The Story of My Life
GA 28
Chapter XXII
[ 1 ] At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience. It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses.
[ 2 ] This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life. Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different. An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him.
[ 3 ] I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons. But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things. [ 4 ] For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say.
[ 5 ] But this also cast its light back upon the world of spirit. For, while the sense-world revealed its being through the very act of sense-perception, there was thus present to knowledge the opposite pole also, to enable one to appreciate the spiritual in the fulness of its own character unmingled with the physical.
[ 6 ] Especially was this decisive in its vital effect upon the soul in that it bore also upon the sphere of human life. The task for my observation took this form: to take in quite objectively and purely by way of perception that which lives in a human being. I took pains to refrain from applying any criticism to what men did, not to give way to either sympathy or antipathy in my relation to them; I desired simply to allow “man as he is to work upon me.”
[ 7 ] I soon learned that such an observation of the world leads truly into the world of spirit. In observing the physical world one goes quite outside oneself; and just by reason of this one comes again, with an intensified capacity for spiritual observation, into the spiritual world. [ 8 ] Thus the spiritual world and the sense-world had come before my mind in all their opposition. But I felt opposition to be not something which must be brought into harmony by means of some sort of philosophical thought – perhaps to a “monism.” Rather I felt that to stand thus with one's soul wholly within this opposition meant “to have an understanding for life.” Where the opposition seems to have been reduced to harmony, there the lifeless holds sway – the dead. Where there is life, there works the unharmonized opposition; and life itself is the continuous overcoming, but also the recreating, of oppositions.
[ 9 ] From all this there penetrated into my life of feeling a most intense absorption, not in theoretical comprehension by means of thought, but in an experiencing of whatever the world contains which is in the nature of a riddle.
Over and over again, in order that I might through meditation attain to a right relationship to the world, I held these things before my mind: “There is the world full of riddles. Knowledge would draw near to these. But for the most part it seeks to produce a thought-content as the solution of a riddle. But the riddles” – so I had to say to myself – “are not solved by means of thoughts. These bring the soul along the path toward the solutions, but they do not contain the solutions. In the real world arises a riddle; it is there as a phenomenon; its solution arises also in reality. Something appears which is being or event, and this represents the solution of the other.”
[ 10 ] So I said also to myself: “The whole world except man is a riddle, the real world-riddle; and man himself is its solution!”
[ 11 ] In this way I arrived at the thought: “Man is able at every moment to say something about the world-riddle. What he says, however, can always give only so much of content toward the solution as he has understood of himself as man.” [ 12 ] Thus knowledge also becomes an event in reality. Questions come to light in the world; answers come to light as realities; knowledge in man is his participation in that which the beings and events in the spiritual and physical world have to say. [ 13 ] All this, to be sure, is contained both in its general significance and in certain passages quite distinctly in the writings I published during the period I am here describing. Only it became at this time the most intense mental experience, filling the hours in which understanding sought through meditation to look into the foundations of the world, and – which is the fact of chief importance – this mental experience in its strength came at that time out of my objective absorption in pure, undisturbed sense-observation. In this observation a new world was given to me; from what had until this time been present to knowledge in my mind, I had to seek for that which was the counterpart in mental experience in order to strike a balance with the new. [ 14 ] The moment I did not think the whole reality of the sense-world, but contemplated this world through the senses, there was brought before me a riddle as a reality; and in man himself lies its solution.
[ 15 ] In my whole mental being there was a living inspiration for that which I later called “knowledge by way of reality.” And especially was it clear to me that man possessed of such a “knowledge by way of reality” could not stand in some corner of the world while being and becoming should be taking their course outside of him. Understanding became to me something that belongs, not to man alone, but to the being and becoming of the world. Just as the roots and trunk of a tree are not complete if they do not send their life into the flower, so are the being and becoming of the world nothing truly existing if they do not live again as the content of understanding. Having reached this insight, I said to myself on every occasion at which this came up: “Man is not a being who creates for himself the content of understanding, but he provides in his soul the stage on which for the first time the world partly experiences its existence and its becoming.” Were it not for understanding, the world would remain incomplete. In thus knowingly living in the reality of the world I found more and more the possibility of creating a defence for human knowledge against the view that in this knowledge man is making a copy, or some such thing, of the world.
For my idea of knowledge he actually partakes in the creation of the world instead of merely making afterwards a copy which could be omitted from the world without thereby leaving the world incomplete.
[ 16 ] But this led also to an ever increasing clarity of understanding with reference to the “mystical.” The participation of human experience in the world-event was removed from the sphere of indeterminate mystical feeling and transferred to the light in which ideas reveal themselves. The sense-world, seen purely in its own nature, is at first void of idea, as the root and trunk of the tree are void of blossoms. But just as the blossom is not a disappearance and eclipse of the plant's existence, but a transformation of that very existence, so the ideal world in man as related to the sense-world is a transformation of the sense-existence, and not a darkly mystical interjection of something indefinite from the human soul world. Clear as things physical become in their way in the light of the sun, so spiritually clear must that appear which lives in the human soul as knowledge.
[ 17 ] What was then present in me in this orientation was an altogether clear experience of the soul. Yet in passing on to find a form of expression for this experience the difficulties were extraordinary.
[ 18 ] It was at the close of my Weimar period that I wrote my book Goethe's World-Conception, and the introduction to the last volume that I edited for Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur. I am thinking especially of what I then wrote as an introduction to my edition of Goethe's Sprüchen in Prosa, and compare this with the formulation of contents in the book Goethe's World-Conception. If the matter is considered only superficially, this or that contradiction can be made out between the one and the other of these expositions, which I wrote at almost the same time. But, if one looks to what is vital beneath the surface – to that which, in the mere shaping and formulating of the surface, would reveal itself as perception of the depths of life, of the soul, of the spirit – then one will find no contradictions, but, indeed, in my writings of that period, a striving after means of expression. A striving to bring into philosophical concepts just that which I have here described as experience of knowledge, of the relation of man to the world, of the riddle-becoming and riddle-solving within the truly real.
[ 19 ] When I wrote, about three and a half years later, my book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert I had made still further progress in many things; and I could draw upon my experience in knowledge here set forth in describing the individual world-conceptions as they have appeared in the course of history. [ 20 ] Whoever rejects writings because the life of the mind knowingly strives within these – that is, because, in the light of the exposition here given, the world-life in its striving unfolds itself still further on the stage of the human mind – such a person cannot, according to my view, submerge himself with knowing mind into the truly real. [ 21 ] This is something which at that time became confirmed within me as perception, although it had long before been vitally present in my conceptual world In connection with the revolution in my mental life stand inner experiences of grave import for me. I came to know in my mental experience the nature of meditation and its importance for insight into the spiritual world. Even before this time I had lived a life of meditation; but the impulse to this had come from a knowledge through ideas as to its value for a spiritual world-conception. Now, however, there arose within me something which demanded meditation as a necessity of existence for my mental life. The striving life of the mind needed meditation just as an organism at a certain stage in its evolution needs to breathe by means of lungs.
[ 22 ] How the ordinary conceptual knowledge, which is attained through sense-observation, is related to perception of the spiritual, became for me, at this period of my life, not only an experience through ideas as it had been, but one in which the whole man participated. The experience through ideas – which, however, takes up within itself the real spiritual – has given birth to my book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Experience by means of the whole man attains to the spiritual world in its very being far more than does experience through ideas. And yet this latter is a higher stage as compared with the conceptual grasp upon the sense-world.
In the experience through ideas one grasps, not the sense-world, but a spiritual world which to a certain extent rests immediately upon this.
[ 23 ] While all this was seeking for experience and expression in my soul, three sorts of knowledge were inwardly present before me. The first sort is the conceptual knowledge attained in sense-observation. This is acquired by the soul, and then sustained within in proportion to the powers of thought there existent. Repetitions of the acquired content have no other significance than that this may be well sustained. The second sort of knowledge is that which is not woven of concepts taken from sense-observation but experienced inwardly, independently of the senses. Then experience, by reason of its very nature, becomes the guarantor of the fact that these concepts are grounded in reality. To this realization that concepts contain the guarantee of spiritual reality one attains with certitude by reason of the nature of experience, just as one experiences in connection with knowledge through the senses a certainty that one is not in the presence of illusions but of reality.
[ 24 ] In the case of this ideal-spiritual knowledge one is not content – as in the case of the sense-knowledge – with the acquisition of the knowledge, with the result that one then possesses this in one's thought. One must make this process of acquisition a continuous process. Just as it is not sufficient for an organism to have breathed for a certain length of time in order then to metamorphose what has been acquired through breathing into further life processes, so also an acquiring like that of sense-knowledge does not suffice for the ideal-spiritual knowledge. For this it is necessary that the mind should remain in a continuous interchange with that world into which one has entered through knowledge. This takes place by means of meditation, which – as above indicated – arises out of one's ideal insight into the value of meditating. This interchange I had sought long before this revolution in my thirty-fifth year.
[ 25 ] What now came about was meditation as a necessity for the mental life; and with this there stood before my mind the third form of knowledge. This not only led to greater depths of the spiritual world, but also permitted an intimate living communion with this world. By force of an inner necessity I was compelled to set up again and again at the very central point of my consciousness an absolutely definite sort of conception.
[ 26 ] It was this: [ 27 ] If in my mind I live in conceptions which rest upon the sense-world, then, in my direct experience, I am in position to speak of the reality of what is experienced only so long as I confront with sense-observation a thing or an event. My sense assures me of the reality of what is observed so long as I observe it.
[ 28 ] Not so when I unite myself through ideal-spiritual knowledge with beings or events of the spiritual world. Here there enters into the single perception the direct experience of the status of the thing of which I am aware continuing beyond the duration of observation. For instance, if one experiences the human ego as the inner being most fundamentally one's own, then one knows in the perceiving experience that this ego was before the life in the physical body and will be after this. What one experiences thus in the ego reveals this directly, just as the rose reveals its redness in the act of our becoming aware.
[ 29 ] In such meditation, practised because of inner spiritual necessity, there was gradually evolved the consciousness of an “inner spiritual man” who, through a more complete release from the physical organism, can live, perceive, and move in the spiritual. This self-sufficing spiritual man entered into my experience under the influence of meditation. The experience of the spiritual thereby underwent an essential deepening. That sense-observation arises by means of the organism can be sufficiently proven by the sort of self observation possible in the case of this knowledge. But neither is the ideal-spiritual knowledge yet independent of the organism. Self-comprehension shows the following as to this: For sense-observation the single act of knowing is bound up with the organism. For the ideal-spiritual knowing the single act is entirely independent of the physical organism; but the possibility that such knowledge may be unfolded at all by man requires that in general the life within the organism shall be existent. In the case of the third form of knowing the situation is this: it can come into being in the spiritual man only when he can make himself as free from the physical organism as if this were not there at all.
[ 30 ] A consciousness of all this evolved under the influence of the life of meditation. I was able truly to refute for myself the opinion that in such meditation one becomes subject to a form of auto-suggestion whose product is the resulting spiritual experience. For the very first ideal-spiritual knowledge had been enough to convince me of the reality of spiritual experience: not only the experience sustained in its life by meditation, but indeed the very first of all, that whose life thus merely began. As one establishes absolutely exact truth in a discriminating consciousness, so I had already done for what is here brought forward before there could have been any question of auto-suggestion. Therefore, in the case of what was attained by meditation, the question could have to do only with something whose reality I was in a position to test prior to the experience.
[ 31 ] All this, bound up with my mental revolution, appeared in connection with the result of a practicable self-observation which, like that described, came to have a momentous significance for me.
[ 32 ] I felt that the ideal element in the ongoing life retired in a certain aspect, and the element of will took its place. If this is to be possible, the will during the unfolding of knowledge must succeed in ridding itself of everything arbitrary and subjective. The will increased as the ideal diminished. And the will also took over the spiritual knowledge which hitherto had been controlled almost wholly by the ideal. I had, indeed, already known that the separation of the soul's life into thinking, feeling, and willing has only limited significance. In truth there is a feeling and a willing contained in thinking; only thinking predominates over the others. In feeling there lives thinking and willing; in willing, likewise, thinking and feeling. Now it became to me a matter of experience that the willing took more from thinking; thinking more from willing.
[ 33 ] As meditation leads on the one side to a knowledge of the spiritual, on another side there follows as a result of such self-observation the inner strengthening of the spiritual man, independent of the organism, and the establishment of his being in the spiritual world, just as the physical man has his establishment in the physical world. Only one becomes aware that the establishment of the spiritual man in the spiritual world increases immeasurably when the physical organism does not cramp this process of establishment; whereas the establishment of the physical organism in the physical world yields to destruction – at death – when the spiritual man no longer sustains this establishment from itself outward. [ 34 ] For such an experiential knowledge, that form of theory of cognition is inapplicable which represents human knowledge as limited to a certain field, and considers the “beyond” the “primal bases,” the “thing in itself” as unattainable by human knowledge. That “unattainable” I felt to be such only “for the present”; it can continue unattainable only until man has evolved within himself that element of his being which is allied to the hitherto unknown, and can henceforth grow into one with this in experiential knowledge. This capacity of man to grow into every form of being became for me something that must be recognized by the person who desires to see the place of man in relation to the world in its true light. Whoever cannot penetrate to this recognition, to him knowledge cannot give something which really belongs to the world, but only a copy of some part of the world-content, something to which the world itself is indifferent. But through such a merely reproducing knowledge man cannot grasp a being within himself, which gives to him as a fully conscious individuality an inner experience of the truth that he stands fast within the cosmos.
[ 35 ] What I wished to do was to speak of knowledge in such a way that the spiritual should be not merely recognized, but so recognized that man may reach it with his perception. And it seemed to me more important to hold fast to the fact that the “primal basis” of existence lies within that which man is able to reach in his totality of experience than to recognize in thought an unknown spiritual in some sort of “beyond” region.
[ 36 ] For this reason my view rejected that form of thinking which considers the content of sense-experience (colour, heat, tone, etc.) to be something which an unknown external world calls up within man by means of his sense-perception while this external world itself can be conceived only hypothetically. The theoretical ideas which lie at the foundation of the thinking in physics and physiology in this direction seemed to my experiential knowledge as being in very special degree harmful. This feeling increased to the utmost intensity at the period of my life which I am here describing. All that was designated in physics and physiology as “lying behind subjective experience” caused me – if I may use such an expression – discomfort in knowledge.
[ 37 ] On the other hand I saw in the form of thinking of Lyell, Darwin, Haeckel something which, although incomplete as it issued from them, was nevertheless suitable to a sound mind according to the order of evolution.
[ 38 ] Lyell's basic principle – to explain by means of ideas which result from present observation of the earth's nature those phenomena which escape from sense-observation because they belong to past ages – this seemed to me fruitful in the direction indicated. To seek for an understanding of the physical structure of man by tracing his form from the animal forms, as Haeckel does in comprehensive fashion in his Anthropogenie appeared to me a good foundation for the further evolution of knowledge.
[ 39 ] I said to myself: “If man places before himself a boundary of knowledge beyond which is supposed to lie ‘the thing in itself,’ he thus bars himself from any access to the spiritual world; if he relates himself to the sense-world in such a way that one thing explains another within that world (the present stage in the earth's becoming thus explaining past geological ages; animal forms explaining that of man), he may thus prepare himself to extend this intelligibility of beings and events also to the spiritual.”
[ 40 ] As to my experience in this field also I can say: “This is something which was just at that time confirmed in me as perception, whereas it had long before been vitally present in my conceptual world.”
Chapter XXII
[ 1 ] Am Ende meiner weimarischen Zeit hatte ich sechsunddreißig Lebensjahre hinter mir. Schon ein Jahr vorher hatte in meiner Seele ein tiefgehender Umschwung seinen Anfang genommen. Mit meinem Weggang von Weimar wurde er einschneidendes Erlebnis. Er war ganz unabhängig von der Änderung meiner äußeren Lebensverhältnisse, die ja auch eine große war. Das Erfahren von dem, was in der geistigen Welt erlebt werden kann, war mir immer eine Selbstverständlichkeit; das wahrnehmende Erfassen der Sinneswelt bot mir die größten Schwierigkeiten. Es war, als ob ich das seelische Erleben nicht so weit in die Sinnesorgane hätte ergießen können, um, was diese erlebten, auch vollinhaltlich mit der Seele zu verbinden.
[ 2 ] Das änderte sich völlig vom Beginne des sechsunddreißigsten Lebensjahres angefangen. Mein Beobachtungsvermögen fär Dinge, Wesen und Vorgänge der physischen Welt gestaltete sich nach der Richtung der Genauigkeit und Eindringlichkeit um. Das war sowohl im Wissenschaftlichen wie im äußeren Leben der Fall. Während es vorher fär mich so war, daß große wissenschaftliche Zusammenhänge, die auf geistgemäße Art zu erfassen sind, ohne alle Mühe mein seelisches Eigentum wurden und das sinnliche Wahrnehmen und namentlich dessen erinnerungsgemäßes Behalten mir die größten Anstrengungen machte, wurde jetzt alles anders. Eine vorher nicht vorhandene Aufmerksamkeit für das Sinnlich-Wahrnehmbare erwachte in mir. Einzelheiten wurden mir wichtig; ich hatte das Gefühl, die Sinneswelt habe etwas zu enthüllen, was nur sie enthüllen kann. Ich betrachtete es als ein Ideal, sie kennen zu lernen allein durch das, was sie zu sagen hat, ohne daß der Mensch etwas durch sein Denken oder durch einen andern in seinem Innern auftretenden Seelen4nhalt in sie hineinträgt.
[ 3 ] Ich wurde gewahr, daß ich einen menschlichen Lebensumschwung in einem viel spätern Lebensabschnitt erlebte als andere. Ich sah aber auch, daß das für das Seelenleben ganz bestimmte Folgen hat. Ich fand, wie die Menschen, weil sie früh vom seelischen Weben in der geistigen Welt zum Erleben des Physischen übergehen, zu keinem reinen Erfassen weder der geistigen, noch der physischen Welt gelangen. Sie vermischen fortdauernd ganz instinktiv dasjenige, was die Dinge ihren Sinnen sagen, mit dem, was die Seele durch den Geist erlebt und was dann von ihr mitgebraucht wird, um sich die Dinge «vorzustellen».
[ 4 ] Für mich war in der Genauigkeit und Eindringlichkeit der sinnenfälligen Beobachtung das Beschreiten einer ganz neuen Welt gegeben. Das von allem Subjektiven in der Seele freie, objektive Sich-Gegenüberstellen der Sinneswelt offenbarte etwas, worüber eine geistige Anschauung nichts zu sagen hatte.
[ 5 ] Das warf aber auch sein Licht auf die Welt des Geistes zurück. Denn indem die Sinneswelt im sinnlichen Wahrnehmen selbst ihr Wesen enthüllte, war fär das Erkennen der Gegenpol da, um das Geistige in seiner vollen Eigenart, unvermischt mit dem Sinnlichen, zu würdigen.
[ 6 ] Besonders einschneidend in das Seelenleben wirkte dieses, weil es sich auch auf dem Gebiete des menschlichen Lebens zeigte. Meine Beobachtungsgabe stellte sich darauf ein, dasjenige ganz objektiv, rein in der Anschauung hinzunehmen, was ein Mensch darlebte. Mit Ängstlichkeit vermied ich, Kritik zu üben an dem, was die Menschen taten, oder Sympathie und Antipathie in meinem Verhältnis zu ihnen geltend zu machen: ich wollte «den Menschen, wie er ist, einfach auf mich wirken lassen».
[ 7 ] Ich fand bald, daß ein solches Beobachten der Welt wahrhaft in die geistige Welt hineinführt. Man geht im Beobachten der physischen Welt ganz aus sich heraus; und man kommt gerade dadurch mit einem gesteigerten geistigen Beobachtungsvermögen wieder in die geistige Welt hinein.
[ 8 ] So waren damals die geistige und die sinnenfällige Welt in ihrer vollen Gegensätzlichkeit mir vor die Seele getreten. Aber ich empfand den Gegensatz nicht als etwas, das durch irgendwelche philosophische Gedanken - etwa zu einem «Monismus» - ausgleichend geführt werden müßte. Ich empfand vielmehr, daß ganz voll mit der Seele in diesem Gegensatz drinnen stehen, gleichbedeutend ist mit «Verständnis für das Leben haben». Wo die Gegensätze als ausgeglichen erlebt werden, da herrscht das Lebenslose, das Tote. Wo Leben ist, da wirkt der unausgeglichene Gegensatz; und das Leben selbst ist die fortdauernde Überwindung, aber zugleich Neuschöpfung von Gegensätzen.
[ 9 ] Aus alledem drang in mein Gefühlsleben eine ganz intensive Hingabe nicht an ein gedankenmäßiges theoretisches Erfassen, sondern an ein Erleben des Rätselhaften in der Welt. Ich stellte, um meditativ das rechte Verhältnis zur Welt zu gewinnen, immer wieder vor meine Seele: Da ist die Welt voller Rätsel. Erkenntnis möchte an sie herankommen. Aber sie will zumeist einen Gedankeninhalt als Lösung eines Rätsels aufweisen. Doch die Rätsel - so mußte ich mir sagen - lösen sich nicht durch Gedanken. Diese bringen die Seele auf den Weg der Lösungen; aber sie enthalten die Lösungen nicht. In der wirklichen Welt entsteht ein Rätsel; es ist als Erscheinung da; seine Lösung ersteht ebenso in der Wirklichkeit. Es tritt etwas auf, das Wesen oder Vorgang ist; und das die Lösung des andern darstellt.
[ 10 ] So sagte ich mir auch: die ganze Welt, außer dem Menschen, ist ein Rätsel, das eigentliche Welträtsel; und der Mensch ist selbst die Lösung.
[ 11 ] Dadurch konnte ich denken: der Mensch vermag in jedem Augenblick etwas über das Welträtsel zu sagen. Was er sagt, kann aber stets nur so viel an Inhalt über die Lösung geben, als er selbst über sich als Mensch erkannt hat.
[ 12 ] So wird auch das Erkennen zu einem Vorgang in der Wirklichkeit. Fragen offenbaren sich in der Welt; Antworten offenbaren sich als Wirklichkeiten; Erkenntnis im Menschen ist dessen Teilnahme an dem, was sich die Wesen und Vorgänge in der geistigen und physischen Welt zu sagen haben.
[ 13 ] Es war dies alles zwar schon andeutungsweise, an einigen Stellen sogar ganz deutlich in den Schriften enthalten, die von mir bis in die hier geschilderte Zeit gedruckt sind. Allein in dieser Zeit wurde es intensivstes Seelen-Erlebnis, das die Stunden erfüllte, in denen Erkenntnis meditierend auf die Weltgründe blicken wollte. Und was die Hauptsache ist: dieses Seelen-Erlebnis ging in seiner damaligen Stärke aus dem objektiven Hingeben an die reine, ungetrübte Sinnes-Beobachtung hervor. Mir war in dieser Beobachtung eine neue Welt gegeben; ich mußte aus dem, was bisher erkennend in meiner Seele war, dasjenige suchen, was das seelische Gegen-Erlebnis war, um das Gleichgewicht mit dem Neuen zu bewirken.
[ 14 ] Sobald ich die ganze Wesenhaftigkeit der Sinneswelt nicht dachte, sondern sinnlich anschaute, ward ein Rätsel als Wirklichkeit hingestellt. Und im Menschen selbst liegt dessen Lösung.
[ 15 ] Es lebte in meinem ganzen Seelenwesen die Begeisterung für dasjenige, was ich später «wirklichkeitsgemäße Erkenntnis» nannte. Und namentlich war mir klar, daß der Mensch mit einer solchen «wirklichkeitsgemäßen Erkenntnis» nicht in irgendeiner Weltecke stehen könne, während sich außer ihm das Sein und Werden abspielt. Erkenntnis wurde mir dasjenige, was nicht allein zum Menschen, sondern zu dem Sein und Werden der Welt gehört. Wie Wurzel und Stamm eines Baumes nichts Vollendetes sind, wenn sie nicht in die Blüte sich hineinleben, so sind Sein und Werden der Welt nichts wahrhaft Bestehendes, wenn sie nicht zum Inhalt der Erkenntnis weiterleben. Auf diese Einsicht blickend, wiederholte ich bei jeder Gelegenheit, bei der es angebracht war: der Mensch ist nicht das Wesen, das für sich den Inhalt der Erkenntnis schafft, sondern er gibt mit seiner Seele den Schauplatz her, auf dem die Welt ihr Dasein und Werden zum Teil erst erlebt. Gäbe es nicht Erkenntnis, die Welt bliebe unvollendet. In solchem erkennenden Einleben in die Wirklichkeit der Welt fand ich immer mehr die Möglichkeit, dem Wesen der menschlichen Erkenntnis einen Schutz zu schaffen gegen die Ansicht, als ob der Mensch in dieser Erkenntnis ein Abbild oder dergleichen der Welt schaffe. Zum Mitschöpfer an der Welt selbst wurde er fär meine Idee des Erkennens, nicht zum Nachschaffer von etwas, das auch aus der Welt wegbleiben könnte, ohne daß diese unvollendet wäre.
[ 16 ] Aber auch zur « Mystik» hin wurde dadurch fur mein Erkennen immer größere Klarheit geschaffen. Das MitErleben des Weltgeschehens von Seiten des Menschen wurde aus dem unbestimmten mystischen Erfühlen herausgezogen und in das Licht gerückt, in dem die Ideen sich offenbaren. Die Sinnenwelt, rein in ihrer Eigenart angeschaut, ist zunächst Ideen4os wie die Wurzel und der Stamm des Baumes Blütelos sind. Aber wie die Blüte nicht ein sich verdunkelndes Hinschwinden des Pflanzen-Daseins ist, sondern eine Umformung dieses Daseins selbst, so ist die auf die Sinneswelt bezügliche Ideenwelt im Menschen eine Umformung des Sinnesdaseins, nicht ein mystisch-dunkles Hineinwirken von etwas Unbestimmtem in die Seelenwelt des Menschen. So hell wie in ihrer Art die physischen Dinge und Vorgänge im Lichte der Sonne, so geistig hell muß erscheinen, was als Erkenntnis in der Menschen-Seele lebt.
[ 17 ] Es war ein ganz klares Seelen-Erleben, was in dieser Orientierung damals in mir vorhanden war. Doch im Übergehen dazu, diesem Erleben Ausdruck zu verschaffen, lag etwas außerordentlich Schwieriges.
[ 18 ] Es entstanden in meiner letzten weimarischen Zeit mein Buch «Goethes Weltanschauung», und die Einleitungen zum letzten Band, den ich für die Ausgabe in «Kürschners Deutscher National-Literatur» herausgegeben hatte. Ich sehe da insbesondere auf dasjenige hin, was ich als Einleitung zu den von mir herausgegebenen «Sprüchen in Prosa» von Goethe geschrieben habe und vergleiche dieses mit der Formulierung des Inhaltes des Buches «Goethes Weltanschauung». Man kann, wenn man die Dinge nur an der Oberfläche betrachtet, diesen oder jenen Widerspruch konstruieren zwischen dem Einen und dem Andern in diesen meinen fast in der ganz gleichen Zeit entstandenen Darstellungen. Sieht man aber nach dem, was unter der Oberfläche lebt, was in den an der Oberfläche sich nur gestaltenden Formulierungen sich als Anschauung der Lebens-, Seelen- und Geistes-Tiefen offenbaren will, so wird man nicht Widersprüche finden, sondern gerade in meinen damaligen Arbeiten ein Ringen nach Ausdruck. Ein Ringen, eben das in die Weltanschauungsbegriffe hineinzubringen, was ich hier als Erlebnis von der Erkenntnis, von dem Verhältnis des Menschen zur Welt, von dem Rätsel-Werden und Rätsel-Lösen innerhalb der wahren Wirklichkeit geschildert habe.
[ 19 ] Als ich etwa dreieinhalb Jahre später mein Buch «Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert» schrieb, war manches bei mir wieder weiter; und ich konnte mein hier dargestelltes Erkenntnis-Erlebnis für die Schilderung der einzelnen, in der Geschichte auftretenden Weltanschauungen fruchtbar machen.
[ 20 ] Wer Schriften deshalb ablehnen will, weil in ihnen das seelische Leben erkennend ringt, das heißt im Lichte der hier gegebenen Darstellung, in ihnen das Weltenleben in seinem Ringen auf dem Schauplatze der Menschenseele weiter sich entfaltet, dem kann es - meiner Einsicht nach - nicht gelingen, mit seiner erkennenden Seele in die wahre Wirklichkeit unterzutauchen. Das ist etwas, das sich als Anschauung gerade damals in mir befestigt hat, während es meine Begriffswelt lange schon durchpulst hatte.
[ 21 ] Im Zusammenhange mit dem Umschwung in meinem Seelenleben stehen für mich inhaltsschwere innere Erfahrungen. - Ich erkannte im seelischen Erleben das Wesen der Meditation und deren Bedeutung für die Einsichten in die geistige Welt. Ich hatte auch früher schon ein meditatives Leben geführt; doch kam der Antrieb dazu aus der ideellen Erkenntnis seines Wertes für eine geistgemäße Weltanschauung. Nunmehr trat in meinem Innern etwas auf, das die Meditation forderte wie etwas, das meinem Seelenleben eine Daseinsnotwendigkeit wurde. Das errungene Seelenleben brauchte die Meditation, wie der Organismus auf einer gewissen Stufe seiner Entwickelung die Lungenatmung braucht.
[ 22 ] Wie die gewöhnliche begriffliche Erkenntnis, die an der Sinnesbeobachtung gewonnen wird, sich zu der Anschauung des Geistigen verhält, das wurde mir in diesem Lebensabschnitt aus einem mehr ideellen Erleben zu einem solchen, an dem der ganze Mensch beteiligt ist. Das ideelle Erleben, das aber das wirkliche Geistige doch in sich aufnimmt, ist das Element, aus dem meine «Philosophie der Freiheit» geboren ist. Das Erleben durch den ganzen Menschen enthält die Geisteswelt in einer viel wesenhafteren Art als das ideelle Erleben. Und doch ist dieses schon eine obere Stufe gegenüber dem begrifflichen Erfassen der Sinneswelt. Im ideellen Erleben erfaßt man nicht die Sinneswelt, sondern eine gewissermaßen unmittelbar an sie angrenzende geistige Welt.
[ 23 ] Indem all das damals nach Ausdruck und Erlebnis in meiner Seele suchte, standen drei Arten von Erkenntnis vor meinem Innern. Die erste Art ist die an der Sinnesbeobachtung gewonnene Begriffs-Erkenntnis. Sie wird von der Seele angeeignet und dann nach Maßgabe der vorhandenen Gedächtniskraft im Innern behalten. Wiederholungen des anzueignenden Inhaltes haben nur die Bedeutung, daß dieser gut behalten werden könne. Die zweite Art der Erkenntnis ist die, bei der nicht an der Sinnesbeobachtung Begriffe erworben, sondern diese unabhängig von den Sinnen im Innern erlebt werden. Es wird dann das Erleben durch seine eigene Wesenheit Bürge dafür, daß die Begriffe in geistiger Wirklichkeit gegründet sind. Zu dem Erfahren, daß Begriffe die Bürgschaft geistiger Wirklichkeit enthalten, kommt man mit derselben Sicherheit aus der Natur der Erfahrung bei dieser Art von Erkenntnis, wie man bei der Sinneserkenntnis die Gewißheit erlangt, daß man nicht Illusionen, sondern physische Wirklichkeit vor sich habe.
[ 24 ] Bei dieser ideell-geistigen Erkenntnis genügt nun schon nicht mehr - wie bei der sinnlichen - ein Aneignen, das dann dazu führt, daß man sie für das Gedächtnis hat. Man muß den Aneignungsvorgang zu einem fortdauernden machen. Wie es für den Organismus nicht genügt, eine Zeitlang geatmet zu haben, um dann in der Atmung das Angeeignete im weiteren Lebensprozeß zu verwenden, so genügt ein der Sinneserkenntnis ähnliches Aneignen für die ideell-geistige Erkenntnis nicht. Für sie ist notwendig, daß die Seele in einer fortdauernden lebendigen Wechselwirkung stehe mit der Welt, in die man sich durch diese Erkenntnis versetzt. Das geschieht durch die Meditation, die - wie oben angedeutet - aus der ideellen Einsicht in den Wert des Meditierens hervorgeht. Diese Wechselwirkung hatte ich schon lange vor meinem Seelenumschwunge (im fünfunddreißigsten Lebensjahre) gesucht.
[ 25 ] Was jetzt eintrat, war Meditieren als seelische Lebensnotwendigkeit. Und damit stand die dritte Art der Erkenntnis vor meinem Innern. Sie führte nicht nur in weitere Tiefen der geistigen Welt, sondern gewährte auch ein intimes Zusammenleben mit dieser. Ich mußte, eben aus innerer Notwendigkeit, eine ganz bestimmte Art von Vorstellungen immer wieder in den Mittelpunkt meines Bewußtseins rücken.
[ 26 ] Es war diese:
[ 27 ] Lebe ich mich mit meiner Seele in Vorstellungen ein, die an der Sinneswelt gebildet sind, so bin ich im unmittelbaren Erfahren nur imstande, von der Wirklichkeit des Erlebten so lange zu sprechen, als ich sinnlich beobachtend einem Dinge oder Vorgange gegenüberstehe. Der Sinn verbürgt mir die Wahrheit des Beobachteten, solange ich beobachte.
[ 28 ] Nicht so, wenn ich mich durch ideell-geistige Erkenntnis mit Wesen oder Vorgängen der geistigen Welt verbinde. Da tritt in der Einzel-Anschauung die unmittelbare Erfahrung von dem über die Anschauungsdauer hinausgehenden Bestand des Wahrgenommenen ein. Erlebt man zum Beispiel das «Ich» des Menschen als dessen ureigenste innere Wesenheit, so weiß man im anschauenden Erleben, daß dieses «Ich» vor dem Leben im physischen Leibe war und nach demselben sein wird. Was man so im «Ich» erlebt, offenbart dieses unmittelbar, wie die Rose ihre Röte im unmittelbaren Wahrnehmen offenbart.
[ 29 ] In einer solchen aus innerer geistiger Lebensnotwendigkeit geübten Meditation entwickelt sich immer mehr das Bewußtsein von einem «inneren geistigen Menschen», der in völliger Loslösung von dem physischen Organismus im Geistigen leben, wahrnehmen und sich bewegen kann. Dieser in sich selbständige geistige Mensch trat in meine Erfahrung unter dem Einfluß der Meditation. Das Erleben des Geistigen erfuhr dadurch eine wesentliche Vertiefung. Daß die sinnliche Erkenntnis durch den Organismus entsteht, davon kann die für diese Erkenntnis mögliche Selbstbeobachtung ein genügendes Zeugnis geben. Aber auch die ideell-geistige Erkenntnis ist von dem Organismus noch abhängig. Die Selbstbeobachtung zeigt dafür dieses: Für die Sinnesbeobachtung ist der einzelne Erkenntnisakt an den Organismus gebunden. Für die ideell-geistige Erkenntnis ist der einzelne Akt ganz unabhängig von dem physischen Organismus; daß aber solche Erkenntnis überhaupt durch den Menschen entfaltet werden kann, hängt davon ab, daß im allgemeinen das Leben im Organismus vorhanden ist. Bei der dritten Art von Erkenntnis ist es so, daß sie nur dann durch den geistigen Menschen zustande kommen kann, wenn er sich von dem physischen Organismus so frei macht, als ob dieser gar nicht vorhanden wäre.
[ 30 ] Ein Bewußtsein von alledem entwickelte sich unter dem Einfluß des geschilderten meditativen Lebens. Ich konnte die Meinung, man unterliege durch eine solche Meditation einer Art von Autosuggestion, deren Ergebnis die folgende Geist-Erkenntnis sei, für mich wirksam widerlegen. Denn von der Wahrheit des geistigen Erlebens hatte mich schon die allererste ideell-geistige Erkenntnis überzeugen können. Und zwar wirklich die allererste, nicht bloß die im Meditieren an ihrem Leben erhaltene, sondern die, welche ihr Leben begann. Wie man in besonnenem Bewußtsein ganz exakt Wahrheit feststellt, das hatte ich schon getan für das, was in Frage kommt, bevor überhaupt von Autosuggestion hat die Rede sein können. Es konnte sich bei dem, was die Meditation errungen hatte, also nur um das Erleben von etwas handeln, dessen Wirklichkeit zu prüfen ich vor dem Erleben schon völlig imstande war.
[ 31 ] All dieses, das mit meinem Seelen-Umschwung verbunden war, zeigte sich im Zusammenhang mit einem Ergebnis möglicher Selbstbeobachtung, das ebenso wie das geschilderte für mich inhaltschwere Bedeutung gewann.
[ 32 ] Ich fühlte, wie das Ideelle des vorangehenden Lebens nach einer gewissen Richtung zurücktrat und das Willensmäßige an dessen Stelle kam. Damit das möglich ist, muß sich das Wollen bei der Erkenntnis-Entfaltung aller subjektiven Willkür enthalten können. Der Wille nahm in dem Maße zu, als das Ideelle abnahm. Und der Wille übernahm auch das geistige Erkennen, das vorher fast ganz von dem Ideellen geleistet worden ist. Ich hatte ja schon erkannt, daß die Gliederung des Seelenlebens in Denken, Fühlen und Wollen nur eingeschränkte Bedeutung [328] hat. In Wahrheit ist im Denken ein Fühlen und Wollen mitenthalten; nur ist über die letzteren das Denken vorherrschend. Im Fühlen lebt Denken und Wollen, im Wollen Denken und Fühlen ebenso. Nun wurde mir Erlebnis, wie das Wollen mehr vom Denken, das Denken mehr vom Wollen aufnahm.
[ 33 ] Führt auf der einen Seite das Meditieren zu der Erkenntnis des Geistigen, so ist andererseits die Folge solcher Ergebnisse der Selbstbeobachtung die innere Verstärkung des geistigen, vom Organismus unabhängigen Menschen und die Befestigung seines Wesens in der Geisteswelt, so wie der physische Mensch seine Befestigung in der physischen Welt hat. - Nur wird man gewahr, wie die Befestigung des geistigen Menschen in der Geisteswelt sich ins Unermeßliche steigert, wenn der physische Organismus diese Befestigung nicht beschränkt, während die Befestigung des physischen Organismus in der physischen Welt - mit dem Tode - dem Zerfalle weicht, wenn der geistige Mensch diese Befestigung nicht mehr von sich aus unterhält.
[ 34 ] Mit solch einem erlebenden Erkennen ist nun jede Form einer Erkenntnistheorie unverträglich, die das Wissen des Menschen auf ein gewisses Gebiet beschränkt, und die «jenseits» desselben die «Urgründe», die «Dinge an sich» als für das menschliche Wissen Unzugängliches hinstellt. Jedes «Unzugängliche» war mir ein solches nur «zunächst»; und es kann nur so lange unzugänglich verbleiben, als der Mensch in seinem Innern nicht das Wesenhafte entwickelt hat, das mit dem vorher Unbekannten verwandt ist und daher im erlebenden Erkennen mit ihm zusammenwachsen kann. Diese Fähigkeit des Menschen, in jede Art des Seins hineinwachsen zu können, wurde für mich etwas, das der anerkennen muß, der in die Stellung des Menschen zur Welt im rechten Lichte sehen will. Wer zu dieser Anerkennung sich nicht durchringen kann, dem vermag Erkenntnis nicht etwas wirklich zur Welt Gehöriges zu geben, sondern nur ein der Welt gleichgültiges Nachbilden irgend eines Teiles des Welt-Inhaltes. Bei solcher bloß nachbildenden Erkenntnis kann der Mensch aber nicht in sich ein Wesen ergreifen, das ihm als vollbewußte Individualität ein inneres Erleben davon gibt, er stehe im Weltenall fest
[ 35 ] Mir kam es darauf an, von Erkenntnis so zu sprechen, daß das Geistige nicht bloß anerkannt, sondern so anerkannt werde, daß der Mensch es mit seinem Anschauen erreichen könne. Und wichtiger erschien es mir, festzuhalten, daß die «Urgründe» des Daseins innerhalb dessen liegen, was der Mensch in seinem Gesamterleben erreichen kann, als ein unbekanntes Geistiges in irgend einem « jenseitigen» Gebiet gedanklich anzuerkennen.
[ 36 ] Deshalb lehnte mein Anschauen die Denkungsart ab, die den Inhalt der sinnenfälligen Empfindung (Farbe, Wärme, Ton usw.) nur für etwas hält, das eine unbekannte Außenwelt durch die Sinneswahrnehmung im Menschen hervorruft, während diese Außenwelt selbst nur hypothetisch vorgestellt werden könne. Die theoretischen Ideen, die dem physikalischen und physiologischen Denken nach dieser Richtung zugrunde liegen, empfand mein erlebendes Erkennen als ganz besonders schädlich. Dieses Gefühl steigerte sich in meiner hier geschilderten Lebensepoche zur größten Lebhaftigkeit. Alles, was in der Physik und Physiologie als « hinter der subjektiven Empfindung liegend» bezeichnet wurde, machte mir, wenn ich den Ausdruck gebrauchen darf, Erkenntnis-Unbehagen.
[ 37 ] Dagegen sah ich in der Denkungsart Lyells, Darwins, Haeckels etwas, das, wenn es auch, so wie es auftrat, unvollkommen war, doch der Entwickelung nach einem Gesunden fähig ist.
[ 38 ] Lyells Grundsatz, die Erscheinungen in dem Teile des Erdenwerdens, der sich, weil er in der Vorzeit liegt, der sinnlichen Beobachtung entzieht, durch Ideen zu erklären, die sich an der gegenwärtigen Beobachtung dieses Werdens ergeben, schien mir nach der angedeuteten Richtung hin fruchtbar. Verständnis suchen für den physischen Bau des Menschen durch Herleitung seiner Formen aus den tierischen, wie das Haeckels «Anthropogenie» in umfassender Art tut, hielt ich für eine gute Grundlage zur weiteren Entwickelung der Erkenntnis.
[ 39 ] Ich sagte mir: setzt sich der Mensch eine Erkenntnisgrenze, jenseits deren die «Dinge an sich» liegen sollen, so versperrt er sich damit den Zugang zur geistigen Welt; stellt er sich zur Sinneswelt so, daß eines das andere innerhalb ihrer erklärt (das gegenwärtig im Erdenwerden Vorsichgehende die geologische Vorzeit, die Formen der tierischen Gestalt diejenigen der menschlichen), so kann er bereit sein, diese Erklärbarkeit der Wesen und Vorgänge auch auf das Geistige auszudehnen.
[ 40 ] Auch für mein Empfinden auf diesem Gebiete kann ich sagen: «Das ist etwas, das sich als Anschauung gerade damals in mir befestigt hat, während es meine Begriffswelt lange schon durchpulst hatte.»
Chapter XXII
[ 1 ] At the end of my time in Weimar, I had thirty-six years of life behind me. A year earlier, a profound change had already begun in my soul. When I left Weimar, it became an incisive experience. It was completely independent of the change in my external living conditions, which was also a major one. Experiencing what can be experienced in the spiritual world was always a matter of course for me; the perceptive grasp of the sensory world presented me with the greatest difficulties. It was as if I could not have poured my spiritual experience into my sensory organs to the extent that I could fully connect what they experienced with my soul.
[ 2 ] This changed completely from the beginning of my thirty-sixth year. My powers of observation of things, beings and processes in the physical world changed in the direction of accuracy and penetration. This was the case both in science and in external life. Whereas before it was the case for me that great scientific connections, which were to be grasped in a spiritual way, became my spiritual property without any effort, and sensory perception and especially its memorization made the greatest effort for me, now everything changed. A previously non-existent attention for the sensually perceptible awoke in me. Details became important to me; I had the feeling that the sensory world had something to reveal that only it could reveal. I regarded it as an ideal to get to know it solely through what it has to say, without man bringing anything into it through his thinking or through any other soul content occurring within him.
[ 3 ] I realized that I was experiencing a human life change at a much later stage of life than others. But I also saw that this had very specific consequences for the life of the soul. I found how people, because they pass early from the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to experiencing the physical, do not achieve a pure grasp of either the spiritual or the physical world. They continually and quite instinctively mix what things tell their senses with what the soul experiences through the spirit and what is then used by it to "imagine" things.
[ 4 ] For me, the precision and forcefulness of sensory observation opened up a whole new world. The objective confrontation of the sensory world, free of all subjectivity in the soul, revealed something about which a spiritual view had nothing to say.
[ 5 ] But this also threw its light back on the world of the spirit. For as the sensory world revealed its essence in sensory perception itself, the opposite pole was there for cognition, in order to appreciate the spiritual in its full nature, unmixed with the sensory.
[ 6 ] This had a particularly incisive effect on the life of the soul because it also manifested itself in the area of human life. My powers of observation were attuned to taking a completely objective, pure view of what a person was experiencing. I anxiously avoided criticizing what people did or expressing sympathy or antipathy in my relationship with them: I wanted to "simply let people affect me as they are".
[ 7 ] I soon found that observing the world in this way truly led me into the spiritual world. In observing the physical world, one goes completely out of oneself; and in doing so, one re-enters the spiritual world with a heightened capacity for spiritual observation.
[ 8 ] So the spiritual and the sensual world had come before my soul in their full contrast. But I did not perceive the contrast as something that had to be balanced out by some kind of philosophical thought - for example, a "monism". Rather, I felt that being fully immersed with the soul in this contrast is synonymous with "having an understanding of life". Where the opposites are experienced as balanced, the lifeless, the dead prevails. Where there is life, there is the unbalanced contrast; and life itself is the continuous overcoming, but at the same time new creation of opposites.
[ 9 ] From all of this, a very intense devotion penetrated my emotional life, not to a thoughtful theoretical grasp, but to an experience of the mysterious in the world. In order to meditatively gain the right relationship to the world, I repeatedly placed before my soul: "The world is full of riddles. Knowledge wants to get at them. But it usually wants to show a thought content as the solution to a riddle. But the riddles - I had to tell myself - are not solved by thoughts. These set the soul on the path of solutions; but they do not contain the solutions. A riddle arises in the real world; it is there as an appearance; its solution also arises in reality. Something appears that is essence or process; and that represents the solution of the other.
[ 10 ] So I also said to myself: the whole world, apart from man, is a riddle, the actual riddle of the world; and man himself is the solution.
[ 11 ] Thus I was able to think: man is able to say something about the riddle of the world at every moment. What he says, however, can only ever give as much content about the solution as he has recognized about himself as a human being.
[ 12 ] Thus, cognition also becomes a process in reality. Questions reveal themselves in the world; answers reveal themselves as realities; cognition in man is his participation in what the beings and processes in the spiritual and physical world have to say to each other.
[ 13 ] All this was already hinted at, in some places even quite clearly, in the writings that I printed up to the time described here. During this time alone, it became the most intense soul experience that filled the hours in which knowledge meditated on the reasons for the world. And the main thing is that this soul experience emerged in its strength at that time from the objective surrender to the pure, unclouded observation of the senses. A new world was given to me in this observation; I had to seek that which was the soul's counter-experience from that which had hitherto been recognizable in my soul in order to bring about a balance with the new.
[ 14 ] As soon as I did not think but sensually observed the entire essence of the sensory world, a riddle was presented as reality. And the solution lies in man himself.
[ 15 ] The enthusiasm for what I later called "realistic knowledge" lived in my entire soul. And in particular, it was clear to me that a person with such "realistic knowledge" could not stand in any corner of the world while being and becoming took place outside of him. Knowledge became for me that which belongs not only to man, but to the being and becoming of the world. Just as the root and trunk of a tree are nothing complete if they do not live on into the blossom, so the being and becoming of the world are nothing truly existing if they do not live on into the content of knowledge. Looking at this insight, I repeated on every occasion when it was appropriate: man is not the being who creates the content of knowledge for himself, but he provides with his soul the arena on which the world experiences its existence and becoming in part. If there were no cognition, the world would remain unfinished. In this kind of cognitive immersion in the reality of the world, I increasingly found the possibility of creating a protection for the essence of human cognition against the view that in this cognition man creates an image or the like of the world. He became a co-creator of the world itself for my idea of cognition, not a re-creator of something that could also remain out of the world without it being unfinished.
[ 16 ] But also towards "mysticism" ever greater clarity was created for my cognition. The co-experience of world events on the part of man was drawn out of the indeterminate mystical feeling and placed in the light in which the ideas reveal themselves. The world of the senses, seen purely in its own nature, is initially devoid of ideas4 just as the root and trunk of the tree are devoid of blossoms. But just as the blossom is not a darkening fading of the plant's existence, but a transformation of this existence itself, so the world of ideas relating to the sense world in man is a transformation of sense existence, not a mystical, dark working of something indeterminate into the world of man's soul. As bright as the physical things and processes appear in the light of the sun, so spiritually bright must appear what lives as knowledge in the human soul.
[ 17 ] It was a very clear soul experience that was present in me at that time in this orientation. But there was something extraordinarily difficult in the transition to giving expression to this experience.
[ 18 ] My book "Goethe's Weltanschauung" and the introductions to the last volume, which I had published for the edition in "Kürschners Deutscher National-Literatur", were written during my last time in Weimar. I am looking in particular at what I wrote as an introduction to Goethe's "Sprüche in Prosa", which I edited, and comparing this with the formulation of the contents of the book "Goethes Weltanschauung". If one only looks at things on the surface, one can construe this or that contradiction between the one and the other in these descriptions of mine, which were written at almost exactly the same time. But if you look at what lives beneath the surface, what wants to reveal itself as a view of the depths of life, soul and spirit in the formulations that only take shape on the surface, you will not find contradictions, but rather a struggle for expression, especially in my works at that time. A struggle to bring into the worldview concepts precisely what I have described here as the experience of knowledge, of man's relationship to the world, of becoming a riddle and solving riddles within true reality.
[ 19 ] When I wrote my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" about three and a half years later, some things had moved on again; and I was able to make my experience of knowledge presented here fruitful for the description of the individual worldviews that appear in history.
[ 20 ] Whoever wants to reject writings because in them the life of the soul struggles to recognize, that is, in the light of the description given here, in them the life of the world continues to unfold in its struggle on the stage of the human soul, cannot - according to my insight - succeed in immersing himself with his recognizing soul in true reality. This is something that just then became fixed in me as a view, while it had long since pulsated through my conceptual world.
[ 21 ] In connection with the turnaround in my spiritual life, I had some profound inner experiences. - I recognized in soul experience the essence of meditation and its significance for insights into the spiritual world. I had also led a meditative life before, but the impetus for it came from the ideal realization of its value for a spiritual world view. Now something arose within me that demanded meditation, like something that became a necessity for my soul life. The acquired soul life needed meditation, just as the organism needs lung breathing at a certain stage of its development.
[ 22 ] How the ordinary conceptual knowledge gained from sensory observation relates to the perception of the spiritual became for me in this phase of my life from a more ideal experience to one in which the whole person is involved. The ideal experience, which nevertheless incorporates the real spiritual, is the element from which my "philosophy of freedom" was born. The experience of the whole person contains the spiritual world in a much more being-like way than the ideal experience. And yet this is already a higher level than the conceptual grasp of the sensory world. In ideal experience, one does not grasp the sensory world, but a spiritual world that to a certain extent directly adjoins it.
[ 23 ] As all this sought expression and experience in my soul at that time, three kinds of cognition stood before my inner being. The first kind is the conceptual knowledge gained from sensory observation. It is appropriated by the soul and then retained within according to the available power of memory. Repetitions of the content to be appropriated only have the meaning that it can be retained well. The second type of cognition is that in which concepts are not acquired through sensory observation, but are experienced internally independently of the senses. Experience then becomes the guarantor, through its own essence, that the concepts are founded in spiritual reality. One arrives at the experience that concepts contain the guarantee of spiritual reality with the same certainty from the nature of experience in this kind of cognition as one attains the certainty in sense cognition that one does not have illusions but physical reality before one.
[ 24 ] With this ideal-spiritual cognition, it is no longer sufficient - as with sensory cognition - to acquire it, which then leads to the fact that one has it for the memory. The process of appropriation must become a continuous one. Just as it is not enough for the organism to have breathed for a while in order to then use the acquired knowledge in the further process of life through breathing, so it is not enough for ideal-spiritual knowledge to be appropriated in a way similar to sensory cognition. For this it is necessary that the soul is in a continuous living interaction with the world into which one is placed through this knowledge. This happens through meditation, which - as indicated above - arises from the ideal insight into the value of meditation. I had been looking for this interaction long before my change of soul (at the age of thirty-five).
[ 25 ] What happened now was meditation as a spiritual necessity of life. And thus the third way of realization stood before my inner self. It not only led into further depths of the spiritual world, but also allowed an intimate coexistence with it. I had to, precisely out of inner necessity, repeatedly bring a very specific type of concept into the center of my consciousness.
[ 26 ] It was this:
[ 27 ] If I immerse myself with my soul in ideas that are formed in the sensory world, then I am only able to speak of the reality of what I experience in direct experience as long as I am sensually observing a thing or process. Sense guarantees me the truth of what I observe as long as I observe.
[ 28 ] Not so when I connect with beings or processes of the spiritual world through ideal-spiritual cognition. In this case, the direct experience of the existence of what is perceived, which goes beyond the duration of perception, occurs in the individual perception. If, for example, one experiences the "I" of the human being as its very own inner essence, one knows in the contemplative experience that this "I" was before life in the physical body and will be after it. What one thus experiences in the "I" reveals this directly, just as the rose reveals its redness in direct perception.
[ 29 ] In such a meditation practiced out of an inner spiritual necessity for life, the awareness of an "inner spiritual man" develops more and more, who can live, perceive and move in the spiritual in complete detachment from the physical organism. This self-sufficient spiritual person came into my experience under the influence of meditation. The experience of the spiritual thereby experienced an essential deepening. The fact that sensory cognition arises through the organism can be sufficiently demonstrated by the self-observation that is possible for this cognition. But ideal-spiritual cognition is also still dependent on the organism. Self-observation shows this: For sense observation, the individual act of cognition is bound to the organism. For ideal-spiritual cognition, the individual act is completely independent of the physical organism; but that such cognition can be developed by man at all depends on the fact that in general life is present in the organism. In the case of the third kind of cognition, it can only come about through the spiritual man if he frees himself from the physical organism as if it did not exist at all.
[ 30 ] An awareness of all this developed under the influence of the meditative life described above. I was able to effectively refute for myself the opinion that through such meditation one is subject to a kind of autosuggestion, the result of which is the subsequent realization of the spirit. For the very first ideal-spiritual realization had already convinced me of the truth of the spiritual experience. And indeed the very first, not merely the one that received its life in meditation, but the one that began its life. How to ascertain truth quite exactly in prudent consciousness, I had already done that for what is in question before there could be any talk of autosuggestion. What the meditation had achieved could therefore only be the experience of something whose reality I was already fully capable of testing before the experience.
[ 31 ] All this, which was connected with my soul-turning, showed itself in connection with a result of possible self-observation, which, just like the one described, took on a content-heavy meaning for me.
[ 32 ] I felt how the ideal of the previous life receded in a certain direction and the volitional took its place. For this to be possible, the will must be able to abstain from all subjective arbitrariness in the unfolding of knowledge. The will increased to the extent that the ideal decreased. And the will also took over spiritual cognition, which had previously been performed almost entirely by the ideal. I had already recognized that the division of the life of the soul into thinking, feeling and willing has only limited significance. In truth, thinking also contains feeling and volition; it is only that thinking predominates over the latter. In feeling lives thinking and willing, in willing thinking and feeling likewise. Now I experienced how the willing absorbed more of the thinking, the thinking more of the willing.
[ 33 ] On the one hand, meditation leads to the realization of the spiritual, on the other hand, the consequence of such results of self-observation is the inner strengthening of the spiritual man, independent of the organism, and the attachment of his being in the spiritual world, just as the physical man has his attachment in the physical world. - Only one becomes aware of how the attachment of the spiritual man in the spiritual world increases immeasurably when the physical organism does not limit this attachment, while the attachment of the physical organism in the physical world - with death - gives way to disintegration when the spiritual man no longer maintains this attachment of his own accord.
[ 34 ] Any form of epistemology that limits human knowledge to a certain area and that "beyond" it presents the "primal causes", the "things in themselves" as inaccessible to human knowledge, is now incompatible with such experiential cognition. Every "inaccessible" was only "at first"; and it can only remain inaccessible as long as man has not developed in his inner being that which is related to the previously unknown and can therefore grow together with it in experiential cognition. This ability of man to grow into every kind of being became something that he who wants to see man's position in the world in the right light must recognize. Whoever cannot bring himself to this recognition, knowledge cannot give him something that really belongs to the world, but only a reproduction, indifferent to the world, of some part of the world's content. With such merely reproductive cognition, however, man cannot seize a being within himself which, as a fully conscious individuality, gives him an inner experience of standing firm in the universe
[ 35 ] I was concerned to speak of knowledge in such a way that the spiritual is not merely recognized, but recognized in such a way that man can reach it with his contemplation. And it seemed more important to me to hold that the "primal grounds" of existence lie within what man can achieve in his overall experience than to mentally recognize an unknown spiritual in some "otherworldly" realm.
[ 36 ] This is why my view rejects the way of thinking that considers the content of sensory perception (color, warmth, sound, etc.) to be only something that an unknown external world evokes in man through sensory perception, while this external world itself can only be imagined hypothetically. The theoretical ideas underlying physical and physiological thinking along these lines were perceived by my experiencing cognition as particularly harmful. This feeling increased to the greatest vividness in the period of my life described here. Everything that was described in physics and physiology as "lying behind subjective sensation" made me, if I may use the expression, uneasy about cognition.
[ 37 ] In contrast, I saw in Lyell's, Darwin's and Haeckel's way of thinking something that, even if it was imperfect as it appeared, was nevertheless capable of development according to a healthy person.
[ 38 ] Lyell's principle of explaining the phenomena in that part of the earth's development which, because it lies in the past, eludes sensory observation, by ideas which arise from the present observation of this development, seemed to me to be fruitful in the direction indicated. Seeking an understanding of the physical structure of man by deriving his forms from those of animals, as Haeckel's "Anthropogeny" does in a comprehensive manner, I considered to be a good basis for the further development of knowledge.
[ 39 ] I said to myself: If man sets himself a limit of knowledge beyond which the "things in themselves" are supposed to lie, he thereby blocks his access to the spiritual world; if he places himself in relation to the world of the senses in such a way that one explains the other within it (that which is presently in the process of becoming earth explains the geological prehistory, the forms of the animal form those of the human), then he can be prepared to extend this explicability of beings and processes to the spiritual as well.
[ 40 ] I can also say for my own feelings in this area: "This is something that just then became fixed in me as a perception, while it had already been pulsating through my conceptual world for a long time."