The Story of My Life
GA 28
Chapter XXIII
[ 1 ] With the mental revolution thus described must I bring to a close the second main division of my life. The paths of destiny now took a different bearing from what had preceded, During both my Vienna and also my Weimar period, the outward indications of destiny manifested themselves in such directions as fell in line with the content of my inner mental strivings. In all my writings there is vitally present the basic character of my spiritual world-conception, even though an inner necessity required that my reflections should be less extended into spiritual spheres. In my work as a teacher in Vienna the goals set up were solely those which resulted from the insights of my own mind. At Weimar, as regards my work in connection with Goethe, there was active only what I considered to be the responsibility attaching to such a piece of work. I never had to overcome difficulties in order to bring the tendencies coming from the outer world into harmony with my own.
[ 2 ] It was just from this course of my life that I was able to perceive the idea of freedom in a form shining clearly within me, and thus to set it forth. I do not think that the great significance which this idea had for my own life has caused me to view it in a one-sided way. The idea corresponds with an objective reality, and what one actually experiences of such a thing cannot alter this reality through a conscientious striving for knowledge, but can only enable one to see into it in greater or lesser degree.
With this view of the idea of freedom there was united the “ethical individualism” of my philosophy, which has been misunderstood by so many persons. This also at the beginning of the third division of my life was changed from an element in my conceptual world living within the mind to something which had now laid hold upon the entire man.
[ 3 ] Both in physics and in physiology the world-conception of that period, to whose forms of thinking I was opposed, as also the world-conception of biology, which, in spite of its incompleteness, I could look upon as a bridge leading to a spiritual conception, required of me that I should continually improve the formulation of my own conceptions in all these aspects of the world. I must answer for myself the question: Can impulses for action reveal themselves to man from the external world? What I found was this: The divine spiritual forces, which are the inner soul of man's will, have no way of access from the outer world to the inner man. A right way of thinking both in physics and physiology, as well as biology, seemed to me to arrive at this result. A way in nature which gives access from without to the will cannot be discovered. Therefore no divine spiritual moral impulse can by such a road from without penetrate to that place in the soul where the impulse of man's own will, acting in man, comes into existence. External natural forces, moreover, can stimulate only that in man which pertains to nature. In that case, however, there is no real expression of a free will, but the continuation of the natural event in man and through him. Man has then not yet laid hold upon his entire being, but remains as to the natural element of his external aspect an unfree agent.
[ 4 ] The problem can by no means be – so I said to myself again and again – to answer this question: Is man's will free or not? – but to answer this quite different one: How is the way to be attained in the life of the mind which leads from the unfree natural will to that which is free – that is, which is truly moral? And if we are to find an answer to this question we must observe how the divine-spiritual lives in each individual human soul. It is from the soul that the moral proceeds; in its entirely individual being, therefore, must the moral impulse have its existence.
[ 5 ] Moral laws – as commands – which come from an external environment within which man finds himself, even though these laws had their primal origin in the spiritual world, do not become moral impulses within man by reason of the fact that he directs his will in accordance with them, but only by reason of the fact that he himself, purely as an individual, experiences the spiritual and essential nature of their thought content. Freedom has its life in human thought; and it is not the will which is of itself free, but the thinking which empowers the will.
[ 6 ] So, therefore, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I had found it necessary to lay all possible emphasis upon the freedom of thought in discussing the moral nature of the will.
[ 7 ] This idea also was confirmed in very special degree through the life of meditation. The moral world-order stood out before me in ever clearer light as the one clearly marked realization on earth of such ordered systems in action as are to be found in the spiritual regions ranged above. It showed itself as that which only he lays hold upon in his conceptual world who is able to recognize the spiritual.
[ 8 ] During just that epoch of my life which I am here describing, all these insights were linked up for me with the lofty comprehensive truth that the beings and events of the world will not in truth be explained if man employs his thinking to “explain” them; but only if man by means of his thinking is able to contemplate the events in that connection in which one explains another, in which one becomes the riddle and another its solution, and man himself becomes the word for the external world which he perceives.
[ 9 ] Herein, however, was experienced the truth of the conception that in the world and its working that which holds sway is the Logos, Wisdom, the Word.
[ 10 ] I believed that I was enabled by these conceptions to see clearly into the nature of materialism. I perceived the harmful character of this way of thinking, not in the fact that the materialist directs his attention to the manifestation of a being in the form of matter, but in the way in which he conceives the material. He contemplates matter without becoming aware that in reality he is in the presence of spirit, which is simply manifesting itself in material form. He does not know that spirit metamorphoses itself into matter in order to attain to ways of working which are possible only in this metamorphosis. Spirit must first take on the form of a material brain in order to lead in this form the life of the conceptual world, which can bestow upon man in his earthly life a freely acting self-consciousness. To be sure, in the brain spirit mounts upward out of matter; but only after the material brain has arisen out of spirit.
[ 11 ] I must reject the form of thinking of physics and physiology only on the ground that this makes of matter that is not vitally experienced but only conceived through thought the external cause of man's spiritual experience; and, moreover, this matter is so conceived in thought that it is impossible to trace it to the point where it is spirit. Such matter, which this way of thinking postulates as real, is in no sense real. The fundamental error of the materialistically-minded thinkers about nature consists in their impossible idea of matter. Through this they bar before themselves the way leading to spiritual existence. A material nature which stimulates in the soul merely that which man experiences within nature makes the world an “illusion.” The intensity with which these ideas entered into my mental life led me four years later to elaborate them in my work Conception of the World and of Life in the Thirteenth Century, in the chapter entitled “Die Welt als Illusion.”1“The World of Illusion”. (In later enlarged editions this work was given the title Rötsel der Philosophie.)2Riddles of Philosophy.
[ 12 ] In the biological form of conceptions it is impossible in the same manner to fall into typical ways of thought which remove the thing so conceived wholly out of the sphere that is open to man's experience, and therefore to leave behind in his mind an illusion as to this. Here one cannot actually arrive at this explanation: “Outside of man there is a world of which he experiences nothing, which makes an impression on him only through his senses; an impression, however, which may be utterly unlike that which causes it.” If a man suppresses within his mental life the more weighty elements of thinking, he may believe, indeed, that he has uttered something when he asserts that to the subjective perception of light the objective counterpart consists of a wave-form in ether – such was then the conception; but one must be an absolute fanatic if one proposes to “explain” in this way that also which is perceived in the realm of the living.
[ 13 ] In no case, so I said to myself, does such a conception of ideas pertaining to nature penetrate to ideas concerning the moral order of the world. Such a conception can view this only as something which drops down into the physical world of man from a sphere foreign to man's knowledge.
[ 14 ] The fact that these questions confronted my mind I cannot consider as having a significance for the third phase of my life; for they had confronted me for a long time. But it was significant for me that the whole sphere of knowledge within my mind – without changing anything essential in its content – attained by means of these questions to a quickness of vital activity in a greatly heightened sense as compared with what had hitherto been the case. In the Logos lives the human soul; how does the external world live in this Logos? This is the basic question in my Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World-Conception (of the middle of the 'eighties); such it continued for my writing Wahrheit und Wissenschaft3Truth and Science, the dissertation offered for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. There were dominant in this orientation of soul all the ideas I was able to formulate in the effort to penetrate into the substrata of the soul from which Goethe sought to bring light for the phenomena of the world.
[ 15 ] That which especially concerned me during the phase of my life here set forth was the fact that the ideas which I was forced to oppose so strongly had laid hold with the utmost intensity upon the thinking of that period. People lived so completely according to these tendencies of mind that they were not in a position to realize at all the range of anything which pointed in the opposite direction. I so experienced the opposition between that which was to me plain truth and the opinions of my age that this experience gave the prevailing colour to my life, especially in the years near the turn of the century.
[ 16 ] In every manifestation of the spiritual life the impression made upon me was drawn from this opposition. Not that I regretted everything brought forward by this spiritual life; but I had a sense of profound distress in the presence of the many good things that I could hold dear, for I believed that I saw the powers of destruction ranging themselves against these good things, the evolutional germs of the spiritual life.
[ 17 ] So from all directions my life was focused upon this question: “How can a way be found whereby that which is inwardly perceived as true may be set forth in such forms of expression as can be understood by this age?”
[ 18 ] When one has such an experience, it is as if the necessity faced one of climbing in some way or other to the scarcely accessible peak of a mountain. One attempts it from the most varied points of approach; one remains there still, forced to feel that all the struggles one has put forth have been in vain.
[ 19 ] I spoke once during the 'nineties at Frankfort-am-Main concerning Goethe's conception of nature. I said in my introduction that I would discuss only Goethe's conceptions of life, since his ideas regarding light and colours were such that there was no possibility in contemporary physics of throwing a bridge across to these ideas. As for myself, however, I was forced to view this impossibility as a most significant symptom of the spiritual orientation of the age.
[ 20 ] Somewhat later I had a conversation with a physicist who was an important person in his field, and who also worked intensively at Goethe's conception of nature. The conversation reached its climax when he said that Goethe's conception regarding colours is such that physics cannot possibly lay hold of it; and I – was speechless.
[ 21 ] How much there was then which said that what was truth to me was such that the thought of the age could “not in the least lay hold of it.”
Chapter XXIII
[ 1 ] Mit dem geschilderten Seelenumschwung muß ich meinen zweiten größeren Lebensabschnitt abschließen. Die Wege des Schicksals nahmen einen andern Sinn an als bis dahin. Sowohl während meiner Wiener wie auch während der Weimarischen Zeit wiesen die äußern Zeichen des Schicksals in Richtungen, die mit dem Inhalt meines inneren Seelenstrebens ineinanderliefen. In allen meinen Schriften lebt der Grundcharakter meiner geistgemäßen Weltanschauung, wenn auch eine innere Notwendigkeit gebot, die Betrachtungen weniger auf das eigentliche Geistgebiet auszudehnen. In meiner Wiener Erziehertätigkeit waren nur Zielsetzungen vorhanden, die aus den Einsichten der eigenen Seele kamen. In Weimar, bei der auf Goethe bezüglichen Arbeit wirkte allein, was ich als die Aufgabe einer solchen Arbeit betrachtete. Ich hatte nirgends die Richtungen, die von der Außenwelt kommen, in einer schwierigen Art mit den meinigen in Einklang bringen müssen.
[ 2 ] Gerade aus diesem Verlauf meines Lebens kam die Möglichkeit, die Idee der Freiheit in einer mir klar erscheinenden Art anzuschauen und darzustellen. Ich glaube nicht, daß ich deshalb diese Idee einseitig angeschaut habe, weil sie in meinem eigenen Leben die große Bedeutung hatte. Sie entspricht einer objektiven Wirklichkeit, und was man selbst mit einer solchen erlebt, kann bei einem gewissenhaften Erkenntnisstreben diese Wirklichkeit nicht verändern, sondern nur deren Durchschauen in stärkerem oder geringerem. Grade möglich machen. Mit diesem Anschauen der Freiheitsidee verband sich der von vielen Seiten so verkannte «ethische Individualismus» meiner Weltanschauung. Auch er wurde beim Beginne meines dritten Lebensabschnittes aus einem Elemente meiner im Geiste lebenden Begriffswelt zu einem solchen, das nun den ganzen Menschen ergriffen hatte.
[ 3 ] Sowohl die physikalische und physiologische Weltanschauung der damaligen Zeit, zu der ich ihrer Denkungsart nach ablehnend stand, wie auch die biologische, die ich trotz ihrer Unvollkommenheit als eine Brücke zu einer geistgemäßen ansehen konnte, forderten von mir, daß ich nach den beiden Weltgebieten hin die eigenen Vorstellungen zu immer besserer Ausgestaltung brachte. Ich mußte mir die Frage beantworten: können dem Menschen von der äußeren Welt Impulse seines Handelns sich offenbaren? Ich fand: die göttlich-geistigen Kräfte, die den Menschenwillen innerlich durchseelen, haben keinen Weg aus der Außenwelt in das menschliche Innere. Eine richtige physikalisch-physiologische sowohl wie eine biologische Denkungsart schienen mir das zu ergeben. Ein Naturweg, der äußerlich zum Wollen Veranlassung gibt, kann nicht gefunden werden. Somit kann auch kein göttlich-geistiger sittlicher Impuls auf einem solchen äußeren Wege an denjenigen Ort der Seele dringen, wo der im Menschen wirkende Eigen-Impuls des Willens sich ins Dasein bringt. Es können äußere naturhafte Kräfte auch nur das Naturhafte im Menschen mitreißen. Dann ist aber in Wirklichkeit keine freie Willensäußerung da, sondern eine Fortsetzung des naturhaften Geschehens in den Menschen hinein und durch diesen hindurch. Der Mensch hat dann seine Wesenheit nicht voll ergriffen, sondern ist im Naturhaften seiner Außenseite als unfrei Handelnder stecken geblieben.
[ 4 ] Es kann sich, so sagte ich mir immer wieder, gar nicht darum handeln, die Frage zu beantworten: ist der Wille des Menschen frei oder nicht? Sondern die ganz andere: wie ist der Weg im Seelenleben beschaffen von dem unfreien, naturhaften Wollen zu dem freien, das heißt wahrhaft sittlichen? Und um auf diese Frage Antwort zu finden, mußte darauf hingeschaut werden, wie das Göttlich-Geistige in jeder einzelnen Menschenseele lebt. Von dieser geht das Sittliche aus; in ihrem ganz individuellen Wesen muß also der sittliche Impuls sich beleben.
[ 5 ] Sittliche Gesetze - als Gebote -, die von einem äußeren Zusammenhang kommen, in dem der Mensch steht, auch wenn sie ursprünglich aus dem Gebiete der geistigen Welt stammen, werden nicht dadurch in ihm zu sittlichen Impulsen, daß er sein Wollen nach ihnen orientiert, sondern allein dadurch, daß er deren Gedankeninhalt als geistig-wesenhaft ganz individuell erlebt. Die Freiheit lebt in dem Denken des Menschen; und nicht der Wille ist unmittelbar frei, sondern der Gedanke. der den Willen erkraftet.
[ 6 ] So mußte ich schon in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» mit allem Nachdruck von der Freiheit des Gedankens in bezug auf die sittliche Natur des Willens sprechen.
[ 7 ] Auch diese Idee wurde im meditativen Leben ganz besonders verstärkt. Die sittliche Weltordnung stand immer klarer als die eine auf Erden realisierte Ausprägung von solcher Art Wirkens-Ordnungen vor mir, die in übergeordneten geistigen Regionen zu finden sind. Sie ergab sich als das, das nur derjenige in seine Vorstellungswelt hereinerfaßt, der Geistiges anerkennen kann.
[ 8 ] All diese Einsichten schlossen sich mir gerade in der hier geschilderten Lebensepoche mit der erklommenen umfassenden Wahrheit zusammen, daß die Wesen und Vorgänge der Welt nicht in Wahrheit erklärt werden, wenn man das Denken zum «Erklären» gebraucht; sondern wenn man durch das Denken die Vorgänge in dem Zusammenhange zu schauen vermag, in dem das eine das andere erklärt, in dem eines Rätsel, das andere Lösung wird, und der Mensch selbst das Wort wird für die von ihm wahrgenommene Außenwelt.
[ 9 ] Damit aber war die Wahrheit der Vorstellung erlebt, daß in der Welt und ihrem Wirken der Logos, die Weisheit, das Wort waltet.
[ 10 ] Ich vermeinte mit diesen Vorstellungen das Wesen des Materialismus klar durchschauen zu können. Nicht darin sah ich das Verderbliche dieser Denkungsart, daß der Materialist sein Augenmerk auf die stoffliche Erscheinung einer Wesenheit richtet, sondern darin, wie er das Stoffliche denkt. Er schaut auf den Stoff hin und wird nicht gewahr, daß er in Wahrheit Geist vor sich habe, der nur in der stofflichen Form erscheint. Er weiß nicht, daß Geist sich in Stoff metamorphosiert, um zu Wirkungsweisen zu kommen, die nur in dieser Metamorphose möglich sind. Geist muß sich zuerst die Form eines stofflichen Gehirnes geben, um in dieser Form das Leben der Vorstellungswelt zu führen, die dem Menschen in seinem Erdenleben das frei wirkende Selbstbewußtsein verleihen kann. Gewiß: im Gehirn steigt aus dem Stoffe der Geist auf; aber erst, nachdem das Stoffgehirn aus dem Geist aufgestiegen ist.
[ 11 ] Abweisend gegen die physikalische und physiologische Vorstellungsart mußte ich nur aus dem Grunde sein, weil diese ein erdachtes, nicht ein erlebtes Stoffliches zum äußerlichen Erreger des im Menschen erfahrenen Geistigen macht und dabei den Stoff so erdachte, daß es unmöglich ist, ihn dahin zu verfolgen, wo er Geist ist. Solcher Stoff, wie ihn diese Vorstellungsart als real behauptet, ist eben nirgends real. Der Grundirrtum der materialistisch gesinnten Naturdenker besteht in ihrer unmöglichen Idee von dem Stoffe. Dadurch versperren sie den Weg in das geistige Dasein. Eine stoffliche Natur, die in der Seele bloß das erregte, was der Mensch an der Natur erlebt, macht die Welt «zur Illusion». Weil diese Ideen so intensiv in mein Seelenleben traten, verarbeitete ich sie dann vier Jahre später in meinem Werke «Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert» in dem Kapitel «Die Welt als Illusion». (Dieses Werk hat in den späteren erweiterten Auflagen den Titel bekommen: «Rätsel der Philosophie».)
[ 12 ] In der biologischen Vorstellungsart ist es nicht in gleicher Art möglich, in Charakteristiken zu verfallen, die das Vorgestellte völlig aus dem Gebiet verdrängen, das der Mensch erleben kann, und ihm dafür in seinem Seelenleben eine Illusion zurücklassen. Man kann da nicht bis zur Erklärung kommen: außer dem Menschen ist eine Welt, von der er nichts erlebt, die nur durch seine Sinne auf ihn einen Eindruck macht, der aber ganz unähnlich sein kann dem Eindruckgebenden. Man kann noch glauben, wenn man das Wichtigere des Denkens im Seelenleben unterdrückt, daß man etwas gesagt habe, wenn man behauptet: der subjektiven Lichtwahrnehmung entspreche objektiv eine Bewegungsform im Äther - so war damals die Vorstellung -; man muß aber schon ein arger Fanatiker sein, wenn man auch das im Lebensgebiet Wahrgenommene so «erklären» will.
[ 13 ] In keinem Falle, so sagte ich mir, dringt ein solches Vorstellen von Ideen über die Natur herauf zu Ideen über die sittliche Weltordnung. Es kann diese nur als etwas betrachten, das aus einem der Erkenntnis fremden Gebiet hereinfällt in die physische Welt des Menschen.
[ 14 ] Daß diese Fragen vor meiner Seele standen, das kann ich nicht als bedeutsam für den Eingang meines dritten Lebensabschnittes ansehen. Denn sie standen ja seit langer Zeit vor mir. - Aber bedeutsam wurde mir, daß meine ganze Erkenntniswelt, ohne an ihrem Inhalte etwas Wesentliches zu ändern, in meiner Seele in einem gegenüber dem bisherigen wesentlich erhöhten Grade durch sie Lebensregsamkeit bekam. In dem «Logos» lebt die Menschenseele; wie lebt die Außenwelt in diesem Logos: das ist schon die Grundfrage meiner «Erkenntnistheorie der Goethe'schen Weltanschauung» (aus der Mitte der achtziger Jahre); es bleibt so für meine Schriften «Wahrheit und Wissenschaft» und «Philosophie der Freiheit». Es beherrschte diese Seelenorientierung alles, was ich an Ideen gestaltete, um in die seelischen Untergründe einzudringen, aus denen heraus Goethe Licht in die Welterscheinungen zu bringen suchte.
[ 15 ] Was mich in dem hier geschilderten Lebensabschnitt besonders beschäftigte, war, daß die Ideen, die ich so streng abzuweisen genötigt war, das Denken des Zeitalters auf das intensivste ergriffen hatten. Man lebte so ganz in dieser Seelenrichtung, daß man nicht in der Lage war, irgendwie die Tragweite dessen zu empfinden, das in die entgegengesetzte Orientierung wies. Den Gegensatz zwischen dem, was mir klare Wahrheit war, und den Ansichten meines Zeitalters erlebte ich so, daß dies Erlebnis die Grundfärbung meines Lebens überhaupt in den Jahren um die Jahrhundertwende ausmachte.
[ 16 ] In allem, was als Geistesleben auftrat, wirkte für mich der Eindruck, der von diesem Gegensatze ausging. Nicht als ob ich etwa alles ablehnte, was dies Geistesleben hervorbrachte. Aber ich empfand gerade gegenüber dem vielen Guten, das ich schätzen konnte, tiefen Schmerz, denn ich glaubte zu sehen, daß ihm als Entwickelungskeime des geistigen Lebens sich überall die zerstörenden Mächte entgegenstellten.
[ 17 ] So erlebte ich denn von allen Seiten die Frage: wie kann ein Weg gefunden werden, um das innerlich als wahr Geschaute in Ausdrucksformen zu bringen, die von dem Zeitalter verstanden werden können?
[ 18 ] Wenn man so erlebt, ist es, als ob auf irgendeine Art die Notwendigkeit vorläge, einen schwer zugänglichen Berggipfel zu besteigen. Man versucht es von den verschiedensten Ausgangspunkten; man steht immer wieder da, indem man Anstrengungen hinter sich hat, die man als vergeblich ansehen muß.
[ 19 ] Ich sprach einmal in den neunziger Jahren in Frankfurt am Main über Goethes Naturanschauung. Ich sagte in der Einleitung: ich wolle nur über die Anschauungen Goethes vom Leben sprechen; denn seine Ideen über das Licht und die Farben seien solche, daß in der Physik der Gegenwart keine Möglichkeit vorläge, die Brücke zu diesen Ideen zu schlagen. - Für mich aber mußte ich in dieser Unmöglichkeit ein bedeutsamstes Symptom für die Geistesorientierung der Zeit sehen.
[ 20 ] Etwas später hatte ich mit einem Physiker, der in seinem Fache bedeutend war, und der auch intensiv sich mit Goethes Naturanschauung beschäftigte, ein Gespräch, das darin gipfelte, daß er sagte: Goethes Vorstellung über die Farben ist so, daß die Physik damit gar nichts anfangen kann, und daß ich - verstummte.
[ 21 ] Wie Vieles sagte damals: das, was mir Wahrheit war, ist so, daß die Gedanken der Zeit «damit gar nichts anfangen» können.
Chapter XXIII
[ 1 ] With the change of soul I have described, I must conclude my second major phase of life. The paths of destiny took on a different meaning than before. Both during my time in Vienna and in Weimar, the external signs of fate pointed in directions that converged with the content of my inner soul's aspirations. The basic character of my spiritual world view lives on in all my writings, even if an inner necessity demanded that I extend my reflections less to the actual spiritual realm. In my work as an educator in Vienna there were only objectives that came from the insights of my own soul. In Weimar, in the work relating to Goethe, only what I regarded as the task of such work was effective. Nowhere had I had to harmonize the directions coming from the outside world with my own in a difficult way.
[ 2 ] It was precisely from this course of my life that the possibility arose of looking at and presenting the idea of freedom in a way that seemed clear to me. I do not believe that I looked at this idea one-sidedly because it had great significance in my own life. It corresponds to an objective reality, and what one experiences with such a reality cannot, with a conscientious striving for knowledge, change this reality, but only make it possible to see through it to a greater or lesser degree. Make it possible to a greater or lesser degree. The "ethical individualism" of my world view, so misjudged by many, was linked to this view of the idea of freedom. At the beginning of the third phase of my life, it too was transformed from an element of my conceptual world living in my mind into one that had now taken hold of the whole person.
[ 3 ] Both the physical and physiological world view of the time, to which I was opposed in my way of thinking, and the biological world view, which, despite its imperfections, I could see as a bridge to a spiritual one, demanded that I bring my own ideas to ever better shape in both areas of the world. I had to answer the question: can the impulses of man's actions be revealed to him by the outer world? I found that the divine-spiritual forces, which inwardly pervade the human will, have no way out of the outer world into the human interior. A correct physical-physiological as well as a biological way of thinking seemed to me to show this. A natural path that gives rise to external volition cannot be found. Thus no divine-spiritual moral impulse can penetrate by such an external path to that place of the soul where the inherent impulse of the will working in man brings itself into existence. External natural forces can also only entrain the natural in the human being. But then in reality there is no free expression of will, but a continuation of the natural event into the human being and through him. The human being has then not fully grasped his essence, but has remained stuck in the naturalness of his outer side as an unfree agent.
[ 4 ] I kept telling myself that it cannot be a question of answering the question: is man's will free or not? But the entirely other question: what is the path in the life of the soul from the unfree, natural will to the free, i.e. truly moral will? And in order to find the answer to this question, we had to look at how the divine-spiritual lives in every individual human soul. The moral emanates from it; in its entirely individual being, therefore, the moral impulse must come to life.
[ 5 ] Moral laws - as commandments - which come from an external context in which man stands, even if they originally come from the realm of the spiritual world, do not become moral impulses in him by the fact that he orients his will according to them, but solely by the fact that he experiences their thought content as spiritually-substantial entirely individual. Freedom lives in the thinking of man; and it is not the will that is directly free, but the thought that generates the will.
[ 6 ] So in my "Philosophy of Freedom" I already had to speak emphatically of the freedom of thought in relation to the moral nature of the will.
[ 7 ] This idea was also particularly reinforced in the meditative life. The moral world order stood before me ever more clearly as the one manifestation, realized on earth, of such orders of activity that are to be found in superior spiritual regions. It emerged as that which only those who can recognize the spiritual can grasp in their imaginary world.
[ 8 ] All these insights came together for me precisely in the epoch of life described here with the comprehensive truth that the beings and processes of the world are not explained in truth if one uses thinking to "explain" them; but if one is able to see the processes through thinking in the context in which one explains the other, in which one becomes the riddle, the other the solution, and man himself becomes the word for the external world perceived by him.
[ 9 ] Thus, however, the truth of the idea was experienced that the Logos, the Wisdom, the Word rules in the world and its workings.
[ 10 ] I thought I could clearly see through the essence of materialism with these ideas. I did not see the perniciousness of this way of thinking in the fact that the materialist focuses his attention on the material appearance of an entity, but in how he thinks the material. He looks at the substance and does not realize that in truth he has spirit before him, which appears only in material form. He does not know that spirit metamorphoses into matter in order to arrive at modes of action that are only possible in this metamorphosis. Spirit must first give itself the form of a material brain in order to lead the life of the world of imagination in this form, which can give man freely acting self-consciousness in his life on earth. Certainly, the spirit arises in the brain from the material; but only after the material brain has arisen from the spirit.
[ 11 ] I had to reject the physical and physiological mode of conception only for the reason that it makes a conceived, not an experienced substance into the external exciter of the spiritual experienced in man and thereby conceives the substance in such a way that it is impossible to trace it to where it is spirit. Such matter, as this mode of conception claims to be real, is nowhere real. The fundamental error of the materialist-minded natural thinkers consists in their impossible idea of the substance. As a result, they block the path to spiritual existence. A material nature, which only arouses in the soul what man experiences in nature, makes the world "an illusion". Because these ideas entered my soul life so intensely, I then processed them four years later in my work "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert" in the chapter "Die Welt als Illusion". (This work was given the title "Riddles of Philosophy" in later expanded editions)
[ 12 ] In the biological mode of imagination, it is not possible in the same way to fall into characteristics that completely displace the imagined from the realm that man can experience, leaving him with an illusion in his mental life. One cannot go as far as the explanation: apart from man there is a world of which he experiences nothing, which only makes an impression on him through his senses, but which can be quite dissimilar to the impression-giver. One can still believe, if one suppresses the more important aspects of thinking in the life of the soul, that one has said something when one claims that the subjective perception of light corresponds objectively to a form of movement in the ether - this was the idea at the time - but one must be a serious fanatic if one also wants to "explain" what is perceived in the realm of life in this way.
[ 13 ] In no case, I said to myself, does such a conception of ideas about nature penetrate up to ideas about the moral world order. It can only regard this as something that falls into the physical world of man from a realm foreign to knowledge.
[ 14 ] The fact that these questions stood before my soul cannot be regarded as significant for the beginning of my third stage of life. For they had been before me for a long time. - But it became significant to me that my whole world of knowledge, without changing anything essential in its content, became more vital in my soul to a much greater degree than before. The human soul lives in the "Logos"; how does the outer world live in this Logos: this is already the basic question of my "Epistemology of Goethe's World View" (from the mid-eighties); it remains so for my writings "Truth and Science" and "Philosophy of Freedom". This orientation towards the soul dominated everything I created in terms of ideas in order to penetrate the spiritual underground from which Goethe sought to shed light on world phenomena.
[ 15 ] What particularly preoccupied me in the period of life described here was that the ideas that I was so strictly compelled to reject had taken hold of the thinking of the age in the most intense way. One lived so completely in this direction of soul that one was not in a position to feel in any way the implications of that which pointed in the opposite direction. I experienced the contrast between what was clear truth to me and the views of my age in such a way that this experience constituted the basic coloration of my life in general in the years around the turn of the century.
[ 16 ] In everything that appeared as spiritual life, the impression emanating from this contrast had an effect on me. Not as if I rejected everything that this spiritual life produced. But I felt deep pain towards the many good things that I could appreciate, because I believed I saw that the destructive powers were opposing it everywhere as the seeds of development of spiritual life.
[ 17 ] So I experienced the question from all sides: how can a way be found to bring what is seen inwardly as true into forms of expression that can be understood by the age?
[ 18 ] When you experience something like this, it is as if in some way it were necessary to climb a mountain peak that is difficult to access. You try from all sorts of different starting points; you find yourself there again and again, with efforts behind you that you have to regard as futile.
[ 19 ] I once spoke about Goethe's view of nature in Frankfurt am Main in the 1990s. I said in the introduction that I only wanted to talk about Goethe's views on life, because his ideas about light and colors were such that there was no possibility of building a bridge to these ideas in contemporary physics. - For me, however, I had to see in this impossibility a most significant symptom of the spiritual orientation of the time.
[ 20 ] Some time later, I had a conversation with a physicist who was important in his field and who also dealt intensively with Goethe's view of nature, which culminated in him saying: Goethe's idea of colors is such that physics cannot do anything with it, and that I - fell silent.
[ 21 ] As many things said then: what was truth to me is such that the thoughts of the time "can do nothing with it".