden. Mir kam es auf eine «Auslegung» des Inhaltes gar nicht an. Den wollte ich in seiner poetisch-künstlerischen Form einfach hinnehmen. Die waltende Phantasie erklärend mit dem Verstande zu zerstäuben, war mir immer unsympathisch.
[ 17 ] Ich sah, wie diese Goethe'sche Dichtung aus dessen geistigem Verkehr mit Schiller hervorgegangen ist Schillers Geist machte, als er seine «Briefe zur Förderung der ästhetischen Erziehung des Menschen» schrieb, die philosophische Epoche seiner Geistesentwickelung durch. Die «Verständigung des menschlichen Bewußtseins mit sich selbst» war eine ihn aufs stärkste beschäftigende Seelenaufgabe. Er sah die menschliche Seele auf der einen Seite ganz hingegeben der Vernunfttätigkeit. Er fühlte, daß die im rein Vernünftigen waltende Seele nicht vom Körperlich-Sinnlichen abhängig ist. Aber er empfand in dieser Art von übersinnlicher Betätigung doch ein Unbefriedigendes. Die Seele ist «im Geiste», wenn sie an die «logische Notwendigkeit» der Vernunft hingegeben ist; aber sie ist in dieser Hingabe weder frei, noch innerlich geistig lebendig. Sie ist an ein abstraktes Schattenbild des Geistes hingegeben; webt und waltet aber nicht in dem Leben und Dasein des Geistes. - Auf der andern Seite bemerkte Schiller, wie die menschliche Seele in einer entgegengesetzten Betätigung ganz an das Körperliche - die sinnlichen Wahrnehmungen und die triebhaften Impulse - hingegeben ist. Da verliert sich in ihr das Wirken aus dem geistigen Schattenbilde; aber sie ist an eine Naturgesetzlichkeit hingegeben, die nicht ihr Wesen ausmacht.
[ 18 ] Schiller kam zu der Anschauung, daß in beiden Betätigungen der Mensch nicht «wahrhafter Mensch» ist. Aber er kann durch sich bewirken, was ihm durch die Natur und den ohne sein Zutun zutage tretenden, vernünftigen Geistesschatten nicht gegeben ist. Er kann in sinnliche Betätigung die Vernunft einführen; und er kann das Sinnliche heraufheben in eine höhere Sphäre des Bewußtseins, so daß es wirkt wie das Geistige. So erlangt er eine mittlere Stimmung zwischen dem logischen und dem natürlichen Zwange. Schiller sieht den Menschen in einer solchen Stimmung, wenn er in dem Künstlerischen lebt. Die ästhetische Erfassung der Welt schaut das Sinnliche an; aber so, daß sie den Geist darin findet. Sie lebt im Schatten des Geistes, aber sie gibt im Schaffen oder Genießen dem Geiste sinnliche Gestalt, so daß er sein Schattendasein verliert.
[ 19 ] Mir war schon Jahre vorher dieses Ringen Schillers nach der Anschauung vom «wahrhaften Menschen» vor die Seele getreten; als nun Goethes «Rätselmärchen» selber für mich zum Rätsel wurde, da stellte es sich neuerdings vor mich hin. Ich sah, wie Goethe die Schiller'sche Darstellung des «wahrhaftigen Menschen» aufgenommen hat. Für ihn war nicht minder als für den Freund die Frage lebendig: wie findet das schattenhafte Geistige in der Seele das Sinnlich-Körperhafte, und wie arbeitet sich das Naturhafte im physischen Körper zum Geistigen hinauf?
[ 20 ] Der Briefwechsel zwischen den beiden Freunden, und was man sonst über ihren geistigen Verkehr wissen kann, bezeugen, daß die Schiller'sche Lösung Goethe zu abstrakt, zu einseitig philosophisch war. Er stellte die anmurvollen Bilder von dem Flusse, der zwei Welten trennt, von Irrlichtern, die den Weg von der einen in die andere Welt suchen, von der Schlange, die sich hingeben muß, um eine Brücke zwischen den beiden Welten zu bilden, von der «schönen Lilie», die «jenseits» des Flusses nur als waltend im Geiste von denen erahnt werden kann, die «diesseits» leben, und vieles andere hin. Er stellte der Schiller'schen philosophischen Lösung eine märchenhaft-poetische Anschauung gegenüber. Er hatte die Empfindung: geht man gegen das von Schiller wahrgenommene Rätsel der Seele mit philosophischen Begriffen vor, so verarmt der Mensch, indem er nach seinem wahren Wesen sucht; er wollte im Reichtum des seelischen Erlebens sich dem Rätsel nahen.
[ 21 ] Die Goethe'schen Märchenbilder weisen zurück auf Imaginationen, die von Suchern nach dem Geist-Erleben der Seele öfters vor Goethe hingestellt worden sind. Die drei Könige des Märchens findet man in einiger Ähnlichkeit in der «Chymischen Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz». Andere Gestalten sind Wieder-Erscheinungen von früher in Bildern des Erkenntnisweges Aufgerretenem. - Bei Goethe erscheinen diese Bilder nur in schöner, edler, künstlerischer Phantasie-Form, während sie vorher doch einen mehr unkünstlerischen Charakter tragen.
[ 22 ] Goethe hat in diesem Märchen die Phantasieschöpfung nahe an die Grenze herangeführt, an der sie in den inneren Seelenvorgang übergeht, der ein erkennendes Erleben der wirklichen geistigen Welten ist. Ich vermeinte, am tiefsten könne man in sein Gemüt sehen, wenn man sich in diese Dichtung versenkt.
[ 23 ] Nicht die Erklärung, wohl aber die Anregungen zu seelischem Erleben, die mir von der Beschäftigung mit dem Märchen kamen, waren mir wichtig. Diese Anregungen wirkten dann in meinem folgenden Seelenleben fort bis in die Gestaltung meiner später geschaffenen Mysteriendramen hinein. Für meine Arbeiten, die sich an Goethe anlehnten, konnte ich aber gerade durch das Märchen nicht viel gewinnen. Denn es erschien mir so, als ob Goethe in der Abfassung dieser Dichtung, wie durch die innere Macht eines halb unbewußten Seelenlebens getrieben, über sich selbst in seiner Weltanschauung hinausgewachsen wäre. Und so erstand mir eine ernsthafte Schwierigkeit. Ich konnte meine Goethe-Interpretation für Kürschners «Deutsche Nationalliteratur» nur in dem Stile fortsetzen, in dem ich sie begonnen hatte, genügte mir aber damit selber nicht. Denn ich sagte mir, Goethe habe, während er an dem «Märchen» schrieb, wie von der Grenze zur geistigen Welt in diese hinübergesehen. Was er aber dann noch über die Naturvorgänge schrieb, das läßt doch wieder den Einblick unbeachtet. Man kann ihn deshalb auch nicht von diesem Einblick aus interpretieren.
[ 24 ] Aber, wenn ich zunächst auch für meine Goethe-Schriften durch das Versenken in das Märchen nichts gewann, so ging doch eine Fülle von Seelenanregungen davon aus. Mir wurde, was sich an Seeleninhalt in Anlehnung an das Märchen ergab, ein wichtiger Meditationsstoff. Ich kam immer wieder darauf zurück. Ich bereitete mir mit dieser Betätigung die Stimmung vor, in der ich in meine Weimarer Arbeit später eintrat.
Chapter XII
[ 1 ] The time it took me to present Goethe's scientific ideas for the introductions in "Kürschner's German National Literature" was a long one. I began in the early eighties and had not yet finished when I entered the second phase of my life with my move from Vienna to Weimar. The reason for this lies in the difficulty I have described with regard to scientific and mystical expression.
[ 2 ] While I was working on bringing Goethe's position on natural science into the right form of ideas, I also had to make progress in shaping what had presented itself to my soul as spiritual experiences in the view of world processes. Thus I was constantly being urged away from Goethe towards the presentation of my own world view and towards him in order to better interpret his thoughts with the ideas I had gained. Above all, I found Goethe's reluctance to satisfy himself with some easily comprehensible theoretical construct of thought as opposed to recognizing the immeasurable richness of reality. Goethe becomes rationalistic when he wants to depict the manifold forms of plant and animal shapes. He strives for ideas that prove effective in becoming nature when he wants to understand the geological structure of the earth or grasp the phenomena of meteorology. But his ideas are not abstract thoughts, but images living in the soul in a mental way. When I grasped the images he had created in his scientific works, I had something before me that satisfied me in the depths of my soul. I looked at an idea-picture-content of which I had to believe that - in further realization - it represented a real reflection of natural events in the human spirit. It was clear to me that the prevailing scientific way of thinking had to be elevated to this Goethean one.
[ 3 ] At the same time, however, in this conception of Goethe's knowledge of nature lay the requirement to depict the essence of the content of the idea-picture in relation to spiritual reality itself. The idea-pictures only have a justification if they point to such a spiritual reality that underlies the sensory reality. - But Goethe, in his holy fear of the immeasurable richness of reality, avoids approaching the depiction of the spiritual world after he has brought the sensual to a spiritual image-form in his soul.
[ 4 ] I now had to show that Goethe was indeed able to live soulfully by penetrating from sense-nature to spirit-nature through cognition, but that another person can only fully comprehend Goethe's soul-life if, going beyond it, he leads the cognition to the conception of the spiritual world itself in accordance with ideas.
[ 5 ] Goethe stood inside the spirit when he spoke about nature. He was afraid of becoming abstract if he had gone on from this living standing inside to a life in thought about this standing inside. He wanted to feel himself in spirit; but he did not want to think himself in spirit.
[ 6 ] I often felt that I would be unfaithful to Goethe's way of thinking if I now expressed thoughts about his world view. And with almost every detail that I had to interpret in relation to Goethe, I had to conquer the method of speaking about Goethe in Goethe's way again and again.
[ 7 ] My presentation of Goethe's ideas was a years-long struggle to understand Goethe better and better with the help of my own thoughts. Looking back on this struggle, I must say to myself: I owe him a great deal for the development of my spiritual cognitive experiences. This development was much slower than it would have been if Goethe's task had not been fated to interfere with the course of my life. I would then have pursued my spiritual experiences and presented them just as they would have appeared before me. I would have been drawn into the spiritual world more quickly; but I would not have found any reason to dive into my own inner self with a struggle.
[ 8 ] Thus, through my work with Goethe, I experienced the difference between a state of soul to which the spiritual world reveals itself as if by grace and one that, step by step, makes one's own inner being more and more similar to the spirit in order to then, when the soul experiences itself as a true spirit, stand within the spiritual world. In this standing within, however, one only feels how intimately the human spirit and the spirituality of the world can grow together in the human soul.
[ 9 ] When I was working on my interpretation of Goethe, I always had Goethe beside me in my mind like an admonisher who kept calling out to me: He who advances too rapidly on spiritual paths may indeed arrive at a narrowly circumscribed experience of the spirit; but he emerges impoverished in reality content from the richness of life.
[ 10 ] I was able to observe quite clearly in my relationship to Goethe's work "how karma works in human life". Fate is composed of two factual formations that grow together into a unity in human life. One flows out of the urge of the soul from within; the other approaches the human being from the outside world. My own spiritual impulses went towards the contemplation of the spiritual; the external spiritual life of the world brought Goethe's work to me. I had to harmonize the two currents that met in my consciousness. - I spent the last years of the first phase of my life justifying myself alternately to myself and to Goethe.
[ 11 ] What I experienced inwardly was the task I set myself in my doctoral thesis: to bring about "an understanding of human consciousness with itself". For I saw how man could only understand what true reality is in the external world once he had seen this true reality within himself.
[ 12 ] This meeting of the true reality of the outer world with the true reality within the soul must be achieved for the cognizing consciousness in diligent spiritual inner activity; for the willing and acting consciousness it is always present when man feels his freedom in action.
[ 13 ] The fact that freedom lives in unbiased consciousness as something factual and yet becomes a puzzle for cognition is due precisely to the fact that man has not given his own true being, his genuine self-consciousness, from the outset, but must only achieve it after his consciousness has come to an understanding with itself. What constitutes man's highest value: freedom, can only be grasped after appropriate preparation.
[ 14 ] My "philosophy of freedom" is founded in an experience that consists in the understanding of human consciousness with itself. Freedom is exercised in willing; it is experienced in feeling; it is recognized in thinking. Only, in order to achieve this, life must not be lost in thinking.
[ 15 ] While I was working on my "Philosophy of Freedom", my constant concern was to keep the inner experience fully alive in the presentation of my thoughts. This gives the thoughts the mystical character of inner vision, but also makes this vision equal to the external, sensory perception of the world. If one penetrates to such an inner experience, one no longer feels a contradiction between recognizing nature and recognizing the spirit. One realizes that the second is only the metamorphosed continuation of the first. Because this seemed to me to be the case, I was later able to put the motto on the title page of my "Philosophy of Freedom": "Results of spiritual observation according to the scientific method". For, if the scientific method is faithfully adhered to for the spiritual realm, then it also leads cognitively into this realm.
[ 16 ] The in-depth study of Goethe's fairy tale of the "green snake and the beautiful lily", which forms the conclusion of his "Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter", was of great importance to me during this time. This "riddle tale" has found many interpreters. I was not interested in an "interpretation" of the content. I simply wanted to accept it in its poetic-artistic form. I always found it unappealing to atomize the active imagination with reason by way of explanation.
[ 17 ] I saw how Goethe's poetry emerged from his intellectual intercourse with Schiller When he wrote his "Letters for the Promotion of the Aesthetic Education of Man", Schiller's mind was going through the philosophical epoch of his intellectual development. The "communication of human consciousness with itself" was a task of the soul that occupied him most intensely. On the one hand, he saw the human soul as completely devoted to the activity of reason. He felt that the soul reigning in the purely rational is not dependent on the physical-sensual. But he felt something unsatisfactory in this kind of supersensible activity. The soul is "in the spirit" when it is surrendered to the "logical necessity" of reason; but in this surrender it is neither free nor inwardly spiritually alive. It is devoted to an abstract shadow-image of the spirit; but it does not weave and reign in the life and existence of the spirit. - On the other hand, Schiller noted how the human soul, in an opposite activity, is entirely devoted to the physical - sensual perceptions and instinctive impulses. There the workings of the spiritual shadow-image are lost in it; but it is given over to a natural lawfulness that does not constitute its essence.
[ 18 ] Schiller came to the conclusion that in both activities man is not a "true man". But he can bring about through himself what is not given to him by nature and the rational shadow of the mind that emerges without his intervention. He can introduce reason into sensual activity; and he can raise the sensual into a higher sphere of consciousness, so that it acts like the spiritual. Thus he attains a middle mood between the logical and the natural compulsion. Schiller sees man in such a mood when he lives in the artistic. The aesthetic perception of the world looks at the sensual, but in such a way that it finds the spirit in it. It lives in the shadow of the spirit, but in creation or enjoyment it gives the spirit sensual form, so that it loses its shadowy existence.
[ 19 ] This struggle of Schiller for the view of the "true man" had already come before my soul years before; when Goethe's "Riddle Tale" itself became a riddle for me, it presented itself to me anew. I saw how Goethe had received Schiller's depiction of the "truthful man". For him, no less than for his friend, the question was alive: how does the shadowy spiritual in the soul find the sensual-bodily, and how does the natural in the physical body work its way up to the spiritual?
[ 20 ] The correspondence between the two friends, and what else can be known about their intellectual intercourse, testify that Schiller's solution was too abstract, too one-sidedly philosophical for Goethe. He presented the alluring images of the river that separates two worlds, of will-o'-the-wisps that seek the way from one world to the other, of the snake that must give itself up in order to form a bridge between the two worlds, of the "beautiful lily" that "beyond" the river can only be imagined by those who live "on this side", and many other things. He contrasted Schiller's philosophical solution with a fairytale-like, poetic view. He had the feeling that if the riddle of the soul perceived by Schiller was approached with philosophical concepts, man would be impoverished in his search for his true nature; he wanted to approach the riddle in the richness of spiritual experience.
[ 21 ] Goethe's fairy-tale images point back to imaginations that have often been placed before Goethe by seekers after the spiritual experience of the soul. The three kings of the fairy tale can be found in some similarity in the "Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz". Other figures are reappearances of earlier images of the path of knowledge. - In Goethe's work, these images only appear in a beautiful, noble, artistic fantasy form, whereas previously they had a more non-artistic character.
[ 22 ] In this fairy tale, Goethe has brought the creation of fantasy close to the limit at which it merges into the inner process of the soul, which is a recognizing experience of the real spiritual worlds. I thought that one could see most deeply into one's mind if one immersed oneself in this poetry.
[ 23 ] I was not interested in the explanation, but rather in the stimuli for spiritual experience that came to me from studying the fairy tale. These stimuli then continued to have an effect on my subsequent spiritual life right through to the creation of my later mystery dramas. However, I did not gain much from the fairy tale for my works, which were based on Goethe. For it seemed to me as if Goethe, in writing this poetry, had outgrown himself in his view of the world, as if driven by the inner power of a half-unconscious soul. And so a serious difficulty arose for me. I could only continue my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's "German National Literature" in the style in which I had begun it, but that was not enough for me. For I told myself that Goethe, while writing the "Fairy Tale", had looked over into the spiritual world as if from the border. What he then wrote about the processes of nature, however, again leaves the insight unnoticed. It is therefore not possible to interpret him from this insight.
[ 24 ] But even if I initially gained nothing for my Goethe writings by immersing myself in the fairy tale, a wealth of inspiration for the soul came from it. The soul content that arose from the fairy tale became important meditation material for me. I returned to it again and again. With this activity, I prepared myself for the mood in which I later entered into my Weimar work.